Mister Sanity

Screenshot, from my current game on nethack.alt.org

2012-01-01T12:35:00.002-05:00

Why am I posting an ASCII screenshot of nethack here?

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  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonadab the Champion        St:18/** Dx:23 Co:18 In:24 Wi:24 Ch:17  Lawful S:2396967
Dlvl:37 $:0  HP:364(364) Pw:174(174) AC:-40 Xp:26/60006894 T:112414

Because I don't have a good way to post it to usenet at the moment.

Now for something completely different...

2011-08-12T08:07:00.004-04:00

I was in a weird mood and wrote some lyrics, or poetry, or something. I'll just post what I wrote without further comment and let you draw your own conclusions...

Hungry is the bear who lives
A life of shameless luxury
Within the porticos of tents.
Never have the learned ones
Bathed all the infants of the poor
With such aromatic ointments.

I've come from Alabama
With a basket full of questions,
But no one ever answers me.
I'm running from the lawyers,
But I'll sing you my life's story
With the banjo laid on my knee.

Run me ragged.
Rain on my parade.
Strip me naked.
Only the truth will set me free!

Ride the endless bullet train
Until the early winter sun
Sprinkles you down upon its bust.
Cover our ears with cotton
As the earwig conceals its pups
With a thousand motes of sawdust.

I am just a single man,
Treading grapes of speculation
In the winepress of my own mind,
I've sold my hesitation
For that bread and red lentil stew
Because my brother was so kind.

Ride me roughshod.
Call me a loser.
Take my ephod.
Only the truth will set me free!

File down your fingernails
Until the marrow shows right through,
Until you've beaten a dead horse.
In a universe of pain,
Nothing fills the head with knowledge
Like the dread tutor of remorse.

Clench my collar.
Listen to me wail.
Hear me holler.
Only the truth will set me free!

Feed me toxins.
Halt my reverie.
Sell my organs.
Only the truth will set me free!

Cut me deeper.
Drain out all my blood.
Kill me faster.
Only the truth will set me free!

Niagara Falls

2011-06-27T10:55:00.005-04:00

I suppose I should at least post one photo from the Niagara Falls trip, eh?

Hmmm... maybe I'll make it one from each side...

BTW, if you ever go, I do recommend riding the boat. That was significantly better than I expected.

Web Browser Upgrade Cycles (Update: including Webkit browsers)

2011-06-03T14:47:00.007-04:00

Okay, my last post was purely editorial, so this one is going to be purely observational, with no editorial commentary. These graphs show how the two most popular browsers (MSIE and Firefox) compare in terms of new-version uptake, among users of a website that I maintain. From looking at these graphs, it is clear that new Firefox versions achieve, on average, much more punctual uptake than new MSIE versions. This is apparent despite the fact that the graph skews things significantly in MSIE's favor by using version numbers (as opposed to release dates), even though Firefox versions are released much more frequently.

Firefox 2.0 was released in October 2006; MSIE 6 was released more than twice as long ago, in August of 2001. IE 7 was released in October of 2006, around the same time of Firefox 2.0, and has an absolutely overwhelmingly higher remaining usage share, taken as a percentage of the overall usage share for all versions of each respective browser: around twenty percent versus around half a percent during the last two months. (If you do the arithmetic naively you get 19.4% versus 0.54%, but there's significant false precision there. It's based on only two months of data for just one site, so you really have to consider the results as round, approximate figures.)

If you look at the stats for a different website, your numbers will of course vary. Nonetheless, it's very clear from these graphs that new Firefox versions are installed, on average, rather sooner than new IE versions. I could speculate on possible reasons for that difference, but for now I'll leave that as an exercise for the astute reader.

Update: Here are my graphs for the two major Webkit browsers.

Note that, with the sample size being only one site and the usage share of these browsers being smaller, these graphs can (potentially) be significantly skewed by a relatively small number of users. For example, why did usage of Safari 4.1 only become noticeable after 5.0 was released? My guess would be that this is an anomaly. At its peak, Safari 4.1 made 218 page loads from our site in a quarter. That's full page loads, not raw hits, but it could still be explained by a single user.

Still, you can definitely see a trend toward fast uptake of new versions, particularly on the Chrome graph. I could speculate on the reasons for this, but at the moment I'll refrain. If you really want to see a difference, compare the Chrome graph here to the MSIE graph up top. There's obviously a marked difference in upgrade frequency from one browser to another.

Finally, here's a version of the Firefox graph that breaks down minor versions (3.1 versus 3.0 and 3.6 versus 3.5), which is better for comparing Firefox to the Webkit browsers. The first Firefox graph, which groups minor versions, was intended for comparing against MSIE.

Firefox: Why I Refuse to Upgrade

2011-06-02T11:37:00.012-04:00

Everybody knows, newer is better, right? Well, sometimes. Sometimes not so much. Sometimes newer is worse. Sometimes newer is a lot worse.

Recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, for example, have been getting a great deal worse in a wide variety of ways. In this post I will catalog just a few of the most annoying reasons why they are worse, and why I am steadfastly not upgrading.

However, lest anyone think I am entirely negative all the time, I want to start out by spending a couple of paragraphs pointing out a couple of good things.

In the first place, I want to note that I am only talking about this at all because Firefox is my primary browser, the one I use most. Being a web developer and a geek, I experiment with a wide variety of browsers. Firefox is the best of them. When I first started discovering the problems that the rest of this diatribe will talk about, I considered switching to another browser, but the plain and simple fact is that I was unable to find another one that's as good. There isn't another one that's as good. Firefox is the best.

On top of that, the Firefox dev team have been working, trying to make improvements, and a handful of the improvements they've made have been good ones. They've added support for CSS properties that weren't handled before. One of the ones I personally find useful, not just for aesthetic purposes but in some cases for practical reasons, e.g., improving legibility when there's an image in the background, is text-shadow. That's a very worthwhile thing. Even better is the new support for display: inline-block, which makes whole categories of layouts easy to do that were previously, in a word, not. There have also been some performance improvements, which are quite noticeable on older single-core hardware. So I don't want to imply that the Firefox developers haven't been doing anything good. They have.

But they've also been making mistakes lately, some of which are quite serious.

Here's something that's easy to see: recent versions of Firefox can't seem to display certain images (a LOT of the images on the web) without darkening them considerably. Here are a couple of screenshots (one cropped, the other scaled down, but they're not doctored in any other way) showing the same image in Firefox 3.6 and in Gimp. I want to be clear that this is exactly the same image, bit-for-bit. Notice how much darker it looks in Firefox? It's not supposed to be like that.

The same problem shows up in every build starting around version 3.5. Here's a screenshot of Firefox 4.0.1. Again, this is cropped but otherwise undoctored.

How did Firefox 2.0 handle it? Well, let's see here... Oh, look, Firefox 2.0 displays exactly the same thing as Gimp. The latest versions of other browsers, such as Opera and Chrome and even MSIE, do the same thing as Firefox 2. So does every other image display program I have tested. Recent versions of Firefox are the only software I have found to have the odd darkening effect.

Update: Here it is in an alpha build of Firefox 8:

(Yeah, the desktop there looks different. When testing new versions, I use a separate user account, so as not to mess up the profile -- add-ons and configuration and such -- in my regular account. It's easier than dorking around restoring from backups.)

Okay, so that's purely an aesthetic issue. I mean, it's annoying, but it doesn't cause any real material harm. It's not like the images are totally black and impossible to see, or anything. It's just like you're looking at them through really dark glasses. So, no big deal, really. Sure, it's a bug, and they should fix it, but on the balance if that were the only problem I'd upgrade in a heartbeat.

Here's something more serious: all versions of Firefox starting from the 3.0 dev cycle have a serious dataloss bug that shows up if you use bookmarked tabsets. What happens is this: the first time you choose Open all in tabs after upgrading, every single website you already had open in a tab vanishes. You panic and just about keel over from a heart attack on the spot, but once you take a few deep breaths you discover, much to your relief, that the back button does work. You have to go through and hit the back button on every tab, but you're able to recover (at least most of) your tabs. Okay. So, now, how to stop that from EVER happening again? You hunt through the prefs and find the option that controls this disastrous never-should-have-been-implemented new behavior, and you turn it the everliving %#$@! off, and you think you've solved the problem.

But you have not solved the problem by changing the preference. You've just made the problem more subtle, so that each time it happens it can go unnoticed until it's too late to retrieve what was lost. What happens now, each time you click Open all in tabs, is that one of your existing tabs is replaced. If you don't notice this, you make the mistake of hitting close-tab like you normally would when you're done with a page that you've opened, and now you're now short one of the pages that you had open, probably one you weren't done with, possibly something important that you needed to remember to deal with. This happens every single time you click Open all in tabs, until over the course of a few hours or days of regular browser use you eventually figure out what's happening. It took me about three days. I knew I was losing tabs, some of which were kind of important, and I was very much in a lather about it, but I didn't understand out how or why it was happening. Undo Close Tab only showed me pages I didn't need any more, and I couldn't find the ones I'd lost. It was like returning to the bad old days before sessionstore, when a plugin crash or power outage meant things you'd had open were just gone. (Update: this one will be fixed in version 8, but the fact that such a serious bug persisted across no fewer than six releases before finally being eliminated is very telling. Somebody was a little too concerned about dorking with the toolbar layout and just completely forgot about checking to see if there were any dataloss bugs that should be fixed before release -- several times in a row.)

Firefox 3 also crashes significantly more often than Firefox 2. (I don't rightly know how crashy Firefox 4 is or isn't. I haven't used it very much, on account of the fact that it hasn't addressed the above problems.) Firefox 2 never crashes, unless you try to open completely insane numbers of tabs at once. Firefox 3 crashes more than any previously released version of Firefox since clear back when it was called Phoenix.

I haven't even talked about insane new behaviors and UI (*cough* tabs on top *cough*) that can be configured away by changing some settings, because hey, if changing some settings is all I have to do to get things working right, I can handle that. End users might feel differently, but I'm a network administrator. If I can handle tracking down dependencies and compiling things from source, I think I can manage changing a couple of settings. I could write another whole post explaining why e.g. Tabs on Top is stupid and why the arguments in its favor are nonsense (maybe I will write that post later, if I have time), but ultimately it's not important, because I can just turn it off anyway with a pref, so who cares?

But I do want to say one general thing about the UI changes in recent versions: starting with Firefox 3.0, every single UI change, without exception, is something so undesirable that I have difficulty imagining anyone would ever actually want it. Not a single one of them is useful, even potentially. As long as I can turn them all off with preferences I don't really care, but when there are big outstanding bugs, including dataloss bugs, persisting over *multiple* versions (and I'm not talking about a couple of point releases), maybe it's time to stop needlessly fiddling around so much with the UI for a while and concentrate on basic stuff like stability and correctness. IMO, if the Firefox team spent the next entire release cycle just fixing bugs and not introducing any other changes at all, that would be a good thing.

So that's why I'm not upgrading to recent versions of Firefox. I've got 2.0.0.20 both at home and at work now, and I'm sticking with that as my primary browser for the forseeable future.

What would have to happen for me to change my mind? Someone would have to release a browser that's better than Firefox 2.0.0.20. That is all.

Rejected Ideas for Library Summer Reading Promotional Themes

2011-05-09T17:42:00.004-04:00

Sometimes the summer reading themes they send you are a little bit lame. (One of them this year is You Are Here. Really.) Sometimes this gets us talking about the possibility of creating our own theme. It shouldn't be that hard...

But sometimes we get silly. Here are some of the ideas that didn't make the cut...

You Will Read and You Will Like It!

Reading: It Ain't Rocket Surgery.

Summer Reading... Where the Sun Don't Shine

Alien Vampires versus Ninja Nanobots

Studying All Summer Long

In Which We Examine Thoroughly All the Greatest and Most Widely Renown Literature of the Last Three Millennia and Draw Some Interesting Conclusions, @ Your Library!

O HAI. I K/\N H4Z BUXZ?

Tell Me Another One, Gramps!

Cooped Up Inside Reading

Books Is Good

Three-Balloon Clown (with Twisting Instructions)

2011-03-15T12:53:00.006-04:00

The event at the Y on Sunday night was great. We had a fantastic turnout.

For my part, the balloon animals were very popular, and I was able to satisfy all the first-requests from children (i.e., all the requests made by children who didn't already have a balloon animal) save one.

That one, of course, bothers me. Sure, eventually the mother talked the little girl into something I actually knew how to make, but you could tell she wasn't really happy with it. Also, it's not like what she asked for was bizarre (Can you make me a balloon of the invisible man?), an overly-specific licensed character (Dora the Explorer, please!) or inherently difficult (e.g., porcupine). No, all she wanted was a clown, and I didn't know how to do it. A clown. That should be easy, right?

If I'd had five minutes to figure it out, I probably could have come up with something, but I was on the spot in the middle of a crowd of about fifty balloon-seeking supplicants within a two-yard radius, so I didn't have the luxury of spending a lot of time doing custom design.

So it bothered me, and I came home and did some quick searching on the internet, but it turns out to be pretty hard to find twisting instructions for a clown, on account of the fact that every third twisting design for a dog or monkey or anything is "by so-and-so the clown". You get a lot of irrelevant hits.

However, I happened to be browsing around over at balloon-animals.com and ran into Michael Floyd's design for a balloon gingerbread man, and a light went on for me. A gingerbread man is at a very basic level a humanoid design. A clown is also a humanoid shape. The difference is mostly about color.

So, here we are, a three-balloon clown, using standard 260Q balloons.

The red and blue balloons are each inflated about three quarters of the way and have identical twists: pinch twist for the heel, petal twist for the foot (which you can make a little bigger than I have if you want floppy big-shoe feet), longer bubble for the leg, small pinch twist for holding things together, a bubble for the body, another pinch twist for holding things together, then the arm, petal for the hand, pinch twist for the thumb, cut off the rest and tie. Once you've done that with both colors, twist the two halves together via the small pinch twists at the top and bottom of the body. (All of this so far is basically just like the aforementioned gingerbread man, except in different colors, and if you follow the above link there's a video you can watch that shows exactly how to do it.) Arrange it so that the right arm is the same color as the left leg and the left arm the same color as the right leg. Then tie the white balloon in at the waist, make three small bubbles for the buttons, stretch them out a little and tie in at the neck, then do a small petal twist for the face and a larger petal twist for the hair. Cut and tie. Put the smaller white petal (face) inside the larger one (just like making the wheels on the two-balloon motorcycle; Floyd has a video for that too) and arrange it so the face faces forward and the outer petal (which will be the fro wig) is around the edge like a lion's mane. Draw the make-up and rainbow hair on with markers, and use standard shaping techniques to put bends in the knees and elbows.

Voila, a three-balloon clown.

Balloon Animals: I'm a little rusty.

2011-02-22T20:54:00.008-05:00

Okay, before I show you the picture, I want it understood that until last week I hadn't made a balloon animal for several years. I'm not a professional balloon entertainer. I'm a network administrator.

With that said, I've been practicing. See, there's an event coming up in March, connected with our fiftieth anniversary celebration, and someone (a family member, I imagine) let slip that I know how to make balloon animals.

This is true, up to a point. A Philadelphia-area clown going by the name of Pockets taught me the basics in 1992. I made a few that summer (fewer than a hundred, because I only bought one bag of balloons), and then a few years later I made some one day while working at a county fair booth (again, fewer than a hundred, although I also picked up a spare bag of balloons, which I never ended up opening at the time).

So, when word got out that I know how to do this, everybody said ooh, yeah, if we could have balloon animals at the open Y night, that would be great. Okay. How do you say no to that?

I figured I would need to practice up, so I ordered a bag of 250 balloons, plus a pump, and I broke open the bag of 100 that I had sitting around and started practicing. You can stop cringing now. Some things I remembered, and other things I looked up on the internet. (Did I ever mention that the internet is useful? The internet is useful. I've increased my repertoire of animals by at least 25%, maybe more like 50%.) This is as good a time as any to show you a photo...

Okay, so I need a little work on consistent sizing and on correctly gaging inflation levels. I have a couple of weeks yet before the event, and my old bag of 100 balloons is holding up rather better than I expected, given how long it's been sitting around. The black ones for some reason have almost all popped or otherwise misbehaved (with the two notable exceptions both visible in the photo near the front), but most of the rest are doing alright.

I also made, through the happy accident of not knowing how full to inflate the balloon for an animal I hadn't attempted previously, an interesting discovery. If you follow these instructions for making a squirrel but underinflate the balloon so that you run out of air just as you finish the back legs (taking the uninflated tail and rolling it through between the legs to lock it), you get, if you happned to use a black balloon, something that, in my opinion, looks an awful lot like a scottie. So if you ever wanted to twist a one-balloon scottie dog, there you go.

Here's a close-up photo of the one-balloon scottish terrier:

(Ignore the yellow; that's a reflection.)

Here are instructions to make the scottie: Start with a small pinch-twist for the nose, follow that up with a smallish roll-through (i.e., make three identical bubbles, twist the first two together, then roll the third through between them) for the muzzle and then two fair-sized pinch-twist ears. After a small neck use the remaining inflated portion on legs, body, and legs, leaving the uninflated portion for the tail, which you twist around and tuck through the legs before bringing it up into position. Done. For proportions (on everything but the tail), consult the aforementioned squirrel directions, which include a length diagram. Actually, the tail still uses up the same amount of balloon rubber for the scottie as for the squirrel; it just looks smaller because it's not inflated. HTH.HAND.

What were "pocket protectors" anyway, and why are really old people always talking about them?

2011-02-15T18:08:00.007-05:00

We've all been in this situation: you're talking with an old person, and through one circumstance or another the fact comes up that you know something about computers, or at least use them, or that you have studied a little math, or science, or accounting, or business, or pretty much any other subject that the old person doesn't know anything about.

Anyway, as soon as they find out that you know something about anything, they immediately make some kind of remark about "pocket protectors".

Huh? What does that mean? What's a pocket protector, and what does it have to do with the differential equations class I'm taking?

Having heard these "pocket protector" remarks all my life, a couple of years ago I did some research and found out what it's all about, so now I can share that knowledge with you. The short version is that what these remarks really mean is that the old person hasn't really caught on to the fact that they're old and the world has changed since they were in school. Okay, so you probably already knew that part. The details, however, are interesting...

As you are probably aware, technology is constantly improving. If the laptop that was so awesome you couldn't afford it last year is now selling used on ebay for approximately the same price as a discount ringtone, imagine how primitive computers must have been way back in the twentieth century! In fact, you probably can't imagine it, because any degree of primitiveness you can think up would still be a good deal more advanced than what they had back then. But that's okay, because you don't have to imagine: I'm going to actually tell you.

In your great-great grandfather's day, microchips and even transistors simply hadn't been invented yet. Instead they used something much more primitive (and larger) called a "vacuum tube". A single computer filled up an entire room. Several scientists were required to make it work, and it would take weeks or even months to complete a computation that your phone can do in under a second.

Speaking of phones, they had to be wired to the wall in order to work, and they didn't have screens, and you couldn't use them to send text messages or do anything else. All they could do was make phone calls, and that was *it*. Even for that you had to dial them, and I mean actually dial, not select a name from a list. If you wanted to send a text message back then, you had to write it on paper.

Cars in that era were made out of metal, and they didn't have cupholders or power windows, and to pay for your gas (petrol for British readers) you had to actually go INTO the gas station.

They didn't have "pay at the pump", because credit cards hadn't been invented yet. Back then, if you wanted to borrow money to buy something, you had to make an appointment and speak to a person at the bank called a "loan officer", and he would expect you to be able to show that you could afford the payments, or you wouldn't get to borrow the money.

You may already know (perhaps from watching something old with your grandparents) that movies were in black and white back then, and the special effects were really cheesy. What you may not realize is that people couldn't just watch movies whenever or wherever they wanted. If your great grandparents wanted to watch a movie, they had to go to a place called a "theatre", which was basically a dedicated building just for watching movies. (Well, sometimes a building; other times the theatre was outdoors in a sort of parking lot, and you'd watch the movie through the windshield of your parked car. Really.) Even small towns had a theatre (larger towns often had more than one), and people would come from all over town to sit in the theatre and watch a movie. There was only one screen for everybody, so they had to all watch the same thing. At the time, this didn't seem strange or restrictive to anyone, because movies were new and they just thought it was cool to get to watch one.

But it wasn't just the big-ticket technologies like phones and computers and cars and money and entertainment that were primitive. The little things were primitive too. Clothes, shoes, soft drinks, Jell-O (it didn't even come in blue), lunch boxes, and even such basic things as pencils and pens. That's right, pencils and pens were primitive, and that's why they had "pocket protectors". No fooling.

Today, with modern technology, we take for granted that we can just put a pen or a pencil in our shirt pocket and carry it there, and we don't expect anything bad to happen. However, this is only possible because we have modern pens. This is the really interesting part of the story.

You see, back in the dark ages, before a company called Walkman introduced the first rudimentary portable music players, the pens that they had were horrible barbaric medieval things called "fountain pens". Compared to modern ballpoint pens they were much harder to use. (Among other things, it actually mattered which direction the pen was rotated compared to the tilt of your hand against the paper.) Fountain pens were expensive, notoriously unreliable, and a hassle to use. The only reason people used them at all was because they were portable: you could carry them around anywhere. This was a new feature.

The pens people used before fountain pens wouldn't work if you took them away from the writing desk, because they relied on something called an "inkwell", which was built into the desk, to supply them with ink every few letters. The obvious solution to this was to put a supply of ink in the pen so you could carry it around, and that's what fountain pens were: pens that could carry a supply of ink around in them, so you could use them away from the writing desk and its inkwell.

You could use a fountain pen almost anywhere. This was such a useful feature that people wanted to carry the pens around everywhere, just like we do today. (It was even more important back then, because they didn't have portable computers or phones, so everything had to be written on paper.) The only problem was, the companies that made the pens hadn't really figured out how to do it right yet. The pens were unreliable, but the worse problem was that they leaked. Frequently. People wanted to carry them in their pockets, but they knew that if they did, they'd get pockets full of ink.

