Coffee, Cigarettes, Whiskey, and the Web

Tentative link to new blog site.

2009-12-13T12:02:00.002-06:00

I've finished setting up my new blog on the Dangerous Cuteness main server. You can find it at http://blog.dangerouscuteness.com/.

Coffee, Cigarettes, Whiskey, and the Web is moving!

2009-12-12T22:21:00.002-06:00

I've made a spot on my regular server for this blog, and imported all the old posts so that they'll remain persistent. Link soon.

A real estate annoyance or six.

2009-12-05T14:12:00.000-06:00

I've started looking for a new place to live again, and I'm still infected with the notion that I could afford to buy a place. I'm sitting on a couple of things before I get together the financial part of the deal but for now I'm looking at places. The whole process annoys me as much as it stresses me out, which is a lot. Here are some reasons.

Are you sure that's "uptown"?
This is probably never going to die, and it's probably been there since well before Craigslist, but it's still really annoying. I search by neighbourhood a lot, because I know neighbourhoods (Chicago is, after all, a city of neighbourhoods, so I'm told), and I know which ones I'd like to live in and which ones are undesirable to me for one reason or another. Don't try to bait and switch me by labeling something further north than Foster and further west than California as "uptown". That's not uptown, that's the middle of nowhere and dangerously close to being nowhere at all. I'm not even sure which neighbourhood that would be, but it's not Uptown and actually not even within easy walking distance of Uptown's centre. That means it should not show up in my search for "uptown".

$199
WTF does that even mean? It's a condo, it's for sale, it's listed in the "Real Estate - By Owner" category... can I pick it up for just two C-notes? Really? What're the assessments, like $10/mo? If you're not comfortable listing the actual price then don't list the property online and go through a broker or someone who's capable of that level of subtlety. Listing a property for less than a grand when it's obviously more is annoying at best and dishonest at worst. If you meant to put a "K" at the end of that but didn't, it still shouldn't be showing up in searches for sub-$150K real estate (not that that's what I was searching for).

For the love of God please proofread your posts!
This goes for anybody who's selling anything whether it be on eBay or on Craigslist or in a real-world forum like a newspaper's classified advertisements. Accuracy in writing reflects precision in thought, and no matter how intelligent you are it makes you look silly if you just toss off some quick copy without even glancing at it twice or—heaven forbid!—actually reading it aloud to yourself before submitting. I am not a grammar nazi by any means, and I forgive a lot of poor grammar and poor spelling in forums and comment sections because I know it's casual writing that's one-off and not really expected to be held up to any sort of standard. If you're selling something though, you need to hold my attention and describe the item you're selling in coherent enough writing that I feel confident handing money off to you in exchange for it. Otherwise it could've just been your cat jumping on the keyboard or something.

ZOMG ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!11!
Unless what you're typing is an elaborate acronym for something or it's a single word you want to emphasize and you don't have access to italics or bold face font, don't capitalize it. Ever. This is a rule. All-caps text reaches the trifecta of being difficult to read, offensive to the eyes, and rude (in online forums, all-caps reads like yelling). If I load a page where the entire description is in all-caps, I just move on. There's no more reason to continue reading it than there is to try to piece together the ravings of a madman. Why bother?

Nobody cares what "market value" is.
I really couldn't care any less if a place is "$40K below market value!!1" because I'm the market in this case. If I purchase it at the price listed, that's the market value, 'cause that's the price it sold for in the market, of which I as a consumer am a component. Don't try to hustle me by making the implication that its value will somehow jump by five figures in the near future and you're just getting rid of it because you want to give the world a good deal.

So there's just a handful of things... and with writing them I have successfully procrastinated away the time I had set aside for looking for a new place today :D. Don't worry, space cadets, I'll be back at it later.

A sleepless life.

2009-10-17T03:27:00.000-05:00

Okay so... I'm sure most people either know this or have figured it out about me, but I have a sleep disorder. I stay up really really really late at night and I sleep really really really late in the day; it's kind of like being perpetually jetlagged a few hours. I didn't always know this though. It took decades to figure it out.

The first time I remember having trouble sleeping was when I was living in Athens, in the smallest bedroom of my parents' house, at least a decade ago. I took the bus to school and this was during this bizarre period in Athens' schools where, in an effort to relieve the disparity between the demographics of the schools, buses would travel all the way across town to get to you. For those who haven't lived in the South let me explain. Because of the fact that black folks and white folks lived in different parts of town there was a huge imbalance between the schools, almost as if they were still segregated. My middle school was on Baxter Street, right next to the public library, the catholic hospital (at which my mother worked at the time), and the primarily black part of town (for y'all Athenians, I went to Clarke Middle School, near Rocksprings). What I'm getting at here is that I had to wake up super-early to get to the bus to get me to school on time. Ridiculous, I know, but whatever.

I had to wake up very early, and still I had trouble going to sleep at night. After a while I would miss entire nights, staying up all night reading, sometimes for a couple of nights in a row. I started to lose focus during the day, my grades weren't as great, and I started to forget things more. I started to fall asleep in class. Constantly. I saw a doctor who thought it was insomnia.

The doctor prescribed something. I don't remember what it was. The first night, it worked, beautifully. It was amazing, the best sleep I'd had since I could remember. I was at my father's house, in my room that was obviously a garage that had been finished, with shag carpet. The next night, the prescription didn't work quite as well though I did sleep, and over time the pills lost their effect. I found myself still laying in bed awake late at night, long periods of extreme boredom punctuated occasionally by this feeling of dread when I happened to glance at my alarm clock. That alarm clock was brutal. Watching the minutes tick by without even the slightest hint of sleepiness, stressed me out. It was hard to tell if the thought of sleeping at that point didn't cause me performance anxiety, some kind of psychosomatic thing.

I started to get headaches. My doctor at the time likened them to cluster migraines or cluster headaches or something, and said that they shouldn't happen to a boy my age; the usual demographic for such things, he explained, was women in their 30s. Very helpful. I'd like to think I started to doubt his competence at this point but I'm not sure if I did or not. After all, I did keep going to him for medical advice.

Another medication, this time a mild antidepressant combined with a drug that thins blood and lowers blood pressure. This one worked for a while, several months, but caused me to look—and feel—kind of stoned all day. If I stood up too fast I got lightheaded. It was still excruciating to wake up in the morning and concentration still took extraordinary effort for me. I started drinking more coffee. A lot more. Most mornings I had a thermos on me filled with über-strong oolong tea, which I'd found made me less jittery. I was getting by at this point with less than four hours of sleep a night, catching up on the weekends by sleeping for ten to twelve hours at a stretch.

After a while the most magical thing happened. I went to college and suddenly I could schedule my own classes. My first quarter I had one 8am class I couldn't avoid taking (it was an intro programming class), but luckily it was a subject I already knew pretty well and I managed to get by without showing up every day, even though I did try very hard not to skip it. Overall, I slept better. Staying up late was common, being in the computer science program, and I mostly scheduled my classes in the afternoon. In a couple of cases I put off taking a class for a quarter, and took something else, because it was only offered early in the morning but would be later in the day the next quarter. At this point I felt alright. I was able to live my life just fine even though I stayed up very late, and I was at college so everybody was staying up late. I was the last one to leave every party, every show, and I still had time at night to get my schoolwork done, but I slept very late. It wasn't a big deal until...

...I slept through two midterms. In a row. In the same class. I don't think I need to explain that I failed the shit out of that class. This was brutal for a variety of reasons, not the last of which being it was a class I could have easily tested out of and that it was my first F ever. I got berated by my advisor and I took a lot of shit from my family. It sucked. I'd settled into the idea that I was just making irresponsible choices, that I chose to stay up late and couldn't get it together. I was convinced that all these things were my fault.

After college I moved here, in Chicago, and started work at a local ad agency as a web developer. Having to come in at 9am, I started to have trouble again. Those same patterns from high school, the lethargy, the coffee drinking bordering on outright caffeine abuse, the repeated sleeping through alarm clocks. That last one was a serious problem. It was while freelancing at this same ad agency earlier in the year that I slept through my alarms two days in a row, much to my extreme professional embarrassment, and it was at that point that I did what any sensible jewish boy would do.

I called my mom. I had missed a couple of hours of work and I worried that my employers might be pissed about that. My mom tried to cheer me up and then we signed off and I walked back upstairs. Meanwhile, in Saint Louis, my mom started googling sleep disorders.

By the time I talked to her later that night, when I got home, she'd come up with something that sounded identical to my symptoms, Delayed Circadian Rhythm Disorder. After a long dry spell in my work, I had noticed that when left to my own devices I sleep perfectly, but from around five or six in the morning until around noon. I sleep at around the same time every night and can wake up every noon spontaneously (i.e., without an alarm clock) at around the same time. Also, my body has a particularly low core temperature (94.1°F or so), which had always been mysterious. It seemed to fit.

It took me until a week and some change ago before I had insurance and the time to go visit a sleep specialist. Not too surprisingly, when I outlined the symptoms I was experiencing, he concluded I have Delayed Circadian Rhythm Disorder. After taking one month while working and one month while not working to document my sleep patterns I wasn't surprised, but in a way it was like I'd just found out. I started to think more seriously than I'd allowed myself earlier in the year about how this was going to continue to adversely affect my life. But for a couple of excruciating methods that aren't even permanent, there's no treatment for it, and there's no pharmaceutical that affects it. So I'm stuck being this way.

It's a disability, but I don't want to think of it that way. This is my mutant superpower I was born with. Like Batman, I own the night, and that's kinda neat. Now I just need to figure out how I can hold down a decent job living like this. Depressing as the diagnosis is, now that I know what I'm dealing with I feel more optimistic overall. And with that, it's 3:30am and I've still got some other stuff I wanted to do before bed. Sleep tight, space cadets.

Just then, something very mysterious happened.

2009-09-12T10:27:00.000-05:00

Earlier today I was working on a website at work that had severe performance issues in Internet Explorer. The site has a healthy amount of Javascript, a significant portion of which was actually written to overcome various bizarre shortcomings of IE6. For example, IE6 doesn't support the ":hover" pseudoclass for any element that isn't a link, which frankly is absurd, because it almost seems deliberately omitted, since somewhere they would have to check if the element was a link or not. Anyways so every page of this site was taking as much as 35 seconds to fully initialize and run all of the startup Javascript code. This, needless to say, was disconcerting for me, and I tried in vain to optimize my code.

Just then, something very mysterious happened. I reloaded the page, blinked, and it was initialized. Everything was fine. I had written some code to time the hardest parts of the Javascript code, and where these were reading 35ish seconds before the entire page was now loading in less than a second—still nowhere near on par with modern browser performance but quite tolerable. I was ecstatic even though by all outward appearances it appeared as though my little Javascripts had been touched by the Flying Spaghetti Monster Himself somehow, and this was a little alarming to me. At this point my surprise turned to incredulity when I checked the changes to my files; there were none. I had added a superfluous semicolon to one function but when I removed the semicolon the performance was the same. The website had unexpectedly made a 7,000% speedup, and I was mighty suspicious of this. I had a colleague confirm it and he couldn't. The site was just as slow as ever on his machine. I was nonplussed, to say the least.

Which brings me to the point of this little entry. Internet Explorer 6 is eightish years old, as obsolete as a program can be when so many people still use it. That number is diminishing rapidly, but Microsoft recently announced they will continue to support it until 2014. This is terrible news for web developers, because IE6 provides what I would generously call an inferiour web experience by today's standards. It's two versions behind now that IE8 is stable, and it's really showing its age. Yet, because so many corporate users have to use IE6 at their job, it's still vital to make sure any website I build works in IE6. I get that. But what if we change what it means for the website to "work"?

Here's what I propose. Every user, no matter what browser they're using from Chrome to IE6 to godforsaken lynx, should be able to read and view all content, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they need to be able to see animations or transition effects or fun stuff like that. It's extremely difficult to get these kinds of things to work well in IE6, and rather than burn up so many man-hours trying to make the experience exactly identical, I believe it would be more beneficial to only assure that IE6 users can view all the content. If the styles are messed up and the website looks terrible, that's obviously a huge problem, but if clicking that photo gallery link opens an iframe instead of fading the page to a lightbox, I don't think that's necessarily the end of the world. In circumstances where you have a browser as inefficient as IE6 is, particularly at manipulating the content of web pages, you have to use a very light touch lest you introduce too much latency. So my idea is to produce the CSS and Javascript in such a way that semantic data is preserved, but the site experience degrades gracefully along with the age of the browser. IE8, Firefox, and Chrome users may get super fancy animated transitions between elements on the page, and various interactive things, but IE6 users will get just the page and its contents, laid out statically to be just as useful if not as delightful.

The moral of this story is that IE6 users have the crappiest browser still in use in the world. Absent real user testing I can't know this but I imagine by now they're accustomed to the web looking strange. Build your site in such a way that it's still usable to IE6 users, even if that means generating a different experience for them. Alright. Time to relax, space cadets; I'll talk to y'all later.

Newly-scanned black and whites up on my Flickr

2009-05-31T22:48:00.000-05:00

I just stashed a whole bunch of black and white photos from my college years on my Flickr page . I've decided over the past few days since getting my fancypants new camera that I really miss photography. I dunno if it'll ever be the same though....

I started taking pictures probably around sixth grade but always loved any opportunity to futz around with a camera for as far back as I can remember. In high school I took graphic arts classes and had access to a darkroom so I took a lot of photographs, but I took many of my best photos in college. The Iron Heritage set is a product of that.

The set contains black and white photographs of objects steeped in history but largely forgotten except for the odd tourist in Athens, GA. All the objects photographed in the set were forged in the Athens iron and machineworks, now nonexistent, and are so integrated into the landscape of Athens as to be difficult to really appreciate. My favourite of them all is the Iron Horse, found off a highway just outside of Athens, literally mere meters away from the centre of Nowhere. The horse is so majestic and powerful, even in its abstracted form, you can't help but pause even if you're driving by, slowing down just a little to try to take it in. Go ahead and slow down, there's nobody behind you for miles. It's easy to pass though, going 60mph down the road. I stopped and had a closer look. The horse struck me as painfully lonely, not only because of its isolation but because of its origin. It was a sculpture created by one of the art school faculty that was so hated by the rest of the campus that it was defaced nearly constantly and had to be removed from campus permanently so as not to cause a riot. So unappreciated and so solemn, it just seems very alone in that field.

The double-barreled cannon, not yet uploaded as of this blog, is another favourite, if only because it's such a ridiculous story. The double-barreled cannon, conceived in the times of the Civil War—or, as it is known in the South, The War of Northern Aggression—was invented by two Athenians for the war effort. The idea was that two cannon balls could be linked with a chain and loaded into the barrels, with the chain presumably hanging down in a loop in front. This would create a pants-shittingly terrifying projectile that would mow the enemy down. Its only recorded victim, who died during the first test-firing, was a cow far far away from the intended trajectory. What the brilliant inventors had forgotten to consider is that cannon loads are inconsistent at best, and even two fuses can't be guaranteed to burn down at the same speed, so one barrel fired noticeably earlier than the other, causing that cannonball to swing in an arc towards the other barrel, which fired soon thereafter, breaking the chain. One cannonball was the harbinger of a cow's demise and the other was never seen nor heard from ever again. Presumably during this test phrases like "Lawd a'merceh!" and "I do declare!" were heard. What gets me is the sheer chutzpah Athens has for proudly displaying this example of engineering gone horribly wrong; it's right in front of City Hall where everyone can see it.

The arches and fence around the main UGA quad are also pretty fascinating. They're a landmark, so much so that they're incorporated into Athens's official city seal. The city is absolutely flooded with photos of them that all look exactly the same. Every other wedding photograph taken in Athens is the happy couple posing on the Broad Street side of the arches, on the steps, with the camera facing through the arches towards the quad. It's understandable, I guess; the quad, being all green and filled with trees and classical greek architecture, is pretty photogenic. I get it. I just didn't want my photo of the arches to be typical, so I shot it at night from the quad looking out through the bushes onto Broad Street. What resulted is, I think, a more honest take on the arches, as I portrayed them as real things existing in a real city, not existing in some fairyland.

I'll upload some more tomorrow, as well as some old photographs from my grandfather (including some of middle school me... I probably won't be publishing those). Enjoy, space cadets!

Thoughts of the Bay and my father.

2009-05-19T03:39:00.000-05:00

I've been in the bay area for the past week and change, and I'm leaving tomorrow. I make it a point not to give into the temptation to change the time zone on my computer unless I move permanently somewhere, so my clock says "3.01am" right now; this is the time my body is supposed to think it is I guess. Last week's jetlag is a distant memory now so I'm wide awake, yet again. So maybe I can blog myself to sleep tonight.

I met an amazing pool player at the Jury Room in Santa Cruz earlier. He was very drunk but still somehow managed to mop the floor with me and my two companions, as well as the guy who played before us. He'd lost his father, age 85, to pancreatic cancer recently. I related, since I lost mine five years ago to colon cancer (five years exactly this past cinco de mayo). I felt for him, since there's no reason to believe that losing a parent when you're 60 should be that much easier than losing one when you're 20. Cancer, truly, has earned its place on my shit list.

I bring this up not just because of this chance meeting, but because earlier in the week I attended my first baseball game ever without my dad. I've never been into sports really, and baseball particularly is an acquired taste I think, but I have the fondest memories of those games we'd attended together. One in particular stands out. It was my dad's night for custody of me—my parents having been divorced since I was in 4th grade or so—and he was very, very late picking me up from school. I was in 8th grade and already in a shitty mood just existing at that point, so my dad's tardiness wasn't a welcome addition to the scene. I was pretty pissed, sitting around outside my middle school which, by the way, was in the absolute middle of nowhere.

Anyways my dad rolls up and asks if I want to go see a ball game in Atlanta. A new team had recently been created, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and they were playing against the Braves at Turner Field. The game itself wasn't memorable enough to stick in my mind but for one embarrassing moment. The Diamondbacks, as I said, were still a new team, and they lacked cohesion still. They didn't have that vital unspoken coordination, when a pop fly ball is headed for the empty space between two outfielders and the shortstop, to instantly decide who should catch it. Apparently, they also had great focus and were keeping their eyes on the ball only, because all three players collided, got beaned with the ball, and let an easy out turn into a double base hit as they fell over, dusted themselves off, then threw the ball back infield. In my extremely limited experience of the sport, it was the most hilarious baseball moment I have ever witnessed to this day.

I remember my evil bitch of a stepmom saying that my dad watched sports so he'd have something to talk about with people, because he was so great at relating to people unlike him, but that was pure horseshit. My dad loved baseball enough to have books on the topic, enough to have signed photographs of a pre-steroids Roger Clemens and a pretty solid collection of baseball cards. He loved baseball enough to yell at me when I wasn't paying enough attention at games. My dad didn't bother to instill in me love for any sport except baseball.

I can't help but imagine that baseball is a very different thing than it was when he was a wee lad. Turner Field's construction was really the turning point for the Braves where they became just the Yankees of the South, overpaid babies who weren't even from Georgia anyway. So what's the point? The Cubs aren't all from Chicago, you know. The very idea that an entire baseball franchise could transplant to another city is just antithetical to the entire purpose of the game, and, furthermore, the purpose behind being a fan. If the Cubs moved to another city could anyone in Chicago still be a fan? Or would we all have to become (god forbid!!!) Sox fans?

I'm too rational about these things though, because I'm not a sports fan anyway. I can relate to a more basic love of the game like my dad had, though, because I'm really not that dissimilar to him at all (I see him every time I look in the mirror).

Every cinco de mayo I feel like I should write something, say something, do something to remember him, but I remember him all the time, in little conversations and little anecdotes like that one, memories I have always in my back pocket ready for easy reference. It's not that simple though. You can't just schedule all your grief for two days a year (the other: 8 July, his birthday). I have to wait for a moment I can bring it all back and make it all make sense, like the first baseball game I've been to without him.

I realized that, but I didn't feel sad at the game at all. Rather, I just had a great time with my friends, drinking beer, smoking really excellent ganja, eating cheap hot dogs, drinking more beer, shooting the proverbial shit, making fun of Coale 'cause the Royals were getting shellacked something fierce by the A's, and thinking to myself that I understand what my father dug so much about baseball. There really is nothing like it, and no other sport compares. So just like ever I hope my father would be proud of me and what I'm doing. At the very least I think he'd be happy I can still enjoy a ball game without him, and even happier that I was thinking of him in the process.

Sleep tight, space cadets.

The saddest thing you'll read today

2009-05-12T03:44:00.003-05:00

I don't remember how but I recently (today) got to reading Conservapedia and, more specifically, articles on other sites about Conservapedia. For those not in the know, Conservapedia is an attempt by far right-wing nutjobs to create their own alternative reality where Darwin's theory of natural selection is contentiously debated in the scientific community (spoiler alert: it's not, and is supported by an abundance of fossil and geological evidence as well as decades upon decades of good research) and where, apparently, homosexuality is an incredibly important subject. I'm not even joking. There are scores of articles just on homosexuality as it regards to nearly everything else (including smoking habits... yeah I don't get it either).

