dsandler.org

I knew I wouldn’t be tired the night before classes start. I avoided coffee and everything! I don’t even have any classes meeting tomorrow, and I’m still wired. So, some late-night links for you, taken from bOING bOING: The enthralling, disturbing tale of the great Eve Online in-game scam; the NY Times’ diagram of links from Karl Rove to the Swift Veterans for “Truth”; the undulating figure in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” heard to say, “omg i been 0wn3d”. (This is actually quite sad: it is likely that the unfenceable painting will simply be destroyed over unpaid ransom.)

Unrelated: Anyone have any recommendations for an accessible microeconomics textbook or essay collection? I continue to believe that exposure to econ will help me in my future research, but before I commit to an actual course I really need to be sure I can stick with it at that level (or if I should just stick to the “I read a great article” dinner-conversation level).

What to do with pyblosxom? From the maintainer: “I’m not sure what to do. I can’t really take on another project and push it through the motions.”

“If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses.”

Hey, look, there’s my office.

Midnight update: I guess what I wanted to say here was that, during this past week of vacation and orientation, the termination of my employment has only partially committed itself to my brain.

Sure, I’d erased my files and turned off my computers, but there they remained, on the desk in my office, quietly waiting to go back to work. Daily I walked past that room (marked “DINING” on floor plans of our lovely house), and each time I resisted the unconscious urge to veer into my Big Black Office Chair and check email/IRC/IM/feeds/Perforce.

But now I’ve gone and disassembled my office equipment (as you can see in the photo) and as Johnny Five will tell you, this means it’s finally really dead. After I hand it all over (to the other member of my previous employer’s Houston cell), I’ll go about taking apart the other apparatus of my bunker for the last year and a half: The wires, the paper trays, the boxes of files and boxes of boxes, the unusual makeshift desk. It probably won’t look like a dining room while we live here, but it certainly won’t be my office anymore either.

So now where am I supposed to do my tinkering?

Seriously, what is the deal with the Garden State soundtrack CD? No record store (from Barnes & Noble to Cactus Music) has it in stock, and the iTunes Music Store has just one track. I’ll have to resort to an order from Amazon or something.

Celui-ci, c’est pour Mathias: Aujourd’hui j’ai acheté quelques cahiers français pour la semaine prochaine.

Oh, also, please go see Zach Braff’s debut film, Garden State. (On account of how it is awesome, and stuff.) It just opened in Houston (and about a hundred other major markets) today, and since E and I are still on vacation, we took advantage of the “respectable people are at work” time of day to see it.

Brilliant article (snarfed from the NY Times) about the economist Steven Levitt and his unique sort of socio-psycho-politico-microeconomics: The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life). [courtesy muxway]

Schlotzky’s on Kirby: closed.

The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well established distribution mechanisms. Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player.Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.

EFF++;

Well, successfully made it through the easiest day of my graduate education. Two achievements of note:

1. I was able to corner the chair of the grad committee and make an actual appointment to talk about my course requirements.
2. I went to Valhalla.

(My office computer doesn’t work, by the way, so I’m painfully penning this entry on my Clie.)

Halfway through orientation; waiting for riveting TA course to begin.

Anxiety, I am coming to realize, is a normal state of the nervous system. It is not inherently healthy or unhealthy. Like any state machine, the brain takes its current state into account when determining its next state; from an anxious state of heightened sensitivity, my nervous system has two possible successor states, anxiety’s yin and yang: “anticipation” and “agitation”.

Anticipation is the healthier outcome of the two, at least under normal external conditions. It feels like a vascular buzzing in my extremities, and can be accompanied by little shivers as the increased capillary flow vents warmth from the bloodstream through the skin.

Agitation is less healthy; in the state machine it links back to itself in a very short loop, and at any point can branch further into Panic. This is the really bad one, and feels like a flow of liquid lead running down my chest cavity beneath the lungs (probably increased blood pressure pushing against distant constricted veins). There are no shivers, because the vascular system tightens and cannot act as a liquid heat sink; the body overheats.

In each of these two physiological manifestations of anxiety, the symptoms feed the cycle. It is possible that this is evolved behavior; primitive animals which continued to panic even after anxiety-inducing stimuli were temporarily removed were probably more likely to survive whatever came next. Creatures which were able to sustain their anticipation might be willing to venture further into the unknown, to suffer a little more risk to reach a greater reward.

Tomorrow is orientation day for new graduate students at Rice. Classes start next Monday. I am seriously anxious.

And for the first time in maybe three years, I feel only anticipation.

The thing is, because I’ve been working on dsandler.org I’ve been reluctant to post any new entries. This is total laziness: I’ve already extracted and converted the weblog database to the new system, and I don’t want to have to do it again.

But the important part of having a journal like this is to write about things that are interesting to me, when they happen, rather than putting it off until later when I have more time, and, invariably, less inspiration. As with everything else in my life, if it’s not easy for me to deal with it immediately, it tends to disappear from my brain forever (or until it becomes a real problem; see procrastination).

So, here we go, as it happens: Today was my last day at PalmSource. In a way, it was my last day at Be, Inc. as well, as there are about two dozen ex-Be employees still at PSI with whom I converse (over IRC, natch) almost daily. I’ve worked with these people for four years, ever since Erin and I went crazy and went west on the advice of a very good friend.

Improbably, I even had a little farewell lunch today, as Jeff (who lives in Austin) and Jason and and Justin (who are each infesting Jeff’s house at the moment) drove down to Houston to meet Trey and myself for delicious Chuy’s. It was a little bit of Be, one last time, before I close the book on my professional life for quite a while.

Fig. 1. The crowd (E was kind enough to suffer our geek talk all afternoon).

Thanks, everyone.

I had planned to have the new dsandler.org stuff up this week, but it just didn’t work out that way. The code that runs the site is old, cobbled-together and horribly busted; I decided, after some anguished introspection, that I’d prefer to spend less time fixing my weblog software, and so I’d use some OSS package instead of developing my own weblog engine again.

The whole point was to reduce the amount of hassle, and here I am, knee-deep in hassle with pyblosxom. I think the idea behind it is great—entries are Plain Old Files (like my current implementation), flexible categories and URI syntax, and implemented in Python (so I can hack away at the parts that don’t work). I find myself hacking away at the whole thing, because in some ways the architecture is fundamentally flawed.

For instance, I’d like it to show just one day at a time in the default view of any category; OK, I can write a callback plugin to cut off the entry list after the first visible day. But what about “next day” and “previous day” links? Pyblosxom has these great date URLs; out of the box, it will show you a day’s entries if you append /YYYY/MM/DD to a URL. So, given a date, it’s easy enough to create links which blindly point you forward and backward in time, but I want to skip over days which have no entries. Sorry! Once your callback function gets the list of entries for a given day, it’s already erased all knowledge of the rest of the weblog, so there’s no way to search the rest of the database for the next and previous valid day.

This ties into the other fundamental suckage of Pyblosxom: It has no concept of indexing for its entries. It is incredibly slow on the dsandler.org database, because there are a couple of thousand files it must stat() and sort. A database-backed weblog engine would keep a by-date index of the entries, but Pyblosxom does all kinds of perverse destructive things to the list of entries as it scans the filesystem, making indexing impossible. The pyblosxom people must either not use their weblogs a lot (!) or must render every possible page to a static HTML file, which really defeats the purpose (to me) of a dynamic system.

In short, hassle.