i went to the local kragen auto parts store to get a replacement headlight bulb. their parts lookup little computer by the bulbs was not working. so i had to stand in line for 5 minutes waiting to get help from somebody who looked up the parts in their computer and then told me they had 2 versions, one for $12 and one for $20. so i looked at the $12 one and then at its part number and then looked for the one that was $10 and found that -- they were lying by omission presumably to get higher sales. so i cannot say that i like that place at all. (or they weren't lying but their inventory system sucks ass, which also doesn't make me any more happy to go there.)

and who hasn't ever had that flash of insight? "Suddenly, I was dissatisfied with my totally adequate level of luxury."

some day, we will understand typing enough to be able to do all those things which are only easy to do in less-type-anal systems today, without the pain. right?

we all desperately need wireless power.

crazy how so many cool old good ideas were beat out by The Worse. (but "i'm not dead yet!")

uh yeah, maybe funny in retrospect.

i think i quite agree that externalities suck.

"There are eager, or 'strict' functions in Haskell which, when evaluated, will first fully evaluate their parameters. These are usually marked in the documentation."

yeah. good luck with that.

we don't need no steenkin' security.

it has always completely flabberghasted me that, apparently, everybody just simply blithely accepts whatever key they get the first time they connect to another given machine -- they assume there is no man-in-the-middle that first time. which is, to my mind, completely blitheringly painfully stupendously stupid and missing the point, innit? i guess it is good that some people are doing a little bit about it.

i know in the end it would suck, unless maybe apple or sonos did it all, but i think i want a home media system that is simply a server of blades that does everything: radio, tv, recording, cds, games, whatever, all with -- the hard part, of course -- a really good system for dealing with the metadata. it could use reconfigurable digital radio technology i guess for bonus geek fun.

somehow, i think i should send my money elsewhere.

oh, hey, australia sounds nice.

coal can do that. now, i'm not sure about clean coal.

also? it is oh so funny how netpbm doesn't support "--help" and says "Use 'man ppmtogif' for help" in response, and then when you do that the man page says to look at the web! augh!

i think Mac Ports has got to be one of the most shining examples of how to do really bad user experience.

just so you know: if you run "port location foobar" and you get back "Error: port location failed: Registry error: Please specify the full version as recorded in the port registry." which as you can see doesn't tell you how to specify the version, then you can specify it using "@" for example "port location foobar @10.26.51_0+darwin_8".

grrrrr.

amen.

(also: "You are not trained or authorized to enforce laws regarding automotive lighting." tee hee.)

since the other things you use in your software development (e.g. VMs, 3rd party libraries, whatever) can have bugs, it behooves you to keep your own system as squeaky clean as possible so you can more easily (a) determine if a bug is in your code or their code and (b) work around their bugs when they rear their ugly heads. duh.

"I don't hate, it but I'm not jumping up or down." whoo, doggy, and there's more where that came from.

apple is supposed to be so great at usability and user experience. so obviously they should have gone with tiff as the only file type their screen grab utility supports. because, as we all know, nobody really uses jpeg at all.

(yeah, yeah, lossy vs. loss-less -- point being they should also support jpeg.)

oh. wait. somebody talking sense?! in this day and age? horrors to betsey!

it sure is a damned good thing that those pesky investigative publications like the NYT are going out of business! i mean, surely it is better to not have any concentration of investigative power and only rely on what blogs and the government tells us!

time for my little repeating mantra: i! hate! java! (the language; there are others which run on the jvm which i think i detest a lot less.)

i completely fail to understand how the usa can possibly continue to exist, economically speaking. like, will there be a situation where they have to print up the money to buy the printing presses to print more money?

how much of a bad person am i if i love this kind of thing? hopefully not much since really i want to learn how to avoid screwing things up, mostly. (but, still, doesn't everybody enjoy rubbernecking around a really good train-wreck?)

i am not sure i can sufficiently convey to what large degree i feel the Firefox 3 font selection ui is utterly hateful and just not very helpful. i mean, just get rid of it and have people edit .config files in emacs why don't you.

just remember: "self-made" is not equivalent to "honorable". oh, and you need a lot of luck. but of course, luck alone is not enough: you need to be the kind of person who can capitalize on it.

also? when you ask somebody who succeeded how they succeeded, they will view their past through a filter. that's true of asking anybody after-the-fact about something: their views will mostly likely not entirely accurately reflect what transpired. which means maybe they are all leaving out something important...

also? i'm a lazy bum.

ok, so maybe the alternatives are in fact way worse, but i'm not sure i'd be in all that much of a hurry to laud Ben Franklin's invention of the flexible urinary catheter.

no, in fact, Skynet was spam.

i think somebody famous once said something about how they wanted to 'delay/defer/postpone binding' as much as possible. that's supposed to be a nice idea for letting you end up with a more flexible system, but i suspect it has some nasty possible ramifications.

hey, go comment it up, it is fun. :-)

really cool, or just plain masochistic psycho? you decide.

in other words, grinding in mmos.

