One final note, then I'm off to Burning Man. We hope to be out between 2:30 and 3:30 near Uranus, look for two large domes, but we'll put an address under "Flutterby" on the contact board in center camp.
Anyway, the note is: Thanks, Ian!. Ian is a mechanical engineer who works at Dinan BMW and yesterday due to his help and skills the Quadricycle went from a neat idea that worked occasionally to a pretty darned solid little vehicle. I owe him.
Haven't (and won't) have a chance to check this prior to Burning Man, but Eric Boutilier-Brown tells me he's got a major new photo diary update.
URL of Savage Love http://www.thestranger.com/COLUMNS/col.savage.html
QOTD, on being called "one of the people that 'makes things happen'":
Actually, I think it'd be a better skill to be able to make certain things not happen.
--- Randal L. Schwartz
For some reason the DebWeb LogJam ("Covering Sexualityh in the News") had dropped below my radar for a bit, but it's back with a vengeance. Well worth reading, if that's your bent (sorry) there's too much good stuff to bother duplicating any links here.
Howl: Regarding the Atlas Shrugged game, Tara wrote me:
"This is the perfect anti-game concept: in line with the book, you could get points based on how many other people you convinced not to play..."
A new Need To Know
In the Linux chest-beating department, a /. article about Linux in a 911 facility :
"Linux has done so well, that I have unplugged the reset buttons and disabled the power switch. This was done to prevent finger glitch when they have to restart the NT box our radios work from (I just wish Motorola would switch over), that sits next to the linux box."
Further proof that we need better laws on property confiscation, via /. a NY Times article on the FBI's backlog of confiscated computers . In non capital crimes they can apparently hold the computers for 5 years, which is more than enough time to depreciate a computer to 0, so if a prosecutor is ticked at you he can effectively take money from you. Also reveals some interesting attitudes about "innocent until proven guilty".
A great LA Times article on the Iron Giant , talking about the abysmal attempts at publicity and the odd lack of recognition of good films by those who've been hollering about the bad ones:
The Wall Street Journal even ran an article urging readers to ignore the box-office figures and judge the film on its merits. But John McCain hasn't hailed it as a counter to the "coarsening of American culture" he's deplored; Steve Allen hasn't taken out full-page newspaper ads urging parents to see it. Charlton Heston hasn't even condemned it.
A couple of neat articles in Salon today, Bill Wasik gives directions to a Silicon Valley company (I proposed that he should write a follow-up describing how to get to a north bay company. It'd be something like the opening sequence to "Get Smart".) And Mary Roach tackles scents and pheremones :
if there exists a substance that can counteract the repellent effects of cologne or aftershave, it is powerful stuff indeed. And I do not speak from personal taste alone. In a study conducted by Al Hirsch, director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, the smell of men's cologne reduced vaginal blood flow by 1 percent.
In the "I almost didn't bother to pass this on because it's so commonplace and surely none of my readers are foolish enough to still be running this software" department: Via RC3 , another bug in the Microsoft Java VM allowing unprotected code to run without user intervention in Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora for Windows, IE4 and IE5.
A Microsoft security bulletin says the glitch lets anyone "create, delete or modify files on the user's computer, reformat the hard drive, copy data to or from a Web page, or take other desired action."
Well, I got a few e-mails about my "crush video" skepticism. Peter said Kibo had mentioned them in some of his Usenet postings, so I went to DejaNews and found the usual Kibo postings, which only made me more skeptical (although Kibo is rather entertaining in a bizarre sort of way). Then Jesse James Garrett passed along these URLs, apparently he's using a better search engine than I am, and I suppose I'm willing to admit that there are some videos and pictures of women's feet crushing bugs, slugs, small rodents , and food and GI Joe dolls .
"Vanessa's Frog Stomp. It's either a dance craze or a disease. (The best are both, like St. Vitus's.)"