The saddest thing you'll read all day though is the talk page for a now-deleted article on the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus. For those who don't know, the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus was an internet prank from the olden days, back in the late 90s. I vaguely remember fooling some friends of mine with it then. This in itself wouldn't be particularly noteworthy, as apparently Conservapedia is vandalized often enough one single incident could barely be worth noting, but for the fact that it stayed on Conservapedia for some time.

Now, of course, Wikipedia gets vandalized too. Constantly. But those edits get cleared in minutes, not months. Same with Conservapedia; for the most part it looks like when people vandalize articles they get reverted promptly. The PNAO article didn't go away though. At this point they could have said they just didn't notice it, and with 20,000 or so pages on the site it's totally possible they didn't. But no. Instead, there is that talk page, where Andy Schlafly (Aschlafly) tries to play it off like it was a joke that totally fooled all the bloggers that were making fun of them for it.

So... what's the joke? If the joke is that we (the liberal-biased reality around them) thought it was a real article, then I don't get it. If Conservapedia is supposed to be "The trustworthy encyclopedia" then why would it have joke entries at all, however hilarious they might be? If instead it is meant to be a parody of environmentalism, then I still don't get it. As environmentalism satire it falls terribly flat, particularly since the joke isn't even original (as mentioned before, it appeared in 1998). He says "I can't deny being amused by thousands of liberal bloggers trying to ridicule Conservapedia based on a joke about themselves" but how is this a joke about Conservapedia, unless the joke really is that Conservapedia's editors are too stupid to notice that there's no such thing as a Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus and the very notion of one's existence is ludicrous? 'Cause if that's the joke, then I think it's pretty hilarious, but I don't think Andy Schlafly should really be the one laughing.

My advice to Andy would be to listen to Dpbsmith up top there. The better reaction would be to just claim you never got around to deleting it before, not to try to play it off like it's some joke the entire rest of the Internet failed to "get" when really it's obvious that you're the one with the egg on your face. Nice try, but you fail. Miserably.

Stay smart, space cadets.

What the fuck happened in the past eight years?

2009-04-26T19:56:00.000-05:00

I am absolutely furious about this torture thing. Really. When did we stop being a nation that gives a shit and turn into this current one, which is apparently A-OK with war crimes, blatant human rights abuses, and violent, despicable activity by our previous administration?

Torture, no matter who is on the business end of it, should infuriate anyone who has a human soul, and I say right here and right now that if you think it's okay to torture people—even after it has been proven time and time again not only to be illegal, not only to be immoral, but also to be wholly ineffective for the garnering of any usable intelligence—you are not human, you are disgusting, you have no soul. I'm serious. The very idea that this issue is even being debated just turns my stomach. If the Bush administration had extensive proof that their techniques worked and provided actionable intelligence in adequate time to save many innocent lives (spoiler alert: they haven't, and I doubt they will be able to provide any that isn't made up just like every other lie of the Bush administration), I might waffle on this, but the vast preponderance of evidence contradicts this notion.

People like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh disgust me greatly. They are subhuman and should be despised. They do not deserve our attention. They only deserve psychiatric help, as I believe they are both in desperate need of it. I saw Glenn Beck speaking on his show in his pouty, derisive voice, mocking those of us who have more than a single gramme of compassion in our hearts, saying that he doesn't think waterboarding is torture. Know what, Glenn? Nobody gives a fuck what you think, because we already have hundreds of years of history, including the Japanese in WWII, Chinese communist forces in North Korea during the Korean war, even the fucking Spanish Inquisition (bet you weren't expecting that, asshole; nobody ever does), who were all called torturers because of their use of waterboarding. As Paul Begala averred to Ari Fleischer, who is also rapidly climbing my shit list, we hanged Japanese soldiers who waterboarded our POWs. We didn't do it because we won the war; we did it because what they did was morally reprehensible and if nothing was done about it justice would never be served.

A recurring theme in the opinions written about this: we are a nation of laws, not men, or political parties. I would express exactly the same disgust if it had been Democrats in charge, and if we find out that there were some who knew about this and gave it their blessing I say let's go after them too. No one who was in favour of this, who pretended it was legal, who covered it up, or who otherwise condoned it should be spared from justice that is as bipartisan as it is brutal. Seriously. When did we become a country that condones this kind of behaviour no matter how golden the intentions? Not in my name, assholes.

Let's hang 'em high, space cadets.

A stormy harbinger of Spring's arrival in Chicago.

2009-04-25T17:39:00.002-05:00

One of my earliest childhood memories that I can recall was a thunderstorm, or maybe several, in Macomb, IL. We lived in a big house with a front porch large enough for multiple rocking chairs, and it was covered by an overhang such that you could sit and watch a storm go by. In retrospect it sounds very peaceful but at the time I was about 2 or 3 years old and terrified of thunder. My parents and our neighbours were out on the porch watching the storm and I remember being torn between being safe from the thunderstorm in the house, but alone, and being outside with the thunderstorm but being with my parents. I'd have to ask my mom to be sure but I think I remember running between the house and the porch every time there was a lightning strike.

It's funny thinking about it now, since my usual reaction to thunderstorms nowadays is to want to be out in them. I always like having a window open so I can hear them. The window next to me right now is cracked just enough so that my living room is filled with the storm's sounds.

Sometimes I lament that I'm no longer scared of thunderstorms, because now that I'm all grown up I have grownup things to be scared of, like economic meltdowns, nuclear war, and the icecapades. Sigh, loss of innocence, and all that. Stay dry, space cadets.

An unexpected snowstorm ... in April

2009-04-05T21:31:00.002-05:00

Yeah. It's snowing outside, like a motherfucker no less, and it's April. I am so over this Chicago weather. I miss the bay area tons times like this. If you're somewhere where it's nice outside, go out and play a little, for me, space cadets.

A most fascinating coincidence

2009-04-02T00:39:00.003-05:00

Went to Dollop earlier to meet up with Sarah. I got a text from the illustrious Chris Coté saying that a friend of his had recognized me in a photo on his friend's Flickr photostream. Apparently she'd been taken by the adorableness of my wee laptop and took a picture.

This sequence of events, from the photo being taken to me receiving the text message from Chris, couldn't have taken more than 20 minutes. I am awed by this, because each element is so commonplace now. The 21st century is, I've got to say, pretty bitchin'.

Creep on, space cadets.

Another Sleepless Night

2009-03-30T07:02:00.005-05:00

It's 7am on a Monday and I am bored as hell. By far the most unbearable part of not being able to sleep like normal people is that, at the best of times, I have a couple of hours a night where I am painfully aware of the rest of the world sleeping. My buddy list slowly decays over the course of the evening as my friends across the world go to sleep, and I'm left here wondering what to do.

Let me back up. I haven't slept normally (i.e., in the way I believe other people my age sleep) since I can remember. According to my mom it's been since birth but I don't know if that's true. I know for sure I started having trouble in elementary school and it got significantly worse in middle school and the start of high school. I remember going through many pharmaceutical and homeopathic solutions throughout that time but very few worked. In my early adolescence I had severe insomnia, sometimes lasting for days on end, that seemed to be calmed down by a combination of antidepressant and blood-thinning drugs. Unfortunately, as a side effect, I lived every day in a half-asleep daze and would faint if I stood up too quickly. Fun times. Moving to California for college and escaping the right-wing cesspool of ignorance that is the deep South helped a lot, but I was still up late at night for no reason.

Throughout college I had tons of issues, too. Two classes, at least, I failed because I slept through some lectures and tests. I accepted, at the time, the conventional common-sense wisdom that I was a fuck-up and that my sleep problems were my fault. I'd spent most of my life having grown-ups tell me that, so I believed it. There had to be some personality flaw in me or lack of discipline that I was failing to overcome. It was a hard feeling to shake, and I guess I can't really blame anyone for that, because the truth is just so much weirder than that.

In starting my career here in Chicago, I started with a nine-to-five job at an ad agency. I loved the agency I was working at, loved the people there, liked the work I was doing and took a lot of pride in it, but couldn't for the life of me wake up early enough to get there on time. I don't know to what extent my punctuality was a problem but I'd been spoken to about it a couple of times. The next full-time job after that, I specified later hours and got them, but later on my hours were one of the reasons given for firing me.

When I had the chance to work mostly from home for several months on end, I noticed that I was sleeping a full eight hours a night, between the hours of 5am and 1pm—whereas beforehand I had become accustomed to less than six hours a night due to my working schedule. After a few months like this, I worked at the same ad agency again for a few weeks (sharp-eyed readers will note my exasperated blog posts about issues I was having with that project). I overslept two days in a row and freaked out. Something was really wrong if, after more than a week on a nine-to-five schedule I couldn't adjust. So, I did what any nice jewish boy would do in circumstances such as these: I called my mom. Much to my surprise and delight, my mom spent half the day researching and came up with a lesser-known sleep disorder, discovered in the 1980s, the symptoms of which matched my own so perfectly I was taken aback to find out it existed.

Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder is essentially like being permanently jetlagged by a few hours. Brunch time feels like dawn to me, and it doesn't really ever feel like bedtime until the sun's almost ready to rise. Also, occasionally I just don't sleep at all (not sleeping last night is what prompted me to write this entry). Also, apparently, DSPD is the reason why my body temperature and blood pressure are both lower than normal on average (rock steady right around 95°F and typically in the neighbourhood of 100/45, respectively).

I fear I've been kind of obnoxious and overly expositional about it, but honestly I think if people understood how significant this discovery was for me they'd understand. It was a welcome revelation to find out that not only am I not the only one but there are actually many people with the same disorder—about 3 in every 2,000 people on average. Okay so that's still very rare (about 1/6th of 1%) but it's 3 in 2,000 more than I thought there were. It was a wonderful feeling of weight being lifted from my shoulders, the vague possibility that many of these incidents in my past weren't really my fault. My body chemistry is just fundamentally different from normal.

But there were a couple of more ominous implications to the discovery. Most troubling to me was the thought that, while it was nice to know that it's not my fault I can't sleep normally, there is very little that I can do to fix that. While there are some treatments available they're more like coping procedures than real treatments—just ways for you to kind of hack your sleep mechanisms into working for a little while at a time. For this reason it's a bona fide disability, recognized for the purposes of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Again, that's lovely, because it means if I need to I can always get the right hours at work, but this too is disconcerting as any special or different treatment at work isn't necessarily a good thing.

Really a huge part of the problem is that I fear a lot of people think it's fake. This is understandable, I guess, since people rarely see me stay up late at night; they only see me wake up super-late and it's easy enough to assume I'm just lazy. I also get "Oh you're just a night person; I'm a night person too" from people who stay up until 1 or 2 in the morning every night, as if that's remotely the same thing. You can totally stay up that late and still hold down a full-time job. It is significantly harder to do that when your body refuses to sleep before 4am. Believe me: I've been trying to work around this since I was 10 years old. In high school my sleep issues and my frustrating inability to overcome them brought me as close as I've ever come to the brink of suicide (which, if anyone's keeping score, wasn't very close but it's as close as I've ever come).

People always have helpful tips for how to sleep, and believe me I love hearing them, but none of them work on me. I know people are only speaking from their own experience so I can't really blame them, but really my experience with sleep is just fundamentally different than theirs. Just so we get this out of the way right here and right now, I have tried all of the following with limited or no results: acupuncture, melatonin supplements, prescription drugs, illegal drugs, over-the-counter drugs, booze, nyquil, changes in exercise, changes in diet, changes in caffeine intake, homeopathy, herbal remedies (including valerian root), and meditation. There's still some treatments specifically for DSPD that I haven't tried (see also: light therapy, freerunning sleep), so I'll be experimenting with those during my time off work. On the whole though it's pretty discouraging, and the wikipedia article on the subject doesn't exactly inspire confidence (best tip from the article: get a job as a cab driver or bartender; thanks, wikipedia!). My goal for this year is to work out a coping strategy that will hold for a couple of months at a time so that I can still do my work. I need a better coping strategy for late-night boredom, too, I think.

Wish me luck, space cadets.

Not as Many IE Woes?

2009-03-09T19:30:00.003-05:00

Mattie had a look at my web app I've been working on in his virtual machine and it ran just fine. Now, on the whole, this is very good news, because it means I don't have to be as concerned about IE6 users. At the same time, though, it also means that I've basically wasted half the time I've spent optimizing and that I've committed a cardinal sin of programming: optimizing prematurely. Even though I believe that it's understandable I didn't run around the office trying it out on everybody's virtual machine, I still feel pretty foolish having not asked a single coworker to have a look when I discovered something anomalous. Live and learn, I guess.

I didn't get content until today anyway so it all works out. I stayed a little late tonight getting the first block of it into the layout, but when I merged my files with another developer's our versions were in conflict. After a cursory attempt to rectify the conflict I decided to go home. I had already attained Last Developer Standing status for the day and I needed Fred around to do the merge anyway. Tomorrow, then. Wish me luck, space cadets.

Internet Explorer 6: The Cancer of the Internet

2009-02-25T21:34:00.004-06:00

For the past few weeks I've been working on a project at my former employers, VSA Partners. I've been working on a pretty complicated web application, a sort of live search for product lines where you can drag sliders to specify the attributes you'd like. Very cool, and it works absolutely beautifully in Firefox 2/3, Safari/WebKit/KHTML 2/3, and Google Chrome, not surprisingly. Its performance is by far and away the best in the nightly build of Webkit and Google Chrome, again not surprisingly because those are essentially the same browser and existing on the bleeding edge of browser technology. So far, so good. Internet Explorer even runs it tolerably well, with a 2.5 second lag when the page is first loaded and a 0.24 second lag between user interface interactions; resetting all the controls to their original state takes 2.3 seconds.

And then there's fucking Internet Explorer 6, rubbing its shittiness in our faces much to our collective shame and chagrin.

For this project, I knew that IE6 would be a major bump, so I did my homework on it. I read all the Microsoft Developer Network articles on the subject (and yes, there are MSDN articles specifically about workarounds to IE's craptacularness), the not-so-swift Javascript execution in Internet Explorer. In particular there is a nice three-part article series on there about some of the specific sore spots in IE6's performance. I read up and then applied what I had learned to my code. The result was slow and steady performance improvement over the course of a few days, but overall an abject failure. But, this failure doesn't belong to me; I'm not going to claim it, as tempting as it is for me to believe this is my fault. This particular failure sits quietly and slovenly on the shoulders of Microsoft. Internet Explorer 6, according to W3schools (source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp), is still used by about one in every five internet users. This means that, as a web developer and designer, if I ever create anything that can't run or looks terrible in IE6, I've automatically lost one in every five people, 'cause let's face it, those people aren't upgrading anytime soon. Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 make up 44.2% of internet users.

A little bit of background for those who aren't technically inclined (and for those who are but love reading about Microsoft's many failures). Internet Explorer 6 is notoriously difficult to develop web sites for because it has poor or nonexistent support for many of the new standards that are supposed to make web development simpler. Internet Explorer's rendering of web sites hearkens back to an earlier, more innocent time, when there were no massive javascript applications, when web sites were simple, god-fearing websites and IE6 was all you needed. Times are very different now. With the rise of web applications moving the heavy lifting of making the web work over to the client side, the fastest browser wins, and accurately rendering XHTML code to web pages is fundamental—obviously—to the viability of a browser as a platform. In short, web browsers are now expected to be platforms similar to an operating system. As it happens those two tasks, rendering code accurately and executing javascript code swiftly, are the two things at which Internet Explorer is the absolute worst.

In the case of IE6 I don't think it's fair to poke fun at its javascript interpreter. As I said above it was a different time, and javascript really hadn't come into its own yet. It was rarely if ever used for anything move involved than overcoming the shortcomings of CSS and XHTML code. But nowadays we write whole applications in Javascript and skin them with XHTML/CSS, so IE6's relevance to our present-day world is waning fast. Its javascript interpreter may be apples to today's browsers' oranges, but that still doesn't make reliance on it a forgivable offense. Even since I've been writing them web applications have exploded in popularity and scope. As I've positioned myself to specialize in their design and development, I feel pretty good about this. But there's just one problem... IE6.

In a modern web browser I have access to all the new innovations in browser technology over the past decade, but in IE6 I am stuck in the last century. Yes, that's right, Internet Explorer was released in 2001 and, but for security and aesthetic changes, hasn't changed much. Internet Explorer 6 is still the sorrow of the internet, and something tells me those 18% aren't going to upgrade soon. So... I have an idea.

Fuck 'em. That's right. Fuck 'em. They're using a browser that came out before the dot-com crash; they shouldn't be expecting the internet to behave the same for them. At this point I think it's okay to say, Yes I will look at it in IE6 and if there's a quick fix I can apply I'll do it but I will not burn hours and hours tweaking it. Overall this will mean less money in the short term but it will mean better productivity, more websites launching on time, and the betterment of the internet in general.

Once we stop caring about IE6, it's no big deal to write javascript that futzes with the layout of the page (IE6 is notoriously terrible at manipulating DOM objects), or to write elegantly simple CSS layouts, or to write heavyweight application suites. It'll be a better world and when the IE6 users are finally forced inevitably to upgrade, the rest of the world's web will be ready for them. They'll arrive with fanfare to a beautiful and useful web populated by tools that are as easy to use as they are powerful. I'll be here at the bleeding edge... waiting. Come join me, space cadets.

the chatterböxen story

2009-01-25T18:49:00.005-06:00

I have just launched the beta of Chatterböxen, my ephemeral, anonymous chat program (with tightened-up graphics). Chatterböxen began as a simple attempt to create an AJAX chat with jQuery, but quickly evolved into the current look and feel, with words and phrases floating in a bright white space.

I developed the very first incarnation while I was working at VSA a couple of years ago, and wrote it in PHP with a MySQL backend to store the messages. This was fun to show to a few friends by hardly efficient enough for the big-time, and it was also extremely buggy and susceptible to hacker attacks. I showed it to some coworkers and a few friends and then shelved it.

As part of my new years resolution to bring all of my side projects online, I began working on chatterböxen again a few weeks ago, as a ruby on rails project. It was very effective and easy to write that way, but it was too bulky. Rails is a wonderful framework for a lot of different kinds of website, but it's far too complicated for something like this. I had just learned about the Sinatra framework, which runs with Rack and a few other libraries to produce super simple, one-file web applications. I'd seen a blog implemented with Sinatra in less than a couple hundred lines and I was intrigued.

Rewriting Chatterböxen in Sinatra turned out only to take a single afternoon, ajax bells and whistles and all. A few further refinements, and now I am officially announcing that it is in beta and y'all should all go look at it and poke around for a few minutes. Within the next day or two I should have an improved backend solution implemented, and an FAQ on the site for people who are confused or having issues. Also, there is a facebook page! Despite my own reservations about it, this is a thing and it is happening. Go check it out, space cadets.

a curious computer science problem

2009-01-11T00:22:00.002-06:00

I was discussing linguistics with my esteemed colleague and close friend Alex English earlier when I stumbled upon a very interesting computer science problem: the generation of grammatically-correct, semantically meaningful palindromes. The minute I typed my message about it I regretted it, because my immediate impression was that this is an extremely difficult problem.

We have to sort of reign it in just a little and make the problem more generic, too. So, let's say that we have one language P, a subset of a more generally-defined language comprised of only those recognizable phrases which are palindromes. It's fairly easy to arbitrarily generate phrases from a given grammar and lexicon but doing so in such a way that it remains a palindrome is somewhat challenging, but doing so in such a way that it remains syntactically correct is what we're interested in here.

Consider the following simple grammar:

S -> A
A -> x A
|  x

This grammar only generates strings of x's, so of course it only generates palindromes, and it can also generate arbitrarily-long strings. This is a patently ridiculous grammar but it does demonstrate one issue: how do you prove that your grammar even has a maximum-length palindrome? Consider the following grammar:

S -> A
A -> x y A
 |  x y

That grammar produces an infinite number of phrases, none of them palindromes. How complicated is it to prove the existence or nonexistence of palindromes in a well-defined language?

Because it reminds me of some aspects of the Busy Beaver Problem, perhaps a version of the Busy Beaver Problem for push-down automata. If anyone's heard of it or better yet a proof of its complexity, let me know.

Thinking too much as always. Sleep tight, space cadets.

2008: a retrospective

2009-01-08T22:16:00.001-06:00

I'm looking forward to 2009 mostly because I'm glad to see 2008 be finished forever. The politics and the economics of 2008 were just about the worst I've seen in my lifetime. The 2008 primary—at least on the Democrats' side—got super messy. I was behind Obama from the very start because I live in Chicago and that's just how we do; we support our own. Even before his campaign I was impressed with his rhetorical skills, and I agreed with a lot of his politics as well. I disliked Hillary because I saw that since the Clinton presidency she'd been working towards occupying that seat herself, but it always seemed to me that it was for her own glorification that she did it. Sure she would probably do a good job, but that would mean that for my entire lifetime every US president will have been from one of two families, and that just seemed wrong to me.