And that's why they needed pocket protectors. Anybody who wanted to carry a pen around in their pocket needed to protect the pocket from leaking ink. Scientists had recently developed a totally new kind of material called "plastic", and although it wasn't nearly as good as the plastic we have now, it was good enough to solve the problem. Somebody made little plastic pocket-shaped bags that wouldn't leak from the bottom and called them "pocket protectors".

People who wanted to carry a pen would put a pocket protector in their pocket and then carry the pen in the pocket protector. When the pen leaked, the ink would collect in the bottom of the pocket protector, and they could just pour it back into the inkwell built into the pen, and the shirt wouldn't be ruined.

That's a lot of trouble. If the pens leaked, why didn't they just use pencils? Well you see, back then pencils were made out of wood, and the point could not be retracted. If the tip broke off, you couldn't just click the eraser end a couple of times and extend the "lead". You had to actually sharpen the pencil using a device that cut away some of the wood to reveal more of the graphite "lead". Every time you did this, the pencil got shorter. Also, because the tip could not be retracted, and because the graphite "lead" was much thicker than on modern pencils, carrying a pencil in your pocket would often result in unsightly graphite stains, especially if you were wearing a thin or light-colored shirt. Then there's the possibility of poking yourself if the pencil was at all sharp. In short, the pencils were just as much of a pain as the pens.

So anybody who used pens and pencils on a regular basis (mathematicians, scientists, businessmen, teachers, students, doctors, nurses, ...) would wear a pocket protector all the time. People who didn't know how to write, or didn't have a job that required them to write, didn't need one.

So when old people ask you about your "pocket protector", all they're really implying is that you're not too dumb to write.

Creating a Tabbed Interface with CSS.

2011-02-08T14:02:00.000-05:00

Well, this is interesting. I'm not entirely sure it's a good idea, but it's interesting.

Notes to Myself

2011-01-06T15:17:00.004-05:00

Sometimes I write notes to myself. I do this because my short-term memory is imperfect. Call it a compensatory mechanism. Anyway, I've been doing this most of my life.

When I write notes to myself, I don't always necessarily want just anyone to be able to read them. Often the intended audience consists of exactly one person, me.

At some point I realized that, having studied a couple of foreign alphabets, I could write notes to myself in them, and most people wouldn't be able to easily read it, even if the actual words were entirely in English. Since English contains some phonemes that the foreign languages in question do not, I developed special conventions for representing those sounds, either by modifying existing letters with diacritical marks, or simply by taking a letter that normally represents a sound English doesn't use, and pressing it into service to represent an entirely different sound.

Of course, being the person that I am, I couldn't just leave it at that. After all, somebody might know the Greek alphabet. Somebody might know the Hebrew alphabet, for that matter. (This isn't as far-fetched as some might think. I know a handful of people who know both of those alphabets. In fact, I live in the same house with another such person.)

So naturally at some point I started mixing things up a bit. Being a bit of a glossophile, it was natural to learn several more writing systems and adopt some of the symbols from those. Some of the letters were too complex and took too long to write, so I simplified them by leaving off parts I deemed unimportant. At some point I changed my writing direction... and so it goes.

The note in the picture is a good example of the kind of thing I do now. (This particular note doesn't contain anything private, so if you're thinking of trying to decipher it, feel free, although you run the risk of being labeled a linguistics geek.)

Why am I sharing this? I have no idea. Maybe it's a feeler: am I really the only person who does this sort of thing?

Cinci Trip

2010-12-30T07:26:00.003-05:00

My sister and I both had a couple of days free right before Christmas this year (and we've both been in Galion for entirely too many years straight now, several times as long as we've ever previously been in one place), so we decided to take a short trip and get away for a couple of days. We picked the hotel based on price and general location, and then we got there and found this view out the window. Nice.

We went to the zoo in the evening and saw their fancy light display, then we visited a museum on the twenty-fourth. I may put up some photos from some of that later.

Luxury Spending Up

2010-10-28T09:13:00.003-04:00

According to an article in USA Today, spending on luxury goods and services (wine, pet care, televisions, jewelry, etc.) is up, while spending on essentials (bread, milk, eggs, etc.) is still lagging. Now, the conclusion the article draws is that this represents an increase in the divide between those who have (money) and those who do not. That's valid (although it should be noted that this observation reflects a short-term trend).

However, there's another, perhaps more practical conclusion that can be drawn from the same data: if you're looking for work, the local five and dime, or similar places where people tend to apply when they're desperate, isn't necessarily your best bet. Look for industries and businesses that primarily sell luxuries or cater to people with a little more money. They're more likely to be hiring at the moment.

Targetted Web Searching on the Client Side: A Little Programming Knowledge Can Save a Lot of Time

2010-10-22T20:34:00.004-04:00

Okay, here's the background: there's a website that I use, which in general is quite good and very useful. It's called Lang-8. The basic idea is, you write journal entries in the language you're studying, and native speakers post comments and corrections. In turn, you post comments and corrections to entries they've written in your native language. The idea is good, and the site has a lot of really useful features.

One feature it doesn't have, unfortunately, is a really good search capability...

In particular, I wanted to be able to search through the comments and corrections I've made in the past. When you're working with people coming to English from the same liguistic background, they tend to make some of the same mistakes (e.g., Japanese people seem to have trouble learning the correct use of the English phrase "after all", which, admittedly, is somewhat idiomatic), so several times I've run into situations where I remembered having explained a particular thing in some detail before, with examples. Being the lazy person that I am, I wanted to have a look at that previous explanation and possibly copy and paste some or all of it in response to someone else who was asking about the same thing, or who made the same mistake.

So I wanted to search my past corrections and comments, but the site doesn't seem to have a way to do that. I can search my own journal entries, but that doesn't solve my problem. I thought about Google's site-specific search, but privacy features prevent most of the journal entries, and the comments on them, from being visible to the world; Google, from the site's perspective, is the world.

So I used my virtue of laziness to create a way to quickly search through my past comments and corrections. You can see the actual code on Perlmonks. (It's easier to post it there, because of the automatic handling it has for source code.) One screenfull of easy code, and my computer is pointing me right to my previous explanation. The first time I used it, it saved me more time than it took to write it, and I know I'll be using this one again and again and again.

Ugly Words for Beautiful

2010-10-06T09:22:00.002-04:00

Have you ever noticed that a lot of languages have some fairly nasty-sounding words for the concept of beauty? The Hebrew word, יָפֶה (ya-FEH), for instance, sounds kind of like you're coughing up a hairball. The Japanese word, 美しい (oots-koo-SHE-ee) is a little better, but it doesn't exactly roll melodiously off the tongue. In Greek, καλός (cah-LOSS, good or beautiful) is only one letter different from κακός (cah-KOSS, evil, bad, ugly).

I think the worst of all may be the Latin word pulcher, source of the English spelling-bee word "pulchritude", which ostensibly means "beauty", although I cannot possibly imagine ever using such a hideous-sounding word non-sarcastically to refer to genuine beauty. Perhaps we could coin the word "malpulchrated" to refer to unnecessary or gaudy decoration (making something "beautiful" in a bad way, like stringing excessive amounts of five clashing colors of tinsel all over an otherwise attractive building, or make-up a la Tammy Faye Bakker).

Summer Drawing

2010-07-21T08:37:00.009-04:00

I've been working a bit this summer on trying to boost my limited drawing skills, and I've taken to photographing the things that I draw, so that I can go back and compare.

I was using the flip-flop for an exercise wherein I drew the same object from various angles. This was the first angle I drew it from, and then I rotated the stool and did another angle...

I trust everyone is familiar with the whole still life concept.

The exercise here was to focus on a rectangular object. I managed to find two that overlapped.

Here I was drawing from a photograph (that someone else took; I never saw the scene in person).

The Unemployed... and Unemployable

2010-07-19T13:30:00.008-04:00

Normally, the term "unemployed" means that you are between jobs, that (by choice or by circumstance or occasionally by fiat) you have completed your work at one employer and are ready to move on to another employer. I've been unemployed. Most of us have, at one point or another. No big deal.

Increasingly, however, I am running into people who are a different sort of unemployed: people who are NOT ready to move on to another employer, because they have been unwilling, for at least two decades, to ever learn a new job skill. No wonder they are unemployed!

Let me be a little more specific. I'm not talking about people who for some reason have missed some particular new technology and are otherwise generally able to function in society. "Oh, man, I haven't learned ZYML yet, and I'd kind of like to apply for this job, but it requires ZYML. What can I do?"

No, those people can either find another job, or pick up the new skill, or both. They're not the ones I'm talking about.

I'm talking about people who are unwilling to function in the twenty-first century at all.

They want to apply for white-collar jobs, but they don't have, and don't want, an email address. The job application requires an email address, of course (duh), so they ask, "Can I use yours?" Umm, no. *I* already have a job. The prospective employer wants to contact the prospective employee, which would be you. Are you going to give them my name and phone number as well? What do you use your head for, just holding down your shoulders? You're going to need an email account. There are a number of websites that offer them for free. I'd be happy to recommend one. But you're going to have to actually start checking your mail, if you want to, you know, hear from anyone who might be trying to contact you, such as a prospective employer.

It's not just about email. It's much more general than that. They want me to "help them" fill out online job applications (where "help" is often vanishingly close to "please just do it for me"), because they've never used a computer before, and now their job has evaporated. Of course it has evaporated. Any white-collar job that does not require using a computer was destined to evaporate sooner or later. Frankly most blue-collar jobs that don't require using a computer have evaporated at this point. Is this a surprise to anyone? Anyone? Anyone with a brain, I mean? Come on.

But they don't want to see it that way. They want me to basically fill out the online job applications for them, so they can avoid ever using a computer. Learn? What does that mean? You don't think your new employer will notice that you can't or won't learn to do anything you've not done before? I picked up on it in thirty seconds flat, so I'm guessing the employer will probably notice sooner or later.

Has it occurred to these people that if the job application is online, the job itself probably requires using a computer? If the employer assumes that prospective employees will be able to fill out an online application, it probably means their employees use computers as a matter of course. (After all, who doesn't? Neanderthals?) Similarly, if they insist on an email address from all applicants so they can contact prospective employees by email, it's probably a sign they use email within the organization. Duh. Not only does your prospective employer use email within the organization, they probably takes it for granted. You might have some difficulty functioning on the job if you don't know how to do these things. You'll probably have to (shock, horror) learn.

Can you even think of a job, in the developed world, that doesn't require using computers or electronics in some way or at some point? What kind of employment do these people think they want, migrant berry picking? Even the old saw "would you like fries with that" may be out at this point, since most cash registers are computerized these days.

I wouldn't be surprised if even janitors use computers for something or another. Why not? It's the easiest way to do some kinds of things. I mean, you probably don't need a computer to sweep the floor, but I bet it might be the easiest way to order replacement light bulbs, and it might be pretty handy for tracking how many of them you use, too...

The thing is, this is not some new sudden revelation. We've known since the eighties, maybe even since the seventies, that more and more of society was running on computers and that learning to operate them was going to become an increasingly necessary life skill. That was *decades* ago, PLENTY of time for even the slowest learners to pick up at least the basics. I can see putting it off until the nineties (because, until then, even used computers could be fairly expensive to obtain), but now?

Now, granted, the Amish (well, the conservative ones) don't use computers. But the Amish nonetheless manage to maintain useful skills and contribute things that have value to society. Granted, their job options are limited, but how many of them are unemployed? No, the Amish are industrious. They find *useful* things to do with their time, things for which people are willing to pay money.

That brings up an important point: there ARE non-computer jobs out there. But they're hard work. You want to do a job that doesn't involve computers these days, you're going to break a sweat. There's no magical fairy-tale job where you can sit at a desk in the air conditioning all day and talk on the phone and NOT use computers and somehow get paid for it. No, if you want a job where you don't have to use computers, you're going to have to bail hay or pour concrete or something. Are you willing to do that? Would you rather work that hard than ever learn anything new? Because that's what it's gonna take.

Society does not owe you a job unless you are willing to cough up something society can use. That's what a job is, when it comes down to brass tacks: something you do that seems useful to the rest of society and provides enough value to motivate others to do stuff for you in return. In a modern economy, that means something people are willing to pay money for.

But the people I'm talking about are chronically unemployed because they apparently either don't know how to do or aren't willing to do anything that society as a whole values enough to add up to a steady paycheck.

So they are unemployable. I don't mean just "unemployable by a few bleeding-edge employers who insist on embracing all the new technology as soon as it's available". We're at least a quarter of a century past that point. A quarter of a century, by the way, is generally at least half of one person's career, often more. What kind of worker spends half his career not learning any new job skills? A worker no competent boss wants working under him.

Employers willing to even look at applications from these people are dropping like flies, and for good reasons. Quite aside from the fact that a computer-free work environment is a good deal less efficient and means paying for significantly more labor per unit of work accomplished, there's also this other small matter: how on earth can a business compete against its competitors if its employees are unwilling to ever learn anything? How could you hope to deal with *any* change in circumstance, if that's the mindset of your workforce?

Today it's the internet. In another decade or two it'll be something else. The point is, you have to be willing to learn new job skills if you want to stay employable. Any employer who claims to offer you job security without requiring you to learn new skills is either lying through their teeth or doomed eventually to go out of business and take your supposedly secure job along with them.

A Reflection on Weather

2010-07-10T12:48:00.004-04:00

At this time, let us take a moment to reflect on these photographs that I took last February.

Aren't they lovely? I think they look very cool.

Grrr....

2010-06-24T10:12:00.002-04:00

If this happened occasionally, it would be thoroughly annoying. (It takes a bit more than an hour to get a user profile into a ready-to-use state starting from the defaults.) When it starts happening every time a user logs in or out, however, it makes the computer totally unusable. Okay, so it says check the event log... let's see if that sheds any light on the matter...

Haha. I think I'll try reinstalling Windows. That shouldn't take more than a couple of days, right?

Reading kanji more important than writing them by hand with a brush? No kidding?

2010-06-10T16:27:00.002-04:00

It looks like the Japanese government has decided (see also: Slashdot discussion) that it's more important to be able to read the Chinese characters that appear in Japanese writing than to be able to reproduce them by hand. Yeah, I could have told them that.

As a consequence, they are updating their list (of characters you really ought to know if you want to read Japanese), adding almost 200 characters that weren't on the list before. As someone who is trying to learn their language, I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, 200 *more* characters, yikes. It's not like there weren't too many (many *times* too many) already. On the other hand, they presumably wouldn't have added them to the list if they didn't think they were already being used quite a bit, so I probably would have needed to learn them anyway sooner or later, whether they're on the list or not.

Remind me why I picked this language to study? I must be some kind of idiot, or a masochist.

One of the things about a halfway decent camera...

2010-05-21T09:18:00.002-04:00

12x optical zoom means you can actually get shots like this one, without being an animal trainer.

Google Font Directory

2010-05-20T11:00:00.003-04:00

Remember Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web initiative? This is better.

Monster Cookies

2010-04-17T07:00:00.007-04:00

We (the Galion GBC) are hosting a Music Festival (for several churches) on Sunday night, and we (my family) are signed up to bring AT LEAST a gross of cookies, and preferably more.

It's at times like this that you bust out your bigger recipes.

This is one we picked up from Norma Engelberth, when we were at Sidney. (Actually, this is only half of her recipe, believe it or not. We've been known to cut this in half again when not making for a big crowd, but today I'll be doing this whole amount at least, and then probably making a big batch of some other kind of cookies to boot.)

6 eggs
2 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 cups white sugar (mom's note says 1 1/2 cups is enough)
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (or 1 TBSP imitation)
1 TBSP light corn syrup (Karo)
4 tsp soda
1 cup margerine, softened
2 1/2 cups crunchy peanut butter
9 cups oatmeal
1 bag (14 oz.) chocolate chips (or more)
1 lg. bag (14 oz.) color-coated chocolate candies (e.g., M&M)

If you like you can also throw in some raisins, or small bits of other dried fruits, or whatever kind of nuts you like (broken up), or additional small bits of candy (e.g., cinnamon candies).

(You may note with dismay that I have neglected to list the flour, but that's not an oversight. This recipe is all about the oatmeal. And the peanut butter.)

Mix in the above order. Drop 2 TBSP scoops on teflon cookie sheets, about 4 inches apart. (Where possible, try to avoid having the M&Ms on the bottom of the cookies, since they burn pretty easily against the hot cookie sheet. They do much better on the top of the cookie.)

Bake at 350F for about 8-10 minutes. Do not overbake.

When the cookies are hot out of the oven, they bend and break very easily due to all the peanut butter. So, let them sit a couple of minutes on the sheets, then remove them carefully with a large spatula, trying to get the whole cookie on the spatula. Don't box them up until they've cooled.

The recipe given here is rumored to make up to eight dozen. (Update: yep, just about eight dozen.)

Chicken Veggie Salad

2010-03-18T20:28:00.010-04:00

This is based loosely on Rosolli, but we adapted it somewhat for Midwestern-US tastes, and changed it from a side dish into a main dish. Notice that everything except the apples can be prepared ahead of time, and then you can throw it together quickly when it's time to eat.

5 medium-sized potatoes
7 fresh carrots
3-4 apples
2 medium onions (optional, or substitute a few pearl onions)
3 sprigs of fresh dill (optional, or use dried dill if that's what you can get)
1 lb. chicken breast
1 can (20 floz) chunk pineapple
oil for browning the chicken (I use olive oil)
salt to taste

Wash, cut, and boil the potatoes until done but not soft, and the carrots (separately from the potatoes) until firm. (Do not overcook. Everything in this recipe that is cut up should be cut into bite-sized pieces.) Save some of the water from the carrots.

Cut up the chicken and brown it in a skillet.

Drain everything and let it all cool while making the sauce...

Dipping Sauce / Dressing:
½ cup of the carrot water
1 cup pineapple juice (if there's not enough, top it off with more of the water from the carrots)
¼ cup brown sugar
1½ TBSP cornstarch
1/8 tsp ginger
food coloring (optional; a slight peach/orange tinge looks good; don't overdo it)

Mix the sugar, ginger, and cornstarch together, then stir into the liquids over medium heat, stirring until it bubbles and becomes translucent. Cool.

After making the sauce, slice up the onions, chop the dill, core and cut up the apples, and stir it all together, salting if desired. Serve cold, either drizzling the dressing over the salad or leaving it on the side for dipping.

Variation: Scandinavian Style:
Add 7 fresh beets, boiling them with the carrots. Omit the pineapple and the chicken, and replace the above sauce with a mayo-based dressing. This still won't be authentic rosolli, but closer.

Yahoo: Content? What's that?

2010-03-02T10:14:00.003-05:00

I'd like to put forward Yahoo! as my nomination for the Content? What's that? awards.

(Click the screenshot to view a higher-resolution version.)

With my OS and browser chrome all clipped out of the screenshot, the page area comes to 1542x805, a total of some 1241310 pixels. Trying to be as generous as is anything like reasonable, I estimate the content area as roughly 678x39 = 26442 pixels for the search box area (Yahoo _is_ a major web search engine, so IMO this counts), something like 401x213+286x40+131x26 = about 100259 pixels for the TODAY article, plus a somewhat more arguable 500x170 = 85000 pixels for the news headlines (which could easily be considered intrasite links, but I'm trying to be magnanimous), a total of about 211701 pixels of content, roughly 17% of the total page area. For such a major site (Alexa rank: 4), this is an embarrassingly low number, IMO.

Cherry Cake

2010-01-29T07:54:00.004-05:00

This is a variant I developed. There's a plum cake recipe that's been a favorite in my family for decades, and I've always wondered about using other fruits. I've been experimenting with peaches, but they're juicier and not as strong a flavor, so that recipe needs more adjustments before it's ready for general consumption.

But the cherry variant turned out great on the first try. In fact, I think I might like it better than the plum. Here's the recipe.

1 quart home-canned pitted pie cherries
1.5 cups sugar
3 eggs
1/4 cup oil
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp almond extract
2.5 cups flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp cinnamon

For the glaze:
juice from the cherries
1/2 cup sugar
2 TBSP cornstarch

Drain the cherries, reserving the juice for the glaze. Run the cherries through the blender long enough that you can't tell where one cherry leaves off and the next starts.

In a mixing bowl, combine cherries, sugar, and eggs. Beat until foamy, then mix in the oil, milk, vanilla, and extract.

Stir the dry ingredients together then mix them into the wet mixture. Pour into a (greased and floured) Bundt or angelfood cake pan. Bake at 350F for 50-60 minutes. Cool for about ten minutes, then invert onto a plate. Spoon the glaze over the top while both are still hot.

To make the glaze, combine the juice, sugar, and cornstarch in a saucepan. Boil gently, stirring, until translucent.

Beginning to Understand

2009-11-24T21:25:00.005-05:00

I think I may be beginning to understand the Japanese writing system. This worries me, because it's not the sort of thing you really expect to understand. Ever.

There's a bit of necessary background information: I have a Spaced Repetition System, that I use for memorizing vocabulary and stuff. I've had it for, oh, about a year now I guess.

The SRS is cool because it makes review automatic. How it works is, for every active card it tracks two things: when is it due to be looked at next (due date/time), and how long is that since the previous time (repetition interval). When you get a card right without any trouble and click the "Correct" button (after showing the answer to check yourself), it increases the interval geometrically and requeues the card based on the new interval. If you have trouble remembering but do get it, you can click "Difficult", and the interval stays about the same. If you don't quite get it, but almost, "Close" will shorten the interval a bit, and if you just plum forgot or missed outright, there's a button that will cut the interval down to a fraction of its former value. There's also an "Easy" button that increases the interval by a couple orders of magnitude. Anyway, the normal state of affairs, once you get your multipliers tweaked to match your personal learning rate, is that *most* of the time you remember the card and click the "Correct" button, with the result that the interval climbs from minutes to hours within the first couple of days, then from days to weeks, and it just keeps climbing from there. The better you know a card, the longer you can go and still know it.

New cards are introduced as necessary based on how far apart your active cards are spaced. You can also dequeue a new active card any time you want, if you just feel you're ready for a new one, and there's a review-only mode that never gives you any new ones. But usually I just let it give me new ones when it thinks I'm ready. Cards that aren't active yet have a "cue number" that controls the order in which they are introduced.

