dsandler.org

jwz, on a thread about Paul Graham’s new essay about Great Hackers: “One can think in Lisp and still realize that actually writing programs in it has no future. (One sometimes cries.)”

“Do you even care what kind of shit is going down in the world? It’s called Morning Edition. If I don’t get some Carl fucking Kasell right now, I’m going to choke someone.”

The result of a couple of hours of archaeological excavation:

Fig. 1. Eight years.

(Note that I matriculated nine years ago, but Rice revamped the student ID in 1996 and I was forced to surrender my “classic” ID at that time.)

By the way, the pilot for “Joey” is out there, if you’re looking to get a jump on the fall season. (Rod: Is it possible? Not terrible, but actually funny?)

“There isn’t going to be a horse race to cover either in New York or San Diego, but we gave you the airwaves for free 70 years ago. And 357 days a year, you can say who’s up and who’s down—who won the West, and lost the South. But what’s wrong with eight days, not every year but every four years, showing our leaders talking to us? Not a fraction of what they said, but what they said.“ —Toby Ziegler, TWW ep. 3.19, “The Black Vera Wang”. (A choice quote, inserted into my day by a happy TiVo channel selection over lunch.)

(Also, did you spot Richard Schiff at the convention? 10:44 (EDT) during the first night’s NBC coverage.)

J. Bradford DeLong, What the Democrats Will Have Problems Doing. A good read about the hard times ahead for either party. (The times will be harder with one than the other, of course.)

“The most important way to open paths to opportunities is through education. And the Democratic Party will have a very hard time improving American education. One of the big problems with American education today is that we still imagine that we can underpay teachers–we still imagine that for teachers (and nurses) we have this large pool of constrained high-quality female labor to draw on. We need to upgrade the salaries of teachers–and we need to do this while at the same time upgrading the quality of teachers. The Democratic Party can do the former, but it will have a very hard time doing the latter. The latter means that lots of current teachers get fired, and a Democratic Party that has close links with the National Education Association cannot do that.”

“We have damaged the earth’s axis with BOOZE.”

The official site for ペーパーマリオＲＰＧ (”Paper Mario RPG”) just went live (as reported by Joystiq). Known as Paper Mario 2 in the US, it definitely seems to be the future of the Mario series. (Honestly, it looks pretty cool. Being 2-d has all sorts of benefits, like the ability to fold into a glider and fly over the level!)

Rod swoons for William J.: “Clinton gives the appearance of not only believing every word he is saying, but that he wrote it himself.”

I watched Clinton’s speech with closed-captioning (Erin, who gets up at 5 or 6 a.m. these days, was already asleep) and could tell it was a great speech, through the C/C typos and delay. But I also discovered that this must be how Darryl Hammond learns to imitate the man. With the words silenced, every facial expression and gesticulation was deafening. There they all were, the guffaw-inducing trademarks of Hammond’s Clinton bit: The squint; the jocular detour (and abrupt return to form); the bitten lower lip, and the wry little grin that leaks out behind his teeth when he does it.

Rod, again: “I only hope that Kerry can deliver something half as powerful on Thursday night.” Indeed. When Clinton approached the stage, there was a part of my brain already expecting his campaign theme song instead of Kerry’s (which is what, again?) They did not disappoint, and I wondered how many delegates, attendees, and TV watchers found themselves wishing themselves back to 1992.

“Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone…“

I just got the most unusual piece of spam from palmOne about my essay, “requiem for having been”, about the acquisition of Be, Inc. by Palm, Inc.

(continued…) (331 words)

This afternoon’s surviving tabs: April 21 Doonesbury in which B.D. is revealed to have lost both his leg and his signature helmet in Iraq … Salon on Alan Moore: The Man Who Invented The Future … The Atlantic: A Jewish Palestine (H. Sacher, 1919) … Building a bridge to the 19th century … A Softer World … Sulfnbk Syndrome … OSX networking in detail … The Parrot Developers Give Up.

“His online friendship with other Stargate fans across the globe was portrayed as an international conspiracy against the MPAA. And perhaps most disturbing of all, it was later revealed that the FBI invoked a provision of the USA Patriot Act to obtain financial records from his ISP.” Read about the brave new world of copyright law as applied to SG1Archive.com.

Oh, by the way, in addition to Hackers & Painters, I now need to pick up McSweeney’s #13, The Comics Issue (which the Guardian has thoughtfully reviewed for our convenience).

