The cutting edge is in my rear-view mirror (TM)

I needed a motto, and that one came to me 30 mins ago. I like to think of myself as doing programming few others are doing; examples available upon request.

a few months ago came this one: Cloud Computing: not as scary as you might think.

that one was intended as humor...

politics 2

so Sen (R) Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, doesn't like Sonya Sotomayor, a non-white, non-rich non-male as a Supreme Court candidate.

born in Selma, Alabama, according to his wikipedia page...you'd think he'd have a better appreciation...but...

is anyone surprised? The guy's an insensitive jerk. Why is he still in office? Why did he ever GET into office?

Star Trek movie 2009

OMG was this good. Better than I was expecting, really. I was afraid it was going to be "Star Trek kids".

They did of course have to show the one and only Starfleet Academy episode of Kirk's of any significance: Kobayashi Maru. Really, no way to do this timeframe in his life without it, that would have really been ripping off the audience. I did think he was a little smug about it, though, eating the apple...there should have been a point at which he say something more like "when faced with that kind of impossible situation, change the rules".

Only complaint: they missed a couple of opportunities for the various characters to say a phrase permanently associated with them: "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a ___" -- Bones did *not* say a variation of that in the movie, and he should have...and Spock should have said "Fascinating" or "indeed" or "that would not be logical" at some point. Scottie did at least say "I'm givin her all she's got, captain"...[later: upon watching DVD, Bones *does* say it: "I'm a doctor, not a physicist"]

Otherwise, damn near perfect. Except for being a parallel-universe Starfleet...I mean, Spock's mom dead? Vulcan destroyed? How will there be the "Amok Time" episode now? I thought for sure the movie denouement was going to be the time-travel-to-set-things-back-on-track sort of thing...[apparently, from an interview, this change was deliberate, allowing a retread of some familiar things, with a different approach]

But nonetheless...this bodes well for a sequel working out well...and I cried at the end when Nimoy said the opening words: "Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages..."

Monty Python

a personal favorite for years...my son is properly fond of them as well...spouse too.

this is hilarious:

click here for MP game fun

this is a hilarious YouTube piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luVjkTEIoJc

and this is another one...it starts slow, but just you wait:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enlyHAJfwyI

recent reading...

Julie Czerneda's "Stratification" trilogy 1-3, which are actually 1-3 of 9, where 4-6 were published some years ago...and she's working 7 now...kinda like Star Wars, eh?

These were pretty good...I don't remember 4-6, so I guess I'm going to have to go read those again...

computer games on Steam

Steam is of course the service from Valve (Half-life)...this seems to be working pretty well overall.

I snagged some of the game demos, which weren't too bad. I punted one or two right away for being too short, but others were ok.

There's this one series you can get all of for $15, and the demos are decent, called "Alien Shooter" in which have to eliminate aliens from an underground facility or two. Alien Shooter Revisited is the original with newer artwork, AS 2 has a bit more interesting "inventory" system, and Zombie Shooter is essentially the same game except with Zombies. How much better can a game get than whacking umpty-thousand zombies with nifty weapons?

however...Alien Shooter Revisited has flaws...one of which is disastrous...on level 5, near the end, there's this yellow forklift, and if you run to it, you can get math-locked onto it. No way off, which means there's a serious path-finding error combined with what is probably a 3D-model-positioning error, so that you go through a tiny little gap that the path-finding can't get out of. Has happened to me twice now, I've sent a msg to the devs, and I am done playing that one.

Had the same problem with AS 2, got math-trapped in an odd spot. I can't even allow a monster to kill me, their "AI" is too stupid to path-find closer to me.

Apparently AS 1 has a couple more expansion packs, and Zombie Shooter 2 is due out soon.

Jason Bourne...

Robert Ludlum is one of my all-time favorite writers...he was a master of the conspiracy story...

The Bourne Identity was perhaps the most intense story I've ever read...

So I was excited when my wife came home with the "new" Jason Bourne story, "The Bourne Legacy", by Eric van Lustbader. Pretty sure I've read some of EVL's scifi/fantasy stuff at some point, but I don't own any...suggesting it was short stuff, or uninteresting.

