Kiribako

Reading Roundup

Sun, 4 Jan 2009 19:44:00 CST

In lieu of actually writing something, I can tell you what I’m reading:

At NYT: The End of the Financial World as We Know It. Michael Lewis and David Einhorn talking about why nobody cared what Bernard Madoff was doing - among other things.

Thomas Levenson’s “Measure For Measure: A Musical History of Science”. This book hinges on the etymology of the word Instrument: It has broadened over time to include quite a bit of semantic territory, but its concrete usage Music and Science both lay claim.

Levenson attempts to tell a big story about how the aims of “science” have changed over the years in Western society: “The kind of question being asked”. Our concept of the scientific revolution - Galileo, Newton, and the early chemists, certainly - represents a shift to a different question. It’s a story I’ve heard told in many ways before.

Denis Donoghue’s “Ferocious Alphabets”. This book has been languishing on my bookshelf for years. I think I may even have carried it with me to India in 2000 - I brought a lot of books because I suspected that I would have downtime rained in at hotels (I did), and I thought it might be hard to purchase books (it wasn’t). Remind me to talk about the book stalls of Calcutta one day.

But my appreciation of “Ferocious Alphabets” was increased vastly after reading “Proust And The Squid”. The main thing I can say about it quickly is this: Donoghue holds up examples from several writers to illustrate several major approaches to writing. He leads us inevitably back to Plato’s Phaedrus, and the original complaints about writing versus speech.

The Sky In Motion

Thu, 1 Jan 2009 19:09:00 CST

Today I’ve decided to embed this video here so that more people could see it. Both the music and the video are very soothing. If you like that kind of thing…

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

I saw it first on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, where they explain everything astronomical and meteorological going on. You can tell that it’s been filmed at a high latitude, the way the sun and moon come in at such a shallow angle all the time. I was also a bit shocked by how persistent the jet airplane condensation trails were - they indicate that the sky is moving too when you’re not waiting around to watch it.

Wolfram Automata

Thu, 1 Jan 2009 16:46:00 CST

I’ve been noodling around with Processing to figure out how to a couple things. Mainly for the purpose of generating pleasing visuals. While I haven’t yet taken what I want from it, I am learning it from the examples, and that provides ideas that I didn’t bring along with me. In other words, distractions.

Here we have examples of the cellular automata described in the first chapter of Stephen Wolfram’s book “A New Kind Of Science”. Think of time as moving down - each row is calculated form the row above it, and each cell from some logical combination of the three cells nearest in that row above.

If I thought about it, I could probably figure out which rule is at work in this second example… There are 256 possibilities for a function to transform the cells of each row, and with a random starting row, all the possible three-cell combinations should be available to inspect (though perhaps not in this segment)…

The set of all binary functions on three variables numbers 256. That’s an exponential of another exponential. Did you figure out where the three goes yet?

All eight possible inputs can have one of two possible outputs in this system. You have to be careful how you label these things: I might have inverted the colors in the images, which changes the way the rules are numbered. I thought I ran rule #94, but now I think it was #30. If you invert all the colors, you exchange 0 and 1 in the input and output - the outputs are simply flipped, but the order of the inputs get reversed. Transforming twice by inversion should take you back to the original rule, and rules get along in pairs. Rules like #0 and #255 are boring: Nothing happens after the first line. And they are one of those pairs.

Quick Note On Blog Resuscitation

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:58:00 CST

Sorry if you’ve been keeping up here, and expected to see more writing - normally I would have had the time to write, but I had a distinct difficulty logging in to work on it over the past couple days.

Server Moved

My hosting company - they’re great and all, but - moved my account to a different server. That by itself didn’t cause the problem. The problem had to do with a mismatch and resulting incompatibility with Ruby, Rails, and Typo. Upsetting. And difficult to diagnose at first.

Once in a while, scripts have a server’s IP address hard coded: At Olsson’s the database server was separate from the web server, and it didn’t have a domain name, so one day when it moved, all the dynamic pages with database calls in their scripts broke. But, I could rule that out right away since my database is on the same machine so, I can just call it at ‘localhost’. Plus, I didn’t have any other ideas.

A quick look at the error logs showed the dispatcher script failing repeatedly. Without scrutinizing the error log and the access log side by side, it would be hard to say if all calls to the dispatcher were failing, or just some calls. I wasn’t prepared to apply that kind of scrutiny just yet.