--- Kibo
So you may have noticed the media furor over something called "crush videos", allegedly movies of women in high heels killing insects and small rodents by stepping on them. Since this is supposed to be an Internet phenomenon, and you can put in almost anything else related to sex into a search engine and get lots of pages that have faked keywords to draw you there. So I went to a couple of search engines and tried looking for "crush videos". Funny that the only thing I found was the news stories on the topic, huh? Seems to me that there's a media spoofer out there preying on the feeble-minded (ie: journalists and politicians).
Via Robot Wisdom , this SF Chronicle article on Burning Man (.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/08/24/DD11775.DTL) misses the whole point. You can't arrive as late as it recommends and not be a spectator. The weekend is a whole different energy, it's exciting, but I wouldn't call it the best time. This is totally the perspective of a reporter/spectator who just doesn't get it.
A new Mouthorgan
Larry asked who Emperor Norton was. He was a San Francisco real estate developer who tried to corner the rice market in 1854, and lost everything. Wandering the streets in rags, September 17, 1859, he proclaimed:
At the pre-emptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last nine years and ten months past of San Fransisco, California, declare and proclaim myself the Emperor of These United States. - September 17, 1859
And he undertook to be a benevolent Emperor, taking a personal interest in the governance and goings on in San Francisco. He's said to have at least once single-handedly stopped one of the anti-Chinese riots. Many of his proclamations were printed in local newspapers, he printed his own currency, which was accepted by many, and his funeral procession was two miles long when he died in 1880. Proof that government exists in the hearts and minds of the governed.
Clean Sheets is updated today.
Via the Daily Illuminator : iMaul . A Sith Lord for the rest of us.
I added pictures to my July 2nd musings on sailing out to see the tall ships come in under the Golden Gate .
The new NETFUTURE tackles placebos, the impact of television on Bhutan, and the usual raft of interesting topics.
An article in Salon that touches on why GW Bush is a whining hypocrite . If any of the slimeballs running for public office had voluntarily submitted to the standard punishment for their "youthful indiscretions" or came out as pro legalization I'd consider voting for them, but as long as they're in denial and lying to us it's hard to take them seriously:
If and when the Texas governor reaches the confessional stage of his campaign crisis, someone ought to ask him why he believes a 14-year-old Houston slum kid should do time in an adult facility for the same "crime" that had no legal consequences at all for the wealthy, white and well-connected "W."
QOTD (From a link on _Robot Wisdom_):
"I still hanker after the dissident voices because I believe we are now living in a culture of silence and acquiescence."
--- John Gormley, quoted in The Irish Times
I hope this is a good development: Compaq abandons Alpha project for 32-bit Windows 2000 . They're still doing 64 bit Windows 2k, but Linux and Unix will be the primary platforms.
QOTD, this apparently comes from some experience with non-programmers using Access, but I've seen some pretty scary examples of joins on SQL databases by programmers:
"This is excellent, really excellent. Normally you'd have to go to a bowling alley to see relational database design of this caliber."
--- Tim Wijtyszyn quoting his cow-orker Dave, in a.t-s.r
Further evidence that we're peopled out: Average standards of living haven't increased since '52, and technology helps us stay competitive, but we aren't more productive .
For those of you going to Burning Man , I'm behind in what I'd hoped to accomplish so I'm still hoping I'm going to get everything I wanted to get done finished, but my (and Todd and Steve and whoever else wants to join us) camp address will be posted under "Flutterby" in the contacts board in center camp. We'll be on the quiet side somewhere with two 30 foot diameter domes, one with a camo green parachute covering, one with a multicolor 'chute on the top and fabric around the edges to allow for airflow.
My Word's Worth discusses memes.
Todd'll appreciate this: Interesting /. article on why being a computer game developer sucks and why e-commerce can be more rewarding.
Salon has a look back at Julia Child's career . It took me a little while to appreciate her genius since I've only been exposed to her later in her career, but once I came to realize that she's not taking herself seriously and her cohorts in the kitchen are only managing to keep a straight face by dint of incredible will, I understood why she's been so popular. "When you're in your own kitchen, you can do anything you want..."
This could be seriously bad for productivity: The O'Reilly Lego Mindstorms book .
