Changed the default CSS so that this site is now white. Wanted a break from my "blueboxes" theme. How's that for discarding a brand?
Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.
Saturday is XML DTD Day. Now, do I want:
<entry>
<date>
<year>2002</year>
<month>11</month>
<day>30</day>
</date>
<body>
...
</body>
</entry>
Or shall I forsake the spirit of XML with:
<entry date="2002-11-30">
...
</entry>
The Lisp-based representation I've been using:
((2002 11 30) ...)
After wistful window shopping for X Series ThinkPads on Ebay,
cleaned up and updated the GNU/Linux on the ThinkPad 560E page. The 560E (almudena) really is a good little
laptop. I think she's hurt when she catches me eyeing hot young models. My
straying thoughts began with the proverbial Seven Month Itch that we see all
too often in hardware relationships. But I'm a researcher and I have
needs...
Mama Gaia's Café has gone out of business, ironically just after being featured in an 8-Oct Christian Science Monitor article. A search didn't turn up coverage in any of the Boston papers, but perhaps at least the Phoenix will pick up the story.
Mama Gaia's space was still transitioning from that of a paint store when 9/11 happened. A few nights later, I photographed the peace graffiti mural that had sprung up on the construction boarding, amidst the "bomb the Middle East back to the Stone Age!" dialogue. Paper bag lanterns lined the wall.
The scandal continues: David Abel, Boston Globe, "MIT faces criticism on missile test study."
Added my Scheme version of the Newell Teapot to the Using OpenGL with PLT Scheme page. I'd like to hack up something like JWZ's Light Lab in MrEd, but the gears and teapot have been a sufficient test of SGL, and now we turn to more important tasks.
French films are supposed to end abruptly, and only then are you supposed to guess what they were about. Perhaps, with Happenstance, I need to look beyond the brutally obvious. For example, the characters, though not developed as much as I'd like, could conceivably have been intended as archetypes. So the director might be making a point about character in addition to the obvious point about interactive systems.
To install 55.2 MB of W3C documents on your Debian laptop, for offline viewing:
apt-get install w3-recs w3-recs-2002 doc-html-w3
First substantial snow of the winter. Snowball fight erupted outside Draper Lab. I'm joking when I say that the first thing an engineer will do when presented with a new resource is figure out how to make a weapon out of it.
To get OpenGL mostly working on my ThinkPad 560E, which uses XFree86 v3 server with v4 everything else, my slacker research assistant (get a haircut!) and I just installed the correct Mesa and GLUT libraries:
apt-get install mesag3 mesag-dev glutg3 glutg3-dev
glxgears claims 27 fps, which means the underpowered
laptop can do simple interactive 3-D, just so long as we have no pretenses
about pseudo-realistic rendering. Got SGL to sorta work with these libs, by
commenting out a few things in sgl/gl-specs/glu.consts that are
missing from my glu.h, but glxgears.ss seems to have
some ordering/obscuring problem. Don't think the bug is in SGL or
glxgears.ss; will build glxgears.c against these libs
later to test for lib bug.
Saw Happenstance. It would have seemed more tedious, had I not wrongly assumed a surprising twist was coming. I guess it was a cute, simple, little story, but my expectations had been raised by Amélie. Mitigating factors include some great cinematography, especially that involving Audrey Tautou's eyes and cheekbones. Most all of the characters were made dis-likeable in one way or another. Was the director feeling particularly cynical that year, perhaps modeling the drunkard father in his image? The strangers' conversations were very French film; the male nudity near the beginning, in lieu of formula female nudity toward the end, was not.
MIT-area connoisseurs of the food truck falafel might note that lately the Jerusalem Falafel seems tastier (albeit oilier) than the Cous Cous Kitchen. Around 11:30am seems the best time to hit the trucks.
In an attempt to get OpenGL on my ancient ThinkPad 560E, tried XFree86 4.2.1 server, but it failed the smoke test. Reportedly 4.3 has a lot of bug fixes, but for now I'll stick with using the v3 server. Maybe Utah GLX will work. I'll try that another day.
I mentioned the Zendik Farm because I find it curious, but I certainly don't advocate it. The aspects of alternative cooperative living are good, but I think that's compromised by their hierarchy.