Viddy these delicious gaming links. Girl gaming: CounterStrike Ladies at the Electronic Sports World Cup finals [shown: team the Brazil (L) and Sweden (R)]; Women’s Gaming Conference announced; k5 detours into the world of professional competitive gaming. Also I would like to point out to Erin that I think I’m ready to take you on again in Soul Calibur II. (I’ll bring the katana; you bring the whip.)

This is apropops of nothing, except that it made me snarf coffee:

As long as I am at it, I may drop my long-standing policy of being terrified of lions too. I could easily outsmart a lion. I can picture telling my grandchildren the story, “…and as the lion was about to pounce I shouted, “What’s that?!” and pointed behind him. As he turned to look I kicked him right in the nuts. He crumpled to the ground and I bit him on the nose for good measure.”

Then I would refill my pipe.

Stupid animals.

This is from Amishrobot.com, where one can also find a very recent and equally hilarious missive on the caveman brain of the expecting father. (Breadcrumbs: stupid Internet poll #1, by way of hilariously stupid Internet poll #2, from Photo Matt, notorious H-town blogger and creator of WordPress. Whew!)

“Little known: for up to two developers, p4 is free!” Actually, for up to two clients (separate hosts, with possibly divergent views of the master source depot) p4d is free to use for evaluation or what-have-you. As a single developer I found that this was not enough—I had a client on my Mac development station, a client here on dsandler.org, a client … whoops, that’s it, I’m done. (Without being able to code on my laptop, or synch my stuff to a machine at work.) It’s enough to pique the tastebuds a bit, but to really get into perforce you need a larger installation.

Dave: “GNU Arch is idiotic. It’s a deranged developer’s wet dream about how revision control should work. Sure, it permits distributed development. But it does not need to be this complex.”

I write about source control here from time to time (also known as “version control” or “code control” or, as the suits call it, SCM—“System Configuration Management” or something equally obtuse). A trip through the archives yields some tidbits:

• 05-Jun-2004: Monolithic clients for Subversion. I maintain that the sheer volume of arcane library dependencies required to attain a functioning svn installation is a huge roadblock to adoption. (Windows users have it easy; they can use TortoiseSVN, a Windows shell extension that truly rocks all over. I’ve mentioned the CVS version here before.)
• 05-Jun-2004. “Martin Pool: ‘I like thinking and writing about version control because it has an interesting mix of technical problems and human/social problems…’”
• 23-Feb-2004. p4 vs. svn; everything vs. everything else.
• 06-Feb-2004. All about darcs, in which patches are “analogous to the operators of quantum mechanics.”

I’ve been partial to Perforce since I started using it at Be (where they switched from CVS to p4 once the source tree—and engineering department—increased beyond a certain size where CVS is acceptable). P4 Just Works, almost always The Way You Expect It To. Commits are bundled into atomic changelists which have a (single) accompanying change note; the local file tree is not fragile (woe betide the owner of a moved directory in CVS/SVN!); branch integration is handled (almost always) intelligently; the client install is a breeze, and the server install isn’t much harder; Mac resource forks are handled sensibly (these days); the list goes on. Of course, it’s a commercial product with a hefty license, so you won’t see individuals or universities using it any time soon. (They do have a special open-source license, but there are some hoops.) So individuals are left with a few choices: cvs (or svn, a cvs with some old problems solved and replaced by new ones), arch (amazingly complex, from the very first step, when you discover that the command-line tool is named “tla”!), and a bunch of other also-rans.

Is there anyone out there who’s found something he likes, that he can reasonably recommend to a friend without feeling the guilt of having damned that friend to days and days of thumbing through the manual? Anyone?

Update: Joe reminds me about Perforce’s educational licensing. “It seems a little expensive, [$3500/year, no per-seat cost. —dan] but something a department could probably afford if it were to want to actually keep everything that people are working on, even after they leave.”

All about the subtle tweaking of the GE brand’s visual identity.

BusinessWeek on the shift of pop culture’s source from the US to Japan. Mentioned: manga, Scion xB, drifting. Also interesting is the positively Victorian idea of a “leisure class” in Japan, comprised of women living with their parents to save money (which can then be spent on stuff).

Didn’t this happen at the end of the last century? Wasn’t the center of culture, fashion, and style Paris, and then the United States stole it? Well, we had our “it” century, and now we’re … out.

“If it is on the internet this week, we will release it immediately as a legal download on iTunes, and get hard copies into the shops by the end of the month,” he told the paper. “It would be a real pity. It would screw up years of work and months of planning, not to mention fucking up our holidays. But once it’s out, it’s out.”

—Bono, to the Telegraph (as rehashed by Wired’s Cult Of Mac, about the theft of an early copy of their new studio album “Vertigo”