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brain cancer

By anders pearson 15 Mar 2001

today i finally broke down and bought a cellphone. Ericsson T28 World. my coworker got one today as well and when he showed me the phone and the plans that they had, i decided that i had been left behind for long enough.

my metric for the ideal cellphone has always been that i want a phone that is small enough to accidentily swallow. well, consumer technology doesn’t seem to be quite there yet, but we’re getting closer. i can fit the entire thing in my mouth. not sure if that voids my warranty or not though.

interestingly, i hadn’t really done much research on calling plans until my coworker got the same phone but it really looks like you can get a comparable, if not better deal with a cellphone than with a regular wired phone. especially if you make lots of long distance calls. the fact that you can get your email forwarded to your cellphone is pretty sweet too. and the funky brain cancer is just icing on the cake.

the day job

By anders pearson 08 Mar 2001

thought i’d give you all a little glimpse into what i do at my day job. Pierrot Lunaire is a project i’ve been working on for Columbia’s music department that recently went semi-live. in order to make any sense of it, you’ll need a little background. pay attention cause this is tricky; i get confused myself.

Albert Giraud wrote a series of 50 poems in french about a character called “Pierrot Lunaire”. they’re not too bad; pleasantly dark in places. the famous atonal composer Arnold Schörnberg selected 21 of them, had them translated to german and set them to “music” (Sprechstimme and chamber ensemble). the site currently contains the following material: Giraud’s 50 poems in french, english translations of those, german translations of all poems, english translations of the german translations that Schörnberg used for his 21, scans of three different print editions of the poems (1894 french edition plus 1895 and 1911 german editions), and audio of the 21 “Schörnberg” poems being recited in french and german. there’s a lot more on the way too including audio and video of the pieces actually being performed and lots of miscellaneous information about the poems.

the main focus of the site currently is the “poem interface” which is intended to allow students or scholars to easily compare and contrast multiple poems and the multiple translations of the poems. there are two panels that each contain a poem. at the top of each is a bar allowing you to choose which version of the poem to display in that panel (french, english translation of the french, german, and english translation of the german). at the bottom of each poem are a couple icons with the optional additional media for that poem/version (print editions, audio, and video which is currently inactive). below those are pulldown menus allowing you to select which poem to display based from either the original 50 or the 21 “Schörnberg” (be careful, they’re not ordered the same).

the site should pretty much work with NN4+ and IE4+ with javascript and css enabled. if it works on any other browser, i’m pretty impressed. the design is temporary until we get one of our real graphic designers to put something together for it. my real contribution to this besides the mad javascript kung-fu, was the XML/XSL backend that allowed us to go through N-thousand different iterations of the navigation trying to settle on one that would make the professor happy without going insane recoding all 171 poems over each time.

anyway, let me know what you think.

delete yourself

By anders pearson 26 Feb 2001

since i know i’ll probably find the time and money to actually build this, i figure the best i can do is to describe in detail my plan for my installation art concept. it’s not a completed or polished idea, but it’s a start. my sister gets a lot of credit for helping me flesh it out (she’s the one in the family who actually has an art degree).

the idea basically consists of a series of rooms. there are three so far but will probably be more.

first room: the hugging machine.

a while back, i was feeling lonely and depressed about being in new york without knowing very many people and decided that i really needed a hug. i became obsessed with the idea of building a hugging machine. the idea is to build a machine vaguely human in shape, probably constructed largely out of mannequin parts that, when hugged, hugs back. through proper use of padding, heating and force-feedback mechanisms, it should come as close as is mechanically possible to the feel of a real hug from a human.

second room: target.

this room provides the visitor with the unique experience of being both predator and prey at the same time. the room contains several large caliber guns mounted on motorized tripods around the room. it is absolutely vital that these are real guns. each gun is equipped with motion detectors and will follow movement through the room (think: automated guns from Aliens). so as the visitor walks through the room, they have multiple guns continously aimed directly at them. on top of the guns are mounted digital video cameras aimed down the sights which go through closed-circuits to large projection screens around the room. so the visitor clearly sees themselves through the sights of the machinery.

third room: multicellular organism.

design a small, mobile, autonomous bot (probably 6 inches or so in size) that, using its sensors simply moves to get as far away from any other object as possible. fill a large room with a few hundred of these. by themselves, they will spread out until they’re all evenly spaced and can’t get any further away from each other and eventually reach a stable equilibrium point with no motion. when a visitor enters the room and moves through it, they detect the person and the ones nearest scurry away, sending ripples through the rest of the room.

that’s what i’ve got so far. still bouncing more stuff around in my head. someday, when i have lots of time, money and cheap microprocessors…

Quine, RIP

By anders pearson 23 Feb 2001

i missed this, but Willard van Orman Quine is dead [NYTimes article, use ‘cipherpunk’ as username and password]. Quine, along with Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Alan Turing, Stephen Kleene, and Alonzo Church basically invented the fields of logic, the lambda calculus (which follows from logic), and programming (which follows from the lambda calculus).

“Quine” is defined in the Jargon File as:

quine /kwi:n/ n.

