Got up not too late. Gloria called saying she won't be able to come today, so it seems it's laundry time. Oh, well, doesn't really bother me much.
Hans Petter had pulled an all-nighter, I think he's been playing Diablo II quite a bit. He left in the late afternoon to get some sleep. Paul is ill, it seems, had quite a bad cough, so I offered him some bromhexine that I had to spare.
Fixed my procmail and mutt config once and for all. Got the concept off Nick Moffit. It goes like this:
# Mailing list rules :0: * ^Sender: owner-\/[^@]+ lists/$MATCH :0: * ^X-BeenThere: \/[^@]+ lists/$MATCH :0: * ^Delivered-To: mailing list \/[^@]+ lists/$MATCH :0: * X-Mailing-List: <\/[^@]+ lists/$MATCH :0: * X-Loop: \/[^@]+ lists/$MATCH
And then in .muttrc:
mailboxes `echo ~/Mail/*` mailboxes `echo ~/Mail/lists/*` lists `cd ~/Mail/lists/ && echo *` and... fcc-save-hook ~l =Trash
This rules. I can subscribe to anything now, and get it sorted without any effort what so ever. Which makes me think that Evolution should do this sort of stuff. I think Ettore mentioned something about it once, but I'm not sure. Ideally, a mailer should know about both mailing list headers and also how to subscribe, unsubscribe, and suspend subscriptions for different managers. Honestly, there aren't that many managers out there, I think there is max around 10. Of course, I'm a man of high demands. But I think the power users would love this sort of feature from a mailer. I know I would, at least.
Belinda took her placement test stuff for college, and it went well. Good. Her classes begin in a week, it seems. She has lots of very interesting art classes, including one on funerary art, complete with cemetery tours. I'm extremely envious.
Someone's doing a GNOME mail reader that uses mySQL for message storage. This strikes me as a) massive overkill, b) just plain clunky, and c) wrong. I bet JWZ would just love this one.
Otaola, the movie in which I briefly walked across the screen, opened today. I didn't go because I had to work, and wasn't really in the mood. I got a report, though:
Read some stuff about tile layout algorithms. It seems the basic algorithms people are using are like the one I came up with, except more primitive. So it seems mine might be close to optimal. Good. I'll implement it this weekend, if all goes as planned. It's about time I got around to it. Read more about pathfinding algorithms as well, which is a much harder problem. It seems A* combined with some intelligent preprocessing of the map graph will work for most cases, but I need to read up a bit before I think about implementing anything like that.
No responses to the GUI proposal I sent out yet. Slightly disappointed, although I'm sure all these people have a lot of work to do. I guess I'd be less concerned about this if I was less uncertain about my abilities to actually do GUI design work right.
Played some Diablo II multiplayer with Hans Petter at night. It's fun to play multiplayer, since different character classes tend to complement each other. I play a barbarian, he plays a sorceress. I've also tested a Paladin character, which seems quite well balanced, and a Necromancer character, which is kind of strange, but has the potential to be extremely powerful, I think. Of course, the whole necromancer concept reminds me of satan worshipping heavy metal teenagers with inflated egos more than anything else, but then again, that's probably the target audience for the game. Oh, did I mention the plot, voice acting, and characters in general suck?
But it's still really really addictive. To the point where Hans Petter kept on playing as I went to bed, and was still here when I got up, actually.
Got started looking at Slash. Man, this is one monstrous package of Perl. I'm considering asking Miguel what exact features in Slash it is we need, and then hack them into a more maintainable forum system, because this is surely overkill for anything I can imagine us doing.
I'm setting it up locally to play with it first, at least. No chance I'm going to install this behemoth on a production box without knowing the basics of the code. Heh. Maybe I'll pester Hans Petter with lots of questions, he's the Perl master now, after all.
Debian fixes on the internal statistic generations scripts we use. It was easier than I thought. Some more Diablo II playing occured as well.
We got Diablo II. I got to playing a bit, and it's damn addictive. The general badness of the game engine made me happy, though, given that I'm pretty sure Loom can do better than this. There are numerous issues, including the total lack of alpha in the graphics tiles themselves (although it uses hardware alpha overlays for some effects) and the subsequent lack of antialiasing, resulting in most everything having huge black fringes. This is further emphasized by the "perspective" feature they use (which is otherwise quite cool, it gets you parallaxing and stuff), because it scales non-smoothly, thus making the huge black fringes randomly pixel-double and look like crap, as well as making wall sections not quite fit together. There's also a "make walls transparent when the player is behind them" feature which is good in principle, but sucks balls in practice. First of all, it's only enabled on dungeon levels, although a house or a tree does just as good a job of blocking my view, so I have to mouse around randomly until the name of an item pops up before I can pick it up. Pretty annoying.
Also, the plot is laughable. I mean, I even thought the plot in Quake 2 was passable, I don't demand much. But this dreck is so pathetically bad, I'm writhing in my chair when I hear the voice acting. "This is a Horadric Cube. You can use it to unite a Horadric Staff and a Horadric Headpiece." Please.
Of course, it more than makes up for all this by having some of the most amazingly addictive gameplay ever. Hans Petter and I are wasting hours on this, which, I suppose, is bad for productivity.
Did a GUI mockup and draft for the Helix Setup Tools rollback interface. It turned out quite beautiful, in my own opinion, which made me happy. I sent off mail to the relevant people so they can take a look and give their opinion. Regardless of whether or not it's accepted, I may post it here later for public perusal. Perhaps some of the ideas in it can be more widely useful, although there aren't that many pieces of software that need a "timeline" type approach. We'll see. I liberally applied good information design principles, and I'm rather happy with the execution, at least.
Chewed through "Dragons: A natural history", which was very light reading, but a nice little book, with some rather gorgeous illustrations. Time to get back to Hero With A Thousand Faces, though, which is definitely not light reading.
Attempted to go out. Failed, since the people I was going with couldn't go, and then it started raining.
Sat around taking notes for my game. I need to give it a name soon, I think, since calling it "my game" sounds stupid. I've gotten a lot of the main characters more worked out in my head now. I think it's going to be good, they're all pretty interesting characters with a lot of depth.
Finally finished all stats and report work. Feels good.
Discussed dreams with Hans Petter. He had a very interesting sounding one (the one with the key, in his journal. I dream a lot, although I can't always remember things very vividly. One dream I had a while ago is still with me quite clearly, though:
There's a round courtyard with tall, curved adobe walls around it. I'm a biologist or somesuch, and I've collected samples of small gelatinous creatures (which look more like gum candy than animals) in a big equipment case type thing with many small transparent plastic drawers. It's night, but the courtyard is lit with a warm light. As I cross it towards the tall wooden gate, I drop my case, spilling the animals on ground. I start picking them up, putting them in my mouth to preserve them. As I'm busy doing this, a dog comes running in through the gate, which stands ajar. It starts eating the animals, which angers me, so I chase it off. It runs out through the gate. The opening is perhaps two feet wide, and shows the dark indigo blue of a summer night. As the dog passes through the gate, something huge, totally black, and with no discernible shape (but many protrusions and spikes, it seems) glides past the gate very quickly, with a barely perceptible whoosh, and snaps the dog up. The dog doesn't even have time to react. The gate slams shut as the thing brushes against it. I wake up, deadly afraid.
When I told Hans Petter about this dream, he remarked that my dreams are always very demonic in nature, and that this one was almost lovecraftian. I have to agree, I have a lot of very dark dreams (although I hesitate to call them nightmares, since I'm often not very afraid in the dream itself, but might be after I wake), and a lot of them feature things that can only be described as demons. I'm not sure if this says bodes ill for my mental health, since I'm haunted by demons, or well, since I manage to put them into my dreams and let my unconscious process them.
And even more stats. Counting Debian installations and updates turned out to be completely different from everything else, so I need to take that into account.
Hans Petter has spent ages downloading huge CD images on our 56k link. It's interesting that it's even possible to download more than a gig over a dialup line, but it's completely doable, using gtm and liberal amounts of patience. It actually just takes like 2 or 3 days for an image. It's not bad, if you compare with getting a CD shipped by FedEx.
More stats processing. I swear, this is getting ever so slightly on my nerves.
Got up way too late indeed. I think it's about time to wrap around. Feedback on my report, I shall have to gather slightly more data and refine some points, but in general it seems people were happy. That's good.
Managed to poke a hole in "The Hero With a Thousand Faces". It seems only the two first chapters were really heavy on the Jungian stuff. Now he's getting down to the actual examples and the arguing of his Monomyth theory, and it's starting to get really interesting. I wish he'd go easier on the babble, though. Stuff like "The dome of heaven rests on the quarters of the earth, sometimes supported by four caryatidal kings, dwarfs, giants, elephants, or turtles. Hence, the traditional importance of the mathematical problem of the quadrature of the circle: it contains the secret of the transformation of heavenly into earthly forms" hardly adds anything, and is even more ludicrous now that the quadrature of the circle is a solved problem, without us coming any closer to any "transformation of heavenly into earthly forms".
Worked, answered quite a bit of mail, then retired to bed for an hour or two of reading and relaxation when morning broke. I think this is a good a day as any to wrap my schedule around.
Got up too damn late. Lots of work stuff today, processing reports and statistics. It's actually work that I enjoy, working with a large mass of data (and believe me, the stats that come out of the servers at Helix Code are pretty damn big) and making sense of them, trying to distill the meaning, making charts and tables... As I write the reports, I gain the knowledge myself, then I go back and revise to try to transfer that knowledge as efficiently as possible.
Made graphs that were simple and clear, trying to apply the principles from Tufte. People seemed to think the graphs looked boring. Oh, well.
I've been reading Nielsen's "Designing Web Usability" lately. It's a pretty good book. I feel I would have been better off reading it earlier, though. A lot of the lessons taught in it are ones I've already learned through practical experience. I recommend it to anyone wanting to create websites, especially large ones (as opposed to making yourself a cool homepage). Don't take everything he says as law, though. I noticed that even though the book is only two years old, there's a lot of things that are outdated already. Also I disagree with some of his statements, like that people who have lots of experience designing on paper are ill-suited to working on the web. True, there's a lot of adaption required, but good traditional designers have an eye for what works and what doesn't, and aestetics are important. If used correctly, aestetics complement and enhance the information.
So nowadays there's a lot of work. I've been forced to just put my article on hold, although I'm reading a lot of GUI-relevant things lately, so it might be better off for it. Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is wonderful. While Nielsen seems to rely on quoting other books and studies (his favourite term is "studies show that only xx percent..."), Tufte shows the common sense of his viewpoints, and manages to come across as more well-argued than Nielsen, even though his views are probably more extreme. I'm definitely getting "Envisioning Information" in my next book order, then I'll have the complete trilogy. I'm wondering if Tufte's less canonical works are also worth buying, like "Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Decision Making".
Woken up late by a phonecall from Leo, who wanted to "do something". I agreed it would be good to "do something", and got out of bed, showered, and found Hans Petter in the living room. He'd been to lunch with Miguel, which sounded like a fun experience (restaurant, Miguel, lots of coffee, nerf guns, annoyed other guests).
Caught a cab over to Leo's place, then went to eat in Condesa with Leo, Aline, Hans Petter, and Maru. Mama Rosa's is pretty decent, it's supposed to be a pasta place, but I hardly ever eat pasta there (although their pesto is excellent). I went for Thai Shrimp, which was very good, although too expensive, considering it was a fairly small dish. I had some of their great fresh bread and butter with herbs to rectify.
Afterwards, rented "The Beach". My expectations were mixed, given that it was both a Leonardo diCaprio movie (slightly bad, although he has done some decent stuff before), a Danny Boyle movie (good, I really like both Trainspotting and Shallow Grave), and a big hyped Hollywood production (usually a very bad sign). Verdict: Viewable, but totally inferior to the book. If I hadn't read the book, I might have judged it less harshly, but the changes they'd made from the book were both very noticable, pointless, and changed the entire point of the story. Basically, instead of being about basic human nature and the lengths people will go to, it's now a story about lots of sexual tension, a hot stud, and one woman who doesn't mind killing to get her way. Also, lots more people survive, and one of my favourite characters was removed altogether. Not good.