I've got a number of different kinds of things in the SRS: English words, Hebrew words, Japanese characters and words, Bible verses, geography, US Constitutional amendments, whatever I want to memorize that breaks up into bite-sized pieces. I spend roughly half an hour a day using it, broken up into 5-10 minute segments here and there.

So here's the story: months and months ago, I put the word 七曜表 into my SRS. Since I didn't yet know two of the three characters used to write it, I gave it a cue number higher than either of them. At the time I was putting in a bunch of words just so there'd be something there to dequeue whenever I needed it. I then promptly forgot about the word until it came up.

You also need to know that in the Japanese writing system, each character has multiple possible "readings" (pronunciations). There are also a couple of different major *kinds* of readings, "on" readings and "kun" readings being the important ones for most purposes. In my SRS, I always list on readings before kun readings, and they show up in a different color, so *hopefully* I'm getting at least a general sense of which is which. In my SRS I list the readings in kana (the portion of the Japanese writing system that's strictly phonetic in nature, which makes it perfect for pronunciation guides). Here, however, I shall attempt to render these pronunciations in a manner that will make sense for English speakers, on the theory that some of the people reading this might not know kana.

So anyway, as of a couple of days ago I've now reached the point where I've studied all three of the characters used to write this word. 七 can be pronounced either "she-chee" or "na-na" and means seven. 曜 is "yo" (with the o held for two beats; a rare character with only one major reading) and its basic meaning is day, as in day of the week. The third character, 表, is one that I only started studying a couple of days ago and am still reviewing multiple times per day. It has three major readings. The first one is unspellable in English; the traditional transliteration would be "hyo", but you're going to want to make that two syllables, and it's only one: the "hy" is a blend. (The y sound is pretty much the *only* blend-forming phoneme in the Japanese language. They don't really have l or r, and they don't form blends with s or z or w.) Oh, and the "o" is held for two beats. The character can also be read "oh-moe-tay" or "ah-dah-wah-sue". (That "d" is not exactly a normal d. It's a lateral alveolar flap consonant, often transliterated as "r". It sounds sort of like "l", only different. It's closer to d than r. If you know Spanish, it's said to be more like a Spanish r than it is like an English r.) This character carries the idea of displaying or showing or expressing something or ~~making an annotation~~ the concept of a surface or table. (Oops, got it mixed up with another character I'm still learning.)

So the card comes up, and I look at it, and I guess based on its structure that I should be using the on readings, so I come up with "she-chee-yo-hyo" (with each o held for two beats) as my best-guess pronunciation. Then I think about the meaning. Seven-day display? Showing seven days? What, a calendar or something?

And then I clicked the "show answer" button, and... wow. Both my pronunciation guess and my meaning guess were dead-on. That's... weird. Normally when a new card is first dequeued, I expect to get it at least partly wrong the first three or four times I see it, until I finally start getting it pounded into my thick skull. But this one... well, it just sort of made sense.

And that's a major milestone. Because when I first started studying the Japanese writing system, I did not think any part of it (well, other than the kana) would ever make any sense.

Zeke

2009-11-08T13:15:00.002-05:00

Someone asked to see a photo of Zeke (my mom's dog), so I'm posting up this one, which was taken a couple of months ago, when he was about a year old. The photo was taken by my sister.

A Screenshot for the UI Hall of Shame

2009-10-29T10:21:00.003-04:00

Okay, I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, so I was able to figure out what I need to do, but one could be excused, upon a straightforward reading of these messages, from concluding that the goal is impossible to reach due to conflicting requirements. I can't install AD until after I run adprep, but I can't run adprep until after AD is installed (which is what will make this computer a domain controller). What? Gah.

Screenshot

2009-10-29T06:13:00.002-04:00

Okay, I'm just going to post this screenshot here to demonstrate something.

Fall is here.

2009-10-20T20:58:00.009-04:00

Fall has arrived, and you know what that means...

Winter is coming!

Now working on a serif font design.

2009-10-16T19:46:00.005-04:00

Actually, perhaps serif is an inadequate term for this level of decoration.

Anyway, I was playing with design ideas for a serif typeface, and after a few rounds of messing around, this is where I landed for the first glyph, a lowercase a.

Update: After doing the next couple of characters, I realized that the a is too tall: I inadvertently designed it to the cap height. That probably means that the character would need to be redesigned if I decide to go ahead and finish the font.

Thoughts? Is this worth turning into an entire typeface?

Blooming Grove font picked up by dafont.com

2009-10-09T10:30:00.003-04:00

A while ago I submitted a font I've been working on to dafont, a site that makes fonts freely available for download. They screen submissions before placing them on the site, so today I checked back to see if they'd accepted it. They have, and you can see it here.

The fonts on the site use a wide range of licenses, depending on the author, representing pretty much the full gamut of licenses that don't require payment up front. If you want to see ones you have to pay for, there are other sites, but dafont has the distinction of being the first result when you search for the word "font" on Google, so I thought that would make a good starting point for distribution.

In the case of Blooming Grove, I have released the font into the public domain. Personally I feel that this makes the font more useful, since it removes restrictions that might otherwise prevent it from being used in unanticipated ways. A lot of custom font licenses, for instance, are not compatible with @font-face embedding. In some cases (e.g., Larabie) that's a deliberate choice, which is the author's prerogative, but in other cases it's probably inadvertent. Jos Buivenga (of exljbris) has included special provisions in his license to allow @font-face embedding, which is very nice, but ultimately there's no telling what future use will come along...

Not wanting to face this issue with Blooming Grove, and particularly not wanting to potentially have to rewrite license terms as future needs arise, I have chosen to release it into the public domain, which should cover all the bases in one fell swoop. Need to add a cedilla so you can use the word "facade" in full-bore pretentious mode on your website and display it in a @font-face embedded slightly-modified version of the font with the little mark under the c? No problem. Need to bundle it with your application that uses the GPL version 4 with the anti-bundling clause? No problem. Currently, there's no GPL version 4, and even when there is, it very probably won't prohibit bundling with differently-licensed fonts. But you never know what the future holds. With public-domain material, it doesn't matter. You can use the font for whatever you need to use it for, no restrictions.

Oh, and I'm working on a bold variant, for which all of the main letters (both lower and upper case) are now complete. Once I get the numbers and the major symbols and punctuation done, I'll be putting it up alongside the regular weight.

And if the Open Font Library ever gets their upload facility working again, I'm going to put them there too.

Ecannot snation ed

2009-08-26T11:28:00.007-04:00

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Canning Season

2009-08-22T08:48:00.019-04:00

It's that time of year again.

First, you get a few bushels of these things. We used, when we lived in Canal Fulton and had a large back yard, to grow them ourselves (mainly the roma variety, which give a higher yield of thicker sauce per bushel). These days we buy them, usually from the Amish. Roma tomatoes are preferred, but romas cost 70% more per bushel this year, so we went with the regular kind. Romas are worth more, but not 70% more.

Oh, you'll also want some of these and some of these.
You wash the tomatoes, cut them up, put them in the hopper, turn the handle, and run them through. I put up a short video of this on YouTube.

Out comes the juice, which you boil down for a while.

At some point you cut up the onions and peppers, then put them through the blender, with a bit of the tomato juice just to make them blend easier. They then get added to the rest of the tomato juice (no photo of this step yet), along with possibly some tomato paste for added thickness. (The tomato paste isn't necessary if your tomatoes make a good thick juice in the first place, another reason the roma variety are preferred.)

There are a couple of other ingredients as well. Maybe I'll post up our recipe at some point.

You put the sauce in jars (no photo of this step yet), then load them (again, no photo yet) into the waterbath canner.

Outcome: beautiful, glorious canned spaghetti sauce. Server over vermicelli, with grated parmesan on the side. It's also good for rigatoni, lasagna, practically any pasta, really. We were almost out when the tomatoes came into season this year, so we hope to do seventy quarts or so. You can't buy this stuff at the store. I mean, you can buy stuff that says spaghetti sauce on the label, but you don't want it.

Oh, here's a photo of my mom's new wooden stirring spoon. The old one broke, so we got this one from that place in Winona Lake that sells wooden kitchen implements.

How to drive a dog right out of his mind

2009-07-31T07:41:00.003-04:00

In the photo, you can only see one. We don't know exactly how many were living under there, but we do know that at least three of the little ones where white, and at least two of the little ones were black.

Zeke (the dog) couldn't reach them, but that didn't stop him from agonizing. They were able to get clear back up against the edge of the house behind there, and also there was a space directly under the steps (to the left in the photo). So every time we let him out, he went crazy sniffing and sniffing all around the porch and refused to have any part of doing anything else (such as, for instance, the business a dog normally takes care of when you put him out, if you know what I mean). Sarah ended up taking him elsewhere, on the leash, a couple of times a day, for fear he'd destroy his kidneys holding it.

He didn't want to leave the bunnies and come indoors, either. We pretty much had to drag him in, and thirty seconds later he'd be whining at the door. We'd tell him no, and thirty seconds later he'd be whining at the door, every thirty seconds, all day, every day, for weeks.

They've moved on, now, thank goodness. (The photo was taken a couple of weeks ago.) I guess the youngins got old enough to move from the nest. We're very glad.

Dark Alley

2009-07-08T09:26:00.005-04:00

We have, in Galion, an extensive system of alleys. Basically, these are poorly-maintained streets that run parallel to the regular ones, but in the middle of the block, between the back yards, rather than between the front yards and sidewalks. This one is always a bit dark, due to various shade-casting objects on both sides of it.

So yeah, this is what passes for a dark alley around here. Batman, eat your heart out.

This is another shot I took while experimenting with aperture settings, but this time, there's a wider range of distances between the camera and the elements in the photo, so theres' a much
more noticeable difference between F 2.5 versus F 6.4. This, if I haven't got the order I took them in mixed up, is the shot taken with the former setting. The other one is significantly less clear when you zoom in and look at the finer details.

Toothbrush Holder

2009-06-19T09:31:00.004-04:00

This is a photo that I took while experimenting with aperture settings -- four otherwise identical photos (using a tripod) with four different settings. The shot turned out not to show off the effect very well, probably because a lot of the stuff in the shot is about the same distance from the camera as the main subject. I'll select a scene where that's not the case next time. So I cropped away the rest of the shot, and here's the toothbrush holder.

I suppose my sense of humor is a bit odd, but this toothbrush holder (which belongs to my sister, who got it because she likes turtles) has always tickled me. Clearly the design of this holder was based on the kind of toothbrushes that used to exist when I was a kid, the kind with the thin straight flat handles. But by the time this particular toothbrush holder was actually made and sold, those were a thing of the past; all the toothbrushes I've seen in the last fifteen years have contour-molded handles like the ones shown, so they don't fit. To me, this is a perfect example of product design not being revisited as it should be when the passage of time changes the circumstances in which it is to be used.

No matter; Sarah uses the toothbrush holder anyway, because she likes turtles. (And no, I didn't pose the one that's leaning against the wall. It's always like that.)

Esoteric Knowledge Quiz #4

2009-06-15T21:40:00.000-04:00

Do your friends, family, and coworkers accuse you of being a repository of useless information? (Mine do.) Here's your chance to test your knowledge of obscure but interesting tidbits...

Mt. St. Helens, the Alaskan stratovolcano that famously erupted in 1980,
was named for which person?
1. Helena of Constantinople
2. Helena of Skövde
3. Alleyne FitzHerbert
4. Helen of Troy

Which of the following is not the title of a book by Lillian Jackson Braun?
1. The Cat Who Wasn't There
2. The Cat Who Ran Amuck
3. The Cat Who Sniffed Glue
4. The Cat Who Turned On and Off

It seems all the cool kids these days are using SATA hard drives instead of the old IDE kind.
SATA stands for Serial ATA, and the old kind are sometimes now called PATA for Parallel ATA,
but what does the ATA part stand for?
1. Asyncronous Tandem Attachment
2. Asynchronous Throughput Attachment
3. Advanced Technology Attachment
4. Adaptive Terminal Attachment

In the standard model of sub-atomic physics, which of the following is not considered to be a lepton?
1. photon
2. electron
3. muon
4. tau neutrino

2^nd Timothy chapter 3 gives a list of character traits people will have in the last days. Which of the following is not on the list?
1. disobedient to their parents
2. stingy
3. ungrateful
4. lovers of pleasure
(Wording taken from the NIV translation.)

I'll post the answers in the comments at some point.

If you have questions to contribute to future quizzes, send them in to jonadab@NO SPAM THANKS ANYWAYbright.net with the phrase Esoteric Knowledge Quiz in the subject line (or. if you are on the Wheeitology list, you can just post them there). Thanks!

Past quizzes: 1, 2, 3

Succulent Cabbage Rolls

2009-03-18T17:11:00.001-04:00

Ingredients:
cabbage leaves, as large as possible
1 cup onions & peppers (chopped)
2 medium carrots, diced
1 stalk celery or more (with extra leaves if available)
garlic powder to taste
½ lb ground beef
¼ tsp basil, divided
1 cup tomato sauce, or more
1 cup beef broth, or more
½ cup of the water left from boiling the cabbage, possibly more
½ cup brown sugar
1 cup diced tomatoes (not drained)
1 cup pre-cooked rice
½ TBSP corn starch
½ TBSP worchestershire sauce

Preparation:
Boil the cabbage leaves enough to soften them, so that they can be rolled. Save enough of the water for the sauce.

Filling:
Saute the onions, carrots, and peppers in olive oil or vegetable oil until the carrots begin to soften. Add the celery (chopped) and the beef. Sprinkle with garlic powder and half the basil. Cook, stirring occasionally. When the beef is done, add the diced tomatoes (with their juice), half the basil, and the rice. Simmer and mix.

Sauce:
Combine broth and tomato sauce in saucepan on medium heat. Add the water, brown sugar, worchester, the other half of the basil, and the corn starch. Whisk thoroughly and heat, stirring enough that it does not stick, until it bubbles significantly. Remove from heat.

Assembly:
Preheat oven to 350F. Add some of the filling to each leaf and wrap as you would a burrito, but with both ends closed. Place in glass or ceramic baking pan with the loose edge down. When all the rolls are in the pan, pour the sauce over the top, covering the rolls as well as possible. Bake and serve hot.

A QEMU screenshot for your edification

2009-03-13T10:34:00.005-04:00

Heh, heh, heh.

Easier to use, more reliable, faster, and more entertaining. That was some good marketing copy, there.

There were some improvements in Windows 98 (versus Windows 95 OSR2, I mean; comparing it to later systems would be unfair), but these weren't them.

Reliability was basically the same; Windows 98 crashed just as often as Windows 95 and was at least as likely to corrupt the filesystem when it did.

Faster is a joke; Windows 95 performs better every time on the same hardware. (This is normal; newer systems are made for more recent hardware, and they do more, so older systems are always faster. That's true in the open-source world as well, with a few rare exceptions.)

Easier to use and more entertaining? I guess they must be referring to the fact that Windows 98 introduced Windows Media Player, the most impossibly unusable media player EVER (except, possibly, for Apple QuickTime). The only way that's entertaining is if you're watching other people try to figure out how to make it do what they want and laughing at them.

A Very Strange Check

2009-03-03T20:07:00.014-05:00

Today I got a very strange check in the mail. It's clearly designed to make me think it's my state tax refund, but I am skeptical about its authenticity, for a number of reasons, which I shall outline below.

The very first strange thing is the timeframe. This check arrived before my federal tax refund. The federal refund has always arrived first, before the state one, in the past. I just mailed off my IT-1040 a couple of weeks ago, so I wasn't expecting a refund check for another month at least. If that were the only oddity, of course, I'd just figure the state got their act together better this year, maybe some new electronic processing or something, and the checks are coming out sooner. But...

The address in the upper-left corner of the check, which showed through the envelope in the return-address position (the envelope itself has no information on it at all), is a P.O. Box address for something called "Taxation-Refund/Research", which sounds very much like it was carefully constructed to let extremely gullible recipients think that it might come from the Department of Taxation, without actually saying so.

The check is signed by someone named "J. Pari Saberty", whom I've never heard of, and whose title is given as "Director", and the subtext reads "Office of Budget Management". Real state tax refund checks, at least in Ohio, are signed by someone with a significantly more familiar title, such as State Treasurer, or at least they always have been in the past. I've never heard of the "Office of Budget Management" before, and I find it interesting that it isn't the "Ohio Office of Budget Management", as one would expect if it were a legitimate branch of the state government. Perhaps it is the Office of Budget Management of the Taxation-Refund/Research Corporation?

There are some other oddities. The check has a warrant number; maybe I'm just forgetting, but I don't recall seeing one of those on a check before. In the upper-right corner there are also three different unlabeled numbers; there's no way to know what they are supposed to represent.

The tear-off sheet on top, which came folded behind the check, also includes a warrant date and, I am not making this up, a vendor number, as well as a voucher ID number. That word voucher is a bit scary. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but in the back of my mind, there is a notion rolling around that a voucher can come with strings attached.

Then there's this wording:
REFUND FOR TAX YEAR 2008
This payment represents your Personal Income tax refund.
For payment information contact 800-282-1780.

That word "represents" is outright terrifying in its clearly deliberate vagueness. They went out of their way to avoid saying that this is in fact my refund. It only represents my refund. One supposes my actual refund will be coming along later, from the state, and if I've cashed this check meanwhile, then I'll probably owe the refund itself to "Taxation-Refund/Research", perhaps with interest and other attached strings.

I could look up that 800 number and see who it belongs to, but realistically there's no point, because even if the phone number belongs to the Ohio Department of Taxation, it only means that this outfit printed that phone number on the document they sent me. The wording surrounding it is sufficiently vague ("For payment information") that you couldn't even really argue that the outfit issuing the check is claiming the number belongs to them. There's clearly no such claim. They're just advising you to call the number if you need information.

So I did a web search for "Taxation-Refund/Research", and I found... an article on a blog, headlined "Refund checks aren't a scam; they're the work of state government". On a blog. Yeah.

I'll say that again, because it bears repeating: my web search for the name of the organization that issued this check turns up an article on a blog. There are no other significant results. Notably, a web search for this outfit does not turn up any Ohio state government websites.

The blog article is designed to look like it's a column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but the domain name of the blog, while it is a name that would be very plausible for the Plain Dealer, does not match the actual domain name of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, (which I looked up in a search engine).

At this point, loud alarm bells are going off in my brain.

When I trim the blog article's URL back to just the domain name, it's... a blog-hosting site. There's a "sign up for a blog" link right there in the sidebar, which is presumably what "Taxation-Refund/Research" did, I guess.

The blog article claims that the Ohio Department of Taxation got enough calls about the redesigned checks that they posted a sample of what the new checks look like on their website. This claim should be verifiable... but I have looked on said Dept of Taxation website and have not been able to locate any such thing. It's possible that I'm just missing it, I suppose... government websites are notoriously badly organized and difficult to navigate. But it's also at least vaguely conceivable to me that the blog article, reputable though it may seem on account of the fact that somebody posted it up on the internet, is less than 100% accurate, as unlikely as that may seem. This is one detail of the article that I should be able to verify, if it were true, and I cannot.

On the other hand, there's a light "Great Seal of the State of Ohio" graphic built into the background of the check, which probably should ought to be illegal for a private company to use in this manner without proper authorization, though I'm not a lawyer and can't really say this for certain. And yes, I know what said seal is supposed to look like, and this looks like it. So there's that.

Also, the amount of the check happens to exactly match the amount of the refund I was expecting, which would be a pretty odd coincidence if they didn't get the number from the Ohio Dept of Taxation. Then again, the name of the outfit issuing the check includes the word "Research", so maybe they know something I don't about the legal nuances of tax and public records laws. I thought the amount of your tax refund was considered confidential and not disclosed to third parties, but I am not a lawyer and could be mistaken about this. I'd have to research it to be sure, but this also points toward the check perhaps being legitimate, unless there's something I don't know. So there's that too.

Additionally, the check says "VOID AFTER 2 YEARS", which is a normal duration for a tax refund check. You'd normally expect a scam to say something more like "VOID AFTER THIRTY DAYS", to encourage people to stop thinking and just go cash the thing already. This, to my way of thinking, is the strongest piece of evidence I could find that the check might in fact be legitimate.

The two-year duration allows me to just hang onto the thing for a couple of months, if I am so inclined, to see if perhaps my real tax refund check will arrive in the mail from the Ohio Department of the Treasury. Since the check is for a small amount, I might just do that, rather than bother doing any further research.

But it seems very likely to me that this is some kind of scam. The supposed Plain Dealer article on a blog, rather than on the Plain Dealer website, and the lack of any evidence on the web that there's any "Taxation-Refund/Research" associated with any branch of the Ohio state government, are both difficult to explain away. And if it is a scam, it's one of the most underhandedly ingenious ones I've ever seen, and likely to catch a lot of unsuspecting people.

Housing Credit Crisis

2009-03-03T08:37:00.004-05:00

I ran across this video (via Gerv Markham's blog) that tries to explain in layman's terms why the banks have run into trouble. On the whole, I think it does a pretty fair job of breaking down some of the basic points and making them understandable.

It basically comes down to this: sub-prime mortgages are a somewhat riskier investment, and the risk was underplayed, and some funds were invested in sub-prime mortgages that really could not tolerate that level of risk.

How to upgrade Debian from Etch to Lenny

2009-02-17T13:19:00.003-05:00

Okay, if you've tried upgrading from etch to lenny, you've probably seen an error message, to the following effect:
1. You can't upgrade libc6 until you first install a 2.6 kernel.
2. You can't install the lenny 2.6 kernel until you upgrade libc6.
3. This is NOT (in big tall capital letters) a bug.
4. You should add the etch sources and install an etch 2.6 kernel before trying to upgrade to lenny.

I suppose if you do step 4 first, before attempting to upgrade to lenny, that may be all you need to do. However, once you see the error message, you will discover that you are stuck in an in-between state that can be difficult to resolve.

1. If you follow the instructions and ADD the etch sources, then apt-get update will whine that it can't do that because it runs out of memory. The solution is to REMOVE the lenny or stable sources from sources.list, listing ONLY the etch ones (for now).