i feel like to some small degree i am [somewhat] resistant because things which are difficult tend to just piss me off, rather than make me feel justified in doing them. (well, ok, alright, in truth only for the most part -- there are times when for sure i have been an apologist about things that do actually suck.) so, like, i don't like non-agile last-minute burn-the-weekends all-nighter approaches to software, for example.

i suck at even the basic rubic's cube, let alone V7.

i wish i could find drivers that actually worked for the #9 revolution 4 1600sw cards i have. there aren't any xp drivers i could find, and the one w2k driver doesn't do the native 1600x1024 so what is the point?

some really rather nice lisp education (as long as you are coolio with emacs).

remind me to send money to the guy who made VirtualDub. even though i just had $500 in car repairs and i don't actually have any money to send. (now if only i knew if i could / how to script it so i could more easily process a batch of baby movies.)

i thought json was supposed to be this stunningly simple, no-brainer format? but then it turns out that seemingly nothing comes "out of the box" with an implementation, so just trying to get the libraries all set up so that you can actually be talking JSON is a pain in the ass. and makes me mad at everybody who might be all json-this and json-that.

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everything sucks. i download a zip file in winxp and open it in the file explorer and try to copy out contents and it fails miserably. (might be because it was created on a mac or something, judging from the extra files in there?) so then i install 7zip and that works ok. way to go microsoft.

while i think haxe is a nice idea, i find the actual ecosystem to be a bit on the sad side. like, for example, the lack of - as far as i can tell - a coherent and working story around using JSON.

wow, ok, somebody deserves a macarthur genius grant or something (read the comments, but it still seems neat).

it bugs the crap outta me that Iron (Chrome too?) doesn't have a Home button.

if tools are one of the big deals about how humans are supposedly more advanced / better than other creatures, then why are so many people resistant (myself included at times, i'm sure) to the idea of a new tool?

gmail is broken in various ways in the Iron browser, which is derived directly from the Chromium/Chrome code base, which is from google. nice.

[blogger (also a google product, now, of course): conflicting edits.]

i. am. extremely. haytering. the iron browser's Download ui.

extremely.

i love how the microsoft web site is full of broken internal links.

well, i guess somebody saw a niche. (i'm just looking for some home photo organizing software for new baby family member pictures, myself!)

it pisses me off a lot when a web browser doesn't just bloody well open the data as a web page, but instead refuses and forces it to come up e.g. in notepad. i think firefox does that to me sometimes? for sure ion is doing it. haaayyyttteee.

so you watch Them do it wrong. and you say you won't make that mistake. and when it is your job, you do what you think is right. and then it turns out you have to throw a lot of it out and re-do it. because the real underlying lesson is that you will always get something wrong, not that you can be smarter and thus get it all right.

sure, i probably have a touch of the old asperger's, but technology freaking sucks and pisses me off daily. like today: the mac book pro at work says that it is at minimum brightness when it is clearly at max, and i can't adjust it down at all. then when i try to shut it down it ends up spinning the wait cursor for ever and i have to hard-power it off. great. and then my cell phone apparently changes screen saver modes depending on what profile is on, so it stopped showing the clock and instead was doing some crappy stupid useless animation stuff when i just wanted to see the time. and now i'm trying the ion browser and it apparently doesn't use the space bar for page down scrolling.

a blah frustrating day indeed.

aw, crap.

i like denki groove: vitamin is a favourite of mine. so i'm pleasantly surprised to hear they made video games older and newer, too.

dang, we (usa) suck.

as god is my witness, i think i will never ever remotely understand how anybody anywhere any time can have any interest in a purely Tower Defense game.

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yeah, it is amazing how much better things could be if everybody could figure out how not to be a dick, but also how to actually inspect and adapt.

and i've always wondered if you could run a company on consensus; i liked it during my brief food not bombs tenure.

personally, i'd prefer it if we could couch things in terms of Design Patterns instead of always invoking war metaphors. guess i'm a wuss.

is it really true that programmers can ever see meetings as anything other than hell? i mean, aren't they all thinking "i was just in the middle of finishing that task and wanted to check it in..."

i find that when i am working on some little side thing by myself that it is easy to reach some small plateau and then stop and perhaps get distracted. or run out of motivation. so i do try to reduce the distractions. and if i could find a good XP pairing partner that might mean we could trade off back and forth from plateau to plateau. oh well.

i guess i appreciate that erlang is supposed to be of the philosophy "let it die and restart it", but i'm trying to write and debug code which dies silently so i don't know what i need to fix to make it work. so it all kinda sucks that errors seem to be 'disappeared' by the erlang system.

i tried the iron browser briefly. i assume it has the same os ui as chrome. why, oh why, did they not just use the native os ui rather than some insane crappy home-grown thing? like, the minimize, maximize, and close widgets are not standard winxp widgets.

because, you know, that's really where i want people to innovate.

not!

(oh, wait, maybe it is something about them trying to make it look like vista? even though i'm running xp?! i dunno. i just know it is all stupid suckful dumbness!)