Got home, and h4X0r3d a bit.
Deti, davaite poidem na internet I budem smotryet pornografichieskie kartinki.
"The design of everyday things" is very good. However, I'm a bit disappointed that the only use for one-handed typing the author could come up with was "if you're flying a jet aircraft with one hand and need to enter data into your computer with the other".
Yeah, there's a gap here. No, I'm not really sure what happened during these days. It's really a blur, most of it.
Got up late. Paul was around, so I forced him to go to the store.
Spent most of the day writing, patching small stuff, and talking to Belinda. Generally quite pleasant.
I ordered lots of Chinese, so now I have a stock of food that should at least last until tomorrow night. And all really cheap, too. Yet, speaking to the guy at the restaurant is an increasingly surreal experience.
I had an idea for a virtual orbital attack platform. You enter the email address and coordinates of the person you wish to target, and it sends a mail to that person informing him that he's been targetted. Sadly, I think this would be a very popular service, which says a lot about the current state of the net.
Took more notes for my article. I realise I'm getting rather close to how real writers work, actually researching my stuff. I'm impressed.
Hans Petter showed up quite late. As in, after midnight. I think his schedule is seriously toast, but then again, who cares?
Got up quite late, after having been up so late last night doing the announcement stuff. It seems to have all been a smashing success, Sun and other rather large and relevant companies are backing GNOME 100%. Note to KDE people: Publicly stating you're not afraid leads me to think you're very, very afraid.
Today was, all in all, reasonably lax. Hans Petter fought with time-admin for hours and hours, deciphering the seemingly not very intuitive mess that is setting time zones and so on. He finally released 0.1.0. By the time he left here, he'd been up for more than 30 hours straight, and looked a little worn down.
We're meeting the lawyer on Thursday, it seems. We have to pay a small fortune each, but at least now our legal status in Mexico is straightened out for the time being.
Chatted with Belinda. She painted a portrait of me today, but it's not finished yet, nor on the web, so I can't link it.
My tattoo itches. It peeled a lot this morning, and seems to be getting closer to completely healed. I can't wait.
Barnes and Noble has much less useful order status reporting than Amazon, it seems. Orders at B&N are just "In process" for a long time, and then probably are just "shipped", and you have to track using the parcel service's web site. Compare with Amazon, which lets you see what books are actually already packaged, and which ones are not. The time it takes is probably the same, but Amazon's method gives a lot more feedback to the user, and gives the impression that stuff is happening, which is important. I hope this stuff gets moving soon, I want my books.
Not much useful work done, although I did update Setup tools pages to reflect the time admin release. Went to bed late.
Got up lateish, feeling quite rested. Spent some time reading and answering mail, coordinating stuff for the LWE press releases tomorrow.
My tattoo itches. Yet another example of how Eric Raymond is wrong. This is one itch it would be terribly bad to scratch.
Someone pointed out to me that the full FBI file on Jeffrey Dahmer (1200+ pages) was available on the web. If you share my fascination with the extreme fringes of society and humanity, this should be an interesting read. I spent a few hours browsing, and although a lot of it is dry paperwork, there are some interviews with Dahmer himself that are quite chilling. Especially the fact that he seems like a completely normal, likable, soft-spoken guy, who's even a little reluctant to discuss what he's done, because he worries who will hear the interview tape. Of course, from there he goes on to explaining how it "tastes like filet mignon", so there's obviously something not quite right...
Lots of LWE-related work. Got changes in both to the Helix site and the GNOME site, so everything should be pretty much set now.
Paul showed up late today, and Hans Petter even later. Hans Petter is still reading Sluggy, although I think he now has only a few months left.
After this LWE stuff is done, I'll have to finish my article. It got completely lost in the noise of day to day work. Then again, I've been thinking about it a lot, and letting ideas stew is usually a good thing, so we'll see.
Talked to John a bit, first time in quite a while. He told me that a lot of Edward Gorey's stuff seems to be available again. I checked Barnes and Noble, and lo and behold, there's lots! I think I have quite a bit of my next order from there determined already. John has a Gorey table calendar, and I'm a little envious of it. Then again, I have a Gorey tattoo, and I think he's a little envious of that, so I suppose it evens out.
Hans Petter's taken to programming with headphones. I don't really mind, although it's a little less social, of course. Then again, given that he works late, it's a boon when I'm trying to sleep. He listens to the same music over and over again, though, specifically Juno Reactor's Bible of Dreams. He claims it makes him very productive, and I don't have any problems believing that, really. I notice Setup Tools are getting mentioned left and right in press releases and articles, so maybe he's feeling the crunch or something.
Thunderstorm after nightfall. No power outage or anything, just very nice lightning and some pretty heavy rainfall. I quite like it, clears the air and provides nice atmosphere. Of course, I didn't really have to go out today.
Not much interesting to write about happened, really. Did a lot of work, but it all falls into one of two categories, either stuff that's really too boring to report, or stuff that's incredibly exciting, but will be revealed tomorrow. Suffice to say it reminds me of Dresden. All shall be revealed.
Got up surprisingly early (midday), but didn't feel very good. No headache or anything, but a lingering unpleasant feeling. A shower, lots of liquid and some decent music later, it was much improved. Hit my head on the balcony door while getting laundry. Unpleasant, but then again, I comforted myself by drinking more coke and listening to more music.
Did a little work, but wasn't really feeling very efficient. Ordered Benedetti's. Ate. Got up to date on mail, web news sites, web comics, and so on. Standard Sunday stuff. Chatted with Belinda.
Thunderstorm with subsequent power failure. Out of the storm comes a tall handsome man with a wet black jacket and funny hair. He was looking quite a lot more sober than yesterday, though. My arms have bruises from sparring with Paul.
Hans Petter started going through the Sluggy archives, starting at the very beginning. This is going to take some time, but judging from the constant chuckling only broken by fits of uncontrolled hysterical laughter, he's enjoying it. I remember when I did the same thing, it took me a whole Sunday afternoon, and that was a year and a half ago.
Belinda's painting. She did a painting of Hans Petter, and got a cam shot from me to base one of me on. I'd link the Hans Petter one, but it's not done yet, so I don't think she'd like that.
Went to bed early. Not much happened, really.
Tired in the morning. Leo called and woke me around 10:30 to get me to play basketball, but I skipped it, and slept until 4 instead. Felt good when I finally got up, lounged around a bit, did some site maintenance, then cut my hair, shaved and showered, went out and got a minimal amount of sustenance, and headed over to Leo's for the party preparations.
Leo had gotten hold of a mixer, and put two soundcards in his box. With a little mucking around, he got two instances of Winamp, each bound to a soundcard, and some plugin so he could muck with the tempo and pitch of the MP3s. He looked pretty set to be all virtual cyber e- i dot-com DJ and stuff. Then we went to buy alcohol. We basically loaded up as much beer and liquor (well, and some chips and things) as four people could carry. We actually had to send Hans Petter back to the store to get ice, because we weren't able to carry any more on the first run.
When the party got started, people actually showed up in reasonably big numbers. Heavy drinking ensued. The last I saw of Hans Petter, he was totally plastered, discussing CVS with some people who were considerably more sober than him. He seemed to be winning the discussion.
Paul and I did some sparring to music, which is always fun. We have each other's techniques down pretty well, so neither of us get through the other one's guard very often. My lower arms are pretty bruised, though.
I walked home at around 6 in the morning, and collapsed into bed. All in all, a pretty good party. I do actually remember a lot more than I'm writing here, but, well, I have to protect the innocent.
Woke up reasonably early, my stomach didn't exactly love me. There was no water, but I went to the bathroom anyway. Got a shower as soon as water returned, about half an hour later. Did some work, then went out to get some food. Paul left at the same time to go and get new glasses, and cleverly, I'd left my keys inside, so I was locked out. Went by taxi to Rune and Monica's to pick up keys from Torfinn.
Got back and in, and proceeded to do some work. Kept arguing with Amazon. We finally got the billing address corrected (it had, indeed, reverted to Hans Petter's parents' address), but now they claimed that it still couldn't be shipped, since the shipping address wasn't listed with the bank as an autorized shipping address for credit card transactions. I wrote back and complained, as usual reminding them that everything had worked the last time, and they wrote back, reiterating their claim, now calling it a "secondary billing address". It seems to me that when the billing address check failed, it got taken out of the smooth automated system, and put into the hand of morons, and there's no going back.
After a few mails back and forth, I mailed them and asked them to kindly cancel my order, delete my account, and take me off all maling lists, and took my business to Barnes and Noble instead. They had all the same books, and we ended up saving like 50 dollars on the order, so that's good. I also registered the data in Hans Petter's name, to avoid any potential problems.
So now I can also claim to be part of the Amazon boycott. Although I much prefer Amazon's web site to B&N's. So I'm probably going to be browsing for books at Amazon, and actually buying them at B&N, in the future.
Went to see X-Men with the gang. I had high hopes, and I wasn't disappointed. It was clever, entertaining, and at times very funny. I had a great time.
Leo's rigging up his living room for tomorrow's party. It's kinda chaotic now, but I expect it'll get better. He seems very happy about it.
Belinda got a picture of her tattoo, finally. Looks really cool. I've noticed a scary tendency in myself. Whenever I see any piece of art, especially illustration like that of Clive Barker, for instance, I think of it in terms of whether it'd make a good tattoo. I think maybe I'm hooked. Anyway, if I'm getting another one, it'll most likely be Neil Gaiman's Satan drawing, which is used as a logo by SATAN (the infamous piece of software). I really like that drawing.
Woke up around 8, felt like I had a fever, although I didn't have a temperature. I did have muscle aches and a general feeling of discomfort, though. Went back to bed and slept to 11, then got up, generally feeling quite bad, which prevailed throughout the day, with no obvious cause.
Small gnome.org and helixcode.com web fixes, then went to eat lunch with Leo. Had pretty decent sushi. It seems Leo's planning a big party thing for Saturday. He lost his DJ virginity yesterday, playing at the Colmillo, which it seems went pretty decently. So now he's renting a deck and stuff for Saturday, and we're celebrating Hans Petter's birthday, and some other stuff, I think. I forget all the components, but the idea is at least to have a party and get drunk or something. This is supposed to happen after we play basketball against the Mexicans, which is during the day on Saturday. So now we'll see if our practice has paid off. I'm considering borrowing Leo's ball and practicing my shots tomorrow.
Amazon.com is screwing me in the ass. For some reason, it seems something changed between when we placed our last order and now, since the order won't go through. The first thing they said was that the billing address was not correct, which might be due to the fact that the billing address we were using reverted to Hans Petter's parents' house or something, since he hasn't actually lived at his student apartment for quite some time. Then later, they tell me that if I'm to use his card, but the name on the actual account I log in with at Amazon is "Joakim Ziegler", I will have to be added to his account as an official authorized user of the card. What the fuck? Did this change since July 12th, when our previous, successful order was placed? Or what's up? I'm trying to talk sense with them now. Hans Petter will have to call his bank in a couple of hours and try to figure out what's going on, I think.
I went to pay my rent today, too. A reasonably uneventful trip, although the cab driver who took me there was unusually talkative, and also had a veritable hanging forest of... stuff in his windshield. We're talking at least 30 separate miniature guitars, flags, figurines, little sombreros, and so on. He was quite friendly, though, and I got a chance to reluctantly practice some Spanish, so it was all good.
Got back, worked more. Lots of little things happening these days, mostly LWE preparations and stuff. I think it's going to be good, though. Look for waves on Tuesday. Big ones.
