Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
eWeek reports: “A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed.”
I also loved how Allchin tried to make the point that Sun, by encouraging Java use, is discouraging interoperability. Orwell would be proud.
Remember when audiophiles went nuts about the fact (or claim?) that you could improve the fidelity of audio CDs by drawing a ring around the outer track with a green marking pen? The practice has returned, but for different reasons. Now it’s being used to defeat CD copy protection.
A small sub-group split off one of my mailing lists recently — half a dozen people talking about music. Within a few hours we found this chemistry between us. By the end of the first day we had generated more than 100 messages between us. On the second day there were even more. It turned into this flood of rants on music, culture, collections, old girlfriends, having kids, lives of obscure musicians, computing arcana, server configuration…. Can’t stop reading or writing. Don’t have time to, but can’t pull myself away. It can’t go on like this. It’s like an explosion of words from all of us simultaneously – we just struck a vein with each other for some reason. Exhausting.
Almost finished with the SKSM database. Need to wrap up the final freelance obligations in the next month or so so we can start prepping the baba’s room. Also wrapping up the Alumni database at work – has been on the back burner for a long time, but making huge headway lately. Feels good. And finally got Cecilia’s Win2K install squared away (though I missed the SF Documentary Film Fest last night because of it).
Hilarious: Things my girlfriend and I have argued about. The thing that occurred to me after reading this for a while is the fact that the two of them are actually very much in love. It’s a screwed up dysfunctional kind of love, but I really don’t think they hate each other. Note: Amy and I argue like anyone, but we are *not* like this couple.
Birdhouse just got a really favorable mention in the Utne Reader’s Web Watch.
Surprise May rainstorms over the past couple of days – kind of nice.
Uh oh – feeling the beginnings of a head cold this morning.
Friday afternoon decided last minute to go with Mike and Cleve to see Motörhead in the city. I’ve never been a metal-head at all, but this is a band I’ve somehow learned to respect without ever owning any of their records. They’re like the progenitors of the entire speed / metal / thrash / lineage. Even though I haven’t heard much, I’ve always known that theirs is very pure music – absolute rock with no silly metal trappings or pretense. The weird thing is that Motörhead sits in the middle of this sea of bands that are all about pretense – big hair, satanic or christian mumbo jumbo, really bad lyrics, really bad cover art … the whole Spinal Tap trip, but without the irony.
We show up at 3rd and Townsend and the place is swarming with black leather and chipped black fingernail polish. Pop a few vics and get in line, get frisked, get inside. The smell of hair care products and stale beer fills the air. Righteous. T-shirt vendors everywhere. The whole metal scene is all about the t-shirt – hardly anyone there not wearing some band’s shirt – and it’s uncool to wear the shirt of the band you’re there to see – it’s got to be the shirt of the band that the lead singer of the band you’re there to see was in in the early 80s or something. So there are all these shirts of obscure, half-baked metal outfits from 15 years ago. And every stand has like 10 designs. Found a Motörhead shirt that says in big gothic letters on the back, “Everything Louder Than Everything Else.” The classic original Motörhead design on the front. Can’t resist, buy one, now part of the machine.
Four bands on tonight. “Speed Demon” are clearly lying – half of them are too huge to be speed freaks. And they sound like parodies of themselves – close your eyes and you really are at a Spinal Tap show. Next up “Today Is the Day,” which sounds all nice and rosy until you realize they basically mean “today is a good day for an apocalypse.” So they’ve got something in common with your Revelations-reading grandmother, except your grandmother probably isn’t wearing a shirt that says “Kill or be killed” across the front. The singer shrieked relentlessly, totally unintelligible. The drummer defined new levels of posession – played with his eyes rolled back in his head (freaky), throwing his entire weight onto the kit, sweat splashing everywhere. Seemed like he would take a drumstick and start stabbing the heads at any moment. Amazing, but kind of pathetic too.
“Morbid Angel” was the next band – what an idiotic name. Total reliance on that double-bass drum sound Metallica pioneered – 30 minutes of hammering 1/64th notes. Vocals over that were all a single low note – lame attempt to sound satanic. Gimme a break. So much intensity from these bands, but so much of it doesn’t seem sincere. Well, this is the day’s sounded kind of sincere, but the other bands didn’t – more about the shtick. Popped another vicodan, bought another beer. If we’re going to be here, better get into the right frame of mind for it.
