My most cherished New Year's Eve tradition is updating the copyright notice on my Web pages at midnight. There is no small amount of ceremony.
In 1999, I may have submitted the last thesis draft of 19xx — at about midnight, via email to my committee — which was a singular honor, but I wouldn't want to make a tradition of it.
Subject: mindshare thesis draft available Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 23:58:31 -0500 (EST)
Out on the underpowered laptop late Sunday night, where hacking anything other than Elisp can be painful, added pretty lambda support to Quack, per user request. To describe this kind of gratuitous hack, I hereby coin the term "emacsturbation." Will do portability and a new Quack version when I get another couple more disposable hours.
A few very quick snapshots from yesterday: festive fire truck, Harvard School rennovation snow, Maxi's 99-cent Store clearance.
Amy Hughes' Lego Cathedral suggests another kind of highly-addictive drug comes in baggies.
Unconventional Xmas. Watched Medium Cool (1969), which is set around the 1968 Democratic National Convention police riots.
Operation of the GTK 2.0.9 color selector wheel would be more intuitive spatially if the triangle (S, V) were fixed and the ring (H) rotated. For example, currently, changing H causes the indicator for the point in S and V space to move about the screen, even though neither S nor V is changing. I think keeping the S and V space always in the same orientation on screen is also helpful for perceiving values within it. Bugzilla-ing this suggestion.
Caught up on some reading of The Atlantic's Web site: Seymour Hersh, "The Price of Power," Dec-1982 article apropos of Kissinger; Sara Lipka, "A Near Miss," blunt piece on Cuban missile crisis diplomacy; Jack Beatty, "The Temptation of War," suggests pressure on Presidents not to "lose" wars is misaligned with national priorities.
Seymour Hersh, "Manhunt," The New Yorker, on assassination policy. With Hersh interview
Sophia A. Nelson, Washington Post opinion piece, "Discomfort, Even Before Lott," manages to work a Christian reference into a call for party inclusiveness:
The moral solution is to repudiate the party's ultra-conservative wing and to embrace our many moderates, who, like many black Republicans, sometimes have felt less than welcome. It's time to have a true "come to Jesus" meeting within our own ranks.
David Brooks, "Making It: Love and success at America's finest universities," Weekly Standard. Link courtesy of Danah.
Whether pizza boxes are adorned with the US flag image out of a sense of patriotism or merely to capitalize on flag-waving goodwill, I'm not sure they thought through the full lifecycle: each pizza box flag delivered is mere hours from being unceremoniously dumped in the trash.
I think most people who buy DVDs do so because of a collecting impulse, or so they can say "I own that film," not because it's more cost-effective than renting. (I'm excluding the kids' DVDs that are used as babysitters.) Nothing wrong with that, but it should be acknowledged. I rent DVDs at $2 for 5 nights, and only rarely want to watch a film more than once.
For reasons beyond my control, my old nwv@media.mit.edu address no longer forwards to me. Please replace it in your
addressbooks with neil@neilvandyke.org. Hopefully people who come across one of my academic publications
and wish to contact me will Web-search for my current address.
"Bill Of Rights Pared Down To A Manageable Six," The Onion
Two domain names free to a good cause:
inpeoplewetrust.org and inpeoplewetrust.net.
Originally registered them for a separation-of-church-and-state project.
Released Quack 0.16.
The Mama Gaia's Café peace mural I mentioned on 29-Nov-2002 has been painted over.
Released my Privoxy actions file.
The worldwidedns.net commercial DNS service I was
using for the neilvandyke.org vanity domain fell off the net on or
before Friday night, so early this morning I moved DNS to my beloved domain
registrar, joker.com. The DNS servers are now in Germany, but, barring any accidents, that should be OK.
Friend's hyperactive child reminded me of:
Ritalin Cures Next Picasso
WORCESTER, MA — Area 7-year-old Douglas Castellano's unbridled energy and creativity are no longer a problem thanks to Ritalin, doctors for the child announced Friday. "After years of failed attempts to stop Douglas' uncontrollable bouts of self-expression, we have finally found success with Ritalin," Dr. Irwin Schraeger said. "For the first time in his life, Douglas can actually sit down and not think about lots of things at once." Castellano's parents reported that the cured child no longer tries to draw on everything in sight, calming down enough to show an interest in television.
Tatsuya Ishida's first SinFest comic book is out. Mixed bag, but occasionally a great one.
Two things that have thankfully all but disappeared from the Web: "this page is under construction" GIFs, and gratuitous Java applets. Now if we can just kill off gratuitous JavaScript and proprietary media formats.
Spent the afternoon in Providence. Many civic improvements in the last five years. It's noticeably friendlier than Cambridge and Boston, too. The cab driver was only joking when he offered to kill people for me. And Providence doesn't have the Cambridge/Boston convention of four cars running each red light transition regardless of pedestrians. Didn't do much sight-seeing, as I was running on an hour of sleep.