Belinda got a tattoo today, of a Cleopatra eye. I'd link to a picture, but Paul (Paul in Baltimore, not Madley) didn't send her the pictures he took yet. So that'll have to wait. Seems her mother wasn't too happy, though, but then again, that's kind of the charm, isn't it? My mother doesn't know about my tattoo yet, although I'm considering telling her when I call her this weekend or something. We'll see.
Spent an hour or two debating with Hans Petter with my new article as a starting point. He has a lot of good input on data storage, semantic networks and generic objects. It seems to me it's going to be hard to limit my articles, actually. Although I think I'll keep to talking about pseudo natlang in this first one, that should be fairly broadly applicable.
I've had a mild obsession with Tom Waits' "Black Wings" from "Bone Machine" lately. "Well, he once killed a man with a guitar string / He's been seen at the table with kings / Well he once saved a baby from drowning / There are some who say beneath his coat are wings".
Earthquake this morning, a little before 6 or so. The sound of stuff falling off the walls in the neighbours' apartments woke me up, and I decided it was probably strong enough to warrant standing in the doorway for a while. So I did. Quite undramatic, really, but it disturbed my sleep a lot.
So I got up at 12:30 or so, which is a bit later than I like. Paul was here, but quickly left for lunch, and I went to the bank to deposit some money I owed Mancha, then went downtown to give my visa to the immigration lawyer. Since that was close to Bellas Artes, I went for a walk, from around Bellas artes to a few blocks past Plaza Garibaldi. This is one of the seediest bar districts in the city, and it's interesting what it looks like in the daylight. There's a surprising amount of mariachis, hustlers and beggars in the area even during the day, but I'm decent at not attracting attention/getting them off my back, so that doesn't bother me. I really should get some texture shots of the walls in that area. Some of the buildings are really old, and they've also been covered and uncovered by posters a few thousand times.
Caught a cab back home with a cab driver who was quite friendly and talkative, but looked like Charlie Manson.
Finally placed the order for all the books I had in my cart at Amazon. Hans Petter wanted some too, so we ended up ordering 20 books all in all (5 for him, 15 for me). It feels great to order lots of books, it's kind of like a burde has been lifted off your back. Amongst my picks: Tufte's The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information, a couple of Jakob Nielsen books, David Foster Wallace's The Girl With Curious Hair and Infinite Jest, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, Michael Newton's The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, The Malleus Maleficarum, and some assorted other stuff. This, combined with Hans Petter's order of heavy Natural Language Processing books and one Harry Potter volume makes it funny to see how Amazon's recommendation engine struggles to keep up with "my tastes".
Talked a bit to Belinda. It seems she's getting a tattoo tomorrow. I can't help but assume I'm the catalyst for this, and that makes me happy. We've both been talking about getting tattoos for ages, so it's appropriate that we get them around the same time, I suppose.
Went out around 1 AM to get some food. Ended up at my favourite place to eat burgers, a small cart outside the entrance to the emergency room two blocks down from my apartment. The guy makes great burgers that are really cheap. I also have no worries about the hygiene, I've never had any problems, and I see the hospital employees eat there all the time.
Started outlining my next article. Decided to do pseudonatural language first, since that's what I've thought about the most/longest. I think I'm going to be strict with myself on outlining the article and maintaining a logical structure this time, since I was less than happy with the structure of the last one. I think this is going to be good, though, the structure gave itself easily, so now I just need to flesh it out. Expect the article around Fridayish.
Got a mail from a Canadista who was going to Mexico City to visit his girlfriend, and wanted travel advice or something. I told him what I usually tell people, namely "The guide books suck, and the people who live here have a pretty twisted view of their own home city", and so on. I tend to try to be nice and helpful with people who mail me about stuff like that, although I don't know why. Maybe I just appreciate how confusing this city can be.
Tattoo healing is going well. The sort of scab that forms on a tattoo is different from a normal scab, in that it's thin and distributed over a large area (it's of course actually a combined scab from hundreds of small puncture wounds). I keep putting Neosporin on it, as per the artist's instructions, to keep it clean and moist (so the scab doesn't itch or crack). Works pretty well, although it's a bit of work to tend to it three times per day.
Oh, I finished The Beach yesterday night. It was pretty great, and towards the end it got really fucking unpleasant. I put on Ministry's Psalm 69 before I went to the bathroom to read the final few chapters, and as I was doing the last 20 pages or so, where everything just turns nightmarish, Grace came on. Which, I suppose, was appropriate. Did nothing for my nerves, though. I'm actually able to get a lot more upset about books than about movies, even though movies are supposed to be the more powerful medium. If this goes for most people, I'm guessing the only reason the censors aren't crying out for age limits on books is that it would create an uproar. Hipocrisy, through and through.
I'll have to go and pay my rent tomorrow. My vampire landlord will probably appreciate that.
Got up reasonably early, with the feeling that I'd slept for a very long time, which was comfortable. My body seems to have healed itself considerably while I slept, which is also quite pleasing, given that I can now walk straight again.
Did a quick Illustrator trace of the tattoo, so that I wouldn't accidentally get pixels permanently imprinted on my arm. It was originally a structured drawing, of course, which I traced off the original Gorey illustration from Painted Devils, but the AI file was lost, so I had to redo it from the GIF. Turned out well, though. Also, I got Illustrator 9 the other day, which seriously rocks. I can understand why Raph was all worked up over it, it has all sorts of neat tools that take structured drawing one step closer to the intuitive feel of raster image manipulation, but without losing the precision inherent in structured graphics. Simply a beautiful tool, although the interface is ever so slightly cluttered compared to the typical Adobe interface. I suspect this impression will improve as I get more used to it, though.
So anyway, I'm off to get lunch, and then to see the wonderful tattoo artist of Oz. And then there's no turning back.
Had lunch with Paul and some Designet people, since it was the birthday of Toño, one of Paul's ex-coworkers. We had drinks and food at a cantina downtown. Then I proceeded to the tattoo place, where I had to wait for a bit before the people could ink my skin. Which went really well. The people were nice, it was pretty fast, not very painful, and inexpensive. I also get a free subscription to patches and security fixes for my tattoo, it would seem. Oh, and they also played Red Hot Chili Peppers a lot while they worked. I approve.
I didn't get that much of an endorphine rush as I had expected. Then again, I might just be noticing it directly. I'm pretty mellow, though. I went to the pharmacy and got neosporin, which I'm supposed to apply liberally three times per day. Also got some antiseptic which I intend to use, to try to prevent it from getting infected and stuff. There's a bad webcam photo of the tattoo here, as well as the original drawing here.
Spent some time writing stuff later, then talking to Belinda. Hans Petter did some more work on his C header parser. It pretty much kicks ass, making docs generation really easy and beautiful. He mumbled something about making a complete C parser some time, and we talked a bit about what sort of possibilities for code analysis and debugging would open up if that happened. It's an interesting area. As it is, pretty much the only tool in the chain that actually understands code structure is the compiler, and it doesn't do much in the way of analysis and error prevention.
Thinking about a followup to my Anti-Mac article. I'm hoping to turn this into an extensive article series, and perhaps something more at some point (a book seems optimistic, but who knows?) Anyway, I'm considering either an in-depth look at interactive pseudonatural language interpreters, or some ruminations about on-screen presentation of complex data. I'm intrigued by Powsner and Tufte's "Graphical Summary of Patient Status", as seen on page 111 of Tufte's Visual Explanations. It's a logically organized set of diagrams, readable at a glance, that correlate immense amounts of information. This sort of high-density display will probably be needed for future interfaces, and it's a pretty interesting area of inquiry.
Ended the evening mellowing out to Orbital's Snivilization and eating Chinese. Not a bad day, all in all.
Went to bed early last night, and got up a little late today (woken at 11 by the alarm on my Visor). I think I was making up for the lack of sleep in the weekend. At least 11 isn't late enough to screw up my well-adjusted schedule, as long as I resist the temptation to stay up late tonight.
Got some web stats that had been languishing for a few days back up and running. It was less work than I expected.
Went to the immigration lawyer with Hans Petter and Chac. We didn't do much, just gave him our passports, so it was very little to do for the effort of going downtown. I need to get him my FM3 tomorrow, so I'll do that before I go to the tattoo place. I realized I didn't have the phone number of the tattoo place, so I was unable to change my appointment today. I hope it'll be ok if I just go there tomorrow. They seemed pretty lax about it when I actually made the appointment, to the point where they were like "An appointment? Whatever for?"
Hans Petter acted like a robot on low batteries throughout this. I wondered why, until it turned out he hadn't had any coffee yet. When he did, he perked up considerably. It's his birthday today, he turned 23. Congrats and stuff.
Had a talk with Iain about Loom coordinate conversion. I wonder if there's any generic way of doing it. Problem: Rectangular area tiled with arbitrary identical parallelograms. Given a pixel coordinate, find out what parallelogram it's in. Given a parallelogram, find out what pixel it's in (or which one is in the corner, anyway). I thought up a method using a lookup table describing the boundaries of a single tile, which would be reasonably fast, but it seems clunky to me.
Just had a thought. If you split the paralellograms in four, then a given quadrant and the opposing one in the tile next to it is a rectangle split by a regular diagonal line. This seems like it could be generalized into a rule of some sort. Need to think about it more, but this at least feels close to Rightness. Hm.
Duncan started hanging out on #culturalelite. Interesting. It seems the friction is less than what I might have expected. I always consider it an interesting cultural experiment when different communities I'm a member of sort of diffuse and mix, whether or not it's me bringing about the mixing. Some times it blows up (FIX and Crackmonkey, although that wasn't altogether unamusing), other times it's a happy union (FIX and #gnome people).
I started reading The Beach, which Hans Petter brought. I was kind of determined not to like it too much, because of all the hype, not to mention that it was made into a Leo diCaprio movie (which I haven't seen), but despite myself, I'm liking it a lot. The writing is crisp, the action never drags (which it could very easily do telling this sort of a story) and it's just pretty good. I'm not totally hooked yet, but I can see that it might happen.
People from some movie project Belinda's been doing consulting for mailed me about an image enhancement I did as a favour to her. It seems they want me to do a brief interview, so I might schedule that in for when I'm going to Baltimore. I'm not sure what I'm going to add to it, though, so I asked to see the script first. Also, I'm cool with doing an interview, but the attempt in the mail at making it seem like they were doing me a favour by interviewing me annoyed me slightly. If this happens, it'll be my second movie appearance. The first one was as an extra in a Mexican surrealist movie, where I play a mortician. I wonder if this is going to start a long and illustrious Hollywood carreer?
Speaking of which, Sir Alec Guinness died. He'll be missed.
My body is pretty broken today. The weird thing is, the most painful is my buttcheeks, and that was bad even before basketball. I think I must have done something stupid with my buttcheeks on Saturday, which I can't remember now. That's a slightly frightening prospect. It's sort of a deep muscular hurt, like I used my butt muscles a lot (which would probably involve walking up a lot of stairs, but I certainly can't remember that, and besides, my thighs don't hurt).
From Belinda's Inactivity
Log
From Joa's Activity Log
She also got invited to see "Giant Flying Squirrel Crystallized Urine
Gatherers of Pakistan", a "startlingly anti-idiomatic, post-human
improvisations on saxophones, musical saws, custom-built electronics, and
other, harder to follow equipments". Her comment was "I hope
they have an open bar".
I bought an issue of "Alarma!" today. It's a Mexican true crime and accident magazine, tabloid-style, distinguished by its high frequency of graphic corpse photos, and the adverts for marital aids and porn magazines. I hadn't read it before, only heard of it, so I decided to pick up a copy, and it was worse than I imagined. Not only where there photos of dead people grotesque enough to be on rotten.com, but all the headlines had exclamation marks. There was also a morgue photo of a young girl who had been kidnapped and shot, and I noticed that they'd whited out the nipples in the photo. Oh well, into the soft underbelly of Mexican pop culture I go. I find it strangely fascinating, even though it's nauseating at times.