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so far i think the default edit-compile-test cycle in erlang using the shell is pretty suckful since i don't know of a way to tell it to just always reload things?! maybe it is better if you use Distel or something, but i couldn't get that working entirely right. so i'm manually doing either c(foo) or l(foo) for multiple files all the time, and heaven only knows when i forget and am running out of date code?

if you do not have an Extreme Testability mindset, you won't write code that is super componentized and uncoupled and reusable, and so of course you will be in the self-fulfilling loop mindset that the only way to test things is with a lot of manual clicking.

is it me, or is there no way to see what modules are already in the erlang dialyzer plt?

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oh, yeah, as if the system which got us into this mess stood any chance at all of getting us out of it? i. see. doom.

oh my deity. i think i just had a brilliant idea for a game show: you get to pick email spam and have it come true. (how you pick it, and precisely how it comes true are key aspects of making the show successful, i'd wager.)

lo, i am haytering mac os x. the fact that it really does use and require and restrict based on file name extensions (.pdf, .gif, whatever) is evil bullpucky and makes me see red.

i think we need more rebels in this day and age.

i love being able to set breakpoints in eclipse that look like they are ready to stop things but are, in fact, completely ignored at runtime. yup. that's a great way to work.

the axis always made better machines.

it bugs me no end to hear somebody say that html is too much about look-and-feel and not about semantics. what a sad, tortured history we have.

i hate eclipse. for example: the fact that it, apparently, randomly chooses between the "All" and "Selected Lines" choices when i'm trying to find-replace text. with hilarious consequences.

oh, yes! my new band name: mistrial.

yeah, not only do i need more free time to read, i also need to win the lottery so i can put it all in to practice. :-)

yeah, gosh, since everybody sucks at software, you should not try to be any better.

to which i take offense. well, up until they get to talking about what are in effect design patterns.

some interesting thoughts on self-hacking for an improved future self.

i know! how about we misuse scripture to say we should all be bigoted jerks!

wow. my extreme dislike of the facebook user interface knows no bounds, it would seem.

rebooting winxp is such a freaking nightmare of usability suck. especially if you are stuck with FAT.

security is too important to be left to most anybody.

people are weird. "I accept the idea that P4's narrative is punctuated by many hours of dungeon battles that deliver virtually no story at all."

word! "Being able to move your factory to China where the workers are cheaper is not essential. In fact, if you were forced to keep your factories in Montreal where wages are higher, you might very well need to rely more on innovation."

another all-time favourite of mine. the thing after the door opens has always almost made me pee my pants, it is so perfect.

the comic Hard Boiled is, i feel, one of the most wonderful all-time classics i have ever had the good fortune to read. (it isn't for everyone.)

erlang's error messages are lame.

pretty much, not a day goes by that i don't have a reason to hate, based on technology. e.g. people with cell phone rings.

it is pissing me off that programming languages often use the term 'modulus' to mean 'remainder', which is not a particularly accurate + clear use of the term imho. send me crying back to haskell.

also, the erlang documentation seems weird and pretty weak to me. and it seems to be missing some basic things like max(A,B) and min(A,B), and MaxInt?

(ah, apparently erlang uses bignums, which means in theory you don't have to worry about MaxInt, but in fact i want to have a bounded range for my particular purpose. so i'll make my own fake MaxInt, right.)

has anybody done a study on how people really use and react to and think and feel about their on-line ratings? like, if they get negative feedback, what does that really mean to different people? how does it align with the person's philosophy and self-image?

pausing parallels is weird: when i bring it back, it causes all the stupid winxp task bar tool tip things to start playing again (clean up icons, java update, might be at risk, etc.) which is just a lovely experience.

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i love how the printers in winxp depend on what usb port they are plugged in to, but don't tell you that anywhere obvious in the user interface.

the world of erlang is weird. erlang/distel apparently has bugs about enabling debugging, like being able to set breakpoints; the lack of type checking let me make some really silly and thus very oddly behaving bugs (i have to see if Dialyzer would catch it); exceptions don't have line numbers; while dialyzer comes with the distribution, it doesn't come with a pre-build basic .plt; i think things were not working when i used ?MODULE: for some reason (taking it out fixed it); c() only lets you specify one file at a time?

having said all that, i think it is a bit easier to get 'into' erlang than, say, haskell -- like, you can use printfs really easily ha ha -- and the fact that erlang is the way it is i think forces you to write things in an even more decoupled way than you would otherwise, which i think is probably good in the long run (although, because of that, i think the amount of ASCII required to implement what you want might be more than i'd like).

ah, yes, the holiday season: "screwed coming and going."

holy gaming heck, i need more time. somebody buy me a lottery ticket already!

famous author does not a good game make.

ha ha, whoo, tell that to the high restartability folks.

i hope i can find time to play Enclosure.

well, i am doing more exercise than i was. not enough to actually really even count as real exercise. the other half, namely 'eat less', is something i am failing miserably at. i think my current excuses are: being sleep deprived and thus tired and thus munchy; wintertime cold making me seek food comfort; probably some random amount of general ennui thrown in for good measure.

blah.

firefox sucks. neither opera nor safari get this particular thing wrong: when i alt-tab away (well, cmd-tab since i'm on a mac) from firefox when i was using the little quick-search-google text-entry-field, and then alt-tab back, instead of leaving the text cursor where it was the whole text field has been selected. in other words, if i am trying to enter something into the search field and then need to alt-tab to find some key phrase and then alt-tab back to type it in, the search i've entered so far gets nuked and replaced with what i type next. that problem doesn't exist in safari or opera as far as i can tell.

