D. Glenn Arthur Jr.'s Journal

5:25AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-24:

"I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." -- David Foster Wallace, from his article E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993.

(submitted to the mailing list by Reg Harbeck)

2:20PM - Using OpenID To Answer Polls

Huh. DW says non-DW users can respond to polls using OpenID. Only one person has responded (using the poll buttons) to my poll from yesterday, and one complained about not being able to do so. This tells me that (a) there's a hiccup in the process of filling out DW polls using OpenID, (b) how to do so is confusing, (c) both, or (d) it works right but filling out poll answers isn't important enough to be worth clicking through the extra steps for, for many people.

I think (d) seems likely -- it's more steps than using OpenID to leave a comment, and it's really not a very compelling or entertaining poll -- (and feel free to simply respond in a comment, of course), but just in case it's (a) or (b), I went and found out what the steps are. It's a little more annoying than I'd expected, but it did work for me. (Note that there are a few people for whom OpenID just doesn't seem to work in general, for reasons that so far remain mysterious. And debugging somebody else's problem on a site I don't admin, when I can't replicate the problem myself, is not going to get very far, alas.)

I logged out of DW, and tried to fill in the poll. It looked like I simply could not do so. Then I went to the main page, http://www.dreamwidth.org/, which (if you're not currently logged in) has a login button with username/password text entry fields next to it up in the upper-right corner. There's small text up there, "Log in with OpenID", which links to http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid. (The "Log in with OpenID" link next to the login button on http://www.dreamwidth.org/login also takes you there.)

(In what follows, assume we're currently logged in on LJ ...)

I told LJ months ago to automatically accept OpenID credential requests from DW, so I just typed "dglennlivejournal.com" into the box on http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid, and was immdiately logged into DW as my LJ identity, and could fill in the poll. If you've used OpenID to leave a comment on DW recently, and checked the leave-me-logged-in tickybox, you should already be able to fill in the poll.

If I hadn't told LJ to grant future DW OpenID requests, then I would've gotten a page from LJ telling me that DW was asking LJ to confirm that this user claiming to be me-at-LJ is really me. Telling LJ "yes, I triggered that request, it's really me," allows LJ to tell DW, "yeah, it's her," and at that point I'm logged into DW not as me-the-DW-user, but as me-the-LJ/OpenID-user, and can fill in the poll (or leave comments under my LJ identity, or customize DW viewing options under that OpenID login, even attach a user icon IIRC, etc.) I went into more detail on this process in the context of leaving comments, a few months ago and a few months before that.

This process is rather less of an obstacle when leaving comments (except for the folks for whom OpenID just doesn't seem to work, which I wish I was in a position to figure out), and I expect most folks are a bit more motivated when they've already decided to leave a comment and just need to choose between OpenID and anonymous, than when they're still deciding whether it's worth the trouble to fill in a poll. Having "use OpenID" as a visible option on the comment form makes it a lot easier than having to remember, "Oh yeah, I can go to the login page (or directly to the OpenID login page) and log in first, if I want to fill this out" ...

... but if any of you are inspired to experiment a bit with OpenID this afternoon, then hey, I get more poll answers as a side effect. And in the future, if somebody posts a poll where you really, really want to make your voice heard, now you'll know how.

5:25AM - QotD

"My wardrobe is threefold: Things I wear during sex, Things I wear to have more sex and most importantly, 'I don't give a shit.'" -- Twitter user VaginaDrum, 2009-10-26

4:58PM - What's Up With Me, and User Interface Opinon Questions

Uh, did somebody just buy me a gift subscription to Science News? A copy of the current issue just arrived in today's mail ... and I did recently mentioned (and a little less recently) mention having been a reader of it in the past.

If so, thank you. A lot. I've missed it. It's a bit thicker now than I remember.

I could probably get all the same news from the web nowadays, but someties it's just easier -- feels more relaxed and recreational -- to read stuff like that on paper. And by just turning pages instead of scrolling up and down and then deciding which links to click next. (I love the web, but I'm glad we still have dead-trees publications as well.)

I've got a few questions regarding folks' preferences in command-line options for commands. The copy of this entry with the poll in it is at Dreamwidth (or you can jump (I think) directly to just the poll itself)

I'm not sure whether I'll get back to the project that sparked the questions in that poll (see below), but the responses will pertain to some future project too, I'm sure.

