brainstorms

Friday April 14, 2006

first a geek, now a talent...

hmm. Talent, Lifer, or Mandarin quiz spotted me:

You're a risk-taker, and you follow your passions. You're determined to take on the world and succeed on your own terms. Whether in the arts, science, engineering, business, or politics, you fearlessly express your own vision of the world. You're not afraid of a fight, and you're not afraid to bet your future on your own abilities. If you find a job boring or stifling, you're already preparing your resume. You believe in doing what you love, and you're not willing to settle for an ordinary life.

Talent: 54%
Lifer: 33%
Mandarin: 51%

[risk taker? i do not know about that. my life is quite ordinary, except for all the books...]

Monday April 10, 2006

quote of the day, about in principle

this is so good, it cannot wait for my recently noted quotes list. from geoff's not in good faith:

“Agreement in principle.” It’s the way the card-sharp sucks in the mark; once you agree to play, you can’t back out even if you see that the game is rigged. And then you salve your bruised pride by comforting yourself that the original choice was justified, instead of recognizing that, just possibly, there was no “in practice” available to justify the “in principle”.

[musical selection: inimitable que pasa? from song for my father, the horace silver quintet, blue note.]

random 10 [meme]

The Unholy Chazir	New Orleans Klezmer All Stars [Fresh Out The Past]
Beyond The Mirage	Paco De Lucia, Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin [The Guitar Trio]
Technology	Robin Williams [Live 2002]
La Valse Des Montres	Yann Tiersen [Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain]
Depuis le jour	Kiri Te Kanawa [A Night at the Opera]
Nutty	Thelonious Monk [Misterioso]
Happy Land Of Canaan	Wilmoth Houdini [The Gospel Tradition : The Roots And The Branches Vol. 1]
Down Among The Dead Men	Flash And The Pan [Collection]
Allegro Moderato	Grumiaux Trio [Complete String Quintets]
War Poem	UB40 [Who You Fighting For?]

Thursday April 06, 2006

quick notes

word of the day: succedaneum - from latin, to succeed. also used in medicine as a substitute. thanks, starbucks.

ruby: just recycled the language reference manual. it mildy interested me in the beginning [i like programming languages] but does not continue to excite me. perhaps years of lisp, scheme, smalltalk, prolog, icon, oberon, eiffel, java, perl, python etc. tends to undermine one's sense of wonder in a pumped-up [beyond java] relative newcomer with a neo-wirthian syntax.

icon: i have no idea why developers do not pick up the icon bits and re-use for new languages. maybe it is more educational to write one from scratch and badly. [icon sources are public domain.]

very useful online book: james w. cooper's 1998 design patterns java companion

milt prigge's editorial cartoons

review: lowepro rezo 190 aw bag is a waste of money. its "adjustable" dividers cannot be adjusted to store the camera in any way except top down, and mid-size lenses cannot be accomodated because of the flaps that support the camera in that position. this is probably the last lowepro shoulder bag i will buy.

i am still not fully confortable with bibble's workflow. i hope this changes soon. so far i have resisted to use dcraw to bulk-convert d200 images to dng to photoshop. what i really really want is a new intel mac with aparture...

Tuesday April 04, 2006

recently noted quotes

a broad mind is no substitute for hard work. -- nelson goodman

read, read, read.
outline, outline, outline.
write, write write.
repeat.
-- terry brooks [sometimes the magic works]

Performance is often the art of cheating carefully. -- james gosling

I have a hard time getting enough time to do even trivial blogging: being truly thoughtful takes a lot of time. -- james gosling

The great thing about being a philosopher is that if you make a mistake, no one gets hurt. We don't need malpractice insurance. -- daniel dennett

rule number 1: never marry a mad mom! -- eren yigit

As for C++–well, it reminds me of the Soviet-era labor joke: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." C++ pretends to provide an object-oriented data model, C++ programmers pretend to respect it, and everyone pretends that the code will work. The actual data model of C++ is exactly that of C, a single two-dimensional array of bits, eight by four billion, and all the syntactic sugar of C++ fundamentally cannot mask the gaping holes in its object model left by the cast operator and unconstrained address arithmetic. -- guy l. steele jr. [objects have not failed]

euphemisms tend to undermine themselves. --jamie whyte [crimes against logic]

When leaders live in an invented reality, they do a bad job of dealing with real reality. -- paul krugman

Friday March 31, 2006

pick myself up [end of another sprint]

peter tosh sings

sitting in the morning sun
and watching all the birds
passin' by

oo how sweet they sing and though
how much i wish that i could fly
and i try
i said i try
i try
i really try, try try

but i gotta pick myself up
dust myself off
start all over again.

Saturday March 25, 2006

heaps of reviews in amazonia

i just noticed that there are 828 reviews for the serenity dvd. phew, that is a lot of reviews to read. it occurs to me: given amazon's increased need to squeeze what little value there is in every inch of their strange web of product attributes and associations, perhaps they can now find moderators to digest the reviews, and even produce per-book mailing lists for the review digests accompanied by the reviewer-also-reviewed references. it would make it so much easier to choose...

[ps: 836 reviews as of 2006-04-01.]