Meanwhile I got laid off from my job last summer, which didn't surprise me but it still pissed me off. I didn't mind because I really saw Fave as a company adrift. Working there was like living out someone else's mid-life crisis. The owners were amiable and well-meaning enough but at the same time they were two men completely out of their league who, though they had surrounded themselves with people who knew what they were doing, often refused to listen. It angered me but I knew that I would fare better than they would in the long run, so I struck out on my own freelancing and pretty immediately got snatched up by an agency. I've made it to 2009 just fine but I hear interesting rumours coming from Fave lately.

The presidential election last year produced a curious mixture of feelings for me. On the one hand I felt so very proud of this country and, in a way, this city, when Obama won the nomination and especially when it started to look like he was going to win. The Republican side just made me feel ashamed for this country. In the 2008 election we saw that the Republican party has become a party of only three issues: abortion, gay marriage, and teaching evolution in schools. The 2008 presidential campaign was the ugliest I've seen in my entire life and I've been paying attention for a long time. To me my choice was clear and it had to be Obama, because to me he represented everything I liked about America, particularly the notion that you really can raise yourself up from poverty to Presidency here. Having up 'til then lived a life dominated by Bushes and Clintons (except a couple of years where there was a Reagan, but I was like two years old whatever), I had never gotten to witness that happening. John McCain, married to a trophy wife he ditched his old wife for when she got in an accident, son of a wealthy admiral, just did not give me that same impression. He never seemed like he knew what I, as a member of the middle class, go through on a day to day basis to make ends meet. But the real show-stopper there was his bewildering choice of Sarah Palin, a virtual unknown from Alaska whose uncouth "you betcha!" perkiness made me cringe visibly. It was at that point that I almost felt like it was McCain's way of bowing out. When he picked her for VP, it seemed like he was throwing the fight. A sort of dejectedness settled over the McCain camp and it really seemed that by the time election night rolled around, they had long given up.

Speaking of which election night was an amazing night for me. It's rare that you come upon a moment in history and in your life that you think afterwards, I will remember this forever. I think that I will, too. I was in Grant Park and I witnessed first-hand the election of the United States' first President of any colour besides white as all hell. That alone was reason to be excited, but in addition the election of Barack Obama meant the possibility we could break free from the kind of divisive, fear-based politics of 2000–2008. That's really the one thing I will miss the least about 2008: the bullshit fearmongering. I'm not saying that all the Fox News anchors are out of a job just yet, but I think we are about to see a major change in how the White House views the world and the American people.

One of the horrors of 2008 continues still: the economy. In 2008 we saw a house of cards forever on the precipice of implosion finally fall, and I suspect most of the people who built it up knew how fragile it was. In the interest of furthering the interest of a "free" market, the powers that be left the rest of us out in the cold. As a consequence of losing my job at Fave and also the beginnings of the economic downturn, I lost a mortgage on a condo I was planning to buy. In the end I think that was a good thing because I wouldn't want to be saddled with a huge mortgage at a time like this anyway, but it still sucked. I'm seeing more friends than ever getting laid off, and the more I think about it, the more I realize we're gonna be feeling this for a while. This isn't an ordinary recession at all. It feels like a depression. Here's to 2009 being better I guess.

Keep hope alive, space cadets.

My Generation

2008-12-30T03:11:00.002-06:00

My generation was among the first to grow up with television and certainly the first to grow up with satellite and cable television, and lately I've been thinking of what an impact this has had on me and my peers. It's made some of us very unique people but it's spawned a generation of people who are capable of carrying on entire conversations completely comprised of quotes from 1980s and 1990s television shows.

I don't feel like I need to apologize for that though. My generation's appreciation of campiness and irony is part of what I love about it, not just an annoyance to me. People in my generation are extremely comfortable relating to each other via television shows they watch. At first I found this revelation disquieting, but now I realize maybe it's not that bad. I might say the same about previous generations and sporting events or soap operas. I really wonder what my generation's "who shot JR" would be. Maybe the "who shot Mr. Burns" cliffhanger from The Simpsons? Remember that episode?

Stay tuned, space cadets.

Looking for Toynbee idea tiles with my mom

2008-12-28T03:12:00.002-06:00

I spent the few days before xmas at my mother's in Saint Louis, and in the process I got out for a while with my mom to look for Toynbee idea tiles downtown. I'd previously, through my own research here in Chicago, learned of a handful down there, and my mom had photographed some.

Pictured above is a particularly wrecked up tile. There are more photos available on my mom's flickr set, and in particular I think it's fascinating how the older tiles seem to have decayed. Here's one that's a little bit more intact:

This one's missing the paragraph at the bottom but it's completely together as if it was meant to be there. That's what's so striking about them: they fit in perfectly but they're so alien. Walking around downtown Saint Louis you might never notice them, but your eyes glance downward and you see that what you thought was just random schmutz on the pavement is actually this colourful tile full of bizarre nonsensical rhetoric.

They are all placed in such busy places though, which is the most frustrating thing about the whole affair for me. The only one I could find in Chicago was in one of the busiest areas of Chicago—at least as far as foot traffic goes. So not only does this mean that whoever placed these tiles had ninja-like powers of invisibility, but it also means they are very difficult to examine in much detail. They're all in the middle of the street, usually on crosswalks, typically visible easily from the curb, but I've still never really been able to get really close to one. Partly that's because I'm not really into squatting down and closely examining parts of crosswalks while I'm supposed to be walking across them.

I took photos of my own which are available on my flickr page, too. More info here or on my flickr page as I look at the photos some more.

Stay curious, space cadets.

New Car

2008-12-16T16:45:00.007-06:00

Bought a new (to me, anyway) car over the past weekend, a 2006 Suzuki Aerio. So adorable. It even behaves itself pretty decently in the Chicago winter, with the exception of a couple of ice-related glitches. Next investment is definitely one of those little scraper doohickies. Paid for part when I got it on Friday and the rest today. It was no easy job, either; the roads and the sidewalks are extremely treacherous today.

( continued the following day )

The roads have been cleared mostly so I think tonight is a good night to go to Fry's and buy a new hard drive for Biscuit. I need one of those doohickies for clearing snow off your car first though! Little Suzi's pretty well buried out there and I dunno if I can dig her out by hand so effectively.

Already having a car has afforded me a level of freedom that, honestly, would have been totally worth the hassle of keeping my Mercedes in the first place. C'est la vie, I guess, and many lessons learned. Living in a city is absolutely wonderful until the Winter hits. Chicago's winter is a grand equalizing force in that she inconveniences all of us the same no matter where we live. The hardest parts of your commute are always getting to and from that train station, and you either trudge through snow or make your way across vast sheets of ice that seem to love to cover sidewalks especially. If someone were to make a sort of "urban crampon" for urban exploration on ice, they'd make billions probably, 'cause nobody ever salts the sidewalks. Worst yet, a lot of people salt them and don't clear away the dirty melty snow byproducts. Chicago's winter has already claimed at least one pair of my shoes (my first pair of Doc Marten boots, being not of the steel toed variety, were far weaker).

Here in the Chicago winter only the strong survive, and it's only just now beginning. Stay warm, space cadets.

New Eee PC

2008-12-04T11:08:00.002-06:00

Got an Eee PC 900 (linux) the other day and I've been tinkering with it since then. Mine's the 900 (nine inches wide, 900MHz processor, 2GiB RAM, 16GiB SDD, cute as nails).

I have to come right out and say it, the operating system that comes with the linux Eee PCs is absolutely terrible. Xandros, as it is known, is such a failure in every possible sense of the word. It's clearly intended for either small children or extremely casual PC users (web and email, mayyyyyyybe a document written every once in a rare while). Changing anything about the operating system or it's programs is difficult to say the least. Programs are categorized according to "work", "play", "internet", etc., but the taxonomy is hardly specific enough to be useful, nor generic enough not to get in your way. One example of many questionable choices, the filesystem browser is filed under "work", for some reason (presumably because Xandros's committee of architects have never had to move files around for non-business purposes).

Don't get me wrong. Xandros's simplicity could be its strength. It is based off Ubuntu but uses its own apt repository, which for such a special-purpose computer as an Eee is a great idea. Seriously. Maybe the trouble is that Asus hasn't really put a lot of thought into what should go into that repository. While I recognize that the desktop UI, which looks straight up lifted from something Apple tried back in the bad old times of the mid-nineties, is good for newbies, it leaves a lot to be desired from the power user. The main advantages to Xandros are that it comes with working Flash, sound, and Wifi drivers.

Which brings me to the resolution of my adventure: Xubuntu Eee. Super ridiculously easy. You boot from a liveCD on another computer, use a program included on the liveCD to load the operating system and installers onto a USB drive, then boot the Eee from the USB drive. Amazing. Details courtesy of Ars Technica.

Later, space cadets.

Seasonal Affective Disorder or just general-purpose malaise?

2008-11-22T15:18:00.003-06:00

Now that I'm back to working from home this past month, it's been really weird for me. Much as I hate commuting it forces you into a daily routine, which is somewhat comforting particularly in the winter time. Ironically that's also when I hate the actual process of commuting the most. The combination of working by myself in my apartment and being really unable to get anywhere except by bus makes for a pretty depressing situation sometimes.

I mean I'm here... and I'm working. I could work elsewhere but that means trudging through and then standing in the cold to go to a café where I could maybe spend 2-3 hours without severely overcaffeinating myself, then I'd need to trudge home. It doesn't sound like a big deal but being out in the cold can seriously tire you out. Just the process of being out and staying warm is exhausting sometimes.

I've been working too much and being lazy too much, and my apartment's still not fully organized. Having a car will help because I can go pick up some essentials that are missing, but even the process of looking for a car is made more difficult by my location. Being far from public transit and not already owning a car, it's difficult to go searching for one by my usual means (craigslist), and I refuse to go to a lot.

The overall result is just this general-purpose malaise that the weather certainly isn't helping. During Chicago winters I usually stay in as much as possible, taking occasional breaks to go out and drink alcohol to keep myself warm. I fear this winter won't be too different from that. We'll see.

Hibernate 'til spring, space cadets.

RubyConf 2008

2008-11-09T14:41:00.002-06:00

I'm finally back in Chicago after a long weekend in Orlando, FL, at RubyConf '08. As my first large-ish conference I really don't have a lot to compare it to besides Great Lakes Ruby Bash earlier this year, but I've gotta say it was a pretty great time. There's something about Ruby programmers, I think, or maybe it's something about us that makes us want to become Ruby programmers. It's really very simple: we're doing this because we love it.

We do. Programming PHP was a job to me. Programming python was a slightly more enjoyable job but it still felt like work. Programming in Ruby feels as relaxing to me as painting does. It's not just a job to me, and I'm passionate about it; I get the feeling that I'm definitely not the only one and that's pretty cool.

All around a pretty good crowd and a pretty good weekend. A lot of scotch and bourbon was consumed. I'm glad I made the decision to avoid the free beer Saturday night on account of everybody was way too hung over the next day and I felt just fine. Had a good time anyway, paid far too much for some bourbon at the hotel bar, and observed the bizarre crowd at the hotel bar. I don't think any of those people were prepared to see the hotel lobby filled 24/7 with bearded nerds on laptops, but whatever. We're cooler than the tanning bed convention folk anyway.

Once I get some of my thoughts together on the conference and the world I'll write some more. Ciao ciao space cadets!

Leaping from the Edge of Earth

2008-10-30T23:07:00.003-05:00

My esteemed colleague Nick shared this Boards of Canada video with me earlier. Part of the footage used is from Joseph Kittinger's famous Project Excelsior flight.

The more I think about it and the more I watch the footage, the more strikingly amazing this achievement is to me. From an open gondola 102,800 feet above sea level (that's about three times the altitude of Everest's summit and more than twice the maximum cruising altitude of a commercial airliner), he jumped with a parachute strapped to his back. From that high, the edge of the Earth's atmosphere is clearly visible against the black background of empty space. From that height, when you jump, you can't hear air rushing past you for several seconds because there is none.

When you describe it at first, it sounds so violent and terrifying, but I imagine that moment as being most tranquil, those few quiet seconds before the hot roar of reentry. You would drop for miles before your parachute could even function properly, and then thousands of feet before finally reaching the ground, but I think those first few seconds would last forever.

Just thought I would share. Until we meet again, space cadets.

Living in the Fake America

2008-10-20T23:07:00.004-05:00

Okay I don't really write about politics here very often, but this is something that really pissed me off as a city dweller and as a man who makes his living pushing pixels.

I am so tired of this mentality, put forth by the likes of John McCain and especially Sarah Palin, that because I'm a liberal (though I prefer the term "progressive") and I live in a city I'm not part of the "real America". It all started when Sarah Palin said "We grow good people in our small towns". Oh yeah? Well we grow good people in our cities, too, missy, and we grow more of them! We have hundreds of thousands of people in our big cities. In fact, most of the population of this country is in cities. Being as we have a democratic government of a sort (it's a republic but whatever) it would seem that since there's more of us city folk we should definitely have a voice in the way our government is run, and the direction in which our country is headed.

I live in Chicago, which I believe to be one of the best cities in the whole world. I love it here. I don't have a blue collar job anymore. I used to (printing press operator, screenprinter), but I don't now. I'm a pixel pusher and bit twiddler (designer and programmer, for those who can't understand the vernacular), not an unlicensed non-union plumber. I feel, though, that as a citizen of this country my opinion should still matter. I still vote and I still pay taxes, so I should have a say. That's how it works.

If only people who live in small towns are the "real America", if only rabidly anti-choice people are the "real America", if only young-earth creationists are the "real America", if only people like Sarah Palin are the "real America", then count me out. I have news for you, Sarah. We city people run this economy, we spend most of the money, we pay most of the taxes, we have the most people. Your "real America", though it takes up more actual space, is actually quite small. I don't think I'm any less "real" than Joe the fake plumber or this Joe Sikspac Sarah Palin keeps talking about.

We all have our idea of what this country ought to be like. The beauty of our system is that no one person gets to decide that. We all decide it together. If that's not good enough for them, then maybe they should go start their own country, oh, right, Sarah Palin already wants to do that.

Pay attention and stay strong, space cadets. Over and out.

Trash-Talking the Competition

2008-09-30T20:37:00.003-05:00

Look I'm not gonna bullshit anybody here; I'm going to come right out and say this. I believe that I have found the worst website on the Internet. It is the 2Advanced Studios website. Yes that's right. The worst website in the world is for a web design firm. Oh the sweet sweet irony of it.

On loading the website you're treated to a bewilderingly long eight second load animation. It's hard to imagine many company websites that are worth an eight second wait, but I was willing to live with that. The landing page is an expansive Aztek-inspired cityscape that looks like something that would be airbrushed on the side of a conversion van in Tijuana. Okay. That's fine too. It's not my style but it's gotta be someone's.

The first thing that I would say was morally objectionable web design is the navigation. The navigation is not normally expanded, and once expanded gives you a few options. Each of these opens the next tier of its hierarchy in the next column, and the next tier operates the same way. If you mouse off of the menu it vanishes to give you a better view of that futuristic Tenochtitlán. Cool, right? So to navigate the site you have to hit a series of 10px tall targets in sequence or have to start all over again. Clicking on any of these will result in another load animation and a change of background. The common theme seems to be Aztek pyramids. Oh and check this out! The best part is that every page has a "hide/show content" button you can press if you wanted to check out that sweet background just one more time.

This website is upfront and unabashed about it's, if you'll forgive the pun, flashiness. Being a man for whom having flash-based navigation for a website is a cardinal sin, I frown upon such flashturbation. It cheapens the whole industry.

Here's what I don't get, though. If their website is to be believed they have tons of cred. They list an impressive list of projects they've worked on and a decent list of clients. There's even extensive awards and magazine articles. Recent ones, too, but I hadn't heard of any of the magazines. Their work is mentioned in a couple of books on Flash design, too. It's puzzling to me because their portfolio is filled with the most gaudy and disgusting examples of flashturbation, and their own website is just terrible. If these guys can somehow make it then maybe I've got a chance in this business after all.

Wish me luck, space cadets.

RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER

2008-09-27T10:17:00.003-05:00

I've always been intrigued by culture jamming and graffiti, and I love mysterious things, so it's inevitable that some day I would come across Toynbee idea tiles in my daily musings. I'd read about them a few months ago I think on Damn Interesting or, more likely, on the Wikipedia category for mysteries, which I frequently read. After a hiatus I became interested in them again, this time searching for a list of known tile locations. I found one, but it was on the now-defunct toynbee.net. It is still available through the gracious services of the Internet Wayback Machine though.

After work one day last week I didn't quite feel like going home, so I walked up to the shopping district around the Hancock building. It was a spontaneous outing but my current contract is very close to that area of Chicago, just a few blocks. As I got closer I started to get kind of excited though. I'd been in the Hancock/Water Tower district of Chicago many times but had never really paid this much attention. I found myself looking down at my feet while I walked over every crosswalk, stopping sometimes to inspect an anomalous bit of tar on the asphalt. As I walked around, passing intersections I knew once had tiles, I could see tiny remnants at best. I found myself questioning whether I'd seen what I'd seen, little scraps of blackened tar without the distinctive lettering of one of the tiles. All the while I was marveling at how many people were surrounding me, how many cars were passing, and just how busy this part of Chicago is all the time. How could he, the one responsible, have successfully placed so many in this, the busiest part of Chicago? It truly is an amazing achievement that he was never caught in the act. All we have of his identity is whispers in the media from the 1970s and an address in Philadelphia (from the Santiago, Chile tiles) that is probably wrong.

I was close to giving up on the search. The city of Chicago has stated that they see the tiles as vandalism (a difference of opinion they have with Philadelphia, the likely birthplace of the tiles, where they are seen as being worthy of some preservation), so most likely they were all destroyed by the time I set about my search. I did find one, though, at the next-to-last location I would search. Just barely visible on the northmost edge of the northmost stripe of the crosswalk between Water Tower Place and the Hancock building were the words "TOYNBEE IDEA".

It was that moment that I had been seeking, the moment when this phenomenon I'd only read about became a real, tangible thing. I don't know how old the tile was, nor how just that one line of it had survived and the rest had gone away, but I was thankful to see my momentary obsession rewarded. The tile looked like it was made with hardened modeling clay and despite its age the colours in the type still contrasted neatly with the white of the crosswalk stripe, and with the white backing of the tile. I knew from my research that it was made of true linoleum—apparently difficult to come by in the United States—and despite the sloppiness of the letters they were at least consistent across tiles. They looked as though they'd been fabricated and placed very carefully just there. There was purpose to it, as though the tiler had wanted his work to be as visible as possible. Yet he put them all on streets where no one looks down.

If the tiler was indeed insane—and I think by the paranoid inscriptions frequently found beneath tiles he probably was—I would at least like to know what idea it was he was trying to spread. The idea of resurrecting the dead on Jupiter is so outside the realm of possibility that it bears no consideration, but what if there's a shallower meaning behind all of it, and the tile text is inconsequential to that? Perhaps it's his attempt at metaphor.

I don't think we'll ever know.

Tearing Down the Enterprise

2008-09-16T10:42:00.004-05:00

I've been working as a contract web developer on and off for a couple of years now, and I've seen some pretty bizarre enterprise applications in my day. I've worked with Microsoft business applications before and now PeopleSoft for time reporting, and I've got to say...

We deserve better.

I don't mean "we" as in contract web developers or even "we" as in freelancers in general. I mean that the entire business as a whole deserves better, freelancers, companies, and full-time employees. If, in 2008, these applications are really the best that is possible, that just makes me want to cry. Let's look at PeopleSoft since it's the freshest in my memory.

Absolutely every interaction with the page (it's web-based) generates a post-back, which just seems unnecessary. I know it's mostly a consequence of using Microsoft technologies, but it's really annoying when merely reloading a page or hitting your browser's "back" button can completely hose whatever it was you were doing. To enter hours, you have to scroll horizontally (a huuuuge inconvenience for anyone who doesn't have a mouse that scrolls sideways), and furthermore not all the information you need is in one column so you have to scrub back and forth sometimes. Also, there is too much information on the page, your changes aren't autosaved even though with postbacks clearly that would be possible (it appears to have been omitted intentionally), but that's not really the problem here.

The problem is that there's too much information in the system, there's only one path to each page in the system, and none of the steps to get there are named intuitively. This is a huge problem. Web applications especially need multiple paths for each process. You need to be able to get to the timesheet application multiple ways. It sounds silly at first but as you use the web and use computers more you realize that not everybody does things the way you do. I use my keyboard almost exclusively but I know people who are much more comfortable actually browsing through menus rather than remembering keyboard shortcuts. This is an important distinction and if an application were to omit one of these methods half the people would feel alienated. I would personally hate having to browse menus for things all the time and many others would hate having to remember tons of key combinations. These are the people who would rather use WordPad than vim or emacs. And you know what? That's fine. There is no "right" way to interact with an application. Don't impose one on your users.

