Octopodial Chrome

In Baltimore the cops pulled a man and his passengers from his car, then arrested him for stealing it. Then they went on to sell it at auction before he was even tried—the charges were dismissed, but the man is without his property. I think that the police officers involved should have their cars confiscated and given to the man in question.

Whilst reading the Wikipedia article about Jägermeister I discovered something I’d never know: the cross between the hart’s antlers is a reference to St. Hubert, a nobleman who neglected the church for hunting until on Good Friday he saw a hart with a cross in its antlers, which spoke to him thus: Hubert, unless thou turnest to the Lord, and leadest an holy life, thou shalt quickly go down into hell. He reformed his life, gave his goods to the poor and eventually became a pious bishop.

The poem on the bottles reads thus:

This is the hunter’s badge of honour,
that he protect and nourish his game,
hunt sportingly, as is proper,
and honor the Creator in creation.

It’s odd that a beverage with such Christian packaging has become a favourite of drunkards across the nation. A pity, reall.

Ever wanted to keep track of all your books? Every wondered who out there has similar tastes in reading material? Ever thought that a massive-enough database should be able to give you some reading suggestions? Well, LibraryThing does all that. I started using it yesterday, and bought a lifetime account today (it’s free for 200 books, $10/year or $25/life for an unlimited account). Only have 169 books in there, but that’s only two bookshelves and the books lying around my bedroom.

From the Netherlands comes a disturbing report of a new lock-opening technique known as bump-keying. In this technique, a specially-prepared key is made which is hit with a hammer, screwdriver handle or other object; it then turns and opens the lock. Almost all locks are vulnerable to this opening method—one which leaves no trace at all, leading to many insurance companies refusing to accept claims for stolen goods. One bit of good news is that some locks are resistant, and thus over time we can expect that this technique will be provided for in lock ratings.

Tyler Larson has put up a video with instructions on how to make and use a bump key. Interesting stuff.

I just got back from watching Beerfest, a film which is perhaps—nay definitely—the finest film in all of recorded history. Casablanca & Citizen Kane pale in comparison; indeed had Welles & Bogart know what was to come they’d have just stayed home and not bothered.

Yes, it’s crude and crass and not at all good for society—but it’s something better than uplifting: it’s funny. I went with a bunch of guys from work; we drank beer and ate a hearty meal at C.B. & Pott’s, then adjourned to the theatre for this greatest of movies. It was absolutely perfect for our mood. The only unfortunate thing is how few people caught it with us. This is the sort of movie which should be seen in an auditorium packed with delirious fans. But it was worth it nonetheless.

If you don’t enjoy Beerfest, you don’t like beer, or you have two X chromosomes, or your sense of humour has atrophied and fallen off. If, on the other hand, you are a somewhat young at heart (that’s code for immature) guy who can turn off his brain and laugh at some politically incorrect humour, then see this film! See it tomorrow, and bring all your friends.

Apparently the Canadians have a warship, which they even use for war. Who knew?

Just as jail time tends to instill a prisoner mentality, so too does Microsoft Windows imposes its own kind of prisoner mentality. I wonder if Mac OS X does the same thing, to a lesser degree.

Sometime around this week marks a full decade since I started college. It was the happiest day of my life: as I watched my family's van drive off into the long August evening, I felt very strongly the old words of Martin Luther King, Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I'm free at last!. After 18 years of bondage, I was finally free (this wasn't a particularly mature attitude, but it's the one I had at the time).

As soon as they had disappeared, I ran up into my dorm room, tore into my boxes and produced my corncob pipe and some truly foul peach tobacco which I though was the bee's knees back then; then I went outside and enjoyed my first pipe as a free man. It was truly glorious.

Looking back on it all now, it's amazing how much I can still easily remember, and how much I've forgotten. I can recall the second-rate jellybeans at the Hopper Store, but not getting my photo made for my student ID; I can remember listening to The Edge (back when it was 94.5), but not meeting the guys who are now my best friends.

Looking back on it now, I realise that my major failing was treating college just like the previous dozen years of my education. Ever since the abominable Mrs. Freeman in fourth grade, school (life, really) had been a matter of cost-benefit maximisation, of seeing how well I could do for a minimal amount of effort. That's probably not an entirely inappropriate way to handle middle school, but it's utterly wrong for college.

