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Posts published by “centaur”

Memories…

Published July 24, 2005 by centaur
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Wow. This set of screenshots on the evolution of Windows from 1.0 to Windows XP really brings back memories. I first started using Windows in college around version 2.0 - I remember seeing Windows 286 in stores but don't recall using it. Windows 3.0 was a big step forward for us early adopters - up until Windows 2000 I always managed to score a prerelease version (though as a point of pride I always went out and bought a real copy as soon as it hit the stores). I held off on Windows XP, though, as long as possible, waiting until I bought a machine with Windows preinstalled.

But, while I relish the memories, I'd never go back (though I may end up going forward to Mac OS X :-):





Here's an early 10th birthday to you, Windows.

-Anthony

He Has No Idea

Published July 24, 2005 by centaur
centaur 2
So Bill Clementson thinks he has too many books, eh?

The fact that I have too many books is, of course, even more apparent to me at the moment as I'm packing up for the move to Vancouver and I've just filled 15 boxes full of books in preparation for the move!


15 boxes of books. Uh-huh. He has no idea.



NO idea at all.

-Anthony

(P.S. What you can see there, is 25 boxes of books. What you can't see along the walls and behind the archway, is another 25 boxes of books. What you can't see upstairs, is another 75 boxes of books. Of course, some people say the first step in dealing with a problem is admitting you have a problem. On the other hand, I say the first step in dealing with a problem is buying a book written by someone else who has the same problem so you can find the best solution - What? :-)

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously … on the Internet

Published July 21, 2005 by centaur
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Recently, Henry Crutcher and I discussed Chomsky's famous phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", intended to be an example of a sentence which was grammatical but meaningless.

Henry was curious about whether a stronger example of a meaningless phrase could be found, as he could see ways of interpreting it analogically and wanted something stronger. However, he backed off when he thought about colorless green - a seeming contraditction in terms.

Not necessarily. I pointed out if you tweaked the words, you might be able to come up with usages. For example, in quantum mechanics, the Phi meson is a strange particle (a particle made from strange quarks) which has zero strangeness because it incorporates both a strange quark and antiquark. Or, more pointedly, ALL mesons are "colorless" particles because they contain quarks and antiquarks, each with its "color" and "anticolor". So our sample Phi meson might reasonably be described as a colorless green particle because it is composed of green and antigreen quarks.

But this analogy seemed like it didn't help because particles don't really sleep ... unless you consider the furious sleep of virtual particles in the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. Modern theories of physics suggest fantastic numbers of particles that we can't see are created all the time and just as quickly destroyed ... which, curiously enough, funny quirks in the movement of particles that we CAN see. These "virtual particles" don't really exist except through their influences on other particles, almost like how ideas don't really exist except through their influences on the people that hold them. So in this sense an infinite number of colorless green ideas sleep furiously throughout the universe around us. But I digress, because neither of us were buying that interpretation.

Green ideas DID make sense, however, in the "novice" or "untried" sense of green. In that sense an idea can be green - and it can also be bloodless or colorless if it fails to excite anyone. Once an idea has failed to excite anyone, of course, it falls asleep. Henry suggested that sleeping furiously could mean an idea that had many sleeping copies, at which point it occurred to me: an idea that's sleeping furiously is just a failed marketing campaign: millions of copies exist but fail to influence anyone, like New Coke or Windows DNA. In fact, in technology space it seems like every week someone pops forth with a new, green idea, standard or technology that's hot only to their marketing department but is colorless and bloodless to everyone else. The idea is marketed furiously, then peters out and dies as its marketing money withdraws, leaving piles of detritus heaped across the landscape like glacial moraines, still green and untested, but too colorless for anyone to care to wake them from their prehistoric slumber.

So now we know where colorless green ideas sleep furiously: on the internet.

And then Henry and I were very happy, having found an interpretation of an uninterpretable sentence that at last made sense. "Dot NET is a colorless green idea sleeping furiously!" - or at least the marketing initiative is, though .NET is live and well in development land. But again I digress, because our jubilation over interpreting the uninterpretable didn't last. We thought we were being clever ... unfortunately, someone else thought of it first.

Oh well. It wasn't a very good analogy, right bloodless in fact. And I'm sure everyone else who hears the phrase thinks of it too, at least the first time they tackle it like a novice. Perhaps it's best to let this analogy rest, along with all the other thousands of colorless green ideas that sleep furiously beside it.

