jmoiron.net

I suppose this post is long overdue in a lot of ways. I've ended my employment at Attila Technologies and started a position at Advance Internet. I've quit my job as a toolsmith/utility/architect and have become a python/django developer. I started my new job not in Journal Square (where the company is located), but in Austin, Texas.

I have some experience with Austin; my aunt Mel, herself fantastic, lived here with her wonderful friends before she passed away, and I've been down here a few times before to visit. A few months ago, really, after not having my contract formally renewed at Attila, and not getting any raise whatsoever, or any offer of any kind of compensation at all other than what I had been receiving, I decided to pursue other options. I decided on Advance, and upon that decision they told me that they were sending some developers down to Austin and wanted me to join.

The long and the short of it is that I wanted to join, too (even at the cost of a week's vacation), and given the flurry of activity and learning this experience has been, I'm glad I did it. We are visiting a contracting company called Optaros who have developed the application that it seems me and a few other developers will soon take over.

Optaros Austin is, to this point, the epitome of a laid back awesome "agile" development environment. The people on our project are cool, varied, professional (in a good way), intelligent, excited about their work, out-going; pretty much everything good imaginable and with the relaxed, calmly upbeat tone Attila lacked. Part of it is probably Austin itself, and another part of it is probably them. I came into the situation here completely lost on both sides (having not worked a day in AI's office and having never met any Optaros guys), so it's been pretty interesting for me so far. I think that I've been able to make a fairly decent contribution all things considered, although I'm not really sure. The separation from the familiar for me has been very good, and seeing the architecture and the way in which they go about development have given me a lot of ideas on how I will want to work upon my return to New Jersey.

A question has really plagued me for quite some time now. What makes something "good"?

I started thinking about this a long time ago in college. Back then, good design to me was kinda like pornography: in the immortal words of justice Potter Stewart, I couldn't define it but "I know it when I see it." For me, it isn't enough to just recognize something as good, I have to know why I recognize it as good.

I don't mince words here. I firmly state here that some things are good and some are bad and that the difference between these things is not merely subjective. It's not that I think something is better than something else, in some sense I know it's better. It's easiest for me to assert this on things that I am an expert on; I know that some programs are better than others, and I know when code is bad and I know when code is good. In this world, there are some easy measurements for goodness (space & time complexity) and some difficult measures for goodness (cleanliness, elegance). It's the difficult measures of goodness where people run into trouble.

I originally started to think more deeply on this after reading Paul Graham's Taste for Makers. In it, he describes how designers (whether they be designing paintings or programs) get "better" as time goes on, which strongly implies some objective and universal measure of 'goodness'.

Some years later, I read Gödel, Escher, Bach. Within, Douglas Hofstadter explains Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the artistic works of M.C Escher, and the intricate puzzle canon's of Johann Sebastian Bach. He uses these concepts along with a host of other muses to talk about how systems themselves can hold and process information not implied by its constituent parts (like the human brain or a colony of ants) to talk about AI. The meat of this book, for me, though, was the inherent beauty and elegance of Bach's work.

Music is largely considered a matter of "taste" in the United States, and at least people of my generation were taught (virtually brainwashed) that matters of taste were purely subjective. In the "easy case" described above, where there are simple numerical constructs that can define goodness and badness, people are able to yield that one thing is better than another: for instance, Lionel Messi is a better soccer player than my Grandfather, because his statistics are superior. But Hofstadter introduces the genius of Bach and his music (and contrapuntal baroque music in general) via mathematics, an utterly stringent framework in which elegance is immediately obvious to trained professionals and the relative complexity and difficulty of problems is very well explored.

Recently, I watched a program on PBS' Nova called "Secrets of the Parthenon. I was amazed to learn from this program that the Ancient Greeks designed the Parthenon to have "perfect imperfections"; the parthenon is completely devoid of straight lines and right angles. A popular theory for this and the use of entasis (slight curvature in columns & foundations found in the Parthenon and other Greek structures) in ancient Greek architecture is that it subdues or corrects for the effects of optical illusions that you would get in perfectly straight architecture. Over time, the Greeks would have understood that if you line up a bunch of straight lines and view them on a horizon, they no longer appear straight. The ratios between height and width of their temples and the width and spacing are also carefully constructed and come from common ratios in nature (the "golden" ratio, and others).

The Greeks not only came to understand the nature of beauty (which to them, was defined by nature itself and the ratios therein) but were able to duplicate in their works, from beautiful statues to magnificent architectural feats. 200 years ago, Goethe, one of the most intelligent polymaths in modern history, began to unravel basic laws of human perception and revolutionized the understanding of optics and color. And yet today, we've thrown away their hard work and generations of experience; it's all just a matter of personal preference.

This isn't to say that there is a final universal answer to whether or not Pele is indeed better than Maradona, or if The Beatles are better than The Rolling Stones, but merely that there is "good taste" and "bad taste", and the difference is not merely subjective.

I've found out that this idea is sometimes met with hostility, because if you accept that design can be good or bad and that your opinion of something is not necessarily right, it brings up the possibility that things you like might be crap and things you hate might be great. It also means that, although you might be fine with your particular tastes, they can be improved.

To not accept it is worse yet, I think, for anyone who aspires to design anything. It allows you to dismiss any critics you don't agree with without cause, and also means that you can't improve upon your skills. If you hold someone to be a better designer than yourself, it's difficult to explain this and to reconcile the differences in design skill within this framework of thought.

Happy Anniversary to me!

6 years ago I started my blog on the now defunct IRIX server attila.stevens-tech.edu. The first post in this blog was made with a bash script that basically used cat & sed to style a quasi-structured text file that I'd shell into the server and create. The server did not offer any CGI services (for fear that the students would screw up and bring down the server, which also handled email), so it would be a year or so until I was able to move my website to PHP.

From there, I wrote two versions of jmoiron.net using the classic LAMP stack. The second one used PEAR:DB for database safety, a thin home-grown templating system based in PHP (both heavily inspired by jeremy mikola).

In May, 2003, I started to learn the Python programming language (This was the beginning of my summer vacation for the Junior->Senior year of University). My very first mention of the language in these hallowed pages was, well, completely retarded: I was "gonna write an interpreter, or a C compiler, or something." It's funny ha-ha.

By late 2004/early 2005, I had ditched the PHP beginnings and had written some custom mod_python stuff to run the site. I ditched mysql at the same time. By late 2005/early 2006, I started writing my own plain-text -> HTML markup language based on MoinMoin syntax. I had almost my whole database converted (automatically) to this script when, in mid 2006, I traded manual mod_py for django and my markup language to markdown.

I quickly ditched the first iteration of the django site and ended up with what you see today; It's been here for over a year and a half! It was by far the harshest transition, because I also made a switch from storing my posts as HTML to storing them as markdown (which I am, of course, now unhappy with); and back then the automagic html->markup filters left a bit to be desired. I am working on yet another iteration with yet another set of technologies; the next iteration (probably set to finish around April) won't even involved SQL at all, and will be the first one without a real solid framework since I moved to Django.

This site is kind of a technical experiment of mine; It's where I express myself both through code, through design, and through words. Hopefully sometime soon, through pictures too. I hope that it will continue to be something that I can hang out there to dissuade future employers from hiring me!

Most of the past 5 years (chronicled for you, on this site) I've made some kind of attempt at listing something, telling a story about my year, or dodging such responsibility. Last year, I just wrote about some software I was writing. That's what happens when you're actually doing things; you don't take the time to reflect over how little you've done, and you're better for it.

This past year though, not so much. Maybe I'm starting to raise the bar too high, or I'm burned out, or something; but I just can't think of anything to be really happy about this past year. I left my old job but none of my old habits, I started working out in March and while I kept a good schedule the whole year and feel a lot fitter, I still look the same. I had some health problems that I can only assume were caused by doctors; they're all gone now (the problems).

But after a lull in the usual frenetic pace of the work/life/sleep cycle, I've taken a little time to look at myself and where I am and I think it's time to get serious. Serious like I got for my MS;
4.0 serious. The sun sets south and early in January in the northeast United States, and I think it's time for it to set on this uneasiness I've felt. Here are some things I expect to do or continue doing in the coming year, sorted roughly by the order I intend to do them in.

• concentrate more on self expression (blog, photos)
• continue going to the gym
• work more on this very website
• cut my hair
• continue my Japanese studies
• watch more live music
• go down a pants size
• run 5k in 25 minutes (that's a 8 minute mile pace, give or take)
• learn a new programming language
• contribute to an open source project
• submit something i write or create to peer review
• read a book once a month (last year i averaged once every other month)

That's just off the top of my head.

Haven't been writing mostly for want of time. Wanted to drop this, for what it's worth.

It's the holiday season, and you know what that means. Time to provide technical support to relatives! I felt obliged to help out my great uncle with some video games that my godfather had sent him from Portugal. He said he had a disc, but didn't know what to do with it; how to get them installed.

I went up to his place and sat down at the machine. It wasn't on. I live in a world where computers are always on, for some reason, or another, or none, but this one wasn't. Turn it on, and it boots up into Windows 98.

Microsoft stopped supporting this operating system a while ago, and for good reason. It is still inexorably tied to DOS, and the shell is pretty bad. The whole machine locked up completely at least 5 times as I tried in vain to access the cdrom drive (start->run->(random letter:) .... nope, failure). Finally, I get it to boot where it'l show me what drives are what; his optical drives are F and G. Oookay.