Hans Petter went home early. Who does he think he is, leaves early just because it's his birthday? Hmpf.
Woke up on a sofa in an apartment in a completely different part of the city from where I live, with no clear recollection of how I got there. I was surprisingly hangover free, though, so I borrowed someone's towel and took a shower (the apartment was also empty, which was even weirder. I briefly considered stealing everything that wasn't nailed down, but figured that would be a bit ungrateful of me), and then took a cab back home to find Paul and Torfinn here. Hans Petter announced Helix Setup Tools yesterday morning, it seems, but the mail didn't arrive in my mailbox until after I left home yesterday evening. Fixed a news item on the Helix front page, linked and Akamaized tarballs, and submitted the story to Gnotices.
Then I called Leo to inquire about basketball. Turns out he, Hans Petter and company got home pretty late and they were probably also hung over, so he'd have to call me back when he was out of bed. I guess I have a few hours to spare.
Talked with Belinda. She went out yesterday too, and took pictures of naked people having sex at some club she went to. I'm impressed. That last pic looks like professional porn. My girlfriend could be a professional porn photographer. That makes me a strange kind of proud. She also got invited to see "Giant Flying Squirrel Crystallized Urine Gatherers of Pakistan", a "startlingly anti-idiomatic, post-human improvisations on saxophones, musical saws, custom-built electronics, and other, harder to follow equipments". Her comment was "I hope they have an open bar".
Brit-boy badly breaks bathroom. Now that Hans Petter hasn't broken the toilet in weeks, Paul makes a habit of it instead. And I have to get my hands and lower arms wet (with clean water) to fix it every time. The other day, one of them had broken it, and then just ignored it all night, so when I got up in the morning, it had drained the building's water tanks, and noone had water. I'm sure my neighbours would kill me if they knew.
I'm going to have to move my tattoo appointment to Tuesday. I forgot Hans Petter and I are supposed to see our immigration lawyer with Chac on Monday at four. I doubt my tattoo will be finished in an hour. But I suppose I'll manage to wait for one day longer.
Got Leo and Hans Petter out of bed, finally. It was hard, they must have been enjoying themselves. Basketball commenced. We did some pretty decent practices, and ended up getting noticably better. My body is broken, though. I have a cut on my arm which must be from a fingernail or something. Or possibly a tooth.
Much amusement at a group of young skater kids who were smoking weed by the court. We smelled it pretty early on, but it wasn't funny until they started talking to each other in authentic Mexican Cheech voices, at which point we cracked up completely. Of course, it was also amusing when they tried skating and couldn't even stand up straight.
Speaking of which, neither can I. I stretched a bit, and then took a hot shower, but I still feel pretty mangled. I definitely need new shoes. I'm getting bad blisters every time I play basketball, and it's because my feet slip around inside my shoes.
My friends scare and amuse me at the same time. Hans Petter (practicing shots): "This is a lot harder than AvP". Me: "Yeah, shooting the ball through the hoop sure is harder than killing thousands of ultra-aggressive insectoid aliens with acid for blood using just a machinegun". Hans Petter: "Well, if I had a machine gun, I'd win this basket game pretty easily".
Spanish is an interesting language. It's pretty impressive how it not only readily borrows foreign words, but also very quickly mutates them. For instance "basquetbol" and "futbol", and more extreme examples such as "sofwer" (software) and "donas" (donuts). The mutation of the spelling almost rivals that in Japanese at times.
Leo wanted to make Norwegian dinner, but since I had showered and was in my bathrobe, and Hans Petter would like to eat it, but not help make it, he postponed it until later in the week. We ordered pizza from Benedetti's instead.
Helix Setup Tools made it onto Gnotices (quite expected) and also to Slashdot (a bit more surprising). The discussion on Slashdot kinda sucks as usual, though. Most people either miss the point, haven't read the white paper, or just flame. The discussion about "are GUI tools a good thing" is certainly interesting, though. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to map the complexity of a package's inner state to a text config file, and quite a lot more to map that text file to the GUI. It seems to me that a good GUI shouldn't look too much at the config file format, but rather examine what the internal state of the package to be configured is. That's what shares-admin does, and it works really well, combining a lot of different config files and protocols that really have more in common that to set them apart.
Got up before 9, completely spontaneously. It seems there is indeed something "natural" about a normally adjusted sleeping schedule, every time I achieve one, my body settles into it really heavily. Stumbled to my desk, turned out Hans Petter hadn't released Setup Tools yet. Oh well, the web page is up, at least.
So now the weekend is upon me. It feels really nice, actually. I'm up early, feeling productive, and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get work done on Loom this weekend. That's going to make me very, very happy.
Shaving is a ritual. I mean, everything having to do with hygiene is kind of a ritual, but for me, shaving and cutting my hair in particular. I use an electric trimmer with the guard off to trim my hair down to about 1-2 mm, and spend a long time going over it back and forth to make sure there are no stray hair sticking out, which is almost an obsession. For some reason, I rub my scalp a lot, and it always annoys me if I find a hair that I've missed. After the haircut, I shave the relevant parts of my body. That's also pretty ritualistic in and on its own, with the foam, the razor, and the rinse. Hm. I fear I'm becoming Patrick Bateman.
I've discovered that I quite often go back and fix diary entries after the fact, for instance when I remember new stuff from that particular day. It usually happens at most one or two days later, though. On the other hand, if I haven't already written anything down for that day, it's extremely hard to remember anything of substance. So the details only show up later if I've put the rough outline down into text more or less as it happens. It's interesting how memory works. I also find I often edit for flow, since a lot of the diary entries written as it happens are really staccato smatterings of short descriptive sentences.
Hans Petter went with Leo and company to, hm, a place I don't know how to spell, but sounds like it could be spelt something like "Cocoyoc". It's this vacationing place not far from the city, anyway. I was invited, but I didn't feel like going. Anyway, it's pretty quiet around here.
I'm becoming more and more accustomed to the idea of calling the game "Empire Down". I'd like to know what associations people get when hearing the name, especially if they don't know anything else of what the game is about. If you get powerful images and visions from this name, please let me know. Oh, well, if you don't too, really. Hm. Might people think it's a mixture of Empire and Watership Down? "You just dumped 1270 fluffy bunnies into the sea."
Belinda did some Lain fanart which turned out really nice.
Got a call from some people I met the other day, and went out with them. There was alcohol, and the rest of the night is somewhat hard to remember.
Was woken up slightly before 9, by my phone ringing. It was Paul, wanting to check that I was here because he didn't have keys. I was, obviously. I got up and lounged around reading and answering mail in my bathrobe until Paul arrived, then showered and got breakfast. I think I dreamed something weird, but it slips through my fingers like sand.
Did the web page for the setup tools today, with nice copy and screenshots and stuff. As I was writing the copy, I realized what a kick-ass piece of software it is. With the planned features, it'll actually make workstation admining easier than on Win or MacOS.
Paul returned to more expected levels of whininess, because he couldn't make some software installation work. I had to tell him to shut up, as it was annoying. He became slightly less whiny after that. He did however assemble the last desk, which means the small desk he had been using was freed up, and was promptly employed as a general table to put stuff on, which made the entire living room a lot neater.
Got my tattoo printed and priced. 350 pesos, or 35 dollars for it 9 centimeters wide. That's pretty damn cheap. Almost authentic Edward Gorey illustrations permanently applied to my skin. I must say I like it. I made an appointment for monday at three, really looking forward to having it done. Went to eat with Paul and Andrea. They opted for some Mexican combo stuff which was extremely greasy-looking, while I did sushi instead. I need to eat sushi once in a while to remind myself of how goodness comes in small, neat, fresh packages. More software should be like Sushi.
When I got back, Hans Petter arrived soon after, and I could finally put updated screenshots in the setup tools page. It's ready for whenever he wants to release it now.
Belinda put up a sketch gallery. Lots of good stuff here, although that grinning toothy girl with no eyes seriously creeps me out. She's the kind of not quite human thing that'll hide under your bed until it's dark, and then climb out and stand at the foot end of your bed looking at you without eyes and grinning, waiting for you to wake up with the feeling of being watched, and see her. Then again, I might have some serious issues.
I thought a lot about the nature of fear the other day, inspired by some of the events described in The Mothman Prophecies. If someone hears heavy footsteps on their roof at night, that's pretty scary. If they go out to see who's up there, and there's noone, yet the sound continues, that's even scarier. Disembodied sounds are scarier than ones that have causes. I mean, some pretty primal fears, like sticking your hand into dark holes, have obvious evolutionary causes. But why a fear of noises which aren't just without obvious cause, but that are provably without visible cause at all? Anyhow, it's interesting how both good horror movies and "transdimensional psyop events" like those Keel describe are basically a systematic pushing of our buttons, in an attempt at an unpredictable pattern.
Got into a seriously funny series of Monty Python references with the Helix people on IRC. I was amused.
My schedule now Officially Works. I got up at 3 AM, but that's to be expected, and is a good sign of a schedule in the process of normalizing. I read mail, did some small work stuff, and then felt restless, so I went for a walk. The streets around here are nice to walk just before dawn, when traffic is just starting. The only people around are garbagemen and street-sweepers, and the air is reasonably clear.
That walk provided an excellent opportunity to do some creative thinking. I don't remember where I read this, but the hours right before dawn are commonly associated with revelatory flashes of insight and visions. It's the time when people most often wake up and see apparitions in their bedrooms, for instance, and it's when mathematicians half-asleep from working all night suddenly realize the connections and see the whole system clearly. I did nothing that'll be remembered for its greatness, but I did sort out a lot of thoughs, and also came up with a new character for my game, and figured out a lot of his details mentally, while walking.
After walking for a while, in a big circle that led back to my apartment, I had tacos with sudadero for breakfast. Terribly non-breakfasty food, really, but the copious amounts of red salsa I put on them gave me a good excuse to drink lots of coke when I got back.
Got back to the apartment, and finished up the HTML stuff I was doing. It turned out pretty well, and Ian seemed pleased. I'll need to clean it up ever so slightly for them to be able to use it, though.
Went to a new computer store on Insurgentes and Xola, which was supposed to have a good selection of peripherals. I wanted to replace my ailing Acer ergonomic keyboard, but there weren't any I quite liked. The store was very good, though. I ended up wanting one of the new Microsoft optical mice with five buttons and stuff, but they didn't have it at the moment, it seems I'll have to drop by on Saturday. Anyway, price was comparable to the mailorder price in the US, so I'm happy.
Went to lunch with Leo and Raquel, a girl he works with, at a restaurant called Chazz. The place wasn't terribly nice, but the burger was good. Finally broke down and bought a cellphone. Normally I'd hate myself for that, but I have the excuse that my phone is always busy, so at least now people can reach me. Of course, that's the excuse. It's going to go downhill from here. Finnish people will be delighted to know I got a Nokia.
Went back by cab, almost pissed my pants on the way, because the traffic was so slow. Luckily managed to keep it in. Did a little more work, then went to Coyoacan to have coffee with some people. Turned out they were goths, musicians, and generally very cool people. The cafe we were at even played Sisters of Mercy. I'm pretty sure Lucretia My Reflection is my favourite SoM song. I'm considering using "Empire Down" as a working title for my game. It also turns out there's a goth/industrial club here every Saturday, so I'm probably going to go clubbing with these guys. Much discussion about the supernatural, as is to be expected. There's an interesting-sounding haunted house in the Coyoacan area, I should check that out at some point.
When I got back home, I got a call on my new cellphone. It turned out to be heavy breathing. I called back (another feature of cell phones I quite like), and it was, lo and behold, Leo. "Why are you breathing heavily over the phone to me?" "I just got home, and I was bored". My friends have issues. Then again, Leo's sexual orientation and tastes has always been the subject of... speculation. He also claimed to be so bored he was bouncing a basketball around his apartment. I'm sure there's some Freudian point here, but I'll neglect to make it, to protect the innocent.