if you are text or even video media of any sort, and you do not have RSS feeds for your stuff -- yeah, well, see you in hell.

i am currently of the opinion that succinctness in code is one of the more important things to pursue. this is because i have found myself more often than i'd like thinking "oh, wait, what i should really be doing to solve X is Y" but then when i go look at the code with the intent of actually converting to / implementing Y i get instantaneously depressed about how much effort it will be. so i think there are at least two things which need to help out here: First, the programming language has to help. Java does not help. Scala has less of the "does not help"-ness. Haskell, if you grok it, has even less. Second, the programmer has to do their best to keep things as simple and straight-forward as possible, both in terms of design and in terms of ASCII.

(p.s. yes, there are many dimensions to the helping thing when it comes to the programming language. i'm sure there are plenty of ways in which Haskell isn't the most wonderful thing.)

i pretty much kinda mostly really hate blogs that require registration to post comments.

i. am. so. sick. and. tired. of. bad. code.


(especially, gulp, mine.)

wind and solar, not coal and nukes.

Ford Mustangs from the 90s are kinda like when Worf said that the Klingons from ST:TOS were a genetic offshoot experiment that was just sorta a bad failed idea.

i got email saying my account was activated for Google App Engine. it said i need to authorize myself using a mobile telephone number and some SMS stuff. i have to pay for SMS so <expletive> that noise. so i filled out the form that they said i could fill out to avoid SMS. that form failed to work. it had a hyperlink off of the error message. that hyperlink doesn't work. (and i have no idea WTF my mobile telephone number has to do with anything about building web apps, so i double-plus hate everybody, since they never explain where the F they came up with that requirement.)

so, all in all, my 5 minute experience with Google's App Engine service makes me believe, quite firmly, that the whole thing is a steaming pile of excrement and i kinda hope the project just up and dies and goes to heck.

now, that's what i call Design.

i dunno about you, but my experience with ripping CDs has been nothing short of teh suck. i fear that the only way to get something which doesn't suck is to spend $1k+ on a Sonos or whatever. i can't afford that.

i have been using iTunes and a Roku wireless player, and have ended up with a library of music that is pretty much foobar'd in all sorts of great ways: there's the drm-locked tunes; there's the ascii-only fonts so my japanese tracks are impossible to navigate; there's the lack of ffwd and rwd; there's the problem of moving and merging libraries, so now i have albums i've ripped which either have duplicate songs or have lots of missing songs; etc.

it freaking kills me.

is there anything out there that doesn't suck so hard? and is open source, ideally? when it comes to one's music collection, and the usability thereof, i think it is way too important to be left to the dumb-asses who run companies.

fun. you know. for nerds.

sorta like those budweiser commercials:

"so, you hate everybody?"
"yes. yes, i do."

especially when it comes to web site usability. for example, isn't it funny when you take the time to enter a comment only to be told that comments aren't working when you hit submit? rather than, oh, say, them having just turned off the comment entry form as well?

as far as my minimal investigations tell me, erlang is simultaneously really freaking cool, and really freaking weird broken odd unfamiliar and thus annoying. i am not sure how much that feeling wears off as one drinks ever more erlang kool aid?

yeah, the digital horse gets out a lot faster than the digital barn door can be closed. i don't believe process will ever take care of that.

okay, so i think the take-away is (1) english sucks, and (2) that's a lot of comments!

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i swear that if i ever run a company, i think i will find it easy to make sure it doesn't make utter crap. i cannot fathom why other people don't Get It.

i cannot begin to describe the level of hatred i have for the Amazon Seller system. basically i have been completely screwed out of (so far) $30 because of a completely lack of usability. i really do hope that somebody who Doesn't Suck comes along and freaking kills them off, capitalistically speaking.

of course i think network effects are such that it is unlikely. and, sure, i can just use a different system. but that doesn't get me back my <expletive> thirty dollars!

(let alone the difficulty of actually getting paid by Amazon for anything which actually sold.)

every time i venture out on to the internet to research and buy something, i am completely stunned at how so many places manage to completely bugger up the entire user experience. in all seriousness it is as if they are explicitly trying to prevent people from spending money with them.

i sorta wish they would die. of course, having said that, i am right now putting up with the crappy experience on one site because i think it will save me like ten bucks. (hey, the economy sucks!)

i almost want one for xmas, what with all the floppies i have in boxes in the garage.

uh, yeah, so, like, how do you make sure the horse is before the cart?

there was a post once, i wish i could find it, about how easy it is to use monads in haskell, and it went on and on and on with some completely obtuse and impenetrable example, only to summarize by saying that what the code did was reverse a string. insanity beyond belief. basically, some people don't know what 'easy' actually means, as far as i can tell.

i am totally buying in to content strategy.

newsflash: for the most part, most of reality is boring crap.

yeah, i gotta say, the public domain don't get no respect.

i'm a woman.