A total relief when Motörhead came on. All the pretenses ditched – still a super-high level of intensity, but – my god – there were actual songs buried in there somewhere. And – shocking – some actual pyschic communication between the players – cohesion, kung fu. Sounded so fscking great, totally exhilarating. To enjoy this, you have to just drop all your associations about the metal scene and all of its negative associations, and give yourself over to the purity of it. It’s like racing through the hills on a motorcycle, playing with the edge, hanging on but just. In total control, but knowing that if they took it one level higher the whole thing could fall apart. Incredible.
Lemmy is in his 60s – beautiful to see a man that age up there rocking that hard. Best cockney accent: “I’m not just a little deaf, I’m totally f*cking deaf! Is it loud enough for you out there?” I wore earplugs through the whole thing, but removed them for their unbelievable cover of the Sex Pistols “God Save the Queen” and again for their Ramones cover (forget which song). And again for “Ace of Spades.” Ears ringing pretty badly today. Not sure if that’s because I took the plugs out a few times or whether it was just loud enough to do ear damage right through the plugs. Hard to say.
Motörhead rocks. Great to see Cleve again too (lived with him in the early 90s). We should hang more often.
Kind of hung over today, but went to breakfast in Point Richmond with Chris and Amy, then kicked around on Solano ave. Checked out some birthing classes – we’ll get started on those soon. In the afternoon went to a matinee of Lantana, which was very good but not what we had expected. Ah well. Rented “Made” (by makers of “Swingers”) and watched in the evening. Down-time day. Tomorrow back on track with all the crap piling up.
Some Apple reps came to campus to talk to departments about OSX rollouts over the summer. Looks like Jaguar is going to make a lot of the things we want to do a lot easier (e.g. integration with active directory, windows file sharing, etc.). But it’s also probably going to come later than we want/need — we want to start our OSX upgrade in the next few weeks, but Jaguar probably won’t be ready until the students are almost back. They didn’t give exact dates – just floating hints.
Watched the QuickTime stream of Job’s introduction of Xserve for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe it’s just as well that I got strong-armed into hosting the jschool site on a Windows box six months ago. Now if the topic ever comes up again I can lobby to do it on an Xserver.
Nothing like shooting an entire afternoon guzzling the sweet nectar of apple propaganda ;)
To add a unique password to every record in a 2,000 row database:
– generate list of random passwords (posted about that a few weeks ago)
Write short script that:
– reads every ID in database into an array
– reads every row in the password list into an array
– for every item in the ID array, do a SQL UPDATE with a corresponding element in the password array
The gears of two tables mesh like clockwork. Two thousand rows update in less than a second. I smile and go home.
Recently discovered that my original Meat Puppets tshirt from around 82 or 83 is still intact. Too tight to wear now, but that’s okay. Guess I’ll just have to keep it around forever ;)
I only have two of the shacker tshirts. Should probably have more.
Some pretty interesting / inspiring words on gumptionology.
Spending a lot of time helping out students with their final web projects over the past few days. End of semester panic mode. I’m actually enjoying that.
Through the metasynth links in my previous post, have started listening to music generated via mathematical analysis of images. Some of it is wonky, as expected, but much of it is surprising, and surprisingly interesting. Now fascinated by this two-way generational relationship between images and music.
The most elusive goal of the perfect LJ Friends page is to display a roster of friends that represents the widest possible array of human experience, and thus to, at any given reload, be able to spontaneously generate an essentially random cross-section of human diversity in collage form.
Was thinking over breakfast today that the ability to locate an object in history is one of those uniquely human behaviors that would be extremely difficult to teach to a computer. For example, most anyone can look at a radio, an automobile, a jar, a brochure, an article of clothing, etc. and tell you with fairly good accuracy whether it was made in the 1920s or the 1960s or the 1970s or the 1990s etc. What is it that is shared by the radio, the automobile, the jar, the brochure, and the article of clothing? What marks these things as having come from a particular era? Color choices? A certain formalism of line? Fonts in fashion? This is extremely hard to pin down, and would be almost impossible to develop computer algorithms to accomplish. And yet it is an almost trivially easy task for humans.
Aphex Twin embedded his own likeness in the waveformss of his song Windowlicker. As I understand it, the process works like this: Use metasynth to create sound waves from an image – in this case Aphex’ own face. When the music is played back and viewed with a spectrographic visualizer, the process is essentially reversed, which reveals the image in the sound waves. Kind of like steganography, but not. Does not work with MP3s, since the compression algorithm destroys the image. The track came out in ’99 but no one found the embedded image until now.
My editor (BeOS Bible, MP3 book) and friend Simon is selling 1/2 can of compressed airon craigslist. An opportunity not to be missed.
At the other end of the spectrum, Duchamp’s famous urinal will be auctioned off on Monday.