If you were a scientist or engineer working on a technology capable of launching a Singularity, or alternately destroying most life on earth, what kind of warning sign would you put on the wall behind the lab bench?
Archive for the ‘Thinking’ Category
Warning Signs for Tomorrow
Saturday, October 21st, 2006Effecting positive change in the world feels good
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006TritonLink now has a Class Planner (beta). I’d link to it, but you need to be a UCSD student to see it (which is silly).
Messrs. Dye and Pajak have done a very good job. It feels a lot like TritonSchedule (which makes me feel really validated, because a pair of professional UI designers made the same decisions I did), with some nice improvements. They did a very good job on the lecture-discussion selection flow, and the department selection is just glorious. They fixed the grid width in pixels, which makes the positioning a lot easier. It’s all ajax, with almost no latency (on campus wireless); it’s very smooth and fluid. I don’t like that the lecture doesn’t immediately appear when you click it, but so far that’s my only complaint.
When I don’t have a CSE141 lab and an EAP application that need to be done urgently, I’m going to go under the hood and look at their JS code and ajax transfers.
On the whole, this is a Good Thing. My hat is off to ACT today.
Lines I want someone to use in a show or movie or book someday
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006A twist on Chief Joseph:
From where the sun now stands, I will take no more shit forever
To be said at the beginning of a war, rather than the end.
It’s a very Penny Arcade style of humor. It may have been partly inspired by a Family Guy segment involving Jesus and Chris Tucker in a buddy-cop movie: “Let he who is without sin kick the first ass.”
You heard it here first.
Geek Girls Rock (updated)
Sunday, October 8th, 2006Teresa has a loft bed. The frame is above my eye level but below head level. I’ve hit my head on it about a dozen times. I’ve been lucky so far: each time I was already ducking, but not far enough, so I’ve only grazed it. One of these days I’m bound to hit it squarely and get a good concussion.
Last time I hit my head, she suggested I put a post-it note on the edge, so I’d be reminded to duck. Since I always carry a pack of post-its and a pen, I whipped them out and made a warning sign for myself:
watch
out
joe
Reflecting upon its asymmetry, I said, “Hmm, it doesn’t seem to be very centered.”
Teresa took the post-it and added to the top and bottom:
<center>
</center>
Isn’t she wonderful?
Update! About a minute ago, I was sitting on the floor under Teresa’s bed. I stood up rapidly and hit the frame squarely with the top of my head. It hurt. A lot. Ow.
All That Keeps Me On OS X
Monday, September 18th, 2006Chris has a new MacBook for work. He likes Mac OS X, and he especially loves Adium. I agreed, and told him Adium is one of the very few apps that keeps me from switching to Linux. He asked what the others were. Here’s the final list I came up with:
- Adium: multiprotocol chat client par excellence. The interface is beautiful and logical; it ties in with Apple’s Address Book; and these days it’s actually pretty stable.
Alternatives: bitlbee. Every graphical client I tried on Linux just left me cold. Bitlbee is at least a novel way to solve the problem of user interface. I used it for a few weeks and didn’t hate it. I’d miss text formatting and the occasional image or file transfer. I’d really miss metacontacts. - Safari and Camino: browsers that aren’t ugly and slow. Sorry, Firefox. You were a pure joy to use back in the 0.7 days. Now, somehow, you’re bloated and slow and not very pretty… just like SeaMonkey you tried to replace.
Alternatives: Firefox sucks, Konqueror does too much that isn’t viewing HTML (just the browser, ma’am), and that’s about it for Linux browsers. - Quicksilver: difficult to describe launcher-and-kitchen-sink. It just does stuff. Awesome stuff.
Alternatives: none I know of. - Finder’s Column View. The rest of the app sucks rocks, but I still love Column View.
Alternatives: Eh, there’s probably something for Linux by now.
These four thin but strong threads keep me on Mac OS X. I could switch to Linux tomorrow—I would have switched a year ago—if not for these few programs I love so much.
The terminology of compatibility
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006My previous post pointed out to me a failing of terminology to describe compatibility. To paraphrase FOLDOC:
- Backward/downward compatibility means playing DVD discs in Blu-Ray players. It is a property of the new system.