College is a golden opportunity: one gets to deal on a one-on-one basis with experts in their fields---one's field, but I didn't realise that. Instead, I saw it as something like high school without parents: I had to do well enough academically to stay in, but there was no need to do better. Tests were not useful gauges of my progress, but instead hurdles to be overcome. Grades were not my friend but my enemy.

It wasn't until my senior year that I really got it and started to do well not because I needed to but because I wanted to---but by then it was too late. It's funny: senior year I partied more, did more, had more fun and got better grades than ever before. Unlike some, it wasn't partying which did me in, but attitude.

Socially, college was the best time of my entire life. I formed excellent friendships, many of which persist to this day. In college, one is surrounded by members of one's age cohort: never again will a young man have so many young women around him, nor will he ever have so many friends.

Life after graduation is inevitably downhill: one gets older; the body which once supported one now needs support; work sucks out what idealism and optimism one had and replaces it with the worst kind of cynicism. How could it be otherwise? What can be better than to be young & foolish, unaware of life's limitations? Age and wisdom may be better for one's character, but they aren't very fun.

And yes, gentle readers of this humble blog, prepare for four years of reminiscing, all leading up to my ten-year reunion. It was a fine thing to be a young man in the twilight years of the twentieth century, and I plan to recount it all.

Over a decade ago Ed Hitchcock made an amazing attempt at an extremely early beer. He malted his own grains, baked them into loaves, mashed & fermented them—and he came up with a good beer as an end result. He also took the post-fermentation yeast cake (with much included grains and starches), mixed it with flour and made more bread. Someday it might be a fun experiment to try.

Turner Broadcasting is censoring over 1,500 Tom and Jerry cartoons, removing any positive reference to smoking (e.g. Tom impressing a lady cat by rolling & a cigarette with one hand), while leaving in negative portrayals (e.g. a villain smoking a cigar). Stalin did this sort of thing too.

I am beginning to think that if one is to admire freedom at all then one must smoke at least a bit, if only as a form of social disobedience.

Remember COBRA from the old GI Joe cartoon? Ever wonder what went on in the minds of its countless faceless minions?

I was reading a page about hnefatafl (a Viking board game) when I came upon this most incredible excerpt:

In Völuspá, a great poem about the creation of the world and the Scandinavian equivalent to Genesis, the Anses play tafl with golden tæflor—table-men—in the innocent days after the creation of the world. When the world is resurrected after Ragnarök, they find the same table-men laying in the grass.

I was instantly reminded of the bit in C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian (the second-published of the Chronicles of Narnia) when the children, pulled back to Narnia centuries after they’d left, discover a golden chess-man in the garden of Cair Paravel.

Gosh, Oxbridge dons are cool guys.

Many years ago I started to get into Scheme, an academic programming language which was supposed to become the official language of the GNU Project; it was this which drew me to it. After all, if the GNU Project would be using it everywhere, then it’d serve me well to learn it ASAP.

Scheme’s an interesting member of the Lisp family; code is represented as a list which may itself be manipulated. A simple Scheme function to add two numbers and divide by a third might look like:

(define (f x y z) (/ (+ x y) z))

It’s a Lisp-1, which means that in the example above the function f is in the same namespace as the variable x et. al.

Anyway, Scheme seemed pretty cool, very clean and idealised. I’d also heard of Common Lisp, but what I’d heard was that it was old, clunky and big—that I should stick with Scheme because it was small & clean. But I found that was never really able to use Guile for doing any real work: it’s not compiled, but simply interpreted (this means that it’s very slow); there’re aren’t a lot of libraries for it and so forth.

Then I saw a Slashdot article about a new book, Practical Common Lisp. It sounded interesting, so I picked up a copy.It was utterly amazing! I’d no idea that a programming language could do the things it could do. Yes, it’s a much larger language than Scheme—but the extra pieces the Common Lisp standard specifies are the extra bits that every Scheme implementation has to invent on its own, usually incompatibly.