furthermore, if you ever thought that societies like, say, Japan, that have lots of cultural requirements which seem fakey are weird, well, they aren't, really, in an absolute sense; it is all just a matter of degree.

here's something that drives me utterly bonkers: people seem to not run their company as if it didn't have much leeway, but when they have to face e.g. a hard economy all of a sudden they (well, if they are any good) start saying things like "we have to focus on making things work" etc. with a new vigor. well, for <expletive's> sake, you should always be that focused and machiavellian! i mean, shoot.

in the category of 'i do not think that word means what you think it means', i'd like to hilight the habit i see all too often of people really mis-using 'agile', and even more egregiously, 'scrum'.

there are some things which remind me that, deep down, i think that i agree with the adage you must do what you love, and the sooner the better.

i'm seeking angel funding to start an ecommerce site selling togas and fiddles. please leave a comment here if you might be able to help. thanks!

a photo series i'd like to see, and then possibly turn it into a set of Normal Rockwell-esque paintings: people doing contortions to get the wallet, wherever it is on their person, to activate the door sensor.

all i'm saying is, however bad you think the economy is and will get, i currently expect it to be even worse. seriously, and not just because i'm by nature a pessimist. the degree to which things were beyond sustainable, and the degree to which people are in still in denial (e.g. any stocks not going down right now :-), make me feel that a lot worse is yet to come. more unemployment will only fuel further dearths of money in the economy; sort of the inverse of what henry ford was doing ya know?

i think when it comes to savory food, the secret ingredient is: Sauce. a lot of american food sucks and is boring and stupid and tasteless because the only 'sauces' you get are ketchup or mustard. or maybe some mayonnaise, and perhaps a pickle. whereas take the same, say, steak and use some fish sauce or something like that and you have a more interesting culinary experience overall, i dare say. that's probably why real French cooking is all about ten years of training about how just to make sauces. and sauces that are made out of simpler sauces, etc.

i mean, look at the Big Mac. i think it is so popular because it has the "special sauce", more than because it has the "two all beef patties".

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honestly, i am not a massive nerdy lisper with a chip on my shoulder, but when people say that python is what showed them TCO is good, i think they must have been living in a cave.

well, that's a fine howdoyoudo: i was trying to make home-made marshmallows, and i guess the analog nature of the candy thermometer placement and reading ended up with me over-cooking the syrup, so in the end the mixer was full of what was basically a form of taffy. which was actually kind of scary to try to deal with, it is so sticky and dense as it cools. a bunch of it was just not going to come out, so i was either going to double-boiler it or (what i really did) re-dissolve by pouring in a bunch of hot water and running the mixer. so now i have a small block of taffy, and a sizable quantity of a form of simple syrup. still, i got out alive: it made me think about how utterly evil a weapon napalm is.

my new sure to be making money idea for a skin mag title: Terribly Legal.

erlang vs. "not"!

The trainer was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.

i like to think that i'd be writing video games, at least!

anybody who thinks Apple's Finder or Terminal programs are anything other than kinda annoying is obviously getting sexual favors from Steve.

also? i wish there were some really nice - as in, beautiful - fixed width fonts which just came with things like Terminal.

also? i wish i didn't have to use a fixed-width font in my command line shells (i've tried it before and it was just misery, imho).

i have a bleeding, liberal-type, heart. but whenever i read about the details of the world and the economy, i do wonder how on earth one can avoid the law of unintended consequences. partially i think the problem is that everybody wants to be wealthy, so everybody is fighting to get a piece of the action. yet i've heard it said that if you averaged (or something) the income of the world across all of the humans, we'd end up with everybody living at the level of a member of the poor in Bangladesh. if that is true then it is obviously untenable that everybody can have their own personal incomes lifted up without some kind of major shafting being done to a lot of other people, both near and far. (well, i guess historically it has somehow mostly been people far who got the Poop Which Rolls Down-Hill, but over the years the Poop Has Gotten Closer To Home.)

so when somebody says they want minimum wage (which sounds like a good idea to me on the face of it due to my bleeding heart), perhaps they really mean that they want to screw over a lot of other people to boot?

zero-sum games suck? (yeah, i think i've heard it said that capitalism somehow magically is not a zero-sum game, that things are magically created out of the aether, and everybody's boat gets a good floatin' due to it, yadda, yadda, yadda. just like in real estate?)

hey, thoughtpile seems really pretty neat! (so far...)

(...update: ok the ui is cute, but i pretty much utterly loathe it when it comes to, you know, actually letting me get at the data. flash-based ass-hats r00l!)

so, like, maybe the real definition of a first-world-country is one that pretty much has slavery, but claims it doesn't, whereas other nth-world-countries are simply more blunt or transparent or whatever?

yeah, i once worked with somebody who was doing critical chain project management, and it made a lot of sense to - gosh, you know - try to include risk in estimates. how zany!