Well, this book stars Bourne...but it's not Ludlum, it's not a Ludlum-style conspiracy...it's really more like a recent James Bond (hm...note the initials on both of them) film. Other than the lack of explosions at the end of the book, it really felt like Bond movie with fewer overall scene locations.

I thought Bourne got into too many fights where he got hurt a bit more than I thought appropriate. He seemed more fight-savvy in the Ludlum books.

It is based on the very early Bourne history, as David Webb, prior to his training that turned him into Bourne. Some of that didn't hang toegether as well as it needed to...

Apparently EVL has written several more Bourne books since this one...well, this story was ok, just not RL. Maybe I'll read the next one, but only as a used pb, not a new one. And maybe not any time soon, I have A LOT of other stuff to read already on a shelf here.

Stephanie Plum...pt 2

Plum book #15 was just published last month...got it and read it last week.

Classic goodness, and this time Stephanie's car blows up again. Twice...well, actually it's Ranger's car each time, but still...that was a signature event in the first 10 books, and then it stopped for a while...I emailed and got a rather stupid reply from some worker-bee who wasn't the author. But it's back.

I definitely recommend this, although if you haven't read the others, don't start with this one, you need the character background, and don't worry, the used bookstore has plenty of copies.

Oh frabjous day! Calloo callay!

(look that up if you don't know it)

So this year I paid more attention to the April calendar and certain "events".

Why?

Well, I think I wrote about this before...apparently in this area (I don't know about elsewhere), beginning about 2 weeks before Passover, and probably for a week or so after, you can actually get what is colloquially (and probably somewhat pejoratively) known as "jewish coke"...

Which is to say, Coke made with sugar.

OMG is that good. I went home and promptly over-caffeinated myself and was awake most of the night (apparently caffeine doesn't pass through me quite so well as it did when I was a lot younger :)

I bought about 45 bottles (it's only available in the 2-liter). Same price. Why can't Coke just go back to that? I called on the phone several years ago to ask about this, but whoever I talked to didn't know anything about the annual recipe change, and I hadn't heard of it yet.

NOT telling you where I got it, I don't need competition next year.

Presidential dining

Apparently when Obama went to Ray's Hell Burger there last week he wanted some Dijon mustard on his burger. Probably been even worse if he'd wanted the foie gras on it. (I happen to like some funky mustards, and have been known to put dijon on one)

And has since caught A LOT of flack about that, at least from the standard bunch of tired old conservative/republican talking heads. You can tell that their lives are pretty feeble if this is what they need to complain about.

Of course, you can tell this is all out-of-town chatter, because whoever wrote about it couldn't manage to get the restaurant name correct. This is probably the same bunch that thought "Freedom Fries" was a good idea.

---

I haven't been to Ray's HB, which is because I'm not much at my company office the past 3 years...Ray's HB is just up the road a tiny bit. Ray's The Steaks is even closer, and I have been to that, shortly after it opened; it's probably better now, I thought it a shade high-priced and under-good right at the beginning. [later: it IS better now]

Gimme that old-time religion

Oh, the irony.

Can you believe this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8041421.stm

Well, the Catholic Church is certainly an expert at mixing religion and politics--been at it longer than any other organization you can name.

Fallout 3 followup

Have played a decent ways into this...

recall the earlier I wrote that it seemed jerky at times...turns out that my machine has other stuff going on that causes it...not sure what, but as an example, if I let NAV run (which it generally does, overnight), that just about kills F3...even if nothing else is running.

F3 runs ok after a fresh reboot, but of course that's only good for a few hours before it's bedtime and NAV runs. Gad.

And as noted the terrain is kinda boring. There are two flavors: southwest US badlands-looking desert-with-rocks, and bombed-out buildings.

The other thing that is really bothering me right now is that a number of areas are only reachable by going through the subway tunnels...because they are actually separate maps that get loaded. You cannot just walk everywhere, from anyplace to any other place, as you could in Oblivion. This means that if the map marker you have to travel to is on one of those other map areas, you are going to have to figure out what combination of underground travel is going to get you to the right place (GNR is the first one where this is a hassle).

