tags: geekery
1999
August
- 1999 Aug 23
- My Training As a Wizard — Episode IV
Why do I kid myself? I feel like my Fate is pretty much sealed, yet I'd rather not accept it.
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2001
April
- 2001 Apr 13
- Irresistible Force
Adding more shit to the crapper known as the Internet.
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2006
February
- 2006 Feb 27
- trying something new again
So I think I’m going to try and use Wordpress after all. While I fondly used blosxom for almost three years [the beginning][the end…maybe], I found it got harder and harder to maintain since I have less and less time to write Perl scripts. It has even got to the point where I find it cumbersome to sync my local archives (where I do my posting) with my live blog since I pretty much use both my desktop computer and my laptop for blog posting. I just don’t have the energy to dig through the man pages of
· Read more…rsyncandcvsto try and figure out how not to nuke my file system. - 2006 Feb 27
- social bookmarking
Man, the web is a weird wild place these days. I still remember when Gopher was the hypertext king, when Mosaic first came out, and when the original browser wars started, but even the more recent days when I first discovered Slashdot and when I first started blogging are now ancient history.
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March
- 2006 Mar 7
- the mechanisms of cultural transmission
Wow, this post is going to be extraordinarily geeky. By clicking on various links, I stumbled upon some very well thought out posts regarding the inexorable programming language clashes that in reality actually affects the average Net dependent webhead in ways that may not be readily apparent.
· Read more… - 2006 Mar 7
- evolution and worse-is-better
Again, perusing posts about computer systems implementation, I come upon the debate between “the right thing” and “worse is better,” I can’t help but think about the way natural selection works.
· Read more… - 2006 Mar 7
- desktop blogging: blog thing
I’m testing out Blog Thing which is a simple Cocoa app that supports the Metaweb API. Ah, the wonders of the Web (version 2.0)
· Read more… - 2006 Mar 7
- desktop blogging continued: bleezer
So now I’m trying Bleezer which is written in Java. Ah well, no Cocoa for me, I guess. But, this, on the other hand, has a lot more features, many of which I will probably never get to use. Neat.
· Read more… - 2006 Mar 8
- simplicity and blogging
I find myself missing emacs, which is clearly a sign of pathology. The silly thing is that I clearly don’t use even 10% of its features. It’s pure nostalgia. Emacs is the only editor (aside from Vi, I suppose) that I’ve been able to run consistently on all the platforms I’ve blogged on—Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. (Yes, I’ve blogged while using Windows, but only as a stop-gap measure.) I haven’t really ever used emacs for something that I couldn’t do with whatever basic text editor comes with the OS (Notepad, GNU nano, Textedit.app—although, interestingly, of these OSes, emacs comes preinstalled only on Mac OS X—in many Linux distros, you actually have to manually install it. Of course, these are the distros that favor Vi—emacs vs. vi is probably one of the oldest computing holy wars around.) I suppose there is something masochistically perverse about having to type CTRL-X CTRL-C to quit. (I still remember the first time I was faced with an empty emacs buffer in 1994, and I had to bug my UNIX guru college roommate to help me regain control of my machine—an already old-at-the-time 486 running at a paltry 50 MHz. Don’t laugh, I’ve computed on machines running at 1 MHz. Machines that you can actually play some pretty neat games on.)
· Read more… - 2006 Mar 8
- the fate of blosxom and other errata
Interestingly, as I am debating the merits of various blogging solutions, Robert Thomas “beau” Hayes Link posts to the Blosxom Yahoo! Group and basically asks what blosxom’s fate is. (Interestingly, I don’t know if he intentionally meant the pun by using “wither” instead of “whither.” Get it? Blosxom. Blossom. Wither. Whither. Anyway.)
· Read more… - 2006 Mar 9
- filesystem vs RDBMS
As I mentioned previously, I find myself conflicted about having my blog posts live in a database. And, really, I don’t see that much difference between a blog post and a generic XML file. (As I mentioned, I wish I could write posts in XML.) I feel that blog posts, like generic XML, don’t map naturally to a relational database, particularly if you want to have fine-grained access to individual elements. Matt Liotta and Chris Preimesberger discuss the possible performance problems you might run into by trying to store XML in an RDBMS, and how a more elegant solution lies in native XML databases that can be queried in more natural (at least for XML) XPath and XQuery instead of SQL. As the name implies, XPath (which XQuery utilizes) has a lot in common with file-system paths. Consider that the browser’s location field is better suited to handling a file-system path than a query written in SQL (and file-system paths are in fact how most blogs are queried—whether by date or category, regardless of whether the blog engine stores posts on the filesystem or in a database.) And, especially in a shared-hosting situation, I don’t know if a database really gets you all that much more performance than simply dealing with the file-system. Then again, considering that I don’t find hierarchical categories all that useful, I don’t know if paths are all that great either, except for accessing specific elements in an XML document. Decisions, decisions.