-the Centaur

News Flash: Established Scientific Theory May Be Wrong

Published July 6, 2005 by centaur
centaur 0
Which one, you ask? Oh. Let's see... uh, well, first of all, in health the low levels of radiation used in X-rays may pose a cancer risk after all, though it is a slight one - but on the other hand moderate sun exposure, long-derided for its potential for skin cancer, may prevent more cancers than it causes by helping the body generate cancer-fighting vitamin D. Or in particle physics and cosmology, it's hard to keep track of who's found a crack in the Standard Model and the Big Bang theory this week ... and which of those from last week have then been labeled crackpots this week.

But the theory I was actually thinking of was the traditional story of how humans got to the New World: by a land bridge, 11,000 years ago. According to New Scientist, 40,000 year old footprints preserved in ash may upset this view. The scientists who discovered and studied the footprints have no idea how humans got there so early --- but they are confident enough about the the dating of their footprints to ask other scientists to check their work.

This isn't the first time that evidence has surfaced that humans were there earlier, but traditional scientists wanted to ignore the evidence in favor of their models: "The conventional view is that humans arrived in the Americas via Beringia around 11,000 years ago, when a land bridge became available between Siberia and Alaska. There have been claims about earlier waves of settlers, who must have made the crossing over water, based mainly on sites with signs of habitation dated up to 40,000 years ago, but these claims have drawn intense criticism."

SO obviously this new evidence will need to be carefully vetted, as the scientists who put it forward themselves claimed. But, in the end, the truth will come out, found by people who are willing to look clearly at difficult problems with an open mind, clearing away the smudges from the screen until the phenomenon can be seen clearly, or not at all. The truth does NOT come to those who reject the data before them out of hand, on the specious principle that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence": that kind of thinking caused people to deny the movement of the Earth around the Sun, or of the continents upon the Earth, or of rocks from the sky to the Earth itself.

On that note, and of those people, I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson's thoughts on meteorites: "Gentlemen, I would rather believe that two Yankee professors would lie than believe that stones fall from heaven."



I, on the other hand, think we should let the data speak for itself.

You, too, can become a statistic…

Published July 5, 2005 by centaur
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SO, I just participated in the MIT Weblog Survey, the latest attempt by the Georgia Tech of the North's Media Laboratory to replicate the success of the GVU's WWW User Surveys. :-)

Seriously, all smackdaddy talk aside, blogging is the latest thing (well, the second-to-most-latest thing, after podcasting) in the evolution of the Internet, and it's important that we try to understand it.

So, if you blog, help the guys up north and take the survey:

Take the MIT Weblog Survey

- the Centaur

Your Cometbuster Deformed My Horoscope

Published July 5, 2005 by centaur
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Been feeling "off" lately? Does your daily horoscope no longer seem SO relevant just to you? Well, now we know why:



In the wake of the successful Deep Impact probe, an astrologer is now suing NASA over the irreparable harm it caused to "the natural balance of the forces of the universe."

Whoops. Sorry about that. For those who have been suffering more long-standing dysphoria, however, NASA scientists had this to say:

We had nothing to do with it.



Seriously, guys, if an entire comet (the astrological symbol of doom) smacking into the largest planet (the astrological symbol of luck) isn't going to deform your horoscopes, there's no way 300 pounds of copper dinging a comet will.

-the Centaur

Words of Wisdom … Not Just for Software

Published June 28, 2005 by centaur
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Erich Gamma, one of the software luminaries behind the Design Patterns book and now part of the Eclipse Project, had the following things to say about software ... that apply to a little more than just software:

Eclipse's Culture of Shipping: "In software, having cool ideas is nice, but shipping them is what counts. For us it only counts if you have shipped the thing. That's really the mindset we have. And given that you focus on shipping, we never want to be in a mode of always being two years away from shipping. You need to have a short-term deliverable. You also plan, decide and act with this mindset."


You know, all artists should probably learn this lesson. It's easy to plan the Great American Novel or the Next Great SF/Fantasy Trilogy, but in the meantime write some damn stories, paint some paintings, write a webcomic, and get your stuff out there.

-the Centaur

Unfayre Humours, Part I

Published June 25, 2005 by centaur
centaur 1
A few random thoughts from recent conversations:

You know the best way to improve British food? Cook something else.

Some people's cell phone contracts last longer than their marriages.