Stayed up, finished all the timezone overlays. If I never live in a timezone again, it'll be too soon. Interesting tidbit: There's practically nothing in GMT -2. It's in the middle of the Atlantic, and doesn't really intersect with much. If you're ever approached by anyone claiming to be in GMT -2, beware. They might be Atlantean agents.
It's interesting how Photoshop and GIMP are good at totally different things. While I much prefer Photoshop's interface for actually editing graphics (it strikes me as more elegant, more compact, and after knowing it for 7 years, it's a lot faster for me to use), but GIMP rules when it comes to exporting a lot of layers as different PNG files, for instance, or general batch processing for web or other end-use.
The mocked around doing work-related HTML. Did come up with some good ideas, but they're not finished yet. Tuomas made some gorgeous graphics to go with it, so this is going to kick ass aestetics wise (as well as code wise, but that's pretty much a given).
Paul's going to be working here for a while. He got a new job in the UK, but he's not going back there for a month or so, so in the meantime, he's using a corner of the living room. It's good, since he's completely in debt to me and Hans Petter now, so we can ask him to do us favours and buy coke and stuff. I briefly considered having him wear a suit and address us both as "Sir", but I concluded that would use up too much of our slack with him for too little gain. He was surprisingly quiet during the day, none of his usual outbursts and whining, so this is going to be good, I think.
Hans Petter spent lots of time polishing the Setup Tools. They're looking pretty r0Xin' now, I think there's a release coming up, and people will most likely love it. Especially the shares admin, I think. It's just a pain to set up file sharing on Unix desktop boxes now (not because it's hard, really, it's just awkward, especially if you really just to mount something for five minutes to copy something), and this tool makes it really effortless.
Crackmonkey is amusing lately. I finally got around to joining, sparked a GNOME flamewar, flamed Enlightenment weenies, and got some pretty good puns in, too. And all in the span of two days. I think this is going to be a long and fruitful relationship. Oh, and I got all my prejudices against E hackers and -users confirmed.
Didn't talk to Belinda all day, since I went to bed at around 7 in the evening. I need to catch up with her tomorrow. As I was checking out her Inactivity log, I noticed she has a neat contact page too. Disbelieve the mention of my puns. They're honestly quite good.
Got up even later. I feel a wraparound coming on. Finished the server move, just in time and all. I notice Apache is kind of a bitch to administrate when you don't do it every day or something, since config parameters change every now and then, and in particular, new and required parameters show up, so your old tried and true configs suddenly break. I'd also like to take this oppotunity to complain about clients that don't speak proper HTTP 1.1, and thus can't use name-based virtual hosts. I thought that sort of thing went extinct years ago, but it seems I was wrong.
Regardless of my thoughts about the US, I must say they've gotten their timezones worked out pretty well. In fact, there are no abnormal timezones at all in the range of zones that intersect the continental US. This means my timezone work is almost done, since the Pacific zones that don't intersect Asia are pretty easy (on the other hand, you Russians should shape up a bit, this "correct borders, but offset by one on all of the continent, while the sea is in the right timezone" stuff simply won't do. There's just no excuse for that sort of thing.
So it seems Mike owes me a case of beer. I didn't really do that much, but I'm not one to say no to an offer like that. I might have to share it with Torfinn, though, if it's at all practical to do so, since he helped me out with some more esoteric Apache troubleshooting. Which reminds me, Apache should actually tell you what the hell it's trying to do, and why it's shutting down. If you mess up and put both Listen and Port directives in the config (I think those were the ones), the syntax checks out ok, and it starts, then immediately shuts down with an "Address already in use" because it tries to bind to its listening ports twice. That should be easy to either avoid, or at least output some useful error message about.
Been thinking a bit about Loom. It's not as good as actually coding on it, but at least it's something. I'm hoping to get a lot of urgent stuff out of the way during the week, so I can put some code in this weekend. Mainly, I'm wondering about what exactly the complexity of a massively multiuser game is, that is, why it's a hard problem. Given that some of the harder and more timeconsuming problems of singleplayer strategy games are removed or reduced in prominence (enemy AI, pathfinding to a degree, etc.), the processing power required shouldn't be that huge. A server or two of the kind that hosts largish websites today should easily be able to serve a couple of thousand simultaneous players, out of a user base of say ten thousand. Now, I don't know what the simultaneous player count for games like Ultima Online is, but it seems like a manageable problem. If it gets big, split the map across servers and get players to jump from one to the other when they move (or use a frontend proxy that does this for them).
I'm seriously considering adapting the FIXmud world I mentioned earlier into a massively multiplayer game. The scary thing is, it would probably be the biggest and most extensive online game world ever, if done completely. Actually, it would span 11 worlds, give or take, each of which has the potential to expand into a game world the size of most other online games. It was originally designed this way to offer "something for everyone" (both from a player and world creator perspective), and as such should be pretty well suited for use in a collaborative effort. Sadly, it seems not all the documents we created back then have been preserved, but the rough pieces are there, and a lot of it would probably do well with rewriting and redesigning anyway, so that's ok. We'll see when I have the time to look at this, though. But reading through the old documents, I do feel the urge.
Got up really late. I think my schedule is about ready to wrap around, which would be good, because this is leaving me feeling guilty and unsatisfied. I'm also noticing that I'm getting too little daylight. Now, intellectually, that's not a problem, I like the night more than the day. But it's getting pretty obvious that a certain amount of daylight is required to keep a certain energy level and initiative, and I'm feeling myself slowed down a bit by the skewed sleeping hours. Not good.
Started the work of moving Helix webservers. More work than I expected, but then again, I meta-expected that. Good thing is that this sort of move gives you the chance to clean up all the config crud and stopgap measures that have accumulated over time.
More timezone overlays. I swear, whoever actually designed these things was on some serious crack. My personal favourite in the world of timezones is GMT -3:45, which is a small country on the northeast coast of South America. I'm too lazy to figure out which one it is at the moment, but I sincerely hope it's a mosquito-haunted, malaria-infested swamp hellhole, they'd deserve it for pulling this sort of shit. There should logically be 24 timezones, but how many are there? 37. Bah.
I think I'm getting back into a writing mood. Which is good, because I've felt bad about letting this log languish. There's still a bit left until I reach the same volume as a few weeks ago, but at least I don't feel so empty anymore.
Got up pretty late, after staying up half the night with Hans Petter discussing consciousness, cognitive process, creativity, user interfaces, and related topics. It was a very enjoyable discussion, but it killed all possibility of basketball today. Oh, well. I spent the day lounging instead, got some timezone overlays done for Hans Petter, and then discussed work stuff on IRC and by mail for a while.
Torfinn, Hans Petter and I ordered pizza. Benedetti's is far superior to any other pizza chain I've tried here in Mexico.
Got up at a decent time, went drinking with Mexicans. Pretty nice cafe we ended up in, the Bizarro in Coyoacan. Good beer, and a nice place. Even played good music. Much sitting down and drinking beer ensued. I discovered there is a limit to how long one can have beer as one's only sustenance.
When I got back, around 11 or so, I had the munchies. Of course, there was no pizza left, so I went on a shopping raid, got tortas and some doritos and stuff. Overestimated my own hunger, doritos untouched.
Belinda has cable now. I'm jealous, actually. Even though I think I managed the cold turkey from 512 kbps to 56k dialup pretty well, I'd sure like to have some more bandwidth.
She also fixed her hair, by cutting it herself and then dying it. I have no pictures. This annoys me.
Since I took the loperamide hydrochloride on Wednesday, I've not been to the bathroom. Well, except to pee. This worries me, as I've been eating normally, and hence, food must either be just absorbed into my system, or my gastric system is on the verge of bursting. Strangely, I don't feel any discomfort.
Basketball tomorrow. I'm happy about this. Paul can't play, as he's going to "ride horses" instead. I'm sure that's code for some perverted limey sexual practice.
Excepting the basketball, I plan to make tomorrow a work day. Lots of little things I want to get done, so I've made myself a list and stuff.
My clothes smell of smoke, which I kind of hate.
Rectal update! I went to the bathroom! Also, the sky outside of my window gives this eerie dull flash of light every few seconds. I'm pretty certain the two events are unrelated, but after having read the Mothman Prophecies, I'm not completely sure.
"60 years ago, it was WW2. Now, it's KDE2. Both are by Germans. Both end in '2'. See the pattern? Stop it before it's too late!"
Got up late (yet another chance to correct my sleeping schedule blown, oh well), found out we released Evolution 0.3.1, fixed webpages accordingly. Suddenly got a whole lot of little tasks to do, fixed some of them, going to take care of the rest during the weekend, I think.
Belinda got a haircut, and it seems it turned out bad. I feel guilty, since I didn't pick out a good one for her or something.
Went to a "Matrix Party" at some club. Got VIP passes through Leo, which was neat. Didn't drink very much, and went home reasonably early. I must be getting old, I get tired after 3.5-4 hours of dancing. Music was cool, and the party in general pretty decent, although it wasn't terribly Matrix-y (with the exception of some people in very cool costumes, who showed up, grabbed a full bottle of tequila each, and promptly disappeared. I'm guessing this is their ruse to get free liquor).
A song was played which had samples of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. The song happened to be pretty cool, but I couldn't help but notie the irony, the room being full of the light-skinned elite of Mexico, perhaps one of the world's more racist countries.
Having bought pizza before going out turned out to be a brilliant move. Eating it cold and guzzling some coke is a pretty neat way to end the evening, actually.
This activity log should now finally be synced up. Entries lately have been brief, but I hope to rectify that from now on. I'll start my habit of having the file open and adding to it during the day again, should work pretty well.
Evolution preview 4 (0.3) day. Got synced up with Ettore about announcements and website updates, actually managed to land the news item on the site more or less exactly at the same time as the announce went out to the list. The beauty of a well-planned release.
This diary entry isn't complete, but if I don't upload now, I'll never get the damn thing into sync. So I'll do that, and add more later.
The end of the day is a blur. I suppose that's what happens when you're up too long, and try to remember it afterwards. Lots of little things on the Helix Code site, at least.
Got up pretty late, my schedule is out of wack again. I'll have to wrap this one around to fix it. Shouldn't be too hard.
Hans Petter spent some time arranging three Helix monkey (one big, two small) and a penguin hand puppet around his Visor cradle. Now, then his Visor is in the cradle, it all looks like one big happy plush family, except that mother penguin got irradiated while she was pregnant with Visor, and he came out all translucent orange and plastic and shit. Still, I'm sure they love him.
Turns out the preview release was postponed until tomorrow midday, which is fine with me, really. Ettore sent me some mail so we can sync up, looks like most of it's under control. Since I got up so late, I'm going to just stay up and get some of my todo items out of the way while I wait for the tarballs and the release announcement.
An old FIX conference, which only sees sporadic activity, got an upsurge today. It's fix.no.roelp, and if you're not Norwegian, you couldn't possibly understand it. Suffice to say we had a lot of fun.
More time reading Foley and van Dam. I'm falling into my usual pattern when attacking a large and heavy book: A period of probing into it at random, before I sit down and read the whole thing. Luckily, it doesn't have extremely tight continuity, it seems, so the probing does give results. Still noticing that my math is less than satisfactory, though. I'm envious of people like Raph and Federico, who know all this stuff by heart.
Stomach upset, administered 4 mg of loperamide hydrocloride orally, which was uncomfortable, but took care of the problem.
People I hang out with on IRC are less than stable.
<mathisfun> haha woah 'now to this newsflash supreme court decided to pull
plug on napster'
<mathisfun> good it sucks anyway
<mathisfun> down with the .mp3
--- mathisfun sets ban on *!*@*.mp3
<mathisfun> afkafkafkfkafkfk
--- mathisfun is now known as afk
Gotta love Matty, though.