2. apt-get update should work now, but apt-get still won't do squat else, and the error message it gives you is vague. Upon closer examination, this is caused by the fact that you have a broken package, which was caused by trying to upgrade to Lenny without installing a 2.6 kernel first. You can fix this by using the fix broken packages option. (This option is in the menus in both synaptic and aptitude, though you still have to apply to make it actually happen.)

3. If you're a forgetful sort of person, chances are by the time you get your broken packages fixed, you've forgotten the exact incantation that the first error message gave you for installing the 2.6 kernel. Here it is:
apt-get install -t etch linux-image-2.6

4. Of course, linux-image-2.6 is a virtual package, so you have a choice of which kernel you actually want to install. I picked the 2.6.18 686 kernel, and that worked for me, YMMV. Don't forget to make sure /boot is remounted rw, if you normally mount it ro. (If you don't know how /boot is mounted, it's probably rw already, and may even be part of the / filesystem.)

5. Since you've just upgraded the kernel, you probably want to reboot. Yes, that means you have to close Firefox (or Iceweasel, or whatever they're calling it these days).

6. While you're still on the etch sources, go ahead and do apt-get dist-upgrade, to make sure you're at least fully up to the latest and greatest etch.

7. NOW it should be safe to change sources.list to refer to stable (or lenny) instead of etch, do your apt-get update, and proceed as usual from there.

Orange Marmalade & Clove Merengue Pie

2009-01-22T21:55:00.009-05:00

This is based on my grapefruit merengue pie recipe, which I posted here a while ago, although there are more differences in the filling than just the fruit. The crust, however, is identical to that recipe, q.v. (Actually, you could use any pie crust that you like with this filling, and, come to think of it, a graham cracker crust might be interesting. But I used the shortbread, and it worked out pretty well.)

Filling Ingredients:

3 oranges, or 2 if large
boiling water, divided
5/2 cups granulated sugar (That's 2.5 cups, if I still remember how to convert rationals to decimal notation.)
3/4 cups cornstarch
1/2 tsp ground cloves (See notes below.)
4 egg yolks
1 TBSP shortening (optional)
orange food coloring (optional)

Prepare the dough for the crust, and place it in the refrigerator to chill.

Stir the cornstarch into the sugar in a medium-large saucepan. Bring the water to a rolling boil.

Grate rind (amount to taste; I took most of the outer, dark-orange layer of rind from two oranges) into a large measuring cup and add the juice and pulp, discarding any seeds, the remaining peel, and as many of the section dividers as you can easily separate from the pulp. Add enough boiling water to bring the total volume, including the fruit pulp, to four and a half cups.

Add the water and fruit mixture to the sugar and cornstarch in the saucepan, stirring. Place over low-to-medium heat and stir as necessary until it boils gently. Add another half a cup of boiling water, the egg yolks, and the cloves. Continue stirring until it reaches a good boil. Remove from heat and stir in the food coloring and/or butter if desired.

Let it cool. Preheat the oven to 350 Fahrenheit. Roll the crusts, invert onto pie pans, and prebake them. Add the filling, top with merengue right to the edges, and bake just until the merengue is lightly browned. Cool. Serve chilled.

I am of two minds about the amount of cloves in this recipe. On the one hand, the presence of the cloves is readily apparent, and a smaller quantity might create a more subtle effect, which might be better, especially if the effect you're going for is "orange pie". On the other hand, the flavor of the cloves is not as strong as the orange flavor, particularly if you use as much rind as I did, so more cloves might create more of a balance. If the effect you're going for is an even balance of clove and orange, more clove is probably wanted. I can't decide which way I'd go next time.

It may also be worth considering a bit of vanilla extract, or a bit of lemon juice in the water.

I believe I got the sugar about right, at least for the oranges I used (seedless "naval" oranges; it's what we had in the fridge, and they weren't the freshest ever either; better oranges would presumably yield better results). I wasn't sure I'd nail the sugar the first time, since I was reducing it from the amount in the grapefruit version, but I think I got it about right.

A Treatise on the Length of Handles

2009-01-15T19:39:00.004-05:00

I am not a particularly tall man, as men go.

According to Uncle John's Monumental Bathroom Reader (a book that my sister purchased for us to keep in the bathroom because, you know, you've got to have reading material in there, and Reader's Digest these days most emphatically ain't what it used to be), 25% of American men are over six feet tall. Even if the precision of this statistic is in doubt, the general principle is undeniable: there are a lot of men out there who are taller than, you know, the short people.

Well, 25% of American men may be over six feet tall, but I'm not. I don't know my exact height, but my father, who is significantly taller than I am, is still a couple of inches shy of six feet. So presumably more than 25% of American men are taller than my father, and I can tell you for certain that a good deal more than 25% (perhaps as many as 50%) of American men are taller than I am. I'm not shrimpy short, but I'm not especially tall either.

Which brings me around to my main topic of snow shovels, and specifically, the length of snow shovel handles. Apparently the entire snow shovel industry is run by eight-year-old children and/or four-foot-tall women, because it is difficult to buy a snow shovel with a handle that comes anywhere near shoulder height on me (let alone on a tall man). Waist height is more typical. (Okay, so my waist is a little higher than average for a man my height. Still.) By the time you angle the shovel at the thirty-five degrees (from horizontal) or so that you need in order to get next to the sidewalk and separate the snow from it, this means the handle is at, approximately, knee height. (Okay, so my knees are a little higher than average for a man my height, and maybe you could make a shovel work at forty degrees, forty-five if it's got a well-angled edge in good condition. Still.) Even if we assume that twice as many women shovel snow as men (which seems unlikely to me), and that 100% of women are shorter than I am (which is definitely not true), that still means a double-digit percentage of the snow-shoveling population is WAY too tall to use the shovels that are commonly available.

WHY should I have to bend over (or, worse, kneel) until my head is barely above the level of my waist? Is there a good reason for this? (Hint: No, there is not.) I'm not yet forty years old, so I can do that for a couple of minutes, but if I have to shovel any _significant_ amount of area, the bending over gets old. Fast. My back and waist and knees get tired *way* before my arms do, even if it's heavy snow. And my arms are not exactly what you'd call the athletic sort, as anyone who knows me can attest.

And heaven forfend I should want to shovel my way *down* the stairs, starting from the top, from inside the house. (Apparently, it doesn't ever snow at night in Snow Shovel Design Land, or something.) In that case I would have to be enough of a gymnast to bend over until my elbows are level with my ankles. Haha. While that would admittedly make an amusing cartoon short, I am in practice not nearly that flexible, so I generally have to step on the snow I'm about to shovel (which, if it's the kind of warm wet snow we tend to get most of the time around here (albeit, not today), makes it rather harder to shovel afterward) to get to the bottom and work my way back up.

I can sort of understand why shovel handles, when measured from the tip of the blade, might only come to three and a half or four feet, if you were only concerned about selling the blessed things in Japan, where the idea that a man might be six feet tall is simultaneously silly and yet also somewhat terrifying. But in the Western world, where it's *common* for a man to be six feet tall or more, and we have entire chains of clothing stores that cater exclusively to men who are over six and a half feet all, why does nobody sell a snow shovel with a longer handle? I'd buy one. I bet a lot of other guys would too.

Incidentally, there are other things I'd like to have with a longer handle as well. Garden implements, leaf rakes, brooms, mops... one could imagine an entire product line based around this simple concept. But the top of the list, as far as I'm concerned, is the snow shovel.

Arbitrary Screenshot

2009-01-13T08:06:00.004-05:00

I've been tapped. The instructions don't specify an order, so I used directory order (ls -U), which is, generally speaking, the order in which things were created. Based on that, the fourth subfolder in /b4/img (where I keep most of my images) is sshots, which as you might guess is where I generally put screenshots.

The fourth file (using directory order again) therein is this little gem.

Wow, that's old. I believe this is from the era when I was using a Windows Me system as a temporary stand-in (which ended up lasting for several months) because my Linux system had developed hardware problems. I had forgotten that Inkscape had been around that long. That was way back before I built the FreeBSD system, which I used for a couple of years, and then I upgraded/migrated it to Debian stable a good while ago, back when sarge was current IIRC, and now etch is living on borrowed time.

Anyway, I took this screenshot to show how practically all software honors the system colors (in the shot you can see OpenOffice.org, Gimp, and the web browser from the Mozilla application suite). But then you also see how Inkscape looked at the time, and how it absolutely didn't make any effort to match at all. It has since somewhat improved, incidentally. It still doesn't use automatic on-screen document colors from the system colors, like OpenOffice does (as you can see), but recent versions of Inkscape do at least paint the UI in the system colors, as you can see from this much more current screenshot:

Inkscape is still a pain to use for me, compared to other applications, because of the fact that it doesn't automatically use system colors for the document while editing. I generally end up changing the actual document background color for editing comfort (I can't work with blinding white backgrounds; it hurts my eyes and gives me a headache), and then I have to remember to change it back any time I want to print, or export a raster image, or anything along those lines. Annoying.

But at least the chrome is painted in system colors now.

Recipe for Pain

2009-01-11T20:59:00.004-05:00

Contract a minor cold, of the kind that you barely notice, except that it makes you cough at the least provocation, e.g., whenever you laugh it starts a coughing fit that takes a minute or so to stop.

Take the puppy out for a romp in the snow, slip, fall, and catch yourself in a way that strains some of your rib muscles, so that they're sore and sensitive to sudden movement, such as coughing.

Decide to enter the Lyttle Lytton Contest again this year.

While working on your entry, be sure to do your research by reading through all the past winners, in order to compile a nice little ranked list of features that the winning entries tend to have.

Modernizing It's All About the Pentiums

2008-12-27T06:56:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite rap songs is Weird Al's It's All About the Pentiums. In some ways the exaggerative style of the lyrics have protected the song, and it has aged relatively well, given the subject matter, but even so there are some parts of it that just seem like they could stand to be modernized. Here are a few of my suggestions. (Note that I'm only listing the parts I suggest changes for. The full lyrics, if you don't know them, are available elsewhere.)

original lyric	comments	suggested revision
Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills	While defragmentation is not entirely obsolete as such, it seems a lot less relevant now than ten years ago, and indeed there are much geekier things one can do with a filesystem these days than defragment it. Unfortunately, tuning the filesystem parameters for performance doesn't seem to fit the metre here, so I had to go with something older, older even than defragmentation, but something all geeks still do from time to time.	Partition my hard drive for thrills (or stet)
Installed a T1 line in my house	While residential frame relay is still geeky in general, T1 is no longer the same kind of overkill that it was when the song was written, and many ordinary consumers have that much bandwidth from DSL or even cable modem service. My revised lyric, however, should be good for at least ten years more.	Installed an OC3 at my house
Upgrade my system at least twice a day	The first line here would have been fine as it stands, except that changing the rhyme makes the next line easier to work with. This latter did not age well and is arguably the worst lyric in the song. (The part about Y2K was laughable within six months after the song's release, and probably should not have been included in the first place.) The line can't even really be upgraded with a modern equivalent, because there isn't one. PnP is a very bad memory for most geeks, with no modern equivalent really, and nobody is very much afraid of 2038, most software having already been upgraded to 64-bit datetime values as I write this. That makes this line a good choice to slip in something that wasn't on most people's radar when the song was written in the nineties. Network security and reliability seems obvious. Social networking and user-created content are another option, but security seems more likely to still be an issue in ten years. Threading and Unicode seem too technical, managed code too likely to be taken for granted in another ten years.	My battery backup is certified green.
I'm strictly plug-and-play, I ain't afraid of Y2K		My generator's clean. My firewall is lean and mean.
You think your Commodore 64 is really neato	No one could have predicted in 1999 that the Commodore 64 would be cool again in 2007, but the retro trend, among teenagers and gamers, has really changed the flavor of meaning this line carries. A small brand substitution should restore the original sentiment.	You think your Packard Bell is really neato
In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user	Yeah, there is still a lot of 32-bit stuff out there, but the cool CPUs now are all 64-bit, and the days of 32-bit software are numbered. I wouldn't have revised the song for this, and it may even be a little ahead of its time, but since we're making changes, this should be updated too.	In a 64-bit world, you're a 2-bit user

Wow, look at that. With only six changes (and most of them are very small changes, and two of them scarcely even necessary) a song from 1999 feels current in 2006. Given the subject matter, that's actually fairly amazing. It's hard to find a computer book from 1999 that's worth the paper it's printed on, so these lyrics really have aged quite well.

Book Series and Strange Titles

2008-12-15T10:16:00.001-05:00

This morning I just happened to see this book, and it set me thinking. I realize, of course, that Visual Quickstart Guide is the series title, and so they kept it on this book so as to match the other books in the series. Nonetheless, the idea of having a visual guide to text-based markup standards is... funny. Well, it's funny to me. So this set me thinking about what other bizarre or oxymoronic titles there could be, if books on certain topics were published as part of a series with a poorly-matched series title...

sed and awk Visual Quickstart Guide

Brain Surgery for Dummies

Teach Yourself Patience in 21 Days

: Quick & Easy

Emacs: The Missing Manual

Cleaning Up Digital Photos Again

2008-12-12T08:45:00.017-05:00

We had a holiday open house at work again, and again we took photos, and again it's my job to put them in a photo gallery on the web. I'm still working on that at work (we took a lot of photos, and I have other things to do as well), but I brought one photo home because I thought it would make for a good demonstration of some of the techniques I use to clean up mediocre photographs.

Here's a sample of what a section of the original photo looks like. This is how it came out of the camera. (Click the image to see a full-size version. Notice how grainy it is.) As I've said before, the ideal thing would be to take better photographs in the first place. A camera that just does better in low light would be good, for instance. In this case, it also might have helped to take the photo in a different part of the building, but I wanted a photo of the punch stand, and it was set up in just about the darkest part of the library, barring a closet. (The building is an old Carnegie building, and this is the part they barely touched when they remodeled in 1990, because it's near the beautiful historical dome. So no lights were added. It looks fine when you're standing there, but it's not so good for photographs.)

Also, I might have gotten slightly better results if I'd moved closer and used less zoom, but I had to take the shot when I could get it, because there were cookies on the table, and most of the time I'd have gotten shots of several people's backs. So this is the photo I've got to work with. Oh, here's a scaled-down version of the whole thing. This is, again, mostly just like it came out of the camera, except for being scaled down.

The image is a bit dark, so naturally the first thing I did was to take the levels tool and lighten it up. I discussed this step in more detail before, so I won't belabor it again now. The result looked like this.

The image is easier to see now, but if we stop here we've almost done as much harm as good, since the poor quality of the image is also now entirely too easy to see. The image is blotchy with apparently random blobs of strong color -- green, blue, red, purple, ... ick. Scaling down will help (click the image to see how much worse the full-size version is), but I'd like to clean it up a little if possible before I scale it down. So I thought maybe I'd try a despeckle filter. Despeckle is designed for much milder damage than this, but I thought I'd see what I could make it do.

I tried adaptive and/or recursive despeckling, but on an image this bad they scarcely have any impact at all, so ultimately I had to turn off those options. This is unfortunate, because it creates blur, but when an image is this badly speckled, a little blur can actually be better than the alternative.

So this is a sample of what I managed to get out of the despeckle filter. It's a bit disappointing, and if I were a real graphics artist I could probably have tweaked the numbers a bit and got something slightly better, or known which other filter to use and how to apply it, but I'm just a network administrator trying to wear an extra hat, so this is what I managed.

I was tempted to scrap it at this point.

However, I've learned that when you're trying to clear up artifacts, like speckles, from an image, sometimes what doesn't look so good on its own can be useful in combination with the original image, by using one of the various layer blending modes. Of course I had run the despeckle filter on a separate layer that was a copy of the previous image, so by changing the blending mode and adjusting the opacity, maybe I could salvage something yet.

I tried several different blending modes, but I'm only going to show you the ones that I thought worth keeping. Here it is (on the left) with the despeckled image in overlay mode with an opacity of 65%, over the (non-despeckled) lightened image. And here it is (right) with the despeckled image in screen mode with an opacity of 33%, overtop of the version with the 65% overlay, overtop of the lightened image.

The screen and the overlay have different effects, and in this case the one was effectively muting some of the speckles out of one part of the image, and the other was de-emphasizing the speckles in other parts of the image, as well as making the image overall lighter. So I combined those effects, and at this point I did my first scale-down, to 1536x1235 (a factor of the original size), using of course the bicubic interpolation. I also cropped the image slightly, which got rid of the big white thing at the left (which is actually the edge of a rectangular pillar, which is really pink not white, but nevermind).

I hadn't noticed originally, because of the other issues that the image had, but by now it was obvious that I was going to have to do something about the man's red eyes. Generally what I do in cases like this is take the lasso tool and select the most egregiously red parts of the eyes, copy, paste, make it a separate layer, desaturate it, and then turn down the opacity until it looks as close to natural as I can get.

If you want to get elaborate you can also recolorize the eyes, especially if you know what color the person's eyes are supposed to be, but in this instance, especially at this scale, I didn't deem that step necessary. Gray is good enough here.

Finally, I brightened the image up a little using the technique I discussed before, lightened that back up a bit (using levels), noted that the effect was still too strong, turned down the opacity on that layer (letting the previous, unbrightened version show through partially) until I thought it was about as good as I was going to get, scaled it down (bicubic interpolation again) one last time to 512x412 (a factor of the previous size), and this is the result:

Okay, it's still not a terrific photo, but compare it to the original:

A is for apple

2008-12-07T08:38:00.000-05:00

A is for apple, B is for ball, C is for caterpillar sitting on a wall.
D is for doggy chewing on a bone, E is for eggnog that you drink all alone.
F is for farctate, G is for Grog, H is for helicopter flying in the fog.
I is for Igloo, J is for Jam, K for kalamari, and L is for lamb.
M is for mnemonic, N for networking, O is for a few people running everything.
P is for pituitary, the size of a pea, Q is for quaffing, R for rascally.
S is for slapstick, comedy that's dumb, T is for tungsten, U for ultimatum.
W is for Wabbit, X for XYZZY, Y is for yoghurt, Z for Zenity.
Now I know my ABC vocabulary. Next time maybe you will sing the song with me.

Book Review: The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World

2008-12-05T21:08:00.000-05:00

One of the things various people have said over the years about Alan Greenspan is that he tends to underestimate his own influence. Reading his book, I think I'm seeing that too. For example, in the introduction, he relates how after 9/11 he made a speech that put a brave face on things, saying that the economy had become resiliant to shocks, but he didn't fully believe it and didn't expect he was fooling anyone. Then he turned out to be right: the economy recovered relatively quickly. It's obvious to me that at least part of the reason the economy recovered so quickly is because Greenspan suggested that it would. People believed (correctly, in my opinion) that he was the leading economics expert in the world, and so when he made positive statements, that gave people confidence, which generally has a lifting effect on the economy. Another example: barely a page later, he relates that after a meeting with lawmakers, he went home thinking all he'd done was reinforce what the lawmakers were already thinking, but the press acted like it was his agreement that made the whole thing happen. Well, it probably was. Apparently the lawmakers in question actually believe that the Chairman of the Fed is some kind of expert on economics, and if he agrees with what they're thinking, that gives them the confidence to go forward with it, and if he has reservations (as at the previous meeting) they hesitate (as they did). So now when out of retirement he comes out with a book saying that we are now living in a world with a "global capitalist economy that is more flexible, resilient, open, self-correcting, and fast-changing than it was even a quarter of a century earlier", people are going to believe that, too, and they're going to behave accordingly. I wouldn't have been very surprised if in the wake of the book's publication the economy surged up a bit: Greenspan just said a bunch of positive things about the economy, so let's all go out and do stuff with money. (It didn't work out that way because there were other forces at work, some of which I mention below...)

The historical narrative in the first half of the book is fascinating, not because I wasn't familiar with the basic events (I lived through and remember most of chapters 5-11), but because the perspective of an economist lights things up just differently enough to show up some things (trends, causes, and generalities) that I'd not been aware of before. Greenspan is a much better writer than I would have expected, and his story is compelling.

After going through the economic history of the last several decades, the author goes on to explore the economic issues that are currently facing various parts of the world, and the cultural and political issues that have important implications for economic policy and development. This is interesting material, as well, though of course much remains to be seen regarding how history will bear out his predictions.

Reading this book has raised in my mind some questions.

First, why is the short-term federal funds rate the only lever that the central bank in the US has to effect monetary policy? (I'm not saying, necessarily, that there should be other levers; I'm asking the question because I don't know the answer.) Greenspan indicates that the Fed was aware of the risk to the economy posed by the "irrational exuberance" of the dot-com bubble but was unable to do anything about it. Indeed, they briefly attempted to control the rising stock prices but found their measures ineffective and possibly counterproductive over the long term, so they left off trying. We can't fight market forces, they concluded. So then we had the dot-com bust and several years of pretty hard times for the IT industry, which had an impact on the entire economy. Not much later the Fed again saw a sudden inflation in another market they cannot effectively oversee, the real-estate market. There was nothing they could do about it, and when the bubble popped the housing market deteriorated quite significantly. The results include a credit crunch and the bankruptcy or collapse of a number of major lenders, especially in the subprime market (i.e., creditors that lend to normal people who don't have the 20% downpayment and other resources needed to get the best interest rates). A lot of first-time home buyers have been foreclosed, as I understand it not so much because of wrong that they've done as merely because the market now cannot support the loans they were offered during the real-estate boom. The home (which is the collateral) is not worth the outstanding loan amount, so if they can't make a payment they're stuck: there's no basis for an extension, and they can't sell their way out. This sort of thing is obviously not good for the overall long-term health of the economy, but what could be done about it? Are there additional levers that could (if Congress were so inclined) be granted to the Fed to assist them in more effectively smoothing out short-term economic forces and promoting the long-term health of the economy? And if so, what would be the other consequences of giving the central bank these additional powers?

Price controls obviously are NOT the answer. Just about all modern economists take it as an axiom that if the markets get too far out of touch with reality they will eventually correct themselves, and it is these market corrections that cause all the problems. The sorts of controls that characterize central planning (socialism and especially marxism) are only good for forcing markets further out of touch with reality, which invariably causes more problems than it solves, as Eastern Europe discovered.