Saying that the web is an engine for delivering vast amounts of irrelevant information is like saying that a library is a building for warehousing vast amounts of irrelevant books. Of course - if you can't be bothered to learn to use them.

-the Centaur

About the Author: "Anthony Francis is a computer scientist who eats fish and chips on a regular basis. His longest cell phone contract lasted 1 year longer than his longest relationship, and if anywhere is a vast collection of irrelevant books, his house is it."

Sandi @ Lambert Gallery

Published June 24, 2005 by centaur
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My honey Sandi Billingsley has a new showing of art at the Lambert Gallery. The Solstice show looks like it's going to be pretty interesting ... Sandi's new faux stone frames go well with her sanded style of art, and much of the other art looked interesting too. Check it out this Friday at Lambert!

-the Centaur

Today’s In-Flight Movie: Theater of the Absurd

Published June 23, 2005 by centaur
centaur 0
Other people have blogged this, but it is so ridiculous that I had to post this as well. Armed national guard soldiers being shipped to fight for America in Iraq are being asked to give up their nose hair clippers before flying:


King, who in civilian life is the Doraville police chief, rolled his eyes at the FAA regulation that requires soldiers - all of whom were armed with an arsenal of assault rifles, shotguns and pistols - to surrender pocket knives, nose hair scissors and cigarette lighters. "If you have any of those things," he said, almost apologetically, "put them in this box now."


All which confirms my belief that airline security is riddikulus. Unfortunately, you can't banish it like a boggart once you realize what it really is: a showy facade of security designed to make selfish, unreflective, self-absorbed people without a clear moral grasp on liberty feel good about air travel, thus distracting them from the serious debates about national security policy issues that might actually improve our safety (Should we arm pilots? Why aid Israel? How can we achieve oil independence? How do we prevent today's allies of convenience from turning into tomorrow's enemies a la Castro, Noriega, Saddam, etc.? What can we do to promote nuclear non-proliferation. How do we show leadership on international issues without creating more fear of American power?).

Riddikulus. Nope. Still didn't work - the crazy distractions are all still there, masquerading as supersized Senate deadlocks over activist reality show judges and pro/anti-globalism factions kung fu fighting over This Week's "Trial Of The Century".

Riddikulus.
-the Centaur

Batman Begins

Published June 15, 2005 by centaur
centaur 0
Batman begins.

Oh yea verily, he does.

Now that was a movie. Revenge of the Sith had mythmaking and sensory overload, but Batman Begins was the most ... well, involving movie that I've seen in a long time ... since Finding Neverland, I guess.

(Speaking of "finding Neverland," among the previews was a sneak peek at "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". It was Michael Jackson level creepy and looked almost as unappealing as "Kingdom of Heaven" or "Cinderella Man". (Note I have not seen any of those movies; I merely found the previews so unappealing that I didn't want to see them. I mean, really! "Chocolate Factory" with a Michael Jackson-ized Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka? "Kingdom" with giant Tolkien-esque battles sans mythos or any recognizable characters? Or "Cinderella" with yet ANOTHER paper-thin depression era story of an underdog who wins big - didn't we do that back with Little Orphan Annie?)

Anyway, "Batman Begins" was great stuff. I believed in the character, his motivation, his limits. I wanted his car. And NO neon tubes were used in the making of any costume that I could see. The movie, while not "understated" by any means, focused more on storytelling than on static visual impact. I could critique the fight scenes as a bit too rushed and hard to follow, but it worked for what they were trying to achieve - and to focus on the fights would distract from the great story: how Bruce Wayne became Batman.

So go see it!
-the Centaur

What the…

Published June 14, 2005 by centaur
centaur 0
From The String Coffee Table:

Unless I am hallucinating the following is the correct formalism to generalize the well-known Deligne hypercohomology formulation of strict abelian p-gerbes to weak and nonabelian p-gerbes.


I know it means something. In fact I know enough physics to get the gist of some of what it's saying and to know where to look up the rest. So I really shouldn't pick on this ... it's perfectly clear for its intended audience.

However, I just can't get enough of "the well-known Deligne hypercohomology forumation of strict abelian p-gerbes". It's just using the phrase "well-known" in a way I hilariously wasn't previously aware of. :-) :-)

-the Centaur

I hope no-one closes off the Internet

Published June 7, 2005 by centaur
centaur 1
I found the following draft deep in my Blogger archives - from almost three years ago, in fact! I don't remember precisely what was really irritating me, so I can only attempt to finish the article; regardless, here's my best bet of reconstructing what was bothering me.