· Read more… - 2006 Mar 13
- inanity and the needless consumption of CPU cycles
After reading these suggestions for the improvement of Mac OS X, I can’t help but think of the manager in “Fight Club” who asks “Can I get this icon in cornflower?” Cosmetic changes, while entertaining, do not an OS major revision make, and can sometimes even break it. Now I’m no Cocoa guru, but if the APIs are exposed, maybe what would be more reasonable is for someone who is not necessarily Apple write a viable Dock or Finder replacement (and at least for Finder, I believe there are already a few around, although the best ones are not free, either as in beer, or as in speech.) Why does the OS itself have to contain millions of bits and pieces that are not essential to an OS?
· Read more… - 2006 Mar 14
- munged
Bah. Another reason why I distrust all this stuff-it-into-a-database business. On one of my last posts, I think I may have missed a closing quotation mark, or maybe a closing angle-bracket. Which will understandably make the rest of the post unreadable. Unfortunately, because I am using the built-in text-editor for Wordpress, the editor decided to url-escape everything after the mistake. While I was able to extract meaningful text from some of it, some of it simply fell into
· Read more…/dev/null, never to be seen again. - 2006 Mar 16
- internet explorer is an atrocity
But I think we all know this already. I was perusing an article entitled On having layout, and I am appalled by absurd inner workings of IE. Man, screw this madness. Designers should design solely for pure CSS and XHTML. There is a quote in there that I find incredibly disturbing—is this just something that folks who design for IE subscribe to, or is this philosophy applicable to software engineers who design Windows software?
· Read more… - 2006 Mar 21
- web 2.0 and server-based applications
Shel Israel asks a very Zen-like question: what is web 2.0? I don’t know, but that’s my personal definition of web 2.0: server-based applications, which Steve Yegge briefly discusses in his article discussing programming language choice and Paul Graham mentions (in 2001, mind you!) in his article discussing programming language popularity.
· Read more… - 2006 Mar 25
- blosxom and XSLT
My dream (heh, that sounds really bizarre and grandiose but there it is) is to write a blogging engine that is centered around entries written in a custom XML language and transforming it to XHTML and RSS via XSLT. The only real reason I’d like to do this is because I spent an awful amount of time learning XML and XSLT back in the day and I think it would let me do things that I otherwise am not able to do easily without massive amounts of perl kludgery.
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April
- 2006 Apr 27
- random links
I am randomly scouring the net. You’d think that using del.icio.us would satisfy my need to bookmark random sites that I will likely never visit again (a technology that I wish had been available when Netscape had first come out—you should’ve seen the madness of my humongous bookmark file.) Alas, that is not to be. Of course, a sideblog would probably work better, but, I’m too lazy to write code right now.
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October
- 2006 Oct 17
- mac/intel != win/intel
J Angelo Racoma looks back at the argument that Apple switching to the x86 would be tantamount to the suicide of Apple Computer, Inc.
· Read more… - 2006 Oct 23
- ipod turns five
Charlie White writes about what he hates about the iPod which is, I guess, praising with faint damnation. First off, the proper colloquial term is “hatorade” or maybe “hatoration” if you want to get pendatic. Get it right.
· Read more… - 2006 Oct 23
- 15 years too early
I stumbled upon this post about NeXTSTEP (the OS that Steve Jobs created after leaving Apple way back when), which basically already had almost all the features of Mac OS X. Which makes sense. Mac OS (what is now known as Classic) was an evolutionary dead-end with regards to operating systems, about on par with Windows 3.11. And while Apple worked on the vaporware that was known as Copland and even while they flirted with BeOS (what could’ve been, huh?), NeXT was already there and was already a decently established development environment. Hell, it had already spawned an Open Source project (GNUstep) before Apple finally decided to get their shit together and bring Steve back.
· Read more… - 2006 Oct 27
- more than just aesthetics
x86 machines have been traditionally much cheaper than their Mac counterparts, but things have improved a lot lately. Still, a Macbook Pro supposedly costs as much as two similarly spec’ed Dells. Naturally, the author ignores certain things (which he at least acknowledges): built-in iSight, bundled software, faster RAM.
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2007
March
- 2007 Mar 27
- one step closer to singularity
I’m starting to find MySpace increasingly tedious because of the sheer amount of comment spam and the number of fembots constantly requesting me as a friend. That and none of the people on my friend’s list ever respond to any of my messages, but that is another rant entirely.
· Read more… - 2007 Mar 28
- on the classification of nerds
Courtesy of my cousin J™
· Read more… - 2007 Mar 29
- effluvia from my leaking mind
Lately I’ve been once again been able to remember what I’ve been dreaming. For the longest time I’ve been having dreamless nights, which, while not very interesting, were probably for the best. I remember from clinical neuroscience that most of our dreams are violent and/or depressing, and this one was no exception. For some reason I was really pissed with my brother. I can’t recall the reason in the dream at all, but the sense of hurt and anger was quite vivid.
· Read more… - 2007 Mar 31
- ground zero: the death star
The problem with conspiracy theories is that you can pretty much twist any piece of data to support your claim, and anyone who disagrees with you clearly is part of the conspiracy as well.
