dsandler.org

More coverage of the DreamHost DDoS downtime from dave peck, and others: Andy Budd; Mike Steinbaugh; and Chad Dickerson, who points out that Feedster is supremely helpful in finding out about this kind of breaking news in the weblog world. In fact, using Feedster at just the right time—that is, in conjunction with an event of particular interest to you—is a very interesting way to discover an ad-hoc community (in this case, concerned DreamHost customers).

Fig. 1.  MASTER USING IT AND YOU CAN HAVE THIS.

Seen on Engadget: Nintendo Launches Classic NES Games For GBA SP.

• Donkey Kong: The best game featuring a plumber rescuing a princess from a big ape pretty much ever.
• Pac-Man: Hel-lo? If you don’t know this game then where have you been?
• The Legend of Zelda: Dude! How classic can you get? The righteous Link whips Ganon and saves Zelda. Link rules!
• Super Mario Bros.: There are pipes and coins and these grody goombas and you just stomp away.
• Excitebike: It’s a rad motocross racing game that lets you rip around a track and kick up dirt and stuff.
• Ice Climber: Like, duh. You climb the ice and whack monsters.
• Xevious: Go to space and shoot stuff with your wicked spaceship.
• Bomberman: Drop bombs on the baddies.

Not only that, but they’re coming out with a “limited edition” Game Boy Advance, with red A/B buttons and black NES stripes on it. Ultimate retro.

Fig. 2. Bitchin’.

Jeremy points out:

Since we were discussing advances in space science, I figured I’d forward this on to you. Its received little coverage in America, likely due to the fact that it was Europeans who found it and Kobe is going to trial (one must have priorities): “Methane on Mars could signal life”.

My hosting provider, DreamHost, is very reasonably priced, has lots of features, and friendly/knowledgeable tech support. They have also just experienced a massive denial-of-service attack that took down their entire network infrastructure for pretty much all of Monday. This was annoying.

For this guy it was really annoying.

Update: more reactions to the DH outage.

Most MOOs run off in a corner of a unix system, as a single process. They re-invent their own programming languages, which are often not very expressive or powerful, their own object oriented database systems, their own multiuser support, and essentially everything you’d find on a unix system. Mooix turns this on its head, and rather than trying to reinvent unix inside a MOO, it turns the unix system into the MOO. It uses every unix strength possible to the advantage of the MOO; its multiuser nature, preemptive multitasking, disk caching, device abstraction, numerous programming languages, editors, libraries, etc. With Mooix, unix is the MOO.

Warning/Achtung/Avertissement/警告:

Do not look into crazy Japanese Date Book with remaining eye.

Action Comics #1 (which you will no doubt recall is the debut of Superman) can now be read online, in its entirety. Not exactly “mint” condition, but the timeless hero’s story transcends creases and dog-ears. (Part of a three-year-old web project on the Man Of Steel at UVa.)

And hey, there’s a coloring contest! Oh, wait: “All entries must be in by midnight, Monday, June 6, 1938.” Damn.

“In my version of Friendster, you’d have to pick me up from the airport—or at least lend me money—before I’d let you in.”

Ze Frank takes on social networking software. (QuickTime, a couple minutes long)

If you haven’t stopped by beerbike.com in a while, or aren’t subscribed to the RSS feed, you might not know that there are some new stories there, following the 2004 race:

• Makin’ Beer-Bike History by Jen Cooper
• Have You Seen My War Pig?
• 2004 Race Results

From a software architecture point of view, HyperCard had a number of interesting ideas which might bear reexamination. At a time when persistent object stores were still novel, HyperCard was built around one. It’s not going too far to say that its user interface was simply a reification of the object database. HyperCard’s programming model was object-like, but didn’t fall neatly into either the class/instance or delegation styles. Individual visible cards in a stack were created as instances of prototypic backgrounds and could be pre-populated with text fields and action buttons. Default message passing was an odd hybrid of visual containment and fixed object hierarchy.

picking Erin up in about an hour and a half

la la la

Well, I had mixed success rolling my own. The first roll was a disaster (they tell you you’ll use too much rice, and you don’t believe them, and sure enough, too much rice), and they got better from there out.

But you know what? I miss the fish.

Next time: more fish. And, actually, nigiri would probably take less time overall—prepping all the veggies and then constructing the rolls took forever.

It was delicious, though. I’ll whip up a photo essay so you can see the process—having handled and prepared each individual component of the norimaki, I now have a keener understanding of where each of the many subtle flavors comes from. (The nori itself has a surprising influence on the overall aroma and flavor, as it turns out.)

“TRY THE INCREDIBLE MILDNESS” … is what it says on the back of my Japanese rice vinegar bottle.

OK, sushi-making was interrupted by an impromptu conference call. I was able to complete the sumeshi, however. It took almost exactly an hour, from opening the bag of rice to putting the dish of finished rice in the pantry. There was a lot of downtime, some of which I used to parallelize the task at hand (preparing the vinegar-sugar-salt dressing, for instance), but the rest of which might have been used to prepare fish or veggies if I had my act together a little more.

