But sometimes it is necessary.
-the Centaur
... even to myself:
But sometimes it is necessary.
-the Centaur
But sometimes it is necessary.
-the Centaur
Posts published by “centaur”
So I was going through my junk in my car today and found some old light bulbs in my auto emergency kit. I wanted to find out whether a 921LL bulb would fit my Nissan Pathfinder or whether it was a leftover from my Isuzu Rodeo kit.
A few quick searches on Google seemed to indicate the answer was yes, but I didn't get a definitive answer until I got to Amazon and searched for the part number.
Amazon, surprisingly enough, had a form where you could indicate the year, make and model of your vehicle, against which it would check the part in question. But then it said something more: it said, "sign in to check this part against vehicles in your garage."
HFS.
I signed in, and frankly it was a bit of a bear to navigate to a point where I found "my garage". Essentially, I had to start looking for parts again, enter a vehicle, and then I found it automatically saved that information to "my garage".
This is definitely a "hidden feature": Amazon could make that more discoverable, and I haven't yet found any information on this feature online or on their site or on its help features. This may be an oversight, or the feature could be in development.
Once a vehicle was entered, though, it was relatively easy to add more information about the trim and features of my car, and Amazon then gave me a complete list of the parts they sold for my car - all 2,156 of them, at last count.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm glad I own Amazon stock. I bought it *after* the Internet crash convinced that ten years from now they'd still be going places, and they haven't proved me wrong yet.
Keep up the good work, Jeff.
-the Centaur
A few quick searches on Google seemed to indicate the answer was yes, but I didn't get a definitive answer until I got to Amazon and searched for the part number.
Amazon, surprisingly enough, had a form where you could indicate the year, make and model of your vehicle, against which it would check the part in question. But then it said something more: it said, "sign in to check this part against vehicles in your garage."
HFS.
I signed in, and frankly it was a bit of a bear to navigate to a point where I found "my garage". Essentially, I had to start looking for parts again, enter a vehicle, and then I found it automatically saved that information to "my garage".
This is definitely a "hidden feature": Amazon could make that more discoverable, and I haven't yet found any information on this feature online or on their site or on its help features. This may be an oversight, or the feature could be in development.
Once a vehicle was entered, though, it was relatively easy to add more information about the trim and features of my car, and Amazon then gave me a complete list of the parts they sold for my car - all 2,156 of them, at last count.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm glad I own Amazon stock. I bought it *after* the Internet crash convinced that ten years from now they'd still be going places, and they haven't proved me wrong yet.
Keep up the good work, Jeff.
-the Centaur
My friends Fred, David, Derek and I were on an Edge vacation somewhere - I don't quite know where - and Fred had rented a convertible to drive us around town. While we were there, we heard that they were going to blow up a mall as part of shooting some movie, and we decided to show up to watch.
We pulled behind a massive structure like Phipps Plaza in Atlanta, waiting in a long narrow street cutting through the big grassy fields behind the mall. There were a few other onlookers, maybe in the hundreds, but we pulled up in our convertible just as they were about to get started, so we didn't even get out.
Then the mall detonated. The parking structure behind it collapsed, tumbling down like the proverbial deck of cards. Giant concrete columns, easily three feet across, were tumbling over like dominoes.
Then something went wrong - one of the timed explosions was too powerful, or maybe there was a boiler overlooked in the security office underneath the parking deck. A secondary blast sent dozens of concrete columns flying, giant treetrunks sailing through the air - one of them right over us.
I looked up, frozen, as the column seemed to hang there in the air, long enough that it seemed to stretch out of our field of view to the left and right, wide enough to kill us. Then it began to shift in my vision, and I realized it was going to fall in front of us.
In that moment, I realized missing us would not be enough. I shouted, "Back up, back up, back up!" and Fred put the convertible in reverse. The column crashed to the ground in front of us and began rolling forward, bouncing - it would have rolled straight over the top of the car, flattening us. We screeched backwards, but quickly the column rumbled to a stop, and Fred stopped the car.
"Wow," Fred said, looking back at us. The column covered the whole road in front of us. More concrete columns were scattered all over the field, but miraculously no bystanders had been killed. "Normally I'm the first one to react. Good catch Anthony!"
I was not so sure.
Thinking over it later, there was no way Fred could have responded in time from my shout to put the car in reverse and start moving; he must have already been acting when I leaned forward and yelled in his ear, and in the confusion of events interpreted things after the fact to think that he'd reacted to my warning.
But what really struck me while Fred was congratulating me was my memory of that moment where the column was hanging in the air: that moment where I knew it was going to fall and hit or nearly hit us, and I didn't say anything because I was frozen. If we had to rely on that reaction time, we'd all be dead.
Must go faster.
Thank God, it was only a dream....
The easiest way to ruin a poem
is to read it like a poem
with stilted voice and stately oration
designed to show the poet's construction
- poetry, as read by "poets"
who learned in English class that
"poetry is the highest form of language."
I do not agree.
Poetry is distilled emotion,
concentrated essence of the darlings a novelist must murder,
packaged up with that punch that took Emily Dickinsons' head off.
Poems should be read
as if by Robert Frost's neighbor,
with sinewy hands moving rocks through the darkness,
springing forth to hurl them through our defensive walls:
the poet as savage.
Poetry should be many things:
inspiring, depressing,
comforting, enlightening,
homespun, heartwrenching.