Eventually, I'm about to give up, because I can't open any kind of explorer window on any directory at all without a full system lockup. Then I ask him, "Does internet work?" He says yeah, he clicks on the blue E. Bingo; Microsoft's monopolizing finally works to my advantage. I copy a bunch of games (which are mostly simple 3.1 and 95 era games) to his desktop to a directory named "Jogos", and we're on our way.

This story is not particular interesting. But a few things about his computer were interesting to me. He had what must have been a 8 year old hard drive that seemed to work just fine (probably off half the time, never been overwritten). He had a brand new-ish samsung syncmaster 17" LCD screen, which looked like it was displaying @ 640x480 at 256 color depth. I contemplated asking him why it was that way, but I knew the two possible answers: he didn't know it can be changed, or higher resolutions made the text too small.

Questions of resolution independence aside, I think my Uncle is a pretty typical pre-internet computer user. This is how most people used their machines before computers became central entertainment and socialization appliances. He had various directions scribbled out there on a pad on how to get a shortcut icon on the desktop, and various other passwordy strings. It really was a blast from the past, on the whole.

I think that this generation of computer user is going the way of the dinosaurs fast. I'd love to see some patterns of his usage, to see what it's like for a user of this type to use a computer, but kids are learning it now at that age where they just absorb knowledge at ridiculous pace; I can't imagine too many lost computer users in 20 years. On the whole, people at least think they know the technology space these days. They understand how to maximize their utilization of whatever gadgetry they buy into. Now they have to wake up fast and see how companies try to pull the rug over their eyes with schemes to artificially contract that space of possibility in their devices with lockware, drm, etc!

You know, I actually thought I was clever for about 3 or 4 milliseconds when I came up with this title, but wouldn't you know that somebody else has already laid their claim. They were actually making sausage, too!

I want to write a little about two Portuguese sausages: Chouriço and Linguiça. Chouriço is actually a family of sausages with a fairly wide (and interesting) range: among them are a sausage that is made with cubed onions and another one that is made with the cartilage and bones in pork ribs and vertebrae. It is basically pork and pork fat with salt, paprika, and wine, stuffed inside the skin of the intestine and then dried over wood smoke. If that doesn't make you salivate, you don't know what food is!

Most of the Chouriço that I ate growing up was very dry; so dry that when you cut it, even the inside of the sausage wasn't wet. This dry "version" is exquisite in pretty much anything: it's almost required for what must be the national soup of Portugal, caldo verde (shredded collards/kale and potato soup). It imparts it's spicy, smoky flavor onto almost any dish, and honestly I haven't tasted anything containing this sausage that wasn't improved somehow by it.

The Chouriço that I have found thusfar in the Ironbound supermarket Seabra has been very wet; so wet that it sweats it's fat out and becomes sour very quickly (within days). I'm not sure if this is just another type, or if it is just failed sausage, but I highly suggest you get the dry version; the flavor is about twice as strong, it lasts practically forever, and it is heavenly cooked up in a cute little dish such as that above meant for cooking sausage with Aguardente. If anyone reading this knows the secret password I have to use to get the fantastic, dry stuff, please leave me a comment!

Linguiça is something that I did not have growing up, so I don't know what it's supposed to taste like, in the best of circumstances. I was told that it was Brazilian, which makes it sort of taboo in some traditional Portuguese families, but in fact it seems to be a sausage that is popular throughout Portugal and most former Portuguese colonies. It is not smoke cured, so it's not okay to eat it without cooking. Unlike Chouriço, it is almost always made with two of my favorite things in the world: onions and garlic.

The garlic in the Linguiça that I had this past weekend seemed to impart a sweet flavor. The sausage is extremely juicy (probably because it was made a day or two before I purchased it), and the grease it sweats during cooking is white, like what you get from cooking chicken, and more like what you'd expect from a white-meat sausage. The onions imparted a very strong flavor and along with the pork the flavor experience as a whole has a spicy (not "hot" spicy, but spices spicy) flavor that is almost sour. It seems perfect for just chomping on, and especially well suited for grilling and eating in a nice Portuguese roll.

Sausage just doesn't deserve the bad wrap(!) it's gotten for being high in fat. It can be balanced in to any dish and used in small quantities, because most sausages have very strong flavors from sitting with their spices. Wet sausages go well standing alone (with a starchy carb like potatoes or bread and a dark green leafy vegetable like those common in Portuguese cuisine) or as part of a sausage & vegetable stir fry (onions and peppers, or eggplant work well here), and dry sausages like Chouriço or Salpicão work well in small quantities in sandwiches.

Checking in from rural Virginia, USA, traveling at about 60 miles per hour on some country road somewhere. Someday in the future, you can do this too in your Volkswagen, and I would have retired to Okinawa.

I had never been to the capital of the United States, even as political as I am. It's pretty weird to see all sorts of parks, street corners, and monuments that I've seen throughout my life on news reports and capital dramas.

I think I've done this before.

There was a time in the distant past where I was relatively stupid, and made stupid, short, inane posts about things nobody cared about. The small echo chamber at college reinforced the value these posts, and all was good. Then I left the echo chamber.

Now I make long drawn out carefully constructed posts about mostly stupid inane things that none of my declining "readership" (hi mom) actually cares about. C'est la vie. I usually wait until I can work philosophy or some greater truth into a small realization I've made in order to post it. That's why in 2007 I've made about 2 blog postings per month. Virtually every night, ideas for something to write flood into me, and words don't come out because it seems trite or unimportant. Bruce Eckel has written about this at length; peruse his article if you are looking for my usual verbosity.

I think ideas are important. I've learned more about software engineering from two newsgroup posts (by Elizabeth Rather and Alex Martelli) than from all of the books I've read on the subject, not because the books were crap (although some were), but because their content was undeniable; pure ideas so right they needed no exposition.

My aims are lower. The other day, I was reading over entries into this blog with pranay and noticed that I use quite a lot of parentheses. I had a quick idea to write an output filter that would dynamically change parentheticals to some kind of little on-hover ajax thing. Quick posts about this, or my post about uromkan; a short post I was thinking about making on
pâté, and a brief description of nankotsu; surely they're all better than long periods of nothing dotted with the diatribes of the self righteous?

I just came off a day at work, a week at work, that was legendary in frustration and triumph. I'm pretty sure that most of the details of what I struggled through, heroically, are confidential at worst and tangential to an NDA at best, so I'll gloss over things in generic but jargon laden terms.

As most of you probably know, when left to my own devices for a software project my first thought is usually to use the python programming language. I find that most of the software that isn't already written out there requires a higher order of thought, or a higher level of abstraction to write comprehensively and with some level of correctness. If your software is something like 7 years old, then maybe "dirtier" languages (and by that I mean languages that have side effects, force you to get in the trenches, and have libraries where you must initialize externs or globals, or prepare inputs, strip outputs, call functions in a certain order beyond the normal init and shutdown are concerned, know idioms in order to accomplish simple tasks, etc.) are going to work just as well. But I try to pick the right tool for the job, and it just so happens that a lot of times my job fits Python pretty well.

My work environment is both colorful and diverse in personality and language of choice. Me, an italian-american redneck in training (Greg), and two frenchmen (Cheech and Nico) have been battling it out with editors, compilers, virtual machines, interpreters, kernels, packaging, and just plain old getting things done for weeks now. We started this endeavor with an idea, a proof of concept, and a 2 year history of knowing that both of them worked in practice. What we've done since April is plain and simple mercenary programming, pounding out a system built from the ground up to work with reliability, stability, and extensibility in mind, delicately balancing academic techno-mathematical purity with necessary engineering tradeoffs so as not to wind up with a beautiful piece of slow code 8 months too late. And this week, we finally landed on the moon.

Our 4-part architecture fit our 4-man team quite well. Greg (a Java guy) tackled the part where we knew Java had been used historically, and knew that Java was a good fit. I (a Python and generic 'systems' guy) tackled the tough integration and communication glue problem. Our pieces are designed to dance delicately in some geeky wet-dream of function and semantic decoupling, and by now they are pretty damned good at it. But we got communication and logistics problems out of the way a long time ago. I spent over a week working on a mysterious bug in a library we were using that caused segfaults (of all things) from python code from only one linux distribution (of 4 that I surveyed). But we had it pretty much down and functional about a month ago. But the past two weeks have been something else altogether.

We were tasked with porting old working code from the legacy "demo" days to the new API we had been developing. No more exceptions, cheap 3 line profiling, or even sane string types for us, oh no. The new task for this pair of mercenaries was untangling a twisted web of casts and somehow building something connection based on top of a broadcast/receive foundation that was prone to crumbling and still very much in flux. And for almost 3 weeks, armed only with our confusion, gdb, and our constant badgering of cheech, we struggled (off and on, occasionally revisiting the sanity of our self-architectured products and cleaning them, perfecting them) to make this work. And today; today, our efforts were finally vindicated.

Greg, always colorful, had many epithets locked and loaded to describe the week. It was pretty exhausting mentally, but we're done. Kinda. We have the smallest, working system that enables us to move forward. Smallest there is actually quite important: there are two types of large software systems, those that evolve from small systems and those that don't work. We plan on making ours work.