12:00 emptied 2.75 cups of short-grain rice into bowl of water to soak

12:05 prepared vinegar (3 tbsp. rice vinegar, 2.5 tbsp. sugar, 1 tsp salt)

12:10 drained/replaced water

12:20 drained water; moved to saucepan, added 3 cups water, placed on high heat, and covered

12:27 at a rolling boil; reduced to simmer (still covered)

12:37 water absorbed; remove from heat (still covered)

12:50 moved rice to shallow pan; poured vinegar mixture and folded in sharply

13:00 wrapped and placed in pantry

TaxCut allows only one state resident return to be e-filed with a federal return. TaxCut does not allow the e-filing of part-year resident returns, except for Maryland, and does not allow the e-filing of non-resident returns.

You mean, I have to use paper? (sob)

Caption: “When I find Clarke, I’m going to beat the snot out of him.”

Angi says that sushi makes everything better. I’m inclined to agree. Tomorrow I will try my hand at すしをにぎる (sushi-wo-nigiru, pron. “sushi oh nigir’”, lit. “handling sushi”). Last time I made nigiri, and demonstrated that while I can get the rice pretty darn sticky, my fish-cutting skills need work—so this time it will be veggies only.

I’ll also time each step of the process, so I can make some sort of claim about how long it would take me to prepare for Erin and myself during a work week.

Hand-drawn icons from the Owlnet Lab Report, circa 1998.
Row 1: Mac II, Mac PPC. Row 2: SGI Iris, Indy, and O2. Row 3: Sun SparcStation, Sparc Ultra.

Hey, another one of my Rice projects found its way onto a public network. The Owlnet Lab Report, which I built in 1997 or 1998, is being proxied to the wider Web at this location.

The Lab Report used rwho and finger data, combined with schematic layouts of the Unix computer facilities (”Owlnet”) on the Rice campus, to generate diagrams of machine availability in those facilities. Absolutely crucial when you’re an undergrad hunting for a free Sparc station on which to do your homework, especially back in the days before everyone and his sister was running Linux in the dorms. The Lab Report was (internally) called mach5, since it was about the fifth time I had reimplemented my ad-hoc machine-availability shell scripts. When I graduated, the Rice IS group offered to move the tool out of my personal directory and maintain the service as the labs on campus evolved. (Since it’s been owned by IS, however, it’s been restricted to on-campus users, which is why the public mirror is news.)

Grant writes:

I just read the entry on your blog about the quality of writing on the web. I know squat about good writing, and I do not and have never aspired to be a writer. But Mark Pilgrim’s words, and yours, made me instantly think of an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.

It’s almost one of those psych studies that ends up sounding like common sense, because in a nutshell, the authors are saying: if you are bad at [writing], you will think you are better at it than you actually are. They tease out a bit more detail, though. In some domains, a person’s skill level is directly tied to how well that person evaluates the skill of others in that domain. The authors give many examples, including grammar, spelling, and chess. Good writing in general probably falls in that category, too.

So, yeah, a web full of people reading and writing for each other. Not being good writers, they lack the “metacognitive ability” to evaluate each other and themselves. If they cannot self-evaluate, how can they hope to improve? It’s not surprising (to those of us with 20-20 hindsight) that most of them do not become better writers.

So what is the magic secret ingredient X? I think Mark hit on it when he said: “the mind-boggling lack of self-knowledge required to write every day and not realize that you write badly.” X is LEARN WHAT GOOD WRITING IS. I realize that’s as helpful as saying LEARN HOW TO PLAY CHESS BETTER, but I guess I’m saying there is no magic secret. It’s just the age-old process of learning. Take a class, study the masters, learn to evaluate others and yourself. LEARN HOW TO LEARN.

I think a lot of the responses Mark quotes are saying basically the same thing about self-evaluation. And your take is very similar, too, which is probably why it made me instantly think of that article. But I have, you know, science on my side, so I win.

Much, er, better written than my attempt earlier. I think Grant is getting at the root cause of what I only crudely grasped with my “we only read crappy writing” thesis; viz., “by only reading crappy writing, we don’t recognize good writing when we see it—or fail to see it—in our own output.”

More on Richard Clarke (mentioned Sunday in advance of his 60′ interview): A Salon interview, and Slate on why we should believe him. From that article:

There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’s lying about being a squeaky wheel about Al-Qaeda before 9/11.

Mark Pilgrim’s discussion of the quality of writing on the web (which prompted me to bring a little Stoppard last Sunday) centers around the following:

I grew up being taught, believing, and teaching others to believe that there were only two things you needed to do to become a good writer:

1. Read every day
2. Write every day

But now we have thousands of webloggers who read other webloggers every day, and who themselves write every day, and they’re not getting any better at writing. […] there is obviously a secret third ingredient required for becoming a good writer. You need to read every day… and write every day… and X.

He’s gotten a few responses, each postulating what X might be. Here’s my take: The key is what the webloggers are reading.

It’s a little like striving to become a grand master in chess, but refusing to play with anyone but the high school chess team for practice. Perhaps this is some fundamental law of learning; You can only potentially exceed your teacher’s skill level by some small epsilon.

In the case of the weblog community, we have a pool of lousy writers, all reading each other, and writing more and more like each other every day. There’s no tide, as it were, to lift all these boats.

I am a lousy writer, in large part because almost everything I read is also poorly written. Weblogs, company emails, technical reports: this is my diet of words, and, well, you are what you eat.