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April
- 2007 Apr 2
- the old dilemma: legacy support vs the bleeding edge
OK, so maybe I’m just a touch melodramatic when I say that Windows’ reliance on the 8.3 naming convention makes me sad. And, yes, I do subscribe to the ”worse is better” school of software design, so I agree that you shouldn’t futz around and break something that already works pretty well 95% of the time.
· Read more… - 2007 Apr 4
- aac
On Slashdot, there is a post about Apple’s deal with EMI to release non-DRM’ed music in AAC format may change how music is distributed on-line. While the conclusions drawn by this article may be suspect, I think there are aspects that are worth considering.
· Read more… - 2007 Apr 5
- blogging code of conduct
In the wake of the debacle amongst the “A” listers in which a prominent female blogger is threatened with sexual abuse and death, I find that even the MSM (that’s mainstream media, not men having sex with men) ended up writing about it, specifically wondering whether or not we need a blogging code of conduct. Darleene muses about who would even enforce such a thing, but interestingly, we already have a code of conduct.
· Read more… - 2007 Apr 7
- erratum or mere sophistry
Randomly, I saw this diagram of a serotenergic neuron. Rageboy wonders about the similarities between LSD and SSRIs.
· Read more… - 2007 Apr 7
- empires don’t crumble, they just fade away
The big internet meme today seems to be that Microsoft is dead, and to claim that a multibillion dollar company that is still making enormous profits is dead is no mean feat.
· Read more… - 2007 Apr 7
- robot chicken: office fighter
Oh, I wasted my life.
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May
- 2007 May 12
- the parable of the cave
I have come to realize that the living room of my apartment resembles a terrorist command center. I have three computers and four LCD screens, seven speakers plus a subwoofer, a TV, and a receiver as well as all the requisite cables and hubs and what not in here, because (1) I couldn’t fit it all in my room anyway and (2) the first rule of sleep hygiene is to only use the bedroom for sleeping.
· Read more… - 2007 May 15
- there is clearly something wrong with me
Man, that was an incredible waste. Three hours down the drain just to get a stupid RSS widget to work in MySpace. I wish that Myspace would just let me crosspost to their blog engine, but noooo.
· Read more… - 2007 May 16
- spam trapping
You know what would be an excellent Turing test?
· Read more… - 2007 May 25
- in transit (how to move your wordpress blog)
On the off chance that you actually cared, I’ve changed this blog’s URL. You will find the latest drek escaping from my vacuous soul at http://disorderedthoughtprocesses.com, and for once the domain name actually matches the title. This will be a transparent process, thanks to the beauty that is the Apache Web Server, and thanks to the beauty of Wordpress itself.
· Read more… - 2007 May 25
- in love (with a machine)
I’m seriously digging on The Hype Machine, a mp3 blog aggregator. Sure, there are probably less painful ways to try and find your favorite track currently being played by
· Read more…the Evil EmpireClear Channel, but for more of the underground, completely whacked-out stuff, you gotta check it. - 2007 May 31
- disinformation (itunes 7.2 and itms)
At the risk of sounding like a raving, gibbering Apple fanboy, I’ve got to ask, what’s up with all the FUD? First there is the paranoia about Apple tracking you through your DRM-less $1.29 downloads, and now there’s this big deal about no longer being able to convert DRMed AACs to DRM-less MP3s (discovered via boingboing.net.)
· Read more… - 2007 May 31
- afraid of apple
Wow. This story has actually hit the mainstream media. The BBC notes that people are paranoid about all that personal information embedded in the DRM-free songs offered on the iTunes Music Store.
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June
July
- 2007 Jul 23
- drag-and-drop goodness
Now, granted, I’m no impartial observer. I’ve hated Windows since the 1998 iteration, and haven’t looked back. I used Linux as my primary OS from 1999 to 2002, then finally ended up buying an iBook and switching to Mac OS X (which was at version 10.1 at the time.) So I am confused by the outrage generated by drag-and-drop “installation” that is the method that Apple recommends to all developers. The article itself discusses the rationale for these guidelines, which I won’t regurgitate, but which I will refer to.
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November
- 2007 Nov 2
- asymmetric warfare (mozilla vs microsoft)
The argument about ECMAScript 4 (the proposed next iteration of Javascript) could very well become quite interesting, although, realistically, this probably won’t be happening for a few years.
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2008
February
- 2008 Feb 24
- serious geekery
Well, this is a fun little puzzle from Google Blogoscoped
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April
- 2008 Apr 25
- fixed
While I had stay at work all night until the morning, I really didn't do much besides get Mephisto up and running again. This all started because I got sick of the Scribbish theme (which is, nonetheless, a great theme—I dig the hAtom support). I tried to install the Clarity-Orange theme but because Safari irritatingly always decompresses files, I ended up with a folder instead of zip file.
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2015
October
- 2015 Oct 7
- serious geekery revisited
I just ran into this old post about idioms rewritten in computer (pseudo)code. It occurs to me that I've learned a lot more Ruby since then, and I decided to rewrite some of the pseudocode into actual code.
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