Controlled experiments back up anecdotal observations:
In the mid-1990s, a pair of professors in Germany caused a stir when they claimed that students in economics "are significantly more corrupt than others." Researchers had staged a series of experiments, including a "lost letter test" in which addressed but unsealed letters containing $10 and a handwritten note were left in classrooms connected with various academic departments. The results were fairly consistent: Students of the dismal science — who had spent countless hours studying the self-interested instincts of mankind — behaved, well, more self-interestedly than their peers.
Heat index 0°F during this morning's walk home, not counting wind gusts. Improvising hot soup.
You too can have a higher Ebay customer satisfaction rating than IBM.
This week's NTK has exposé on digital-outlook.com astroturf marketing. They're far from the first to do this sort of thing (I recall Microsoft getting caught doing it to smear IBM's OS/2 version on CompuServe and elsewhere many years ago, for example). I find astroturf to be an outrageous abuse of what used to be much more idyllic online communities. Most reputation mechanisms won't necessarily help, as they're subverted whenever incentive exists to manufacture an army of reputable identities. We'll have to be increasingly skeptical of people we don't "know" online, as these will increasingly be manufactured and/or salable identities. I'm tempted to hack up a simple Rep-O-Matic tool for Slashdot, even though it's a very crude reputation system, just to raise awareness of the general problem. The main difficulty is that it would have to be evaluated in a real-world environment, which would fly into human subjects ethical problems.
In a theocratic oiligarchy, the Sacred Tanker of Jesus?
Mr. Chávez said he had ordered the navy to board the Pilin León, which was carrying gasoline for the domestic market, and arrest its captain, Daniel Alfaro. "We already have an alternative crew ready," Mr. Chávez said, "organized so the ship can navigate and comply with its holy obligation."
OK, OK, the blueboxes stylesheet has been restored as
the default. The white one is an alternate, if you preferred that.
What the World Thinks in 2002, Pew Research Center for People and the Press
On industrial design: Tamiko Thiel, "The Design of the Connection Machine," 1994. With cameo by Feynman.
I didn't see a discussion of the blinkenlights in the article. My last officemate at MIT had worked at Thinking Machines, and one day, when a package with a CM-2 or CM-5 board arrived as a memento, he mentioned that the array of LEDs along the edge were driven semi-randomly. An interesting aesthetics and visualization problem, when you have tens of thousands of processors running with the pedal to the metal and yammering at each other much faster than the human eye can perceive an LED flicker. When the hardware can't introspect much about the nature of the computation being performed, especially at speed, what information can you discern and convey?
ThinkPad X24 porn. Sadly, the X30 has multicolored keys, and therefore cannot be taken seriously.
About to finish your CS systems PhD? Brown CS faculty search.
Tom Tomorrow, on your Permanent Record. Only rarely do I read Maureen Dowd, but I think she's right about Kissinger. Great photo of our imperious leader, from msnbc.com or foxnews.com or
similar (sorry, forget which outlet), a few months ago.
gnushush.el version 1.2 fixes typos caught by Frederik Fouvry.
Coincidentally, someone reported a webjump-plus.el bug today, so (while I was stuck somewhere with semi-working wireless) I finally went through and updated the entries and released version 2.3.
I've switched to Privoxy and am no longer maintaining my Junkbuster blockfile. I'll release my Privoxy actions file as soon as I get a chance to adapt junkbust.el.
Epilogue to the other day's XML DTD adventures:
<entry year="2002" month="11" day="30">...</entry>
Chomsky spoke at MIT again tonight. At 8pm, I first saw the poster for his 7pm talk, sigh. I hope he's taking his vitamins, as I don't forsee anyone else in the near term being able to do what he does. (I know I don't want the job, even were I qualified.)
Making an XML Schema Definition. The first few schema models and languages you learn are interesting. After that, picking up another model and language is usually simply the chore of seeing what subset of modeling concepts is used and what the syntax is. That XSD seems boring is no fault of its designers — it's largely tried and true concepts, selected for their appropriateness, with minor extensions.
On a separate topic, the (Adaesque? Modula-2ian?) XML end tag verbosity we see is an artifact of XML's SGML heritage that is now entirely redundant. OK, let's do a little exercise that not everyone has done. Here are two XML elements:
<foo:someElem ...>...</foo:someElem> <foo:anotherElem .../>
First we drop the redundant names in end tags:
<foo:someElem ...>...</> <foo:anotherElem .../>
Then we see that we could treat '/' as element
terminator syntax for both kinds of elements:
<foo:someElem ...>.../ <foo:anotherElem ...>/
Which is:
StartElem Name ... EndAttrs { ... }? EndElem
The structure, ignoring syntactic sugar, is:
Name { Attr }* { Content }?
If we decide that "attributes" are almost equivalent to
"content," with the distinction irrelevant to our syntax, then we
combine them and drop the funny-looking `/' syntax:
<foo:someElem ...> <foo:anotherElem ...>
Hey, that's cleaner, but — gasp! — it looks like that weird parentheses language! Are we even allowed to use that without growing beards?
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