It should never be safe.
is to read it like a poem
with stilted voice and stately oration
designed to show the poet's construction
- poetry, as read by "poets"
who learned in English class that
"poetry is the highest form of language."
I do not agree.
Poetry is distilled emotion,
concentrated essence of the darlings a novelist must murder,
packaged up with that punch that took Emily Dickinsons' head off.
Poems should be read
as if by Robert Frost's neighbor,
with sinewy hands moving rocks through the darkness,
springing forth to hurl them through our defensive walls:
the poet as savage.
Poetry should be many things:
inspiring, depressing,
comforting, enlightening,
homespun, heartwrenching.
It should never be safe.
I can be such an idiot sometimes ... or, put in other words, the right way to solve a problem is often much, much easier than the wrong way.
For example, if you're doing woodworking, you may use a modern steel clamp to hold a part tight to work on it. That sounds good and does the job. Of course, when you need to change the position of the part you must unscrew it, reposition the part and rescrew the clamp.
So far, so good ... but, according to David Petersen, the author of Mouse Guard, there is a better way. Petersen researched medieval woodworking equipment for his Eisner-award winning comic and found there was a simpler scheme involving a foot pedal and a lever, which had equal gripping power but could release and reapply pressure in seconds just by lifting your foot.
Moral: newer and more complex is not always better.
Fast forward eight hundred and fifty years. Robert Kroese, a colleague at the Search Engine That Starts With A G, has his own book that he's working on, and an associated web site Mercury Falls. On that site he has a form to enter an email list, and I thought, what a great idea! I should have a form where someone can send me an email list on the Dakota Frost site.
So I started looking into it. To make the form work, you need not only a web form, which is easy to set up, but also some kind of server program on the back end which can accept the results of the form and a database to store it.
Historically, I've had bad luck with scripts and databases on my web sites: Earthlink / Mindspring basically welched on the scripting features of their web hosting that I was paying for, and my next provider, Tophosting, screwed up one of my databases.
So I was hesitant, and I started thinking. Then it hit me...
... there was a simpler way.
Instead of creating a form and the backend plumbing that goes with it, I should use the existing plumbing I had to achieve the same effect. What plumbing was already in place? A web site, a hosting provider, an ability to forward emails to a given address ... and a mail client with filters.
To make this work, I went to the GoDaddy control panel for Dakota Frost and set up a forwarding email: contact at dakota frost dot com. I had that sent to one of my catchall email accounts, and in Gmail I then set up a filter which collected all those email addresses into a single folder. Bam: problem solved.
Even if I want to do something more complex, this solution still works, as long as I keep looking at simple tools that are already available. For example, if I want an official email address list as a separate file, I could always download those email messages to the mail client of my choice, filter the messages to a folder, and grep over the email addresses in the file. For the scale at which I need to do it right now, the problem is still solved.
Moral of the story: the more you overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain. Keep it simple, and things should just keep flowing without effort.
Or, to translate this back into development speak: there are two kinds of solutions: solutions which are easy to think up, but take a lot of coding effort to make work, and solutions which require thought, but which can be implemented in staggeringly small amounts of code.
In this one, we have an extreme example: to make this problem work the "no thinking way" would require an HTML form, a CGI script, a database, and considerable configuration on the server side of my hosting provider. To make this problem work the "no effort way" required some thought, but in the end less configuration of my hosting provider and a few minutes setting up some email filters.
You see the same thing in software libraries: really good libraries don't take a lot of code, but that doesn't mean that they didn't take a lot of work. What happened behind the scenes was a lot of thought, wherein the library author searched the space of possible designs until he found a great one before ever publishing the library. You as the consumer don't see that effort, no matter how short or long it took: you only see the pure, parsimonious, elegant efficient piece of code that remains.
If you don't put thought into what you're doing, you might try it sometime. You'd be surprised how little thought can get you substantially improved results.
-the Centaur
My current excuse for not posting (other than feverishly trying to finish Blood Rock) is attending San Diego Comic Con 2009, the largest comic convention in the world. Here I'm seeing talks, meeting friends, working on Blood Rock, leaving flyers for Dakota Frost: Frost Moon, and enjoying the fantabulous nightlife in San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter:
You cannot explain how large Comicon is; you must see it yourself. I could show you the mammoth Exhibit Hall / Show's Floor / Noah's Ark of a Dealer's Room, but it is hard from a single picture to get the scale:
I could show you the external architecture, the huge steps and rounded escalator leading out of the upper levels (actually, the round escalator had just moved out of the picture at this point), but it is still hard to get the scale:
Perhaps only by showing the huge tide of people leaving after the Dealer's Room had closed can you truly see how large the San Diego Comic Con is:
It can take up to thirty minutes to reach your car in the parking lot, as we unfortunately found out today when we joined for lunch some friends who had driven. Halfway to the parking lot, you can see the length of the Convention Center, and can see why it takes up a significant part of the city on Google Maps:
Comicon has been held 40 times over the last 39 years, making it a cultural event only slightly younger than I am. This year is also Green Lantern's 50th anniversary, and the Con and its attendees are celebrating with special T-shirts, movie premieres, and of course, fan costumes:
It's all sold out this year, officially 126,000 but rumored to be as many as 140,000 strong ... but if you have even a passing interest in comics, movies or other popular arts, you should make at least one pilgrimage to check it out.
More later. Must crash.