Cameron was in town last night, so we did dinner then I dragged him out to my panel at the NBMA . Nice guy, hope he decides to come out here and play in the big leagues.
Also from Frank: The U.S. Postal Service is watching you closely .
Frank passed along a link to this scary article. I don't want to start the gun control wars. It happens that I'm anti gun control, but I don't own a projectile weapon right now (Well, aside from my Nerf Ballzooka and chain fed thingie). On the other hand the rhetoric of knee jerk politicians against guns and free speech and other freedoms makes me very scared. In the wake of the shootings in LA unscrupulous politicians are trying to leverage the incident for political gain and increased spending on issues that would do nothing towards stopping the sorts of incidents that they're so callously using, and we have notes like this:
[Lee Baca, LA county Sherriff] "said he thinks it should be a civil offense to offend the "psyche of society" by making hateful comments about people from another race or religion."
Sex on the brain is the topic in volume two, issue three of Scarlet Letters .
KibOS (animated GIF): It's an operating system, and part of a complete breakfast.
Planet found orbiting two stars .
Mouthorgan expresses some indignation over media treatment of sexual matters this week.
I've got a confession to make: I'm not a regular reader of The Onion . But my office-neighbor Tom came in and told me I should read their latest Point-Counterpoint: Career Choices . He was right.
QOTD:
Remember - if all you have is an axe, every problem looks like hours of fun.
--- Frossie in the Scary Devil Monastery
Yay! in Fort Lauderdale the public believes that what teachers do on their own time is their own business , despite the moralizing of school boards.
More detail from the USGS on yesterday's quake
Topping the News updated while I was gone last week, as did the Up and Coming calendar of Bay Area sex events. Unfortunately I rarely find anything that looks too interesting in the latter since it mainly covers the stripping and swinging scenes, but it does incorporate the Good Vibrations schedules.
Clean Sheets has updated.
Yow: That big red square on the USGS map of earthquakes in the bay area denotes a 5.0 on the San Andreas fault out near Bolinas that hit while I was standing in a bookstore in San Anselmo. My friends who've been through big ones say that there's a point before which earthquakes are fun and after which they're terrifying. Thinking back to the books falling off the shelves around me, that may have been that cusp.
MAG DATE LOCAL-TIME LAT LON DEPTH LOCATION y/m/d h:m:s deg deg km 5.0 99/08/17 18:06:18 37.91N 122.69W 6.9 0 mi SSW of BOLINAS
QOTD from a Rolling Stone article about porn stars and rockers via DebWeb LogJam :
"The idea of life is a simple one, either you're going to enjoy it or you're not. Life is better with porn stars. It's as simple as that."
--- Gene Simmons of Kiss
Hey! I found another use for virtual desktops! I've got a whole screen devoted to those stupid little pop-up ads from GeoCities and AngelFire. With all those little windows down there they don't pop up anywhere else to bug me. X windows rocks!
Meta: I've removed Dave Winer's Scripting News and Tomalak's Realm from my daily Nibelung Ring , if you use the ring regularly for your own weblog browsing, be aware of it. The feedback from those who've noticed has been positive.
Meta ][: Would y'all rather have my mid-length notes, such as my copious babblings from SIGGRAPH, inline as I sent most of them, or in separate rants? Tell me (email is danlyke at flutterby.com, of course).
Reiterating my concerns yesterday about eye development to chlidren subjected to virtual realities including television, the American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a press release discouraging television for very young children , the policy itself concentrates more on the emotional and psychological effects than the physical ones.
Quote of the day comes from Microsoft's NT 3.5x and 4.0 TCP/IP documentation:
"CAUTION: The Windows NT TCP/IP implementation is largely self tuning. Adjusting registry parameters without careful study may adversely affect system performance."
Yeah, "adversely" apparently means it might actually work! Right now I'm trying to figure out why it insists on recycling an open socket after the time specified by the obscure TcpTimedWaitDelay registry entry. What does NT require me to tweak that every other socket implementation in the universe doesn't? Sigh...