However, the role of the central bank, primarily, is to control macroeconomic forces, most especially the value of money. (This is why we call it monetary policy, after all.) Controlling inflation (and deflation, if that becomes an issue) is very clearly within their mandate. But if the inflation occurs because of a situation in a market over which they have little or no influence, how can they control that inflation and keep the value of the currency stable? Besides the stock market and real estate, what other markets are there that the Fed cannot readily influence? What dangers does our economy face in the future? Just for instance (and purely *cough* hypothetically, ahem), what if labor becomes significantly overvalued? What kinds of havoc would the resulting market correction wreak?

A Word About Standardization

2008-12-03T07:58:00.002-05:00

If you pay any attention at all to what people in technical circles (especially programmers) are saying, you will be familiar with the concept of standardization: everyone agrees to adhere to a particular standard, or the standards published by a particular body, and as a result everybody's stuff works together. To hear some of the zealots talk, virtually everything about computers, and especially software, should be standardized.

But that's not really necessary, or even a good idea.

What should be standardized in computers and software is exactly analogous to what should be standardized in the physical world. Specifically, it is not the things themselves that need to be standardized, but the connections and interactions between the things. This is equally true whether the things in question are kitchen appliances, part of your household plumbing, audio equipment, or computer applications.

Electrical and electronic equipment varies tremendously in terms of how it works inside and what it accomplishes, but it all interacts with other systems -- specifically, the power grid -- in pretty much exactly the same way. Setting aside for the moment what happens when you travel overseas, and heavy industrial equipment that runs off weird stuff like three-phase, normal stuff all runs off the same voltage (err, one of two voltages) and the same cycle of alternating current and plugs into one of a very small number of outlet styles. (Most things in the US plug into the same one style of outlet, but there are additional special styles for electric stoves, clothes dryers, and certain kinds of lighting. Other countries may have different exceptions. But even the exceptions are standardized: all clothes dryers in the US, for instance, plug into the same kind of receptacle.) If a device needs something different, the manufacturer includes (either inside the thing or along with it) a power supply or plug-pack that effectively makes the differences go away, or it runs off standard-form-factor batteries that can be recharged in a standard charger that plugs into a standard outlet. You can go to any store and buy any electric device for any purpose by any manufacturer, and it may do all kinds of weird stuff on the inside, who knows, but its interface with the power grid will be the same as for every other device. It doesn't matter if it's a computer, a blender, or an electric nose cleaner. You buy it, you take it home, you plug it in, and it Just Works.

Which brings me around to software.

Some things are pretty well standardized already. Network connectivity, for instance, is pretty much locked into TCP/IP. IPv6 has been coming for ten years, but at this point I am not convinced it will EVER replace IPv4, and there are no other contenders at all. There are some new application-layer protocols (e.g., BitTorrent), but these mostly are related to kinds of applications that were never standardized in the past. As far as things that have been around for a while are concerned (e.g., email), the standards are firmly entrenched. (The idea of an email-sending program that doesn't use SMTP has been tossed around in theory on a number of occasions, but trying to get anybody to use one is like trying to sell a life preserver that doesn't float.) The last time I can think of that established protocols were ditched in favor of new ones was when telnet and rcp gave way to ssh and scp. Even there, technically, telnet is still in use as a platform that other protocols (such as http and smtp) stand on top of.

Another place where things need to connect has to do with data. Internally, when a program is working with data, it can use whatever data structure it wants, whatever makes the programmer's job easiest. Nobody cares what structure the program uses internally, except for the people who maintain the program itself. But when the program goes to export the data and store it somewhere (in a file, in a database, wherever), now you have to consider the possibility that the user might also want to work with this data using other programs, and so you need a standard file format.

Programs that don't consider this possibility can end up creating data that the user can't ever do anything else with, and that severely limits their usefulness. There are lots of examples, but I'm going to pick on Microsoft Publisher in particular. Everything I say about it, of course, also applies to any other software that doesn't support any standard formats or other mechanisms for data interchange.

If Publisher could export its publications to a widely-supported format like PDF (or Word document format, or anything else that's widely supported), then people who wanted to send their flier or poster or whatever by email would have a way to do so. Better still, if it just used a standard format in the first place, then the user wouldn't have to go through the extra step of exporting: they could just attach the thing and send it. But Publisher can't do that. It only saves in one format: Publisher format. Nothing can open its files except Publisher. So if a user creates something in Publisher and asks me, "How do I send this to [someone]", there's only one answer I can give them: "Well, first, instead of Publisher, you have to create it in a program that supports a standard file format." Users do not like this answer, because it means the work they've already done has to be thrown away, but there's nothing to be done about that: Publisher simply does not provide for data interchange. (Copy and paste can be used to extract limited portions of a Publisher document, mostly the text, but that is usually not what the user put the most work into and is most eager to preserve.)

I call software like this Dead End Software, because there's no outlet: any data you put into it is trapped there, and there's no way to get it out. I strongly recommend against using such software for anything other than quick one-off work. (By "one-off" I mean something you're never going to need to refer to later, e.g., a Wet Paint sign. Even there you want to be careful, because a lot of times you think you won't need to refer to something later and then it turns out that you do.) It's a black hole, a final resting place for your data. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Hepburn Must Stop

2008-11-22T21:50:00.006-05:00

People who know me generally are aware of the fact that I am interested in language. The topic has always fascinated me, even since I got my dad to explain parts of speech to me when I was three or four years old. (Actually, come to think of it, I already was familiar with three writing systems at that point, as well.) So it should come as no surprise that I've been looking at assorted language-related stuff in my spare time ever since I left college.

Most recently, I've been looking at Japanese. Yeah, I know, it's a weird one to pick (especially since it seems almost all of the English-speaking people with any interest in it are obsessed with anime and manga, which don't interest me at all), but hey, I've seldom been accused of being excessively typical.

Anyway, in the course of reading (mostly on the internet) about Japanese, one of the things I've run into is the Hepburn Romanization. This is a system whereby Japanese text is transliterated into Latin characters. Transliteration is seldom without problems, and studying a foreign language from a text that transliterates everything is generally inadvisable (unless all you want to learn is how to say "Does anyone speak English? Does this airplane go back to the United States? How much is a ticket?"), but it seems to me that Hepburn is particularly obnoxious, especially for English speakers.

In the first place, learning to correctly pronounce the Romanized Japanese is at least as hard as learning Hiragana, maybe worse, because of the need to unlearn long-ingrained habits associated with English use of the same characters (e.g., it's difficult to learn to pronounce "ou" as a held long o rather than as it would be pronounced in English). This is compounded by the fact that Hepburn uses Latin vowel pronunciations, so e is a and i is e and u is oo and so forth, like in Spanish. The Latin vowel mappings by themselves, if they were the only major issue, would be no big deal at all, but in Spanish you don't have combinations that would be dipthongs in English showing up every other syllable to screw with your mind.

Hepburn doesn't even have the good graces to be easy to type on a US-English keyboard, because it uses a diacritical mark (which for added bonus points is not even a mark that's particularly common in European character sets) on vowels when they are held for an extra mora. Since this is untypeable on most keyboards, most of the time in practice you usually either simply don't see any indication that the vowel is held (which is extremely bad, because it makes non-identical words identical, and the absolutely *last* thing Japanese needs is twice as many homonyms) or else a second vowel character is used, which aggravates the aforementioned vowel pronunciation issue for English speakers. Using a punctuation mark to indicate a held vowel should have been an extremely obvious approach, since after all that is what katakana does, but no.

The letter y is even worse than the vowels, because you have to unlearn the notion that it could ever under any circumstances be a vowel, even when it directly follows a stop consonant. Did you know that "Tokyo" is two syllables? Also "Kyoto". This shows up in approximately seven out of every ten Japanese words and is *hard* for an English speaker to get used to reading correctly. When you see the corresponding hiragana, you don't have this problem, because each symbol stands for exactly one syllable (or "mora" or whatever they call them), so it's very obvious where the syllable divisions go. This is fairly important in Japanese, and the Romanization obscures it.

Just in case the y issue didn't do enough to obscure the syllable boundaries (which, it bears repeating, are important in Japanese), Romanization also obscures the syllable divisions in other areas, though I think a certain amount of that would be fundamentally unavoidable in any system that transliterates a syllabary into a true alphabet. (Alphabets are inherently suited for writing languages with a more freeform syllable structure allowing for closed syllables and arbitrary blends; the only closed syllables you have in Japanese are with the sokuon, and the only blends you have are the aforementioned yoon.) The only thing worse than transliterating a syllabary into a true alphabet is trying to go the other direction and write a language like English in something like katakana, which is just wholly altogether unworkable (not that that stops the Japanese from doing it, of course).

The most egregious offense I want to talk about, though, is the letter r. Hepburn uses the r to represent an alveolar flap, a sound we don't have in English at all. Now, the idea of using a letter that wouldn't otherwise be used to represent a sound that wouldn't otherwise be represented makes a certain amount of sense, but r is a particularly unfortunate choice here, at least for English speakers, because of the various bizarre properties of the r sound that English speakers take for granted and do without thinking. (For native speakers of Romance languages, I suppose Hepburn is maybe not so bad, but in practice how many people are there who speak Spanish and Japanese but not English?) There are other letters that could have been used, not least l, which is somewhat closer to the sound anyhow, but no, Hepburn uses the r. Problem is, if you pronounce it as r, or anything even vaguely like r, you're in for all manner of trouble, because r has all sorts of phonemic consequences. It colors every letter it sits next to, either before or after, especially vowels. It's also completely impossible to form certain very-common Japanese blends (most notably ryo and ryu, which it should be noted are one syllable each, see the previous paragraph about y) if you pronounce this r as the English r.

Aside from the blends, and the weird and unfortunate mess it makes out of adjascent vowels, r isn't even a stop ("plosive") consonant. It's a liquid. Japanese doesn't have liquids, unless you count the syllabic nasal (which is altogether another topic, and believe it or not Hepburn Romanization manages to make that one harder to read easily as well).

So anyway, all of that is to say, every time I run into Japanese language-learning materials that make extensive use of Romanization (which is *annoyingly* common), I cringe and go looking for something else. I suppose the writers of these materials believe that transliterating everything will make it "easier" for English speakers by removing the need to learn kana, but honestly, anybody who is even *slightly* serious about learning a language can certainly handle picking up at least hiragana, and everything thereafter will be *much* easier than with the Romanization.

It's not like hiragana is anywhere close to being even the tip of the iceberg for what characters you've got to learn if you actually ever want to be able to read any actual Japanese. I mean, you can't even look up words you don't know in a dictionary without learning two or three hundred radicals (and their lexical order) just to get started, so 46 hiragana characters is really no big deal.

The economy: near death, or cuts and scrapes?

2008-10-16T06:13:00.005-04:00

Last night somebody told me that the stock market has lost trillions of dollars (he said how many trillion, but I don't remember) in a few days. Okay. My immediate response was, "What's that as a percentage?" I mean, yeah, trillions of dollars sounds like a lot, but the US economy is bigger than most people realize. It can afford to lose a few dollars here or there, from time to time.

As it turns out, the overall percentage of loss, since the last major peak (in 2007) is around 30%, depending on which index you look at. That sounds like a lot, and for a short-term drop it is a pretty good-sized chunk, but it's hardly the end of the world as we know it. There are peaks and bubbles (the fruits of periodic irrational exuberance), and then there are corrections back down to a more sane, gradual, and sustainable growth rate. 30% is a pretty large correction, but it's not out of line with what we've seen in the past.

So I went to a website that does stock charts. There are a number of sites out there that do basically the same thing, but in this instance I happened to select MSN Money, because it came up first in the search results. I went to the financial site, and I asked for charts of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, because that's a well-known index. It's not the only index we could look at, but it's a common choice, and, I believe, an instructive one.

I'm going to show two different charts here. The first represents the short-term view, on a linear scale.

Okay, yeah, that looks pretty bad. Actually, it looks worse than it should, because they've left off the bottom portion of the chart, starting the linear scale with eight thousand at the x axis. When you have to leave off more than half the numbers at the bottom of the scale in order to show the interesting part without making the chart too big, it usually means you should have used a logarithmic scale.

Now, let's step back and look at the larger picture. This second chart is on a logarithmic picture. (Otherwise the first three quarters of it would sort of resemble a flat line across the bottom.) Take a look:

What a difference! The black lines are original. I've taken the liberty of putting a red circle around the current economic crisis. On the one hand, yes, that's one of the biggest drops on the chart. On the other hand, it's clearly nothing very far out of the ordinary. If anything, that weird bulge around the (most recent) turn of the century is more unusual. The big dip at the left, of course, corresponds with the Great Depression.

I said I was going to show two charts, but here's an extra bonus image of the second chart, this time with a trend line drawn in, in green:

On the one hand, we're not seeing the steep growth of the eighties and nineties, but on the other hand this crisis has got to go some to look anything like the sharp drop of the early thirties.

That flat section across the seventies is called "stagflation", and in some ways that was worse than the current crisis, because it just went on and on and on, and then it went on and on and on some more, some twelve or thirteen years before things really started to pick up in the early eighties.

Of course, I don't know the future, and it's conceivable that things could keep going down until the current crisis turns into a second Great Depression. But there's no reason to assume that's what's going to happen. What we've seen so far is part of the normal up and down motion that happens all the time.

I don't want to be accused of being an unbridled optimist, so I'll say now that just because the economy hasn't completely collapsed doesn't mean our society isn't headed for a peck of trouble in other ways. All I'm saying is, some people are blowing the current economic crisis out of proportion. It's not really our gravest concern. There are, indeed, much more worrisome things to be upset about. (The condition of the public education system, just for instance, is outright terrifying. But that's a topic for another day.)

Bad Analogies 101

2008-09-24T07:37:00.006-04:00

At church we're going through an evangelism course called Way of the Master. I want to be clear up front that just because the course uses one tortured analogy doesn't make the whole course bad. It only makes the analogy bad. Indeed, the course could potentially be valuable. (How valuable? Too soon to tell. We've only had one week of it so far. Though, already, it has managed to set me thinking, and that in itself is not without value.) Still, I feel the need to vent about exactly how terrible this analogy is, so here we go.

The analogy is that a firefighter arrives at a house fire and proceeds to sit locked in the fire truck, listening to music on headphones, while the house burns to the ground around a family of five, whom he can see screaming and calling out to be rescued, which pleas he ignores. When questioned about his actions, he says he was testing the CD player that he'd bought as a gift for the fire chief, at great personal expense.

Aside from the obvious physical problems with the analogy (he can see the family from the truck, but they can't get out of the fire without help), the really broken part is the spiritual side of the picture. I don't know about you, but to my knowledge I've never had an unbeliever cry out to me for help with spiritual things. Ever.

Believe me, if somebody even *asked* me to explain salvation to them, let alone *cried out*, I'd be... willing isn't even the right word. Enthusiastic probably falls short of the mark as well. That's the kind of thing you daydream about, but it does not generally, you know, happen. On the contrary, people typically don't know the house is burning around them, and the few who do know it are usually convinced they cannot be helped.

Now, I'm not saying it's right for us to sit and do nothing just because unbelievers are content to stay that way. It's certainly not. But I *am* saying the analogy is flawed.

Here's another analogy: I'm not a firefighter. I'm a geologist. My geology degree is from an unaccredited college, which most people have never heard of, which has had to move across international boundaries numerous times as various governments have tried to shut it down. The government of my country officially tolerates the school, but you can tell they consider it an embarrassment.

So I have an unaccredited degree, and I call myself a geologist, but I am not employed as a geologist. I work some other job to pay the bills. The equipment I use is different from the equipment that other geologists use, too.

For the past few years I've been independently studying a certain mountain, and I have concluded that not only is it actually a stratovolcano (a fact which was previously unknown), but furthermore it is active, and is building up tremendous seismic pressure even as we speak and will soon erupt. It's impossible to know an exact timeframe, but with every passing month the pressure builds higher. There is a large bulge on the side of the mountain that has doubled in size over the last six weeks. It's going to go, soon, and furthermore it's going to be a very potent eruption. From the amount of pressure that's building up, my estimates say it could be bigger than Krakatoa, or at least comparable.

At the base of the mountain there is, of course, a town. When the volcano erupts, it will blow a large chunk of mountain, tens of thousands of tons of rock, down the mountainside and straight through the town. And on top of that there could be lava, volcanic ash, quakes, and so on, all the usual destructive stuff that goes with a major volcanic eruption.

I have to convince the people to evacuate.

People have been living in the town for generations. The mountain has never erupted in the past. The local news runs stories about what a crackpot I am. The local authorities, as well as the state government, are reassuring people that of course the mountain is an ordinary mountain, just like all the other mountains in the area.

But the people still need to evacuate. They're going to die if they stay. I know they're going to die, but I sit in my bedroom and make excuses for why I'm not talking to them about the volcano. I even post about it on my blog (which nobody reads), but I don't go out and tell people about the volcano.

Okay, so this analogy isn't perfect either. I think it's closer than the other one.

Esoteric Knowledge Quiz #3

2008-08-23T08:18:00.003-04:00

Do your friends, family, and coworkers accuse you of being a repository of useless information? (Mine do.) Here's your chance to test your knowledge of obscure tidbits...
I've had some help coming up with the questions for this one, so hopefully they represent a broader spectrum of topics.

Which was the first toy to be called an action figure?
1. Barbie
2. Captain Action
3. G.I. Joe
4. Superman
Thanks to Mark Harris for sending in this question.

Which of the following is not a hardwood tree?
1. Hickory
2. Cedar
3. Sycamore
4. Balsa

The 1985 NFL season will forever be remembered by fans for the historically great Chicago Bears defense, which helped power the team to a convincing 46-10 win over the New England Patriots in Superbowl XX. But what team lead the league in offense that year?
1. Chicago Bears
2. Miami Dolphins
3. San Diego Chargers
4. San Francisco 49ers
Thanks to Dave Gable for sending in this question.

What is the traditional well-known TCP/IP port number commonly associated with NNTP?
1. 17
2. 70
3. 119
4. 179
For an extra bonus geek point, which one is (or was) commonly associated with gopher?

If you have desmodromic valves on your vehicle's engine, what is their function?
1. Opening and closing the intake and exhaust valves without the use of return springs
2. Removing air from the crankcase to lower internal air resistance
3. Routing exhaust gases through the engine to help it warm up faster
4. Allowing gaseous fuel vapors to be burned alongside liquid fuel
For bonus points, which of the following brands of vehicle is most likely to have these valves?
1. Ducati
2. Peugeot
3. Kawasaki
4. Honda
Thanks to Andy Kerr for sending in this two-part question.

Most of the answers are in the comments now.

Past Quizzes: 1, 2

Quiz four is already in the works. If you have questions to contribute to future quizzes, send them in to jonadab@NO SPAM THANKS ANYWAYbright.net with the phrase Esoteric Knowledge Quiz in the subject line (or. if you are on the Wheeitology list, you can just post them there). Thanks!

Esoteric Knowledge Quiz #2

2008-08-05T23:00:00.002-04:00

Do your friends, family, and coworkers accuse you of being a repository of useless information? (Mine do.) Here's your chance to test your knowledge of obscure but interesting tidbits...

What is the major factor usually blamed for Dutch Disease?
1. too much lowland in too small an area
2. too much of a natural resource
3. too many seventeen-year cicadas
4. too little magnesium in the diet

What does the word farctate mean?
1. stuffed full
2. fluoroastatic acid
3. play in an irresponsible manner
4. pass gas

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Dr. Soong puts the emotion chip intended for Data into Lore, the android sings a song. The song that he sings features two major characters, only one of whom is named in the part that Lore sings. What is the name of the other character?
1. Abu Hasan
2. Kassim Baba
3. Enkidu
4. Ivan Skavinsky Skavar

Which of the following islands is currently claimed by Japan, but controlled by another country?
1. Atlasov
2. Iturup
3. Wake Island
4. Okinawa

The following quote is an excerpt from (a translation of) a letter sent to a civil authority. Who wrote it? "In the second place, I was not even examined, let alone asked what my faith was, much less found guilty of any misdeed. Such a procedure, firstly, is counter to the Jewish law, John 7:51, where Nicodemus says: 'Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?' Yes, it is also counter to the Gentile justice, Acts 25:16, where Festus says, '... it was not the custom of the Romans to give up any one before the accused met the accusers face to face, and had opportunity to make defense concerning the charge laid against him.'"
1. Johann Reuchlin
2. Huldrych Zwingli
3. Alexander Mack
4. Galileo Galilei

The answers have been posted in the comments.

Microsoft Gives a Month for Seven

2008-06-27T11:43:00.006-04:00

Okay, it's time to revisit Windows Seven Dates and my Vienna Timeline. Network World reports (see also the slashdot discussion) that Microsoft is now putting a specific month to their projected release date: January 2010.

Of course, that doesn't mean it'll actually be available in January 2010. Haha. No. In the first place, the date can and probably will still slip a bit. In the second place, new versions of Windows are never actually available to the public on the official release date. No, they become available only to select partners on the official release date. (Select partners, in Microsoft parlance, are the large multinational megacorporations whose Software Assurance licensing allows them to install any version they want, any time they want, on any computer they want. Typically the IT departments of these large corporations would never in a million years actually deploy a brand new release the same year it comes out. Most of them have only moved from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP in the last few months; some of them still haven't.) Actual availability to the public comes several months later. That's how it was with Windows '95 (officially released in December 2005; not available until 2006), Windows XP, and Vista. There's no reason to believe Seven would be different in this regard.

Nonetheless, their putting a specific month on their release prediction is significant. Very significant. There's a lot less wiggle-room in a month than there is in a vague projection like "early 2010", and in the past Microsoft has usually not projected specific months until they're legitimately close to having something they believe they can bang into release-quality shape in approximately that amount of time.

If you look at my timeline, it doesn't call for a specific-month release projection until 2016Q2, less than a year from actual release in 2017. Going by just that alone, one could be excused for concluding that my timeline is off by eight years.

I don't think my timeline is off by quite that much. For one thing, even if Microsoft actually comes out with the product in January 2010, that's only seven years ahead of my timeline. Furthermore, the projection in question on my timeline is for a release date only two quarters forward from when it's projected; as of now January 2010 is still six quarters out, three times as far into the future. Historically, the further into the future a projection is, the more room there is for it to still be pushed back. I fully expect Microsoft to push back this release date at least once yet, and then on top of that I expect them to release to select partners only, buying a few extra months before actually shipping the new OS to the public.