(the follow-up sorta role-playing post is a good read, i think, too.)

ok, that's worth like a good couple of days rent in heaven.

ever again the old adage: funny how when you have the right secret weapons you can tell everybody and your competitors for the most part still won't clue in.

while i can't say i'm the price of TDD (or BDD, which might be even better), i think i already buy in to it, philosophically. also, the YAGNI part.

damn! (i love nixies.)

yeah, my gut feel (which is obviously not something to bet on) is that a copy is not me, sufficiently enough for me-now to feel like i will become me-then. sure, me-then will feel like it was also me-now, but that doesn't do me-now any damned good, now does it?

i know things like last.fm and pandora exist, and others, but i think none of them have the UI that i see in my head when i day-dream about being able to learn about new music based off of music i already know and like.

maybe the only good thing about burnout revenge, a game that seemed to divide the world into those who liked it and those who didn't. like, really didn't.

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$MG\`````
`
end

oh, hey, that's a neat little history (if you are a nerd like me).

[blogger: conflicting edits]

shap on concurrency: "we really do know something about concurrency: all of the models that are deadlock-free impose hierarchies."

i really do wish i was allowed to use Scala instead of Java.

well, hell. i wish somebody had mentioned this to me sooner.

ok, i metaphorically just threw up, in my mouth.

solution: serve weed, instead.

[Blogger: conflicting edits]

i assume it must be a hard problem since it seems to never actually be done right: streaming anything which needs buffering up before it can play through. like, it always ends up running out of buffer and freezing the feed for me at some point before the end. is that on purpose? like, did they figure i would want to have it just stop dead every now and then for fun? (i know, vs. waiting for ever before it begins, is the other evil.)

there are so many ways in which floating point representation in computers sucks nasty buttocks. i understand why, but that doesn't make it any less hateful. so then you end up doing things like rolling your own super cheesy crappy lame-ass fixed-point stuff. which obviously sucks if it isn't done cleanly. and in languages like Java you can't use '+' for the library. etc. so it bugs me a lot that supposedly otherwise wonderful programming languages don't come with a standard fixed-point type. i mean, aren't there more people than just me who have to deal with this poop?

carbon trading and infidelity trading. two things i wish i'd thought of so i could be the one getting stinkin' rich off of it all.

there is a circle of heckdom for people who say "PIN number", right?

oh, and 'nother thing i should read before i die.

[blogger: conflicting edits]

hooray for sanity.

drat. of course, while i was impressed with how much custom ink's ui didn't suck, that was then and this is now, and i've found some ways in which it... sucks. blast. (free tips to their developers, or to their competition -- i know, they probably can't get around to making a full-on Illustrator competitor, but these things would make the current editor go from 'meh' to 'cool (enough)!': flipping images; hiding elements; push item forward/back in layers; snapping to other things; rulers; not changing away from the color palette; multiple selection; mirroring; interactive drag to resize; etc.)

ok, i appreciate that math is powerful and all that. honest. really. seriously. although i am not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination, so to some degree i have to take other people's word for it that it is super great in reality, and not just theory. nevertheless, when i attend a big discussion about "what is Intelligence?" and mathematical formulas are trotted out as The Answer, i feel like we are doing a great disservice to the whole idea. if i stop and try to think why i feel that way, perhaps it is just me wishing that e.g. human intelligence has something unassailably special about it? that it can't so easily be reduced? which is perhaps kinda lame. but, like, where is free will? etc.

i currently think that you can't guarantee Friendly AI will always and ever remain so, and that Unfriendly AI will have a competitive advantage over Friendly AI. so i think we, as humans in our current form, are completely doomed. either we lose by falling apart enough that we can't make the AIs, or we lose by making the AIs.

wow, ok. the Cortex Command mac demo really... kinda sucked.

i think i loathe subversion from the bottom of my heart.

some random selfish things i wish i'd done before i died: information architecture; typography, type design; scuba diving; visualization; world travel; written a book that made back the investment, at least; opened a cafe; produced all those art project ideas i have; written a successful video game; learned japanese (there are other languages, too, but that one is particularly relevant for family); learned a decent amount of kanji; done 100 consecutive push-ups; earned a PhD (honorary would be fine); created music; had success with some retail food product ideas of mine.

i heart the world of typography and signage.

how many revisions of OS X, and the Finder is still an <expletive> pile of excrement?!

know what i hate? everything, pretty much. well, most everything involving humans, at any rate. especially economics.

the thing that kills me about bad customer service (net10, for example) is that in this day and age one could just apply some basic usability design to vastly reduce the suck. but seemingly nobody ever does.

portal is great.

jobster seems a bit creepy, like, some sort of breeding ground for head hunters? (yes, i know there are some actually good head hunters out there, but i also know from personal experience as well that there are some creepy lame bad ones. oh well.) pretty much overall i haven't come across a site that is better for looking for jobs in my geographical area than craigslist.

w00t!

i do appreciate the pipe nature of unix tools. on the other hand, the tools tend to not really quite cover everything you'd need to do, and i often find myself being forced to do all sorts of transformation trickery to get the results i really want. in other words, yay awk. ('now they have two problems.')

[blogger: conflicting edits]

without really good interaction and feedback, i think drag-and-drop is pretty evil, actually.

wow. parallels on a mac book pro starting up winxp pretty much hogs the whole machine until xp is finally going. not a particularly impressive or pleasant user experience, there.

gmail claims to be all about search, and yet doesn't let you restrict results based on things like # of replies / length of the thread.

wow, do i hate gmail. the little star that you can click on to toggle only works if you click right on the star; if you click one pixel off of it above or below it takes you to reading the whole message instead. that's a lot of fun.