I started worrying when restrictions were clamped down on Chinese blogs on top of the already restrictive Great Firewall:
BBC NEWS | Technology | Chinese blogs face restrictions

"The internet has profited many people but it also has brought many problems, such as sex, violence and feudal superstitions and other harmful information that has seriously poisoned people's spirits," said a statement on the MII website, explaining why the new rules were necessary.

It has developed a system which will monitor sites in real time and search each web address for its registration number. Any that are not registered will be reported back to the Ministry, the statement said.

Known as the Great Firewall, the filtering system used by the Chinese government is not entirely unbreachable; for every new restriction and technical door that it slams shut, the Chinese people find a hack, a workaround or an entirely new way of communicating.

But one anonymouse China-based blogger told Reporters Without Borders that when he phoned the MII to register he was told not to bother because "there was no chance of an independent blog getting permission to publish".
I was really worried that this would get worse over time. At my 50,000 foot view, I think this fear turned out to be justified.

My next, knee-jerk comment was: "I know, you think, that's just China. Nope:"
Iran jails blogger for 14 years

"By handing down this harsh sentence against a weblogger, their aim is to dissuade journalists and internet-users from expressing themselves online or contacting foreign media."

No fucking spit, that's what they aimed to do. Since I cobbled together my initial notes on this, Iran's and China's ongoing success at keeping a lockdown on their citizenry makes these comments by protesters in the Iran case seem laughable:

"The eyes of 8 million bloggers are going to be more focused on Iran since Sigarchi's sentence, not less.

"The mullahs won't be able to make a move without it be spread across the blogosphere."
Yeah, but "the mullahs" want you to know what they're doing so that bloggers in their country will crap your pants and keep their traps shut for fear of losing 20% of their life expectancy to the inside of a totalitarian regime's jail.

My next thought was "Of course, many of you may be thinking, this can't happen here." Feh:
Apple makes blogs reveal sources

In making his ruling, Judge Kleinberg said that laws covering the divulging of trade secrets outweighed considerations of public interest.

California has so-called "shield" laws which protect journalists from prosecution if what they are writing about can be shown to be in the public interest.

The Judge wrote: "...it is not surprising that hundreds of thousands of 'hits' on a website about Apple have and will happen. But an interested public is not the same as the public interest".
Talking out of my orifice, it seems to me really odd that in our country the judicary has continued to stretch some concepts to the breaking point --- for example, stretching the definition of "public good" in eminent domain to the point that it covers taking someone's home so a developer can build a new shopping mall --- while others, like the public interest in shield laws, get squeezed out or even thrown out because of little technicalities like the publication being a blog rather than a newspaper. Oh wait, I forgot to follow the money - it no longer seems odd to me now.

Let's see, where was I? OK, next I was planning to talk to the script kiddies, free downloaders and open source zealots: "you think they can't get you." Wrong again:
DVD Decrypter Author Turns Tail, Coughs Up Code

The DVD Decrypter author has announced that he has been served with an order to cease his development of DVD Decrypter. The developer has been forced to hand over all source code and the domain that he was using. It is thought that it could be Sony who have served this notice, as it is rumoured that he broke their new copyright protection within 72 hours of its release."
That left me feeling "Gee, I hope no-one closes off the Internet." But now, a few years later, I find that you can easily look out there and find a lot of people who want it to happen for anyone who's not using the internet just like them:

Why Tiered Broadband is a Wonderful Thing and ASIVS

If the choice is between your being able to download more movies or other video and my getting the best possible speed from my internet connection, I'm thrilled when you get kicked off. It can't happen soon enough. Speed is what I need. Take all your P2P downloads and get the hell off my internet.

I have no sympathy for bandwidth hogs. You all are productivity killers for the rest of us. People who are working, people who are trying to play games, people who are in virtual worlds, people who are networking, people who are just trying to watch a Youtube video or their favorite TV show, you all are the reason why we get incredibly annoyed by slowdowns and buffering.

Leave and take your bit torrent client with you.
Nice. Self-centered idiots irritate the heck out of me. I love reading Mark Cuban and his blog but short of P.Z. Meyers, I can't think of anyone who is more in a need to spend a mile walking in someone else's shoes to understand how insular his point of view is.

Best of luck getting that principle to work when someone else with more money or who feels their power is threatened decides YOU're the one doing something they don't like. Wake up, people. All the things you don't want to see, or want to see happen to other people you don't like: guess what, they can happen to YOU.