-the Centaur
You cannot explain how large Comicon is; you must see it yourself. I could show you the mammoth Exhibit Hall / Show's Floor / Noah's Ark of a Dealer's Room, but it is hard from a single picture to get the scale:
I could show you the external architecture, the huge steps and rounded escalator leading out of the upper levels (actually, the round escalator had just moved out of the picture at this point), but it is still hard to get the scale:
Perhaps only by showing the huge tide of people leaving after the Dealer's Room had closed can you truly see how large the San Diego Comic Con is:
It can take up to thirty minutes to reach your car in the parking lot, as we unfortunately found out today when we joined for lunch some friends who had driven. Halfway to the parking lot, you can see the length of the Convention Center, and can see why it takes up a significant part of the city on Google Maps:
Comicon has been held 40 times over the last 39 years, making it a cultural event only slightly younger than I am. This year is also Green Lantern's 50th anniversary, and the Con and its attendees are celebrating with special T-shirts, movie premieres, and of course, fan costumes:
It's all sold out this year, officially 126,000 but rumored to be as many as 140,000 strong ... but if you have even a passing interest in comics, movies or other popular arts, you should make at least one pilgrimage to check it out.
More later. Must crash.
-the Centaur
So I've mentioned before that I like pound cake, and that I'm working on a recipe. To make this go faster, for a few months I made pound cakes at home, cut them in half, and served half to my coworkers. Based on feedback from me, my wife, my friends, and coworkers (too dry / too moist / just right; more vanilla / less vanilla / you use vanilla?), and based on events during the cooking (collapses, crust cracks, etc.) I made changes to the recipe, which I tried the next time.
At first I thought of this as the scientific method, or at least engineering. And in one sense it is: I'm doing the minimum required to perform science, which is identifying a subject matter, establishing a procedure to study it, taking careful notes about the study procedure, and recording the results. And I'm doing the minimum required to perform engineering, which is identifying the is
But later I realized that my procedure is more like alchemy: tweaking something again and again without a true theory in the hope that tweaking it will somehow make gold.
To truly make it "scientific", I'd need much more. At a minimum, I'd need to make my independent and dependent variables explicit. The independent variables are the things that I control, like the recipe, whereas the dependent variables are the outcomes, like whether the cake collapses and how it tastes. To determine the true sources of power, I'd need to change just one independent variable at a time, such as the number of eggs. To control for confounding factors in ingredients, I'd need to make two cakes at the same time, one "control" cake with the old recipe and one "experimental" with the new recipe. Furthermore, the evaluation should be double blind: I should give slices of the cakes to someone without either me or them knowing at the time which recipe they got, so taste and texture would be evaluated without the knowledge of how the results "should" turn out. Each recipe comparison should be done multiple times to control for the small-n factor. And going beyond this, other things ought to be varied, like temperature, cooking time, egg and flour varieties, etc...
Ultimately, the goal of many such experiments would be a working theory of pound cake baking: what pound cakes are, how they are baked, and what role each ingredient and each baking step has in producing the cake. Only with such a working theory could you actually do true engineering. Engineering is not science; its goal is not understanding. Instead, the goal of engineering is to take a problem description - produce a good pound cake that satisfies my late-night sweet tooth - and use the best available understanding to produce the best possible solution to the problem. Unlike a scientist digging into the unknown, an engineer's task is to think through all the implications of the known for any potential solution to the problem. With a working theory of pound cake baking, an engineer can tell me how large a cake I can bake, whether it is feasible to bake a cake in the ovens that are likely to be available to me, and perhaps even the optimium size of pound cake for the heating characteristics of my oven. If this was a real engineering problem, a well-trained engineer would automatically go further, inquiring about the rate of pound cake consumption and the expected shelf life of baked cake, and might end up suggesting that I bake a smaller (or larger) cake so that I get the most pound cake for the least baking effort, while still ensuring that I eat it all before it goes stale.
Obviously, I'm not going to do all that. I'm going to tweak my recipe until it works right, then bake that cake and eat it. But if somehow I get tossed over into the Groundhog Day universe, I've got a plan to make the Best. Cake. Ever. All it will take is ten thousand trials...
-the Centaur
At first I thought of this as the scientific method, or at least engineering. And in one sense it is: I'm doing the minimum required to perform science, which is identifying a subject matter, establishing a procedure to study it, taking careful notes about the study procedure, and recording the results. And I'm doing the minimum required to perform engineering, which is identifying the is
But later I realized that my procedure is more like alchemy: tweaking something again and again without a true theory in the hope that tweaking it will somehow make gold.
To truly make it "scientific", I'd need much more. At a minimum, I'd need to make my independent and dependent variables explicit. The independent variables are the things that I control, like the recipe, whereas the dependent variables are the outcomes, like whether the cake collapses and how it tastes. To determine the true sources of power, I'd need to change just one independent variable at a time, such as the number of eggs. To control for confounding factors in ingredients, I'd need to make two cakes at the same time, one "control" cake with the old recipe and one "experimental" with the new recipe. Furthermore, the evaluation should be double blind: I should give slices of the cakes to someone without either me or them knowing at the time which recipe they got, so taste and texture would be evaluated without the knowledge of how the results "should" turn out. Each recipe comparison should be done multiple times to control for the small-n factor. And going beyond this, other things ought to be varied, like temperature, cooking time, egg and flour varieties, etc...