Still, this caught me off guard, and I'm now very much convinced that my timeline is overlong, and that Microsoft will beat it by several years. Also there have been fewer feature announcements than I predicted, and I believe this is significant: Microsoft actually learned from the Vista development experience and is aiming somewhat lower for Seven, no doubt deliberately. More realistic goals, less wasted time. My timeline was written with the assumption that they had not learned this lesson, but it appears now that they have. Which is good, for Microsoft and for their customers.

The Value of Dead Languages

2008-05-14T22:32:00.003-04:00

Sometimes people question the utility of studying a dead language, but honestly, I think dead languages have just as much utility as living ones, albeit for different reasons. The value of knowing dead languages was kind of hammered home for me tonight.

My dad was on a discussion forum, and he turned to me and said, "How do you spell sarcophagus? p-h-a?" I didn't even have to think about this question; the answer was blindingly obvious. I just looked at him and said, "Dad, it's from σαρξ and φαγομαι." So, yeah, p-h-a then.

Obviously, I didn't study Greek just so I could spell English better. But having studied it I do know English better, and not just spelling either.

Vista Notes: the Gadget Sidebar

2008-04-30T16:31:00.008-04:00

Okay, so where I work we've been putting off Vista uptake, waiting for the service packs to come out. I was hoping to wait for SP2, but definitely I didn't want to touch the thing until SP1 (which just arrived).

But after June, there is to be no more OEM XP, and no more retail XP either. Meaning, any computers we replace after that point, if they need to be Windows (which our library automation software requires on staff workstations, unless we want to use the ILS through remote desktop, which most of the staff probably don't want) will probably be Vista. In preparation for this... I, as TCG, need to have at least some familiarity with this turkey.

So late last week a new computer arrived, containing Vista. Which I am currently using as I type this. I've been taking notes, and I feel the need to vent, so I will be documenting some aspects of my experience here.

The first thing I want to talk about is the gadget sidebar. This was for me one of the most exciting features of Vista.

It's something Gnome and KDE have had for aeons, of course. (I know for sure that Gnome had already had it for a while the first time I saw Gnome, in RedHat 6.0. That was Gnome 0.x. I didn't see KDE until a while later (circa Mandrake 7.1), but when I did it did already have this feature. And we're still talking twentieth century here, back when the default web browser for both of said environments was Netscape 4.x. Konqueror didn't exist, and the Mozilla project releases up to that point had version numbers starting with "M" for "milestone". So yeah, it's been a while, and panel applets in Gnome and KDE weren't really a new feature even then.)

Nonetheless, it's a feature that OS X does not have, and it's an incredibly useful feature, at least potentially. Now, I already knew that Vista's implementation would not be as flexible as that in Gnome and KDE. Among other things, I knew that the traditional taskbar elements would not be reimplemented as gadgets and so would not be able to be positioned anywhere. As before, they're still locked in place. Similarly, the new gadgets cannot be positioned on the taskbar, only on the sidebar. And you can only have one sidebar. And it has to go on the side, not top or bottom. (From long experience using side panels on other systems, I can tell you that you will probably want it on the left, rather than the right.) All this I knew. (How did I know all this stuff? I've been acquainted with Windows since it ran on DOS, so by now I'm somewhat familiar with how Microsoft does things. Also I'd seen screenshots.) But despite these caveats I was still looking forward to the sidebar, because it's still a big step forward from what Windows XP provided in this area, (namely, squat), and it's still potentially very useful.

Of course, the first thing I wanted to do to the sidebar is resize it. The default size is preposterously exaggeratedly large, the size you would want it to be for a tradeshow demo so people can see it clearly as they approach your booth from across the room. For daily use, this is terribly impractical, because it consumes way too much screen space. In Gnome you can make any panel any size, down to like 12 pixels if you want (though in practice it's not very useful below about 24px on a modern display resolution). So I wanted to resize the sidebar. I suspect everyone who uses Vista will at one point or another want to resize the sidebar.

Only, it doesn't do that. Well, there's a third-party Sidebar Styler you can get that, among other things, is supposed to let you resize the sidebar. And it does, after a fashion. Specifically, it lets you resize the panel itself, i.e., the background. But the gadgets do not change size. At all.

Now, Gnome has a couple of badly-behaved gadgets that will not resize to fit a narrow side panel. (The RSS reader is one example of this.) Of course, in Gnome, you can put those applets on a top or bottom panel, where more width is available. And they're not really the most useful applets anyway, so even if you *only* use a side panel, you can pretty much live without those badly-behaved applets.

But on Vista, *all* the gadgets -- not just all the default bundled ones, but *all* the ones I managed to find -- do not resize. At all. (Well, some of them do expand and become even more preposterously huge if you undock them. Determining the practical usefulness of that particular "feature" is left as an exercise.)

So I can either let the sidebar consume some hundred and fifty pixels off the side of my screen, or I can turn off the sidebar. I suppose if I had the budget for a round of thirty-inch monitors for every workstation, capable of 2560x2048 or higher resolution, then this might not be such a big deal. As it stands a lot of our systems here at the library aren't even up to 1600x1200 yet, so the sidebar, if we want to use it, will consume 12% of the screen, or even 15% (at 1024x768, which is all some of the older LCDs can handle; no, we do not generally replace the display when we buy a PC; we replace it when the display dies). This realization was the first of several significant disappointments regarding the sidebar.

The second thing I noticed about the sidebar is no big deal, and in fact I rather expected it: the bundled gadgets are junk. I don't think there's a single one of them I would ever use. The clock is not only analog-only, but also takes up far more space than you would ever want to devote to something that basically just shows you the time. Its options are limited to one of about six skins, showing the second hand or not, and timezone. The calendar is even more underwhelming. It has no options whatsoever, it's orange, and like the clock it takes up FAR more space than it should. If you want both the time and date, with the default gadgets, you've used up almost 300 pixels of your sidebar's height right there, just for the time and date. The CPU meter looks cool for about fifteen seconds until you realize you can't actually tell whether your system is loaded or not by looking at it. And so on.

So the bundled gadgets are junk. As I said, I expected this. The purpose of the bundled gadgets is pretty much just to demonstrate the concept, and what you're really going to do is download gadgets that will actually be useful. I was pleased to discover that there's a readily accessible "Get more" link, which takes you to some kind of Microsoft-hosted gallery. This is not altogether dissimilar to the "Get Extensions" link in Firefox, a system that works *reasonably* well. In a few minutes I was able to find some extensions I would actually use: A CPU/memory meter that can actually be read at a glance, a digital clock, a current-date gadget that doesn't take up a fifth of the sidebar and isn't orange... I later replaced both of those with a single gadget that shows the date and the time, plus weather, in less than the space the bundled weather gadget consumes, much less the clock or date, much less all three.

Most importantly, I found something called App Launcher, which is exactly what you would hope it would be: a way to put launchers on the sidebar. Gnome and KDE treat launchers as first-class citizens on the panels, so you don't need a special applet to have the capability. But that's a detail. The important thing here is that I can now have launchers on the sidebar. This brings it much closer to parity with KDE's panels. (Gnome, of course, has drawers, which increase the usefuless of the panel to another level, but that's another discussion. And nothing's stopping a third-party developer from creating a drawers gadget for the Windows sidebar, though I didn't see one on my first trip through the gallery.)

Now, granted, the taskbar has had QuickLaunch since 1998. But the taskbar is so cramped for space that you can't really afford to put very many launchers in the QuickLaunch. Five or six is about all most people want in there, because every three of them consumes the space of one window on the task list, and the Windows task list already has way too strong a tendency to run out of space and start doing grouping and/or scrolling, which pretty much chucks convenience right out the window. Gnome and KDE let you put the menu and the notification area ("system tray" in Windows parlance) and the launchers all on a different panel from the task list, so that the task list has the full width of the screen. Well, now with Windows you can at least put the launchers on a different panel, namely the sidebar. The menu and system tray are still stuck on the taskbar, on either side of the task list, but at least the task list no longer has to compete for space with QuickLaunch as well.

So anyway, putting app launchers on the sidebar means you can easily have a couple of dozen launchers readily accessible. Which means you don't need to get to the desktop all the $#@! time. Which means you don't have to compulsively minimize everything constantly. This is a big usability win. Real big, in my estimation.

The next thing I noticed about the sidebar is that the much-hyped transparency in Vista is of quite limited utility. (This actually applies to more than just the sidebar -- the transparent window title bars, if you use Aero, have the same issues. But for the moment I'm talking about the sidebar.) On the one hand, making the gadgets mostly transparent does make them stand out less, which is nice, because it lets you focus on what you're doing and only look at the gadgets when you need them. Good. On the other hand, the main purpose of transparency in other contexts typically is to let you see through to what's behind, but the transparency in Vista does not really allow for this, because of the inherent blur. If someone knows of a way to turn the blur off so that the transparency can be actually useful, please tell me about it.

Also, the sidebar does not have a hide button. It can be turned off, and you can put windows in front of it, and a hotkey will bring it to the front... but to my knowledge there's no way to just quickly hide (and subsequently unhide) the sidebar. (This is particularly unfortunate in combination with the fact that Windows Explorer does not seem to be smart enough to avoid putting desktop icons behind the sidebar by default, although as I noted earlier with the App Launcher gadget installed the desktop icons are much less important than they used to be.) Also, maximizing a window causes it to cover up the sidebar. Given the non-configurable large size of the Windows Sidebar, that's probably for the best, but it's sure not ideal.

I should point out too that you can't position the applets where you want them. Well, you can arrange their order, but they always start at the top and work their way down, leaving the bottom blank if you haven't filled the bar. This is somewhat unfortunate, since there are certain kinds of gadgets one might specifically want to position at the bottom (e.g., directly above the Start button). This is not a big deal, though, and it's something that could be fixed in a later version without requiring gadgets to be updated. It is also worth noting that the sidebar fills the whole side even if you don't have it full. This is a good default, but there ideally should be an option to let it end where it runs out of gadgets. Again, though, this is functionality that could be added in a later version without requiring gadgets to be updated.

Despite the disappointments, I still feel that the gadget sidebar is one of the most exciting new features in Vista -- perhaps the most exciting one of all from a user's perspective.

I have more to say about Vista -- much more -- but I'll leave the rest for another post.

Seven Dates

2008-04-06T07:58:00.005-04:00

In light of a couple of recent items in the news (see also slashdot coverage), I'm going to say a few words again about the Windows Seven Development Timeline, as previously discussed here.

First, let's get that story about the XPHE extension out of the way. This is actually official info, but it's nonetheless irrelevant to my timeline. Because of the way it only applies to special (ultra-portable) hardware, this extension would mean nothing for mainstream computers even if it included the pro edition, which it doesn't. Id est, this is not a story about Microsoft changing its operating system plans. Like most systems, the latest version of Windows requires beefier hardware than a several-year-old version. That's normal, and because hardware continuously improves it's mostly no big deal, though of course people whine about it a lot. (Remember DOS? It can run comfortably on a system with a single-digit-megahertz processor and RAM measured in kilobytes. XP isn't quite that old and lean, but it's older and leaner than Vista.) So this is just about ultra-portable hardware not being up to the specs of a modern desktop.

Now, on to the more interesting stuff: dates.

The soundbyte you keep hearing is "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version." That's from the horse's mouth, but the words "or so" are, IMO, rather telling. Microsoft presumably wants you to think, or at least hope, that "or so" means something like "plus or minus a couple of months", i.e., that the new version would be out sometime in 2009. But the words "or so" could just as easily mean "or two, or three, or more... you know, schedules change as things progress". Which IMO is probably what it will eventually turn out to mean.

CNET was told (by a MS representative, they say, and I have no particular reason to disbelieve that) "roughly three years from Vista's January 2007 debut". That would be 2010Q1, closer to two years than one from now -- and again, "roughly" is an important word. The person who's saying this knows, or at least suspects, that that date will slip (as all release dates tend to do, and not just at Microsoft).

So then, looking at my Windows Seven Development Timeline, there are a couple of different places this announcment might fit, though none are a very good fit. The 2011 Q2 announcement (predicting a release in early 2012) seems too close (that's a clear less than a year prediction, and this is more like 1-2 years). The 2008 Q2 prediction is a little far out, and in any case we really already had that one, over a year ago (yes, it was ahead of my schedule). So I think the current prediction identifies most closely with the 2009 Q4 prediction (second half of 2011), which is more specific than this one, but seems to be of the right general duration.

As best I can figure, that places Microsoft about six quarters ahead of my timeline, give or take (depending on how you interpret the technical announcements, and whether Dev Corvin has actual information or is just making stuff up). That's a year and a half! If this progress keeps up, Seven could have a shorter (real) dev timeframe than Vista did, which would bring my predictions up short (not that that would be a bad thing).

So now we're looking for some non-date announcements: something about security, something for developers, and something related to the internet. (Actually, all that talk about Live could potentially qualify for the last.) Those are listed for 2010 on my timeframe, so if they come in the next few months we'll definitely be ahead of schedule.

But let me be perfectly clear here: if Seven is actually available to customers in 2010, I will be absolutely flabbergasted. There's a reason my timeline shows the date being pushed back repeatedly. Six quarters ahead of my cynical schedule would ultimately mean release in mid-2015, and if they keep gaining quarters at that rate (six quarters off my timeframe for every five that pass) they could potentially make 2012. If they short-circuit the last couple years of my timeline entirely they could maybe even make 2011. But that's wildly optimistic. 2010 would mean they were meeting their own estimates, which as far as I'm aware has never happened in their entire history as a company.

Dropping Binary Compatibility With Previous Versions

2008-04-05T06:19:00.004-04:00

Apple did this in 2000. At the same time, they also completely scrapped their old codebase, a move that was long overdue. The old Mac OS didn't have real multitasking, a sane framework for non-GUI programs, memory protection, ... in short, it was in much worse shape than Windows, technically speaking. Apple had concentrated totally on the UI, and that was not sustainable. UI is important, but you have to have a strong foundation to build it on.

Anyway, my point is, while Apple needed to make huge changes, and Microsoft can probably get away with smaller changes, dropping binary backward compatibility with old system libraries is something every OS has to do periodically. Only, until now, Microsoft has only done it gradually, piecemeal, and by accident. (If you try to run software designed for a long-dead version of Windows you'll discover what I mean. Little things will just not quite work right.)

As this article notes, the attempt to retain binary backward compatibility across multiple versions costs something. Now Microsoft wants to free itself from those costs, as Apple did with the release of OS X.

Most Unix systems don't incur these costs in the first place, at least not in the same way, because they don't worry so much about binary compatibility. They don't need to, because they have source compatibility. In an enviroment where you have the source code for everything anyway, you can just recompile as necessary when you upgrade to a new version of the core system. (Take this philosophy to its logical extreme and you get Gentoo, or the BSD ports system, where the user's system recompiles everything from scratch, locally, every time they upgrade anything. But the distributor can also pre-compile the software for each major version of the OS and make pre-compiled versions available, which is what most distributors do, because it makes upgrades faster for the user.)

But Apple and Microsoft both rely heavily on proprietary third-party software, for which source code is not available, except to the ISVs who produce the software -- and they cannot always be relied upon to do any porting, especially not punctually; Apple had significant trouble getting Adobe to finally support the new version, and they still haven't moved to Cocoa, most of a decade later. Microsoft doesn't rely as heavily on any single ISV as Apple does on Adobe, but that's only because the stuff they rely on is spread out over a larger number of ISVs. So they have to think about this issue.

The logical solution is to do what Apple did: supply an emulated old-version environment for running old-version software, with all the performance penalties that implies. Software that is updated promptly can be run natively, with the advantages that go along with that. I don't think they can afford to do this every major version, but at this point they're well overdue for it.

Whether they'll actually do it is an open question. I don't know whether Dev Corvin actually has any significant inside information, and of course it's so early in the Windows Seven development timeframe at this point that any decision that's made can potentially be changed several times before release. Nonetheless, it's an interesting point.

Whether (and how) this figures on my timeline is also another question. Assuming it's a for-real announcement originating from Microsoft, it would be a fairly sweeping technical announcement of the general type that my timeline has slated for 2010. But it's not related to security, and there was only one sentence about how this sort of thing is good for developers, and it's not clear that even that sentence necessarily means third-party developers. So I'm not sure there's a specific timeline entry to pin this on.

Chain Forwards on the Web

2008-02-05T06:12:00.000-05:00

Well, I've been tagged.

Back in 1996, I used to receive (and ignore) email messages with these kinds of instructions all the time, but this is the first time I've ever seen it outside the context of email. In honor of the fact that it's the first time, I'm actually going to attempt to play along somewhat. This time only.

I am currently reading Greenspan's book, and happen to have it sitting within eight inches of my keyboard. It's a fascinating read by the way. I'm on page 339 at the moment, but backtracking to page 123 (which just happens to be the first page of chapter six), here are sentences 6-8:

...In the process, the demise of central planning exposed the almost unimaginable extent of the rot that had accumulated over decades.

But the biggest surprise that awaited me was an extraordinary tutorial on the roots of market capitalism. This is the system with which, of course, I am most familiar, but my understanding of its foundations was wholly abstract...

That part was easy. Now the business about sending it on to (err, tagging) five more people, that's another matter. My blog is kind of atypical. Almost all visitors find a specific post (most commonly this one, as it happens) through a search engine, in the same way one would find content on a traditional website. I guess you could say I'm on the fringes of the (do I have to hate myself for using this word?) blogosphere. Naturally, the two people whom I have some reason to believe might occasionally drop by just to see if I've posted anything lately have both already been tagged.

Very well, there's nothing in the instructions that says you can only tag people whom you're confident will read the post and know they were tagged. So, in the spirit of following the letter of the instructions and ignoring the intent, I'm tagging Andy Jentes (a friend who, as far as I know, does not have a web presence at the moment), Dave Gable (another friend, going by the handle randomneuralfirings over at Xanga), Derek Lowe (a biochemist over at pipeline.corante.com), Dan Ritter (a hardware reviewer from down under -- dansdata.blogsome.com), and, umm, Tim Vroom (of perlmonks.org fame). Hey, why not?

Strange Ideas in Grammar

2007-12-30T23:22:00.000-05:00

I don't know whether there are any natural languages that do these things, but my brain just comes up with this stuff...

What if there were a language with both prepositions and postpositions? Would certain words always be prepositions, and others always be postpositions? Would some words be able to function as either? If so, what would determine when it could be used each way? Would a given word have a different range of meaning as a postposition from what it would have as a preposition? Perhaps the surrounding grammar would determine the word order. Perhaps prepositional phrases would function as nouns or adjectives, but postpositional phrases would function in other ways (e.g., adverbially). Or perhaps some other factor would determine the word order. Maybe prepositions would introduce their phrases when the speaker is happy or content, but follow their objects in postpositional fashion when the speaker is angry, sad, or nervous. Or maybe postpositions would be more formal and polite than prepositions. Or vice versa.

Then there's case. Natural languages have a fair variety of different case systems. Some languages, like English, barely even HAVE a case morphology, because everything is determined by word order. Greek is practically the opposite: word order has pretty much nothing to do with case, so it's all determined at the individual word level by case endings. In Greek, case is determined pretty much just by function: direct objects are in the accusative, for instance, irrespective of the rest of the structure of the sentence. There are exceptions to that simple rule, of course. Certain Greek verbs, for instance, take what we think of as their direct object in the dative case. Still, though, it's the role of the noun as the verb's object that is determining its case, and that selection doesn't change to accommodate other aspects of the grammar of the sentence. I think I would say the same of ergative-absolutive systems: even if the subjective case varies depending on the transitivity of the verb, it is still the role of the noun as subject of a given verb that drives its case selection, so while it's more complex than a straightforward subjective/objective case system, it is guided by the same basic principle. However, what if there were languages that determined a noun's case by not just its role in the sentence but also other factors? What if the mood of verb, for instance, determined case roles, so that e.g. in a subjunctive clause the subject were in the case that would be used for the indirect object in an indicative clause? Or what if a combination of case and word order determined function, so that if the first major noun in a sentence were the subject it would be in a certain case, but if the second noun were the subject it would be in a different case? (There could be whole systems of word-order/case patterns, so that SVO sentences would, say, put the subject in the A case and the direct object in the B case, but OVS sentences would put the direct object in the B case and the subject in the D case. This sort of thing could even be combined with mood-driven case selection as above...)

And what if there were a language with an extremely small number of verbs, perhaps just one (a linking verb, presumably), with actions specified periphrastically using other grammatical constructs, such as adjectives? I can just imagine the kinds of sentences you could get... Instead of saying that someone ran, you would say they were fast. Instead of saying that Bob gave Mary a box of chocolates, you would say that Bob was generous and then there was a box of chocolates in Mary's hands. Replacing verbs that carry more meaning would require more acrobatics, but I'm convinced it would be possible to say just about anything in such a language, with sufficient noun and adjective vocabulary, once you got used to it.

Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns

2007-10-11T05:46:00.000-04:00

First off, let me preface this review by saying that this is pretty far removed from the kind of book I normally read. It's basically Romantic (in the older sense of that term) fiction. However, the setting sort of reached out and grabbed me: the book is set in the historical twentieth-century third world. When I discovered that the public library had it on audio, I went ahead and checked it out.

As historical fiction, however, I found the book disappointing. The book jacket information raves that "personal lives are inextricable from the history playing out around them", but I find this to be less than altogether true, as the main characters are two very reclusive women. During the bulk of the story they almost never leave the house and so have almost no opportunity to directly observe anything going on outside its walls. The history is reported almost entirely through the men in the story, who are really side characters, and through intermittent narration largely irrelevant to the story. We hear about the Soviets through Laila's father, and about the Mujahideen and the Taliban through Rasheed, a man so distant (and poorly detailed) that he is himself almost a part of the setting rather than a character. There are two notable times that the history really has a direct impact. One is when a stray rocket serves as a plot device to keep Laila from leaving the city with her family. Historical fiction is not a genre that I've read extensively, but in what I have read of it, the history was much more integrated into the story than this. (The other instance, admittedly, is better writing, if a bit macabre: the hospital conditions for the delivery of Laila's second child.)