Despite the welcome arrival of a copy of Science News, it's been a discouraging week. The Mac won't boot, and it died just as I was fine-tuning the interface for a program that was nearly ready to share, beautifully comment, with a man-page and everything ... that I had not yet copied elsewhere to try compiling on a different OS, or to post yet. There was a lot else not backed up, but most of that will merely annoy and inconvenience me; this bit is the "somebody kicked over my masterpiece sand castle just before I finished it" kick in the gut. (Hmm. Much of what was backed up was backed up to DVD. I'm not sure yet whether any of my other computers can handle that. Experiments to put on my to-do list.)

Couple that with the main Linux workstation -- the bedroom machine -- which I hadn't been using much since I was given the Mac, no longer talking to its monitor, and I've been getting by with an itty-bitty Windows XP machine with a tiny screen and a so-so X server on it for the past few days, and it's been really putting a dent in my enthusiasm. So, in the immortal word of Charlie Brown: AAAUUUUUUGH!

(The bedroom Linux machine shows the POST messages on the monitor -- which is itself having major problems, but I have an even larger monitor to use ifwhen I ever feel capable of getting it up the stairs -- but at some point the screen goes blank and nothing I do to the keyboard or mouse will light it up again. I can SSH to it, and throw X apps to the itty bitty XP screen (a VAIO that only works when plugged into the wall), but I don't get the benefit of the decent-sized screen or the larger keyboard.)

The small screen is fine for web surfing and email; not so good for editing source in one window, editing docs in another, looking stuff up in a third, and viewing output in a fourth, or comparing two PS/PDF pages side by side. Or maybe I'm just spoiled from having a Mac to use for the past several months.

I haven't had the heart to start reconstructing a week of coding from scratch (get a filter working: a couple hours; add enough comments that I won't be embarrassed if anybody else sees it, usefully robust command-line arguments and options, and somewhat reasonable user documentation: a week) -- and I'm still clinging to the faint hope that the files can be recovered -- so I tried to dive back into composing and arranging, and am finding the tiny screen even more annoying for that than for programming. Or maybe I'm just too acutely frustrated and discouraged to cope with even small inconveniences right now. Maybe I'll feel differently about this in a month. But right now, it sucks.

The plan is to head down to Virginia to see whether justgus37, who has more Mac tools, more Mac experience, and OS install media, has any more success ressurecting the Mac than I've had. Wednesday I wasn't feeling well enough to drive that far; last night I got a late start and then ran into some kind of mess that turned I95 and the Beltway into obstacles instead of arteries, and turned back after it became clear I wouldn't get there at any sane hour. So: trying again tonight, if I'm up to it, which at the moment is iffy but I've still got little under and hour to decide. (By the time I got home again last night, it hurt to steer, and I've got power steering. But on the plus side, I got more sleep this morning than the past couple of days, so let's see what my body decides to do with that.)

I want my code back. I want my files back. I want my tools back. This business of knowing I need more backup media and a big disk for a live backup, but not being able to afford either ... well it's starting to wear me down.

5:25AM - QotD

-- from the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-10-16

12:40PM - QotD

"I do not like this word 'bomb'. It is not a bomb; it is a device which is exploding." -- French ambassador Jacques Le Blanc (sometime in 1995?)

[My ISP where the QotD script runs was installing a new file server last night/this morning ... I'm guessing that has something to do with the script not being executed this morning, since its scheduled run was in the middle of the maintenance window.]

12:33PM - Dream Fragment

( a short conversation )

5:25AM - QotD

"I'm waiting for a simple straightforward 'The Only Solution To The Swine Flu Crisis Is To Give Me A Big Pile Of Money' article. I honestly don't know whether to expect it to appear in The Onion or a 'normal' news outlet." -- stevemb, 2009-10-30

5:25AM - QotD

"justice is not about the law. though the law should be about justice." -- stoneself, 2009-10-16

5:25AM - QotD

-- from the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-10-16

5:25AM - QotD

"Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?" -- John Dos Passos, 1917

[I don't suppose calendars with intercalary months count, but does getting an extra hour at the start of Samhain due to the end of Daylight Spending Time count as a (very short) gap? Happy New Year, folks, and don't forget to check your clocks (and VCRs and PDAs and ...) if you live in a place that ends DST on the US schedule.]