Ultimately, the goal of many such experiments would be a working theory of pound cake baking: what pound cakes are, how they are baked, and what role each ingredient and each baking step has in producing the cake. Only with such a working theory could you actually do true engineering. Engineering is not science; its goal is not understanding. Instead, the goal of engineering is to take a problem description - produce a good pound cake that satisfies my late-night sweet tooth - and use the best available understanding to produce the best possible solution to the problem. Unlike a scientist digging into the unknown, an engineer's task is to think through all the implications of the known for any potential solution to the problem. With a working theory of pound cake baking, an engineer can tell me how large a cake I can bake, whether it is feasible to bake a cake in the ovens that are likely to be available to me, and perhaps even the optimium size of pound cake for the heating characteristics of my oven. If this was a real engineering problem, a well-trained engineer would automatically go further, inquiring about the rate of pound cake consumption and the expected shelf life of baked cake, and might end up suggesting that I bake a smaller (or larger) cake so that I get the most pound cake for the least baking effort, while still ensuring that I eat it all before it goes stale.
Obviously, I'm not going to do all that. I'm going to tweak my recipe until it works right, then bake that cake and eat it. But if somehow I get tossed over into the Groundhog Day universe, I've got a plan to make the Best. Cake. Ever. All it will take is ten thousand trials...
-the Centaur
Recently I got nailed with the following note on Facebook or Myspace or some other damn thing:
"Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you."Well, neo-Luddite that I am, I don't want to encourage this whole walled-garden social networking thing, so I'm not going to post a note there until I can effortlessly crosspost with my blog and everywhere else. But I can come up with 15 books:
- Godel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
Convinced me to get into Artificial Intelligence. I've probably read it half a dozen times. Has a fantastic layered structure that Hofstadter uses to great effect. - The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky
Opened my mind to new ways of thinking about thinking and AI. Also read it several times. Has a fantastic one-chapter-per-page format that really works well to communicate complicated ideas very simply. - The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Feynman, Leighton and Sands
Taught me more about physics than the half-dozen classes I took at Georgia Tech. I've read it now about four times, once on paper (trying to work out as many derivations as I could as I went) and three times on audiobook. - Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley
Opened my mind to new ways about both thinking and programming. The chapter on estimation blew my mind. - Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
A true epic, though it's probably better to start with the Virtue of Selfishness if you want to understand her philosophy. Every time I think some of Atlas Shrugged's characters are ridiculous parodies, I meet someone like them in real life. - Decision at Doona by Anne McCaffrey
I must have read this a dozen times as a child. I still remember two characters: a child who was so enamored of the catlike aliens he started wearing a tail, and a hard-nosed military type who refused to eat local food so he could not develop cravings for the foods of (or attachments to the cultures of) the worlds he visited. - The Belgariad by David Eddings
A great fantasy epic, with all of the scale but none of the bad writing and pointless digressions of The Lord of the Rings. I've heard someone dismiss Eddings as "third carbon Tolkien" but, you know what? Get over yourselves. Tolkien wasn't the first person to write in the genre, and he won't be the last. - The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
All of the adventure of the Lord of the Rings, but none of its flaws. The long journey through the great dark forest and the Battle of Five Armies still stick in my mind. I like this the best out of what Tolkien I've read (which includes The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion, and some other darn thing I can't remember). - The Dragon Circle by Stephen Krensky
Loved it as a child. Still have a stuffed dragon named "Shortflight" after this book. - Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini
Another true epic, this time a graphic novel. Resonates with me in a way that few other fantasy epics do. I have the first 20-issue series in a massive hardbound volume which is now apparently worth a shitload of money. Out of my cold dead fingers, pry it will you. - Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp by Peter Norvig
Yes, your programming can kick ass. Let Peter show you how. - Reason in Human Affairs by Herbert Simon
Helped me understand the powers and the limits of human reason, and why we need emotion to survive in this complicated world. - The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
More than anything, I appreciate this book for a few key vignettes that made me realize how important it was to understand other people and where they are coming from, and not to impose my own preconceptions upon them. - The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers by Ayn Rand
Straight talk about fiction from one of its most effective writers. You don't have to agree with Ayn Rand's personal philosophy or even like her fiction books to learn from this book; half her examples are drawn from authors she personally doesn't agree with. - In the Arena by Richard Nixon
Straight talk about surviving in politics from one of its most flawed yet effective masters. A glimpse into the workings of a brilliant mind, broken down into different sections on different aspects of life. Don't bother reading this if you feel you owe a debt to your personal political leanings to say something nasty about Richard Nixon in every sentence in which you mention him simply because Nixon did some bad things. (Note: I think that Nixon's alleged crimes are the worst of any President, because they attacked his political opponents, undermining our democracy. However, his political philosophy, once divorced from his personal paranoia, is something very important people need to understand).
Blogosphere, consider yourselves tagged - your turn.
-the Centaur
Cost of a taxi from SFO to MTV: ~$90. Cost of BART+Caltrain: $5.75. Hm ... this green thing has more advantages than just feeling good about "saving the environment". Of course, it takes way the heck longer and many of the trains aren't full, so I need to add public transit to my things to study.
I have fond memories of many old Norton products ... the Norton Utilities, Norton Desktop, even Norton Antivirus in its early Symantec incarnations. But somewhere around the time that Norton/Symantec introduced Product Activation, things turned sour.