The two main characters are developed thoroughly and well. They are multi-faceted, dynamic, interesting, and reasonably realistic, and the reader can identify with them and feel sympathy for them. Most of the other characters, however, are relatively underdeveloped: flat, largely uninteresting, and in many cases static. The story suffers for this, particularly from the poor development of Rasheed. Here we have a major character, around whom the plot is wrapped like a glove, so that virtually everything that happens to the other major characters is a result of some action on his part, and yet he is so poorly developed, so distant, that I found myself completely unable to identify with him at all, unable to care at all what happened to him (for good or ill). The parents of the four women all also have important roles in the early part of the book, but of the four, only Jalil has more than one facet of his personality explored in any depth. Later, Aziza is a fairly important character, or could be, but we know almost nothing about her.

The plot writing is, in my estimation, better than the characters. Although it is predictable and even obvious at times, there are a number of unexpected turns. Most of these turns are created by actions taken by Rasheed, not by the "history playing out"; nonetheless the story has a satisfying complexity and completeness. This had to be difficult to achieve, with characters who spend nearly all of their time at home, but the author manages it surprisingly well.

Windows 7 timeline updates

2007-07-21T20:16:00.000-04:00

There have been some significant developments apropos the Windows Blackcomb/Vienna/7 development timeline, which I've discussed in the comments there.

MT Tech Rally

2007-06-09T08:57:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I attended a Tech Rally in Mansfield, hosted by a local reseller-and-servicer business there with the word "typewriter" in its name (or, at least, that's what it used to stand for).

The Sophos presentation on network security was a real eye-opener for me. A lot of what the guy said made sense, on some level, but he was talking mostly about kinds of networking we don't even have at the library. In particular, the whole mindset of the talk was deep in Microsoft think. When he spoke of not allowing a system "onto the network" if it doesn't meet your requirements (e.g., for having certain antivirus software installed), I'm pretty sure he was actually thinking mostly in terms of not allowing it to access certain services on the network, e.g., application servers. There were also a lot of highly-Microsoft-centric things that were fairly central to his talk, not least Active Directory. (As an administrator of OS-agnostic/heterogenous TCP/IP-style networks, I only just barely know what AD even *is*. It's not really relevant to any kind of computer network I've ever worked with.)

This doesn't make everything he said invalid, it only makes it irrelevant to me, at this time. (If I'd known that was the kind of network he was going to be talking about, I wouldn't have attended the talk, but it was just labelled "Network Security", and I work with network security (I write firewall rulesets, for instance), so how was I to know?)

I did catch the presenter in one mistake, which he made presumably because he is thinking at a higher level (specifically, at the application layer on the OSI model) and mostly looking past or ignoring the details on lower layers (notably the data link and network layers). The specific mistake he made (which I swear on Dave Barry's life that I'm not making up) was in speaking of DHCP as an enforcement mechanism. As anyone who understands TCP/IP at even a basic level can tell you, it fundamentally isn't that. (DHCP is a convenience mechanism; it doesn't enforce squat.) If the system doesn't meet your requirements, he was saying, then the DHCP server can hand it a 32-bit subnet mask, and so then it "can't go anywhere" on the network.

Yeah, he really said that. The reader may now laugh heartily at the prospect of an attacker that does not know how to change the TCP/IP settings on his computer. What kind of threat are we protecting against here? Great Aunt Mildred? Dilbert's boss?

However, he also talked about other enforcement mechanisms, including access control lists, among other things. To fully evaluate the correctness of his talk I'd have to know more about things like LDAP and NT's non-DNS "domain"-based networking, but I didn't get the impression that it was all bogus like the DHCP thing. On the whole the talk seemed coherent and mostly sane. Not that any network administrator should ever swallow anything said by any security vendor without a large helping of salt, mind you.

I also got to see one of the Microsoft "across America" vehicles (sort of like a converted bookmobile or mobile home with a lot of computer hardware crammed inside). On feature, of course, was Vista, which I got to see up close and personal for the first time. (Previously I'd seen screenshots on the web and a couple of short promo videos.) The demo guy (whose name I didn't catch) did a really nice job and seemed to be pretty well informed.

First, I want to say that the Aero Glass visual enhancements are quite slick. As someone who generally sets XP systems to the Classic look because it's just less goofy and dumb-looking than the default appearance in XP, I must say I'm pleased this time.

Some of the improvements to the Start menu in Vista also appear to be quite worthwhile. Expanding folders vertically (right into the list, albeit with an indent, sort of like in the left pane of the Explorer view in the Windows Explorer file manager) rather than horizontally seems like it will overall be an improvement (less mouse movement is required, for one thing), and the Start Search appeared to be really slick. I don't know what kind of hardware they were running it on, but it did perform really well. Impressively well, compared with XP on any hardware I've ever seen it on. These are small things, but it's often the small things that determine the quality of the user's experience. I am optimistic now about Vista being a real improvement over XP.

Not that I'm going to rush to deploy it right away, mind you. I'd like to hold out for SP1 if possible, or at least wait until next year when it's been out for a while and the first round of post-release bugs found and fixed. Nonetheless, I'm now kind of looking forward to it.

Lastly, I want to talk about the panel applets. (Microsoft has another name for them, which I forget at the moment, but I'm talking about the little applications that run embedded in that panel on, by default, the right side of the screen, updating the display in realtime.) As I predicted, it *is* more than just a fancier clock: it's a real panel-applet capability, or at least the beginnings of one, and thus a major step forward for Microsoft. I asked specifically about biff, and the demo guy confirmed that yes, there is one. Although he specifically used the word "Outlook" (which suggests to me that it may be specific to that (highly undesirable) mailreader, rather than doing POP3 or IMAP checks itself), it is nonetheless a good beginning. That's one of the major things people use panel applets for, so it's important that Microsoft thought to include it. It means they're thinking in the right directions. Also there was a system monitor of sorts (showing CPU usage and a couple of other things; gkrellm it is not, but for a ships-with-the-OS component it is a worthwhile inclusion) and something that looked like it might have been an RSS reader, though I don't actually know where it was getting its data. I didn't ask about the availability of third-party ones, but I imagine they will appear in time.

The bad news is that these panel applets cannot be placed on the regular panel (the taskbar in Windows parlance), only on the special panel dedicated to them. I asked specifically about this and the demo guy confirmed my suspicion. I didn't get a chance to find out how resizeable it is. Nonetheless, it's a beginning, and a good one. Hopefully now that it's a core feature of the Windows UI it will see improvements in future releases.

Vienna Timeline Update

2007-06-09T08:55:00.000-04:00

An MS exec has announced that the next version of Windows will be "fundamentally redesigned" to take better advantage of multi-core processors. I discuss this further in my Windows Vienna Development Timeline thread.

Turning the Users Loose

2007-05-29T10:25:00.000-04:00

You never find all the bugs in anything until you turn real users loose on it.

Yesterday at work, while the library was closed, I made the changes to our network infrastructure that have been in the planning and testing stages for several months now. Instead of one firewall protecting our network from the outside world and the subnets from one another, we now have two firewalls: an outer firewall that protects the whole network from the outside world, and an inner firewall that protects mission-critical systems from the rest of the local network. At both points there is no ethernet path past the firewall, so the isolation is at the physical level, and the only stuff that goes through is what the firewall expressly forwards.

I tested everything I could think of to test, of course. My testing checklist, which I spent weeks compiling, was a full page, and many of the lines read along the lines of "Test foo, bar, and baz on all of the staff workstations". I tested ICMP echo. I tested ssh. I tested the web. I tested the ability to access our web catalog. I tested the ability to access our cgi server, and whether each of several internal databases thereon automatically authenticate the user by IP address (which they *are* supposed to do for staff workstations, and *not* for anything else). I tested ftp. I tested the ability to print, to each printer. I tested all of that on each and every computer in the building.

But I forgot to test encrypted websites (https). Naturally, this morning at 9:30 (we open at 9), about five users discovered this oversight at more or less the same time (within the space of a couple of minutes).

I had to actually go in to find out what was wrong, because my coworker who was describing the problem to me on the phone was too flustered (what with several people hounding her about it at once and everything, and not being very technically inclined anyhow) to explain it very well.

So all the way there I was thinking that the internet was completely not working, and I'm like, but I *tested* that right before I left. I tested *every* computer. They could all access the internet last night...

When I got there, of course, I walked over to a patron, who promptly explained that she could access Yahoo mail, but when she tried to "do anything" (which she demonstrates by clicking a "log in" button), ... Ah, yes. I did indeed forget to test any encrypted sites. (I even tested sites that have you log in, but the ones I tested were low-security sites where the only thing at stake would be a little public profile information, so they didn't bother with SSL...)

Sure enough, port 443, although I had intended for it to be forwarded, wasn't. Well, it was from some parts of the network, but not from the patron subnet. Oops. Fixing it, once I figured out what the problem was, was a simple matter.

You never find all the bugs until you deploy.

No, Your Child is Not at the Library

2007-05-23T17:35:00.001-04:00

Earth to parents:

No. If you have to call the library and ask if your child is here, the answer is no. I know your child probably told you he'd be at the library, but what that really means is he didn't want to tell you where he was going to be, either because he hadn't decided yet, or because he just doesn't want you to know. This is true for children of all ages, but of course it goes double for teenagers. The library is the number one leading lie American children tell their parents about where they are going to be. This was true even before the Spiderman movie a couple of years ago gave the idea to the other 7% of kids who hadn't already come up with it on their own or picked it up from a friend.

Almost all kids who come to the library come with their parents. If you aren't here, then your kids almost certainly aren't here either.

Yes, we do have kids in the library all the time who are not accompanied by their parents, but it's the same two or three dozen kids all the time. (Some of them are here almost as much as they're in school.) If your child were one of them, you would know.

Let me reiterate that: if your child were one of the ones who comes to the library, you would know. If you have to ask, then he's not here. Please stop calling the library and asking if your child is here. Your child is not here.

Most Abused Scripture Passages: Ephesians 5

2007-05-14T17:44:00.000-04:00

I have for some time intended to document my frustration with the carelessness and disregard with which some people treat the scriptures and, in particular, certain famous passages. In his Mother's Day sermon, Pastor Simpson used Ephesians 5. He handled it correctly (our church is fortunate), but I was reminded of some of the ways I've seen the passage handled in the past, and of my intention to write about this subject.

Marriage too has been on my mind of late, primarily since this May-July this year see me attending three wedding ceremonies in as many months (which is rather unusually many for me).

Note first of all that this passage (and the entire book of Ephesians, really) is primarily talking about the church. The passage certainly does speak to marriage, but people who ignore the larger context often get confused about what it says about marriage. The worst offenders quote just verses 22-24:

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

These three verses, out of context, have been used to prooftext all manner of dire heresy. I will not dignify most of it with specific responses, except to say that anyone who quotes just these three verses in isolation from the rest of the context is invariably up to no good.

The bare minimum you can quote at one go and have a reasonable chance of doing the passage anything resembling justice is verses 21-33:

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

You can see there the mutual nature of the relationship. It's not entirely symetrical, but it is very much cooperative on both sides. And yes, I have looked at verse 21 in the Greek, and it says the same thing as the English translation I quoted. If there is a word there that someone could reasonably take issue with it is "reverence", which could also be rendered "fear". Doing a detailed study on fearing the Lord would take us far off track, and in any case it would not change the basic meaning of this passage. People have been known to take issue with the word "submit", but again any wording that can reasonably be chosen (e.g., place yourselves under one another) would not change the basic meaning of this passage. "One another" is the part of this verse that we cannot get around, and it is borne out in any case by the verses that follow.

Now with that said, the wording and emphasis are quite different on the two sides of the relationship, because the man fills one role in the family and the woman another. And it is true that the man is to be the head of the household (and this is even more clear in other passages). Yet the relationship is very much reciprocal in nature, and if a man is treating his wife as some kind of servant or lesser partner, he is absolutely missing the mark.

It is worth mentioning too that the very closeness of relationship herein implied is fundamentally alien to popular culture's concept of marriage, wherein a much greater separation and individuality is retained.

But we still have not touched upon the main point of the passage. Paul explicitely states in verse 32 what should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the general flow of the whole letter: he is talking about the church. A proper treatment of this passage really should look at 5:21 — 6:9 as a unit. 5:21, in particular, is a concise statement of the whole passage, which is expanded then in three main parts: 5:22-33 (wives and husbands), 6:1-4 (children and parents), and 6:5-9 (slaves and masters) — all of which is talking primarily about proper relationships among believers within the church, and all of which also ties back into what was said in chapter 4.

So if you see a man use Ephesians 5:22 as an excuse to live his live selfishly, making decisions without consulting with his wife, expecting her to work a side job in addition to doing all the cooking and laundry and whatnot while he sits in a chair, and generally treating her badly, tell him to go back and read it again.

Wow, it feels good to vent. There are plenty of other frequently abused passages in scripture. Perhaps I should write up a few more in the coming months.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. The "NIV" and "New International Version" trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Lightening and Brightening: Color-Safe Bleach for Digital Photographs

2007-05-11T23:33:00.000-04:00

I recently mentioned the technique of using an unsharp mask to brighten a dark image, and someone asked me how "sharpening" can compensate for underexposure. This post is an attempt to explain. First, I should note up front that it's better to get a good clear photo in the first place. For the example, though, I have chosen one that is, in a word, not. The end result would be a bit better if the starting photo were a bit better, but using a really poor photo makes it easier to see what is going on, so for the sake of example, that's what I'm doing. This photo was taken using a cheap old consumer-grade digital camera. Here it is in mostly undoctored form:

I say mostly undoctored because I've cropped it. The curious can see more of the context here (this is part of the second photo there), but this much will do for the sake of explanation.

When a photo is terribly dark like this, the first thing most of us want to do (assuming we don't want to just throw it out) is lighten it up. There are various ways to do that, each with advantages and disadvantages (brightness/contrast, gamma correction, channel curves, ...) but the method I usually use in this kind of situation is the levels dialog box. (I'm using Gimp here, but other photo editors presumably have something similar.)

This photo was so underexposed, a significant band of values at the bright end was entirely unused in the original. So I brought the rightmost of the three sliders left to the point where the graph tapered off into nothing. Additionally, the darkest values are over-represented (note the giant spike on the left side of the graph), so I dragged the middle slider to the left a bit in an attempt to compensate. There is, however, a limit to how far you can go with this. After a little experimentation, these are the positions I ended up with:

The color is now rather dull, especially in the background. It was dark, and we've lightened it a bit, but lightening it too much more would wash it out. Instead, at this point I opted to use the unsharp mask filter. Again, I'm using Gimp, but other photo editors (well, ones serious enough to have filters) probably have something similar. Note that I ran the radius up to 50 pixels:

With a small radius (the default in Gimp is five pixels) the unsharp mask exaggerates changes in color across short distances, which helps blurry edges to seem sharper (though, technically, they aren't actually made sharper as such). With a larger radius like this, though, the changes in color are measured, and exaggerated, over larger distances. Rather than picking out edges, this picks out whole areas of the photo and makes them seem more distinct from one another. This has an overall brightening effect, making the colors seem bolder. Again, it can be overdone, but this image really needed it. Look at the difference in the woodwork around the windows from the image above to the one below. The snowflake also now looks white instead of dingy gray.

Finally, this image, in addition to being dark, was also rather grainy. Fortunately, it was taken at a larger resolution than I needed for the web, so I was able to solve this problem simply by scaling it down to a factor of its original size. Note the use of the cubic interpolation: chintzier scaling algorithms like nearest neighbor are not recommended, as they can actually exacerbate image quality problems. Here is my result:

It's still not the best photo ever, but if you scroll back up and look at the original again, you will notice how much worse it was. This really is an improvement. Of course, starting with a better photo initially will yield better results.

Book Review: Born on a Blue Day

2007-04-28T10:18:00.000-04:00

The opening paragraph of this book had me hooked right away. That's usually a good sign.

As the next few pages progressed, I began to worry that the entire book would be a loose collection of examples of synesthesia. Then the first chapter ended, and the second chapter began a chronological journey through the author's life. The book is indeed well organized.

I found this book rather interesting. It is well-written and engaging, and the main character (the author himself) is interesting to get to know. The reader can sympathize with him from fairly early in the book.

I do have a couple of caveats, however. In the first place, the cover is a bit misleading with the tagline, "inside the extraordinary mind of an autistic savant". The author is not, in fact, autistic, and never was. This becomes immediately clear upon reading the first pages of the book. He does have Asperger's syndrome, but although Asperger's is considered to be loosely related to autism, it is certainly not the same. It is a much milder disorder, much less debilitating, and much more common. It is normal for someone with Asperger's to lead a more or less normal life. Several major Silicon Valley CEOs have been diagnosed with it. There was an article on Wired a while back entitled The Geek Syndrome, which seems to cover Asperger's pretty well, at a layman's level, so I'm not going to detail it further here. Long story short, I consider this tagline disingenuous on the part of the publisher.

The more interesting thing about the author's mind is indeed (as was hinted from the first paragraph) his pervasive synesthesia, and it IS fascinating, particularly so because it is a first-person account. The first several chapters of the book, covering the author's early childhood, are particularly interesting.

The other caveat comes to light later in the book, when the author reveals he is a practicing homosexual. This is not by any means the focus of the book, however, and it does not appear to color the remainder. For a discerning adult, I would say that the book is still interesting and, indeed, valuable. But I thought I would be remiss if I did not mention it.

A third caveat, if it can be called such, is that I am writing this review without having actually finished the book. I am writing this now, but I may update it later if I come back and finish the book. Another book has pulled me away from it for the time being, but I intend to get back to it and at least read more of the account of the trip to Lithuania, which was only just starting where I left off. That another book was able to pull me away is not a significant criticism. In the first place, this happens to me all the time, and in the second place, the book that pulled me away is by one of my favorite authors. So this is more a caveat about my review, than about the book itself. Caveat lector.

I have little doubt that a significant portion of the critical acclaim this book has received is due at least in part to the fact that the author is homosexual. Nonetheless, it does not follow that the book does not deserve some significant acclaim. It is rare, in my opinion, to see a non-fiction book about a fascinating subject like this receive any significant attention in the kinds of sources where this one has been written up — library-oriented publications particularly. Normally they focus on much less worthwhile books: formula fiction (lots of this), inane autobiographies by celebrities who neither can write well nor have had interesting lives, incoherent political ramblings, vapid self-help books... in a word, drivel. This book is certainly not that, and although the critics may like it for the wrong reasons, they are not wrong to like it.

Born on a Blue Day

2007-04-12T05:49:00.000-04:00

I saw this book at the library, and it looked interesting. Now I'm reading it, and it is interesting. So I've set Stone of Farewell on the back burner and am planning to finish this one first. I'll post a review when I finish it.

On monikers, real names, and finding yourself on the web

2007-04-11T09:21:00.000-04:00

I have for years used the moniker Jonadab the Unsightly One on the internet, partly because it struck my fancy, but also partly because I expected it to be more unique and identifiable than my actual name.

Yesterday, on a whim, I punched my first and last name (Nathan Eady) into Google and started looking through the results. I expected the first several to be me, because Eady is not a terribly common name, and because I've been active on the internet for a while. But I did not expect to get past the first page of results. In fact, the first result I found that does not, in fact, refer to me was the very last result on the fourth page, i.e., the fourtieth result overall. It's a PDF entitled 'Slide 1' from the Development Services department of the city of San Diego, and the name Nathan Eady (both halves together, even though I didn't do the search as a quoted phrase) occurs in a list of employees being noted for some dubious award. Having never been anywhere near San Diego, I am pretty well certain this isn't me.

What is perhaps more interesting is some of the stuff I found along the way -- reference to myself, or my participation in various things, that I had not thought about in some while. For example, I received an honorable mention in a contest for short bad prose, entitled the Lyttle Lytton, in 2001. I remember that sentence very well, but I had forgotten that I wrote it myself, or why. (I do remember the contest, though. It was announced on a usenet group I was reading regularly at the time.) In another place, someone had collected something I said once in a list of quotes. It was clearly something I said, but I have no recollection of the context in which I said it, only the quote remains. I found a number of things like that, obscure places I'd turned up over the years that I'd nearly forgotten about.

Two observations I'd like to draw out of this. First, it's interesting to look at what other people see and remember of you, the things that have been recorded. Second, if I'd just used my actual name in the first place instead of a moniker all these years, that guy in San Diego would be *way* further down the list.

VBS Materials moved to Blogger

2007-04-04T10:00:00.000-04:00

A while ago I secured free hosting for our Vacation Bible School materials.

Well, the free hosting didn't work out. The site was constantly going down, presumably because the free hosting service offered some things that are difficult to secure when the content providers are untrusted. More than half the time when I tried to update the content I was unable to do so, due to technical problems.

So I've moved it over to bibleschoolmaterials.blogspot.com and am now using Blogger to post the materials. One positive side of this is that it makes it easy (err, automatic, really) to keep an update history.

The downside is that it takes time to post things, since I can't just use FTP. (At least I'm *able* to post, though; with the hosting site, ftp was down half the time.) So far, all I've got up is the Bible lessons for 2007, and some general information. Nonetheless, it seems to be working out, so hopefully in the coming weeks I'll get things fleshed out over there.

Map of Osten Ard

2007-04-01T21:45:00.008-04:00

I've been rereading The Dragonbone Chair, and in the process I've been working on this composite map. There are maps in the books, of course, but there are several issues. First, each book only has some of the maps, so one would have to carry all three (rather thick) volumes around in order to have all the maps handy, and there can be a lot of flipping around to find them. Even if you photocopy all the maps from the books and keep them paperclipped together or something, it can still be a lot of shuffling to find something, because different maps, aside from showing different areas, also have different details. Also, some things on the maps sometimes go by other names (e.g., a Sithi name, a Qanuc name, ...), so having them labeled with both names can make referring to the map easier in some cases. Finally, there are a few instances in which the text of the story directly contradicts the maps (e.g., the location of Haethstad, which on one of the maps is placed where Hullnir is on my map, but the story clearly states its correct location for Heathstad is the northeast corner of the lake). So I've been putting it all together into one map.