The only thing historically that has served to stop these atrocities (big and small) from happening is to push extremely broad protections down to the fricking constitutional level and then to stand by them even when they prove inconvenient for your wallet or sense of security.

-the Centaur

Bolot Kerimbaev, Technology Commando

Published May 25, 2005 by centaur
centaur 1


SO many of you (where many is defined as N greater than or equal to one) may remember that the Wiki was down for "security reasons". Well, this wasn't that someone had hacked the site, trashed the data or even just spammed the comments pages: it was, more literally, a security issue with my web hosting provider, which tightened its security provisions on script hosting and killed OddMuse, the wiki engine I was using. Fortunately Bolot Kerimbaev, a friend from Taido class, uses the same wiki engine and the same service provider, and he told me that the use of semicolons rather than ampersands in the URLs was causing the problem. A simple fix, really.

Well, not so simple.

I worked at it for a while, but found that other features were broken on my site as well ... because semicolons were EVERYWHERE in URLs in the OddMuse code. At first I tried changing them individually, then, as the problem got more complex, decided to try to abstract out the separator character into a $SEP variable that I could change and control. That worked well ... for a while ... but eventually the OddMuse instance I was working on became unstable, then stopped working entirely. Because I'd been futzing around with vi on a local directory and uploading the Perl script to my web site rather than using proper source control (for shame!), I couldn't even roll things back successfully without losing all of my changes.

SO I called Bolot for help, and we got together at Atlanta Bread Company at Perimieter Point to take care of the problem. This Atlanta Bread Company (one of their best stores) is right next to a Starbucks Coffee, which kindly provides T-Mobile Wi-Fi. So we logged in and tackled the problem, and after a few minutes showing Bolot what was going wrong, he took over the keyboard to fix it.

And a whole lot more.

First, rather than laboriously editing the files locally and uploading them with FTP, Bolot suggested we use SSH and edit the files in place so we could see the changes immediately. This point is so important I'm going to follow it up with a separate post, but that's another blog for another day. Now, apparently I got through thirteen and a half years of Georgia Tech without using SSH extensively (I almost always relied upon remote X Windows logins prior to my Windows/Cygwin days) so this option never occurred to me. Bolot, however, was able to do it almost instantly:

ssh -l username hostname

Moreover, we found that using the Cygwin instance on my laptop, we could not just SSH in to the site ... but could actually use VIM, the enhanced VI editor. And with a few quick commands, he had syntax highlighting and color schemes working - remotely, via SSH, in the bash window already set up in Cygwin on my machine. Other than the window title and the lack of a toolbar, it looked identical to the gVIM I frequently use on my machine.

vim
   :colors darkblue
   :set nu

(Note tab completion actually works on setting the colors!

After finding and fixing the first and most important of the problems, we then went to test. Bolot immediately became frustrated with my Internet Explorer installation and turned to my copy of Firefox instead, which was hopelessly out of date. Within moments, he showed me why people use Firefox: within moments he was able to painlessly install gesture support, web developer tools, a variety of search tools, flash blocking, ad blocking, and a host of other applications which made the Firefox experience almost palatable, despite the fact that its interface is still slower, clunkier and uglier than IE. Shortly thereafter, Bolot was able to find and eliminate the rest of the problems in OddMuse, realizing that the problem was not semicolons in URLs in general, but the presence of the string ";id" in the URL. By the time he was done, he had not just corrected the problems in OddMuse itself, but also other problems with my installation which were interfering with stylesheets.

SO: an improved browser, web site, method of connecting to the web site, and a whole host of other tools. All delivered straight to my brain in less than an hour.

Lessons learned: Be dogged with your tools. Find out all they have to offer you. Use them as they were best intended. And be dogged about eliminating problems in your way. Make it possible to get feedback on changes instantly, so you make many small changes safely and feel free to experiment. Then, you will be able to work far faster than you ever thought possible.

More thoughts on this later .... but, until then, hats off to you, Bolot Kerimbaev, Technology Commando.

-the Centaur

new fanu fiku – chapter 0 concludes

Published May 24, 2005 by centaur
centaur 0
Well, after 8 months, the zeroth chapter of fanu fiku has come to a close.

Breaking my arm was less of a barrier to finishing the story than trying to teach a class at the same time I was prepping for a Mars trip. Life lesson: you can only do so much.