Not that that's the problem - even though I once had to pay for Symantec's Antivirus suite twice on my wife's computer because of an unresolvable error with the antivirus subscription. The problem wasn't so much the Product Activation per se, but that the software got into an unstable state which prevented it from accepting the subscription - which I could prove that I paid for - and eventually the only way to fix it was to nuke the site from orbit, reinstall everything, and pay again.
And therein lies the kernel of the problem: it's so easy for Symantec (née Norton) products to get into an unstable state, activation or no. There's the antivirus issue I mentioned. I once installed Norton Antivirus on a PC with Zone Alarm installed, and the two products got into a death match over which one was the "real" firewall even though I was not trying to install Norton's firewall features. There have been several other instances, most with Norton 360 Premier Edition, and now this:
You can't see it in the picture, but Norton 360 is frozen like a Canadian lake in winter. Recently our main backup drive for our Windows workstation died, and I replaced the old Maxtor with a larger Iomega drive. However, when I went to change the backup to point to the new drive, Norton locked up trying to determine ... what, I don't know. Files to back up? Looking for backup locations? It isn't clear. On the first try of this, it appeared to be frozen checking backup schedules:
It stayed there the whole time I was working on this article (up to this point). Right around the time I wrote that sentence, I finally killed Norton and restarted ... no dice. Now it can't even find the backup locations:
There is no excuse for software to be written this way by a professional company with collectively over 30 years experience. This is the kind of crap I write the very first time I whip together a utility for a new operating system, before I learn where the blocking calls are. A program should never block on a dialog finding something as simple as a list of backup schedules, much less files or anything else. Modern computers have millions of cycles a second available to realize a call is taking a long time, present the list of items found so far, and give the user the opportunity to do something - which, in this case, would be me telling it to forget the old backup location and to try the new one. Instead, I get this, still frozen trying to find a list that could be easily cached, interpolated, discarded, supplanted, SOMETHING:
This goes to my overall rant on what's wrong with disk and networking software. Modern web applications like GMail have vast abilities to cope when servers are offline. Networking and disk operations, in contrast, are either blindingly fast, or pause for minutes or even hours, obviously befuddled but never bothering to pass that information on to the user. Someone, I can't remember who, wrote an article about this a few years back, pointing out that it was all related to design decisions we'd made early on in computing that are wrong. He sketched out how you could design a computer to never effectively lose data, even if you powercycled in the middle of writing an essay, by changing how we think about saving data. I'll dig up the essay, but for right now, we STILL have THIS, frozen in the same place:
At the time of this writing I've spent almost THIRTY MINUTES waiting on Norton to perform what should have been a two minute operation: changing a backup disk and starting the new backup. This makes my problems with Apple's Time Capsule look trivial. By the way ... Time Capsule is working perfectly now. Time to switch my wife to the Mac?
-the Centaur
Postscript: we went and worked out, and this window was still up, an hour and a half later. I took the pictures I needed for this article; then, I did what I hate to do: asked my wife to log out (in her session, she was working on proposals and had half a dozen windows open) and rebooted the machine. When we returned, Norton worked just fine. I started this article feeling nostalgic for Norton/Symantec's older products; well, Norton gave me what I wanted, and took me all the way back to 1995, when you had to reboot to do anything.
It's all right, Peter. We still love you. This isn't your fault, nor is it necessarily something that the hardworking people at Symantec could have fixed in this instance. But if I don't complain, you'll never know anything was wrong.
Not that that's the problem - even though I once had to pay for Symantec's Antivirus suite twice on my wife's computer because of an unresolvable error with the antivirus subscription. The problem wasn't so much the Product Activation per se, but that the software got into an unstable state which prevented it from accepting the subscription - which I could prove that I paid for - and eventually the only way to fix it was to nuke the site from orbit, reinstall everything, and pay again.
And therein lies the kernel of the problem: it's so easy for Symantec (née Norton) products to get into an unstable state, activation or no. There's the antivirus issue I mentioned. I once installed Norton Antivirus on a PC with Zone Alarm installed, and the two products got into a death match over which one was the "real" firewall even though I was not trying to install Norton's firewall features. There have been several other instances, most with Norton 360 Premier Edition, and now this:
You can't see it in the picture, but Norton 360 is frozen like a Canadian lake in winter. Recently our main backup drive for our Windows workstation died, and I replaced the old Maxtor with a larger Iomega drive. However, when I went to change the backup to point to the new drive, Norton locked up trying to determine ... what, I don't know. Files to back up? Looking for backup locations? It isn't clear. On the first try of this, it appeared to be frozen checking backup schedules:
It stayed there the whole time I was working on this article (up to this point). Right around the time I wrote that sentence, I finally killed Norton and restarted ... no dice. Now it can't even find the backup locations:
There is no excuse for software to be written this way by a professional company with collectively over 30 years experience. This is the kind of crap I write the very first time I whip together a utility for a new operating system, before I learn where the blocking calls are. A program should never block on a dialog finding something as simple as a list of backup schedules, much less files or anything else. Modern computers have millions of cycles a second available to realize a call is taking a long time, present the list of items found so far, and give the user the opportunity to do something - which, in this case, would be me telling it to forget the old backup location and to try the new one. Instead, I get this, still frozen trying to find a list that could be easily cached, interpolated, discarded, supplanted, SOMETHING:
This goes to my overall rant on what's wrong with disk and networking software. Modern web applications like GMail have vast abilities to cope when servers are offline. Networking and disk operations, in contrast, are either blindingly fast, or pause for minutes or even hours, obviously befuddled but never bothering to pass that information on to the user. Someone, I can't remember who, wrote an article about this a few years back, pointing out that it was all related to design decisions we'd made early on in computing that are wrong. He sketched out how you could design a computer to never effectively lose data, even if you powercycled in the middle of writing an essay, by changing how we think about saving data. I'll dig up the essay, but for right now, we STILL have THIS, frozen in the same place:
At the time of this writing I've spent almost THIRTY MINUTES waiting on Norton to perform what should have been a two minute operation: changing a backup disk and starting the new backup. This makes my problems with Apple's Time Capsule look trivial. By the way ... Time Capsule is working perfectly now. Time to switch my wife to the Mac?
