dsandler.org

There’s a followup story at Plastic on the topic of the Voronoi zen rock garden.

I have recently received complaints that the recounting of my recent CHP encounter is most infuriating due to the notable absence of a citation and fine.

To those people I say, “OK, fine, but let me tell you about the time Boston decided that I had been delinquent in paying hundreds of dollars in excise tax on my car, and had informed me that they would impound it if they saw it. They were right; I hadn’t paid any of that tax. (But I had also MOVED AWAY the year before.) It took about a year and a half, and several hundred dollars, all told, to get them to stop trying to collect taxes on my California-registered car.”

I had a hard time getting to work today. Traffic was lousy, and I was kind of distracted (I’m getting sick, so my head is getting foggy). Oh, and I got pulled over.

Travelling westbound on 92, I debated turning on my wipers; my car had been parked under a tree all weekend, and was full of schmutz. I was going slowly enough (up a hill on 92) that I figured I was probably not in danger of over-spraying wiper fluid all over the car behind me (this is a point of highway courtesy seldom followed). I checked my rearview mirror to see what kind of car I might be offending in case traffic started moving, sending some of my wiper fluid onto his windshield.

“Hey, it’s the CHP! And they have their lights on! And are motioning me to pull over!”

[The officer walks very, very cautiously up to the passenger-side window of Dan’s car.]

Dan: Uh, good morning?

Officer: Do you know why I pulled you over?

Dan: Um, no.

Officer: Your registration has expired. Six, two thousand two. That’s a long time ago.

Dan: Uh, oh, gosh, wait, did I forget to put the sticker on? [Note: the rest of Dan’s lines must be read in the style of the geeky monsters from Monsters Inc.] I must have forgotten to put the sticker on. [rummages around in glovebox, to the increasing unsettlement of the officer; removes an envelope and empties the contents.] See, here it is, I just forgot to put on the sticker!

[The officer takes the sticker-carrying registration sheet from Dan’s hands and scrutinizes it. He turns it to face Dan, slowly, and begins flicking the sticker, even more slowly.]

Officer: You’ve gotta put this on. [Flick, flick.] Where are you driving this morning?

Dan: Uh, to work, sir.

Officer: And where is that located?

Dan: Uh, Sunnyvale, sir. [thinking: “I work for the White House.]

Officer: Well, when you get there, you put this sticker on right away. They’ll pull you over for it again if you don’t. Now accelerate slowly, and merge when it’s safe. [walks away]

Dan: Thanks, sir, yes, I will, sir!

Twitch, twitch. I simply do not handle interaction with The Law gracefully. (Ask E. to tell you about the time we went through Canadian customs. Remember to imagine the geeky-monster voice!)

World Domination HOWTO

After years of complaints about unfair use of their dominant market position to establish new, de facto standards out of closed protocols and formats, Microsoft seemed to turn over a new leaf. “We’ll stop using private, undocumented protocols; we’ll codevelop SOAP, a human-readable meta-protocol, and use it as the heart of our .NET initiative. That way, you can read the messages our .NET apps are passing between one another, and develop your own replacement for one of those apps if you like. See, no lock-in!”

“Oh, by the way. We had a patent pending covering an almost identical technology, also named SOAP. Yeah, we had started this project, and killed it, before the public SOAP initiative ever got off the ground. But, given the patent system the way it is, we pretty much have license to sue your ass for even thinking about interoperating with our apps. Better luck next time.”

Erin’s started a section on her site for the wonderful world of Alias (summary available; synopses for the new season forthcoming).

Articles about the PalmSource open house event that took place yesterday at the new Sunnyvale campus:

OSNews.com: Report from PalmSource’s OpenHouse Day, by Eugenia Loli-Queru
TheRegister.co.uk: Nagel, Sakoman map Palm’s future by Andrew Orlowski

I did not attend. But I heard stories about the chocolate fountain, which just sounds too bizarre (and circa-2000) to contemplate. My friend Ingrid, however, had no trouble contemplating it:

From: ingrid
To: dan & erin

[…]

Thought of chocolate fountain most of last night and today. Had super gooey brownie chased with milk this aft finally, and I gargled the milk slightly for a fountain effect. I miss that sort of bizarre excess! Hearing about it put a smile on my face.

It’s arts and crafts day here at dsandler.org:

Just for kicks, I used one of the applets I mentioned in my last post to plot out the positions of the actual rocks in the Ryoanji Temple. Voilà: the hidden tree revealed.

New Scientist: “Hidden Tree” the secret of Zen garden.

Summary: A 500-year old Zen rock garden in Kyoto is almost entirely empty, yet is almost subliminally pleasing to the eye, in the same way that man-made shapes echoing the Golden Ratio tend to seem harmonious. A similar mathematical secret has just been discovered: the regions of symmetry, when traced out, tend to draw a branched tree.

Is it just the CS geek in me, or are we looking at a half-millenium-old Voronoi diagram?

More Voronoi links: a rigorous definition courtesy MathWorld; path planning and medial axis at Rice (I took Dr. Kavraki’s course while I was there); an appled called VoroGlide; another applet at Cornell.

Last update for today: You can now get dsandler.org in RSS format, for use with a headline fetcher such as NetNewsWire for MacOS X.

The URI for the dsandler.org RSS feed is: http://dsandler.org/dsandler.rss

How could I have missed Daring Fireball brand Mac punditry and curmudgeonry? For shame, Dan!

A Foam user writes:

I just wanted to thank you for the simple install of your Foam screensaver, viz. “(drag saver here to install)”. Too often, I see complicated installers that don’t tell me what they’re doing. Your idea is excellent.

Credit where credit’s due: This technique (of including an alias to the final install directory in the software download, with a name like drag software here) was pretty common for small BeOS software packages. It’s only possible on operating environments (like BeOS and MacOS X) where you really can drag software to install it!

no one wants a fat and slow browser, caused by having to compile and run a Java Script based user interface at runtime.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.