I logged in to a command line session to see if running the dispatcher directly would give me any diagnostics. Ruby in the “verbose” mode ought to say something useful… And, boy, did it. It was way too much information. I had to redirect standard error to a file and browse that. I didn’t understand much.

I went through some user forums for possible causes… Instead of a login screen, I was getting the message “Application Error, Typo Could Not Be Reached”. That usually happens to people who have manually configured Typo, but made a mistake. That didn’t happen to me: I installed Typo directly from the package.

So I broke down and asked for help - knowing that it would take some back and forth before we could home in on the proper degree of my ignorance…

Such as: “Did you freeze Rails?”

“What does that entail?”

“We tell everyone to use Rake to freeze their version of Rails - here’s a link to instructions…”

“Yeah, um… Those instructions gave me an error.”

The upshot is: Somebody eventually fixed it for me. How sweet.

But it forced me to go through a lot of textbooks, websites, and commentary. I do resent slightly that I don’t understand the system and its interactions fully. But who does? Maybe I’ll offer a recap of that soon.

Mythbusters Marathon

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:02:00 CST

Last night I watched several episodes of Mythbusters on Discovery Channel. I can see why it’s popular - In some ways it is like “Jackass”, but their methods are a bit more scientific. I liked it, but at the same time I found it annoying.

So much mass media is too packaged for my tastes: Like junk food, it fattens you up without being terribly nutritious. The presence of an occasional vitamin is supposed to make up for all the fat. Mythbusters and a range of other television shows are simply infotainment: There is no guarantee that you will learn anything. They tell you not to try any of it at home (in one episode they were trying to tenderize steak with explosives) but in truth, there isn’t very much you can learn by watching. To really learn, you need to do. And, clearly we are only watching the hosts as they learn something. But, I’m not even sure about that… Information is just a starting point. For this dangerous content, we’d be better off with an interactive medium - some of which can indeed be found on the Discovery Channel website.

But, something else irks me about many of these shows: They’re so chatty. The hosts banter a lot, and it distracts from the content. They achieve the worst of both worlds, wherein they can claim to be informative, but dilute the intelligence down far enough to appeal to a wider audience. Obviously, other people don’t agree with me, but I think a large part of the audience is caught in the same trap that catches me: Wishing for the shows to be even better, watching to extract as much goodness as possible, then inadvertently wallowing in the entertainment. Is it a show about investigating myths, or is it a show about investigators goofing around with each other while they do? And if it’s both, why is that better? The “Voyeur Nation” angle is tantalizing: What else are we doing but eavesdropping on people going about their business?

Entertainment ropes people in to the serious content, but it’s too easy to hover at that level without ever going deeper. They provide the veneer of serious content, and in turn, we assume we learned something. It’s quite possible that we learn just a tiny bit for the hour we watch. All that money might be better spent actually involving people in the lesson, but I can already see the arguments: It reaches more people this way, and the only reason all that money materializes in the first place is from the prospect of advertising to all of them. There’s no advertising money in one person teaching a classroom full of people. I’m underwhelmed by the efficiency of the transfer.

In other words, producers of video answer the valid complaints that it is a passive medium with attempts to impart something worthwhile. But, they could consign those passive forms to passive content and develop more interactive forms on interactive media. It’s a mystery to me why they are compelled to mix that up.

Make

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:39:00 CST

I’ve been reviewing how to use the program Make to compile computer programs. Some of my readers know exactly what I’m talking about, but I will take explaining it as an exercise. I should have learned to use it years ago, but I’ve been spoiled by Integrated Development Environments - GUI programs that manage the dependencies in a programming project. They’re great in their way, like using a calculator. But, if you rely on a calculator too much, you’ll lose an important sense for how numbers work. Of course, not everybody needs to have that sense.

While I was looking into Linux, and gathering some information on what to do with this Asus EeePC, I was reminded that things don’t always work the way they should. I suppose that is an understatement.