I'm not done, obviously. (Some of the islands in the south aren't drawn in at all...) I'll be finishing up while I reread the other books in the series. Nonetheless, what I have is already good enough to be useful, so, here it is. Update: I've since added a preview of the completed version.

Trying to look for Osten Ard maps on the internet doesn't appear to turn up anything this good or detailed, so I figure making it available to the public is a (small) service to Tad's readership. It's available in larger resolutions and in vector formats (SVG or eps (update: or PDF)) upon request. To request a copy now that this blog entry is no longer current, contact jonadab AT columbus PERIOD rr PERIOD com and be sure to put the words Osten Ard in the subject of the message. I've been answering one or two of these requests each month.

Please note that leaving a comment here does not automatically give me any way to contact you or send you the map. So if you want a copy, you need to follow the above instructions.

French Songs

2007-03-27T08:43:00.000-04:00

One of the songs my piano book has had me playing for a while now is Alouette. The song is, of course, unmistakably French. For some reason, it was bugging me that I didn't know the words very well. So I looked them up. Unfortunately, being the curious sort of person that I am, I also looked up what they actually mean. Skylark, gentle skylark, skylark, I will pluck you. I will pluck your head! Skylark, gentle skylark, skylark, I will pluck you. I will pluck your beak! The scary thing is, this is supposedly a popular children's song.

When I read that, it caused me to wonder a bit about French culture. Bear in mind, this is only the third French song that I have seen translated into English. There's nothing particularly worrisome about Frere Jacques, but La Marseillaise is... very violent. Of course, it was written during a rather bloody revolution, and it's doubtless not the only national anthem to have a little war in it. Even our own Star Spangled Banner, which is mostly about a flag, nonetheless speaks of munitions going off in the first verse, and the third verse, although it is less graphic than the French anthem, is very much the stuff of war. Again, the song was written during a war of revolution, so it's going to contain some violence. Goes with the territory.

So what's running through my head now is, maybe Alouette is an aberration, and most French children's songs are more like Frere Jacques. Probably that is the case, and I just had the misfortune, in knowing only three French songs, to run into an abnormally high percentage of violent ones.

Still, would you encourage your children to sing a song with lyrics like that? Skylark, gentle skylark, skylark, I will pluck you. I will pluck your neck! And your beak! And your head! I'm pretty sure that if I were a French parent, I wouldn't teach my children this song.

Pink Grapefruit Pie

2007-03-22T20:50:00.000-04:00

Crust Ingredients:

1 cup soft shortening
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
7/4 cups wheat flour
1 TBSP lemon juice
1 TBSP hot water

Filling Ingredients:

1 ripe pink grapefruit
boiling water, divided
3 cups granulated sugar, or a bit less
3/4 cups cornstarch
4 egg yolks
1 TBSP shortening (optional)
1 drop each red and yellow food coloring (optional)

Mirengue Ingredients:

4 egg whites
4 TBSP granulated sugar
1-2 tsp vanilla flavoring

First, mix the crust dough: beat the butter together with the powdered sugar, lemon juice, and hot water until creamy, then add the cornstarch and flour and mix thoroughly with a sturdy spoon until it looks homogenous at a glance. Form into two lumps and refrigerate at least 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, mix the filling: Stir the cornstarch into the sugar. Bring the water to a rolling boil. Grate some grapefruit rind (according to taste) into a large measuring cup, then add the pulp and juice, discarding the section dividers, seeds, and remaining peel. Add boiling water to make a total volume of four and a half cups, including the fruit, then immediately combine this with the sugar and cornstarch, stirring. Place this mixture in a saucepan over low to medium heat, and stir until it boils gently. Add another half cup of boiling water and the egg yolks and continue stirring until it comes to a good boil. It should be a nice translucent pale pink. Stir in the food coloring if desired, for a stronger shade of pink. Remove from heat and stir in the butter, if desired. Let it cool.

Preheat your oven to 350 Fahrenheit.

When the dough has chilled enough to be workable, place each half of it in turn on a large floured board and roll with a floured rolling pin, flipping and flouring once or twice as necessary, rolling it into (approximately) a circle a bit larger than a pie pan. Using a broad plastic spatula, loosen it from the board. Place a pie pan over it (upside down) and invert both together, then adjust as necessary so that the crust fits the pan, cutting off the edges. One nice thing about this shortbread crust recipe is that if it tears a bit, it mends easily enough: take a small scrap from the edge and patch the hole or tear, pressing gently. This works better than with traditional pie crust dough. Once you have both pie pans nicely lined with shortbread dough, bake them for a few minutes until they are nearly done, but don't overdo it, as they're going to spend some more time in the oven after they're filled.

When the crusts are ready and the filling cool, put half the filling in each of them, then make the meringue: beat the egg whites thoroughly, then add the sugar 1 TBSP at a time, beating after each addition. Add the vanilla last, when the merengue is already beaten well enough, and then beat it only just enough to mix the vanilla in. Using a rubber spatula, spread it evenly over the filling, making sure it goes all the way to the edge and seals to the crust. Bake until the meringue is just lightly browned, then cool them.

Makes two pies. Serve chilled. (Yes, I know I misspelled marang about five different ways. I have never quite gotten the hang of French phonetics.)

Nice to have an excuse

2007-03-21T13:48:00.000-04:00

I must be the most efficient person in my workplace.

Esoteric Knowledge Quiz #1

2007-03-09T20:49:00.000-05:00

Do your friends, family, and coworkers accuse you of being a repository of useless information? (Mine do.) Here's your chance to test your knowledge of obscure but interesting tidbits...

In a large glass bowl over medium heat, mix distilled water, gastric acid, and lye, taking care that it doesn't get out of the bowl. Balance the amounts of the acid and the lye so that the pH is precisely neutral, then boil away all the water. What's left?
1. sodium hydroxide
2. calcium perchlorate
3. table salt
4. sneezing powder

What was the name of Julius Caesar's wife?
1. Cornelia
2. Calpurnia
3. Pompeia
4. all of the above

The English words dam, dyke, and sluice all come from the same source language. Which language is that?
1. Old German
2. Dutch
3. Greek
4. Finnish

When the priest Hilkiah found a long-lost copy of the book of the law while cleaning the temple, he gave it to a secretary, who read it, then took it to King Josiah and read it to him. What was the secretary's name?
1. Shaphan son of Azaliah
2. Joah son of Asaph
3. Benaiah son of Jehoiada
4. Shebna

For most of the twentieth century, the Poincaire Conjecture was widely considered to be the most important open problem in mathematics. Today it is widely considered solved, due mostly to the work of one man. What is his nationality?
1. Russian
2. German
3. American (of mixed European descent)
4. Han Chinese

Answers have been posted: see the comments.

A Treatise on Mustard

2007-03-08T11:43:00.000-05:00

I grew up thinking I didn't like mustard. The reason I thought this... well, I'll come back around to the reason in a moment. Anyway, my dad really liked mustard, but I liked ketchup, not mustard, or so I thought. But I have since discovered that mustard can actually be a quite worthwhile culinary item.

The first seeds of doubt about my dislike of mustard were sewn years ago, when I was working in fast food and became cognizant for the first time of the fact that some of the items on the menu contained mustard, and (although I had not been a big fan of fast food for other reasons) the mustard had never bothered me. At first I thought maybe it was a different, more palatable form of mustard, but no, it was indeed regular ordinary yellow mustard.

If I'd been making the sandwiches (and thus actually dispensing the mustard) right away, I'd have figured out the real issue sooner, but assembling sandwiches requires actual training, so they don't teach you to do it until you've demonstrated the ability to show up for several consecutive shifts. (Back then you could spend your first week doing nothing but toasting buns; this practice was discontinued in the late nineties, but I assume they still find extremely easy things for the first-week employees to do, because something like half of all new hires industry-wide never make it to the second week, and it would be a waste of other employees' time to train them on anything very significant.)

So anyway, what I did really notice first was that the ketchup had to be refilled about every hour (more during a busy lunch), but the mustard dispenser, which was smaller, was refilled much less often (perhaps twice a day, thrice at the outside). I watched for items that received ketchup but not mustard; there weren't any. Light bulbs started going on in my head. I already knew that fast food didn't go very heavy on the ketchup, but yet it disappeared much faster than the mustard.

Indeed, mustard is typically used in smaller quantities. This, believe it or not, was news to me. Growing up, I only had my dad's example to look at. He uses mustard in roughly the same way I use ketchup, applying it liberally to both sides. (He puts his mustard straight on the bread; I tend to put something (lettuce for instance) between the ketchup and the bread, to keep the bread from getting soggy, but other than that the principle is the same.) He uses it in quantities such that in addition to dominating the flavoring it also significantly increases the moisture level of the sandwich, oozes around when you take a bite, and so forth. I don't think I will ever like mustard used in this way.

Having discovered, however, that mustard used in smaller quantities as a seasoning is much more palatable, I began to experiment. I've since discovered any number of uses for it, some few of which I will list here:

Downmixed with about ten parts ketchup (and possibly some brown sugar, depending on your mood and the rest of the meal), it jazzes up the flavor, making a good dipping sauce for anything from dill pickles to fried potatoes.

It also adds interest to barbeque sauce. I use about the same amount of mustard as worchestershire sauce in this context.

A little mustard in some water makes a good cooking medium for chicken.

A couple of teaspoons of mustard goes well in some molasses-based sauces, e.g. for over a stir-fry or glazed carrots.

Basically, the trick is to know how to use it.

Paul's News (draft two)

2007-03-05T08:58:00.000-05:00

As I said initially back in January, I've been working some more on this poem, which I like to think of as potential song lyrics (though a refrain would probably be needed). Anyway, I've worked on it a little more and have made good progress, so I thought I'd post an update. I expected to only go through chapter 12, but it fell shy of the end of the stanza, so I added brief synopses of the following three chapters, which in some ways does draw the whole thing to a better close.

The Good News According to Paul:
A Synopsis of Romans 1-15

God can be known, but men turned aside, exchanging their God for nothing.
Wickedness grew, and God let them go, his judgement in sin erupting.
Hypocrites boast, condemning themselves, but Gentiles and Jews are the same.
No one does good, but God gave the law to show us our sin, then he came.
Righteousness comes apart from the law by faith in the act of his Son.
Abraham's faith that justified him preceded his circumcision.
He is our father, we who believe. Our sins are not held against us;
Thus we rejoice: our hope comes from God, and hope does not disappoint us.

While we were helpless, God demonstrated love when he shed his own blood.
Death from the time of Adam till Moses reigned, for we couldn't make good.
Now we can die to sin and can live to God through the life of one man.
Slaves must obey the master they serve, but sin is no more our sultan!
Freed by this gift, we die to the law, which made us aware of our sin.
Ruled by my sin, I do what I hate: I know nothing good is within.
Through the command sin put me to death — I can't keep the law, I now see.
Sin within me does what I should not; he rescues me, setting me free.

God sent his Son in likeness of man to do what the law requires.
Live by the Spirit: you are in Christ, your mind set on God's desires.
We are his children, led by the Spirit; this is our obligation.
Nothing can take away his great love; we wait in anticipation,
Children of promise, chosen by God, because of his mercy righteous.
Israel's sons, to whom it belongs, received it from God before us.
Though they pursued, they did not obtain; they fell on a stone of stumbling.
We are his people, though we were not; they did not accept his coming.

Working to gain salvation themselves, they did not rely on God's plan.
Faith comes from hearing: someone must preach, and it is by faith that you stand.
You make them jealous, that they may come; a remnant was chosen by grace;
We are included based on their fall. They will be restored to their place.
Their unbelief was mercy for us, so God may receive the glory;
Therefore, respond by giving yourselves to God. We all form one body,
Different gifts for serving the Lord. With love accept one another,
Living in peace and trusting in God and praying for me, your brother.

Isomorphisms, Popular Hymns, Equivalence Classes, and Gilligan's Island

2007-03-01T06:41:00.000-05:00

I have known for some time that an isomorphism of timing exists between certain popular hymns (e.g., Amazing Grace, and the verse of Oh, How I Love Jesus), campfile songs (e.g., Fill Up My Cup), and the theme song from Gilligan's Island. As a result, the music and lyrics are interchangeable, so you can sing the words from one to the tune of another.

It has now come to my attention that the popular Christmas carol, Joy to the World, is also a member of this same equivalence class. So if you've ever wanted to sing Joy to the World to the tune of Gilligan's Island, now you can.

Stuffed Shells

2007-02-28T22:00:00.000-05:00

We recently made stuffed shells, but I said something to the effect of not being overly fond of them, on account of that just being too much ricotta in one place. So we modified the recipe, putting in spinach and mushrooms and motzarella and a good deal less ricotta. And lo, the stuffed shells were actually good.

I should have changed the recipe sooner.

Three Flats

2007-02-27T19:02:00.000-05:00

I haven't said much about the piano lately, so here's an update. I'm now playing melodies on the piano in E-flat major (three flats on A, B, and E) on the treble cleff straight out of the hymnal. I can't play in this key very *fast* yet, but I can play in it well enough to start practicing.

I'm getting better at moving and reaching up and down for higher range, too: I can now play things that I can't sing properly, because my vocal range isn't wide enough. For congregational singing, I have to wrap the higher notes of some of these songs around into the same octave as the lower ones, or some days I just can't hit them at all. But on the piano I can reach over and actually hit them. It's cool.

Finally, I think the previously mentioned course book is about ready to start me in on chords in G Major (one sharp on F); until now I have played chords only in C Major (all white keys except for marked accidentals, which do occur e.g. with the G⁷ chord), but I think that is about to change. G Major is pretty much a breeze now for playing melodies, so chords in that key is a logical next step. Soon. Later this week, perhaps.

Hairdressers, Bartenders, and Librarians

2007-02-22T08:50:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure what it is about the public library that attracts people who just need to talk about their problems, but they'll stand there at the desk for hours, telling you all about their messy personal issues. It's not just a few people either. I'm starting to think we should change our mission statement from meeting the "educational, informational, and entertainment needs" of the community to the "educational, informational, entertainment, and counselling" needs.

Do all public libraries see this phenomenon, or is it peculiar to our community?

Snow day? Work on VBS!

2007-02-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

The library was closed on Tuesday, because they couldn't keep the walks clear, and on Wednesday due to the level 3 condition. Besides taking Puff for an hour-plus walk, shovelling a lot of snow, and visiting mom in rehab, we also worked a little on assorted bits and pieces of our Bible School Materials.

We now have patterns for the preschool sheep bank craft. The Saul & the Sheep filmstrip craft still needs the three pictures from the lesson, but we have the frame pattern done for it.

Lasagna

2007-02-11T17:02:00.000-05:00

We've combined two related concepts: regular lasagna, and vegetable lasagna.

Ordinary lasagna typically has (besides the noodles) a tomato-based sauce, ricotta, ground beef, motzarella and parmesan cheeses. Sometimes there are other ingredients (e.g., mushrooms), but those are the basics.

Vegetable lasagna is typically made with a different sauce, usually something white (e.g., alfredo), no meat, but lots of vegetables. It may or may not have the cheeses, in some cases just one of them.

So we made it with the usual tomato-based sauce, ground beef, and motzarella and parmesan cheeses, but also inserted broccoli, peas, and carrots into the recipe. This is good. We'd have used a little ricotta and also spinach, but we didn't have either, and Sarah wouldn't let me substitute collard greens for the spinach. I suspect the spinach would have improved the flavor if we'd had it, but it was good as it was. (The ricotta I can take or leave, but Sarah was disappointed we didn't have it -- not disappointed enough to make a special trip to the 24-hour grocery four blocks away, though, so she must not have wanted it too badly. I could also take or leave the beef, but we browned, drained, and rinsed it before putting it in, so it didn't really hurt anything much.) I also might have liked to add kidney beans and mushrooms, but Sarah was against including these ingredients, so we didn't.

I must say, even with the missing ingredients, I like this a lot better than traditional vegetable lasagna. I guess I like the tomato-based sauce a lot better than the traditional white or alfredo sauces. Pasta without tomato sauce tends to seem a bit off to me.

Windows Vienna development updates

2007-02-11T16:32:00.000-05:00

Microsoft has already made two announcements (that I'm aware of) about the next version of Windows. I'm tracking all these developments by adding comments to my timeline article on the subject. Long story short, it seems Vienna is on, if not ahead of, schedule so far. I'll be tracking further developments as they arise. If anyone notices any articles or press releases containing announcements or developments I have not covered, feel free to chime in with them.

When Vienna is finally released, I'll have a full history of all the developments, which we can analyze in retrospect, use to make predictions about the subsequent release, laugh at, poke fun, et cetera.

Mom in rehab

2007-02-11T16:22:00.000-05:00

I mentioned previously that my mother was having joint replacement surgery on her hip on the seventh. That went well, better than the doctor expected, the surgery being completed in only two hours with minimal loss of blood.

However, when they were evaluating the possibility of sending her home, a test revealed that she is a bit anemic, so they instead transferred her to the rehab unit in Galion hospital. This makes it easy for us to visit, and once she gets her hemoglobin count up she'll hopefully be able to come home.

(Even then, of course, she will have a considerable amount of recovery to do, but that is expected.)

D Major makes four key signatures.

2007-02-11T16:13:00.000-05:00

I'm now playing (on the piano) melodies written in C Major, G Major (one sharp on F), F Major (one flat on B), and D Major (sharps on F and C).

This last key is technically a two-sharp signature, but it effectively means sharps in three places, since the same melody often hits both middle C# and also the next C# above it, in addition to the F# between them. Obviously that's possible in the other keys as well, and there are additional occurances in the bass cleff, but playing just melodies I didn't run into that often in those keys; in D Major, I do.

Also with this new key signature I for the first time am no longer using the crutch of introducing myself softly to a new key signature by highlighting the notes that are sharp or flat. I just started finding two-sharp pieces in the hymnal and playing them directly, and I found that I am able to do it.

Playing in this key is a little slow going at first, but not too bad.

Memory verse lessons complete.

2007-02-06T10:16:00.000-05:00

With the addition of the preschool verse, the memory verse lessons for God's Sheep are now complete.

Promotional materials for Bible School are online

2007-02-03T09:10:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we worked on a poem that we intend to use as a dramatic reading in the church service, to announce Bible School to the congretation. We also finished up the fliers. So this morning I put our promotional materials online, or, at any rate, what we have done of them thus far: the poem, the poster, the fliers, the invitations, and a sample invitation letter similar to what we plan to mail-merge.

Any additional ideas for things we can do to help our congregation get excited about inviting children to Bible School this summer?

The living room is ready

2007-02-02T06:09:00.000-05:00

Well, we had to measure everything and play around with a graph paper scale model of the room and construction paper furniture to get it all figured out, but the actual furniture has now been shuffled around as necessary, and so the living room is now ready.

Ready for what? Oh, yeah, this will be the first time I've mentioned it. My mom's going to have joint replacement surgery on her hip, on the seventh. When she comes home, she won't be able to go upstairs to her bedroom for a few weeks, so we set up a bed for her on the main floor. Also we had to be sure that the walker, which is wider than you might think, can go everywhere she will need to go. This is now done.

G Major -- for real!

2007-01-29T10:13:00.000-05:00

A while ago I started playing (the melody line of) works written in G Major, but with the F# notes highlighted. Today I started playing (the melody line of) works written in G Major, without the benefit of the highlighter, and it isn't nearly as much harder as I expected. Really, figuring out the fingering when the melody goes up and down beyond where a hand can reach is still the hardest part, and I'm getting better at that, too, insofar as I no longer precalculate the fingering and mark finger numbers over the notes. Sometimes I still stumble when the fingering is hard, and sometimes I hesitate longer than I should between notes, but the key signature is barely even an issue any more. (It will be again when I add in the left hand, because the bass clef will add another place where F can be, but if it's no more an issue there than it was on the treble clef, I should be playing comfortably in G Major by March, no sweat.

I've got some hymns in F Major (one flat on B) highlighted already, so maybe next week or so I'll start trying to play some of them.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned yesterday, practice with chords in C Major is ongoing.

Ah, more material.

2007-01-28T13:13:00.000-05:00

I now have another book of piano music I can play, when practicing chords. This is right at my level, at this point: the first several pieces are all in C Major, with the right hand doing mostly just the melody, and the left hand doing chords, mostly chords with which I am already familiar. (This is not a coincidence; the book was designed to go with the piano course book I am using.)

These are fun to play, because I can actually play them, but they do stretch me a little at this point, and the practice is good.

Paul's News (draft one)

2007-01-27T09:29:00.000-05:00

I've been working on this, off and on, in my spare time, for a while now. It's intended as song lyrics, but it would need a chorus, plus of course the music. Otherwise, it's just a poem, as presented here.

The Good News According to Paul:
A Synopsis of Romans 1-12

God can be known, but men turned aside, exchanging their God for nothing.
Wickedness grew, and God let them go, his judgement in sin erupting.
Hypocrites boast, condemning themselves, but Gentiles and Jews are the same.
No one does good, but God gave the law to show us our sin, then he came.

Righteousness comes apart from the law by faith in the act of his Son.
Abraham's faith that justified him preceded his circumcision.
He is our father, we who believe. Our sins are not held against us;
Thus we rejoice: our hope comes from God, and hope does not disappoint us.

While we were helpless, God demonstrated love when he shed his own blood.
Death from the time of Adam till Moses reigned, for we couldn't make good.
Now we can die to sin and can live to God through the life of one man.
Slaves must obey the master they serve, but sin is no more our sultan!

Freed by this gift, we die to the law, which made us aware of our sin.
[line needed; possible ending: I know nothing good is within.]
Through the command sin put me to death — I can't keep the law, I now see.
Sin within me does what I should not; he rescues me, setting me free.

As it now stands, it leaves off in the first part of chapter eight. I'm still working on it, obviously. The intention is to take it through the end of chapter twelve, where the topic finally changes. I was going to wait until I finished to post it, but &e says I should post stuff here more frequently, so I guess I'll go ahead and post now, and then post again later when I finish some more of it.

Incidentally, the metrical pattern of each line is as follows:
dactyl trochee dactyl trochee dactyl trochee spondee