- Forward/upward compatibility means DVD players were originally designed to play Blu-Ray discs with some level of degradation. It is a property of the old system. (This is not true, of course. DVD players have no idea what a Blu-Ray disc is and will spit it right out. The physical layer wasn’t designed to be gracefully forward compatible.)
I’m looking for a term that means that Blu-Ray discs were designed to be played in DVD players. It’s a property of the new system; the new system was built to work with the old system, the old system never had a clue about the new system.
Nailing Blu-Ray’s coffin shut
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006Toshiba Creates Three-Layered Disc (Gizmodo via Slashdot).
Backwards-compatibility! Today’s normal DVD players will play these hybrid discs just fine, and when you put the very same disc into an HD-DVD player, you get the next-gen HD content. You pay once for both next-gen HD content and graceful degradation to ubiquitous players. It’s no longer a binary choice between DVD and HD. The very best part: so few next-gen HD players and discs have shipped yet that this tech has a fighting chance of being in the second wave of products making it out to customers.
It’s not clear yet if next-gen HD will have as sharp an adoption curve as DVDs did. DVD’s advantages over VHS were fairly overwhelming: extra features, physical convenience, vastly better video quality, multichannel audio, multiple audio tracks, optional subtitles in multiple languages. Next-gen HD doesn’t bring much, just a little bit more of everything (resolution, channels, tracks, frames). DVD has a formidable installed base without compelling reason to upgrade, so the transition to next-gen HD may be fairly slow. In a slow transition, the most backwards-compatible format will win.
Blu-Ray’s only possible hope of responding is getting players in front of TV sets and burners into the lion’s share of computers, fast. PS3 is trying on the first count, but it may not be fast enough to get out there. At least its competitors, the 360 and Revolution, don’t come with HD-DVD players. As for computers, a brief survey of the two formats’ wikipedia articles seems to indicate Blu-ray has a slight headstart, though HD-DVD has more supporters in the PC industry.
As an aside, HD-DVD uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and friends for interactive programming and menus, while Blu-Ray uses Java. To me, that says everything that needs to be said about the two formats’ technical merits and likely trajectory of adoption by programmers.
php.net/sort
Thursday, September 7th, 2006Description
bool sort ( array &array [, int sort_flags] )This function sorts an array. Elements will be arranged from lowest to highest when this function has completed.
[snip]
Returns TRUE on success or FALSE on failure.
How do you fail to sort an array? You can sort it correctly, or you can sort it incorrectly. But the actual sorting doesn’t fail…
update: see comments. DJ and Scott win, and PHP and I lose.
After almost a year, I’m signing back on AIM
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006For the past ten months or so, I’ve used only Jabber and Google Talk as IM services. No AIM, no MSN, no Yahoo. I signed off of the others, permanently as it seemed at the time, because I believed I need to do everything I can to help encourage an open XMPP network, analogous to the open SMTP network that delivers email.
Recently I’ve realized that trying to get the whole world to move to Jabber is hopeless. There’s simply too much inertia in the big three legacy IM systems. Little nudges will not be enough, because to the vast majority of people, the reasons to switch seem like unimportant technical details. The only thing that will pull people permanently away from the big three is when the big three themselves either move to jabber (unlikely) or die (also unlikely).
Meanwhile, the open network is very slowly appearing. Companies and organizations are slowly rolling it out. I haven’t heard of any universities providing Jabber accounts to their students, yet. Ahem. (Hi DJ!)
So I’ve decided that my idealistic goal of moving the world to an open XMPP network is not worth cutting myself off from my friends. It pains me to write it, but I’m going back to AIM.
I’ve re-added most people whose screen names I remember. If you want to talk on AIM again, and you don’t see me, leave a comment or email me, and I’ll re-add you.
I’m also shutting down my Jabber server (tongos.com), and I’m combining both Jabber accounts (tongos.com and gmail.com) into one new gmail account (j.auricchio). I still prefer using Jabber over AIM, when I can.
Why should I care about compatibility with the past?
Thursday, August 3rd, 20066.20 Why should I care about compatibility with the past?
This is one of those questions in which the answer never convinces those who ask it. Somehow, everybody who ever asks this question ends up answering it for themselves as they get older, with the very answer that they rejected years earlier.