Went to the/a doctor today. From what she told me, my lower abdominal pain and other symptoms can be one of 4 possibilities:

1. Colitis (colon infection)
2. Appendicitis
3. Gall Stones
4. Hypochondria

I'm hoping for a 4 or even a mild 1. I have to buy medication tomorrow, and then drink some disgusting milkshake designed to light up my insides the following night. Good luck, me!

I've been thinking a lot about a lot of things lately, like what makes me happy, what relaxes me, etc. A lot of sorta self-searching ninny stuff that hopefully will result in me being a better person for some definition of better; either one of "happier", "wiser", and "healthier" will do. So I'd start with something simple, like something I claim to myself and to others that I like doing. I like to travel. Do I really? Do I just like talking (bragging?!) about where I've gone, what I've seen? Do I just like having the authority on a subject/location/culture/nonsense? Do I just really love the word nonsense? (yes)

The reality of that situation is a defiant yes to the first question, and then "of course but that's secondary" to the rest of them. I think I have this thirst for knowledge and a lot of people really have effected not only the knowledge I have but the way I go about getting new knowledge.
John Dolan and his alter ego dared me to challenge the establishment line in a way that I hadn't really done previously. What if all of the literature I've ever read was total bullshit? Maybe it is!
Mark Ames clarified this position and led by example: what if our entire understanding about another culture was not only bullshit but simultaneously tainted by insane aspects of our own culture that we are blind to.

This isn't really constructive in the 'kill your idols' knee jerk reaction sense that you could take by simply miming their movements. Try things, do things, and make your own path to "enlightenment". That's what travel is to me; I grew up in a country (and in a family) where nothing was known about Chinese people, of which there are 1.3 billion I remind you, other than their appearance and their caricatured (racist) portrayals in old western movies or their exaggerated portrayals in kung fu movies.

I don't know that my view of the country (empire?) is accurate today, but I sure understand the culture more by virtue of the people I've surrounded myself with, the food I've eaten, etc. I think this is what travel is to me, the ultimate in that kind of experience. So I'll go to that country, eventually, and meet people that have lived there. And they might be completely ignorant and oblivious to their own condition, like I am or like hopefully someday I was.

It isn't perfect of course. In the end, what the fuck do I know about Egyptians? Not a whole lot, but I've met a bunch of them and I've seen their ancient relics for myself; I've witnessed that whole spectacle. They are absolutely amazing (the relics) and fascinating (the people), from what I've gathered, and applying historical knowledge to try to understand the rich tapestry of any culture is at it's absolute worst a rewarding mental exercise.

That's pretty convincing, even to myself. I don't think I could come up with something like that if it was a lie, although there's always the chance that I might surprise myself. But my travel and the travels of others have always been rich and satisfying for me.

Similarly, whatever my original primary intentions were to learn Japanese (manga), it's become a beast of it's own, knowledge that is enriching and a lack there that entices me to discover more. The friends I've made that were aided by this continuing adventure (like Masakazu Omoto or Hirota Fumiki or poor, poor Minoru-san) and the new ways that I have come to understand the world and myself make it worth it.

Taking this angle with games, what kind of games make me happy? Why do I play? I have fun playing a lot of games, but a lot of the "experiences" that I can think of in the past involved games where I got deeply engrossed in something utterly un-game-like. I ventured past the "system" of Gemstone III and into the rich, complex economy and social structure of the game. I suffered and triumphed with Crono, Lucca, and Frog in my youth, mourned the loss of Agro and contemplated the virtue of my actions more recently.

The point is, games don't just make me happy: I don't just have fun with games, I get a deeper experience through their play. Sure there is the mechanical and mental challenge of performing fantastic acrobatics with Kawase-san or taking the right line through a turn in a tuned up Audi S4 and then finding the new line in a Sauber or the MINOLTA. But there's also a deep emotional element there in that rare game, and it happens when I get engrossed in story or character or just about anything but the method in which I am controlling my on-screen avatar, which leads me to wonder out loud whether or not the innovation in the Wii prevents it from sporting such a title?

So in closing, I hope I don't end up having to piss stones.

I have something in the works about the recent political "debates" on (MS)NBC. It's about Gravel and Kucinich and how both of them kinda get it and kinda don't. It's about how scary it is that seemingly smart people in the so called liberal party have to appear hawkish in order to be popular. It's about the ridiculous worship of Ronald Reagan, and how 9 of 10 Republican nominees outright disapprove of allowing abortions at all and 3 of 10 don't "believe" in evolution. It's about how ridiculous it is that questions about evolution are even posed like that in this country; as if evolution or science in general is something that is to be believed and not understood, this really frightening push (from both directions) to appear to take things more on faith than reason.

But then life got in the way. I started a new job, which has been going quite smoothly but has also been requiring a lot more of my time than my old one. I've been trying to get various technical things in place (like a backup system), and also pass classes with the usual flying colors.

But chinks have started to appear, perhaps related to the gradual siphoning of my free time. I've started to go to the gym nearly every day in another probably vain attempt to get into some kind of shape. This has been quite straining, since it's adding an hour or two onto every workday and forcing my significant other to take dinners with me at 21:00 or later.

My classes seemed to concentrate a good portion of their workload on the end of the semester (which, for those many years removed from college, is now). I also have a Japanese class coming up starting May 29th. It's been 5 months since I took the last one and I am very rusty, so I need to spend a significant amount of time catching up. This would be fine, too, except I'm trying to plan a foray out of the country for early June. My foray is slightly complicated by the fact that I already have a great deal of money towards flight tickets tied up into the system of some airline company (I forgot which one but I think it might be Delta).

Even this would be doable; I could make flight plans and hotel/hostel reservations over the next few weeks in downtimes between homework. But my landlord kinda dropped a bomb on us. They haven't been very good (they didn't paint, they never contact us, they don't fix issues we have, etc), but not contacting us at all to notify that they were not planning to extend our lease was pretty low on the decent human being scale. The truth is that we violated our lease (by allowing one of our roommates girlfriends to stay with us), but in light of the fact that we are quiet, always pay early, and renovated the apartment ourselves when we moved in, I think the company could have at least done right by us and told us ahead of time.

So now I'm juggling 2 finals scheduled for the 7th of May, a final project, a hellish amount of work, a 3 week streak at the gym I'm quite unwilling to let go of, an absolutely necessary amount of studying/cramming for my upcoming Japanese class, vacation planning and apartment hunting.

Somehow, the little afro guy next to me (his name translates to: 'pretz holding-kun') and about 3 hours of diving through youtube all came about because I wanted to see a katana slice through an egg at like 1000 frames per second. One thing led to another, and I came upon the most insanely saccharine thing ever produced: an Aya Matsuura pretz commercial. In the middle of this pink dreamworld, you see a picture of an guy with an afro on the back of a pretz box holding a pretz.

Japanese commercials are pretty famous for being unusual or freaky, but there's actually a pretty good reason for it. Tivo-style technology took a hold a lot faster there than it did here, largely because VHS never really became ubiquitous like it was here for a variety of reasons (It's not Sony, Laserdisc did much better in .jp than it did here, VHS tapes are big and bulky, et alii). A average Japanese citizen, being far more advanced technologically, and for more inclined to accept new gadgetry and technology than Americans (that part is actually more important.. more in the next paragraph), has been using their PVR's for quite some time. They know how to record their favorite programs so they can go out for a drink with the coworkers, and then watch them later without commercials, and this was creating a big problem.

It was so big, in fact, that a national advertising campaign was started in an attempt to get people to remember the 'good side' of commercials. One of the best ones featured a salary girl home from work, crying, while the campaign's monkey mascot Komasaru (since it's Japanese, of course it's a pun: 'komasaru' = commercial, 'saru' = monkey) is jumping around on a ball trying to get her attention. She looks up at the television, bleary eyed, with probably the most sympathetic face a human has ever conjured, and komasaru falls flat on his ass. She cracks a smile, and then laughs. The song in the background, an endless repeat of "I love, I love, Commercials", fades.

It sounds like Orwell, but it was actually quite a touching moment to behold. It didn't have the same oomph as, say, choco party girl, but it's heart was in the right place! It just proves, on top of all the obvious evidence that traditional program interruption advertising is under attack, that the advertisers feel under attack. At least, they do in Japan, which basically amounts to the future. So commercials are made increasingly zany and eye catching, and a culture that seems to thrive on making as little sense as possible just gets more amusing to onlookers.

Pretz Motteru-kun is a cool cat and all, but what I really should be talking about is the epic change I'm undergoing as we speak! I am currently unemployed and will stay that way until... Monday. Upon Monday's arrival, I will start working at a small startup called Attila Technologies. I'll be working on the commercial incarnation of a project that I worked on for a time 3 years ago when I first started at WiNSeC, but this time with a chance (albeit a tiny one) of coming away with fat sacks of cash money.

So a little more than 3 years after it started, I've left the first full time job I've ever supported myself on. It's a brave new (very uncertain) world: I don't really live in one place, I don't really have any idea what months that will happen this year will be like. Take December. Will i still be employed? Will I be exactly the same as I am now? Will I finally be done with my masters degree? Will I be destitute? Wealthy? Living in America? The exciting thing about this move (and the dangerous one, I suppose) is these are all possible (some more than others), and the weird thing is that I wouldn't mind any of them if it means I can change the status quo for a little while and do something different.