[blogger: conflicting edits]

we. are. so. totally. doomed.

wow. the Dark Horse (comics, etc.) web site really sucks. i'm surprised such things pass muster any more in this day and age. ok, maybe i'm not really surprised, just depressed.

if gmail is such hot excrement, why doesn't it reformat fixed-width-text messages so that they don't look like utter ass in gmail? especially because the reason there isn't enough space for the text is the bloody ads.

oh, how i hayteth.

i liked the red sphere/module at the end. (and, of course, the a****** heck.)

overall, i <heart> nitrome.

i declare that whatever kind of freeness there ever was in the history of humanity is officially over and done with, in the grand scheme.

yes! we need this kind of thing more often, if i do say so myself.

yeah, word up. the whole "army of one" thing made me really mad, at how utterly stupid it is, too.

in my dictatorship, it would be more than just a punch in the face.

i told you so. up in here! (sorry, ya had to have seen robo jox. and i guess the collective memory of my friends isn't so good, or maybe just mine; i thought we always quoted it as "up", but imdb says "in".)

i should have realized that all my bitching about zimbra could be more easily summed up.

i think one reason the flash game world is so big is that the entire ecosystem of finding, installing, and playing mac games and demos -- even in the intel-mac age -- is a festering heap of vomit.

the fact that stuffit files still exist makes me both laugh and cry. oh, and hayte.

a problem with shared mutable state concurrency is that most of the code i see using it, including my own, is full of at best silly and at worst horribly broken stuff. personally i really don't trust most anybody to do a good job of it, especially if the code isn't written in a very XP pairing style.

i hate blogger.

wow, way to dress up the data like a cheap tart, lloyd.

things wot currently make me hayte: seemingly any and all photo upload / backup sites; and the fact that i can't get a DSL service that is more a la carte so that when i have a zillion photos to upload i could just pay more for that burstiness, but then not be having to pay for that ability at 3pm when i'm at work and there's nobody using the network at all at home. flat charges with maximum usages are teh suck, just like being forced to buy all those other crappy cable channels (although i don't have cable, personally).

well, i laughed, at any rate.

it didn't work. is it good or bad that the last couple of paragraphs read, to me, like a pretty funny onion article?

personally, i have always found the Amazon UI to be a little weird and unsettling. things like the fact that it doesn't have a logout link, and says things like "Not John Doe? click here" as if it is letting lots of other people see my (John Doe's) account, really tend to make me feel creeped out. apparently, i can say from experience, it gets worse when one tries to sell things via the marketplace. shudder.

i think it would be interesting if all products and services came labeled with three numbers, each of which can be 1, 2, or 3, where 1 is best and 3 is worst. the first number would be the nutritional value; the second would be the pollution generated by that thing; the third would be the amount of slavery used by that thing. some completely random guesses at values below (obviously a stupendously hard part of all of this is figuring out how to implement the metrics):

chocolate: 2, 2, 3
bananas: 1, 2, 3
wheat: 2, 2, 1
mcdonalds: 2, 2, 1
xbox360: 3, 2, 1

?

how anybody (including myself) ever thought that Cliff Bars were anything other than feces, i do not know.

ok, the Tron Paul image was funny.

i didn't play it much, but i really do agree that it was pretty awesome.

damn, i had that idea, too. i hope they don't eff it up.

wow.

yay, a thread we can sink our teeth in to!

some day i'd like to open a restaurant or two or three. one of them would be called "i can has cheezburger".

i need to go back to school. and how. secretly, i'm an ideas man.

hey, i wonder if the prison industrial complex is suffering due to the real estate implosion?

syntax for exceptions in Java/C# really, really sucks. i think i hope the D "scope-exit" thing will be better. one example of the suck: you write some code which has the chance of throwing an exception early on in the order of things. but you don't want to have to somehow convert the exception into a boolean to let you avoid running the subsequent code when an exception happens, so your try/catch is as big as the whole block of code, pretty much. which means that when somebody comes back to read the code they have no freaking idea which line could throw the particular exception. and, if you wrote the code expecting only that first thing to possibly throw the exception, something else might start doing that later still in the same block, which might screw up your catch() code.

while i can appreciate the creative and artistic freedom, it still bugs the crap out of me when space ships are designed as if they were aeroplanes. like, wouldn't a real space ship want to have thrusters everywhere, along the lines of a starfury?

and, yet, our slides really suck.

ok, this is pretty hysterical. (i particularly liked The Finger.)

it is to weep.

i want to make a FPS video game where all the literary sinners of history come back to kick the ass of the uptight parochial moral majority. PLAY AS: Hester Prynne, with the Assault Rifle! etc.

from my own personal limited experience with going back to look at already-written code (code i wrote, code other people wrote), i have come to the point where i think java/c# style oop is a crock of steaming confusing poo. there might be some folks who are really good at wielding it all in just the right way to keep maintainability, but unfortunately i really haven't seen much java/c# style oop code where i'm like "hey, wow, that makes a lot of sense and is really beautiful."

