The New Road

Smacking Penguins

Now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout.

Hip Tip for Rippers

Not that I would know anything about this, but should you take the opportunity to rip the CDs of some friends make sure that you rip at the highest possible quality you can. Regardless of the disk space. If you mess it up you probably won't get a second chance and that means having to fork it over for the disks.

Ok, I know a little something about this. I'm re-ripping a large portion of my collection on Claudia because her sound system is so much better that I can really hear the difference. Well, two things really make the difference. The first is to enable volume matching which makes sure that all songs play at the same volume. The second is to use the preset equalizer settings, in particular the Acoustic setting which seems to bring the music right to the edge of your ears.

One last thing, the word on the street is that the Walmart website has the best cover graphics for those of you with systems that support assigning cover graphics to albums. One nice thing about Clutter is that it will go and get the cover for any song you are playing. You can then copy that cover and paste it back into iTunes so that you can have the cover offline.

Pixar dumps Disney

Take that Disney! Hah! Love it. Rumor has it that Pixar is starting their own 2D animation shop. Sounds like retro is on the return.

Good poker, good movie

Mel came over to the office last night for a game of poker with the locals. Lots of great hands, at the end I was up 1,300 units. That was down from a nice haul because of a run-in with George who I was sure was bluffing. Oh, well. Dalbir was both the big winner and loser. He finished the evening up 2,700, but that was about half of the stack he had in the middle of the night. He went on a loose tear in the last couple of hands and lost a bundle. I ended up taking Mel out of the game after he made a fearless all-in call. I had a flush, but it was nowhere near the nuts and it was a tough call to make. It took me so long that Josh complained afterwards that we needed to pick up the pace.

After the game Mel and I went to see The Cooler, which I thought was good but a bit predictable. The nomination of Alec Baldwin is well deserved, he plays a complex and rich character and he pulls it off.

Oscars - Master and Commander

I liked Master and Commander, but it wasn't a good enough film to be best picture. Russell is good, as he always is, but like Gladiator I thought the movie was well done but not so well done as to be at the level of Oscar greatness. Master and Commander had serious flaws. It didn't end, for example. The novels don't begin or end either, but that doesn't excuse the movie from having to be a great film. Though I suppose one could argue that Return of the King had too man endings. The two movies had their flaws, but certainly Master and Commander is the worse of the two. I haven't seen Mystic River, but I'm going to pull for Return of the King. I think that in this case it deserves special dispensation as it represents a series three films.

New Version of Umm

I've noticed that recently my writing style has become significantly more terse, and I think that is an improvement. To wit, I was walking around the house this morning and I heard the water running. Which is a bad thing if you don't know why. Turns out the handle on one of the toilets was stuck.

While I was walking around I was having a conversation with myself about how one becomes in tune with their house and even minor noise variations can be significant. This internal aside went something like this:

"When one owns a house they become in tune with the sounds of the house. They can pick up on small variations in the noises. The small sounds of the running of water. The creaks in the walls. The sounds of wind stressing the walls.

I put in italics what I am going to call the new version of umm. Instead of saying um, we drivel on with pointless extra information of no value. From the listeners perspective umm is actually much better than this verbal drivel because at least you know to ignore umm. I hear the new version of umm on NPR most often, but Bush also does it in press conferences. All in all, there is a reason for umm, let's use it.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings... more pictures of Megan. This time she is playing in her new sandbox.

Heavy Dose of Fear and Violence

I guess I missed this piece from the N.Y. Times about two months back:

American forces have used the tactic in other cities, including Awja, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. American forces also sealed off three towns in western Iraq for several days.

"With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," Colonel Sassaman said.

The bombing of the house, about a mile outside the barbed wire, is another tactic that echoes those of the Israeli Army. In Iraq, the Americans have bulldozed, bombed or otherwise rendered useless a number of buildings which they determined were harboring guerrillas.

Somehow I don't remember fear and violence being mentioned as tactics to be employed in operation Iraqi Freedom when Bush outlined it for me a while back. Why are we there, again?

Couple of silly things

First, we talked about an alternative to Frendster yesterday, Hatester. Where you link yourself to those you hate. The problem is that if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then it gets pretty complicated tracking enemies and friends.