My last post, written relatively quickly and in somewhat of a rage, is probably the best writing I've done in the past 2 years. Back when I was still angry, I used to write like that often. When your life is as charmed as mine, it can be tough to work up the audacity to lay on the vitrol nice and thick.

I've had many unfamiliar roles lately, the least interesting (and fun) of which was the whiny brat mentioned previously: a happy go lucky dreamer, a 'playboy' hitting for the asian cycle, a relationship specialist, a translator and a chauffeur. Since that last one is french, I'll arbitrarily pick that one to discuss and leave you to your own devices on the others.

As a quick recap, I was supposed to escape New Jersey on the 14th of December. My escape vector would lead me across Manhattan Island towards JFK Airport, and then catapulted from the earth towards lands of splendor, but I ended up getting sick instead. For my crimes, my escape (because it had to happen one way or the other) brought me only 40 miles north of Manhattan.

As a reminder that I don't know any native english speakers, let alone american citizens, everyone on earth was migrating great distances to see family this week. For my crimes, I volunteered to drive everyone in reaching distance to the airport, and it was absolutely glorious . There are few rides on the east coast better than driving from Hoboken to the orwellian named Newark "Liberty" Airport. You get to simultaneously travel through time, the economic strata, and as an added bonus a nice cross section of Japanese rock.

Your journey starts in the heart of Hoboken, if you're lucky. If you're stuck on the west side (like me, the other plebs, and the select few elite minorities that live in the 'projects'), you can skip this part, but it really gives the full perspective. Getting to drive down Washington st. is like watching a time lapse movie of your life while on amphetamines; all you really need is motion blur to complete the effect, but the thick cake of dirt on my surrogate civic's windows sufficed in a pinch. The glamorous lives of yuletide yuppies pass you by on a wide, well lit, well stocked corridor, and then you make that right.

You exit Hoboken under railroad tracks that look like they were comissioned by the mafia for the express purpose of disposing of bodies in the 60's and 70's. What isn't paved in ancient cracking concrete and asphalt is either part of a rusty iron facade or a lumpy graveyard terrain. You emerge into this wasteland, uninhabitable section of Jersey City that is essentially a large parking lot that has been converted into an unintelligible collection of roads, the major one being a funnel that swirls traffic into the holland tunnel. Factories here have broken windows by design, abandoned or condemned for years, waiting for the price of housing to make a rennovation and refactoring into luxury lofts economically worthwhile.

From here the distinct privilege of traveling on 1&9 away from the funnel and through the long tunnel with grafiti painted on hundreds of columns in such a way that the perspective of oncoming traffic makes one contiguous picture. Or it did, until assholes either painted it over or covered my windows with so much dirt that I couldn't make it out anymore. The road leading to the skyway here is lined with that old concrete that has the multi-colored pebbles in it; crafted before such concrete was made extinct presumably by the overconsumption of said pebbles.

The pebblecrete leads you to the glorious, terrifyingly beautiful Pulaski Skyway. A huge concrete structure that must measure 5 miles in length (but crosses a river no more than 100 meters wide), It's crown jewel is an metal span that is painted black and looks like (from a distance, or speeding car) cast iron. You're surrounded by smoke stacks on and enormous oil-drill looking machinery on either side, and upon reaching the summit you get to enjoy a breathtaking view of an endless shit-infested concrete sprawl that makes up much of New Jersey. Steam gushes or leaks slowly from the stacks, and in the dark you are sure you are being chased by the wild imaginary machines of a steam-punk novel or a mid-90's final fantasy game.

That gotham city stretch of road is the real highlight, especially with it's middle-mounted entrance and exit ramps, but you still have the roller coaster stretch followed by the airport itself. Airports are the only place in the United States where there is some acknowledgement that the world at large exists and might be noteworthy, and for this they have my endless thanks. On the way back, triumphant fist pumping Jrock blaring from the speakers, mission to assist in exodus complete, you get one last spectacle coming off the skyway: and endless sea of cars slowly seeping into that tunnel, fish with tail lights falling inevitably into the whirlpool and getting spit up right onto canal street.

I hate clubs, clubbing; the whole culture and people that go along with it. This dislike is so heavy it seeps into innocent bystanders; people who happen to go clubbing get splattered by the awesome precision of my driveby anti-clubbing rage. A legion of assholes, perfumed, groomed, greased up, blinged up, dancing a thin disguise on an otherwise bald quest to get laid. The activity is almost as stupid as my irrational rejection of it, like some kind of bacteria that must be dispatched quickly, one way or the other.

Johnny finaly went through and cooked a meal for everyone, and it was really good. "Traditional 30 cent Taiwanese food" consisted of some saucy tofu and pork stew-like dish, a corn soup, and some japanese raw tofu. I wasn't feeling too good before dinner, but the night went fine. And then a promise caught up to me. I promised I'd go clubbing.

Even though they knew I hated it, people never stopped reminding me about the endless shifts in plans and hypothetical complications. Ceache told me at mola that there might be a problem because all of a sudden we were going to be packing 11 people; 6 male, and 5 female, and that we were going to be a little male heavy and might be denied entrance. This was probably the origin of the geyser of bile that I was unable to fend off after dinner, as I was notified that there was a dress code and that my shoes might not fit. I had other shoes, and I started to put them on when it hit me: "What the fuck?"

I fucking resent that. I resent it to hell, that I should have to primp myself and wear something acceptable to go do something I hate doing around people I normally also hate. This isn't some kind of reclusive reaction; I fucking love live music, lounges, bars. This is a survival instinct I've honed so that I can keep a safe distance between myself and the kind of people who get hair cuts twice a week and give half a shit about celebrity. So I realized immediately that it just was not happening, and this intense gut-wrenching hatred spread (naturally, unfortunately) in the direction of my good company. It was fucking stupid. The whole damned thing.

And I'm supposed to be in Europe right now. Holland at least, probably Germany (or a train in that direction). I had it all set up, and then my ass, knee, arm, and eyeballs all decided to up and break simultaneously. I had to break those plans off, and what's worse, I totally let down my brother. As close as 3 days before I'd fly out, it took me 15 minutes to shuffle in a pain addled penguin-like manner 2 lousy blocks to work.

Regardless, my decision was upsetting to more people than myself, and it should have been. We had dinner for like 4 hours and then 10 minutes before gametime I had to throw some childlike tantrum about how I don't like this or that and wouldn't do it. My girlfriend spent like 45 minutes getting dressed up all pretty and it couldn't have mattered less, except as an oppresive weight on my concience for the rest of the night. No matter how pure the intentions (she just wanted to go and have fun and for me to be with her), it didn't matter one god damn. And that's the real tragedy.

Back in high school, me and my friends used to play this game where we'd go into a public place and then say "Asshole" at an ever increasing volume until finally someone chickened out and lost. We'd play the same game with just about any word; 'Head' was also popular and less likely to get you expelled from the venue. Tonight's reaction was some ungainly regurgitation of the asshole game, splashed out onto the worthy shoes of clubgoers everywhere, because when you grow up you realize that the real loser of the "Asshole" game is everyone involved.

So I spared myself 4 hours in some dark shithole, watching a bunch of headless (brainless) chests bounce around to the tune of the worst techno "music" in the world mixed with the cranial echoes of the sipping noise on a $10 wuss drink, but what I got in return wasn't any better. Clubbing just fucking sucks; and being an asshole isn't really any better.

A month ago while I was visiting home I put on my girlfriends glasses and lo, I was able to see much better than normal. I had noticed slight deterioration of my vision about a year earlier, as signs that were far away were slightly fuzzy, but I saw far better with the glasses on than without. This was a bit alarming.

I still haven't seeked a specialist to solve the problem. Those that know me really well know that I'm attracted to women with glasses. The real reason is that I'm attracted to people smarter than me, and people with glasses look smarter (It'd probably be interesting to investigate why, psycologically, this is the case, but most people probably agree with me here). I don't necessarily hate the idea of wearing glasses myself, but when I put them on and move my head around, the world swirls about in a focused fisheye that makes me dizzy as hell. The last few days have been considerably less stressful than the previous week and I actually am seeing quite a bit better: no more tunnel vision, focusing is coming easier, so I'm putting off a trip to the eye doctor for a bit.

While I haven't been studying my ass off or memorizing my ass off, I've been coding (my ass off). Although a lot of progress has been made on saudade (all of which can be seen), the stuff I've been doing recently has been mostly dealing with xchat scripts. Most of the hits on the devsite have been in search of "xchat", "xmms", or both. In response, pymp, a simple xchat mp3 announce & control script, now has support for 5 media players: audacious, xmms, beep, banshee, and juk.

The pymp code is actually pretty clean, but there is a lot of code that could probably be done away with. There are a few shortcuts and instances of macro-programming (macro has become somewhat of a dirty word but I mean it in the lisp meta-programming sense) that I am a little proud of. There is a LOT of passing of functions as data and a lot of dynamic code evaluation that saves a ton on LOC (which in general saves a ton on correctness).

I am really getting tired of the current theme, and since the saudade-based site has numerous enhancements (auto-summaries, improved rss feed, blog list navigation, and huge improvements in todo list performance), I want to get it out as soon as possible. I am a bit behind on 日本語の宿題, but I hope I can get the next version of jmoiron.net off the ground soon and start to work on the gallery. I'm shooting for November 20th.