So I’ve been working with Common Lisp for about a year now and I couldn’t be happier. I’m actually getting work done and programming is as fun as it was when I was a kid mucking about with HyperCard, which was my introduction to this world.

Tumblewood Tiny House Company produce small (many below 100 sq. ft.!) homes. It occurs to me that these could be put to good use as summer cabins, second residences, carriage houses and such. Space-efficient, energy-efficient and dollar-efficient: can’t beat that.

Apparently a a fellow in Minneapolis drove off some burglars with a sword. According to the original URL, one of the attackers had a gun—for all the good it did him. A followup story tells of the indictment of the burglars. Interestingly, their names would indicate that they are Mohammedans!

A tree in San Antonio, Tx., become a spring, with water streaming from its side. I predict that in a decade we’ll all have one.

A Navy chief has sunk lower than any man in history, using a hardsuit to dive to 2,000 feet. Go Navy!

Scotland has banned knives & swords. So much for Scotland the Brave; they’re all a bunch of poltroons now.

The Library of Congress is hosting a pictorial Bound for Glory of colour photographs of America from 1939–1943. It’s amazing to see how backwards we were back then.

Many years ago, when I was still a young man, the Geek Code was created as a simple way for one to list one’s geekiness in a concise format (even the desire to do so is geeky…); my own geek code is:

GCS d+(++) s:+ a- C++++$ ULSA++++ P— L+++$ E+++ W+++$ N+++ o+ K w— O- M– V- PS+++(–) PE++ Y+ PGP t– 5++ X– R>+ !tv b++ DI++ D+(++) G+

Ah, the days of my youth!

I’ve recently been playing at home & at work with AllegroServe & Webactions, a web development framework from Franz Inc., one of the leading Common Lisp vendors. Once you’ve worked your head around it, it’s quite powerful. I’ve also been learning how to use Lisp macros to reduce my coding burden. For example, take a look at the following lines:

(def-db-object brewer (thing)
  ((rating
   :type float
   :reader rating
   :html (html (:princ (make-stars (rating *object*)))))
   (beers
    :db-kind :join
    :db-info (:join-class beer
			  :home-key name
			  :foreign-key brewer
			  :set t)
    :accessor beers
    :html (let* ((beers (beers *object*))
		 (webaction (webaction-from-ent ent))
		 (websession (websession-from-req req))
		 (beer-path (locate-action-path webaction "beer" websession)))
	    (html
	      (:ul
	       (dolist (beer beers)
		 ;;(error "brewer: ~a; beer: ~a" (name *object*) (name beer))
		 (html (:li ((:a href (concatenate 'string
						  beer-path
						  "?"
						  (query-to-form-urlencoded `(("brewer" . ,(name *object*))
									      ("name" . ,(name beer))))))
			     (:princ (name beer) " (" (rating beer)
				     "-Star "
				     (style beer)) ")")))))))))
  (:base-table "brewers"))

These lines create a class named brewer, which has slots (members, if you’re familiar with that terminology) named rating & beers, and which inherits slots from the class named thing; it also creates nice little HTML-extension functions to display rating, beers & name, URL and notes inherited from thing. It also over-rides the default function provided for rating and displays it as a series of little asterisks instead as a number, and does the same for beers to instead create a nice little undelimited list (the :ul bit) with the list items being links to the beers.

Not too shabby for just a few lines, eh?

Well, for one, Zed Shaw will kill them if they don’t. But seriously, he brings up some very important points about the use and misuse of statistics in computer science circles.

I’ve used R, the statistical package to which he refers; it’s a nice piece of work, and very useful for my purpose at the time (which was determining the root cause of some performance problems on one of my hosts).

I recently found an interesting interview with Alice Cooper, one of the founders of heavy metal. He’s a preacher’s kid, a family man, a Christian and a Republican—and an old pal of Groucho Marx. I can’t say that I care for his stage persona, but the interview with the man himself is good reading.

The Ozzie interviewer’s political bias is shockingly out-there, though. Even in America our interviewers are rarely this forthrightly partisan.

A 60-year-old Norwegian man taught some muggers a thing or three; what they failed to realise is that he was a boxer in his youth, and no pushover even in his dotage.