I also notice a new and disturbing trend in online conversation, which is sure to leak into the real world: If people are told to "read", "check out", "see" or "find" something, the common response is "URL?" I stupidly did this today when Belinda asked me to find her a cool haircut, as if there's some Internet Haircut Database out there where I could just pick one I liked. Actually, that's not a bad idea. If you create one and dot-com it, I'd like some pre-IPO stock as thanks for the idea.
Got up to the sound of the doorbell, books finally arrived. Yay. Spent the next couple of hours reading Tufte's "Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative". Gorgeous book, and even though it only touches on computer interface design in a paragraph or two, the entire thing feels really relevant. In particular, in the light of my recent ruminations, I'm interested in how heavily Tufte criticizes icons, metaphoric devices and complex systems that mask the actual information, when it could be better illustrated by a more abstract display of the raw data.
Still, I must admit that I'm having some problems evisioning how exactly an anti-mac interface would look, especially how the entire "desktop" would look. I don't have problems seeing how components could be, for instance a shell, but I'm uncertain how it would all come together. A windowing system might still be the most suitable way of organizing the space on your screen, but I'm not 100% convinced of that. I feel that a windowing model is very unchanging with context, although I'm not sure if that's a good enough argument for not using it. It might be that it can be augmented somehow. Need to think about it more. Perhaps the ideas of separate components will grow in my mind until they touch each other, and cover the screen.
In that vein, I had a talk with Hans Petter about my pseudo-natlang shell ideas. It seems he liked them a lot, we talked about the differences in complexity in imperative, inquiring and descriptive pseudonatural languages. Imperative language is typically quite simple (which is why I'm convinced a shell like the one I've described would work, and would have a high level of precision.) The hard part of natural language is descriptive language, it would seem. I thought a bit about how a shell that used a pseudonatural language would probably want to have the ability to display results graphically as well, not sure how that should be combined. Need to look at this XMLTerm stuff too, sounds like that's something along those lines.
Made myself a little checklist for the Evolution preview release tomorrow. It's not that much work, but the last time I got to know about from the lists, so I'm going to be prepared this time. I think I've got it more or less down.
Foley and van Dam is different from what I imagined. Good news: It's not quite as heavy on the math as I feared, and the pseudocode and C example code is very readable and understandable, so I think I can get through most of the 2D stuff at least without too much math. I need a reccommendation for a good calculus book, though, since I never actually got any university-level math. I asked a couple of math-inclined people I know, and they're going to cook up some ideas for what books I should buy. At least I'll have more motivation to learn this stuff now than back in school. Bad news about the book is that it covers stuff well, but very quickly. They don't say too little, but they sure don't say too much either. No skipping pages, or you'll suddenly be stuck without knowing how to draw lines properly or something. But, all in all, it seems an excellent book.
Got around to linking the Helix Setup Tools page from our tech section, after Miguel asked me why it wasn't. Turned out I'd forgotten to commit my changes. Still need to make a more user-friendly page for it. Been pondering the interface of the share admin a lot, there's a bit too much clutter there, but I'm uncertain how it can be removed. Annoying or challenging, depending on how you look at it.
Was up all night, so this log starts at some random point in time.
Bank runs today. Since the Mexican bank system hasn't caught on to the whole idea of interconnecting their systems, you can't actually go to any bank to deposit money in someone's account, you have to go to the nearest local office of the bank the person uses, and deposit there. So I went pretty far today, to make two payments (the banks were in opposite directions from my house). This led to: a) Me being randomly offered a credit card in a bank where I'm not even a customer, and when I explained that I wasn't a customer, and not even a Mexican, they were like "Doesn't matter, you just need your passport". I got the chick's card, I might check it out. A Visa card would make book purchases much easier (I currently use Hans Petter's card for that). And b), the same bank has an internal TV channel. This is on with the volume cranked up loud close to the 20-minute line where you have to wait to make a deposit. And this channel is showing a documentary show on... Vengaboys. My head hurts. Terribly.
Later, I went out and finally got a fluorescent tube for the bathroom. That was kind of tricky in itself, I got sent from store to store, deeper and deeper into what I can only describe as a bad neighbourhood. I didn't even know there was one so close to my house. It wasn't terribly bad, but I might have second thoughts about going there at night. I almost bought a kitten on my way back, there was a pet store that had some incredibly cute ones. Figured it might be better to think about it for a while. I do want a cat, though, I miss the ones in Norway.
Also on the way back, I met a homeless man who was talking to himself and gesticulating. Scary part was, he looked a lot like RMS. I'm not sure this means RMS looks uncouth, or if there's some deeper meaning, but I was a bit taken aback. I gave him some money, even though he didn't ask. He seemed to be happy about it, though. I mean, this guy probably didn't get a MacArthur award or anything.
Someone sent me a huge mail. I mean, this mail is like Charles Bronson in the great escape, it's digging ssh tunnels. Yo' momma's mail is so big, postfix hit some default limit on mail size, and I had to reconfigure it to be able to pull it down with fetchmail. To make things worse, this particular form of SMTP daemon croaking throws fetchmail off or something, so it quit the entire session. Result was that I had some 300 mails queued on the server that caches my mail in Norway, with this monster mail first in line. It's downloading as we speak. Yes, I could just have telnetted in and deleted the damn thing, but I'd like to know what it actually is, now that some person bothered to send me multiple tens of megs of data in one mail.
Maru dropped by, and left with Hans Petter. Twenty minutes after they left, the rain came down, like a wall of water right off the edge of the balcony. Clears the air, at least. The wind that always comes with it swept through the apartment, scattering papers all over.
<Ankh> But knees and feet get bad press, so I like to help them.
Hans Petter returned, and didn't get wet. I'm happy for him, yet my schadenfreude didn't get satisfied. There are hummingbirds on the balcony now. I should get one of those feeder things that you fill up with sugar water. Then again, having played "It Came From The Desert", I know that sugar can attract unwelcome visitors.
The sky turned an awe-inspiring bright orange as the sun went down tonight. Hans Petter commented that the only thing that could possibly make it better, was if the light pulsed. "I't a beautiful day! Just look at that sky! Hah! Nature never knew colors like that! And when you look at it, be sure to wear your shades!"
My mammoth mail was, um, a garbled mess which I could extract no useful information from. Annoying.
Books should arrive tomorrow. Yay and doubleyay.
Got up insanely late. As in, vampire late. More comments to the article on Advogato, several of them good. Considering writing another followup, but I think I'll wait until I've thought about things a bit more, and also so that more followups can agglomerate.
As usual when I sleep on and off for a long time (which seems to happen when there's a particular type of weather, not too hot nor too cold, and before heavy rains), I had vivid dreams. I dreamt I went with some friends (none of which were my real-life friends) down a forest road in the dark, and then into the forest, which was full of fog. I lost sight of my friends, and wandered about for a long time. When I finally found my way back out, my friends were nowhere to be seen, so I went to their house to ask what had happened. They were old people, and told me I'd been lost in the forest for many years. After that, I wandered around the town for a while, and drifted into a marketplace, where I met a woman with red hair who I recognised as an old lover. She sold books on the occult, and we decided to resume our relationship.
I managed to play some Thrill Kill Kult to Hans Petter. Turns out he hadn't heard it before, and after a few songs (including Martini built for two, Sex on wheels, Glamor is a rocky road, and Waiting for mommie), he exclaimed "This is brilliant! I didn't expect to find music I'd never heard before that I liked this much!" Well, I'm happy to deliver. Of course, he might have been in an altered state of consciousness after the insane undertaking he embarked on today: He decided the perl scripts and things that generated API docs for GTK and related projects were too lame to use for Flux, so he sat down with flex and bison and made a fucking C header file parser. In a day. And it works. He now gets the entire syntactical structure parsed to Flux' own base data structure, token trees. I tell you, the man is insane. But I'm still envious.
Walking to the store at 2AM to get some coke, I passed a young man dressed as if he was just out of the tennis club; white v-neck sweater over a white shirt, white pants, and white shoes. He was lugging a huge sports bag, and whistling a merry little tune. I wonder what was in the bag. Latinamerican Psycho.
JWZ posted a rant about fanboys. I think must be the final indicator that he's entered geek superstardom. Interesting, since, as he's fond of pointing out, he's not even in the industry anymore.
Got into a discussion with Åshild over at FIX about the Norwegian cultural heritage, why I hate that expression, and why people should read Ibsen because it's damn good literature, not because they happen to be Norwegians, as was he. The discussion eventually turned to the indigenous people of Norway, and I made a humorous point about giving limited self governance to the Pakistanis of eastern Oslo. My point was actually that we should either give the Sami people their own country, or we should integrate them. It's not like other minority groups are pampered in the same way.
Unfortunately, no basketball this Sunday, with me sleeping, Paul out of town, Hans Petter hacking his insane C parser, and Leo probably hung over after being out last night. We'll need to pick it up next weekend, though. Perhaps even before, but I think Leo might have problems getting off work to do that.
I think I have to cut this diary entry short, because it's strictly speaking Monday now.
Got up really late, discovered the article had hit Slashdot. I suppose that makes me as cool as iGN. As usual, the discussion on Slashdot was mostly inane and missing the point ("These anti-mac bigots always say the same thing! I'm not going to read the article!", "A natural language interface? Haha! That'll never work!", "I think speech interfaces are the way of the future", "BeOS is this, it has both a GUI and bash", and the obligatory discussions about MacOS, BeOS, the superiority of the command line, and so on), while the replies on Advogato, also as usual, are well thought out, clever, and low-key. Not really surprised by any of this.
Spent some of the day reading papers that people on Slashdot and Advogato provided pointers to. I guess there are some reasonable people on Slashdot too. I'm pretty fascinated by the whole Calm Computing thing, and also a bit annoyed that I've only barely heard it mentioned before, considering it was actually a pretty publicized philosophy in the mid-nineties.
JWZ informed me that the reason he's bitter and hostile is that it's the only way he can keep from snapping and killing a bunch of people. So now I know. I think I can understand him, after reading the log of his DNA Lounge work. I wonder what was tougher, the crunch when he was working on Netscape Navigator 1.0, or the work he's doing now. I wish him lots of luck, anyway. It seems I need to go on a trip to SF whenever it finally opens, from what I've read, our tastes in both music and visuals overlap quite a lot.
Hans Petter rewrote his Empire display engine to scroll by copying the reusable area of the display to a backbuffer, painting the scrolled in area to the backbuffer, and then blitting the whole thing back. He hoped to make the redraw look monolithic, but it turns out blitting a full-screen 1600x1200 pixmap from RAM to video memory is pretty slow, so it takes like 3-4 vertical scans to do it, making the scroll look as ugly, although in a different way than before. This pissed him off enough to physically jump up and down, mutter about the state of X server technology, and then go out on the balcony to smoke furiously. I told him to get XF86 4.0 with the new XAA and stuff. Of course, when I actually checked the status of the 4 series (specifically 4.0.1, it turns out it supports sod all chipsets. My Savage 4, for instance, is unsupported.
Bought pizza to celebrate my newfound Slashdot fame, then Torfinn came back here, and Hans Petter, him and I played AvP for a bit.
At some point during the day, the keyboard on my Linux box lost the repeat speed and threshold setting, making text editing annoying. I'm too lazy to fix it right now. Bah. Ok, I finally got around to setting it. It's always tricky to get it right, because although I love fast repeat rates on local editors and so on, a shell somewhere in Norway which I see through SSH on our 56k dialup line is a a bit scary to operate with 50k characters per second repeat rate. It's decent now, though.
Wrote a big followup to the comments to my article on Advogato. Too bad I couldn't come up with more to add to Raph^H^H^H^HAdvogato's comments, but I felt they were reasonably well stated in themselves. Just not very relevant, maybe. No matter how you figure, the web is a kind of shitty user interface. It's sad, but true. Anyway, the followup is over here.