Although it seemed like it might be complete and utter fallacy up until about August 30th, I actually did manage to not only sign up for 2 graduate courses but also Japanese levels 5 & 6, thus saving myself from being a total liar.

Automata and Formal Languages is essentially a theoretical computer science trial by fire, or maybe a theoretical computer science sink or swim test. Japanese 5&6 is a completely natural progression of levels 1-4, but that's probably mostly to do with the incomparable Minamoto-sensei. I handed in Cecilia's homework on thursday, and when Reiko-san asked me if I was there for a textbook, I said: 'ああ、いいえ、ともだちのしゅくだいがあります。' almost instinctively. In class, we've finally covered "the existence of experience" form, which is heavily used (ことがあります), and also the plain form of past and past negative tenses. My kanji reading is up to around 80, which is a something like 4% of what you need to be able to read a newspaper.

I've been djangoing ( v. to code using django ) quite a lot, and also quite studiously engaging in Web2.0 and Ajax development patterns and trying to figure out what was good and what was bad. Although work on the gallery section kinda hasn't really started, I feel much more comfortable with the framework and with "modern" web application development techniques, and I am starting to come up with better ideas on how to build such a system. A system in which every picture's exif tag gets its own row in a table would quickly result in a table with 10's of thousands of elements, but this is kinda exactly what RDBMS' are supposed to be able to cope with. I'm going to ask around on freenode to see if any database experts can give me any better ideas, and it might be interesting to solve this problem in a way that bypasses Django's ORM functions.

It seems like forever ago that I made the new years resolution to not plan anything. I think it's been pretty successful, and considering what was going on during my New Years, I think it was a logical extension of best practices. We're already on the cusp of October, which sounds really late in the year, but there are still a few months of my favorite season (秋, pronounced 'aki', whose radicals mean 'rice plant' and 'fire', is a particularly beautiful/poetic way of looking at it) and a festive month to spend with family. There's 66 days left in the work-year, and being able to take off 23 of them feels pretty good.

I've been in some kind of groove recently. It isn't too productive of a groove, but my mind has been racing like I'm on speed. If only insane hyperactivity came with the same metabolism benefits as methamphetamine. Another drawback is that I haven't come down for the past week, and have been going to sleep on average 20 minutes later each night.

A lot of my time has been going into coding, but what people don't realize is the ammount of perfectionism I suffer from and how much of my time it wastes. Say I write something pretty small; about 300 lines of python code. I test my application on average every 3 to 4 lines of code. This is, in my opinion, way too much, but I can't help it. I usually completely lack confidence that what I have written will do what I want it to, and I often end up unit testing any non-trivial aspect of a program.

So we have a small python module that has been tested at least once per line (that's a generous estimate, usually on a small project I will write about 1.5x the ammount of code that I end up with, since I tend to refactor or polymorphise at the slightest hint of necessity.. this introduces more testing and more bugs). If I actually get it done (usually I don't but in the last year this has started to change), I tend to document verbosely and elaborately. It might not look like much, but getting everything perfect on that page probably took me a few hours. Even though I can rip through html & css like lightning, I had to run the app in question and decide what should go in the documentation. Those were easy.. I've spent 1 week+ on documentation on projects for work in the past. Documentation I knew nobody would ever read.

Now that it's documented and somewhere, my little module has to get blogged about. The code that I've been linking here went through 3 complete re-writes before I even had a satisfactorily working version. I probably spent about 2 weeks thinking about its architecture and about what it should or shouldn't do before banging out most of the code in a single weekend. It stands virtually alone in the collection of software I've written in that it actually makes my life easier, other people have actually used it, and I've actually found and fixed bugs a few months after its "completion."

Lots of time went into creating that small app, but writing it only took me about 8 hours. I think I've been getting better, due in part to a breakdown in my reluctance to use tools developed by others to help me accomplish my task. Still, I've found fit to write something like this even though there are about five thousand apps out there that I could have used. When I sit down to write it, any one of a thousand distractions can impede my progress. For every 45 minute period where I am completely in the zone generating dozens features or bugfixes I spend 2 hours watching tennis, watching EPL, reading news, or blogging about it.

If I'm lucky, I'll figure out what music fits my mood in under 5 minutes, only to tune it out when I get down to business. If I'm lucky, I'm not trying to multitask, or else going to get the laundry will lead into a trip to the grocery store, making dinner, etc.

Wei Alan Tsang, hacker, philosopher, meme-expert and father, advised me in nike like fashion that when I remember I have something to do I should "just do it". The biggest void in my life right now is having never created anything I can look back on and be really proud of. There's no Lucious Anatole Moiron. When this void is filled, the next largest regret will be having only created one thing I could look back on and be proud of, and I'll commence work on the second. That's what it feels like when you can't stop thinking about what you want to do and can't seem to do what you can't stop thinking about. You're just a progress bar in a world that's standing still.

Feels like I've been doing less than nothing for the past 10 days.

I still haven't handed in my study plan and gotten signed up for classes. Today is the first day of the semester. I haven't called japansociety to register for 5&6. I haven't finished my todo list yet (big surprise).

I haven't made any headway on my gallery. I haven't made any headway on anything. I haven't done any research for any trips I'm planning (Brazil and/or Japan). I haven't gone to the city to get my laptop situation worked out, I haven't gotten my Egypt pictures off of my camera. I haven't charged my batteries for my mp3 player. I started writing a small post that was supposed to be a changelog of all of the changes I've made to the site in the development sandbox, but I haven't even added a single feature to the post yet.

I got terribly sick with bronchitis and didn't leave my bed for 3 days. On the 3rd day, I was feeling good enough to do something with that day, but didn't. And that's how it has been for the past week. Feeling good enough to do things, but not good about doing things. Gotta get out of this rut, it's seriously going to disrupt plans.

...and the living is easy. I got older on the 27th of June... seems like it's at the same time every year. On the 22nd, I was able to see the pillows for the third time (saw them twice previously). 日本語のクラス is plodding along at a decent clip; ときどきむずかしです。 By next week I will be done with level 3 and starting level 4, which I think begins kanji and radicals.

All manner of life things hinge on the outcome or development of two super secret secrets, the secrecy of which are somewhat silly and somewhat damaging to me and others simultaneously. It's kinda like private key encryption.. I think there's only one other person out there who knows both, and those who know one probably do not have the requisite access to the other. Unfortunately, in one case it's kind of Serious Business, and impacts the life of people from whom I must keep the information secret. They throw my late august travel plans into a question mark which I now must have resolved within the next few weeks.

World Cup Fever has hit .. well, everyone. I did a lot more watching of the Premiership and Serie A this year than previous years, so I knew about most of the big names (and some of the smaller) and what kind of form they were bringing to the world cup. This knowledge really changed the lens through which I have viewed the american comentary, which has been very poor. You can sorta tell that the announcer doesn't know what it means to be a midfielder from Internazionale when he reads that tidbit from his bulleted spec sheet.

The final is set to be played in a few days between France and Italy. France beat out Portugal in order to make it in a match that was quite close and decided by a penalty kick. It was really unfortunate, because I would have rather liked to see what would happen if the teams were forced to score from the field instead. Portugal dominated most of the second half (searching for an equalizer) but could not find away around France's 7 defenders (4 backs and 3 mids who hardly saw the light of the portuguese half). Very entertainingly, portuguese keeper Ricardo played mostly inside France's 18 yard box for the last minute or two of the game, but the equalizer just wasn't there. I'll have to settle for watching Portugal vs Germany in a few days.

The most bitter thing about world cup losses is having to return to your normal life, where there's nothing to cheer for. As if one let down wasn't enough, Kenneth Lay died and avoided 20 years of entirely deserved punishment. The people he completely fucked over can no longer sue for punitive damages, and officially he will never be recorded as having been indicted (which he was) or convicted (which he was) because he was in the middle of his appeals process.

There's a reason I don't get any sleep. Sometimes, its this blog; other times, its the "I'll just catch up on news real quick" chicanery that I often tell myself. But some times, I really do legitimately try to catch 40 winks and come up empty handed. Tonight is one of those nights, and it falls under one of the more depressing of types.

I got home this evening at around 18:00, which is 4 hours earlier than my recent average. I figured to do lots of interesting things, but instead kind of loafed around and did nothing. It's ok, I'm allowed. I get tired around 20:30, and decide around 22:00 that I could get a boat load of sleep and wake up refreshed for Friday and the subsequent weekend. I quickly slip into dreamland and don't look back...

Until 2:00, when I wake up and feel as though I am living in a blast furnace. Dehydrated and discombobulated, I make my way to the kitchen for a glass of water and then fail in returning to sleep for the next hour. My mind now racing on all manners of subjects, I decide to pop online real quick and seek answers to my idle inquiries. Using my sexy, sexy laptop prooves to actually be a passing fancy, and I quickly return to my previous endeavors (failing to sleep).

4:00 rolls around.

I'm distinctly aware of the time I will be waking up; the image of my finger on the "what time will I be waking up" button is still fresh in my mind, the red digits "7", "4", "5" searing my visual memory. Quick arithmetic leads me to the conclusion that I will spend Friday tired. Woe is me.

I decide, being still alert, to check on IRC. Before you laugh, some background. I have been re-crafting (with a somewhat official capacity) the arlong park (which currently is down) site as a wiki. As far as I know only a handfull of people are aware of the project, but if you're curious you can inspect my progress. In any event, I had completed most of anonymous user facing cosmetic changes that I wanted to last night, and was curious as to what the sites former (and future) maintainers thought of the new system.