Since the comic is already a month behind my self-imposed schedule, I plan (ha! ha! good one) on rolling into the next issue without delay. fanu fiku issue 1: manifestations will begin next week.

-the Centaur

Obi-Wan Kenobi is Redeemed

Published May 22, 2005 by centaur
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Ok. Sith made 50 million in its first day, and by now almost 1 in 10 Americans have seen it, so we can proceed without spoiling anything for anyone:

At last, Obi-Wan Kenobi gets to kick ass.

For almost the entire Star Wars saga, Obi-Wan gets pantsed by everyone he encounters. Sure, he lops off arms in bar-room brawls, bats blaster ricochets into legions of droids, and even kills Darth Maul, but outside that, put him toe-to-toe with a Jedi or trained bounty hunter and he falls to pieces. In the Phantom Menace, he's basically a young punk who can't even keep his lightsaber charged - Qui-Gon carries him through the whole movie until whacked by Maul, which apparently energizes the young Kenobi enough for him to pull his weight. But by Attack of the Clones Obi-Wan had devolved into a pompous, dismissive arrogant twat that Anakin carried through the whole movie.

Now, don't get me wrong - I thought it was stone cold of him to leap through that window onto a fleeing assassin droid to try to track it back to its master, and thought he held his own pretty good against Jango Fett while being fired on by an entire starship. But one of my good buddies put it best: in the end, he loses just about every fight. The bounty hunter picks him off at a quarter mile, after which he's rescued by Anakin. Then baby-faced Boba Fett gives him the Slave II smackdown. Finally he gets schooled by Count Dracula - excuse me, Dooko - only to get saved by, yes, you guessed it, Anakin - who in Attack of the Clones can't pull his weight either, requiring a Muppet-ex-machina save by Master Kermit - excuse me, Yoda - and his newly energized CGI powers.

Now, Sith starts off the same way. While he does well against legions of the can't-shoot-straight stork droids, Obi-Wan still can't fly, gets re-schooled by Dooku and then literally carried out by Anakin. But almost immediately he starts showing signs of maturity. He credits Anakin for his hard work and derring-do, rather than smacking him down, tries to help him cope with the Jedi council's duplicitous ways, and ultimately flat-out tells Anakin how much he admires him before hurling himself into the forefront of the war.

Where. He. Kicks. Ass.

Unlike the reckless Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan is shown to think carefully about his moves, even the boldest of them: leaping straight down into an enemy army to call out Grievous. For the entire rest of the movie, Obi-Wan out-fights, out-thinks and out-plans all of his foes, smacking down Grevious' troops, slicing up Grevious himself, and even outwitting his own clone troopers when they turn on him. In the final climactic battle with the newly minted Darth Vader, Obi-Wan excellently plays above his weight, staying toe-to-toe with someone More Powerful Than Any Jedi while at the same time constantly manipulating the battlefield to his advantage. Like Darth Maul luring Qui-Gon before him, it's Obi-Wan that lures Anakin out onto catwalks and platforms where his sheer power can no longer help him; it's Obi-Wan that keeps an eye out for lava around them, and it's Obi-Wan who maneuvers himself out of danger, always with an eye for Anakin's sword as he's doing so. In contrast, Anakin whacks away at Obi-Wan like he's trying to cut down a tree, and is constantly suprised when he finds himself dodging lava or trying to escape from a sinking platform while Obi-Wan is waving at him from the high ground.

At first I was disappointed that Obi-Wan had to use the terrain to defeat Anakin - as the same friend said earlier, the cool thing about the fight between Qui-Gon and Darth Maul is that Maul didn't throw sand in his eyes or make him slip on a banana peel: Qui-Gon just got beat by a superior opponent. But upon reflection, that's the point. Obi-Wan saw how Qui-Gon went down, and knew how he took Darth Maul out with Maul standing on the same high ground he now held over Anakin. He had experience. He distilled it into wisdom. And when Anakin came a-chopping, Obi-Wan held him, thought him off, and struck him down.

Anakin never really had a chance. When he intoned, "This is the end for you, my master," and leapt over Obi-Wan onto the platform, Obi-Wan could easily have nailed him in the back. Then when he landed, he stumbles, and Obi-Wan actually waited for him to get his footing and to bring the battle back to him, rather than press the advantage.

In reality, Obi-Wan was stringing him along - because he couldn't bear to kill hisfriend. But in the end, he did what needed to be done.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my hero.
And you kick ass.

-the Centaur