And you can't "noclip" to just fly over the buildings, that doesn't work. Bummer. I'm losing interest...I can't be more than halfway through the main quest, and that's after accidentally short-circuiting some of the early stages.

I wish Starcraft 2 was coming out sooner.

playing Fallout 3

I think I reported earlier how Fallout 3 installs ok, starts up ok, and plays ok *until* you get to this point early where your gf has just told you the cops are coming to arrest you. As soon as you exit your room, some script is triggered and the game crashes to the desktop for me.

So I let my son run it a bit on his computer (32-bit) and do some saves, so I could try to run from one of his early saves...which worked just fine.

In one sense, F3 is "Oblivion with guns". Except that I don't think it's as interesting...and my son has already finished the game, in just a few days...apparently when you complete the central quest sequence, the game terminates. Not interesting.

Have had some trouble with it, in terms of mouse-responsiveness, etc. It feels a little jerky in comparison with Big O.

I don't really/yet like the skill-leveling approach. Big O did this well...I.e., if you spend time sneaking, your sneak skill goes up. In F3, you have to get XP in order to level up, and then have skill points to spend to level-up individual skills. So there's little value to sneaking very much.

Son says you can read multiple copies of a skill-book and increase that skill multiple times.

I haven't gone very far yet, but it's not as interesting as Oblivion. It does have a lot of similarities, but the terrain isn't as interesting or variable (at least as far as I've gone). Looks like burned-out wasteland. Which of course it should, but that's all there is. I'd have definitely gone for more of the Wash DC buildings. It's not like that would be hard to do, since you could go photograph the outsides, and paint those results onto the models as wall textures...and a work acquaintance is telling me he knows how to extract a 3D point cloud from an image sequence taken as you drive past a bldg...instant-3D model!

Idiocy in Pakistan

Today is April 28, 2009. For reference.

What do you think the likelihood is of the Taliban taking over Pakistan this year? How about next year?

Personally, I won't be surprised if it happens this summer.

It *IS* going to happen. Soon. Not enough people there with a clue how bad that is going to be. Or how undifficult to solve. Hard to feel sorry for them...the only really bad part about this is that they'll probably have something in the way of a nuclear device.

Maybe I need to start a pool at work. That'd be interesting.

conservative writers

I do find it amusing reading the editorials in the Wash Post. Not sure if I've ever really changed my mind about anything based on them...Some are better than others.

in the Post, there are several conservative writers who appear regularly. Krauthammer and George Will are the most "prominent".

George Will wants to be William F Buckley the 2nd. You can tell this because he uses a lot of "buckley words" -- you know, the ones that cost $20. Buckley loved them. George does too.

So much so that you can measure the pomposity of Will's columns in "buckleys" -- i.e., how many buckley words he uses.

George Will is at his best when he writes about either baseball or First Amendment issues. The rest of the time, he's just a pompous, unhappy conservative.

But occasionally he's unintentionally funny, like a couple of days ago...when he wrote a column in effect showing what a geezer he has become, because he doesn't like the fact that so many people don't dress the way he wants them to, i.e., too many folks wear denim too often. And then he complains that too many people over 18 play computer/video games (probably would prefer that they listen to him pontificate [ooohhh, I used a buckley word]).

This reminds me SO much of the classic quote attributed to Socrates (approx 400 BC) about how the young people of "today" don't respect their elders and behave like their elders wish them to:

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.

(the full quote is better, but seems hard to find online?!)

Socrates was pompous, too.

Old people

What is it with old people and sticker bushes?

You know what I'm talking about. If you are older, let's say past 50-something, live in a single-family detached house, eventually you are doing gardening in your yard. At some point you decide that what would look good is a sticker-bush, so you plant one. Or two. Or more...

This has a pleasant side-effect: kids will now avoid your yard, so you don't have to go out and yell "get out of my yard!" at them.

But still...I hate sticker bushes. Partly because I remember being a kid having to go through yards where there were sticker bushes...

So a few years ago my mom decided she had to have a couple of sticker bushes. Guess who had to trim them when they got too big? They're gone now, thank you.