This brings us finally to the reason that I am writing right now. One of the maintainers was expressing his disdain to me that the former site was lost and that gathering data from caches that vary in recency was a pain. He was working on rebuilding the old episode guide, which I suppose now numbers almost 250, and was missing the most recent 40 episodes, when I commented that he could probably find them elsewhere. "Of Course!", he should have remarked, and then expressed his disdain that the encyclopedia information had been stolen from Arlong Park.

The gentleman I speak of is 17 years old, which is, for the next 20 days, the same age as my brother. There is a real mental disconnect there, and I'm not sure if its a technological, social, or generational one. The value of a website like that, or even like this, is not what is there, but the community around it and what will be there in the future. I tried to make the case for this stance, but it seems that the idea that information and hard work should be owned and not shared is pervasive even on the web. As proof of this, he asked me if there was a way to make a site impossible to copy and paste.

It's a popular conceptual argument that DRM cannot work because if the end user is allowed to view the content, they can in the end create ways to copy it. The classic example is evident in that movie theater cam rips are available 0 day for virtually every Hollywood movie, even though there are societal and legal prohibitions on such behavior. In the same way, I think that many people desire in some way to be associated with the content that they produce, and in fact demand it, while not realizing that the content itself is not the point.

I could write my little blog here, and print it out, and distribute it among friends and coworkers, were I so inclined. But I choose to make the information available to everyone, knowing full well that people could copy it and pass it off as their own. While the odds of this happening for some silly rants that I write are low, it follows for pictures I take or code I post as well. The information is important to me, and the fact that I created it and it is posted on my site is attribution enough. The real value of 'publishing' it on the web is that it is available for everyone, and not that I wrote it. If someone decides to copy my blog, or copy multiple layouts of mine, that's fine, because that isn't part of what gives this site value.

Similarly, for a site like Arlong Park, the value there is not that the information is held by some cadre of dedicated individuals, but that it is centralized, organized, searchable, and easily accessible. It's the forum community, and hopefully the community that will soon be updating the information on the wiki. The value isn't that the information is yours, or mine, or whoevers; its just that it's there. You could make a complete copy of WikiPedia (as many, in fact, have), but since you cannot easily replace the community around it, that copy would not have the same value as WikiPedia itself. If WikiPedia was shut down, though, that copy becomes tremendously valueable, and so the fact that it can and is copied is a good thing, even in cases where it is sans attribution.

In closing, I shall use the word "insofar". Thank you.

A lot has happened in the last month that I haven't been blogging about, but I've been kinda relaxing and taking things as they come. In order to not deny the past month's existence, I present to you this unordered list:

• Installed Tiger on the Mel1
• Learned Hiragana
• Saw Attack Haus et. al.
• Turned 23
• Still no girlfriend (is this an acomplishment?)
• Gained 10 lbs, Lost 10 lbs... again sighs : former glory?

That's a pretty short and depressing list! I have been having fun going home each weekend and hanging out with friends. This Friday The Flesh are dropping by The Knitting Factory; if there are still tickets come down and check them out! Thursday night is wings w/ Olger & Rudy! This week is only 3 days of work for me! Shit, I am so enthusiastic!

I was staring at the big billboard of the Manhattan Pharmacy a few (2? 3?) weeks ago thinking to myself: "If that were written in Japanese, I wouldn't be able to read it." I don't know why that thought popped into my head at that moment, staring up at the morning sun, suffering through 65% humidity, but I realized that I already knew how the kana system worked, and I might as well spend a few weeks or months learning them so I can read things; after all, there are plenty of things that I am interested in, and being able to even sound things out phonetically would probably help navigation immensely.

This thought kinda stewed for a day, and at night when I was wondering what to do that could possibly be constructive, I realized that all those past nights where my constructive thing was arranging my backgrounds or trying and failing to code could have been used to actually learn things. Cursing a missed opprotunity to easily become fluent in Portuguese or to learn how to read Japanese at a child's level, I began at once to copy kana's of different styles into a little book and learned them 5 by 5 (a i u e o [あいうえお], ka ki ku ke KO [かきくけこ], etc) until I had a very good grasp on the first bunch of sets and a decent grasp on the remaining 3 and a half sets. Trying to understand different pieces of linguistics (a field which is quite vast) really helped immensely; learning intuitively what voiced and unvoiced consonants are will cut down your work 50% since the Japanese "phonetic" (its not quite 100% but its very, very close) writing system has the concepts of voice built into it.

I realized before I started that learning kana and knowing how to read were completely different for a number of reasons (kanji, lack of word separation, etc), but I just wanted to be able to sound things out that I come across in my daily web exploits. If my practice leads to more fascination and eventually to a decent understanding of the language itself, I could only count that as a good thing, and if it doesn't then I'll have met my goal of learning kana. As it is now, my grammar and vocabulary are far too poor to be able to understand anything but the most basic exclamation.

A bunch of people I know are going to be graduating tomorrow, so congratulations and good luck to all of them. This includes Mike "Super Jew" Krupnic, Jeremy "Jerumu" Mikola and Wei Alan "Just Got Married" Tsang. Two of these guys have jobs so good luck with that, and Krupnic you might want to try searching for work in the pacific north west since you've already tried in every other region!

With the graduation comes a reminder of my graduation (which I don't remember because I had maybe 5 hours of sleep the entire week before) and of course grades for my first term of graduate school. Since I'm non-metriculated, I'll have to get a few offer letters and actually apply before I can take more than 4 courses, but I'd say that so far I'm starting off on the right foot!

I really do plan on adding even more to my post on KDE 3.4, but its really tiring taking all of the screenshots and commenting on them, especially since I find anything without a propper mouse to be less than comfortable to use. Still, I want to at least cover some miscelaneous nags, some interesting new features, and the notable positive and negative changes to the control center.

I've been using (_gasp_) windows lately on my workstation. I wanted to play some games I had lying around and also finish out some FPS' that I played back when I roomed with Demarco and Jerumu all those years ago. Seldom do people come "fresh" to windows knowing linux, and ideed most of my computer use before 200½002 was in windows, but I've found myself completely absorbed by features that windows does not have out of the box, and completely out of the loop for leet haxor programs that give me the functionality. The mouse in XP seems to really lag behind from where I think it's going to be; I remember feeling the same exact way about X when I first started using it, but X has gotten noticably more reactive in the past few years and it seems that windows has somewhat lagged behind. Most of the other features I sorely, sorely miss have to do with window management. I miss having "alt + left click" dragging a window, "alt + right click" to resize, and scrollwheel/doubleclick to do a window rollup (which isn't even provided at all by windows; I have to use the nvidia driver nonsense to get it).

Those gripes aside, I've been having fun (almost too much fun) playing some games; mostly dividing my time between The Longest Journey and GunBound. I started playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but the mouse issue I had within windows was far more severe in that shooter (Oh how I miss the crisp accuracy of Half Life!) and I have come to realize that FPS are on the whole only fun multi-player.

Finally, I've been actually doing some work on the server. I still haven't set up an IRC server, but that's because I don't know which ircd is the best or even anything about running an ircd and what the associated vulnerabilities are. I set up mail to work within the local host, but have not enabled the world to get to it yet because I want to read up a little more on configuration of the server and in specific what security issues there are with it. I wrote a script that emails me a digest of what is upgradable in apt and threw it into cron which has helped stay on top of keeping up to date, and finally I've examined the error logs and found a lot of asshats sniffing for the awstats.pl vulnerability but other than that just a bunch of bots upset at a lack of robots.txt.

This past Thursday; the 28th of April 2005; I went to see a show at the Knitting Factory. The effects of listening to music can sometimes take a while to sink in, and sometimes it takes something else to make you realize why what you've just listened to was incredible. Any band with a keyboard and a disco beat can make you dance; it takes a special band to make you smile. Thank's Palomar.

I rode home on the train from the Melt Banana show with a girl who had a FSRN shirt on; it reminded me of things that are important in life (girls, clothing, and politics) and I've started podcasting Democracy Now! on the way to work and Free Speech Radio News on the way home. Just slowly slipping into that dreaded lifestyle I guess. At least I am at the forefront of Gentrification.

Prompted by his lifetime of political activism, a few co-authored works with Noam Chomsky and a recent interview with Amy Goodman, I decided to pick up 2 of Howard Zinn's books; one of which is the famous "A People's History of the United States". I plan to start it tonight.

Finally, I must urge all of you who know me personally; please do not invite me to weddings via a mass email! My old roomate Joe did it, and now a good friend of mine Wtsang did it. Your wedding should be something personal that you remember for a long time; even past your divorce! Humor aside, regardless of outcome it will be one of the most significant days of your life, and you should feel compelled to share it with your closest friends. I'd rather not be on that list than show up as part of some group who was given an umbrella invitation. Maybe (probably?) this is me just being selfish, but if you want me there please ask me personally; the odds of me going to an invitation whose title starts with "Re:" are slim indeed.

The average latency for blogposts has increased for me and for others, but the bandwidth has stayed about the same, regardless of what format I'd rather employ. The problem lately is that I detest my ¼ complete backend and the entire structure behind it; Jerm's decision, although heavily ridiculed by myself and yet others, was the right one, because he and I are of a particular breed of perfectionist that can either have everything absolutely perfect, or nothing being satisfactory at all. I am just not capable of doing small, incremental design changes; when I get into a process, I put my all into it, and when I back out, I forget about it and use that space for other things. I work best in batch mode, a-la Knuth.