The naming and clutter are serious problems. As a contractor I do not need to see the options for vacation time. Also, it doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense that the area for me to enter my hours is under "Travel and Expenses". I am neither traveling nor am I expensing things. As a contractor, in fact, I am an expense. Further complicating the process is that even the travel and expense center is under "Employee Self-Service". I am not an employee, so this wasn't really the first place I looked when I was first using PeopleSoft.

I think the true gauge of the success of an application is how much training is required to use it. Obviously this isn't true of specialty applications like Photoshop or Illustrator or even things like vim. These are applications that you have to learn to use, and that's fine because if you're learning to use them clearly you have a task that requires them. For an application like this that a wide variety of people must use—and use quickly so that it doesn't take up a significant portion of their day—it is absolutely unforgivable that it be so complex it requires training of any kind. A contractor should be able to come into a system, enter his/her hours, and get out so quickly and intuitively that s/he hardly notices the task. Entering hours is not hard work, so it should be a trivial part of your day.

Something must be done about this situation. It should never be the case that you're spending significant amounts of your time cursing your software. The software should be a transparent layer, an extension of your mind into the abstract world. You shouldn't even notice it.

My point is that the world deserves software that is enterprise-capable, but not enterprise-like. The world deserves software that works with users not against them, that knows when to assist and when to get out of the way. All it'll take is a couple of companies seeing their productivity suddenly jump for the change to start.

I'll see you all at the enterprise revolution, space cadets.

Moving and an Unexpected Time Capsule

2008-08-07T22:51:00.003-05:00

I just finished moving. Just now. Mere moments ago. It has been a crazy adventure. I would've liked to have stayed in Wicker Park until I could buy a place but, well, shit happens. My landlord wanted to move the rest of his kids into the building and normally I would've protested but Jay's been a really great landlord. He's been really tolerant when I've been late on my rent, and he and his family have always helped me out when I've needed a hand with something. So, honestly, who was I to protest? At the time I had been meaning to buy a place anyway but we all know what happened there. It's alright though. I got myself a nice new apartment with new stuff and an adequately sized office (!!!). It's the kind of place that probably would house two people, but it's just me and Villainous Industries over here.

To do the final push of my move I borrowed a Honda Element from iGo Cars. If you're a Chicagoan and you don't own a car for whatever reason, it's a pretty decent option for quick trips to and from the grocery store or, in this case, moving a desk and some random crap. The iGo cars actually come with CDs of music from local Chicago bands on them, which is awesome, but I've already heard all those bands so I browsed through my old CDs. I found this old mix that I used to run to. Really wild. My first thought was, Wait... I used to run with CDs?, but after that initial reaction I popped it in and was immediately taken back through time to when I used to run a couple of miles every night and listened to a bizarre mixture of punk rock and electronica.

It's so weird how you change through life, and how you always listen to the same music but the particulars change. I've been into these same genres of music nearly as far back as I can remember. I remember the first time I heard hip hop: my father was really into it when it was a new thing. De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising was the first hip hop album I listened to. That was in my CD case too.

Mix CDs are such an interesting thing and it's so easy to discard them as ancient technology. If you want to burn a CD of music now (a CD? How very quaint!) you can fit hours of music on it. If you're into burning DVDs and have a car that can read them, you can fit days of music on one. I have a music library that would take months to listen to all the way through, yet on a day to day basis I listen to what I'm listening to around that time. It's whatever's new or whatever I haven't heard in a while. My iPod is never on shuffle, and maybe it should be more often. Sometimes I'm surprised by terrible music that someone else has uploaded to my server, sometimes I'm surprised by some little nugget of awesome that I've accidentally overlooked or haven't heard in years. It's kind of wild. So, I don't think it's a trick I'd pull at a party unless it was a pre-approved playlist, but it's something I'd try walking around. I think I'd have to skip if it landed on John Cage or Frank Zappa's seminal piece, "Lumpy Gravy". Actually no. I'd wait 'til the end of the main theme then skip "Lumpy Gravy".

Some New Sites

2008-07-31T01:44:00.003-05:00

For your webernetting pleasure, I have launched three websites last week: one for my portfolio and two side projects.

Seeninchicago.com is a photo sharing site with an emphasis on the geography of Chicago, dreamt up by my friend Sarah and me. There's the possibility of a national or international launch later, but for now it's just interesting stuff that people have seen in the city of Chicago. It's still very much a work in progress so be nice and keep checking back to see what kinds of cool stuff we come up with.

Fortunator, currently residing at dangerouscuteness.com is an experiment to see how varied the fortunes in fortune cookies are. If you have fortunes to enter in, please do so and, once I've added support for it, tell me where you got them. The eventual idea is to be able to connect chinese food restaurants across the country using the fortunes they offer. Stay tuned for some support for geocoding and possibly reviews.

My design and development portfolio is now available at max.dangerouscuteness.com. It's still incomplete but some of the more significant stuff from my portfolio can be found there. I'll be adding more to it soon, too.

Your Next Favourite Band

2008-07-22T02:22:00.001-05:00

max thom stahl
2:15 yeah.....
2:16 One of only three or four really famous things to come out of UCSC.
2:16 The others being David Huffman and the Human Genome Project.
2:16 Oh shit. I think I just named my next band.....

alex
2:16 Hahahaha
2:16 AWESOME

max thom stahl
2:16 holy shit.
2:17 All our songs would be written in such a manner that they could compress really well.

alex
2:17 I will totally get in on that, son.

The Protomen Rock; That is All

2008-07-13T20:26:00.003-05:00

Ok. So.

The Protomen fucking ROCKED, but let me back up for a second here....

I went to view two apartments today. One of them I was pretty set on but the other one I was kinda so-so on. The second one got shown by this guy Kyle who's just getting into the real estate biz. We got to talking about my Tetris machine and such, and he told me I should go to this Protomen show, so I did. I got there way too early though 'cause the website was all jacked up and said the show started at 7 when it really started at 9.45. So I hung out at the café nearby for a while and overheard people at the table next to me talking about The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which is a pretty goddamn awesome documentary about Steve Weibe. Steve Weibe now unofficially holds the world's highest score at Donkey Kong (officially second of all time), generally considered the hardest of all arcade games. Pretty impressive.

Anyways so I parted ways with the café crowd but they were at the show later AND they knew Kyle too. So I met up with all of them at the show.

The show was unbelievable. The lead singer wears a motorcycle helmet with a microphone embedded in it and holds an arm cannon made out of PVC pipe. There's a guy with a silver robot mask that occasionally walks through the crowd and gestures at people (and I suspect he was one of the people in the balconies of the church playing the horn). Oh yeah did I mention this was another show at that abandoned church on the south side? Yeah, so there was that level of awesomeness added too.

Anyways there were about 12 people on stage, including four female vocalists forming a choir. The guy in the megaman helmet played keyboard and sang and all the other people wore crazy silver makeup. The minute the lead singer busted on into a screaming keytar solo, I knew I was in for a show that would tax my ability to handle awesomeness.

After the show Kyle, his roommates, all the people from the café and I got provisions at a local 7/11 then headed off to Kyle's apartment to watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and get drunk. I ended up spending most of that time talking to a freelance film guy who's also a tremendous comic book geek and also lives in Wicker Park right down the street from me.

Amazing. It seriously is amazing how unbelievably random life can be and how the sheer randomness of it all produces such symmetry. Seriously once in a while there's an epically random night like that where I think the Universe is just a pretty awesome place to be.

The Most Asinine Thing Ever

2008-06-25T17:45:00.003-05:00

Got a phone call early this morning (9am) from Wamu saying they couldn't issue my loan, even after all the paperwork had been shuffled around and I'd spent a month assuming that whole mortgage thing was well in hand. Their reason: not enough units in the condo building had sold yet. WHAT? Seriously? I mean... really? The phone call woke me up, so I had a hard time processing it, that somewhere on the other end of that telephone call there was someone saying this with a straight face. After a couple of questions to confirm that the lady at Wamu wasn't just yanking my chain and making shit up, it appeared that it really was like that.

I sprang into action, making some phone calls and emailing people. Got in touch with another mortgage broker with whom I'd worked before getting bamboozled by Wamu. He seemed optimistic until he found out that I lost my job a couple of weeks ago. I am absolutely confident that I'll be able to pay my bills just fine but it's hard to transfer that confidence to a lender in this market. I understand that. But still, I really do feel like none of this was my fault and I've just been royally screwed. I have put months of effort and a non-trivial amount of my time and money into this venture and now it is folding because of a bank's incompetence combined with Fave Media's decision to let me go, which I also contest.

I don't really know what to do right now. Go back to school? Get another full-time job that I'll inevitably hate after just a few short months? Try to work for myself (in a rented apartment... grrrrrr) and make it really work then buy an apartment two years from now—inevitably in a less favourable market? None of the options seem so great.

The Fave thing still really burns me a little. I just really feel like my perspective on what was going on was never really consulted and when offered it was never acknowledged. We all have our own opinions of what people can be expected to do for what amount of money, and for me I thought I was a programmer who would be doing a little bit of systems administration. As a sysadmin I think I did a really great job, and as a programmer when left to my own devices I think I performed similarly. The work environment at Fave, the requirement that I be in the office during business hours when the other programmer had no such requirement, the constant interruptions, and the increasingly unreasonable demands that I fix all the windows PCs in the office, were all very detrimental to my productivity.

I don't know if that perfect work environment for me really exists or if I'll be able to sufficiently convince the proprietors thereof that hiring me would be a good idea. I hope it does, because it's not my fault that I can't sleep at night and it's not my fault that four years of college for theoretical computer science didn't teach me how to set up printers in Windows XP. When I'm in a cooperative environment with coworkers that I like and respect, where I'm not interrupted often and where I'm not spread too thin, I absolutely excel. When I'm in an environment where I'm absolutely everybody's first-tier tech support guy, I don't, and I think that's perfectly understandable.

This whole thing just leaves me feeling ill.

to the asshole in the lexus

2008-06-09T22:44:00.002-05:00

You know. The one that zoomed past me while I was waiting for the bus and summarily transferred the entire liquid contents of a muddy puddle from the gutter to me. Yeah. You, asshole. Not many of the people you splashed today can memorize the license plate of a car while it's still speeding away, but at least one of us can.

The fat man walks alone. Your days are numbered, Lexus.

Space-Time Inflation in a Shrinking World

2008-06-01T18:47:00.003-05:00

I was in another of my very pensive moods this weekend. I realized very suddenly, for not the first time in my life I suppose, that there is a disparity between how much of my time I spend in the real world (meatspace) and how much of my time I spend in the virtual world. When I was little my imagination ran wild, hopped up on pulp science fiction and cyberpunk literature, envisioning a world where very little of your interaction with the outside world would be so personal. Rationality would reign supreme and—this is getting a little personal over here—my own inexorable evolution into a breathing machine would be socially acceptable.

We're all humans though. We are social creatures and we interact most effectively in person. 93% of communication between us is non-verbal in nature. The gestures, the facial expressions, the subtle and almost imperceptible changes in our posture as we talk, are all so essential to sociality that we feel isolated and estranged without them. I feel isolated and estranged. I have friends all over this country and in different parts of the world. These are real people that I have spent significant amount of time with, but we do not live in the same location anymore. Some of them we never lived in the same place and we know each other mostly through this medium: text.

When I went to Santa Cruz that last time, I found that everybody had changed in ways that were difficult to see in the text that went back and forth, even in the phone calls going back and forth. There were people to whom I'd spoken regularly who seemed like strangers to me when I arrived. Their views on the world had changed; their views on me had changed. I was so sad. Obviously I couldn't expect to leave a place and have it in a deep freeze until I went back. I couldn't expect that at all, but it still surprised me how much had changed, and I came to a conclusion. In the absence of sufficient social information conveyed in conversation, you assume people feel about you how you feel about them. I think this is just a baseline human condition and I got royally screwed by it.

This is a weird time though. It used to be when you went off to school you might possibly keep in touch with one or two friends via postcards or hand-written letters back and forth. People would keep their letters and if you were famous they'd get published after you died as your complete correspondence. I have a few such books (most enjoyable among them: Hunter S. Thompson's complete correspondence). Now we have the Internet, and the world is smaller and smaller all the time. We can get anywhere in the world within a couple of days by plane or by train. For a while there we had supersonic flight available for the general public but now we just have ridiculously overpriced regular flights, and they're getting slower and more expensive because of the price of oil. We can keep in touch with an unlimited number of people though. People who knew me when I was in grade school can find me on Facebook, read my blog, follow me on Twitter, and see what I've been browsing on my Del.icio.us links. It's amazing, but it also provides me with this profound sense of isolation. The people that I love the most are everywhere but here, and that is sad enough to me right now that it is not offset adequately by the fact that I have more friends total than anyone fifty years ago would ever have time for. But how well do I know them all? How well do they know me?

I had friends in California that I cared about a great deal when I was living there. Those feelings have deepened considerably for some of them since then. For some, they have dampened and now I no longer feel that way. But my perceptions are my own and can't really be mirrored in the other person exactly so. I wish there were a way to figure it all out but there isn't really.

I swore I wouldn't go back the last time I went. I swore it was my last trip to Santa Cruz, and maybe it still should be. Absolutely everything possible went wrong that trip, including flight mishaps, lost work time, and crippling computer troubles. On top of all that I just really didn't have a good time. I didn't see all the people I wanted to see, didn't do anything that I wanted to do, and the whole time I was haunted by the spectre of work. I need a real vacation. I have actually never had one since I've begun my career. I need a real vacation where all I take is a couple of changes of clothes and a cell phone, which will spend most of its time switched off. I might need to take a vacation to somewhere I've never been before, too. I just need to pull myself out of this funk I'm in, this rut. I just need to escape.

i am the greatest!

2008-05-24T22:38:00.004-05:00

Got this week's #1 high score at Fairway to Hell, a flash game available on Adultswim.com

Oh yes that's right. Number one! Booyah!!

goddamn raccoons!

2008-05-20T02:57:00.002-05:00

I volunteered to help my friend Steve shoot some stills for a school project he's doing. We chose this one park north of Belmont at the lake shore that was alongside a golf course as the location, set up, then waited for dusk. The scene the stills were for was at night, so we needed it to be super dark out and take long exposures. As we were walking down the path . . . we heard all manner of scurryings coming from a nearby bush. I looked over there and dozens of raccoons stared back. I was so creeped out!

We took five seconds worth of stills in the dead of night surrounded by raccoons. I'm still a little shell-shocked.

Saving the Precious Internets

2008-05-09T09:55:00.003-05:00

As I'm sure some of my readers know, even the best networks are fragile things. The slightest thing from someone tripping over a cable in the dark to something as simple as a tornado can bring them down. I had a mysterious issue with the Fave network earlier this week that was infinitely perplexing.

I have been in the process of porting all our phones from one VoIP provider to another, and in the process have ported about 1/3rd of our phones. Very suddenly the other day all of the phones from the old provider went down simultaneously. My initial thought was that the T1, also from that same provider and through which all those phones worked, had gone down. I rushed down to the Haunted Basement to investigate, leaving a network tracer in the server room. When I connected to the T1 box downstairs the connection was good. Despite red lights on the T1 terminus itself the connection to the internet from there was good, too. I was mystified.

When I reascended to ground level things got weirder. The internet connection for all the desktop computers had gone slow, and the VoIP phones from the new provider were dropping out, breaking up, and generally sounding like cell phones circa 1998. Bad times, to be sure, but what was the cause? After conferring with the T1 provider to check if they had full connectivity to our router and firewall on that side of the network, then after speaking with our shiny new IT consultant, Joe, it became apparent that our big network switch may have been at fault. Power-cycling the switch would fix the problem for a few minutes but then seemingly random ports would lock up. Finally I went back to the server room to look at the switch to see what she was up to.

Pandaemonium. Utter and complete chaos. Every single collision light was flashing as fast as possible in unison, indicating that something somewhere was broadcasting packets like a messenger, hopped up on speed, who'd panicked and lost their way. It was exactly as Joe had predicted. So I began unplugging each of the 24 ports on my main binding post one by one. When I got to port 4, all the traffic calmed down considerably to the network equivalent of a dull roar. Looking at my port map, I saw that port 4 was in the old creative closet—a tiny room where all the Creative department used to be. It is now only used as a sound studio and occasionally for cold-calling potential clients. I rushed back there.

The room was empty save a couple of phones and one of our sales intern's laptops, which was shut down. I picked up the hub that was connected to port 4 and found that its collision lights were going crazy like those in the server room's main switch. Intriguing! On closer inspection, there were four ethernet cables plugged into it, and only an uplink, the laptop, and one phone to account for. On even closer inspection, the "PC" port and "WAN" port of the phone were both plugged into the hub! The phone was in a perpetual state of colliding packets with itself, constantly retransmitting its own requests to the network and to itself. Since these were keep-alive signals to the network at large they weren't stopped at the switch level and were getting passed along, thus completely and totally hosing the network. I unplugged the cable plugged into the "PC" port and saw the hub's lights immediately glow green. Going back into the server room I saw green lights all around with a slow rhythmic pulsing of amber collision lights.

When I returned to the main room of the office, there were green lights on every phone, two or three people noticed an immediate speed-up in the network, the next phone call I made on my desk phone was crystal clear, and all was right with the world of Fave.

Ennui and the Struggle to Get Things Done

2008-04-26T18:09:00.003-05:00

Feelin' kinda strange lately. It's a combination of different factors that have been in play for a long time now I guess. I have this terrible habit of beginning projects and not finishing them. Frankly, I'm a little tired of it. This year I've been really trying to wrap all these projects up in a hurry. Since I've got some free time now (thankfully!), I've been doing some work on them.

Stay tuned for a new and innovative way of finding respectable chinese food restaurants, a superbly useful way of designing and sharing programs that recognize patterns in input (regular expressions, parser grammars, etc.) as well as a way of exploring different flavours of programming, and a multitude of ways to show the world your more Villainous™ side. In addition, I've resolved to begin writing again, which includes this and other blogs, as well as the possibility of a screenplay with one of my coworkers. I hereby declare this the Summer of Max.

The house hunt continues unabated. Well, maybe a little abated. I've been lazy about it because it's just so difficult. It seems so adult! I turn 25 this summer and by that time I will own my own home, be it a condo or a loft or some kind of bizarre industrial space. That last one has proven to be incredibly elusive but hopefully I can track one down. Another option is to just settle for a nice condo somewhere and then constantly be on the lookout for the perfect space. I really just need a place with a lot of room to spread out and compartmentalize my space the way that feels most natural to me. I keep going over in my head all these things about my current apartment that I don't like and how I could fix them in the next. It's a good exercise but it's setting me up for disappointment pretty much everywhere. The cheap places are all separated into rooms in a way that makes little sense to me and I know would end up annoying me. I don't want a place that's cute with little nick-nacks on neat shelves. I want a place with exposed brick and ductwork that I can hang stuff off if I want to. I want high ceilings and big windows. I don't know how easily that's going to happen but here's hoping.

And hey. Maybe I'll have an apartment situation I won't feel ashamed having people over to. We'll just see, space cadets. Later on.

Ridin' the Fave Wave

2008-03-15T14:50:00.002-05:00

Hi there space cadets! It's a beautiful new season here in Chicago and it's a brand new Fave website, too. The new design and new data set are both online right now. The new design is thanks to Steven Weber, one of our video folks, with the assistance of extensive cajoling, ridicule, and mostly constructive criticism from me. Site front-end development from me, and our shiny new indexing engine and extensive site optimizations thanks to the tireless efforts of our very own Sanjay Kapoor.

I've gotta say. I feel really excited about the new look, because the old one was... well... not so great. Now we have a professional—albeit corporate-looking—site that we can show the world, and hopefully in the process get funding and parties and all kinds of fun stuff! Startup life, y'all!

I will continue to deliver updates via this blog and via Twitter whenever anything cool happens. I think now is the time to temporarily become Irish for the St. Patrick's Day parade. Ciao, space cadets.

Our Busted-Ass PC Market Part I: Windows

2008-03-09T15:48:00.004-05:00

PC users, I am finally getting around to calling you out. I want to know something....

...Why do you put up with the deficiencies in Windows when there are superior alternatives that would only cost you a little extra money (OS X—and honestly the "extra cost" is debatable there depending on how you determine cost) or a little extra time (Linux)?

This isn't going to be yet another Windows-bashing article. Seriously. I'm going hold back on the name-calling. I'm going be methodical about this. I'm going to be as nice as can be. Let's get started.

the interface

My biggest pet peeve with Windows is the interface. Part of that you may feel absolutely free to chalk up to my computer experience, which I will admit is not ordinary at all. I started using UNIX at an early age and grew up in a house with Macintosh computers, beginning with Mac OS 5.5 back in the early days. Yes that's right. Anyways I look back on my experience and I see that UNIX has remained rock steady my entire life. Commands I used on the command line as a nine-year-old still work and still do exactly the same thing now. UNIX and pretty much any POSIX-compliant environment remain absolutely true to the adage that if something ain't broke you don't need to fix it. Mac OS has a similar history but it's been more of a slow progression with intermittent leaps forward. Today's OS X is a completely different animal than even OS 9 was. There are intermittent pieces of continuity among all of the versions but the interfaces are only similar in their operation the same way Windows and Mac OS X are. That being said, let's have a look at Windows XP vs. Windows Vista vs. Windows 2000.