part of the problem is that when i try to break up my code to not be all coupled and everything, it ends up making what i once heard described as "macaroni code" (instead of spaghetti code in the less oo but still imperative languages); when you go back to look at it, you have to jump around a zillion places to figure out what the fudge is actually supposed to be going on, and you have to do all sorts of runtime simulations in your head. that's really not something that leads to great code, imho.

i want a flash based cdrom interface that i could easily plug in to old machines and consoles via whatever their cdrom interface is. that would make it easier to experiment with my old sega saturn, for example. (i'm assuming there's some amount of standardization for some cdrom interfaces, even if things like the GameCube or Dreamcast did weirdness -- which seems like it could more easily be emulated though that flash version than through hacking physical disc spinning hardware.)

i told steam to install condition zero deleted scenes. it gave me a window that basically said it was trying to upload Dark Messiah into Steam itself.

ha ha.

ha.

WTF?!

wow. is it scary when i suddenly grok forth better by analogy with haskell?

step one: "specify value". i wonder how many groups can even actually really do that?

i think one thing that is (obviously) powerful about the relational model (not that we have such a thing really in most dbs, if you are being picky, but anyway) is that it tends to come with a query language. when we make relationships in anything other than a rdb, we end up with things being way too hard-coded, imho.

a kicker is that i think it is easy to not realize that when one is working with smaller programs, like one would run into in, say, college.

the other kicker is that even when you do run into situations where it is bad, most people don't seem to notice it, or don't seem to feel a need to seek something better.

which is why i cry a lot.

basically, while most programming languages will let you do anything, languages like Java/C/C# don't seem to really help get you away from the language itself and into some better personal DSL. i really think that the level of sophistication of those languages in their default use is way too lame to produce really good software.

it is almost as if nobody has ever heard of separation of concerns. for example, in a functional language a function 'object' has both a name-of-an-implementation and a type. whereas java tends to lead people to use a single identifier for both. sure, the advice these days is to not do that, and to use interfaces, but the whole static factory thing in java is hardly ideal.

if you don't do something totally right then i think you are running the risk of in fact doing it wrong, which then confuses the issue for other people; if there are edge cases, then people have to know about them and write their own hacks around them, and that just sucks.

there's various reasons why a software development team should be kept small. one reason in particular i think about often is that the divisions between what people work on are the places where you can more easily get bugs creeping into the process, because it requires more than one person to make simultaneous changes to remove the bug.

languages w/out the ability to name parameters at the call site (rather than at the receive site) kinda suck butt.

let's hack some stuff to meet demand in the we have no time schedule, to bring in more people which will inevitably lead to fire drills based on what happens there, which will lead to another schedule with no time, which will make us hack things more, lather rinse repeat oh look we have netscape 4.0

not sure if this is a bash thing, or a bash-in-os-x thing. but often when i try to use tab to get completion of a word, it puts in something that has nothing to do with what is actually a possible real completion. for example, there is a file called "Foo Bar.xls" and i type F-Tab and i get "Foo\ " which is good, but then I type B-Tab and i get "Foo \Bsvn" which is completely insane wrong broken fubar since there sure as heck is nothing around that is named "Foo Bsvn*".

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wow. sure, one can write anything in perl if one is sufficiently slow and careful and willing to put in the elbow grease. but it sure doesn't seem to naturally lead one to write code that really is obviously maintainable, because one can easily be a little too curt. (not to mention the lack of obvious typing, bleck.)

some day i'd like to read up on the real tipping works, since i get the impression that Gladwell is too much hot air being blown up your ass.

"The tipping phenomenon is pursued in several different contexts in another of Schelling's influential books, Micromotives and Macrobehavior from 1978, and has been further analyzed by other social scientists."

ok, here's another wonderful little bit of suck about blogger and web-based text-entry in general: if i paste something in that has line breaks, it is hard to see where they are vs. where the auto-text-wrapping is causing the visual line break. so cleaning up such pasted text is a pain in the ass. if the text entry field had a way to show the hard line breaks (like what you can do in MS Word) then that would make it easier.

good thing we're following this advice regarding the current bail-outs, right?

Schelling (1956) noted that "What makes many agreements enforceable is only the recognition of future opportunities for agreement that will be eliminated if mutual trust is not created and maintained, and whose value outweighs the momentary gain from cheating in the present instance."

well, it sounds plausible.

if i had the time or money, i'd start a project to make a plug-in for eclipse called SuckLess that would attempt to fix up some of the more painfully suckful things about the platform.

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all i'm saying is: wow, humans sure are selfish. as if there aren't reasons to be happy? as if there aren't reasons on other days to be sad? as if even on that day there aren't far, far bigger reasons to be sad? (i do get the point of the post. i'm just sayin', is all.)

my experience with generics in java leads me to call bullshit on the claim that some people make that complexity is something only library writers have to deal with. i call bullshit on it because often when writing code that isn't library-for-other-people code, you still want to create abstractions for yourself. which pretty much means dealing with the type system. which means the claim is bullshit.

it still kills me that games don't have a "maintain this frame rate" feature. (half life 2 i'm looking at you.)