Tue, 27 Nov 2007

Help from Jesus

Sometimes I think it's irresistible to make fun of other people's names. Summary of the context here: Fixing the problem won't be too hard:

Jesus could look into the pyreadline source code

If he did, I wonder what he would see.

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Sat, 17 Nov 2007

It's ok

It's ok to deviate, just try not to.

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Fri, 16 Nov 2007

New York Times goes shopping

This leads me to believe that I should either live on a plane or have a partial lobotomy. . . . I can conclude only that simply avoiding wistful pondering is the best strategy.

-- Carrie Fisher, Memoirs of a Shopper.

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Mon, 12 Nov 2007

Playing favorites?

This article (via /.) seems to accuse Google of playing favorites:

Just last month Google acknowledged an accomplishment of the communist Soviet Union, which launched the Sputnik space satellite 50 years ago.

Uh-huh. Sure.

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Sat, 10 Nov 2007

What about AT&T?

Interesting tidbit at the Washington Post about l33t 4dwarez h4x0r pleading guilty to being malicious:

John Kenneth Schiefer, 26, variously known online as "acid" and "acidstorm," agreed to plead guilty to at least four felony charges of fraud and wiretapping, charges punishable by $1.75 million in fines and nearly 60 years in prison.

That was for for 250,000 computers. When the evidence is laid out against people at AT&T, if the evidence says they defrauded and wiretapped at least 100 times that many people, what will their punishment be?

I'm rooting for 60 * 100 years in jail, spread evenly among the people who did the wiretapping. Or perhaps 60 * 100 years for each person, if that seems more fair.

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Brings new meaning to "electronic music"

Watch + listen to the Super Mario Brothers theme as played by Tesla Coils.

Was there something like this at Burning Man this year, or were the Tesla Coils I saw not musical?

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Thu, 08 Nov 2007

Is not! Is too!

Seen on OpenAFS-devel:

Quoth Jim Rees:
> It's not outside the chroot.

Quoth Michael Loftis:
It is so outside the chroot.

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Wed, 07 Nov 2007

Tokyo

John Wilbanks from Science Commons asked me to give a talk about the Neurocommons project on SC's behalf in Tokyo.

Monday evening, as I was sitting in the CC office wondering what to work on next, I decided I would put all my papers in order and update my calendar so I would have precise notes about which of the many email attachment I'd need to refer to at which time. I wasn't leaving until Wednesday, but I figured I'd need to do this sometime.

That's when I learned that I was actually leaving Tuesday, not Wednesday. The only reason I made my flight is because I procrastinated real work with organizational work. The shock from that realization lasted for pretty much the twelve hours that followed it.

But right now, I'm in an airplane that will soon land in Tokyo. I'll be presenting on Thursday, and attending the rest of the conference Friday and Saturday, and then I plan to sort of hang out in Japan for a week (ingeniously, I'll work remotely, so I can hang out in Japan without using precious vacation time). So if you want to hang out, or if you want to tell me what to do / where to eat / who to meet, drop me a line!

I'll probably get a cell phone for the time that I'm here (apparently the Japanese aren't really into GSM, so I'll have to rent a real local one), and presumably I'll post its number when I have it.

If you're wondering where I'll sleep and bathe after the conference, it's in Joi's Lab!

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Music puzzles

When I explain to people what the MIT Mystery Hunt is, I usually give this example from 2004:

You are faced with a web page whose title is "Track 13" and that embeds an MP3 file. The file is aobut 30 seconds long, and it seems to be two-second snippets from about 15 songs. So you get a bunch of people together, and you identify the songs. Once you write out the track titles, they look something like this:

Order by New Era
Rapid Fire by The Pixies
Delirium of Disorder by Bad Religion
Eggcellent Epiphanies by The Choo-Choo Train
Raindrops Fallin' On My Head by Ozzy Osbourne
Later On by Bruce Willis
Your Mom Is Amazing by Your Mom
Reconstruction of the Fables by They Might Be Giants
Interesting People by Cute Is What We Aim For
Crazy by R.E.M.
Consistent by R.E.M.
Licking Lips by Ray Charles
I'm Not Your Grand-Pa by Your Grand-Pa
Ponies Rule by Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Sock It To 'Em by The Low-Flying Kites
Bacon, Bacon, Bacon by Interpol
You'd Never Believe Me by Blink 182
Raccoon Tail by Mario
Amaze Me by Girlyman
Nathan's Rise by Mozart
Katholic Kookies by Kristian At Heart

That is, the first column spells out "ORDER LYRIC CLIPS BY RANK". So now you have to figure out the lyric clips that you've been hearing, which takes even more collaboration and Googling, and once you do, you stare at it, trying to figure out an order until someone comes by and says, "Hey, Rolling Stone just released their top songs list this year." So you order it by that and you get the name of some band, followed by "NOT DON".

As luck has it, everyone in that band (according to All Music Guide) had the letters "DON" in their name, except for one guy. So you call in his last name as the answer, and you move on. We did all this in the Bio Lab of ESG.

In the 2007 hunt, we had a new music puzzle! We began to work on it in the Bio Lab of ESG! But when I asked if anyone remembered "Track 13" or worked on it, they all had blank faces.

Maybe the explanation is not that I'm old. After all, there are veterans on the team who have been there since I joined them. But it struck me as evidence of a generation boundary, which saddened me, especially in my last year at Hopkins where most of my good friends had already graduated.

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Mon, 05 Nov 2007

PCI Slots

Quoth Johannes Berg:

I don't own any boxes with PCI slots

If Venkatesh went this route, I suppose he'd have more company than I once thought.

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Sat, 03 Nov 2007

Maybe his phone is busy

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I don't worry, I hope

AT&T has been "allegedly" illegally wiretapping Americans for ages and giving that data illegally to the government. Here's the government's take:

The companies face suits from customers who say their privacy was violated. Administration officials say they worry that the suits, pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, could bankrupt the utilities.

I don't "worry" they could bankrupt the utilities. I hope.

If there is no incentive for these corporations, and others in a long line past them, to follow the law, then we no longer have the rule of law: companies will simply do illegal things and then explain that if the law were enforced, they'd have to pay some money.

I've been screaming and swearing about this for a week. I can't understand how anyone can calmly disagree with this.

Let me remind you that the President, who is charge of the executive branch of government in this country, "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed" according to the Constitution.

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