Via /. comes the great Hart Scientific's unofficial Y2K compliance statement :
Even if our accounting software stops working on January 3, 2000, you can count on us finding a way to bill you for whatever you bought from us prior to Armageddon. Even if we have to write your invoice on the back of bubble gum wrappers, we're going to bill you.
"An IBM Electronic Calculator speeds through thousands of intricate computations so quickly that on many complex problems it's just like having 150 EXTRA Engineers ."
My Word's Worth this morning tackles art versus transience.
A reminder on the comics: Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly
Just saw The Iron Giant. Full review is linked above, synopsis: See it.
Things that scares me number 4.15289*10^37: At SIGGRAPH I got a chance to play with assorted VR gear, from stereo glasses on projection systems to head mounted displays. All of these handled the stereo portion of the display correctly, but they didn't do anything for focus tracking.
And I got to thinking: I'm finding that I'm getting nearsighted because I've worked on a fixed focus display for years, my monitor's always about 3 feet away from me, my glasses prescription is DS -1.
But what's going to happen to all of these kids raised on Teletubbies and Sesame Street who didn't have the years that I had to strengthen their focus muscles?
Well, SIGGRAPH is effectively over. A relatively static year for the conference itself, but the parties were fun, I met a lot of people, and ended up staying up way late Thursday night listening to Dick Dee too loud in the Wilshire ballroom.
Next time around I need to pick a career with a better gender balance.
It'll be good to get back and catch up on sleep, and it'll take a bit of time to catch back up on everything.
While waiting for Phil this morning I was watching the news on KTLA. I'd forgotten just how vapid LA is. Although it does occur to me that rather than trying to render hairy monsters or furry animals we should just put newscasters in our movies, that way we can model their hair as a single monolithic object of plastic.
Need To Know should have updated yesterday.
Updates from Wednesday that I didn't have a chance to send: AMD's new processor (what would have been the K7) is called the "Athlon". The Wall Street Journal reports that "Athlon" is also a registered trade mark of Trespa North America Ltd. for "a material used in partitions that separate toilets in office bathrooms."
Also from Wednesday's WSJ, a note that Proctor & Gamble, GM, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and Sears Roebuck are commissioning "family friendly" TV scripts to air prime time on the WB network. I suppose it should come as no surprise to anyone that these corporations are helping to create the culture that would encourage passive consumption. It's a shame that "family friendly" has become a euphemism for promoting consumerism.
Did the legalization of abortion lead to a lower crime rate ?
Levitt said the findings support the idea that legalized abortion "provides a way for the would-be mothers of those kids who are going to lead really tough lives to avoid bringing them into the world. They're the ones who are most likely to have been unloved by their mothers, to have faced intense poverty, to have had tough lives."
Interesting omission: Microsoft doesn't have a booth or new technology at SIGGRAPH. Anyone remember Fahrenheit or whatever their image warping and rerendering technology was called? I'm not gonna take any easy potshots at "ChromeEffects" or whatever last year's VRML killer was.
Good morning! Mouthorgan should update today, I'll be on the show floor at SIGGRAPH, by the time you read this chances are the posters will be all gone.
I had a couple of really brilliant things I was going to say here, but I didn't drag my laptop with me today and in my sleep deprived haze I forgot them all.
A cool session on invisible user interfaces yesterday. Well, not invisible, but that we've got so many good user interfaces that have been honed and refined over the centuries we may as well stick to the ones we've got rather than creating new ones. Some of this is going to involve new interface hardware which lets us get away from the mouse/screen/keyboard design, those of you who've heard my rant on how much information is wasted on my alarm clock radio can probably guess where this is going.
I think I'm gonna go back to the bay area tomorrow, it'll be good to be home. I've got some ideas and renewed enthusiasm for my Burning Man piece, I'll be hitting the hardware stores lots this week. Anyone know where I can come up with lots of pillows and/or beanbag chairs cheap?
