As some of you may noticed, posting to the Library was down for a while because my FTP provider changed its configuration silently. Blogger was able to publish to the old site without errors - but that old site was no longer being published to the web. This is one of the many reasons Blogger has decided to discontinue FTP. I've talked with the team and read over their documentation, and while there are some usage patterns that I can do for many of my blogs, I'll be transferring the Library of Dresan over to a new hosting provider and blogging provider. There will be some disruption for a while all the way down to my email addresses as I get my online life a little more under control. Please be patient while this goes on ... I'll keep posting via Blogger through maybe March until I get this sorted out.

Labels: Webworks

This cartoon illustrates a common misconception of The Left:

"We're fed up with Washington! The Government can't get anything done! It apparently takes a supermajority to pass anything! Let's make sure no-one has that!"

No, no, no, no, NO! For goodness sake, people, listen to what your opponents are saying instead of projecting your desires upon them. What the people who just voted a Republican into Ted Kennedy's seat are saying is this:

"We're fed up with Washington! The Government is doing things we don't like! Fortunately, it takes a supermajority to pass anything! Let's make sure the bad guys don't have that!"

Not that I think the Democrats are the bad guys - I voted for them - so let's just say that this is my creative way of making the point that it's pretty darn stupid to imagine that the people who voted out the Democrats are motivated by what Democratic voters want. If you need a reminder, in general, excluding social conservative and military issues, it's Democrats who want government action and Republicans who want to stop the government from acting.

Labels: Politics

So I've been working my ass off on something at work for the past ... oh, I dunno, two weeks. That's not entirely true - I've actually been working on it since September, but the really nasty, push 90-hour-weeks two-or-three at a time have come in about four surges, two last year and two this year. Nothing I seem to do seems to push this forward, because it isn't a coding problem, it's a manipulate-large-sums-of-data-produced-by-massive-systems-to-generate-an-evaluation-for-a-feature-launch problem whose intermediate steps take anywhere from thirty minutes to eight hours and whose end-to-end steps can run from four hours to a whole week. So if you make a mistake early on in the process - and it's easy to do - it's no fun starting over. And if something else changes during your work on the process, guess what? You start over again, even if you did nothing wrong.

So what can you do? Work harder, work smarter, ask for help from those more experienced - and there are probably a dozen blogposts I could write on how I've improved my process during all this - but sometimes that's not enough. So you come in early, stay up late and stress your body out until you're so sick you have to call in and work from home because work-related stress is tearing up your guts so much you can't eat or sleep and you just want to GET this DONE. And still sometimes that's not enough - so you keep pushing harder.

Or, you can pray.

I'm not a "Bible believing" Christian. To me, that's almost an oxymoron - Jesus Christ was a real person and what the community of faith that he founded wrote down about him is a pale and often misleading substitute. But a Christian has to take the Bible as the first primary source about Jesus - Scripture is what we've got, and Tradition and Reason have to take it as it is. But even as Reason speaks quite loudly that we can't take Scripture literally as history ... it also speaks loudly to ask us why the Church that Jesus founded was inspired to collect those books in the first place. Just because the Israelites and the early Church didn't have modern standards of evidence, we still have to ask: what experiences did they have that prompted the writing of these books, and what lesson did the collators of the Bible want us to learn?

Turn to the Old Testament. During much of the latter half of Exodus through the Chronicles, the authors of the Bible depict the Israelites committing shocking acts of genocide against the native peoples of Caanan - as a friend of mine said, it would suck to have been an "-ite" in the days of Joshua. But did the Prince of Peace really want those stories recorded as an example of how Christians should behave? Not for the genocide, surely, and even in the Old Testament text when the Commander of the Armies of the Lord speaks to Joshua son of Nun, he does not take sides even as the Israelites are about to attack Jericho and destroy it. I think instead it's to demonstrate why we should put our faith in the Lord. Again and again through the Old Testament, the Israelites are shown failing on their own merits and succeeding when when they put their faith in the Lord: overcoming giants, huge armies, and even toppling the walls of Jericho. Whether or not the battle of Jericho happened as depicted in the Bible is beside the point - the meaning of the story is that people can tackle impossible odds if they put their faith in the Lord.

Case in point: my Jericho, that massive data collection problem that I've run rings around for months. I literally made myself sick last night staying up super late to get the evaluation done and, while I produced some approximate estimates, I still had many problems. I worked from home all day, again literally fading in and out of productivity and half-conscious stupor, until finally I'd done all I could do. I tossed my estimates "over the cube wall" via email, grabbed some dinner, and went to Writing Group. On the way home, slightly rested and refreshed, started thinking about the problem again. There were a few minor things to try but the very next step was starting over from scratch. I thought back about the power of prayer, about recent sermons I'd heard and readings I'd read, and I turned to Jesus (not theologically, I've already done that, I mean, once again, literally here, I think of him riding in the seat next to me in the car, or exercising on the next treadmill when I'm working out) and said: you can solve this, can't you? Because I can't do this on my own.

When I got back to my home office and opened my email, my feature had been approved for launch.