Monday March 20, 2006

michael crichton quote

from michael crichton's this essay breaks the law op-ed piece:

I wanted to end this essay by telling a story about how current rulings hurt us, but the patent for "ending an essay with an anecdote" is owned. So I thought to end with a quotation from a famous person, but that strategy is patented, too. I then decided to end abruptly, but "abrupt ending for dramatic effect" is also patented. Finally, I decided to pay the "end with summary" patent fee, since it was the least expensive.

Monday March 13, 2006

what, me worry?

for some reason, this test [found it through tom's blog] indicates i am a nerd. is it because i guessed a few chemistry bits correctly, identified a few famous faces [i never forget a face] and take notes in more than one color? gack.

intel's clue on cores and power

seen in register's analysis of intel's recent clue:

Then, you can look at Sun, which began talking up multi-core chips in late 2002. Sun insisted that a disconnect between memory (slow) and processor (fast) speeds had given rise to a need for new chip designs. Sun also began to jump on the "green computing" bandwagon, saying that lower-power processors would help save energy, although it pushed this idea less than the memory disconnect thing back in 2002 and 2003. At this week's IDF, Intel more or less recycled Sun's old slides.

Wednesday March 08, 2006

recently noted quotes

I'm curled up in a ball somewhere trying to get the voices out of my head. One of us will return shortly. -- a friend's "i'm away" message in aim

Tim!Tim! Benzedrine! Hash! Boo! Valvoline! -- crankshaft the half-orc [quoting bored of the rings after noticing scott's email to mark hurd]

If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. -- paul graham [how to do what you love]

in this particular segment, ladies and gentlemen, we have adjusted our perspective to that of the kangaroo and the didgeridoo. this automatically throws us either down-under and/or out-back. and from that point of view it is most improbable that anyone will ever know who is enjoying the shadow of whom. -- duke ellington [opening monologue for chinoiserie in afro-eurasian eclipse]

being someone's father is not a right. it is a gift! -- horatio caine

disks are out to get you. -- russ cox

The central point, and this is a critically important point, is that as a problem solver, you have to take responsibility for your own approach to solving the problem at hand. It is not enough for you to say, "Well, so-and-so used the xyz-algorithm, so that's what i'll do too" or worse, "Everyone is using the xyz-algorithm -- if I don't use it, I'll look dumb." In fact, these are truly cardinal sins. You have a duty to search for better ways to solve problems and to question the assumptions that others have made before you. -- michalewicz and fogel [ how to solve it: modern heuristics]

Friday March 03, 2006

as graham predicted...

every day, sifting through a few poor bits of spam, i remember what paul graham accurately predicted in his notable a plan for spam:

Assuming they could solve the problem of the headers, the spam of the future will probably look something like this:

Hey there. Thought you should check out the following:
http://www.27meg.com/foo

because that is about as much sales pitch as content-based filtering will leave the spammer room to make. (Indeed, it will be hard even to get this past filters, because if everything else in the email is neutral, the spam probability will hinge on the url, and it will take some effort to make that look neutral.)

Wednesday March 01, 2006

dot commiserating

register: ICANN approves dotcom contract

just because we've heard a spine-chilling, blood-curdling scream of the sort to make your very marrow freeze in your bones doesn't automatically mean there's anything wrong. [terry pratchett]

[see also: IGF à la Bierce]

Sunday February 26, 2006

deep doodle and notes

found prints and photographs division of library of congress through a link in coplien and harrison's organizational patterns of agile software development.

continuing to read and re-read george swede's haiku. brooks books collection almost unseen is a must for a serious haiku library. [ditto for lee gurga's fresh scent]

an interesting collection of essays by cartoonist guy gilchrist

zf: new zeiss lenses for nikon bodies reminds me: in 1996, carl zeiss could deliver 35mm optics with a resolving power of 200 line pairs per millimeter. that is a convenient maximum one can expect to get out of a 35mm optic; in other words, i doubt anyone would need more than 35 megapixels in a 35x24 sensor.

teen titans is very cool. now all together watching the first season dvd.

sleepycat db je: very, very good. i hope oracle ownership does not discourage people from using it in open-source apps. i do not see any worthwhile substitutes. [this reminds me: i have to re-visit the java version of sdbm, and update it for java 5.]

[doodle note: obvious cliched attempt to join the ranks of doodliterati. alas i could not think of anything sufficiently gnomic...]

Friday February 24, 2006

recently noted quotes

Software is easy to criticize and hard to do. The bigger the software, the more that is true. It is thus like speech—the more you say, the easier it is for the reader to find something to criticize, and the more likely the critic will get it wrong. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is wit that is the soul of brevity. -- dan geer [from his foreword to software security: building security in]

I am dismayed to see that the NYTimes is continuing to ask literary critics to review philosophical books about science. It's like asking a ballerina to review an auto show. -- unknown

Argle bargle morble whoosh! -- crankshaft the half-orc [quoting bored of the rings in response to linux boot on niagara]

rene descartes walks into a bar. the bartender says "would you like a beer?" rene says "i think not", and he disappears. -- robin williams doing stephen hawking doing comedy at mit.

lying doesn't scale. -- guy kawasaki [the art of the start]

however empty of full may be, the page must breathe, and in a book - that is, in a long text fit for the reader to live in - the page must breathe in both directions. -- robert bringhurst [the elements of typographic style]