Dec 2007
- Dec 3
- facing the unknown
will it be just like falling asleep
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without waking
an eternal night
without sun’s dawning
no stars, no moon
just the silence
and the void? - Dec 3
- amazon and itms
Robert Scoble seems to be spinning this as an attack on Apple, but as an iPod owner, what this means is that I now have two places where I can legitimately buy songs in digital format (and even more if more artists get with it and go the way of Radiohead.) Looks like a win-win to me.
· Read more… - Dec 5
- exile
unfinished
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unending - Dec 5
- retrospect/chronologic
- Dec 8
- multicellular computing
A phrase that seems to be cropping up more and more to describe Web 2.0 and the evolution towards Web 3.0 is ”software above the level of a single device.”
· Read more… - Dec 9
- always struggling with inertia
Am I growing set in my ways? Or is it just that I really hate this time of year, and the night feels like a smothering weight crushing me into the ground?
· Read more… - Dec 9
- central dogma
Of course, I suppose I really should’ve searched Google before trying to coin a phrase. Other people have already used the analogy of the mechanisms of life to the mechanisms of computer programming and information technology.
· Read more… - Dec 10
- versioning metaphor
Still reading stuff about multicellular computing.
· Read more… - Dec 10
- still chasing starlight/the relationship of music and spacetime
I think it might’ve been Sirius, the dog star, in the southern sky that lit my way tonight, like a beacon, brighter than the ambient glow of the urban sprawl before me, but I only have a faint grasp of celestialography, so I could be wrong.
· Read more… - Dec 11
- the longest road
Just when you thought it couldn’t get lonelier. Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any more difficult than it already is. There will be no resting on any laurels. The road ahead climbs up steeply, into the forbidding vault of the heavens.
· Read more… - Dec 13
- subsistence
when degrees of freedom
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fail
just one
a single loss
enough to imprison
caged
still - Dec 18
- where is everything?
Coding—even in Ruby—is not exactly plug-and-play, but it's a whole hell of a lot easier than it used to be, I guess.
· Read more… - Dec 19
- six degrees from robin hood to j.r.r. tolkien
Wikipedia has basically become the path of least resistance these days, and if I want to find information on anything, it tends to become my first stop. Which is sometimes unfortunate, because sometimes the primary sources aren't exactly transparent. There are very few well-documented Wikipedia articles, and the ones that are well-documented have way too many references, leaving me with no idea how to stratify the authoritativeness of each reference. I can understand the reluctance to perform this stratification: it's a lot of work, and the tendency is to leave the burden—perhaps quite rightly—on the reader, but failing to do this makes Wikipedia far less useful than it could be.
· Read more… - Dec 19
- scattered thoughts on code complexity and natural language
Steve Yegge's rants about programming are always really interesting. I'm all about the big picture, and I like how he can properly abstract his arguments so that it makes sense to a non-specialist. Very few technically competent people (whatever the field) are actually able to do this, and if they could, it would certainly make cross-discipline interaction a lot easier.
· Read more… - Dec 21
- documented higher risk of mortality
It's official. I have hypertension, which is more simply known as high blood pressure.
· Read more… - Dec 22
- switching back from simplelog to mephisto
In case you didn't notice, I also switched my blog engine again. Now that Rails 2.0 is out, I thought I'd give Mephisto (from
· Read more…svn) another spin, and it seems to be working relatively well, much better than when I last tried it, although I still get the occasional 500 error. - Dec 22
- misunderstanding modern medicine
I have finally found a synonym for my embryonic philosophy tha I've been calling "The Art of Not Wanting." Akin to Hindu and Buddhist ideals (where desire brings about suffering),voluntary simplicity is a lifestyle that eschews the excesses of the modern and post-modern era. It has significant bearing on the contemporary environmentalist movement as well as with its intersection with Neomarxism.
· Read more… - Dec 22
- axial tilt
The words come bubbling up all of the sudden
· Read more… - Dec 26
- truth, truthiness, and authentic fiction
In the Western model of education, there is an operational distinction between physics and metaphysics. The former gets you grants from the Department of Defense, and opens doors to working at NASA or JPL. You get to work with nuclear reactors and supercolliders and fusion bombs and Einstein-Bose condensates. The latter is stereotyped as the demesne of hippies trapped in the 1960s and undergrads who have no idea what they want to do with their lives. Generally, the discipline is called philosophy and not metaphysics, but a rose is a rose. You know you're pretty marginal when even the social science and humanities people look at you with that "What the hell do you do?" look in their eyes.
· Read more… - Dec 27
- Dreamhost, htaccess, and routes.rb
I have never been able to get my
· Read more….htaccessfile to properly redirect requests from different blog engines. For example, Simplelog tacks on either/archives/or/past/to its URLs, and Typo tacks on/articles/to its posts. That's one of the things I like about Mephisto: it doesn't add what I feel are superfluous tokens to the URLs. (Although I am still trying to figure out how to get rid of/archives/from the monthly posts.) - Dec 28
- simplelog to mephisto
migrating from Simplelog to Mephisto
· Read more… - Dec 28
- Benazir Bhutto
I feel extremely saddened with thinking about Benazir Bhutto's assassination, casting a shadow on the end of the year. News of her death rocketed across the blogosphere at near light speed.
· Read more… - Dec 29
- oh no, not again
I won't disagree with the notion that Western Imperialism has caused much evil (the plight of the Pakistani in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination is yet another piece of evidence in that regard) but this monologue from Shakespeare still sends chills down my spine
· Read more… - Dec 29
- hope
I read Barack Obama's speech and felt like I had to post it (originally on Politico.com):
· Read more… - Dec 30
- recapitulation of the ontogeny of computer languages
Steve Yegge's rant about huge code bases and how Java exacerbates the problem is definitely circulating the internets. Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror chimes in and agrees wholeheartedly.
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- Dec 31
- models
I dig this quote:
· Read more… - Dec 31
- pinanggalingan/paroroonan
In six months, my plan for the future will officially run out.
· Read more… - Dec 31
- teaching a computer to read your mind
The crux of the eternal static versus dynamic typing debate is just how much are you willing to let the computer (or more accurately, the language implementers) decide what you mean. Those who favor static typing tend to favor explicit direction over implicit intuitive understanding, and strictly-defined categories and hierarchies rather than free-for-all tag webs and interconnections. The static typist immediately recognizes that the computer (specifically, the compiler or the interpreter) is a non-intelligent entity that must be told exactly what to do, or else you're liable to saw your own foot off. The dynamic typist, while not delusional about just how intelligent the computer is, is willing to have a little more faith in the language implementers, believing that they will do the Right Thing™ with the input that is fed to them.
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