Nothing supernatural is required here, if you're not inclined to believe. I know that. I'd worked hard, reduced the data load of my feature, produced a new set of estimates, and even though this class of estimates had previously been deemed unsatisfactory, the new load was low enough for approval to be granted. You might think it was weird that the approval came on the heels of the prayer, but a proper skeptic, thinking it through, should say that there was nothing mysterious about it: even the timing of the prayer was only to be expected given how long I'd been working on it. (And even if you are NOT a skeptic you need to learn the mental discipline to realize that these things CAN just be coincidences, or you're going to go crazy and turn yourself into a nutcase seeing miracles where there aren't any). So ... was this simple response to a long period of hard work designed to produce that exact outcome an actual miracle? Not necessarily. Almost surely not.

Mmm-hmm. Suuure. You go on believing what you want. As for me? Thanks, Jesus, for coming through again.

-the Centaur

Labels: Development, This Guy Called Jesus

Or is my FTP flakey, proving the need for them to discontinue FTP?

Testy Testerton from Testtown, Testania. Test. Test.

Labels: Webworks

Amazing to see some of the concepts in the story brought to life ...

... and many of the "filler" images are actually going to create scenes in future books. :-)

-the Centaur
Crossposted on my Dakota Frost blog.

Labels: Dakota Frost, Dragon Writers, Moving Pictures

And it's one of the parodies he's ranting about. Recursion again!

Labels: Strange Loops

Well, evening has come and the day has passed, and I have tossed as many Mapreduces into the Great Cloud as the Great Cloud will take - time to go to bed. I leave you with these thoughts, overheard in the wild today:

Woman #1: And did you hear about the iPad?
Woman #2: Oh. My. God. That has to be the stupidest name.
Woman #1: I know. Don't they know what it sounds like?
Woman #2: I think their brains must have been off for the entire development process.
Woman #1: And what gets me, there was a Mad TV skit about the "iPad" like two years ago.
Woman #2: Don't they know people are making fun of it? Don't they care?
Woman #1: Maybe they think at least someone's talking about it.
Woman #2: I dunno. It seems so ... useless. Who's going to carry that?
Woman #1: It's like a giant iPod you can't talk on.
Woman #2: Might be good for some people. At $499, maybe for my nephew?

For the record, I know a lot of people interested in an iPad, I'm very impressed by the drawing features ... and I'm not going to get one as I do not buy closed platforms. (My Mac has a UNIX command line, thank you very much, and no dang App Store is needed to put software on this thing).



I'll be buying a Spring Design Alex to help my favorite bookstore Borders and my favorite phone OS Android ... assuming that Steve Jobs doesn't crush his enemies, drive their tablets before them, and hear the lamentations of their programmers.

Good night.
-the Centaur

Labels: Compline, Development, We Call It Living

Ok, this is a good runner up for the best definition of recursion. Douglas Hofstadter would be proud.

I think I'm going to start collecting these.

-the Centaur

Comic from xkcd, used according to their "terms of service":

You are welcome to reprint occasional comics pretty much anywhere (presentations, papers, blogs with ads, etc). If you're not outright merchandizing, you're probably fine. Just be sure to attribute the comic to xkcd.com.

So attributed.

Hm. Does the xkcd terms of service apply to the xkcd terms of service? Is that a bit like a post about recursion referring to itself? How meta.

Labels: Intelligence, Strange Loops

Dakota Frost in the ink, if not the flesh. Changes include a new face, facial tattoos fixed, left hand enlarged.

-the Centaur
P.S. And have I mentioned I really love my little "imagelink" program that automatically formats HTML inserts for images just the way I like them? Latest tweak is to copy it to ~/bin/ so I can run it anywhere I'm working at the command prompt.

Labels: Artworks, Dakota Frost, Development, Dragon Writers

Oh ... oh my goodness. I'm working on a revised version of Dakota's face for the frontispiece of Frost Moon and ... and ... "working" is not just a metaphor. This is actual work. I'm sketching, and soon after that I will be writing again on Liquid Fire or Jeremiah Willstone. As part of real work, and not just some crazy hobby anymore.

Too cool.

-the Centaur
Pictured: the revised face of Dakota Frost for the frontispiece, pre-cleanup and compositing into the original drawing.

Labels: Dakota Frost, Dragon Writers, We Call It Living

My wife Sandi Billingsley has a new art show at Kaleid Gallery in downtown San Jose. She and Mark Damrel are the featured artists at Kaleid this month and their reception is this Friday at the First Friday Art Walk in San Jose, when many galleries get together to show and promote their latest works - see this announcement for what's showing this Friday.

Sandi's art in this show is exploring themes of recycling through transformation:

Transfiguration is a collection of three dimensional art is an expression of Sandi Billingsley's faith that "we humans can live in luxury while being environmentally responsible." Transfiguration is essentially the art of changing the properties of an object. In this case it refers to the changing of garbage into art. This series is made entirely from rescued materials. The core is made of Styrofoam collected from shipping packages, friends and dumpsters. Sandi then applies a combination of old paint clothes, junk mail, phone books --- basically anything with natural fibers headed for the trash. Dipping these flexible materials in non-toxic glue gives them strength to hold interesting shapes. Finally, the piece is finished with "Aqua Brand" textures and paint which are non-toxic. The result is an environmentally friendly piece of art.

Mark's art in this show is exploring themes of fatherhood in adversity:

Relative Matter is a series of paintings by Mark Damrel inspired by the hardships he encountered on his journey into fatherhood. "Years went by with little to no hope. I started to get used to the fact that I would never have a family, and then it happened." In groupings of mixed media paintings on wood and paper, he explores the themes of childhood memories, despair, hope and joy.

Please drop in, check their art out, enjoy it, and buy something!

-the Centaur