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Cal Day 2008

Miles and I had a great time yesterday at Cal Day, UC Berkeley’s campus-wide open house. Miles got to play with a 15 foot python, had cockroaches and stick bugs walking all over him, went fishing for lizards (I remember when my brother and I used to make lizard fishing poles out of car antennas and fishing line), watched his own voice dance on the screen of an oscilloscope, experimented with the Bernoulli principle (a ball floating on a column of air), experienced his first drinking bird, created a miniature earthquake, built an Indian boli, and almost got conked by the physics experiment below – I turned around to get my camera out of its bag and heard a clunk and some gasps – he had been pulling on the steel balls and the whole thing came off the table and wound up around his neck! Fast reactions – he caught the frame with his hands.

Momentum

Afterwards, went to a musical performance of The Emperor Has No Clothes at the historic Julia Morgan Theater.

Flickr set

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Scripts and Utils

Over time, I’ve built up a handful of shell and PHP scripts, written to satisfy various itches with WordPress, Movable Type, QuickTime Streaming Server, hosting performance, etc. I’ve been tossing them into a dorky static site in case they prove useful to anyone else.

I’ve been meaning for a while to drop them into a WordPress installation – a little software library, open for discussion. Finally got around to doing that: scot hacker’s scripts and utils. Not much different from the old site, but now includes commenting, categories, search, RSS, etc. Using the badly named but very clean WP-Candy theme.

One of these days I’ll have to dig up all my old BeOS scripts and utils and give them a permanent home.

Music: Essential Logic :: World Friction
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Windows Is ‘Collapsing’

A few days ago, I had the, um, pleasure of having to install some lock-programming software on a Windows laptop — a process that should have taken five minutes but instead took upwards of an hour. Endless DLL conflicts, an uninstallation fiasco, an installer caught in a circular loop, literally hundreds of entries being written to the registry… The whole farce would have been hilarious if it hadn’t wasted so much of my time. I run Windows so seldom these days, I forget how bad it can be.

Sounding a lot like the BeOS founders and evangelists from a decade ago, who used to talk about Windows being held together with bailing wire, chewing gum and twine, a pair of Gartner analysts recently came out and said it: Windows is ‘collapsing’ (Computerworld):

Calling the situation “untenable” and describing Windows as “collapsing,” a pair of Gartner analysts yesterday said Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been … Analysts said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts. “For Microsoft, its ecosystem and its customers, the situation is untenable,” said Silver and MacDonald in their prepared presentation, titled “Windows Is Collapsing: How What Comes Next Will Improve.” Among Microsoft’s problems, the pair said, is Windows’ rapidly-expanding code base, which makes it virtually impossible to quickly craft a new version with meaningful changes. That was proved by Vista, they said, when Microsoft — frustrated by lack of progress during the five-year development effort on the new operating — hit the “reset” button and dropped back to the more stable code of Windows Server 2003 as the foundation of Vista … “Windows as we know it must be replaced,” they said in their presentation.

It’s one thing for the userbase to talk like this, but analysts like Gartner are serious about what they do, and don’t make heavy-handed proclamations lightly. Something is in the wind, and it smells like carrion. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig.

Music: Ivan Boogaloo Joe Jones :: You’ve Got It Bad, Girl
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Wishful Drinking

Fisher About a year ago, we won a pair of tickets to the Berkeley Rep at an auction. Suddenly realizing they were about to expire, Amy announced a few days ago that we were going to see Carrie Fisher‘s one-woman show, Wishful Drinking. The fact that our house has been filled with Star Wars talk for three months running did not exactly have me enthused about the prospect, but I had heard she’s had an interesting life, and what the hey – why not open up a few new circuits?

Prepared to be underwhelmed, but both of us were blown away by how good the performance was. It would be hard for anyone to spend two hours talking about their own life – no matter how surreal – without it coming off self-indulgent or egocentric. But somehow, Fisher managed to be both hilarious and humble about… everything: Her marriage to Paul Simon, her plunge into mental illness, her substance abuse, her relationship with Hollywood (her mother is Debbie Reynolds, her father was the singer Eddie Fisher, who left his mother for Liz Taylor (she did a great extended segment called “Hollywood Inbreeding 101”)), her magical ability to turn men bald and gay, the comic book collectors and sci-fi fans, who stalk her from the wings, the strange grandmother who locked her in the closet, yelling “Go ahead, cry all you want – you’ll pee less!” The whole thing was endearing and charming and full of silly wisdom that somehow seemed life affirming, despite all the tragedy.

Somehow we missed “the juicy stuff about making out with the actor Harrison Ford” (New York Times), but she did get 10 minutes of good Star Wars gossip into the mix, e.g. remembering George Lucas telling her she wouldn’t be allowed to wear a bra under her white robes in Star Wars. “Umm… OK… why not?” “Because there is no underwear in space,” Lucas deadpanned back, with that face that knows only one expression. “Ah, right. Lucas has been to space, looked all around, and didn’t see any underwear. He knows!”

Kind of tough to get across just how compelling the show was. If it comes to your area, just go.