Between versions of Windows absolutely everything moves, and to this day I'm not entirely sure why. This would be like car manufacturers deciding every year to move all the controls around, just to make sure that no driver ever gets used to them for long. Not just this but the names of things change, and where they are. Mapping a network drive in Windows XP is an entirely different sequence of mouse clicks than doing the same exact operation in Windows Vista. So, if you were accustomed to Windows XP for these past few years and you switch to Vista, you have to re-find everything. This may actually be less annoying for people who use Windows as their primary desktop OS, but for those of us who rarely have a Windows interface in front of them it is maddening. As an IT worker bee, I sometimes need to lay hands upon a Windows box and it is really embarrassing to have to poke through menus for ages to find where to ask it to re-acquire a network address through DHCP.

The story's the same for where the network connections are, where the filesystem can be accessed, where you go to change system settings, etc. Who is it at Microsoft who's so against consistency between versions? Seriously it's absolutely the most annoying thing ever. I've got a lot of material to go through here though so let's move it right along.

slowing me down

I think there's one thing about Windows that slows me down more than anything else, and it's kind of cruel to bring it up I guess because it seems that Microsoft really likes this kind of a thing. I'll demonstrate with an example: networking.

Let's say I'm on my mac and I want to connect to a new wireless network. I can do this one of several ways. I have the little airport icon in the menubar of my mac, and I can just click on that, bringing up a menu that has all the available wireless networks in it. I click on one of those, enter the authentication info for it (WPA/WPA-PSK/WEP/whatever) which is usually automatically figured out by the operating system, then I'm on. It just works. This is truly beautiful, because I frequently dart back and forth from one network to another, like my home and my work wireless networks, so having it just automagically do whatever it needs to do to connect to a new network rocks. If I have to do something like VPN or something really exotic like that, I tell the operating system what I want, because obviously I know what I'm doing. If I didn't, I'd use the network setup assistant (Mac equivalent to a "wizard" for you Windows people).

Now. That's all well and good, but what happens in Windows? Well, whereas Mac OS X will allow me to just get my shit done and get out, because I know what settings I want, Windows does not. I must travel through the menus and consult a Wizard. I'm not going to get into pedantic details, but Windows's interface for system settings and pretty much everything is based on presenting the user with a list of things that they may want to do. This is just stupid, because there is no other interface for making changes to system settings until you first get past this point. In Windows 2000 Pro, it was pretty easy to get to the TCP/IP settings. You right-clicked on Network Places on the desktop, choose "Properties", then you're presented with a listing representing the network stack. A little cumbersome to users who aren't exactly great at these kinds of things but at least you could get to those precious settings within a scant three to five (depending on what you were doing) mouse clicks. Now, when you try to do that, Windows will bring up a wizard. The wizard will ask you what kind of network you're setting up. Are you setting up a home network? An office network? Are you connecting to a DSL modem? Are you doing this? Are you doing that? SHUT THE FUCK UP. Seriously. What does it even mean that you're connecting to an office network rather than a home office network? What if I'm connecting to a token ring network, at home, that has a DSL modem connected to a router? What then, O Great Wizard? Okay. So that was kind of cheating because it's been a solid decade since I last set up or even saw a token ring network, but still!

Quite frankly, for a power user who actually knows what he's doing with networking and pretty much anything else that's not specific to one operating system, it is incredibly frustrating to work this way. It all boils down to this: real operating systems that are designed with respect for the user's time in mind let you tell the operating system what to do, whereas Windows will ask you questions to try to divine from these what you want to do. Weak sauce, people. Just let me do what I need to do and let the ordinary users learn how to use their computers rather than confusing them with these prompts.

there are how many different versions?

This has less to do with the actual operation of Windows and more to do with how it's marketed. There are so many different versions of Windows I can't even keep track of them any more. There's Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate, as well as a handful of special-purpose versions for media center or tablet PC or whatever (wiki wiki). THAT'S TOO GODDAMN MANY. Seriously. Too many. What's the difference between them all? Nobody knows! Besides the usual reasons that too many choices can be a bad thing, there's the fact that it's nearly impossible to market multiple products all at once rather than focusing on just one. Will everybody spring for the Ultimate version? Doubtful. I think a lot of people ended up with Home Basic and went home disappointed with it, because it's definitely missing some pieces.

Here's a novel idea. Why not make just one version of the OS? For servers there's already the hopelessly dated Windows Server 2003 (seriously, just go with linux for your server environments), and for home and business users why should they be different? What do business users require that home users do not? Taking it another way, why should home users be left without features that business users get? Taking it yet another way, why deliberately create multiple versions of an OS by removing features? It just seems counterproductive.

On the other side of the battle, Mac OS X comes in only two flavours: regular and server. I would wager that the vast majority of Mac users don't even know that OS X Server exists, and honestly they don't have to. They have the regular version that came on their computer and that really does have all the features they would need. Users who need the extra features of the server edition (domain administration, a much more intricate Apache setup, all kinds of other servers like mail and iChat and such) can buy it. Oh and how about this: the regular version of OS X ships with SSH, FTP, SFTP, and Apache servers. What does Vista (even Ultimate) ship with? Only Jack and Shit servers.

my advice

You didn't think this was just a rant where I wouldn't offer any solutions, did you? For shame!

First, ditch the multiple versions. I'm serious this time. Get rid of them all and just have "Vista" and "Vista Server", or continue to keep the regular and server branches branded differently. The point is to have one version of the operating system, and this is the right one for business users, for home users, for owners of tablet PCs, for owners of laptops, for anyone who is interested. Even if the price point was set a little high I think this would be a win for Microsoft if they could just pull their heads out of their asses and make it happen. Given their history I just don't think this will happen, but it'd be really nice!

The other thing is immediate bug fixes for all users. If you're a regular user you have to wait 'til Patch Tuesday for your fixes, but what if you've got an open vulnerability in the OS that needs to be patched right now to avoid an exploit? Tough cookies? Unacceptable. Also, while they're at it, they really need to not take for damn ever to patch zero-day exploits. "Zero-day" means "people can use this to pwn your box right now", so hurry it on up.

While we're on the subject, Microsoft needs to ditch its fetish for backwards compatibility in the form of ancient, unsandboxed code. Remember the wmf exploit in Internet Explorer a while back? That was because, in the days before the internet, it made sense to someone at Microsoft to be able to include executable code in image files. WHY DID THIS CODE MAKE IT INTO XP??? It really, really, really shouldn't have. Ever. There is simply no excuse for that.

Also, it's time to scuttle Vista. It was released way too hastily and it was obviously hampered by way too much bureaucracy in the corporation. The whole thing reeks of design-by-committee, and it's time for a do-over. While you're at it completely de-couple the internet browser from the operating system. It doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense to have IE not only bundled with the OS but also fused into the OS itself. That is just a really stupid idea and it's a giant hole that malware and spyware can just jump straight through. Get rid of it and migrate your user base to something that more accurately renders the web, or spin it off as a separate project so that it can get the attention it needs.

Last but not least, and I'm sure you all saw it coming: embrace open source. There are thousands of open source developers like myself that form a supportive community that is reliable and strives for rock-solid code. Why do we do this? Because we work with this software every day and it's in our best interest that it be the best it can possibly be. When you start to release software with the mentality that your payment is better-performing software, magical things happen and you get such great things as Apache, MySQL, Ruby, Rails, SQLite, and of course the Linux kernel. You don't have to open up the entire Windows kernel (although that doubtlessly would improve it over time; I'm sure a LOT of developers would jump in and make improvements) but a lot of the problems with Windows could be solved by substituting open source libraries for Microsoft ones. It'd mean a serious overhaul but I've already said that a serious overhaul is necessary, and I think a lot of IT professionals agree with me.

Will Microsoft ever follow my advice? Unlikely, as I've never really been a customer of theirs (I have one legal license of Windows XP and that's hopefully going to be the last Windows I need to buy). A man can hope, though. Sometimes that's all we've got.

Until next time, space cadets.

Upgrading the Server

2008-03-09T15:36:00.004-05:00

Went on the dorkiest date EVER with Leila on Friday night. We went to Fry's and bought hard drives. Apparently she'd been shafted at the Tiger Direct outlet the other day when they didn't even provide cables to connect the drive (!!!). So lame. Anyways Leila bought a PCI SATA interface just in case her motherboard didn't have one (turns out it did, so now we've got a spare) and some cables—which were UV sensitive, rice rocket style. Truly a classy move. Of course I shouldn't talk: the big fat linux server at Fave, Darling, totally has neon and a window (even though it's not being used for anything right now; ugh too many servers!).

So Biscuit's got a new half-terabyte drive in her and that'll be the new /home partition just as soon as I can copy over the HUGE amounts of data that resided in /home before. I'll have room for a separate /tmp partition now, which should be handy. The old drive will be used solely for system files and will, aside from the /tmp partition, be pretty closed off to normal users. So, for my users, this will result in a better, more secure Biscuit. Soon as I can afford it there'll be a RAID. I've got room for two more drives in there, so getting two more 500GiB or 750GiB drives is not totally out of the question. We'll see.

On a somewhat unrelated note, has anyone else seen these commercials where a burly lumberjack looking dude interrupts couples in their most romantic moments to tell them to put their gear to good use in Ontario, Canada? It just seems so rude! Also, why does the guy not say "Put your gear to good use in Ontario, eh?" He just doesn't seem Canadian enough....

Also, who has any good ideas about how to make Biscuit an easier tool to use for Windows users? I'm all out of ideas now that I know it'll be decades before anyone ports FUSE to Windows. SFTP seems too hard for people since it's a pretty ghetto enterprise in Windows.

2008-01-12T18:31:00.000-06:00

I've just finished erecting the world's shittiest bookshelf ever. I question whether anyone is really so stupid that they can't operate a screwdriver, yet the design of this bookshelf is specifically targeted at this woeful (hopefully) minority. Seriously, every aspect of its design was not just tweaked but wholly worked around the idea of not using tools. Seriously people, get a fucking screwdriver. It's not that hard. You push and twist. Push and twist. Oh well. It will last the few more months that I'm going to be living in this apartment, then it'll go to the great big alley in the sky.

Among the first items to go onto the bookshelf were the contents of a box my sister gave to me before moving to New York City, artifacts from my father that I'm pretty sure she didn't even bother looking through. Among them are some books of guitar tablature and sheet music, and half of the baseball collection my father helped me amass in elementary/middle school. But there are two items that gave me pause and for which I am writing this entry now. My apologies for anyone who actually reads this blog for my tech writings; I've deviated quite a bit from those in recent months. I'll get back to it when I feel like it. Right now this blog is for me, not you, and I've got to write this.

There is the "A–Ameri" book of a set of 1986 Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopaedia. Why only one book, you might ask? Looking through the long lists of consultants and writers and researchers in the introductory couple of dozen pages, my father is listed: Steven A. Stahl, M.A., Ph. D. I remember once in Athens he'd bought just this one book, 'cause his name was in it. He didn't want the volume that actually contained his work, just the one that credited him, because he thought it was hilarious. He told me he'd put the "funk" in "Funk and Wagnall's". Say what you will about us jewish boys, but I definitely inherited my soul from Dad. So silly to have just volume 1 of an encyclopaedia on a bookshelf, but there you have it.

The other is a passover hagadah. For those not in the know, passover is a pretty big holiday for us jews. It's a feast to celebrate our deliverance from the pharaoh of Egypt in the book of Exodus. I always hated it in Georgia though because everyone kind of associates it with Easter just the same way they associate Channukah with Christmas. They're completely different holidays from completely different cultures celebrating completely different things people! But whatever. People are just ignorant as hell and there's not a whole lot I can do about that except to note here that teaching others is among the greatest of mitzvahs. Maybe I, like my father before me, will eventually become a teacher. Maybe I already am in a way. Life's weird like that.

Anyways this particular hagadah is very special, because it was my father's hagadah when he was a child. Its pages are worn from dozens of passover seders, with a couple of dog-eared pages (a practice my father absolutely forbade in his home!) just to give it character. It smells like old book, and rifling through the pages I can see my father's characteristic scrawl on the pages. His handwriting was as unmistakable as it was incomprehensible. He could've been a doctor with handwriting like that. On the cover, though, in forced D'Nealian cursive, are the words "Property of Steve Stahl — President, Treasurer, Secretary of Steve Stahl, Inc." and near the top "From the desk of Steve Stahl". It's so funny. When my dad was a kid he wrote his lower-case "d" nearly identically to how I do it now. And, I mustn't forget, it also says "Copyright © 1962 MCMLXII All Rights Reserved".

Though I am happy to have found these little things, it just seems so unfair that this is all I have left to remember Dad by. Of course I'm never going to forget him completely, yet as I keep living my life without him he fades just a little bit year by year, and every time I notice this decline I sadden just a little more. Children are supposed to outlive their parents, such is the way of things, but I still feel cheated. I feel cheated out of the extra couple of decades I could've enjoyed with my father had colon cancer not combined with a sociopath second wife to take him away from me.

It hardly seems fair that the most vivid memories I have of my father are of his decline or of the breakdown of my parents' marriage. It just doesn't seem fair at all. And people will tell me they know how I feel and maybe if they've lost someone close to their heart they do, a little, but everyone's feelings are theirs and theirs alone. True perfect empathy is an illusion and it's really just something you say to someone because you want them to feel just a little better. It does make me feel better when I know I'm not the only one suffering, but I have no comfort to offer others. I've been dealing with this for three years and seven months and a week or so and it still hurts like hell every time I'm reminded of it. I've been sitting here for an hour thumbing through these books and listening to music and, every once in a while, crying. I'm just so struck by the enormity of it some times, that this spectre of cancer that we know so little about was able to swoop in and take my father away from me. I am left with these books, some artwork, and myself, being nearly identical to him in appearance and eerily similar to him in demeanor. I have my memories, too, even if they fade a little.

Death of a Wicker Park Legend

2008-01-02T12:11:00.000-06:00

I was sad to hear earlier today that Gene Lee, our own Wicker Park dancing man, took his own life recently. There is a brief note on Gapers Block and an entry on his myspace blog, written by his family.

My condolences go out to his entire family, in which I am presumptuously including all of Wicker Park. Gene, we will all miss you, and I think that is a gross understatement.

For those who are unfamiliar, I wrote a myspace blog entry about Gene back in 2006.

Xmas

2007-12-26T12:34:00.000-06:00

I'm down in Saint Louis for Xmas right now. On the way down I met this girl, Martha, and thought it was so totally random but then I remembered that's basically how I met Leila (s/bus/airplane/). Have I really been meeting random people everywhere all this time and only just now, now that I've got a system in place for this sort of thing, am I remembering them? I can't tell if my memory is getting better or if I'm getting better at not relying on it. If there were a way to test it....

Since Friday's shenanigans at the office I've been getting back into poker, even to the point that I'm currently designing a kind of poker server that multiple clients will be able to connect to at once. Here's the twist: I want to attract other programmers to write plug-ins for it so that I can see what the bot programming community is up to with poker. Historically, bots have not been very good at this sort of thing. They're not good at reading humans on such little information—meanwhile humans can read other humans very well because, well, we're all humans. That's a big advantage, particularly when a human can read someone's face. There are microscopic movements someone's face makes when making decisions regarding money. Certainly a computer could be trained to pick up on these, too, but I think that would be pretty weird literally building a poker robot rather than just a wee online bot.

I think this is my new hobby, though, until I can get an apartment with a garage so I can go back to building stuff. I want to write simple bots and monitors if for no other purpose than to keep my AI skills sharp. In this case, I think my favoured approach is going to be a neural network with an input set for each player which will carry a normalized signal from that player's current bet. For those not in the know, a back-propagation neural network is basically a computer simulation (and an inaccurate one, but authenticity is easily trumped by effectiveness) of a connected network of brain cells. Each layer is triggered by the inputs of the previous layer, multiplied by weights. Back-propagation is where, upon a result, the weights are adjusted layer by layer so that the result next time will be closer to the desired one.

Since humans could intentionally play crazy during the first few hands to un-train the net for later, it seems like a pretty bad idea to back-propagate mid-game, but perhaps that would be safe as long as the human players can be trusted not to exploit it too much. Also, the more established the neural network's paths, the harder it would be for a human to exploit its mid-game learning, yet to a certain extent it would be able to adapt its gameplay to each player's style. I've learned in the past that artificial neural networks are best kept small, though. My best one ever was actually not a neural network at all but a single perceptron (one "neuron" of a neural net) with a couple hundred inputs and meta-inputs. I did this mostly as an expedient, since back-propagation is way harder to program than perceptron learning, but it ended up being rock-solid. I'm not even really sure if, at the time, back-propagation was an option since this was for a class.

Oddly enough, a single perceptron with a sigmoid function to introduce nonlinearity into the threshold computation might suffice. At any rate, I am much more experienced using perceptrons than I am neural networks, and I know a lot more tricks with them. The beauty of the way I'm programming this is that I can try both and have them battle against me and against each other! The notes are in my private wiki now . . . I suppose I should get going and start writing the monitor. Wish me luck, space cadets, and I'll see y'all at the tables.

A question about climbing Everest

2007-12-19T01:18:00.001-06:00

So . . . you're climbing Mt Everest. It's -4°F and really windy. You're climbing. . . . What happens if you have to pee?

OMG CUTE

2007-12-13T13:34:00.001-06:00

Okay. It's finally happened. I have found the cutest picture in the whole internet. BEHOLD!

moar funny pictures

On the Subject of Hot Librarians

2007-12-10T21:48:00.000-06:00

Hot librarians the world over: we salute you.

max thom stahl
9:44 I'd say being a librarian and hot is pretty much a 99% guarantee that I will be all up onz.

David
9:44 and they help you navigate their dewey decimal system in the stacks...

max thom stahl
9:44 yeah dude.
9:44 and I act like it confuses me, 'cause it does.
9:44 She takes my hand....
9:44 And we dance.

David
9:44 heh

max thom stahl
9:44 On into the night.

David
9:44 Gabriel Ananda is playing on the loudspeaker...

max thom stahl
9:45 Awakening in the periodicals section, naked, in each others' arms.

David
9:45 muahaha...

max thom stahl
9:45 That's how it'll happen when I finally meet my hot librarian.

Life in the Haunted Basement

2007-12-10T19:49:00.000-06:00

So, shortly after I rolled up at work today, a technician from AT&T arrived to install our new T1 line. This, of course, entailed me venturing into the Haunted Basement. Let me back up a bit; you need some background for this.

Fave Media, Inc.'s offices are located at 2350 N Clark St. Come in sometime; we have a storefront where you can hang out. Anyways, we share the building with a goth/industrial club called Neo. Pretty neat, right? From my server room, I exit a back door to a stairwell shared by Neo and Fave, then out an outside door (that doesn't have a working lock...) into the dumpster area. There are some slippery looking stairs there leading down to an iron gate. Opening the padlock to this gate, you have to violently jerk the bolt to unlock the gate, then there's a little door there with a bare light bulp over it. It is at this point that you should start to feel concerned. There is a peephole and mail slot in the door. Why? Nobody knows!

Open the door and step inside, fumbling about for the light switch. Don't look too disappointed, the light switch only turns on one bare bulb about two metres in front of you, and does not at all illuminate the rest of the hallway. A wall is conspicuously missing to your left, and you can see the rusty skeleton of a fixed-gear bicycle that's gotta be about as old as you are. There's other stuff there but seriously, you just don't want to know.

Down the hall a jog is the doorway into the room where the T1 line is. The T1 line is a pristine box set into the wall among a veritable rat's nest of wiring. There are high voltage signs on some of these little rat's nests, but no bare wires visible as far as I've seen. All around you are dust-covered relics from all the other businesses that have occupied this building—including but not limited to a giant pile of mannequin pieces and some pretty respectable-looking stereo equipment. At this point, if you're not creeped out, you're just not human.

Added to the craziness, a pipe had decided to burst or loosen or something and was pouring down water just next to the basement entrance. I'm still not sure what it was, but I got some of it on me so I'd rather not think about that. Best part? I get to go down there tomorrow, too!

Seriously AT&T needs to hurry on up and finalize that installation.

There Must Be A Way....

2007-12-06T19:21:00.000-06:00

This trip to Santa Cruz has been so disastrous, so calamitous, so unfortunately terrible, that I'm not sure I will recover from it any time soon.

Rather than waste the $200 I'd spent months ago on my ticket out to San Francisco, I made the decision to go out there and just leave a couple of days early, because I have very little trouble working remotely from anywhere in the world. I just need my laptop and a reliable internet connection and I'm good to go. My first day or two in Santa Cruz this was absolutely the case. I was able to get plenty of things done at first, getting some nice graphical changes pushed up to the server and such.