Second, I did the obligatory icon replacement fest on my machine last night. I got most of the new icons from xicons. I particularly liked the Firebird replacement and the Safari replacement. Lori liked the Mail replacement. Claudia, the new 17" PowerBook G4, is really starting to feel like home. I haven't booted the older machine in more than a week.

New use for Fortune

It looks as if the spammers attacking my blog are using the unix 'fortune' program to come up with the blog comments. There may be new life in the old girl yet! ;-)

Mac turns 20 today

The Mac turns twenty today. I love this quote from Steve Jobs:

"People are going to bring them home to work on something Sunday morning, they're not going to be able to get their kids away from them, and maybe someday they may even buy a second one to use at home..."

Here is the 20th anniversary Jobs interview. I love his response about market share:

"Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes's or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?"

Another set of interviews has a section with Dvorak, who says, "Choosing a PC over a Mac is choosing beige over metal -- or beige over anything. The PC has the big market share because it's the safe choice. If Apple produced a safe, dull-looking machine, the company would, I think, be shocked by its success. Thank goodness it doesn't." Um, yeah, that's nuts. The reason I switched back to Macs was because of a stable operating system that was made humane by a company that concentrates on usability. It's a perfect match. You have the reliability of Unix combined with the usability of Apple. Windows, on the other hand, has all the elegance and reliability of the time machine from Back To the Future.

More stuff: Here is the famous 1984 ad that introduced the Macintosh. (Notice the ridiculous addition of the iPod). MacRumors says something big is coming out on Monday.

xBack and the Red Pill

If you are into the Matrix and have a Mac with lots of processing time to completely burn, then try this. Install xBack, which is a menu bar item that allows you to run a screensaver as your background. Then install the Red Pill screensaver, which is a Matrix screensaver. Then select the Red Pill screensaver in xBack. The effect is very, very cool. Especially when you are using transparent terminal windows. That being said, this eats up processor time like there is no tomorrow.

Sick as a dog

No blog yesterday because I was in bed sick as a dog for most of the day. I caught Megan and Lori's stomach flu. I'm pretty sure that I got it when I was playing around with Megan and she stuck her hand in my mouth. I'm back at work today but I'm still feeling pretty bad. Hopefully I will feel a lot better by tomorrow.

Blog Spam

I'm getting more spam comments than real comments on my blog now. Today I am up to four fake postings.

Sears

Nice quote from the CEO of Sears:

"... you know, there are four or five times as many smart, driven people in China than there are in the U.S. And there's another four or five, three or four times as many people in India that are smarter or as smart or have more drive."

Enterprise to be Cancelled

Word on the street is that Enterprise will be cancelled. I won't be shedding many tears. The show was just too conventional. The broadcast houses need to take some hints from HBO:

• The show is a serial but the episodes don't really share a sequence of events. Mini-plots don't start in one and resolve in another. Whatever Babylon 5 did, they did it right. If that means going to a single author or a small team of authors, so be it.
• Kill characters at any time during the season. Not just at the beginning or the end.
• Get out of the rut of having central characters and guest characters. Bring new people in and have other people leave all the time.
• Don't dredge up plots from earlier shows or from previous series.
• The characters are too perfect. Archer is always right. T-Pol always has "pole in butt" syndrome. They are too consistent. It's boring. And when they go out of character you know it's something stupid which is just going to resolve itself at the end of the episode. Look at the evolution of Carmela Soprano. That character has changed a lot and it was a genuine and realistic progression based in an understanding of what we all go through as we go through the stages of our lives.
• Never, ever, do clip shows.
• They need to put guns on the shuttlecraft to turn them into little fighters so that we can get an aircraft carrier in space thing going on, like Battlestar Galactica, or Andromeda.

There are more, but this would be a good start.

Stargate is also suffering from the same problems as Enterprise. Each season there are fewer and fewer reasons to watch. In the first couple of seasons they set up alliances and new enemies and really changed stuff around. Now it's just a boring character study.

Kerry over Dean

Wow, I thought Dean was a dead lock in Iowa, but perhaps not. Either way we need to rally around the winner. Bush needs to leave office on a rail.

Mickey Mouse would be a far better President than Bush. He has charisma and verbal skills way in excess of W. His girlfriend is cuter. People all over the world love him. And he has the big ears, so Republicans won't know the difference. Go Mickey!