[from the name of the logician Willard van Orman Quine, via Douglas Hofstadter] A program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement. (We ignore some variants of BASIC in which a program consisting of a single empty string literal reproduces itself trivially.) Here is one classic quine:

((lambda (x)
(list x (list (quote quote) x)))
(quote
(lambda (x)
(list x (list (quote quote) x)))))

This one works in LISP or Scheme. It’s relatively easy to write quines in other languages such as Postscript which readily handle programs as data; much harder (and thus more challenging!) in languages like C which do not. Here is a classic C quine for ASCII machines:

char*f=“char*f=%c%s%c;main()
{printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c”;
main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);}

For excruciatingly exact quinishness, remove the interior line breaks. Here is another elegant quine in ANSI C:

#define q(k)main(){return!puts(#k”\nq(“#k”)”);}
q(#define q(k)main(){return!puts(#k”\nq(“#k”)”);})

Some infamous Obfuscated C Contest entries have been quines that reproduced in exotic ways.

there’s also a nice page listing quines in almost every language. basically, the field of computer science owes a lot to this man and he will be greatly missed.

s/\/dev\/random/thraxil/g;

By anders pearson 21 Feb 2001

along with the redesign, i’ve decided to deprecate “/dev/random” as the name of the site. just about every day i get one or two hits from people searching for “/dev/random” on google. somehow i get the impression that this isn’t what they’re looking for. since its hard enough to find what you’re looking for online anyway, i thought i’d try not to aggravate the problem. so it’s now “thraxil”

N-day

By anders pearson 21 Feb 2001

in support of the WaSP’s browser upgrade campaign, i have redesigned the site to make use of the standards that web developers have been fighting to get browser makers to support for the last six years. that support arrived in the form of mozilla and IE5 yet we’re stuck using the same workarounds and hacks to make things work for the old, non-standards compliant browsers because some people are still using them.

aside from a basic table structure to provide the columnar layout, all formatting and presentation on this site is now done through CSS. because netscape 4 and other older browsers have such broken CSS engines, they now get the “retro” version.

some explanation for non webdesigners: different web browsers have, historically, rendered html differently. a page that looked right in netscape might not be at all legible in Internet Explorer and vice versa. this was partly because of bugs in both browsers, but more often was because the browser makers purposefully made it that way, the idea being that webdesigners had to more or less choose one or the other to support and if they could get designers to write their pages to work for one browser only, they would be able to own the market. since neither managed to completely dominate, the end result was that designers couldn’t afford to support just one and had to spend hours and hours figuring out complex workarounds to get their pages to work in both browsers. i can say from experience that webdesigners usually end up spending about 75% of their time in the frustrating cycle of getting things to work in browser A, seeing that it’s broken in browser B, fixing it for browser B, seeing that it’s now broken in A, etc, etc. it’s really sad that so many creative people had to spend so much time doing that kind of tedious work instead of creating innovative, beautiful sites just because of a few companies’ greed. technologically, the web was set back years.

the previous incarnation of this site contained countless hacks to make it look right in netscape 4. the result was bloated code that took longer to download and render and was a nightmare to modify.

no more.

i know that a few of you are still using netscape 4.x (a 4 year old browser; a lifetime on the internet). consider this a gentle urging to upgrade. i recommend IE5 if you’re on a Mac and Mozilla (NOT netscape 6, which just takes an old version of the mozilla engine and piles on hundreds of AOL ads) or Opera otherwise. i also realize that due to old systems, slow connections or things just being out of your control, some of you probably don’t have the choice to upgrade. well, now you get a lighter, faster loading version of the site that is less likely to overwhelm your connection or your poor computer and is less likely to crash your browser. meanwhile, the rest of us can get on with our lives.

i would also like to point out that while some members of the WaSP advocate automatically redirecting non-compliant browsers off your site to their upgrade page, i have to strongly disagree with that tactic. this site will remain accessible to any and every browser with no exceptions; it just won’t look quite as shiny unless your browser is standards compliant.

2 seconds

By anders pearson 19 Feb 2001

emile’s heard this before but i think he’s the only one. i did this a while back but it just occurred to me that other people might find some amusement value in it.

2 seconds from happiness [9.3MB] is a little improvised guitar bit that i recorded one evening. just me making stuff up off the top of my head playing around with textures. file under “avantgarde/ambient/experimental” i guess. it’s just solo electric guitar; no overdubbing, mixing or editing involved. that means you get to hear all the sour notes and hiss and static from my preamp being turned up too high for my poor soundcard to take. my apologies for the size/length.

bird

By anders pearson 19 Feb 2001

there was a big falcon or hawk (i’m not sure how to tell the difference) sitting on a light right outside the window of the sixth floor office i work in today.

my coworker, Peter, got this picture of it with his digital camera. the backlighting was a bitch and the window was really dirty so it’s kind of hard to make it out very well. there isn’t really anything to give you a sense of scale in the picture but i’d say that it was about 2-2.5 feet from head to tail. if anyone can make out enough to identify what kind of falcon/hawk it was, i’d like to know.

really neat to have a big, cool, beautiful bird sitting a couple feet away from you seperated by only a piece of glass. i was just waiting for it to swoop down, grab a freshman and start snacking. that would’ve made my day.

congratulations mimi

By anders pearson 16 Feb 2001

i just got word from mimi that she has accepted a position as a graphic designer for eBay Deutschland starting April 1st.

i’m very happy for her although i will miss hanging out with her now that she’s moving to Berlin. i guess i’ll just have to fly over and visit her every now and then :)

good luck, mimi!