Complicated operating systems make writing programs more complicated. Potentially. You might not attempt to take advantage of the more extensive programming interface, but the chances are that more behind-the-scenes code is being included in libraries. On a big project, much of that imported code is redundant, but it illustrates an important fact: As a group collaborates, or as an individual moves from one segment of the project to another, some of the code is going to sit there unchanged for a long time. Libraries of code are not likely to change at all over the course of a project - but they might. Having separate segments of the project compile independently allows quicker compilation because not every segment needs to be compiled every time. On the other hand, if something relatively static does suddenly change, it would be nice to have a program to keep track. That’s one of my big complaints with a lot of software: It doesn’t take advantage of the available computing power to keep track of things that aren’t easy for me to keep track of.

A Report From Curbside

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:33:00 CST

There Will Be Blood

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:14:00 CST

This afternoon I’ve been watching “There Will Be Blood” It’s my roommate’s copy, and ironically, once I started watching it, he interrupted me frequently. I was trying to eat my lunch, then we talked for a while in the kitchen before I resumed the movie and my cold sandwich.

I actually haven’t finished watching that movie yet - Maybe it was longer than I expected - and now I am watching “Doctor Zhivago” on PBS. No choice there but to take it all in one go.

A Linux Foray

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:19:00 CST

I got my hands on a little EeePC yesterday. A friend of mine lent it to me so I could “fix” it. When he got it, it had one flavor of Linux, then he installed a second flavor… Then, it had some interesting problems.

That little guy is so small I can hold in in one hand and type with the other.

After some false starts and other exploration, I am trying to use the GUI package manager in Eeedora to install Open Office components. It keeps warning me about dependency problems - maybe I’ve got it working now - the progress bar can be really slow.

I can get the Wi-fi to work here in my Apartment, but when I went to the coffee shop this afternoon I couldn’t connect to the free Wi-fi there. That’s a crucial component: He wants to be able to use the Internet with it, and I needed a connection for the Package Manager.

I am tired of computer interfaces misleading me - Warnings or errors that describe some red herring of a problem while ignoring the real trouble. I waste a lot of time pursuing these misdirections, and I want some of that time back.

Hi-Def And Nihon-Ryori At Tomoko's

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:18:00 CST

My friend Troy and his girlfriend Tomoko have been bragging about the High Definition TV and Blu-Ray DVD player they assembled at her apartment.

“You’ve got to come over some time and see how sharp it is!”

Eventually, a date was set. Sunday the 14th of December. Tomoko would make authentic Japanese food at the table in a hot pot.

Getting There

The bus system is a poor chariot. Tomoko lives in one of those huge apartment buildings along Glover-Archibold park - the creek that rises near American U. and joins the Potomac behind the playing fields at Georgetown U. We know the N2 goes down her street, but it doesn’t go anywhere near mine. I chose the 96 bus instead. That bus stops on my corner and goes up the hill to the Cathedral. Everything is downhill from the Cathedral.

I don’t know why I thought Tomoko’s place was so far away. It’s about the same distance as walking from my place to Georgetown - if it weren’t for the long uphill stretch, I suspect it would take half an hour. When I take a bus somewhere, I use a special logic: Buses are tragically unreliable, so I can’t expect to get anywhere on time. I have to show up early for pick-up and expect to have some time to kill after drop-off. Door to door service isn’t so important when you have to program in extra time anyway. That’s why I prefer the final leg of a journey to be on foot: If I am running late, I walk straight there, but if I have a lot of extra time left over, I can take more circuitous routes, exploring the neighborhood…

That 96 came right on time. Or, close enough. I was at the Cathedral with half an hour to spare. I examined Macomb street to see what had changed since the last time I was there. Cafe Deluxe and the flower shop are still there. Cactus Cantina which I might not have been to since the day we got our India visas in 2000. One coffee shop I used to like has been replaced with a wine bar. There’s Two Amys, the Italian joint. A fancy antique furniture store that has been there as long as I could remember, a sushi joint that looked closed but wasn’t, then just residential to the end of the block. I cut down Idaho to Cathedral. A church on the corner of Massachusetts was selling pine trees in the parking lot for some obscure religious holiday. I turned on to Cathedral, and checked my clock. Twenty five minutes left. So I did a little reconnaissance around the corner on Nebraska. It wasn’t far from there to AU. I looked at what shops were in the little strip there. I was tempted to get an espresso, but by that time I decided that I was not too terribly early, so I returned to Tomoko’s building.