Fallingwater Rising

Lori got me a copy of Fallingwater Rising for Christmas. It was excellent. Now I understand the personalities involved in the project, how it was developed and the impact that it had on America at the time. An excellent story and it was very well written.

Mongolia and India

So what is Mongolia bringing to the table?

Hubble

While I agree with going to the Moon and Mars. I don't agree with letting the Hubble rot as part of that plan. The Hubble has been a fountain of real scientific data for years now and is too valuable to let die on the vine. Surely we can spare one pit stop by the Hubble to repair and upgrade her in the next couple of years.

Mars : Agree With Lori

I agree with Lori in that I am excited about the prospect of going back to the Moon and going on to Mars, but that I still think we should dump the shrub. Apparently Bush's father made similar plans (or lies) while he was in office.

I can really see what the press means when they report that people either love or hate Bush. On the one side people think he was sent by God to save us all from external and internal peril. On the other side people think he was sent to us by Satan as the warm-up act to the Apocolypse. "Hey, you thought that was bad. Wait until you see what's next." Personally I think he is the classic idiot progeny in a family line that looks at the Presidency as a birthright.

Apple-Shift-L

I didn't know this until last night but on Apple's you can select any piece of text, hit Apple-Shift-L and it will bring up a Google search on the text in the selection. Beautiful!

Two Laws of Conversation

These two laws are excellent. I only learned them myself in the last ten years or so but I still find myself doubting.

Pissing the Night Away

I was in the car with Lori and Megan coming back from the city when Tubthumber came on. Yes, the lyric is pissing the night away.

Dude Living on a Golf Course

I used to play at this course. I don't remember any dude living on the course though.

Free Books

I thought it would be great to get free books from Addison-Wesley (or anyone), but of the four that they have sent me so far, two are pretty bad and the third is terrible. Which stinks because I can't give them a positive review, so I try and try to come up with something which is remotely positive to say.

All of these books are in desperate need of development editing. This is where an editor acts as the customer to shape the form of the entire book, the subject, the chapters, the style in which the subject is addressed. The whole shooting match. All of the bad books were written as if the author had no idea who the audience was, or if he did, he just didn't care. The worst of the O'Reilly books (Java Cookbook, Javascript Cookbook, etc.) are still far better than these books. It's really sad.

Back to my original point. Free stuff. It's a curse and a blessing.

Ratchet and Clank 2

My long nightmare is over. I finished Ratchet and Clank last night. It's a hell of a deep game.

Deep Space Nine?

Ok, I get Bug's Life, Aristocats, and that stuff, but why would a 1-2 year old daughter want Deep Space Nine and 2001?

Sad news for Mindstorms

Lego might be dumping Mindstorms. That really sucks. I was looking forward to doing Mindstorms projects with Megan. I'm sure someone will pick up the slack though.

Excited about the New Mac

I'm very excited about the new Mac. I read a short Wired article on the twenty most influential Macs, of which I had experience with twelve. The five most important were:

• Mac Plus where I learned event oriented programming using Think Pascal. It had a 20MB hard drive!
• Mac IIcx where I wrote QTest for Mark O'Connell. I took a vacation for a couple of days to write the program as a Christmas gift.
• Mac IIfx where I wrote Pulse Control for Bookman. This was a work-horse machine with an amazing 80MB hard drive that ran like a bat out of hell.
• PowerBook 170 where I wrote FretNavigator during the first year of my marriage to Lori. Psst, this was actually a work machine (I never owned my own machine until the G4 PowerBook Mac). I wonder if UM cares that they own the rights to FretNavigator. Methinks not.
• PowerBook G4 Pismo that I used for Code Generation in Action which I will now be replacing. It's an outstanding machine, but the hinges broke, the drive is dead, the display is scratched and the keyboard is stuffed. Plus it is badly in need of an OS clean sweep to make up for three years of my abuse. It would take $700 to fix just the case and for another ~$500 we could get Lori a new machine that is twice as fast, has twice the drive and twice the RAM of the G4 and has no flaws.

The replacement is a very high end 17" PowerBook that will have a gig of RAM. Which is incredible. I couldn't have even imagined this powerful a machine when I was working at the University of Miami only eight years ago. Crazy. If I had thought of it I would have been thinking server. Not a five pound notebook that I would be taking on a plane and watching computer generated movies on. My how times have changed.