Then... my laptop died catastrophically. At this point, being as I've been using these computerboxen for quite some time, I knew pretty much immediately what was wrong but lacked the tools and the space to safely fix it (fixing it required opening up my laptop). At this point, I tried to make do with Brian's computer but ultimately gave up on that. I tried to change my flight back to Chicago but found that I could not without spending an absurd amount of money (about $300) to do it. So... I decided that I would come back at my regularly scheduled time and somehow find a way to deal with the consequences. How I will do that remains to be seen....

This trip to Santa Cruz really was quite different from the previous ones. Whereas previously Santa Cruz had been my place to relax and be with the people I love, this time it was more where I went to feel trapped, brooding, anxious, and depressed. I did manage to see almost everyone I wanted to (almost), and I saw the Red Elvises perform live, which was great. I also played a fair amount of pool—enough to almost completely recover my old skills at the game.

In short, I just feel like my visit to Santa Cruz increased my feelings of alienation, maybe not even necessarily because of anyone in particular but because of me. I just wasn't feeling it, and the fact that I had so much work I couldn't do just made me so anxious I had a hard time enjoying myself. My life just really does seem lately like it's not at all what I wanted. I'm in a holding pattern until I have enough money or enough prospects to move on.

Somebody Gotta Save My Soul

2007-11-29T19:10:00.000-06:00

I'll be in Santa Cruz from this Saturday 'til probably Wednesday or Thursday. I had to switch around my flight plans so as to be back in the office in time for a T1 line installation. The more I think about it the more I just really need to get back there for this trip, and then eventually for good. Not necessarily Santa Cruz proper, but northern California for sure.

The winter is coming in, and it's depressing the hell out of me. I'm okay admitting that; it's depressing being here in Chicago during the winter. I've never really been susceptible to seasonal affective disorder but I was feelin' it last winter and I'm starting to feel it even earlier this winter just by thinking about it too much.

Being here, I feel really lonely sometimes. I'm in this huge city, and I do have friends now, but it's hard to shake that feeling because 90% of the people that I know and that I love are back on the west coast. I mean, I talk more frequently to people there than I do here, and that's just weird. It's a postmodern kind of weird, because I don't know that I could've even imagined that'd ever be the case even five years ago. Ten years ago this level of connectivity (and disconnectivity, I guess) was inconceivable. Getting to know people and letting them get to know you is already a pretty difficult process, but the events of the past year have left me so guarded, so jaded, I don't know if I'm still capable of letting people get that close to me.

Isolation's always been my thing, though. For that matter, being really confident and not being super-emo has always been my thing, too. So what gives? Honestly, I really just don't know. I've been looking at myself a lot lately and thinking... was I always like this? Was all this neurosis and fragility always there, lurking just underneath the surface? Case in point, this blog has rapidly devolved from a blog about my thoughts on the web and technology into a discussion of bullshit like this. Meh. It's alright I guess.

On the one hand I feel like my condition would seriously improve if I had myself a steady-ish girl. Thing is, I don't know if there's anyone out there who can tolerate me the way I've been feeling lately. I feel like a wreck even if I don't always act like one, and that's kind of impaired my ability to relate to other people regularly. It's one of those spiraling down kinds of feelings where what you really need to do is hit the reset button on your whole way of dealing with social situations. You just have to forget all the times you've gotten burned or accidentally burned someone else or anything like that, and that's really hard to do, especially for me. Every relationship is in part affected by all the relationships before it, just like any experience is.

Maybe this trip really will fix it all for me. Maybe moving back will. I just know I've gotta try something. The fact of the matter is that, when I look back on it, my experience here in Chicago has been a collection of the good and the bad, and the bad is starting to catch up to the good in a huge way. Maybe it's time to cash in my chips and jet.

Typopolis Coming Into Its Own

2007-10-19T19:40:00.000-05:00

Well that special date has almost arrived, people! Typopolis is live and crazy and nearly bug-free (nearly). Tom Gillis, Timmi Oyen, and I have been working tirelessly these past months to make it happen and our hard work is nearly ready to pay off. There's a launch party tomorrow night and then one week hence. Those in Chicago wishing to be invited are free to plead with me but the guest lists are already pretty much nailed down.

For those who haven't heard, Typopolis is a new social networking website where users can share their book interests and also have in-depth conversations with other users about books, about reading, about life. It picks up where other social networks have left off by offering the tools for users to not just review books, but to discuss specific passages and collectively analyze these for academic reasons or just for fun. You can establish online book groups or fly solo, and you can even meet people in your area who like the same books as you.

As we approach the launch party season for us, I'm excited to say that the site is live and ready to upgrade from "alpha" to "beta" release. Very exciting! We've been working on this thing for nearly a year on a shoestring budget, and it's up there for everyone to see.

So! If you want to be invited, email me and I'll pass you one of my many invitation codes.

The Twitter Monster Cometh

2007-10-11T16:32:00.001-05:00

Yeah yeah yeah. I was one of those twitter haters initially. I was. It seemed like a solution lacking a problem when I first looked at it.

Now that there are more people on it, and more people are leveraging it to do interesting things, I've changed my tune quite drastically the past couple of weeks. So much so, in fact, that I have now started twittering as well, at twitter.com/villainous. Yes. I am Villainous. Sorry Brandon :-P.

If you've got Twitter, add me to your watchlist so you can see updates on all the kinds of villainy I'm up to these days. There will be updates about my various projects up there and possibly some random little thoughts. Should be a great time. Or if you don't care, that's awesome too. It's Twitter, after all.

Stay tuned, space cadets.

Playing the Radio At Work Counts as "Public Performance"

2007-10-08T03:59:00.000-05:00

I heard tell that in Scotland at least playing your radio at work is now grounds for getting sued. When did this happen? When did we, as a society, decide that our courts had so much time on their hands that they could try completely nonsensical bullshit like this? Oh yeah and the motion for dismissal was denied. Seriously, people. Seriously. This is happening?

The music industries woes are really just the aftershocks of a revolution that's already come. The forces they're reeling from have already permanently changed the face of the world that they're living in. They just haven't gotten that memo yet.

Dear RIAA, CRIA, PRS, et al:

I'm sorry your business model is outdated and no longer relevant in the world that we live in today, but you had decades to see it coming (MPEG Layer 3 audio became an ISO standard in 1991, but was invented in the 1980s; for those who are really crazy about these things, the research that led to its inception was completed in 1979). Napster may have been a threat to your business but it was a sign that the tide was turning and that you needed to change your approach. Instead you tightened your grip as more and more sand escaped your fingers.

Now the opportunity to innovate has passed. That call has already been answered by the pirates, and they've won only because you've refused to change how you do things. Why should I pay for a CD when I get less for my trouble, and the free alternative is not only more readily available but also superiour?

I feel the worst for the artists, because they're taking it in the shorts for this. I'm not saying that they're starving because despite all their complaining they're clearly well taken care of (Britney could use a new stylist and life counsellor though... that girl's seen better times). I am merely saying that it's not their fault either that the music industry's business model is trapped in the eighties (actually... let's be honest here: the 1930s).

I will not pay for music twice. I will not repurchase it just to have it in another medium or another format. I will not pay extra to be able to play my music whenever and wherever I please. Because it's mine. I paid for it and it's mine, and if we're talking about information—be it analogue or digital—there are no limits, no chains you can place on it, that will prevent me from exercising my right of fair use. I will enable others to do so, too.

Listen. It's not that "information wants to be free" or any other such anarchist bullshit. It's simply a matter of free market economics. The RIAA and friends have failed at their purpose: to regulate the distribution of musical recordings. Musicians deserve to be compensated for their work if I'm enjoying it, and I gladly pay for the music that I listen to because I enjoy it. But in this Age of Information everywhere I look I'm seeing fewer and fewer walls, fewer and fewer traps in my way, fewer and fewer limits on what can be done—except in the music industry. I'm saying that's crap and if their new business model is to only profit from suing people, then their days of extortion are numbered.

If this is incoherent babbling then forgive me, space cadets, as I'm tired. I sleep now.

Weird Dreams, the New Chemical Brothers Album, and Craziness

2007-10-07T05:14:00.000-05:00

I've been having the weirdest dreams lately, which is odd for me because I usually don't remember my dreams. Anyways they've been wild recently.... A sample, if you will....

A few nights ago, I dreamt that I was in my sister's apartment, and she'd filled her kitchen sink with saltwater. There were these weird scallops swimming around in her sink. They were like ordinary scallops but with these red gelatinous growths on their sides. Really weird. Anyway one of them swam up through the water into the air towards me and I reached out towards it. It opened and this tiny red squid, maybe five inches long, emerged from its shell towards me. I reached out one of my fingers and its tentacles wrapped around it. I felt it bite me and I thought that was rather rude of it, then I woke up.

Another dream. I dreamt last night that I was on the beach with a bunch of my friends in Santa Cruz, and one of them placed a tiny white crab on my shoulder. It made me nervous but I didn't shake it off until I got back to my apartment, in Chicago, somehow. The crab extended its claws and I got antsy and threw it off my shoulder, where it clinked against my counter then my floor just like a quarter that's landed on its side. It landed on my kitchen floor and remained perfectly motionless for a while. As I stood there, though, the crab became more and more agitated, more and more angry. As it became more and more angry, more and more things began to unfold out of its carapace. First claws, then a bigger carapace, then eventually wings then a second set of wings. It charged at me a couple of times, then when it grew wings it flew right at me and I dodged it right as I woke up.

I dunno what's up with me lately. I keep drawing mollusks and crustaceans in my little notebooks. Squids and crabs and lobsters and bees abound in my notebooks. It's really weird. I have no idea what's going on with me. Doodling in my notebooks constantly I guess gives me some insight as to what's going on in there, but it's still so hard to interpret. Earlier tonight, at the bar, I randomly took out a piece of paper and drew a squid on it; I don't know why. Mebbe something crazy's going on up in my subconscious. Who knows. Still. It's very weird.

In unrelated news, I am thoroughly loving the new Chemical Brothers album, We Are the Night. The title track especially is just unbelievably amazing. So are "Burst Generator" and "Do It Again". I don't even have words to describe how well put together this album is. Even the duller moments of the album serve as the perfect time to recuperate between melt-your-face amazing tracks. I don't know how they can still be producing this kind of quality work after all these years, but they are. It warms my heart to know it.

Ok. I've just been out "for the duration" at Estelle's, so I should probably get some sleep. Later, space cadets.

Thoughts on the Future and the Continuation of Our Species

2007-09-22T15:59:00.000-05:00

Ok. Let me preface this by saying that I've been reading Ray Kurzweil's new book and it's kind of getting me thinking too much about these things. That being said, let the insanity begin!

I've been thinking about what will happen over the next thirty years of my life. There will be a point at which machine intelligence and human intelligence merge, I believe, and become the same thing with one helping the other. That's the next step in an unstoppable exponential climb towards the Universe's ultimate destiny.

For one, what if we become, essentially, immortal? What if we can live as long as we care to? There won't really be a reason to keep perpetuating the species at that point, biologically speaking, but there will still be a reason to keep making newer and better machines. The process of evolution will have totally shifted from being a biological process to being a technological process. At this point, the only way to die would be to have your consciousness erased from the Universe somehow, and I'm not even entirely sure how that would work or if your consciousness proper would have made the jump into the information age with you. This fits nicely in with the idea that the current asymptotic progression of technology is a continuation of earlier biological processes (things like DNA, going from single-celled to multi-celled organisms, and fish evolving jawbones can be thought of as paradigm shifts the same way that the transistor and quantum computer can).

So, reproduction will no longer be the driving force of evolution. It will become a human-driven process completely, and we will control it with our own ingenuity. That's pretty awesome, but it reminds me of something that Louis Armstrong once said when the Pope asked him if he and his wife had children. He supposedly said, "No but we're sho' havin' a lot of fun tryin'." I think it's gotta be the lewdest joke that a Pope has ever laughed at. Anyways think about that a second to get what I'm talking about.

The other thing that I think about a lot lately is what's going to happen to the people who get left behind. The Singularity and the next age, and in fact this current information age, are first world phenomena still. The third world is just now getting online, beginning with China and moving along through Asia, South America, and now Africa. I have a feeling that the XO laptop and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) campaign will coincide neatly with all of these world events. The very notion of absolutely minimizing the price of a laptop is interesting in and of itself, but that it's happening right here, right now, is very special. I have a feeling that very few human beings younger than I am right now will be truly and completely left in the dust, except perhaps by choice (theirs or someone else's). This is all so inevitable, like a rising tide that is bringing us all up with it.

Keep looking forward, space cadets; I'll see y'all later.

What Does Your Brain Look Like

2007-09-20T13:36:00.000-05:00

Tess and I agree to swap minds for a day sometime whenever that's possible. I don't think she knows what she's getting into. This place is like the Thunderdome, 'cept two men enter and then no one leaves for like a week.

max thom stahl
1:30 hahahaha
1:30 what is your mind like.
1:31 If it were a house or a building, what would it be like inside?

Tess
1:31 organized and pretty
1:31 everything matches
1:31 and lots of chandeliers

max thom stahl
1:31 oh hehehe
1:32 Mine would be like a jungle with a bunch of ziplines between trees, and hookers, and blackjack, and chalkboards everywhere with all kinds of math notation written in bad handwriting all over them.
1:32 And lots of chandeliers.

Things I Miss When Programming in PHP

2007-09-08T20:15:00.000-05:00

Ok. This isn't meant to be an entry just about trash-talking PHP. It's more of an entry discussing what are the things that are missing from PHP with regards to database-driven web site development. I do like PHP and of all the languages I've used "in the wild" so to speak PHP is the one I've got the most experience with. Still, I've got a few bones to pick with it so there may be a little trash-talking involved here.

Lack of Functional-ness

My programming background is pretty heavy with cryptography and artificial intelligence, so I feel like I really shine when I'm programming in functional languages like Ocaml, Haskell, Lisp and to a limited extent Scheme. I've even been known to bust out with some Prolog where appropriate. I think it's completely unreasonable to expect a language like PHP to have things like functional currying or functional pattern-matching, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some amount of functional programming magic to be possible.

For one, recursion is a no-no in PHP because there is no tail recursion. This may change in the future, but it's a pain to do recursion in PHP anyway and you're better off with a while loop and a stack (which is what tail-recursion turns into on the machine code side anyway). That's a bit of a pain because there are certain processes which are intuitively recursive processes, and these should be workable that way without penalty. Though I have made recursive functions in PHP and used them in quasi-production environments, that's outside the best practices for the language and I would never do it if I knew the system running my code was short on memory. Also, even without ordinary memory limitations, PHP's runtime can be configured to limit stack and heap space artificially, so recursion can still be a bad thing on systems that have plenty of memory.

Another beautiful functional programming trick is mappings. I love mappings. I mentioned list comprehensions just earlier (without calling them that), but if I had to choose one or the other I'd choose mappings. In python, ocaml, haskell, lisp, scheme, ruby, and a few more languages, there is a syntax for "Take each item in this list, apply this function to it, and return me a list of the results". It sounds less useful than it really is, but this is an amazing tool that you can use for all kinds of magic. Right up there with mappings are functional folds, where you can say "Take the items of this list and put this operator or function between all the elements, tacking on this constant to the end; return the result of that whatever it is." For example if you folded the "+" operator with 0 as the constant, you'd get the sum of a list. This is also handy for taking a list of words and appending them all together into one big string. In Haskell and Ocaml you can fold on the left or on the right but watch out, 'cause the right-hand fold is not tail-recursive.

Cons Über Alles

Another problem is the Array construct in PHP, which doesn't actually behave like an array at all but instead works like a hash table. The problem here is that sometimes I have an array that I wish to access like a hash (random-access), but oftentimes I want something that behaves like a List. Lists in functional languages get turned into single or double linked lists in memory, which is just peachy. In Haskell (and, I believe with some magic, Ocaml), you can even have the tail links to these lists pointing to thunks of code that generate the remainder of the list on-demand. That's not necessary for PHP, but it would be really nice to be able to have some kind of data structure native to the language that behaves like a list (or, for all you functional space cadets, a cons). This falls into the same category as recursion, because lists (at least single linked lists) are inherently recursive structures. I miss them.

We <3>

There's no built-in support for regular expressions. Now, I know what you're thinking: there isn't any built-in support for them in Ocaml or Haskell or Lisp either. They're library functions in those languages. But you know what? In Ocaml I don't have to type a mouthful like "preg_replace()" when all I want to do is the same thing the s/// operator in perl does. I know that perl's syntax is confusing as hell to people who are unfamiliar with it (and also to some who are quite familiar with it) but why shouldn't common things like that be a symbol rather than a long-ass function name? While we're on the subject, why are all the functions in PHP so long? Seems there's gotta be an easier way to handle them all.

Get Out of the C++ Mentality

One of the really powerful features of Ruby that scared the bejesus out of me at first but I grew to love is the fact that you can, anywhere you want, add or remove functions or members from classes. This is really scary but really powerful. A lot of the cooler features of Ruby on Rails would be completely impossible without this. For instance you would not be able to have something like acts_as_authenticated or acts_as_taggable, which are functions that shove code from plugins into your existing classes. In PHP you have to have separate classes or subclasses to do this kind of work and it's kind of a pain. Why not just have code blocks hanging around that you can swap in and out of where you need them when you need them? This is, of course, because PHP is a C++ derivative and Ruby is a Smalltalk derivative. Both have their advantages, but this is one of those pure object-oriented things that should've crossed over.

Lemme see... what else. If I had any choice about it, I'd program web sites in Python or Ruby, but Python doesn't integrate very well that way, being that it doesn't have the inline HTML magic that PHP and Ruby both have. I'm still a little uneasy about the syntax of Ruby, too, even though it looks like it should be something very familiar to me (it looks like Ocaml sometimes). Meh. We'll see.

Ok. Back to work for me. Later, space cadets.

The Sky, the Stars, and Everyday Life in the Age of Information

2007-09-02T15:19:00.000-05:00

I just realized the other night that I and many others like me are, on a day to day basis, living out the wild acid-trip fantasies of futurists everywhere years ago. What prompted this was a week spending most of my free time (what little of it I've had) browsing Google Earth.

Seriously think about this for a second. I have an application on my computer (and, in a limited fashion, on my phone too) that allows me to look at aerial and satellite imagery from anywhere on the globe. I can overlay it with any set of metadata that I want, can see points on the Earth that other users have found interesting or that have historical significance, too. In my case, I was browsing the globe for the sites of atmospheric nuclear tests, because you can see their craters in satellite imagery (disappointingly enough the site of the 57 megaton Tsar Bomba blast is poorly imaged because, I imagine, no one can fly a plane there safely). In a certain bizarre way, detached both in time and in space, I was gazing at the sites of some of the world's worst mishaps. Chernobyl looks great from the air. Mayak, just northwest of Chelyabinsk, looks desolate and forgotten, a major nuclear catastrophe swept under the rug of the world (you've never heard of it, have you). Three Mile Island looks amazing. The giant crater in Bikini Atoll at the site of the Castle Bravo event is clearly visible, and you can view it without getting the lethal dose of radiation you'd receive at the surface after a couple of hours.

Information is not only free now, but it's everywhere, instantly accessible at every moment in our lives. We're surrounded by outlets for all manner of information all the time. And here fifty years ago people thought that Television was revolutionary! Think of it for a minute, though. Have you ever been having a conversation with someone, and in the back of your mind there's a topic that's related but you can't remember any details about it? Now you can just look it up, anywhere, any time. Amazing.

I can now browse the skies as if they were an open book I was reading. I can zoom into places I find interesting, look up whatever Messier objects I find nearby, find imagery in whichever spectrum I require. That feeling I used to get as a kid looking at the Universe's unbelievably infinite majesty isn't really dampened now, looking at imagery instead of the real world around me. I'm still painfully aware that we orbit Sol, one tiny little yellow star in the backwaters of a spiral arm in a giant galaxy. Our galaxy is one of an uncountable multitude, on an unstoppable collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. It's so impossible to think of how huge they are, too. Don't ever try; you'll hurt yourself. Just sit back in wonder, zoom in, and realize that that smudge you were looking at is actually billions of stars, and that thing you thought was a star is really a galaxy, containing even more stars.

It's hard to think of it this way, but we are furry little creatures on a tiny blue rock in a Universe that is so enormous we cannot even begin to conceive of it, even though it is finite. As I write this it expands, though, and space stretches even further. Our lives are so short; all of Human existence is less than the blinking of an eye to the Universe, but to us we feel so significant. The Universe's existence and our own are so deeply entangled that it's only too tempting to think that the Universe is the way it is so that we can observe it, and we can exist within it only because it is exactly as it is. The tiniest deviation at any time in the past 13 or 14 billion years would have produced an entirely different experience, or no experience at all. To me it's no wonder at all that people believe in God. It takes an even greater leap—not in faith, but in perception—to see that we're here because everything was exactly right for us to be here, and if it weren't then we wouldn't be around to ask those kinds of questions. That thought alone is enough to bring tears to my eyes some nights when I can't sleep for thinking about these things.