-the Centaur
Postscript: we went and worked out, and this window was still up, an hour and a half later. I took the pictures I needed for this article; then, I did what I hate to do: asked my wife to log out (in her session, she was working on proposals and had half a dozen windows open) and rebooted the machine. When we returned, Norton worked just fine. I started this article feeling nostalgic for Norton/Symantec's older products; well, Norton gave me what I wanted, and took me all the way back to 1995, when you had to reboot to do anything.
It's all right, Peter. We still love you. This isn't your fault, nor is it necessarily something that the hardworking people at Symantec could have fixed in this instance. But if I don't complain, you'll never know anything was wrong.
Amazing presentation...
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8]
Did you know?
-the Centaur
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8]
Did you know?
-the Centaur
As a teenager I used to play OGRE and GEV, the quintessential microgames produced by Steve Jackson featuring cybernetic tanks called OGREs facing off with a variety of lesser tanks. For those that don't remember those "microgames", they were sold in small plastic bags or boxes, which contained a rulebook, map, and a set of perforated cardboard pieces used to play the game. After playing a lot, we extended OGRE by creating our own units and pieces from cut up paper; the lead miniature you see in the pictures came much later, and was not part of the original game.
In OGRE's purest form, however, one OGRE, a mammoth cybernetic vehicle, faced off with a dozen or so more other tanks firing tactical nuclear weapons ... and thanks to incredible firepower and meters of lightweight BCP armor, it would just about be an even fight. Below you see a GEV (Ground Effect Vehicle) about to have a very bad day.
OGREs were based (in part) on the intelligent tanks from Keith Laumer's Bolo series, but there was also an OGRE timeline that detailed the development of the armament and weapons that made tank battles make sense in the 21st century. So there was a special thrill playing OGRE: I got to relive my favorite Keith Laumer story, in which one decommissioned, radioactive OGRE is accidentally reawakened and digs its way out of its concrete tomb to continue the fight. (The touching redemption scene in which the tank is convinced not to lay waste to the countryside by its former commander were, sadly, left out of the game mechanics of Steve Jackson's initial design).
But how realistic are tales of cybernetic tanks? AI is famous for overpromising and underdelivering: it's well nigh on 2010, and we don't have HAL 9000, much less the Terminator. But OGRE, being a boardgame, did not need to satisfy the desires of filmmakers to present a near-future people could relate to; so it did not compress the timeline to the point of unbelievability. According to the Steve Jackson OGRE chronology the OGRE Mark I was supposed to come out in 2060. And from what I can see, that date is a little pessimistic. Take a look at this video from General Dynamics:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCAiQyuWfOk]
It even has the distinctive OGRE high turret in the form of an automated XM307 machine gun. Scary! Admittedly, the XUV is a remote controlled vehicle and not a completely automated battle tank capable of deciding our fate in a millisecond. But that's not far in coming... General Dynamics is working on autonomous vehicle navigation, and they're not alone. Take a look at Stanley driving itself to the win of the Darpa Grand Challenge:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ3bbHTsOL4]
Now, that's more like it! Soon, I will be able to relive the boardgames my youth in real life ... running from an automated tank ... hell-bent on destroying the entire countryside ...
Hm.
Somehow, that doesn't sound so appealing. I have an idea! Instead of building killer death-bots, why don't we try building some of these instead (full disclosure: I've worked in robotic pet research):
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKAeihiy5Ck]
Oh, wait. The AIBO program was canceled ... as was the XM307. Stupid economics. It's supposed to be John Connor saving us from the robot apocalypse, not Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Various shots of OGRE T-shirt, book, rules, pieces, and miniatures, along with the re-released version of the OGRE and GEV games. Videos courtesy Youtube.
"Now that's what we call a computer crash..."
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXUIlULqUGQ]
More seriously, this is why when you really want to film something you need two or three different cameras. This really cried out for three: one closeup on the computer, one long shot on the shooting range to see it fly in the air, and one on the shooters.
-the Centaur
UPDATE: I had a discussion with friends, and there are at least two things the people in this video are doing that make them a hazard to themselves and others:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXUIlULqUGQ]
More seriously, this is why when you really want to film something you need two or three different cameras. This really cried out for three: one closeup on the computer, one long shot on the shooting range to see it fly in the air, and one on the shooters.
-the Centaur
UPDATE: I had a discussion with friends, and there are at least two things the people in this video are doing that make them a hazard to themselves and others:
- They're TRAP shooting with RIFLES!