The intrepid road warriors from Zendik Farm, including Avi, braved freezing temperatures and 32 MPH wind gusts in Central Square tonight.
I found Scott Owens' OpenGL bindings for PLT Scheme, fixed a minor
omission of glEndList, and ported glxgears to it.
See the new Notes on Using OpenGL with PLT Scheme page.
Released Quack version 0.15, since someone on comp.lang.scheme asked
for keyword highlighting (which I'd added to the PLT Style a while ago but not
released).
Early this morning, Twente University is on fire.
{security|non-us|qa|nm}.debian.org
are down. Unless there's an official Debian announcement otherwise, just wait
for official replacements to be brought up and DNS to be updated.
There's something incongruous about blasting gangsta rap from a Volvo station wagon.
I think the majority of work on HoG (GTK 2 bindings for MzScheme)
is done, with approx. 2000 function bindings working, plus numerous constants
from enums and CPP macros.
-rwxr-xr-x 1 nwv nwv 1742937 Nov 18 23:57 hog.so
GTK 2 currently isn't terribly bindings-friendly. There are some
mechanisms, like GObject and GClosure, that make
bindings easier when they're used consistently, but the API hasn't been fully
converted to use them. So, roughly-speaking, the bindings effort doubles,
since you have to support both GClosure and 40 different
function pointer types, for example.
While I was testing my bindings this morning by rewriting
gtk-demo in Scheme, found that some demo apps are accessing
struct fields directly, rather than through accessors. I forsee
another big chunk of work in making reasonably safe bindings for that.
Not certain I'll have time for this and all the other gotchas, since HoG is just an intermittent evening project, to prep a tool that I expect to want to use for my research. HoG is not an end in itself, even were numerous people to benefit from using it. Research (preferrably using Scheme) and PhD are the goals right now.
Speaking of research, as a couple readers know, I'm suddenly looking for a new advisor and PhD program. Dealing in collegial good faith and working through the university processes, rather than filing a lawsuit, has exhausted my time, funds, and trust. And I think we all know that raising serious complaints publicly, regardless of their merits, is professional suicide for an unfinished grad student. I'd find my own situation unbeliveable, had I not known several other people who faced similar situations there. They had families or visas, so when they were wronged and were given the runaround when they tried to raise the issues, they had to give up on their PhDs. They, like me, can prove their cases, but that's irrelevant when your goal is to earn your PhD.
Liem pointed out this divine revelation.
Lightweight Languages Workshop 2002 (LL2) was today. Got to meet people like Shriram and Anton in the atoms for the first time.
Tools-building and misc. volunteer work will be slowing down a bit while I take care of some other business. Also now available for consulting.
Did some more work on the GTK 2 bindings for MzScheme, which are tentatively called HoG. My test program now runs using some bindings automatically generated from an S-expression encoding of header files. A bunch of things remain to be done. I'd say that GTK 2 is one of the more work-intensive libraries to make bindings for, due to its size and complexity. Now I know why PyGtk has taken so long and still isn't finished.
Mercuri and PGN have articles on voting in Risks Digest 22.36
Not that the Drudge Report is very reliable or reputable, but treat this as a crude example of inevitable malfunctioning (accidental or intentional) of electronic voting systems that do not provide the controls advocated by Mercuri and other experts:
FLORIDA VOTERS CLAIM MACHINES 'BROKEN', VOTED FOR MCBRIDE, MARKED IT AS BUSH "I voted for McBride, but the machine counted it as Bush. It did this three times. The polling worker finally said, 'We have to reprogram this machine. Another person was having the same trouble while I was there.'"
Vocabulary term for today: subviral marketing
Interesting Paul Krugman article in 20-Oct NYT Magazine, "For Richer."
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Link courtesy of Anton van Straaten.
Trying Privoxy for a week in lieu of using Junkbuster. I've been meaning to drop
Junkbuster, which is an unmaintained code base, and yesterday Junkbuster broke
for the first time in about 5 years. (First suspicion of cause of the
explosive new memory leak is a misinteraction with the latest
libc6 in Debian unstable, but it's not worth
debugging.) Here's the latest snapshot of Sample Junkbuster Blockfile, in case I don't get back to it. I'll hold off on modifying the
Privoxy rules until I get a feel for how the defaults work.
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