I remember as a kid reading 2001: A Space Odyssey and wishing so badly that I could be a Star Child, a being of pure energy so immortal that I could scoff at space and time themselves and explore the Universe at my whim. Maybe that'll be possible some day. For now, I'll just have to content myself with having imagery from the world's most powerful telescopes in space and on the surface being instantly available to me all the time. *sigh*

Later, space cadets.

My Paranoid Fantasies

2007-08-17T23:31:00.000-05:00

I get really paranoid when I'm by myself in my apartment, thinking about things. I've taken a couple of naps today because I didn't sleep so well last night; did a fair amount of thinking.

My dear friend Alex, who is currently residing in Bulgaria with the Peace Corps, sent me the disturbing news that Putin has returned Russia's air defense bombers to the skies, just like the Cold War all over again. In true Max Thom Stahl form, I'm watching Wargames right now to celebrate this little daydream of mine.

Since the US has gotten stuck in the quicksand desert that is Iraq, people have been coming out of the woodwork everywhere just to do whatever it was they wanted to do if the US would ever drop its guard. Afghanistan's poppy fields are churning out more heroin than ever before, North Korea's gone off the crazy-charts, and now this from Russia. I had a bit of a scary thought earlier....

While the US is out there trying to make money for big Oil and for the Halliburtons of the world, playing in their 169,234 square mile sandbox, the grownups are finally coming out to play. Everybody sees that we're occupied and can't really muster the resources to deploy anywhere else right now, so they're just doing whatever they want, wherever they want. There's nothing to stop them now.

I don't believe the line that Iraq was enough of a danger to the US that we had to invade them, at all. I just don't. There simply was not enough evidence to support the idea and then once we invaded most of the "evidence" turned out to be what leading insiders would call "bullshit". The anthrax factories thing was an embellishment at best, but a complete fabrication at worst (I lean towards complete fabrication), and ruined Colin Powell with that shameful presentation of his at the UN. Nobody was buying it, but we invaded anyway for some reason. And now, this war is a clear and present danger to the US and to the whole world, because the balance is gone. In the good old days, ten years ago, the US was the most powerful nation in the world but the whole world could, together, keep us in check. Now our president has tried to grab more power than this nation is entitled to, it's backfired, and every rogue state out there knows we've got our pants down.

This sucks, people.

Max's Magical Fung Wah Adventure

2007-08-10T17:17:00.000-05:00

After a much needed mini-vacation in central Mass., I decided that my preferred way to get to NYC for this business trip was the illustrious (and infamous) Fung Wah bus. I have ridden the Fung Wah once before, and it was an interesting journey. This time wasn't nearly as shady (I didn't have to buy my ticket from a guy in the back of a bakery in Chinatown) but had almost all the required elements. In particular, there's the fact that my "ticket" was a hand-written card that I'd signed:

Amazing, right? So I got on the bus and actually, it wasn't that bad. I even made a friend along the way. Now, being in Brooklyn with all the rain and negative feelings I have about this place, it's really hard not to think that I'd really like to be back where I just was, or Chicago, or somewhere completely different. I just don't know. I bought a nice army surplus jacket, and that'll help with the rain and cold... but that's really just removing the cause but not the symptom. Think what I really need to do is just go for a while.

*sigh* I'm gonna go back to maintaining. See you later, space cadets.

More iPhone Awesomeness

2007-08-02T20:25:00.000-05:00

Got myself an iPhone. Oh yes. That's right. iPhone. Feelin' pretty good about this decision.

This does not mean everybody needs to start sending me emails like crazy 'cause they know I'll get them in a timely manner. I will do my best but it's an iPhone, ok?, not a crackberry. That being said, I'm just gonna try to get the usefulness out of having a smart phone that I need without doing all the asshole things that smart phone owners do. And, before anyone asks, no AT&T's network doesn't reach into the tunnels. When I'm on the train, that's Max time. Ok? Got it? Awesome.

That being said, I really dig this thing. This is me coming from the world of regular, boring phones whose only data capability is SMS/MMS messaging. I just upgraded from a not-fully-enabled Razr to an iPhone and that's a pretty nice step. The web browsing is absurdly smooth and fast on my wifi, and email functionality is pretty easy to use. The whole thing is just so nice, I'm never going to be able to go back.

In other news, I got my power adapter for my Macbook Pro, so now I'm able to work normally on my projects. So, all around, things are looking up for me and for getting things done in a timely manner. Feelin' good about all of this.

Later, space cadets. It's time for me to go watch youtube videos on my iPhone.

Why is it so f*cking hot out?!?

2007-08-02T14:19:00.000-05:00

I feel like I've left entries like this before.... Oh well.

Weather Underground says it's 90.3°F outside. I dunno if I believe that. Seems like it's much hotter here. Nothing inspires crazy workaholic behaviour like excessive hot or cold weather though, I guess. I'm at my drafting table now, in my undies, sweating still.

Wish me luck as I try to persevere, space cadets. Over and out.

The Whole World's Against Me

2007-07-28T22:54:00.000-05:00

Ok. So. Here's the deal.

Last night my macbookpro's power cable finally expired in a cloud of smoke. It had been just barely hanging on for a couple of weeks and it finally died on me, melting itself in the process. I went to the Apple store today to try to get a new one, but Emily loaned me her power cable for a couple of hours so I could hang out at a coffee shop while she took her dog to an acupuncture appointment. The café had no internet access, or it was at least very intermittent, so I couldn't get any work done really there. Then, we went to the Apple store, and they wouldn't replace it for free, so I had to pay for one. But then they didn't have any in stock anyway, so I went home. Then I looked online at Apple's website and saw they take 3-4 weeks to ship. I needed this thing yesterday so I nixed that. Looking around three or four other retailers yielded ship times of between 1 and 4 weeks if they even carried the power adapter. So, I went to eBay. I got a used power adapter for about the same price (with shipping) as a new one, and it's likely to have the same problems as my old one.

So, I've been using my powerbook g4, but it's lacking all the software I need to get anything done and the operating system is so old I can't even install the software I need (Adium, for one, requires at least Mac OS 10.3.9). So I resolved to download linux for it. Gentoo installation was far too much of a pain (before anyone accuses me of not being hardcore enough, I did try, and I run Gentoo on two other systems). Ubuntu is available for powerpc systems, but not the newest version. I looked through all my CDs and couldn't find a copy of Ubuntu Edgy Eft for powerpc. So I have to download one. It's been going for four hours and it's still not downloaded.

Without a system loaded with the right software to work, I can't do my freelance illustrations for Liz, can't do any work on beyondscreens*, can't do any work on Typopolis, can't do anything. It's really, really, really shitty over here. *sigh*

I swear... the whole fucking world's against me these days.... Pray for my sanity, space cadets.

No Splinters, But a Generation of Pansies

2007-07-28T21:44:00.001-05:00

Good evening, space cadets. This is a little bit off-topic from the usual fare, but just roll with it.

As I was walking through my neighbourhood earlier today, I noticed for probably the hundredth time the "Wood free neighbourhood" sign in that "Luddite's Unite!" guy's window, and it got me thinking again. The photo depicts a sign outside a playground saying it is "wood free", and honestly this makes me really sad. Let me back up a bit here.

Years and years and years ago, when I first moved to Georgia, I went to Barnett Shoals Elementary School (go barnett bears yay!). Barnett Shoals—and in fact all of the other public elementary schools in Athens-Clarke County, GA—had an amazing playscape. That's right. A playscape, not a playground. Let me explain. Nowadays when you go to a playground, you go to a rectangular space, filled with rubber strips scrapped from old tires, with a plastic, splinter-free, multicoloured structure on it with no surface higher than safe falling distance for kids. All of this so they don't get hurt, right? But these playscapes are booooring and laaaaaame. The one at Barnett Shoals was beautifully architected and made out of wood, old and weather-worn and full of splinters! I loved it. There were so many little places to jump around and hide and squirm around, and so much space to just run around. The playscape was taken down and replaced by a boring, run-of-the-mill plastic and steel affair. I was so sad.

One of my frequent soapboxes is the systematic dumbing-down of the American child, as many of you will know. These new-style playscapes are just one more part of that. Rather than an amorphous, angle-ridden, rickety wooden structure kids can use their imaginations with, they're given linear play structures with specific paths through them for the kids to follow. Run up the ladder, scamper across the bridge, traverse the improbably-low monkey bars, slide down the slide. Over and over and over again. I realize that my adult mind gets bored with a lot of things that used to be utterly enchanting to me as a child. But does that mean we shouldn't ever build anything or do anything or say anything that will challenge kids? Oh and about the splinters: a little splinter never hurt nobody and kids just need to be tough.

Alright. I'm done ranting about this right now. Later, space cadets.

iPhone Awesomeness

2007-07-02T00:50:00.000-05:00

I do not yet have an iPhone because I was in transit when they came out and I don't really have the money right now anyway. I have, however, been immortalized on Thom's iPhone. It is the hardcorest address book entry ever!
I don't know if you can tell by looking at the little tiny picture of me on there, but I'm throwin' up the horns \m/.

I, for one, welcome our new Ruby on Rails overlords

2007-06-24T20:09:00.000-05:00

Ok. So. It finally happened. I am learning how to use Ruby on Rails, and I'm really enjoying it too. Craziness.

Now... I just need to get Brandon to learn Haskell. Then we'll be straight rockin' it!

Leaving VSA

2007-06-07T20:17:00.000-05:00

I put in my letter of resignation at VSA earlier today, and tomorrow is my last day. It's crazy and I'm just filled with this combination of excitement, anxiety, and sadness.

I'm sad because I really do love all the people at VSA, and I think it's a great company. I do feel pretty privileged to have spent a year and a half there, and I'm not just saying that. It's weird; I don't think most people have heard of VSA, but there are circles that I run into before where passing off one of my black business cards to someone actually turned a head or two. At this stage, though, I'd achieved what I wanted to there. I worked at VSA full time for a year because I wanted to try out the whole corporate thing, meet people and make connections, gain some much-needed experience with web work, and settle into my post-collegiate life a little. By now I think I've done those things and some more. I'm sad, though, that I have to leave all the people there, because I've grown pretty attached to them.

At the same time, though, I have this steadily growing sense of incredible excitement. I can hardly contain it, because over the past year I have come up with so many ideas, so many concepts, so many possible interesting things to do. I want to have time to implement at least a few of them. This is my goal now: I want to make the Web a more magical place. I want to create small moderately useful sites—or even perfectly useless ones—that people will either use on a daily basis and will really benefit people, or that will merely amuse people. So I have my projects with other people, Typopolis and beyondscreens*, that will hopefully be incredibly useful even if it's only for a small portion of the population. Then I have my own concepts which vary from the useful to the "interesting" to the outright postmodern. This is where things like Vi.llaino.us, Chatterböxen and some others that I'm keeping to myself come in. These will begin trickling out over the next few months and I hope that everyone will like them....

Another thing is that this blog is getting itself updated on a regular basis. That's vital. The whole thing is supposed to be about working on the fringes of the web . . . I've just been waiting until now to reach the edge. Now that I'm here, I'll be transmitting more missives from there to you, my extremely small and questionably loyal audience.

I just want to create things that people think are really cool, even if that doesn't make me much more money than the bare minimum I need to live off. If I can do that, and if enough people like what I'm doing, then I'm set. If I can't, then I guess Corporate America is always waiting for me, and there will be people out there who have a use for my unique talents. (Speaking of which, if there's anyone who has a need for a modestly skilled graphic designer or a highly elite computer scientist, call me!) On the one hand, I can't help but feel like VSA was a deviation from this path that I'd set for myself, but on the other hand how could I possibly have predicted all of this? I don't think I could have ended up in the position I'm in now without having worked at VSA; I think I'll think of it in the future as my own little crash course in Web 1.0, so that I'd be ready for Web 2.0.

At this point, though, I'm like Fuck it, let's kick out Web 3.0.

Later, space cadets.

Back in Santa Cruz Again

2007-05-24T19:30:00.000-05:00

If anyone's been paying attention, you'll know I'm in Santa Cruz, CA, again right now. Got myself tickets for a week-long trip out here for only $50 each way (thank you, Southwest Airlines!), so I figured why the hell not?

It's so strange being back here. I missed everybody so much but now that I'm here it's so hard to arrange to see everyone I want to without making it way too structured for me. I hate making plans more than a few hours in advance, and when you don't live somewhere that's just kind of way too much for your friends to deal with. Just kind of sucks, because I love these people and I want to see them all, but I can't really do that unless I'm just sorta here often enough that they can fit seeing me into their routine.

All this brings up a lot of thoughts that I've been having for the past couple of months that I've not really committed to paper just because I haven't wanted to, but now's a pretty good time to do it. I feel sort of trapped in my life right now, and I want out. Some background first....

In the beginning, when I started college at the urging of my entire family, I wanted to study art and computer science/engineering. That really didn't pan out 'cause my computer science classes took up so much of my time I didn't even really have time for general education classes much less another major. I'd always been really good at art, though, as a kid and I wanted to get some actual training and maybe be able to go after design/programming jobs post-college. I'm kind of jumping ahead of myself here though. The truth is that my art interest faded to a distant yearning while I was in computer science because I simply did not have the time to pursue it. I only started making time for my art after my dad passed away.

When dad died, I was pretty well devastated even though I'd known for a few months that it wasn't going to be long. No amount of preparation can really ease you into losing a loved one. Anyways once he died I had to think of a course of action for coping with it. I gravitated to my oldest passion: photography. I got myself into the kresge darkroom co-op, bought a pentax k-1000 and a bunch of film, and just hit it. So I got back into things. Moving to Chicago I started drawing again because I was tired of not drawing. I kept having al these ideas and no time and no resources and no space to do them in. It's so frustrating!

So that brings us up to date. I'm kind of on the brink over here. I'm going to turn 24 this summer and it makes me think . . . I need to be doing or have done something amazing by the time this time of year rolls around again. At 25 I want to be able to point to something that's mine, that I created or helped create, that people use and love and is a part of their lives. I want to revolutionize something—I said that a couple of years ago, I remember, when Jessi and I were talking about the future. (I miss her optimism in those days sometimes.) I dunno if I feel like I'm still on-schedule or not. Chicago just seems like such a huge setback sometimes, like I somehow abandoned what I really wanted to and needed to do by not taking a programming job of some sort (my brain feels like it's starving) and by not having enough time for my artwork. I just feel like working and living in Chicago I've made so many compromises. I'm not working on my own schedule, I'm not even sleeping on my own schedule.

I don't even know why I'm writing all this right now, and on this blog, too. This is supposed to be my blog for writing about my hardcore web developer lifestyle, but somehow I don't really feel like I'm living that right now. I have fewer and fewer little bits of awesomeness to share on here, and that makes me sad. Being back in Santa Cruz makes me realize that in Chicago I'm just so far removed from my support system, my friends, so many of the people I love. Keep realizing there are more than I thought when I left, too, and that's been saddening me a little too.

I'm gonna go get myself together. See you later, space cadets.

128 bits of FURY

2007-05-08T21:32:00.000-05:00

Ok so I don't know who's been paying attention, but there was an incredible hullaballoo a while back when the MPAA attempted to squelch the release of an AACS key that someone discovered.

Anyone familiar with this blog (or, indeed, with information theory or cryptography) will know already my stance on digital rights management of any kind. I'm not a huge fan. Trying to hold back the publishing of a number though . . . come on!

So I found a service where you can generate your own, and then use it to encrypt a copyrighted haiku. Once that's been done, because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that number is now an illegal circumvention tool (just like the aforementioned number for AACS!). So, my number is 7D BC 54 0B 36 C5 AF 0D 6E 97 0E EE 4F 49 CE 58. Don't anybody use it!

More info on Freedom to Tinker.

The Olympiad of Misguided Geeks, or, One More Reason I'm Going Straight to Hell

2007-04-29T02:30:00.000-05:00

Most hilarious programming competition ever, The Olympiad of Misguided Geeks. The whole point is to produce the most interesting "WTF" program.

For those of you just joining us, a "WTF" is a program or information technology system (this includes security policies) that has one of the following qualities:

Totally unreadable or otherwise unmaintainable code. This is sometimes called the "job security" programming paradigm.
Attrocious over-engineering that implies a novice understanding or unwillingness to use readily available library functions.
Lack of documentation or, just as bad, excessive documentation. Also, horrible user interface.
Convolution, metasolutions, failed attempts at cleverness.
Security by obscurity or use of the Ostrich Algorithm.

I don't know how Thom and I are going to do it, but we, two college-educated professionals, have to create a working program so amateur that we're both going straight to hell for it. I can't give any details here, but so far our program leaks memory like a sieve, overly complicates operations so simple as adding two numbers, and throws a segmentation fault every once in a while just for good measure. Oh yeah and so far it doesn't work. We'll have to fix that.

More updates later, space cadets.

Feisty Fawn

2007-04-23T22:45:00.000-05:00

I've started using Ubuntu 7.04 on my macbook pro, and I've gotta say that the setup is worlds different from 6.10 (Edgy Eft). I was initially put off of Feisty because I couldn't boot from the liveCD. I got an issue with the VESA video drivers, but installing the ATI drivers for Xorg fixed that. The following commands

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo aticonfig --initial

fixed that right up. It's a little weird, but just roll with it.

Once the ATI driver problem is fixed, the installation goes swimmingly. I was a little troubled that it auto-installed grub over my previous installation of lilo (I miss lilo), but I was pleasantly surprised that the auto-installation of grub works better than lilo. And all this without my intervention. Seeing as my macbook pro is hardly typical linux hardware, I'm pretty pleasantly surprised over here.

Unlike with my vanilla installation of Edgy, sound (ALSA) is fully operational, as are the drivers for my ATI graphics card and synaptics touchpad. Feelin' pretty excited over here.

Thought of the Day

2007-04-12T16:49:00.000-05:00

max
All these questions. Even the answers overwhelm me.

nicole
all of physics is overwhelming. I don't even know the stuff we DO know.

max
The Universe is such a fucked up but beautiful place. . . . There's so many times that I'm just really glad to be here and thank God for having me. Like I'm on His talk show or something.

Throwin' Thom Off His Game

2007-03-26T23:07:00.000-05:00

max thom stahl
10:46 hi

Thom
10:55 hi
10:55 wait, hi? that's not how max greets me.

max thom stahl
10:55 hahahahaha
10:55 I know.
10:55 It's how max throws you off his game.

Thom
10:56 yeah, and that's how max makes me lose the fucking game, god damn you.

Crazy Dreams

2007-03-24T10:53:00.000-05:00

oh god I had the most bizarre dream last night!

I was some kind of rogue secret agent of some sort, or maybe a mercenary of some sort. Something. I was walking through the city at night, and I think people were chasing after me or something, because I had all these weird capsules in a special briefcase on me and some weird equipment. It started to rain and right afterwards thousands of mushrooms started to come up, then they got larger and there were two kinds. Once the mushrooms had grown to a certain size, I sat down among a group of them and I opened my case and took out a syringe and one of the capsules, which was just a cylinder with clear tubes suspended in a fluid, and the whole thing was wrapped in a porous material that I guess was impermeable to the substance in the cylinder. Anyways I went through this process where I'd take one of the large flat mushrooms growing out of the ground vertically (they reminded me of . . . I can't remember the species name but I remember this whole thing so vividly I could look them up; they looked like sea fans but in mushroom form). I'd take one of those and I'd place it on top of one of the large toadstool-style mushrooms and I'd inject some of the liquid in the tiny tubes inside the cylinder into both of them, but through the same hole. Some kind of weird biochemical process would happen and then these little spores would come out, and turn into these little creatures that were like banana slugs but much thicker and they could move much faster. I had control over them and I'd send them behind me to slow down whoever it was that was chasing me. It was kinda crazy, 'cause I controlled them using voice commands and a playstation 2 controller.

Eventually I got to this bridge and I had like a billion of those things trailing behind me, following me 'cause I guess they'd dispatched with whoever was after me, and there was another agent on the other side of the bridge. We had this weird showdown situation going on, and I don't really know what was up with it because I woke up around this point in the dream.

Just lately I've started dreaming again, which is a pretty good feeling for me because I stopped for a long long time. I just kinda wish my dreams could be less bizarre from time to time....

My new best friend

2007-03-17T18:42:00.000-05:00

I was at Costco earlier today, and you know how when you're at Costco, somehow prices don't mean anything and all you tend to think about is how discounted everything is. You don't pay any attention to the $300 worth of toilet paper and sausage in your cart at all.

Well, I got something more than toilet paper this time. I got a Roomba and it's the cutest thing ever!!! I'm gonna decorate it with googly eyes and fur! Great times.

Next post will be less dorky, I promise. Until then, space cadets.

In Hot Pursuit of the Edge

2007-03-16T16:14:00.000-05:00

Human interface design is one of those things I hardly get to write about, but it's been on my mind of late. It's come to my attention, particularly of late, that there's something definitely wrong with how people are forced to interact with the Web.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the markup language that drives the web for the most part, was originally invented by Tim Berners-Lee ([1], [2]) in the early 90s as a method of disseminating documents that had cross-references in them among his colleagues. Since then it's been published as a standard and constantly developed and paired with other technologies like XML and CSS, as well as dynamic scripting languages like JavaScript. It is still, however, primarily a language for marking up text for easy display on the web, just as languages like LaTeX are used to mark up documents for printing ([3]).