I've been reading some python blogs recently, mostly about the weird monkey-typing system they plan on implementing. I'm not so sure I like this; this is not what python is. Before I explain that a little more clearly, I'd like to give some background information.

I've finally started Graduate Classes at Stevens Tech, and decided to get the ball rolling with CS 571 (Java) and CS 765 (A special topics course called "_Foundations of Programming Paradigms_"). The former is taught by an industry man, and the latter by Andrew Koenig, who is more of an academic.

Since Greenshpun is opinionated, he gives his opions on the Java language; why the lack of multiple inheritance is bad, or why interfaces are good but lack the power of simpler and more elegant solutions (my favorite "interface" solution is duck typing). Koenig on the other hand is much more drawn to the human side of things, the "how does this (or that) play with our cognitive process", and inspecting why certain structures work better than others. In the respect of simply studying programming languages, which is one of my favorite topics of study, these two classes are serving me very well.

Having two classes from completely different ends of the spectrum gaze upon one issue (language design) really leads to interesting insights, and sometimes these insights were even known to me (and definitely to others) previously, but never explored more deeply. But I have come recently to realize, much to the help of Jerm (who probably doesn't know it), that languages are tools in more than one dimension. When you understand why something is, you start to see a bit deeper and realize what it is.

There is this cliched maxim in CS about choosing the right tool for the job, but theres also a completely competing strategy that seems to work quite often as well; create the right job for the tool. If you have don't know how to use a screwdriver but are a whiz with a hammer, maybe you can grind down that screw to make it a nail. This has all been explored before in famous papers like the "right-way / wrong-way method of programming", but with today's languages there's an interesting paradox; the language is also a tool; not only so far as semantics or libraries go, but in the ways you deal with the language. For languages that have a runtime, or better are interpreted, this can give you considerable power.

A long time back, while writing his blog backend and reworking it to use almost exclusively PEAR (because, you know, you might want to run msql or postgre or firebird someday...), Jeremy was getting fed up with its templating system. When I spoke to him later about templating, telling him that I felt that CSS was enough and that mixing source and code was OK in projects our size, he told me his solution: use PHP as the templating language.

In languages where you can dynamically load new code and then deal with that code as you wish, using the language itself (or more clearly the interpreter) to do things you'd normally have to write code for is a pretty interesting shortcut, but in this case it was especially clever. PHP already is a templating language, he told me, and I have to agree.

So with all of this language design floating around in my head I plopped down in my chair at work today to do a rush job. We have this visualization that I wrote in PyQt 6 to 8 months ago, and even in the time since I've written it I've become exponentially better as far as code organization and program design that I detest the way it is written and wish I could redo it; this thing is a classic example of what happens when you have no idea what the specifications for your program are going to be, or when you have features that you are adding to the featureset as time goes on. We were told that we have to give some manner of demo on monday, but we don't have the hardware, so none of the daemons for the visualization can be set up. My boss asks me about the feasibility of creating a few dummies for inclusion into a presentation in flash, since he's the new proprietor of a presentation that has to be rushed and completed in 3 days.

"Why don't we just use our existing visualization and then feed it the necessary data to create what we want; then capture it over VNC with vnc2swf and include movies that show something that we actually have done?" -- me

When the idea hit me, I realized that had it also involved Guinness someone probably would have moved their hinge-jointed arm and exclaimed "Brilliant!". In order to actually create these movies though, we'd need to have something dynamic enough that it could change its behavior in time such that we could simulate real behavior. Most of this; bandwidth, etc, could just be randomly generated; but to make all of it grow in time; the simple console that I wrote for the program was just not equipped to do this in batch mode, and besides when you ran information from the logs you lose things like context.

So I set to work creating a demo module that would import the minimum ammount of hooks it'd need to provide functionality to time and loop all of this. I knew that I'd have to be able to save each demonstration (5 in all) as a file of some sort, so that we could replay and tweak in case the recording came out bad, or had bad settings, or we just wanted some timing to change, etc. Then it hit me; why not just let Python do that? I needed some language that would have access to time, loops, and pass back strings. Python itself has more than enough functionality, and if I formed my individual demo files as valid Python code, I could dynamically import whatever I want and then make a call to a predefined function to run it all.

As it turns out, with the nature of the program (3 or 4 concurrent threads all running infinitely, gathering data and listening for signals), this solution was beyond ideal! My demo templates could themselves import a trivial ammount of shared code, and then I'd be off to the races. I don't have to create a language, or write a parser; I have python already. Oh what I would have given to have thought about this back when I wrote the command console for the application in June!

But this whole experience has taught me a valueble lesson; know what your tools are and why they are. Python works well as a general purpose language, but its real functionality is as a quick prototyping and glue language. When you need a quick prototype yourslef, use the interpreter you already know is running. Sometimes, your hammer really is a screwdriver.

It looks like, over the years (and I can't freaking believe I've been blogging for multiple years), the blogging style of myself et. al has gone from writing a small blurb whenever something interesting or worthy happens to a more sporadic, flowing, and literary digest style. Perhaps its to show off our amazing vocabulary or our surprising grasp of grammar in the face of so much rubbish, but we prefer to slave away, painstakingly crafting posts that inevitably revert in on themselves and describe our feelings, or what have you. After a week of procrastinating, we spend a few hours and lovingly construct these delicious delicacies, and then you, the reader, get to scan through our hard work for interesting links and ignore our content.

This would be fine and well, if it was actually working for me. I spent the morning wondering just what exactly provided me the necessity of sleeping 16 hours from 07:00 to 23:00; and this wonderment had interesting consequences. A midnight bike ride down Kennedy searching desperately for 24 hour laundromats, a 5 o clock conversation about laundry, maroon 5 wannabe bands, and food; an insane man on IRC sending me Beach Boys and Ronettes MP3's, somehow under the impression that they were "_bad ass_" and "_off the hook_"; a laundromat clerk with the largest piece of Hindu themed bling I have ever seen in my life. This is my life; 06:00 at a laundromat, desperately urging the washers to wash, the driers to dry, listening to Interpol and Joy Division and Shy Child; and it's completely unsuited to what I hope is my previous style of writing.

I've come to the realization that I'm not trying to make history here; that no such scrutiny is taken when reading my page. This point strikes true when looking at who reads my page; one of whom really does not read it at all, the other hardly possessing the necessary skills to decipher the genius that goes into my work. Its just, when I see a man working at a laundromat at 6:00 AM with a silver om the size of a dinner plate, I want to be able to make play of the situation in my public forum without the pressure of fashioning a Homeric epic.

Completely different:

Whistler: "Your majesty is like a stream of bat's piss."
(all): "What?!"
Shaw: "I-I-I meant that your majesty shines out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark!"

Monty Python are not remembered as comedic geniuses for no reason. Recently I have been reminding myself of that; If I can figure out a Halloween party to go to, I will probably dress up as Cardinal Ximenez; for sure, nobody would expect it.

There are a few things going on of late worth mentioning; my struggle for self diagnosis (or: My fight with the night), the presidential debates, and my frequent forays into the land of the hip. For the sake of adequate blockquote spacing, they will be discussed in that order.

I can't really figure out if I have a real (read: medical) problem with sleep, or if I am just good at fooling myself, or what it is. I can, however, present you (and myself) with the following facts:

• 95% of the time, it takes me over an hour to fall asleep
• I find it fairly easy to stay up for over 20 hours
• left to my own devices, I live on 28 hour days (10 sleep, 18 awake)
• I find it easy to convince myself that 5 hours is "enough"
• I find it almost impossible to sleep before midnight
• I fidget constantly (knee shaking, hand wringing, etc.)
• I almost always set overly lofty goals and get heavily dissapointed for not meeting them

I feel that I might have some manner of anxiety problems, which explains fidgeting and lack of sleep, but the problem is that they never improve, regardless of my situation. If I am incredibly anxious, I will stay up later; when I do not conciously feel anything, the condition doesn't really improve.

The other explanation (in the scenario where there is actually something wrong) is that I have some kind of mild insomnia and that my difficulties with this somehow create my neurosis. Of course, I might be fine in which case I basically lack any and all self control and should really make a conscious effort to fix things. Still this pattern of behavior has been extremely difficult for me to deal with lately; and I've known about it and tried to understand it for the better part of 10 years with little or no success.

On the subject of presidential debates (!), I watched the first two and (regretfully) only the last 40 minutes of the third one. Before the debates had started, I was effectively sick and tired of the whole process; did not care one bit for either Bush or Kerry, and in fact was so turned off by the innability to enact any progressive change when in the past 4 years it has been so obviously necessary that I had stopped reading even my usual (quite liberal) stops.

I knew plenty why I and nobody I know should be voting for Bush: he's incompetent, dangerous, quick to wage war and equally quick to erode civil rights. But why bother with Kerry? Why bother in an election between two coorperation friendly old-money billionaires?

The only thing I knew about Kerry before the debates was that having ties to the ketchup industry seemed like it would ammount to less sinister actions than having a cabinet full of Big Oil Barons (tm). I doubt Theressa would be pushing for war in New Jersey to liberate its people, basing economic questions on the ability to take over the famous Jersey tomato fields.