Arriving

Tomoko’s apartment number has an “E” on the end. The building is really two buildings, so I decide that she must live in the more easterly one of the two. I have to walk around the elliptical driveway to the front door, but when I arrive, there is a doorman to open the unlocked lobby doors for me. Kind of nice - later I am told that there are a lot of elderly residents, so I figure that having someone to open the heavy glass door for you is an attraction unto itself. I enter the lobby and turn to the east, where I can see a set of doors leads to one of the glassed in corridors and the more eastern building of the two. That door is locked. I didn’t see a front desk yet, so I thought I would reach it at the end of the corridor. Confused, I look back where I came from for guidance. That front desk is all the way on the other side of the room.

They called up to announce my presence, and buzzed me through those eastern doors. Down the corridor to the elevator bank and I got in an elevator completely out of proportion with the rest of the complex - an elevator in which four people would have been a crowd. Signs gave an arrow for different ranges of apartment numbers, and I proceeded the correct direction down a hallway so long I couldn’t see the far end. When I arrived at her door, I marveled at just how far I had walked within the building itself, although certainly being indoors makes such distances appear longer.

I forgot completely that I should wear loafers to a Japanese house. My lace-up sneakers are best for all that walking, but they lack a certain convenience factor. Tomoko thought she might have a pair of house slippers big enough for me, but they were inadequate. My socks would have to do. I produced a bottle of plum wine from my bag (with actual plums in the bottle), then Troy and Tomoko welcomed me in and sat me down to watch BBC’s “Earth”.

Since I was early, I was also first, but soon Tomoko’s friend Jef from Baltimore showed up. I remember another Jeff we used to hang out with, but this wasn’t him. Troy, searching for something to show off the equipment, put in a disc of Kubrick’s 2001. It had a strange effect on the look of the sets - I thought it looked more like videotape than film. Textured backgrounds that moved on screen had a strange moire pattern that I found distracting. At one point I thought sitting any closer to the screen would drive me to distraction, eyes tracking all over the screen at the wealth of detail, unable to make sense of the whole.

We were waiting on Troy’s college roommate John who couldn’t be reached by phone. Eventually, he called to discover that he had the date mixed up. He would join us shortly.

Dinner Is Served

Nihon-Ryori is Japanese for “Japanese Cuisine”. It’s a bit self-conscious, since you might just say “Ryori”. What other kinds of cuisine would you mean without qualification? Nabemono is the word for food cooked in a ‘nabe’ - a hot pot. But cooking food this way constitutes a whole procedure. Restaurants have little choice but to serve you a bowl of the finished product - meat maybe, tofu, mushrooms, and vegetables in a soup stock. At home with a group of people, you just keep adding new ingredients as they cook and people take from the pot.

Turning food into such a process puts the idea of cooking into a whole different light. “Compliments To The Chef” seems a little off… Tomoko did everything, swooping in to serve us from the pot so that she could add more ingredients from platters she had arranged or broth from a saucepan. In other words, hers was a management role - more magician than cook. We were left to hunt for flavors from the various plates of garnish and bowls of sauce. There were flavored soy sauces, fresh grated ginger, dry seasonings and a sesame dressing - if I can remember it all.

John arrived in time to participate in the hot pot, then when we were all stuffed we retired to the TV for more fine-grained visual stimulus. Troy had a copy of the Batman movie, filmed in the ’60s after the first season of the TV show aired. Once again, it looked so much like video that I felt as if I could climb through the surface into the virtual space of the display. After cake rolls and some coffee, I could barely reach my feet to put my sneakers back on. John offered me a ride home and I stood in the foyer browsing Tomoko’s Japanese books while I waited for him.

Shop Talk For Electronic Musicians

On our way to the car, John and I talked a little about what we’ve been working on lately. He teaches music and I’ve seen him play bass in one of his old bands. I was raving to him about how my Roland keyboard’s user interface is woefully inadequate, and that I had discovered Audacity and Nyquist, which would help me construct and deploy synth tones more freely on my laptop screen.

Of nearly everything I do, you could ask: “Why didn’t you start sooner?”. Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it? So many high barriers to entry, so many unprovable advantages. So what if I become proficient at something - how useful will it prove to be? That hasn’t stopped me from pursuing advantages - it just makes pursuit more of a hedge maze. I will never experience a lack of avenues to run down, but with every avenue I do run down, I am just as likely as not to wonder where I really wanted to go. A heuristic like “just keep climbing” won’t necessarily take you to the top of the mountain, and yet everyone who arrives there spend quite a while doing just that.