12:40PM - I may be overcommenting

Is this over-commenting / a sign that I didn't sleep well enough last night? I just wrote, in a C program:

    int     i;                     /* Ye olde generick loope counter (you  */
                                   /* do know that the 'Y' in "ye olde" is */  
                                   /* really supposed to be a _thorn_, so  */
                                   /* it's still pronounced "the old" not  */
                                   /* "yee old" right?  Well you do now.   */
                                   /* Not sure what most C compilers would */
                                   /* do with a non-ASCII character in a   */
                                   /* comment though.  But I digress ...)  */

I do seem to comment more extensively after trying to read almost anybody else's code, where I'm lucky to find comments describing a function's purpose, much less any explanation of its arguments or useful clues as to where I need to poke at it to add a feature. And I've been reading other people's code lately.

Obviously, this is code I'm planning to send to a bunch of other people ... (But while I'm posting -- do other compilers supply the __FILE__ and __DATE__ pre-defined macros, or is that just a gcc thing? I don't know what Windows users will compile this with.)

5:25AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-11-01:

"Ye had need tak care how ye dispute the existence of fairies, brownies and apparitions there; ye may as weel dispute the Gospel o' Sant Matthew." -- James Hogg, in 'The Wool Gatherer'.

http://www.archive.org/stream/talesandsketches01hoggrich]

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)

[The line is spoken by a character named Barnaby.]

Happy Hallow'een and a blessed Samhain Eve, all!

5:25AM - QotD

"We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future." -- Randall Munroe, xkcd, 2009-10-21 (image title attribute on that day's strip -- hover over the image (or use "view source") to see it), comparing Terminator to today

5:25AM - QotD

From the PBS television program, Charlie Rose (formerly The Charlie Rose Show according to IMDB), 2009-05-11 (video and transcript):

5:25AM - QotD

"One way to introduce a course like this would be to promise you that by reading these books and by debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen. You will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgment, you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. This would be a partial and misleading promise.

"Political philosophy for the most part hasn't worked that way. You have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one. Or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And that's because philosophy is a distancing (even debilitating) activity.

"And you see this going back to Socrates [...]

"[...] philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions, and from settled beliefs. And those are the risks, personal and political.

[...]

"... the very fact [these questions] have recurred and persisted may suggest that though they are impossible in one sense, they're unavoidable in another. And the reason they're unavoidable, the reason they're inescapable, is that we live some answer to these questions every day... just throwing up your hands and giving up on moral reflection is no solution."

-- professor Michael Sandel [copied from longer passage quoted at The Obligate Scientist; also in a clip shown on the PBS television program Charlie Rose, 2009-10-12]

5:25AM - QotD

From Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler ( howardtayler), 2009-09-13:

5:25AM - QotD

"To today's Republican, attempting to understand what one's opponent is saying is a sign of weakness. a TRUE Klingon tries to prevent his opponent from saying it in the first place." -- admnaismith, 2009-09-10

5:25AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-04:

"Sleeping, I dream about my cyborg half, that it's a monster that has half-devoured me, its teeth sunk in the right half of my body. Or it's a forest I've wandered into, and I'm lost amid its mazy pathways, deep pools, strange trees whose long fronds brush my shoulders. In the center, there's an enchanted well I can never quite reach. Night falls and the sky shows strange new constellations. Waking at night, the world glows in wireframe.

"Tonight, I have a whole long dream about a list of assembler instructions and their possible uses and then about the team that wrote them, a bunch of engineers in the 1980s. It turns out to be obsolete documentation that got left on an install disc for a chip series three generations before mine, made by a Protheon-owned company out in New Mexico. Just before waking, I catch a glimpse of red earth and a storefront office window in an Albuquerque strip mall, the smell of air conditioning and bad office coffee, the glass door swinging shut, as if whoever made me has only just left the building."

-- Austin Grossman, from his novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible. The novel tells the story of Fatale, a cyborg who joins a group of superheroes known as the Champions.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

5:25AM - QotD

"In the middle of the concert I require to, as Wayne Shorter would say, take a backwards flip into the unknown. I need 20 minutes to half an hour where nobody knows, including myself, what we're going to do. Not the light man or the sound man. So you can dip into what's not written, beyond the mechanics, the intangibles." -- Carlos Santana (b. 1947-07-20), interviewed by Tavis Smiley on the PBS television program Tavis Smiley, 2009-04-02