I would say that for most of the content of the Internet, this is just fine. People can access most sites kind of like they would interact with a book or a magazine. Clicking on links is a shortcut to page-turning, and content is presented like print is. But why should the other percentage, which is growing larger day by day particularly when we hear all this talk of AJAX and Web 2.0 awesomeness, still have to behave like that? In just the same way that users form expectations of how applications behave (mac users like to see "Preferences" under the "Edit" or Apple menus; PC users like to see them hiding under "Tools") depending on their experience, the same goes for Internet users. Users really like to see their websites broken into sections, and these sections broken into sections possibly, and they like to see navigation options between them displayed at the top of the page. Users have grown to like multicolumn layouts, and they've grown to dislike framesets ([4], [5]). That's all well and good.

My question, right now, is this: why do we have to always put nav links at top, have little cross-links in the body, and have a page layout that expands vertically, with only one column of text? Why can't I have, say, a picture gallery that's 600 pixels tall and 1300 pixels wide, scrolling from left to right? For me, that would be more intuitive. You're then interacting with a web page like you "interact" with the walls of an art gallery. Your mouse's position can tell the application where you want to go and what you want to look like, perhaps with a smaller version of it down below, scaled to view, so that the user can skip around via thumbnail links. If you're looking at a chart with relational data or a network topology displayed on it, why shouldn't you be able to click and drag the elements around to get a better view of them? Why can't you zoom in for more detail directly there on the page without having to go to another page that displays details?

You can. The only thing holding everyone back is that nobody's done any of this before. If your new system is intuitive and beautiful, if it's captivating and keeps people interested, then why not try it? The problem with interface design on the Web today is that nobody's trying anything, and it's really starting to bug me. This is not at all to say that nobody anywhere is trying anything at all to push the envelope. I'm just saying that I don't think anyone's trying anything that's truly unique to the Web, any kinds of interaction you can't find elsewhere in a better form.

I want to take the web and do something with it that nobody's thought of doing before, presented in a way that no one has ever seen but that they'll understand immediately. It should beckon users further into the interface without having some kind of annoying guide (Clippy, anyone? [6]). It should encourage users to play around and see what kinds of features they can discover on their own. A good interface should also prioritize so that features users want should never be more than two clicks away. It needs to retain the consistence of other user interfaces while at the same time increasing, overall, the variety of interactions possible.

That's all I've got for now. Give me a couple of weeks and then I'll show how I put all this into practice. Later, space cadets.

I Got Somethin' that Makes Me Wanna Shout

2007-02-24T11:24:00.000-06:00

max
11.21 DO IT NOW OR I DO IT FOR YOU

Brandon
11.21 No you won't.

max
11.21 I will!

Brandon
11.21 no, you do not have r00t

max
11.22 I got w00t though, and that's what matters.

A Life Without Functional Programming

2007-02-20T20:45:00.000-06:00

max
man where the fuck would I be without lambda expressions?
Riddle me THAT, Nick!
I'd be lost and drunk in a gutter somewhere covered in filth, that's where.

ninjatune5
that and swimming in bitches

AR Season, Day 3: Snowed Out

2007-02-13T17:54:00.000-06:00

Well, space cadets, it's that time of year once again. Time, that is, for online annual reports. Pretty much everyone on our client list at VSA has to put out an annual report every year around tax season, and pretty much every one of them wants to have a richly interactive online version up. That's where I and my esteemed colleagues come in.

So everything's been going fine. Great, actually. Most of the financial section for this annual report I'm working on presently were finished last night around 7 or so. We only had a handful of pages (about 13) to finish and that whole section would be done. Just when things are going great is when you know that something terrible is right around the corner, though, and just as I was saving my work on one of the pages, the power winked out. So, we developers and designers and project managers and information architects and whowhat sat around for a couple of hours telling bad pirate jokes and doodling things on the whiteboards. At some point in there, the IT folks notified us that the server room had to shut down because it was getting too hot in there.

So, we all started to pack up to go home, 'cause word on the street was that the power would still be out until at least 5.30 or so. Everyone's all packed up to go home, and suddenly, just as I was turning around to leave, the power comes back on. After a brief debate about whether it would be prudent to stick around now that the power's back on, everyone goes home anyway. So that's why I'm home so early on day 3 of AR season. *sigh*

Alright. Time to do some snowed-in relaxation. Later, space cadets.

Hillary, Barack, Iraq, and 2008's Prospects

2007-01-18T12:43:00.000-06:00

Those of you who've known me or have been reading my writing for a while will already know quite well my opinion of Hillary Clinton as a senator and as a presidential candidate. Now that Barack Obama has, essentially, thrown himself into the fray, I think some further discussion needs to happen.

First and foremost, this country seriously lags behind not in minority rights, but in minority status. Whereas minorities in this country have less and less every decade that holds them back, the fact of the matter is that the distribution of income and status in this country is neither uniform across race nor across genders. This is definitely the right time for more women and more people of all colours to get into politics. While I think it's fantastic that an increasing number of women are getting into politics (kudos and propers go out to Nancy Pelosi, our first female speaker of the house), I think there's cause for some caution in the 2008 elections coming up. Just as it would be wrong to vote for someone in a presidential election only because they were a man, it is equally wrong to vote for a woman only based on her gender. I feel like, with things the way they are and with Hillary Clinton running, there's a good probability she will get swept up by the gender vote.

This is a problem for me, because while I do think that Mrs. Clinton is very intelligent and certainly qualified for the Presidency, I disagree with so many of her policy decisions, stated opinions, and political allies that I could not bring myself to vote for her in '08. I think there are a tremendous amount of others in this country that, while perhaps not for the same reasons, do feel the same way. I disapprove of her record on the Iraq war, for one. Only just now is she saying that troops need to be redeployed away from Baghdad, and she voted in 2002 to approve the war to begin with. She has also ardently opposed any set timeline for troop removal. As if that weren't enough, she is buddies with Joe Lieberman and Tipper Gore, and supports their calls for censorship of video games—policies that I cannot abide.

It is definitely my opinion that, barring a serious coup from Obama or Edwards, Hillary will get the Democratic nomination, possibly by a wide margin. I don't think that she would perform well in a national election, though, and that's really the problem here.

Let's talk about Obama for a minute. Let's make this clear right off the bat: I like Obama. His continued, consistent opposition to the war in Iraq, work on improving Pell Grants (even though that bill got pigeonholed), and his immigration reform notions (which I found to be slightly more sensible than many alternatives) have all been pretty good. As a junior senator, though, the big question on everybody's minds is, is he experienced enough to be president? That I'm not so sure about. Even though I do think he'd have a pretty good chance of being elected, I'm not 100% sure yet whether or not he'd make a good president at this point. He's a junior senator here in Illinois, and he's only been in that national office for less than two years now. He did also serve in the Illinois state senate, but is that really enough? I believe it's possible, but I can't really know for sure.

We've still got a ways until it all throws down. For right now, let's focus on not letting this decaying republic fall apart. Until then, space cadets!

Restoring Power to UCSC's Campus

2007-01-16T12:01:00.000-06:00

Excerpt from a conversation I just had with Thom amid the power disruptions today at UCSC's campus.

Tom Gerdes (work)
11.50 it's dark. I'm tired of it being dark.
11.57 damn it max
11.57 make it less dark in here

max stahl
11.58 *starts a fire*

Tom Gerdes (work)
11.58 wooo... you rock. (power's back on)
11.59 that was actually kinda magical.

On Safari

2007-01-05T13:09:00.000-06:00

I wrote a long while ago about standards compliance and how the ACID2.0 test really is a valid thing to strive for, but today's experiences with Safari, which is ACID2.0 compliant, have shown me the other side of this argument. Standards, when you're talking about the world wide web, are by this point a constantly fluctuating near-consensus. This consensus, like any, is derived from the collective feelings of a lot of different users, web developers, and application developers. Since these can't agree (I'm looking at you, Microsoft) or can't keep up (that's right, Mozilla Foundation), what you get to develop for is a "standard" that is really just a mean value of everything everyone is doing right now. Browser vendors can't break existing, non-compliant sites by being too strict and web developers can't either. So things slowly, slowly, crawl.

Here's a conversation I had just earlier with Brandon while fighting with a web site that looked flawless in Firefox 1.5 and in IE6/7, but looked unbearably ugly in Safari. (Some editing was performed to clean up language and protect the innocent.)

Max: I cannot stress this enough. Real people with real lives shouldn't use Safari. It's shit.
Brandon: eh?
Max: Standards-compliant my aching ass.
Brandon: hahaha
Max: No I'm serious here.
Max: I do very little testing in Safari because every fix for Safari breaks everything else because nothing else complies to the standards like Safari does.
Max: So all the tricks I have to use to get things to work in IE totally break in Safari.
Brandon: ok, well that's IEs fault :P
Max: doesn't matter.
Max: You can't just sit back on your ass and be all like "Well, *we* comply with the standards" because it's not that simple anymore.
Brandon: yeah
Max: Like . . . Safari almost flawlessly conforms to CSS 2.0 and the XHTML 1.0 and 1.5 standards. Rockin'. That's great news. It still renders every non-compliant page out there worse than Henri Matisse without his glasses on.

The lesson to be learned here is that standards-compliance isn't everything, and until everyone in the whole world can bite the bullet and conform to just one standard, the internet's going to continue to be a frustrating place. I will say, however, that Brandon's right: this isn't all Safari's fault. It's IE's fault, maybe moreso than any other culprit out there. IE is always just far enough off the mark to make it really challenging to make richly styled pages work in both IE and Firefox. My point with Safari is that Firefox manages to be off the standard in similar enough fashion to IE that you can develop for both much easier than you could develop for Safari and IE simultaneously. That's the problem I've had today.

Until later, space cadets, I hope you're having more fun than I am.

Some New Years Resolutions for Us All

2006-12-21T12:02:00.000-06:00

Help me make these happen. They're not the sort of things that one man can do alone.

First, in fashion. Argyle is the new plaid; houndstooth is the new pinstripe. This is my decision. Everybody go make it happen; now please. While you're at it, no more tucking jeans into boots unless you live in Texas. Even then, it might not be such a great idea.

In application interface design, I want to see woodgrain where I'm starting to get tired of seeing brushed metal. Brushed metal was cool for one season, but it got overused mostly because Apple refused to follow their own Human Interface Guidelines. The madness stops now, people. Woodgrain is the new brushed metal, for when the interface is meant to duplicate the feel of an existing device. I want a stylized look that *isn't* going to become so overused it loses its edge. People are so jaded with window decoration these days and they need to be snapped out of it. Elegant is the new complicated; beautiful is the new functional. Spread the word.

In web design, let's sit back and revolutionize the way people interact with web pages and the Web as a whole. It's time for a transformation in the nature of the medium. I'm not talking Web 2.0 here. I'm saying that Web 1.0 was really Print 2.0. Let's not chain ourselves to words on paper; we don't need that paradigm to constrain us any more. So let's band together and make an experience that is unique and completely separate from looking something up in a book or reading a newspaper, but that is so intuitive that people will feel like it's how they've always been doing it. I have my own ideas but it's too soon for them to come out. Let's race and see who gets there first.

And in my life, I want to get back to the production end of music. I love to listen, but I also love to play, and I haven't been playing at all recently. Getting my decks out of storage was the first big step. Getting my skills out of storage is going to take some doing. I can do this though, and I will do this. My mind constantly swims in music and I love it. I need to bring it back, but this time I'm going to use all of the new music that I have grown to either love or grown to realize has a place in hip hop, and I'm going to bring it back. A lifetime of listening to the widest possible variety of music night and day will definitely teach you that everything is connected and everything is influenced by everything. The best hip hop deejays are the ones that listen to rock (see also: DJ Shadow, but in particular Afrika Bambaataa and Prince Paul).

I know this is a tall order for myself, but within five years I want to be able to do whatever I want. You can take that to mean that I'll have enough money or enough influence or enough power or enough streetcred so that if I say I want to take three months and drive a motorcycle through all of South America, I can. If I want to travel to Siberia to take photographs of old soviet nuclear waste dumps, I want to be able to do that. We're entering decade three here; it's time I showed the world my power move.

That is all. Until later, space cadets.

-- m a x

Thanksgiving

2006-11-24T19:16:00.000-06:00

I just returned from the odyssey that was Stahl Family Thanksgiving 2006. Oy. . . . It was really great to see my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and everything; it was just really not so great having to drive six hours to get to Cleveland, drive six hours back, and suffer the awkward situation that is my relationship with my brother-in-law. Seeing Juliet again was awkward, too. I don't know what's wrong, but I worry about her a lot, even if she does constantly drive me away with her behaviour. Methinks that's an entry for another time though, or maybe another place.

Emily's parents were asking after me. I should write up a super-snooty bio and resume online somewhere for people to find. Maybe I'll even post it here! Hrmmmmm *schemes* stay tuned, space cadets.

A Lesson for the Kids Out There

2006-11-21T14:48:00.000-06:00

Before you decide to do some work at home, go ahead and look at your environment at home and make sure it's sufficiently similar to your environment at work for you to actually accomplish things. Things to look for include having similar software on your machine, having a similar server setup, and last but not least never trusting another human being to test your site from outside your home.

To all the people who tried in vain to help me out last night, thanks, but I really oughtn't've asked you in the first place 'cause it ended up being more embarrassing the more people who could view my incompetence. The site worked great on my machines, but didn't work at all on other people's outside my LAN. It looked straight outta ninety-three (oh by the way, Brian; you could've said that first; that'd've been handy to know). Bah. It's no one's fault. I was developing it in a vastly different environment then I planned on launching it. Even so; I was embarrassed and that was no good.

For those that still care after last night's fiasco, I was demonstrating the capabilities of my AJAX-enabled FAQ component, for Joomla. This component is capable of maintaining groups of frequently-asked questions in an intuitive and un-cluttered interface that people so far seem to love. As an added bonus, browsers that don't have Javascript enabled can still view the FAQs if they want (though they won't be treated to the awesome slide-out effect I wrote in). This site I'm including it in will not be publicly-accessible (it's on an company WAN), but the same FAQ component will be used on Vi.llaino.us and also on another upcoming project of mine. The beta version of it, if you will, is also on the First Data website.

Yeah . . . so . . . my dev environment is a little better at home now and I shouldn't be having any of these problems anymore. Good times, right? Until later, space cadets.

End of an Error

2006-11-10T13:29:00.000-06:00

Nick
1.26 bush isn't a lame duck president
1.26 he's cooked and being served
1.26 haha

max stahl
1.27 Oh he's gettin' served alright.
1.27 hahaha

Nick
1.27 haha
1.27 that was a certified zinger

max stahl
1.27 *swish!*
1.27 Count it.

Digital Rights Management: Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle

2006-10-18T09:34:00.000-05:00

Some of y'all might be familiar with DRM, some might not. Let me break it down thusly.

Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is the concept that the copyright owners of the contents of digital files should have control over how they are used on your computer. This is where things like iTunes' FairPlay® system come in. In FairPlay you're allowed to play your music files you've purchased on your computer and four other computers, and you're allowed to burn the files to CD a limited number of times. It sounds okay but kind of restrictive, right? This is the least restrictive of all the DRM formats that I've seen. The rabbit hole goes much deeper; let's take a look.

One of the earlier forms of DRM copy protection was CSS. That's not Cascading Stylesheets, but Content Scrambling System. CSS was the copy-protection scheme used for DVD players. This turned out to be ridiculously easy to break, requiring about 17 lines of code written shortly after DVDs became popular. The scheme consisted of a "region" encoding, that would restrict the playing of DVDs to players that had the same region. This way the cheaper DVDs produced in Japan could not be played on American DVD players, cheap American DVDs couldn't be played in England, etc. In addition, the contents of the DVD, the actual video, were scrambled according to a simple cryptographic scheme, protected pretty much only by its obscurity (stay tuned for more cryptographic articles later). This system provided the content providers with control over where their content could be sold (or at least viewed) and thus how much it would cost; it also protected the digital content of the DVDs from immediate ripping like was experienced with CDs. CD audio is just an integer stream representing the sound wave it aims to reproduce; ripping it to a computer just means transferring that information to the computer from the CD. Digital to digital; easy, right?

There is an incredible weakness in CSS, though, so easily exploitable that it becomes laughable. And as I will argue in a moment, this weakness is inherent in any DRM scheme imaginable, for a multitude of reasons. Look at this from a cryptographic perspective. Say Alice sends Bob a movie, but requires that the information remain secure in transit. However, she and Bob have nevere spoken before. So, they follow an established protocol for talking so that it's secure; they have a key with a limited keyspace (I totally can't remember what it is for CSS; maybe 512?) and when Bob receives the movie, he'll test all the keys really quickly and see which one decrypts the stream properly. In this little imaginary scenario, Alice is the DVD content provider and Bob is a DVD player. The weakest link that I was referring to above is that there has to be some way for Bob to guess the key intelligently, and we can guess it, too.

Therein lies the insurmountable hurdle for all content providers who wish to use any DRM of any kind: at some point, the purchaser has to be capable of hearing the music or viewing the file or watching the movie, and it's at this moment that it all breaks down. Let's back up, first, though.

For any secure channel (for the sake of argument, let's move away from the DVD analogy and move on to a TV episode you've purchased as a .mpv file), the recipient must at some point have both the cryptotext (the file, protected), and the key (presumably stored on their computer or sent via the internet and cached) at the same time. The actual data received in the end is the plaintext (in this case, our TV episode). If the user doesn't have the key, they're not authorized to view that content. Fine. But this entire scheme relies on the "trusted" nature of the program used to view the file. But what if we wrote a program that pretends to be the trusted program, opens the file, receives the key, and performs the decryption using the key, storing the plaintext on the hard drive rather than viewing it? It sounds, actually, a lot harder than it really is. iTunes 7 encryption was compromised in this way less than eight hours after the release of iTunes 7.

The only other real options for content providers are rootkits (see also: Sony's huge fuckup of this past year), which would attempt to enforce DRM on the operating system level, a hugely controversial move, or trusted hardware. Trusted hardware brings the same idea as trusted software down to the parts of a device you can kick. A DVD player is a simple example of one such device; the content providers have an agreement with the DVD player manufacturers that they will build their product with these certain features to limit users' ability to copy DVDs. But what if some enterprising hacker were to build an untrusted device that behaved like a trusted device? In Australia, for example, it's illegal to sell DVD players that aren't "regionless" (i.e., they must ignore the region encodings of DVDs); an Australian DVD player will act like a trusted device this way, but will not act in the way that content providers wish it to act.

There's a central fallacy here. At some point, the user must be able to view, listen to, or otherwise enjoy the content they've purchased. Whether at the speaker output, as it's being decoded for play, or elsewhere along the chain of DRM goodness, the plaintext data must reveal itself in order for this to happen. It is not possible for the user to be able to hear a song they've purchased without the data that makes up that song passing through some untrusted hardware or software along the way (like, for example, a pair of headphones). So at some point the file is bare and naked, and can be cached that way. Also, no DRM scheme can be overly complicated, because at some point a portable device may be expected to play files, and overly complicated DRM both slows down playback and also drains batteries. Because of the combination of these two things, no DRM scheme will ever be unbreakable; it is much more likely that every DRM scheme will fall into the "trivially breakable" category like FairPlay and CSS both are.

In conclusion, the music industry is now forced to undergo a radical shift in how they sell music. In the good old days, you'd buy your music on vinyl. Though you had in your hands an extremely high-quality analogue recording, lovingly reproduced with excellent fidelity, the owners of the copyright on that recording were guaranteed that you could only play it so many times before it would wear out. A 7-inch 45rpm single would wear out with a few hundred plays sometimes. So you'd buy a new record when that happened. Now, with digital formats, the music is encoded as binary and stored on a hard drive or backed up to CD, and the bits never die. The only way you could lose a recording is if you actually lost it via hard drive crash or otherwise. There is no longer any way for content owners to fully control what is done with their materials, and there is still a limitless market for content. When strained, consumers will find other ways to get what they want, and these consumers have rights, too. This DRM business is silly. All it does is limit honest consumers, and for those of us who want to exercise absolute control over our data, it has turned us into outlaws (see also: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and it doesn't even work.

New Blog

2006-10-15T20:44:00.000-05:00

Since the shitty little move that Richard pulled a few weeks ago—namely the destruction of www.maxstahl.com—I haven't had a good place to put techy blog things.

So, you can expect things here kinda like were on my old site. Sort of theoretical and analytical articles on the Web, on programming (particularly for the web), on development in general, and also just on computer science and the sciences in general.

For more detailed commentary on web-specific topics, you'll want to stay tuned. We of the Great and Powerful Development Team at VSA are all going to have blogs soon and when I get that one I'll actually make a pretty good effort to keep it up. Until then, space cadets.