Got a mail from a very angry gentleman regarding something called Eternity, seeminly a distributed storage and retrieval system, which I haven't had time to look at closely yet, but it looks interesting. So I'm putting it in here to not forget. Oh, and Linas, don't sweat the elitism thing. It's a fundamental part of how Advogato works, and it works really well. If you'd bother to put some info about yourself, you'd get certified plenty quick too (I had to dig a bit to figure out who you were, I knew I'd heard the name before, but not where). All communities define themselves by exclusion. It's how it works.
Belinda named a tamagotchi thing after me. It lived for about an hour, she neglected it to talk to a gay guy from the Philippines (pretending she was a guy) and it stepped in its own shit, got poisoned, and died. Makes me wonder if there would be a market for voodoo Tamagotchis, a small device with a slot to insert a lock of hair or something, and then you could nurture the person, neglect it, and kill it, causing instant magical death in the person as well.
After writing the example in my followup at Advogato, I kind of feel like taking Hans Petter's language parser code and make a Python module from it. It'd be a pretty good starting point for a shell like the one I describe. But I can't do that now, no time, and way too many things to do already. We'll see.
I'm really starting to notice how writing down my thoughts helps make them much more organized and coherent. I've taken to keeping a window with this file open all the time, so I can add to the day's activity log entry as I go along. Then at night, I go back and reread it all, and upload the file. In addition, of course, I've been forced to structure my thoughts for the Advogato article, and that's helped me straighten out a lot of ideas I've had for user interfaces for a long time, but haven't really managed to flesh out. If this keeps up, I'll be a mean, lean thinking machine within a few weeks more. Can't say I mind. I said "mind". How amusing. Ouch, my sides.
Still no Hans Petter-related toilet breakage. Oh, and he coded on Flux today, apparently doing some major identifier renaming and such. I'm happy, this is the beginning of changes that will percolate up and become Conglomerate coding activity.
Just before I was going to transfer this, the power went out. Second time today, both short (5-10 minute) outages. I'm really happy about the UPS, though. Not sure how long it lasts, but it handles these short outages quite nicely, so all I had to do was sit around in the dark and wait for a bit. I guess that's a hint to go to bed.
Got up late-ish, no books, so I called DHL. Turns out they've been trying to call me to ask me if it's ok that I pay a customs fee of 240 pesos. I told them yes, and could they please deliver the books soon. They said "Yes, on Tuesday". Groan.
Somehow got involved in a discussion about tantric sex. Hans Petter was kind enough to inform everyone that it leads to an increased risk of prostate cancer. Specifically, male orgasms without ejaculation do. Annoying. I shall have to cut down on my 25-orgasms-per-night-and-no-wet-spots sex life, I suppose.
Talked to Miguel about the GUI of Hans Petter's setup tools. Sadly, Hans Petter wasn't present, but it seems I'm going to be at least providing some input on interface stuff. This makes me really happy. When I grow up, I want to be a UI engineer.
One of the BSD guys on FIX (don't remember which one, the BSD people all look the same to me) told me that Usenix' monthly journal is named ;login:. Now, I'm sure there are historical reasons or something for this name, but it's still pretty ugly use of punctuation. It reminds me of the mindless use of colons by a a certain Norwegian newspaper. (Note: Any jokes about the phrase "Use of colons" will be met with serious abuse of the joker's colon. You were warned.)
Arguing with JWZ and others on #gnome about Jabber, ICQ as an IM protocol, free software programmers' tendency to NIH syndrome and cloning, and so on. As usual, I'm impressed with how hostile JWZ is to everything and everyone, but, also as usual, he's got some good points. In particular about innovation, or the lack thereof.
Great quote from JWZ a little later:
...Colorado Rockies slugger Todd Helton's unique explanation of why his team has yet to win a game at San Francisco's Pac Bell Park. "The people all wear dark clothing," declaimed the 6-foot-2, 206-pound first bagger and student of urban angst. "It's the Gothic scene. It brings you down. Nobody is happy around here."
Oh yes, the gothic baseball fans of San Francisco. There's a story over at Salon if you want to read it for yourself.
Amusement as I figured out the Michael Newton on a mailinglist I'm on is the same Michael Newton that wrote "The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers", which is in my shopping cart at Amazon. Said shopping cart contains 16 books now, for a total price of 400 dollars plus shipping and handling. Being an intellectual ain't cheap.
Raph mailed me his feedback on the draft of the Anti-Mac article. As usual, Raph delivers in large amounts. Some of the feedback, I worked into the article, some other (specifically about the moving of the UI to the web) is something I'll let him cover in a followup, since it's not that central to my article. Went over it again, added some stuff, and posted. Probably one of the longer articles in the history of Advogato. I'm reasonably pleased with it, but I still feel it could be more consise. Oh well, we'll see what people say in followups.
Belinda's going to start keeping a journal, to keep up with Hans Petter and me. She claims that since she doesn't do much, it'll have to be called an "inactivity log". It's over here, and I strongly urge you to check it out. If nothing else, then for the very cute monkey drawing.
Matty, a skateboarder we hang out with on IRC which is most remarkable for seeming to channel the ghost of Burroughs, got back from the Bahamas. They didn't have grass skirts there, but they had coconuts.
Belinda pointed me to Spoon Watches again. I've seen them before, but then I was poor, and now I'm not. I think I want this one. Face For Watches seems to even want to ship to Mexico. Their Flash interface is annoying, but I'll put up with a lot to get this thing.
Yay, the article is getting comments on Advogato, and they're good comments, too. Joey Hess linked to a paper from PARC called The Coming Age of Calm Technology, which seems to have some very interesting ideas about how computers can communicate information to the user in a non-intrusive way. Looks promising, I need to think about it some more. Anyway, if the influx of great replies continues, I'll definitely need to sit down and write a reply myself tomorrow. I'm reminded why I love Advogato; unlike many other online forums, which are like big shouting matches, Advogato is like sitting down and having some coffee with a few friends and friends of friends, exchanging ideas about issues of mutual interest. In a way, it reminds me a lot both of the discussions on FIX, and of the best late-night conversations I've had with my best friends.
Got up not quite as late as usual, feeling better. Might be my intensive chemical warfare programme is bearing fruit. Gloria was here, did the whole washing and laundry thing, and even fixed a clothesline. Joy.
Still no books, still "clearance delays". I'm not amused. If this package doesn't arrive tomorrow, I'll call DHL or something. It's not supposed to take this long, dammit. I have another 10 books or so lined up at Amazon for when my next salary arrives, including a pretty complete daemonology library, but this is an offputting experience.
I need to change the fluorescent tube in the bathroom. It does give a certain AvP feeling, but, much as in the game, I suppose, it makes it hell to aim. I think I need a Smartpenis, that tracks the toilet by itself. Short, controlled bursts, people. Then again, changing the light might be easier. On the light side, it's been ages since Hans Petter broke my toilet.
Belinda got her new machine today, which means more web design and stuff on her part. Can't be bad. Although it means I've hardly talked to her today, as she's busy moving data and stuff. Situation should improve when she's all done.
Rain in the afternoon, that heavy, pounding rain that clears the air and drives people off the streets. Can't say I mind, but I probably would if I needed to get to or from somewhere; traffic basically just stops when it rains, which is probably a good idea, given that the sewage system can't drain away more than a light drizzle, so the streets turn into rivers.
Had brief but interesting article with Hans Petter about why people perceive their existence as meaningless (it is, ultimately, of course, but that doesn't mean I think perceiving is at such is beneficial or even natural). We both seem to agree that it's caused by people not being allowed to find their preferred area of expertise, but mainly because the educational system doesn't encourage or even allow enthusiasm about what you're doing. In the end, enthusiasm and joy of the labor is what drives both me and Hans Petter, and I think also most other free software hackers (forget the fuddy-duddy "Gift Economy" crap). Love what you do, and you'll do it well.
Made a draft of the webpage for Hans Petter's setup tools, while he started doing the interface for the share admin. That's the tool to really demonstrate how incredibly neat the whole architecture is, it combines lots of complex and non-intuitive operations in the background, and gives you a wonderfully simple interface for finding and mounting network shares, be it Samba or NFS. So that basically kicks ass.
We ordered Chinese. It took forever to get, turns out the guy tried to call here and got a busy signal. I need a second phone line, I think. All the while, Hans Petter was complaining about being hungry, but when the food finally arrived, he had stopped being hungry. No wonder he's so skinny. The proprietors of the Chinese restaurant (La Nube Blanca, by the way, most excellent, Insurgentes Sur and Angel Urraza, 55591448/55595101/55598169, order the Chao Mein especial and the Cha Siu agridulce, and maybe some pan con carne) speak a very... interesting Spanish, basically sounding like a movie parody of a Chinese accent, but applied to Spanish instead of English. Almost impossible to understand, but they're so nice and polite people, it's usually not a problem at all.
An earthquake hit around 1am or so. Not terribly powerful, but the movement was large and slow enough that I deemed it worthwhile to go outside, so I stood around in the street for 10 minutes. My neighbours are either very heavy sleepers or just careless, only the twentysomething couple downstairs bothered to come out. They showed up looking confused, in pyjamas, and then proceeded to walk off into the Mexico City night. I never saw them again, but I spent some time watching the bike cops gather at a street corner, shouting into their walkie-talkies, and as it turned out the quake wasn't very serious, they stood around telling jokes and talking. Being a Mexico City bike cop probably isn't too bad. CNN reports no material damages, and no people hurt. In my ever-optimistic state of mind, I choose to believe that this means the tectonic tension is broken for half a year or so, so I practically got a new lease on life. Well, having the flu and then getting squashed under a collapsing building is the kind of stuff that could theoretically piss me off a lot, so I'm happy it didn't happen.
Spent a couple of hours writing up an article on the Anti-Mac stuff I've been thinking about lately. I'm planning to post it on Advogato tomorrow, since it's mainly done, but needs some (a lot, possibly) polish. The draft is over here, if you bother to read it and have constructive comments, you can mail them to me. I actually think it's pretty decent, considering I had the flu and was interrupted by an earthquake while writing it.
I definitely have the flu. Nose clogged when I got up, throat partially. In a preemptive strike, sure to confound the enemies of my well-being, I bought and ingested chemicals. Large doses of oximetazoline nasally, and bromhexine orally really did the trick. My nose is now constantly running, but at least it's thin as water, and not as annoying. This stuff really tastes bad, though. Bromhexine in particular, the liquid is thin as water and doesn't taste much when you first swallow, but then this really bad metallic/chemical aftertaste sets in. Oh well, at least I can function more or less normally.
Noted we have Sun on our side now. This ought to get interesting. Also noted KDE people were mysteriously silent in the Slashdot discussion, with the exception of a couple of "Damn, I'd hoped for KDE integration" and "We can use this code for the KOffice filters!"
Encouraged Hans Petter to make lame "Share and enjoy" jokes in his share-config tool. Not sure if this will work. Still no more books. The DHL website lists a ridiculous number of "Clearance delays", which seem to be random events that take up time after the package has actually arrived. These "clearance delays" now take up nearly two full days.
A round of AvP cooperative with Hans Petter in the afternoon proved challenging, but mildly repetitive. I won, the difference was around 100 points, ending up at around 1200-1300 each, in total. The grenade launcher is a misunderstood weapon. Most people think it's all about brawn and knocking out large areas, but it's really a precision weapon with a lot of subtle potential.
Made a new mailing list subscription interface for the Helix Code site. Not beautiful enough to use yet, but it's nice, functionality-wise. Noticed Miguel's OLS speech, in which I think he succeeded nicely in insulting everyone. Mainly Red Hat, though, I think. Yet, there are lots of good points in there, Unix' fear of standardizing, which I think not only came about as a defense for hackers, but also as a result of the different commercial vendors not wanting to sacrifice proprietary "advantages", is pretty crippling, and has made the learning curve much steeper than it needs to be. Luckily, we're here to change all that.