From one friend: "This will probably surprise everyone, but in my opinion these guys are complete morons because they are endangering others. They are "trap shooting" with rifles! I think I saw one shotgun in the whole video. I'm sure my gun enthusiast friends will agree with me that unless these guys are at least 3 miles from any other people (and even in the deep woods of Tennessee, you can't possibly be sure of that) they are endangering others by firing high-powered rifles into the air. As an example, a 30-06 rifle aimed at a high elevation can fire a round about 2.5 miles. Interestingly, the maximum range occurs at about 35 degrees elevation, not 45 degrees as one might think. When the round returns to earth, it's still moving at around 500 fps, which is fast enough to kill someone." - They have NO IDEA of EXPLOSIVE SAFETY:
After reading that, I remembered something else bugging me and I went back and found it. Watch the video again closely for the following gem around 1 minute in: The guy fills the test chamber with explosive and a fuse, he tamps it in with a stick and wooden hammer, then he puts his body over the chamber when putting the books on it. Now, the first time that I watched this, I thought he tapped the whole wooden shaft into the hole, but you can see it lying on the ground later. Regardless, he's putting himself in the line of fire with no thought of what might go wrong. From the other poster: "Yeah, I noticed that one too. I bet if it blew and tossed him into the air, his buddies would instinctively start firing until the smoke cleared and they realized it was him!"
I certainly would agree about the trap shooting and with the care needed with black powder and fuses. There is no way to know, of course, but the woods in the background look pretty dense. If it's all private property it could go for miles. Still I wouldn't do that stuff with my rifles.Ok, it's all fun until someone loses a loved one. Be safe, all.
You can blog from your mobile phone with a text message. HFS!
UPDATE: But if you mistype something in your smartphone, Blogger does something weird with it ... I accidentally typed an upside down exclamation point after the "HFS" above (not sure why) and it translated that to "HFS?", which should have been "HFS!". Probably this is a language encoding issue or something similar.
UPDATE: But if you mistype something in your smartphone, Blogger does something weird with it ... I accidentally typed an upside down exclamation point after the "HFS" above (not sure why) and it translated that to "HFS?", which should have been "HFS!". Probably this is a language encoding issue or something similar.
My wife and I are xeriscaping our lawn - transforming it from a green sucker-of-water into a still-green landscape of native plants that require little or no water. Lawns consume a lot of water, and this is one way we can make a difference that both saves the environment and saves money.
But a xeriscaped lawn isn't always just dirt, or just brown, or even just green. Here you see the succulents we've planted in fantastic bloom, which require almost no watering during the course of the year. During the day their flowers open in a brilliant polychromatic display; at night they close up.
We've also used low-water plants and trees, either existing ones or new ones planted that will require little to no water. Unfortunately new trees require some water to get started, and so the grass that would not grow before has come back with a vengeance (as you can see in the upper left).
We've made the problem a little harder on ourselves by using reclaimed materials as much as possible, letting plants grow out to fill the space rather than buying more, planting from cuttings, using no artificial fertilizer, and using almost no artificial pesticides (other than slug pellets, which we could not avoid using as they love succulents). So it's taking some time ... we're in the start of the second year of our front yard landscaping.
But after that first year, it's starting to bear fruit. Already the result is a wonderful Seussical landscape that requires little to no watering. Who knows what it will look like after another year.
-the Centaur
Pictured: our front lawn, with closeups of the flowering succulents (grown into the space on their own), a medium shot of the path (made from reclaimed wood chips), and a long shot of the tree (saved from death with a little mulching), the path and the gardener.
There's been some confusion recently about the "fanboy reception" of the new Star Trek movie - some people going so far as to say "fanboys will hate it because they changed everything". Well, speaking as a fanboy who recently was seriously arguing with my high school friends about whether J.J. Abrams shitted or pissed on our childhoods (and no, I'm not joking, those literal words were used), I beg to differ: my problems with the movie are with the movie as a movie, and particularly with its plot logic, not with its degree of Trekkiness.
I'll deal with the problems the movie has as a movie later (e.g., Nero is mad at Spock because ... Spock tried to save Romulus? WTF?!), since the movie is so good on an acting/directing level I don't want to give it too much bad press. (No, really, if good acting is your bag, run to the theater, baby; similarly if you like humor, excitement, action or adventure you won't be disappointed. If you care about a movie making sense ... eh.) Right now I want to show that it is indeed a good Trek movie. To see why, let's go through the Fanboy's Official Star Trek Movie Checklist and see how J.J. Abrams fares.
Oh, wait. One thing. SPOILERS AHEAD. Ok, moving on...
First off, the big three that we need in any Star Trek movie:
- Kirk makes bold command decisions. Taking a shipful of cadets toe-to-toe with a Romulan war machine that's already wiped out Klingon and Federation fleets? Check.
- Spock is conflicted about logic and emotion. Face it: this is is Spock's movie, and we get this quintessential Trekkiness in two flavors, old Spock and young Spock:
- Old Spock: "Trust me, I'm emotionally compromised." Check.
- Young Spock: Oh, where to begin, there are so many - I'll take the Vulcan Science Academy and his neat little speech where his voice says "The only emotion I wish to express is gratitude" and his face says "you stuck up racist prigs." Check.
- McCoy gets Kirk and Spock working together: Well, this one doesn't happen, but it is a prequel, and he does act as a counselor to both of them. We can see where this is going, but still ... Miss. But a near miss.
- Kirk bangs a hot alien chick. And she's green. Check.
- Spock does something brilliant. See "Stupid Transporter Tricks" below. Check.
- McCoy says "I'm a doctor not a..." Check.