Okay, I'm feeling a bit better this morning. I don't yet know if the Dan, Leo, Phil & Sam party had any arrests, but it did have nudity and lots of good conversation. Admittedly, I was a wimp and didn't get naked, my excuse is that the security guard seemed to be paying an undue amount of attention to the hot tub about the time I was going to move that direction, so transit in and out seemed risky. And that was at quarter to two, I don't know what time the bar closed but I didn't want to have to hang out there forever.
If you got a ticket, save it. It should be the beginning of a tradition.
I knew SIGGRAPH had truly started when the most conversation I could get walking to the conference center from the hotel this morning was a hung-over grunt. But I did get a solid 4 hours of sleep last night. And I had a hell of a time removing the "void" stamp from my forehead.
URLs of note: Jean-Pierre Hbert has a cool piece in one of the art galleries, a table of sand through which moves a steel ball that traces out cool patterns.
I played a bit with Virtual Technologies force feedback glove. For $40k it seemed a bit steep, I wanted a little more resolution in the touch, but that may have been because it was only my hand that was interacting with the environment, not my hand position (weird to feel pressure on the fingers without having the arm blocked). But it was a fun toy. And I played with their sensor glove alone (more like about $10k) in another exhibit with a stereo display, and that was actually quite cool (using my hand as a 3d paintbrush), so there are possibilities here.
Other cool idea was the sketch based 3d modeler. It was a bit crude, and the interface didn't end up being nearly as intuitive as I thought it was going to be, but the idea has merit. Draw a shape, it gets roughly translated to a 3d object (given some rounded thickness). Draw another figure on that first shape and it's a shape for extrusion, you can then rotate and draw another guesture to do the extrusion. Draw a cut from that shape and you get an indentation. I think it's available from http://www.alice.org/
Nothing much on tap for today, I think there was one paper that interested me, and I want to go find some of the people I talked with last night (For instance, Terrence Masson's doing a book signing, his new book is a dictionary of CG terms), and investigating the party options for this evening.
Blind note: Clean Sheets should be updated today.
Aaargh! Don't have a gender changer for my laptop, so I can't plug that in and try my newly downloaded DHCP client. I'm using a different e-mail system courtesy of Eric Bradway to update, so hopefully we can do away with the advertising banners and the multiple sends.
That sound session yesterday was largely on ways to parametrically synthesize sounds, and to calculate issues like reflections and such. Cool discussion. I got hauled out at the end to go to the show floor and try to figure out a problem with NT. Looks like I'm just going to have to rewrite that entire system to blow off the sockets layer and use a more complex threading and native API approach. C'mon, Microsoft, networking doesn't have to be that complicated.
If you're in LA, party tonight at the Figueroa, 10 to midnight. Find me and I'll buy you a drink.
And I must be getting old, I'm much more interested in conversation than hanging out with the sweet young design school students. Not that there are terribly many of them, the male to female ratio here is extremely high. As you'd expect.
The show floor opens today, we'll see what looks cool there.
Pardon the "mailexcite" banner on the bottom of the entries today, I'm in helLA and web based mail is what I've got. I need to get that machine colocated.
Some blind updates: My Word's Worth should be new, and comics wise I'd be keeping up with Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly if I didn't have so much else to see and do here at SIGGRAPH .
Question on one of the walls: "Will fashion be futuristic or retro?" Fashion hasn't been futuristic since we first donned animal skins to keep ourselves warm. After that it's all been a homage to something.
The talk I wanted to get to yesterday evening was cancelled because of legal wrangling and intellectual property issues. This morning I'm trying a talk on "Virtual Worlds / Real Sounds", which I hope is going to cover a lot of stuff about synthesizing audio in a 3d environment, the algorithms used to do placement of sounds. I played with QSound (link is off the top of my head, I hope it works) back when we were developing the RAPIX 3d application framework, and was pretty impressed by the kinds of positioning that our aural system is set up to do (and how the QSound guys used that). Hopefully this will cover some of the nuts and bolts of how to do that.
I'm off. Have a groovy time. Check out Need To Know which should update sometime today. Don't get caught doing anything I wouldn't get caught doing. If you need to get in touch quickly use the danlyke at mailexcite.com address.