I wonder if GNOME on Unix is moving towards Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen's Anti-Mac Interface. It would seem that we're at least laying the foundations for it, especially with Bonobo exposing so much of objects' interfaces to the world. When Hans Petter did a sort of natural language parser last year (it was more like an Infocom text adventure parser on steroids, but could handle reasonably complex sentences, if not poetic language), I toyed around with the plausibility of building an object manipulation system on top of it. Letting a parser like that at Bonobo interfaces, with some thin glue logic, could be interesting, if the interfaces in themselves are high-level enough, and the parser does some preprocessing (for instance figuring out what files the user is referring to when he says stuff like "the report I made on Friday" or whatever).
In addition, we certainly have the graphics infrastructure for more expressive interfaces. Nautilus does some of the things talked about, like using thumbnails (even small versions of the actual document) as icons, so there might be room to do this sort of thing there.
Stuff like the Helix Updater and Evolution can also nicely be the foundation for shared control, at least between the user and her human contacts. I don't know of any efforts to do agent type technology in GNOME, but I can see how that sort of thing would fit in (monitoring of news sites, usenet, mailing lists, web searches). Personally, I really want and need the possibility to not only perform a search once, but to do it continuously, monitoring new data added to see if it matches my query, and alerting me if it does.
Rambling, I guess. Now I really want to do interface work again. Or maybe I'm just on drugs. Hey, wait... Anyway, I feel tempted to do a write-up for Advogato on how we might be more or less unwittingly approaching the Anti-Mac interface, and what this means for Unix GUI environments. Let me know if you have comments.
Woke up late again, slept well, a warm, deep sleep. I'm sure I dreamed, but I can't remember any of it. My throat was still sore, seems the flu that was toying with me a week ago might be coming for real now.
DHL package with a single book arrived while I was in the shower. The Mothman Prophecies has an incredibly tacky cover, expertly done by my old hero Frank Frazetta (it even has a busty, scantily clad woman). I tore through the book quickly, a very easy read. Damn strange, though. I don't really know what I think of it yet. The events described in it are eerie, sometimes primally frightening, yet the author's total paranoia and belief that huge events are set into motion centered on him seem a bit too much like mental illness to me, especially towards the end of the book. Still, great addition to my new "library of strange stuff" project. I most definitely need a bookshelf.
Hans Petter was all stressed out because someone had demoed Conglomerate at the O'Reilly documentation summit. Apparently, Eric S. Raymond had been very excited about one of the slightly more original parts of my GUI design, the display of markup names below the marked up sections. Yes, that's ESR, the author of the famous The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He liked my stuff. Yay. My life is now complete. I think I'll get a gun and change my political views. Hold on. No, I won't. Still, it's interesting that people are displaying interest. Hans Petter seems ready to start work on Conglomerate again, and I'll try to do up a detailed UI spec for the new version.
Got some more work in on the developer page. My scripts crashed and burned on the first test, not totally unexpected. A splitting headache and growing muscle pains set in during the afternoon, so I did some reading and relaxing instead. I hope this passes quickly, I hate being sick.
Belinda's new domain, sinthetic.org came up today. It'll be interesting to see what she's going to do with it, we talked a bit about finally doing the urban legends project we've thought of before, and publishing it there, as well as some other things. Should be good.
I hope the rest of my books arrive tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm afraid of glowing red eyes in the dark. I notice most of my computers have green, not red lights. Must be to prevent people from accidentally mistaking them for glowing red eyes in the dark or something.
Federico's activity log gave me the courage to finally remove the keyboard drawer on my desk. Smart move in principle, but in my weakened state of the flu, as well as it being late at night, I unscrewed stuff while sitting in my chair, thus making the keyboard drawer fall off suddenly, onto my feet. Luckily, I'd taken the keyboard out first, but I now have bruises. Oh, well. At least I could elevate my chair, and I think my back will love me for this. But I had to clear the desk to make room for my big-ass Acer Ergonomic keyboard, which makes me think that a) I have way too much stuff on my desk, specifically there's no need for three different Visor cradles, and b) I need a shelf for my books (see above).
Got up late, uncomfortable sore throat that lasted throughout the day. Uncertain if it's the pollution or some sort of cold. Today's positive observation: I don't feel like I've been beaten up the day after excercise any more. That must mean I'm getting in shape or something.
Hans Petter and Belinda arguing about her ghost photos, not surprisingly with little progress on either side. I don't think I'm going to pick a side in this particular discussion. I'm a skeptic by principle, but there's stuff in those photos that don't look like lens reflections or other simple explanations to me.
Amazon and/or DHL are on crack. They sent one book on Saturday, the rest on Sunday, neither package has arrived yet. In addition, DHL's tracking system is worthless, given that there's a 12 hour or so delay from an event happens until it actually shows up on the website. I hope at least one book will arrive tomorrow.
Hacked on the developer page on www.gnome.org. It's pretty finished, but I needed to create the database tables on the actual mySQL server, and RedHat's connectivity is ridiculous at times, at least when it comes to interactive response. When it stopped completely, I decided to put this off until tomorrow. It's not like people will complain if it's not up tomorrow morning or anything. Still, it feels good to start knocking items off my www.gnome.org todo list. It's been languishing way too long.
It seems Conglomerate was shown at the O'Reilly documentation summit, and even got a mention in an article on the O'Reilly site. Interesting. I hurried and got the FTP archives up, so people who want to download the outdated prerelease demo can do so. If O'Reilly think this will change my attitude towards their parasitic nature and their promotion of the corp corruption of all that is pure, holy and right which is the so-called "Open Source Movement", they're wrong. Bwahaha.
Leo joined Hans Petter and me for a game of AvP cooperative skirmish. Just us three Norwegians against the hordes of Aliens. Surprisingly fun, although we kept killing each other. I was even more surprised that I managed to keep up with Hans Petter when it came to the score, first being ahead, then trailing by 30 points constantly for a long while, and then catching up with him, the game ending with us withing a few points of each other. Not bad at all. He also played a little single player, and I think he got a better idea of the sheer terror that is AvP Marine Single Player.
Bedtime. I hope my throat is better tomorrow. If not, it's nothing that huge amounts of caffeinated beverage can't cure, I'm sure.
Got up, showered, and found Maru and Hans Petter in the living room looking for a prescription. They didn't find it, but it turns out it doesn't matter, as prescriptions are mainly a formality. His conversation with the pharmacy person went something like -"Excuse me, do you have mindbending chemicals that you can sell me without a prescription?" -"Yes."
Went to play basketball with Leo, Hans Petter, Paul and Torfinn. I almost fell down a manhole, simply by stepping on it. I think it had been unseated or something, it flipped halfway round. Maybe something down there wants my soul. Finally managed to find a free court. Andrea showed up but refused to play. It seems our play is getting gradually better, although we still generally suck. Leo and I seem to suck slightly less than the rest, though, which I suppose is gratifying. A few more weeks of regular excercises and we might be on a level where we can compete with the Mexicans.
When we got too hot and tired to continue, we bought cold beer and stuff, went to Leo, Paul and Hans Petter's apartment, ordered pizza, and watched an X-files marathon, then the Simpsons and Futurama, interspersed with Discovery documentaries about what really happens to your body when you 1) Have a heart attack, 2) Get a cold, 3) Die, and 4) Get totally piss drunk and unsuccessfully try to get laid (no, really).
Leo scared himself shitless playing AvP until late, while the rest of us watched Nude Indoor Skydiving on E! TV. Any channel that's called E has to have at least something going for it. When I left, Leo was afraid to turn the light off. Wuss.
My body, specifically my muscles, hate me today. I got up at five in the afternoon, and had to spend ten minutes doing exercises to try to limber up enough to be able to walk straight.
Amazon mailed me to tell me that the order I placed on Tuesday, consisting entirely of "Usually ships within 24 hours" books, had been shipped in pieces to ensure speedy shipping. The net result? One of the 8 books was shipped to me today, the rest are still holding. Strange. (Yes, I shop at Amazon. Yes, I know of the boycott. But other online bookstores have either abysmal selections or abysmal interfaces, and don't even get me started on the selection in bookstores here in Mexico.) Anyway, that means my copy of The Mothman Prophecies will probably arrive on Monday, so I'll have something to read, at least. But I was looking forward to getting my own copy of Foley and Van Dam.
Played some more AvP. Getting a little better all the time. Still not able to get up to a consistent 10:1 ratio, though, even on levels without Praetorians.
Talked a bit to Iain about Loom, I set up a Sourceforge project for it yesterday. Sourceforge is kind of neat, it Just Works with lots of services that are at the minimum a bit of hassle to set up yourself. But I still have this queasy feeling about it, which might stem from my dislike of VA. Finally got Iain's map-reading code tarball. Wrote a mail to him about how to do redraws optimally, building off Hans Petter's Empire code. Coding on the bare metal feels kind of good, to be honest. To the degree you can call GDK the bare metal. I'm curious if this stuff will work on the Win32 port of GTK.
Went to see American Psycho tonight, opening night here in Mexico. It was wonderful. Much better than I'd expected, and I expected a lot, the book being one of my all-time favourites. If I was to come up with anything negative to say, it was that the humor of the movie felt somewhat more lightweight than in the book. Didn't hurt much, but I kind of have a weak spot for how the book makes you laugh and then feel kind of guilty about it. Hans Petter was uncertain of what he thought of the movie. Then it turns out he hasn't read the book. I need to lend it to him and rectify this immediately.
Got home, listened to Subsonica (thanks, Ettore), talked to Belinda, read mail, etc. Nice day, all in all. Basketball tomorrow afternoon.
Awoke from an incredibly paranoid dream in some sort of secret agent scenario where everyone was trying to kill me while I was trying to get from Mexico to Norway on a plane. Involved a woman with posion syringes mounted on her teeth, who tried to bite me, and a car full of armed goons who wanted to shoot me. I shot them instead. Much running about and general paranoia. I might be weird, but I kind of like these sorts of dreams.
Coded some.
Later, convinced myself my abysmal AvP skills were due to my short headphone cable. Went on a long quest to get an extension cable, in the afternoon head. Finally got one, came back, played, was marginally better.
Listened to Coil and went through my mail. As usual, that turned my brain into a mush of confusion and claustrophobic depression, so I switched to some hip hop instead. Listened to that until it was time to go to a party, which was in the apartment of a business relation of Leo's. It rocked, kind of to my surprise, although the people there weren't exactly the kind of crowd I usually mix with, more like models, TV actors and DJs. So I was definitely the least hip person there. Still, fun. Got there at ten, started dancing around eleven, left at four. I think I'm getting old, I was starting to get tired after five hours of dancing.
At an unspecified point during the day, I realised that the universe miscellaneous FIX people invented, and which I was the main developer on for a year or so, for FixMUD, might work pretty well as a massively multiplayer type game using Loom. It's a pretty complex setting, an SF/fantasy crossover spanning several worlds, which manages to be pretty consistent without too much fudging of reality. The interesting part is that given that Loom has no real restrictions on map size or number of units in terms of memory, the only problem for huge-scale games would be unit AI. Which, of course, is elegantly solved if all the units are controlled by players. Need to think about it more.
Started this activity log here. It's all manual and stuff. I think it'll be easier to get motivated to keep it up to date when it is, for some strange reason. Also redesigned my main web page, it's all spartan and stuff now. I'm beginning to think I must get rid of some images and focus on text for a while.
Otherwise, quiet day. Too hot to do useful work during the day, hence the web site redesign. I think I'm going to do some coding later, first work-related, and then maybe some Loom. Hans Petter is lying about his 1:10 kill ratio in Aliens versus Predator. That ratio is against the computer, not against Leo and me. Still, he's getting really good at it, and I'll have to practice to keep up. Belinda's buying a digital camera today, supposedly. I'm looking forward to getting up to date pictures.