- Sulu buckles some swash: Check.
- People make fun of Chekov's fake Russian accent: Check.
- Uhura contacts an alien life form: You know who I mean. Check.
- Scotty saves the day with some engineering fu: "If we eject the core..." Check!
- They pull a Stupid Transporter Trick: We get this not one, not two but THREE times:
- Chekov: Beams up someone falling. Check.
- Scotty: Beams three people on two ships to one platform. Check.
- Spock: Gets the grand prize for beaming two people onto a ship in warp, using only what looks like the transporter system on Scotty's dilapidated mobile home. Check.
- Chekov: Beams up someone falling. Check.
Now, I admit I think some of the changes J.J. Abrams made undermined himself - for example, I think the change of the phasers both made them harder to see visually as well as disconnecting them from Star Trek's heritage. But those are minor nits. Get over it - I did, and I'm probably a bigger fan than almost all of you.
On the broad scope, Star Trek was Star Trek. No two ways about it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the first pic is my desk at the Search Engine that Starts With a G, including a model of the original Enterprise from TOS. The second is my bookcase, including a model of an original hand phaser and a model of the U.S.S. Prometheus from Star Trek: Voyager. The blue box USB hub and the salt shaker with the plunger and ray gun are both from Doctor Who. For those who are confused by the horse without a head, it's a centaur from Narnia.
That's Dakota Frost, in the flesh, penciled and inked by me, based on my own sketches, internet references for the Mohawk and tattoos, and the body of my lovely wife, who was kind enough to model for me.
I had to do some promotional flyers for Frost Moon, have talked to the publisher about a frontispiece; this may be it.
-the Centaur
Thanks to the permission of IGI, the publisher of the Handbook of Synthetic Emotions and Sociable Robotics, the full text of "Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities" is now available online. I've blogged about this paper previously here and elsewhere, but now that I've got permission, here's the full abstract:
Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities
by Anthony Francis, Manish Mehta and Ashwin RamBelievable agents designed for long-term interaction with human users need to adapt to them in a way which appears emotionally plausible while maintaining a consistent personality. For short-term interactions in restricted environments, scripting and state machine techniques can create agents with emotion and personality, but these methods are labor intensive, hard to extend, and brittle in new environments. Fortunately, research in memory, emotion and personality in humans and animals points to a solution to this problem. Emotions focus an animal’s attention on things it needs to care about, and strong emotions trigger enhanced formation of memory, enabling the animal to adapt its emotional response to the objects and situations in its environment. In humans this process becomes reflective: emotional stress or frustration can trigger re-evaluating past behavior with respect to personal standards, which in turn can lead to setting new strategies or goals. To aid the authoring of adaptive agents, we present an artificial intelligence model inspired by these psychological results in which an emotion model triggers case-based emotional preference learning and behavioral adaptation guided by personality models. Our tests of this model on robot pets and embodied characters show that emotional adaptation can extend the range and increase the behavioral sophistication of an agent without the need for authoring additional hand-crafted behaviors.
And so this article is self-contained, here's the tired old description of the paper I've used a few times now:
"Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities" reports work on emotional agents supervised by my old professor Ashwin Ram at the Cognitive Computing Lab. He's been working on emotional robotics for over a decade, and it was in his lab that I developed my conviction that emotions serve a functional role in agents, and that to develop an emotional agent you should not start with trying to fake the desired behavior, but instead by analyzing psychological models of emotion and then using those findings to design models for agent control that will produce that behavior "naturally". This paper explains that approach and provides two examples of it in practice: the first was work done by myself on agents that learn from emotional events, and the second was work by Manish Mehta on making the personalities of more agents stay stable even after learning.
-the Centaur
Pictured is R1D1, one of the robot testbeds described in the article.
Posting some Q&A; about Frost Moon from an email...
Hope that clears all that up...
-the Centaur
- Q. How long is Frost Moon?
A. Frost Moon is ~90,000 words. The version my friends and beta readers read was 87,000, but the draft the publisher and I are working on has expanded that to 91,000. - Q. How does that compare to a normal novel?
A. "That depends." The scuttlebutt in the writing community led me to believe that are about 60,000 to 90,000 words, and I was shooting for 75,000 when I wrote Frost Moon. Since then I've done some research, and it seems like novels range from 60,000 to 100,000 with a sweet spot at 75,000 to 80,000 words ... but again, that depends:- The always entertaining Orson Scott Card weighs in, giving us this answer with many caveats: "a book feels like a normal novel somewhere around 100,000 words and is hard to publish at less than 75,000"
- Wikipedia presents a range of evidence on the topic, ranging from Animal Farm at 30,000 words (typically considered a novella) to War and Peace at nearly 600,000.
- Fantasy novels tend to be larger ... 250,000 words is not unusual.For comparison, Atlas Shrugged is almost 650,000 words, and Lord of the Rings (considered to be one novel published in three volumes) is 525,000. Romance novels, on the other hand, tend to be shorter ... 50,000 to 60,000 words.
- Q. What format will Frost Moon be published in?
A. The publisher is thinking Frost Moon will be a trade paperback, a slightly larger sized format that's easy to print on demand. However, depending on interest, this publisher will basically reissue Frost Moon in whatever size and format sells. - Q. Why aren't you mentioning the publisher's name?
A. Two reasons:- Until we have a signed contract that would be presumptuous, and
- Don't jinx it.
Hope that clears all that up...
-the Centaur