If, on the other hand, you’re in the mood to throw up a little bit in your mouth, re-live the saccharine, Hallmark-y 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special: Happy Life Day (warning: includes cute baby wookies). Glutton for punishment? This 5-minute condensation of the two-hour boondoggle includes Bea Arthur and The Jefferson Starship, together at last on one stage! Looking at these now, it’s amazing she didn’t spend half the show talking about the shame this one TV special must have caused.

Thanks grahams for the Holiday Special links.

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Boys’ Weekend

Just returned from an extended weekend with Miles at Grandpa’s house in the mountains outside Tahoe, on the cusp of spring. For the first time, just the three of us boys; Amy sat this one out. Spent the first day sledding and playing in the snow; the next visiting Daffodil Hill, geocaching, and journeying into the bowels of Black Chasm cavern in Volcano, CA. Miles: “Whoooaaa! Is this really what it’s like in the center of the earth?” Later, asked if he remembered what kind of rock the caves were made of, responded “Marbles!”

Daffodil Hill 1

On the return trip, Miles and I ventured into deeper woodlands to find our 200th geocache (hard to believe we started just under a year ago; we’ve found all but ~30 of these together). It’s become a centerpiece of our bond, and he’s still surprised when he realizes that most kids have never been. Phoned our milestone into the Podcacher podcast, and Miles did the talking; hopefully we’ll get to hear his proud little voice on next week’s show.

Black Chasm was an amazing experience; years since I’ve been in a real cave, being stunned by mineral drapery, 200,000-year-old crystal extrusion, a pool of earth’s purest water 200 feet below glowing blue and green, inhabited only by sea monkeys. Got to Daffodil hill just as it entered it was entering waning stage, flowers just starting to think about drooping, but still beautiful. And catching a large male peacock in full strut, on a corrugated tin roof no less, was just stunning.

Flickr set

Music: The Mountain Goats :: San Bernardino
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Moon-Walking Bear

Awesome U.K. ad promoting bicycle awareness:

Sad truth: No amount of psych tricks will raise driver awareness. Not when those drivers are on cell phones. Bluetooth won’t help.

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Fold-In Bliss

Foldin My attempt to sell off boxes of 30-year-old+ comics was an abject failure. The market is flooded, the internet is taking over the comic space, etc. etc. Especially disheartening was that I couldn’t find a good home for all my old Mad magazines. Thumbing through the boxes a few months ago, had to take time out to do a bunch of Mad Fold-Ins — the back page was always a treat, and every issue has vertical creases at the 1/3 points. Creator Al Jaffe (now 86) has been creating the fold-ins by hand almost non-stop since 1964.

The New York Times is featuring an excellent collection of fold-ins, with interactivity expertly re-created in Flash.

Music: Holy Modal Rounders :: Down the Old Plank Road
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Spam J-Curve

Weblog comment spam rates continue to surge. This chart is from one installation of anti-blog-spam tool Defensio, showing an insane uptick through the last part of March, 2008:

(Thanks ViperBond). Akismet’s charts show more than 5 billion blog spams identified in the past two years. I’ve personally noticed a dramatic increase in hand-written blog spam recently. Knowing that tools like Defensio and Akismet are going to get spammers banned from blogs net-wide within minutes, the method is now one of social engineering – getting bloggers to consciously allow spammy comments to go live by making them highly relevant to the post they’re attached to, and plausibly written. All that distinguishes this latest form are the author URLs — which no longer point to cialis and poker sites, but to tile shops, beauty parlors, commercial art galleries, pool-cleaning supply houses, etc. Human blog spammers have been around almost as long as bots (to defeat captchas, etc.) but this latest form amazes me because it’s written so carefully. I really have to puzzle over some of these recent ones to decide whether to push them through or not.

Because Akismet is less likely to have identified these as spammy, the moderation burden falls back onto blog authors. It’s no longer possible to identify spam at a glance – we now have to study each message carefully to ascertain sincerity.

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BeOS Journal Lives

I’ve fallen out of like with the web’s usual April Fool’s day shenanigans (on account of being an old humorless curmudgeon), but this one hits joyously close to home.

Toward the end of the BeOS era, I was working with the publishers of the Linux Journal to create a sister publication, the BeOS Journal (this is true – not making this up). I was the senior editor, and had commissioned and packaged all of the content. We had the first issue in the bag and had already gone to layout when Be made the formal announcement that it was folding their cards. Of course, the BeOS Journal went down along with it, and issue #1 never saw the light of day.

But today is a great day. Seven years later, the publishers of Linux Journal have finally come to their senses, and have decided to drop Linux coverage in favor of full-time BeOS content. The introductory video speaks for itself.

The day we’ve anticipated for so long has finally arrived. I’m thrilled to see the technology world finally sitting up and taking notice of the greatest OS ever developed. Though I unfortunately can no longer promise to be a substantial contributor to the project, I’ll be reading BeOS Journal regularly and cheering from the sidelines. Hup hup!

Also excellent today: ThinkGeek is running a special on the Super Pii Pii Brothers video game for Wii controllers (see video). Now that’s compelling game content!

Thanks Bret Chou.