But still...am *I* going to want a sticker bush in my yard in 10 years? Kill me now.

another brilliant statement in the Wash Post

"Team cohesion and concentration on missions would suffer if our troops had to live in close quarters with others who could be sexually attracted to them."

The authors on this are a former SOCOM cmdr, former CNO, former SAC cmdr, former assistant USMC cmdr.

Who is being referred to here? Care to guess? When was this written?

----

Can't have women in the military, can we? Troops might get distracted.

But this one is about gays in the military. Any real difference between the two groups in this case?

News reporting n such

Loved the Jon Stewart new-A ripping on Jim Cramer. (As I recall, the last time Stewart really took someone to task a week later they didn't have a show any more.)

So there's this local nitwit, Richard Cohen, who writes for the Wash Post, who complains about Stewart's having done this...and goes on to prove he didn't actually watch the episode. And it all feels like whiny-boy stuff, and "how come my newspaper's not doing so well?"

Which of course is because newspapers are in the process of ceasing to exist. ALL of them.

Which is kinda sad, but probably inevitable.

More about the Jag

Spring is here, and I'm getting itchy to get the Jag fixed up and drive it.

Finally got a replacement (not new) alternator to try out (hope that's all that is wrong).

Just ordered new inner tubes for the wheels, so I can get the tires all replaced too. Then I can get out and really wind it up!

Having it out of commission the past few months has been painful...going past it in the garage, knowing I can't do anything but look.

Last I fiddled with it a few weekends back when there was some actual warmth outside, I took the non-functional A/C off, and the old ALT. With luck, this new(er) one...

O/S basics

I don't know why this is, the solution seems absurdly obvious...Only recently did calendar and address book functionality become part of the operating system, but it's so basic you have to wonder why it took so long.

It's not like that kind of info is difficult to store and make available...

I was back on this issue because of getting the new MacBook (17") at the beginning of the month (3/09). I wanted to get it set to read the calendars on my G5 and wife's Mini. But I had lost how to publish those other ones, in the Leopard upgrade a year ago. So we hadn't been sharing calendars for months. And that extended to our PDAs.

The problem has several aspects: #1--I don't want my calendars out on the web. I put things in it that are only for her to know about. #2--I'm not buying Leopard Server for another umpty-hundred $ (apparently "LS" has built-in assistance for managing this). #3--I wasn't remembering the correct name for what I wanted to do; I kept thinking it was CalDAV, which it would be for "LS".

What I needed was WebDAV for iCal. Regrettably there doesn't seem to be any helper tool around to get you through the awkward need to use Terminal (cmd-line). Not that I can't, been a unix user for nearly 20 years...but there are more than a few tiny details.

Turned out that I still had the old setup properly in place, I just needed to do the Apache parts, which are about creating a userid/password and a httpd config block. Of course, this means YAPTR (yet another password to remember), which really means it has to get written down somewhere...

I'm still migrating from the old Powerbook onto the new one...there's built-in help for something that complex...why not for WebDAV? Mostly done, except for things like my old address book, the keychain, mail archive, and probably something else I don't remember. I did the manual drag/drop so far, haven't run the migration tool. (Why not? Because I had to completely reconfigure my home network again. Seems I have to start over every single time I add a new wireless device, because I don't remember how I did it before. Even after writing it down. Too many passwords.)

Spelling check should have been part of the O/S years ago, too. Why wasn't it? It's not like that is hard either...granted, a big dictionary is a good-sized file, which would have been problematic >20 years ago, but now? Should be a standard function so that any app can use it.

Built-in general-purpose database, too. That, too, would have been a problem in the 80s...but it ain't now. Granted, there is no shortage of free databases around, but they take a lot of work to do anything, even something simple.

Which is why Excel became the defacto database for an awful lot of information. I mostly use Filemaker for that sort of thing, for my own personal data. It's pretty friendly.

But a built-in database would be the right kind of place to store all kinds of stuff...you could argue that the filesystem IS a database, and in a very loose sense, that's true, inasmuch as you can store anything. But it doesn't really have any built-in organizing capabilities; limited sorting; usually doesn't handle large quantities of files in a single folder very well...

What other things should be O/S built-in capabilities?