After the debates, I suppose I know a little more about Kerry. I know that, while he soundly won the first and last debate, many of his complaints about Bush were not that his policy initiatives were flawed (which I believe they were), but that they were underfunded. It seems that liberals in this country no longer believe that our ideals are fit enough for mainstream policy; that in order to win against conservatives, they (we?) must claim to be able to better administer conservative plans rather than offering more traditionally liberal counter-plans.

Not to blow steam without examples, take the No Child Left Behind act. The act didn't work; it leaves more and more children behind, and not only that but oddly (as the children left behind are high school dropouts who are encouraged to drop out to increase high school scores) enough it puts these children that are left behind beyond the elaborate testing mechanism (which by the by made George's brother Neil profit handsomly) that the act itself created. Why, then, can it only be argued that the act failed because it was underfunded? Why can't you pose the logical thought that inflicting rigorous testing standards on understaffed schools is a mistake and the money is better spent on teachers and books?

The Clear Skies Act, or whatever (to quote Kerry) Orwellian name Bush and his cronies came up with (most likely in order to disparage political opposition; Kerry voted against the clear skies act? He is not in favor of clear skies?!) for their environmental plan, is broken. Why argue that it is underfunded or ignored? Why not just say it is stupid and broken? You do not protect swampland by changing the definition of swampland to include that which is not swampland; you do not, contrary to what the president thinks, protect forests by cutting them down. You do not liberate Iraqi's (which of course was not even the reason to invade, anyway) by killing a great number of them.

I found that this was a disturbing trend in the debate; that liberal ideologies were not used to fight conservative ones, instead opting to point out the presidents gross inneptitude and claim that the plans would work under different stewardship. What was I supposed to get out of this? That if I like Bush but concede he is an imbecile, I could just vote for Kerry?

What about those of us; like what I am only assuming was a large portion of the 1 million people who were with me on the streets of New York City on the ides of February a few years ago; who think that these policies are just bad? You know; maybe we are not down with the doctrine of preemption, or an ill defined, mostly unilateral global war. Maybe we'd rather have higher paid teachers and text books that feature presidents beyond Nixon than standardized tests? Maybe we want accountability and a working Superfund rather than weak, volluntary coorperate polluter cleanup programs.

What the conservatives, but more precisely the handlers in the Republican Party, have managed to do is create a political climate in which not voting for their initiatives is considered unpatriotic bordering on treason; worthy of public ridicule and scorn. They've made public ridicule and scorn of their own policies taboo; all the while being reclusive in their responsibility to report to their boss, the average citizen of the United States. In this kind of climate, this "either with us or against us" mire, they were able to ensnare many a spineless democratic senator; and now that they've all voted together for what have turned out, even in this tightly controlled media, to be widely held as idiotic initiatives; they have to argue in favor of them for fear of being called a flip-flopper.

What we need is strong resolve? Steadfast, resolute, principled leadership? Who the fuck made those a presidential requirements? A group of people who would most definitely be destroyed if it was suggested that a good leader be flexible and be able to adapt to different situations and new information; be able to incorperate the views of those who do not agree with them into their own, or to weigh all viewpoints in a discussion before making a decision.

Enough of my political ranting though; I end with recommended listening and a most flattering (and coincidentally funny) quote:

(Screen Name Hidden To Protect The Guilty)
(02:08:13) Christian Tsuraun: your stylishness is a plague
(02:08:31) Christian Tsuraun: I've gotten two people addicted to woxy
(02:08:40) Christian Tsuraun: if they get two people addicted in turn
(02:08:45) Christian Tsuraun: you know the math
(02:09:08) Christian Tsuraun: you're in danger of becoming mainstream at this rate ^_^

Recently, I have reached out to people in an effort to get them to listen to the Woxy (internet) radio station; and it seems that people are actually listening. I'll have to find some utterly unlikeable music to attach myself to soon.

This update is brought to you by Lucas, who reminded me that September 19th was in fact quite a long time ago.

Once again, the lack of an update is due to two parts laziness and one part privacy, and not really a want for anything to write about. I'm finally getting into the groove of commuting via bus to work and carrying things around and having no free time except for when I'm sacrificing sleep. I'm not sure that this is a good groove to be in, but its allowing me to pay off my school debt about 10 years ahead of schedule, so I'll stick to it. I also received an infmaous "Freshman Laptop" for my duties here; the specs are roughly: 2gz Pentium M, 512 MB of RAM, DVD RW, wireless b/g, and an incredible 1920x1200 screen. I was planning on buying another 2001FP, but with this I'm not sure if one is immediately necessary.

This past Friday there was a party at Alpha Sig which, remarkably, featured real booze. Apparently, fraternity parties at Stevens are only supposed to stock Milwalkie's Best, but there was a case or two of Yeungling, an uncountable number of Budweiser and Coors Light cans, the famous Sig Punch and not to be outdone, hard liquor for mixed drinks & shots on a 300 lb. ice slide. Just like the last time, Bacos shows up (this time with a girl named Sheri [sic] who was totally hip) and feeds the Jay booze engine. We also recite some obscure Sublime songs from memory, which prompted me a few days later to go back and listen to some of my favorites like "Mary" and "Boss DJ".

Another side-effect of this party, besides getting wrecked, was meeting the infamous Piney [sic]. He had brought some ammunition for Ellis' potato cannon, but alas Ellis had already gone to sleep, so instead we lit random things (like the house, and Piney himself or my shoes) on fire. This time the trip to Gio's was quick, less drunken, and featured a calzone rather than a beef patty, but all in all it was a kickin time just like it is all the time.

After a day of not doing anything Saturday, I trapsed off to the Franz Ferdinand concert at Roseland Ballroom with Jeremy, Dev, Marshall, and later to be joined by Maria. The first band sucked; the 2nd one (Blanche) definitely had its charm and its cool factor, and a red-head french maid to boot. After struggling through these bands, Franz took the stage to a raucus applause. I have some live cuts of them from my early days as a firstcomer, and they just didn't sound good live. I was hoping that the real thing would belie the recorded version, and that a year of playing together have sharpened their craftsmanship. I was not dissapointed.

The place was hopping and absolutely packed with girls, and much dancing did ensue. Even the stoic Dev and Jeremy got into it, singing along and trying to move while being pinned to the guy in front of them. They played 4 songs or so that were not instantly recognizeable from the record, and since the concert I have come to learn at least two of them; all 4 were unsurprisingly incredible. They ended the night with "This Fire", which I correctly identified as the only one they had left to play. I broke out the vocals, which I myself could not even hear, but I was told I was at least in key. On the way out, Marshal and I spontaneously began singing The Doors version of "Whiskey Bar".

If I had more than $20 to my name, I would be going to the Shy Child release party tonight; but alas that situation is hypothetical and I will probably end up going home. I might try to bum some cash to go see The Flesh & Pretty Girls Make Graves on Friday at The Delancey, but this proposition still highly hinges on a yet to be had meeting with Human Resources later this afternoon. While we're on the show scene, I discovered through a music blog the completely indispensable site Oh My Rockness!, which I beg all you into the NYC scene to visit at once.

It's been somewhat of a busy month since I last posted, but that's really no excuse; whenever there's a lack of activity here you can rest assured that the blame lies solely on my apathy and temporary lack of writing impulse.

I spent most of July looking at apartments. I didn't think it'd take that long, and in fact I was essentially correct in this thinking, since eventually an apartment was found in about 2 days. I spent one week looking up studio's and 1 bedroom apartments in Jersey and Union city; one week looking up and visiting 2 bedroom apartments in Jersey and Union city (at which point I decided UC sucked); another week looking at studio and 1 bedroom apartments in JSQ and JC Heights, and then about 3 days looking at 2 bedroom apartments in JSQ and JC Heights. In hindsight, my experience looking around JC for something paid off since I was able to narrow down which apartments would be good the 4th time around and landed a pretty sweet deal.

My first apartment seemed to be some cause for celebration, so my mother decided to take me on a whirlwind 12 hour shopping marathon that ended with lots of furniture and household essentials covered at little cost to myself. I still need a bed and an entertainment center, and I will be returning to bastion of evil today with two identical pieces of a desk drawer in order to receive 2 mirrored pieces of a desk drawer.

Having a car for the last month has really changed my whole mental makeup; for the most part I am not at peace with it around. This was much more of a problem before I miraculously got a 2004 hoboken parking pass. Apparently the old woman at the counter was sympathetic to the plight of the Fraternities who owned their own houses and were getting shafted by Stevens and Hoboken and decided to at least extend the proper etiquette of a reach around.

The car has afforded me one luxury; the ability to return home often. My frequent visits have prompted me to look up some of my High School buddies; out of both need to have something to do and curiosity for what other people have done for themselves in the 4 year span since I last saw them. Rudy and Bruce seem to be doing ok, and it was nice to see Olger again (The Legend Lives). James is probably still alive (judging by his away messages), and it was great to catch up a little bit with Fred the Friendly Philipino.

An email Rudy sent me about a gathering we had this past weekend made me realize that of course I could have googled some old people, and so off to the races I went until about 4:00 AM seeing if anyone from my old school did anything worthy of mention. Two of my friends seemed to have graduated from Harvard (actually; one was a friend turned aquaintence, the other was just this girl that everyone liked because she