Just in case I forget in the morning, I'm off too SIGGRAPH for the week. I'll try to update, but don't hold your breath.
Oh yeah, one more Pixar/SIGGRAPH answer: No, we're not remaking Tron. But we are considering The Last Starfigh... Nevermind.
Sorry to my less technical readers, but this sucks and I need help. I've got a Windows NT application that converses with a server. During low traffic situations everything's fine, but when I'm sending a lot of data from the client to the server the select() call is taking a minimum of 200 ms. That's 1/5th of a second. In the particular case that this is happening that means that the NT version of this code runs orders of magnitude slower than the Unix version, all because of the client, not the compute bound server. I've tried everything I can think of to disable the Nagle queueing, and I can't find any other timeouts that should be pertinent. Anyone out there who knows how to fix this send e-mail to me at danlyke at pixar.com, please!
Microsoft ploy for free testing backfires as machine they wanted to be hacked crashed of its own accord soon after going online.
Don't remember if I mentioned this before, but I'll be at SIGGRAPH 99 next week. I'll be hosting a party at the Figueroa bar 10-12 on Tuesday, find me, mention Flutterby, and I'll buy you a drink; and personing at the Pixar booth on Thursday.
In watching the Pixar booth, my answers will be (in this order):
Mouthorgan takes on Eyes Wide Shut and American Pie, and the seriousness of each. Lots of spoilers, so be careful.
An interview with the creator of The Iron Giant , which from the buzz sounds like the must-see movie of the summer.
The Daily Illuminator reminded me that I'd missed _The results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest . Wendy Lawton's entry that won the children's prize:
"The greedy schoolbus crept through the streets devouring clumps of children until its belly groaned with surfeit, then lumbered back to the schoolhouse where it obligingly regurgitated its meal onto the grounds."
I want one: Jar Jar candy with 10" push-up tongue .
Keith Knight on yuppie sushi eaters
Be afraid: FBI trying to stop satellite phones because they're hard to tap :
Federal communications officials are holding up critical operating licenses for Globalstar and a handful of smaller satellite phone services while they negotiate with the FBI over wiretapping issues.
So I went to that Time poll below and poked around to some of their other polls. How bloody vapid.
Clean Sheets is updated. An article on posing for porn, a new story, new photo exhibit (a little glam for my tastes), haven't had a chance to dig any deeper.
John Aldrich passes along this note:
Subject: Time's Person of the Century poll
Linus Torvalds is ahead of Bill Gates -- barely. Please do your part! :-) http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/time100/poc/century.html
Drugs Are Really Excellent: D.A.R.E. is moving towards acheiving its goals! Latest studies show that D.A.R.E. has no effect on drug use , this is an improvement over previous studies which showed that D.A.R.E. graduates tended to have higher drug use rates than those who hadn't had the program in their schools. Only users lose drugs.
Because I'm so frantically chasing SIGGRAPH stuff, some stolen links:
From Rebecca's Pocket a warning from pediatricians against TV for young children .
Regarding privacy concerns, as prominent an organization as SIGGRAPH has screwed up and released attendee information despite a very clear effort by me and my coworkers to click all the appropriate "don't release our information" boxes. The official excuse being given is that some humans processing information misunderstood the wording, but there's nothing in the process of copying a database to external vendors that wouldn't be automated.
I thought I'd sent this from somewhere, but apparently not. Note on the men's room wall of The Stone Lion, Chattanooga's premier dive bar:
I wish I was a Columbine High School student so that my opinion mattered.
A new My Word's Worth talks about a sense of history.
I've got a long rant coming on the stasis of Chattanooga, but I'm not completely sure where it's going yet. This week is going to be total heck, I've got a bunch of fixes and tweaks to have ready by SIGGRAPH . One of the things that's nice about Burning Man is that there's a sense of enforced idleness, I hope that I can get enough of my prep work done that I feel that again, because this vacation felt hectic at times.
But it was fun.
Shock of the morning: Coming home to 700 new messages. Choke.
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com