Today's Movies Suck

I hate this time of year because the movies just suck. What did we get this week? Chasing Liberty and My Baby's Daddy. Please. The only thing that could make those films watchable is if the only other movies were an Olsen Twins movie or a Rugrats movie.

I saw the Rugrats movie on HBO. It was horrible. It was beyond bad. I can't imagine it being pleasurable for kids and it was painful for parents. Kids dancing in a shower of their own urine? Who comes up with that? And how do you explain that to the animators or to the studio executives?

Server Side Article

I got an article published on The Server Side. That's kinda funny since it's such a Java resource and I am so not the Java guy. ;-)

Amphicar

I lost a dollar betting that this never existed. Turns out... it did.

League of Extraordinary Crap

I rented The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen while Lori was at her mother's group a couple of nights back. It was really, quite bad. I mention this experience only as a warning to other souls who might find themselves interested at a maudlin level. This film is only palpable to canines and those on a ventilator. Though the dogs only like it because they can bay along with the howls of pain in the audience.

Spellbound

I'm bummed I missed Spellbound in the theatres. I'll definitely have a watch on DVD.

Comedy Tonight!

When I was playing Poker on Monday night I was annoying everyone with this song:

Something familiar,
Something peculiar,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!

Something appealing,
Something appalling,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!

Nothing with kings,
Nothing with crowns;
Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!
Old situations,
New complications,
Nothing portentous
Or polite;
Tragedy tomorrow,
Comedy tonight!

Something convulsive,
Something repulsive,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!

It's from A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. This is an excellent bit of musical theatre. You should check it out if you get the chance. The movie version with Zero Mostel is also very good.

New Machine

I ordered my new Apple yesterday. It should arrive at the house in 5-7 days. It can't come soon enough. The monitor on my current Titanium flops back and forth like a leaf in the wind since the second monitor support broke. Plus I can see the two power leads going to the LCD and the are scraping against the metal of the LCD support, so each time I open or close the box I come a little closer to the final short that will probably melt the box.

Big Bounce

I like all of the male leads in The Big Bounce. I don't know the female lead. The trailer looks good but I hated Get Shorty.

Apple Pricing

The Jobs keynote was today. They didn't drop any of the pricing on their laptops! Grr...

Released the book

I released the book this morning at Paddy's Coffee.

Spam Comments

I've been getting spam in my blog comments. Most of them have been attached to me old "What's Up?" posting. I think that one gets a lot of links, which makes in popular, and thus a spam target. Crazy.

This year we dump the shrub

Want a New Years resolution? Dump the shrub! Stuff like this just makes we want to dump him all the more.

Book News

I never expected to make any money on Code Generation in Action, but recently I have been wondering when I would get a royalty check, even if it's a tiny little check. Last night when I got home from watching Big Fish with Mel I was really surprised to find a check from Manning for the first three months of sales and it was nicely big. Not huge, but not small. Lori, Megan and I will be going to the Cheesecake Factory in Palo Alto to celebrate today.

I've also been thinking about releasing a copy of CGiA into the wild at Paddy's Coffee.

Code Generation Alliance

I started the Code Generation Alliance to coordinate code generation education and advocacy efforts. I hope it works. It will be great if it does.

BTW, my last blog was my 500th using Moveable Type! Woo hoo!

Spirit and Opportunity

I suddenly have gotten very excited about the Mars landings of Spirit and Opportunity.

Amazing win

What a game! I was thinking all through the second half, "Damn two point lead!" It was just enough to make a field goal relevant and then boom, wide right! Love it. Then there was the first down bomb that Rix threw to the ten yard line. The first time I saw it I thought pass interference and my heart just sunk. Then watching the replay it was clearly offensive pass interference. Finally, a good call for us. It must have been so intense to be there live. Even when Berlin took the knee you could see FSU was still trying to rush him to make something happen. FSU really wanted that win. What makes it even better for me was that my Dad called right at the start of the game to bet a dollar on it. Now I am up one dollar! Woo hoo!

Kinda Cool

This is kinda cool in a geeky, extremely old school way.

Here we go again!

Everyone up for a little football action? Another chance to beat FSU. This time on our own turf!