2004 11 11 - Thu
posted by jack at 00:49 CET in / humor 
According to this
quiz:
Which File Extension are You?
Well, that certainly beats being a .inf or a .bak, that's for sure.
2004 11 03 - Wed
posted by jack at 20:29 CET in / politics
TBogg nails it:
Four more years of American soldiers being used as cannon fodder.
Four more years of scientific decisions being made by people who believe in a ghost in the clouds.
Four more years of debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay off.
Four more years of racists and lunatics for judicial appointments
Four more years of looting the treasury and squandering it on corporate cronies.
Four more years of making enemies faster than we can kill them.
Four more years of fear and darkness and racism and hatred and stupidity and guns and bad country music.
I look at the big map and all of the red in flyover country and I feel like I've been locked in a room with the slow learners. We have become the country that pulls a dry cleaning bag over its head to play astronaut.
2004 10 29 - Fri
Now available for both Mac and Windows, it's about time for some
BushPanic.
Click
here for details on this crazy new shoot'em'up.
2004 09 18 - Sat
Another two months, another handful of new changes.
(It's amazing how little spare time one can find to work on hobby projects during vacation and parental leave)
- Cleaned up event handling code; this should fix some bizarre hanging problems.
- Smoothed out the falling monster trail.
- Enhanced alien explosion clouds.
- Levels are now differentiated further. Earlier levels have fewer enemies.
- After every five levels you are given a level skip code.
- There are now "super aliens" which require two hits with the normal weapon (or one with the super gun) to kill them.
- High-score table!
And here's where to get it:
- spinvaders for Macintosh (OS X 10.3 or later)
- No windows build of spinvaders 0.0.3 is available at this time
Installation is the same as before: The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like.
2004 09 02 - Thu
posted by jack at 14:14 CET in / politics
At the risk of turning this blog into an endless list of political essays you should read elsewhere, here are a couple more:
High plains grifter: The life and crimes of George W. Bush is sort of a Cliff's notes version of Molly Ivins' excellent
Shrub for people who don't have time to read that. Incidentally, everyone who didn't already read
Shrub years ago should really do so.
The Great Divide offers a new approach to dividing the American nation into two: Instead of republican vs. democrat, it's "metro vs. retro". I haven't read this yet, but it seems interesting, not least because in addition to being able to
buy it from Amazon, you can also
download the whole thing for free, which I heartily applaud.
2004 08 31 - Tue
posted by jack at 20:19 CET in / politics
In democratic circles, John McCain is often considered to be fairly tolerable (for a republican), and is sometimes thought to be somewhat "like us", since he has had some public disagreements with Bush's policies.
At the RNC yesterday, however, most of this went out the window, at least as far as I'm concerned. McCain made a clear jab at Michael Moore (which Moore seemed to take pretty well) in the midst of his praise of the Bush regime's foreign policy mess:
"Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise -- not our political opponents, and certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker [...] who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when, in fact, it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves, and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls."
Frankly, I'm beginning to get pretty tired of this sort of straw-man argument where the liars of the right claim that anyone who questions Bush's policies is actually a big Saddam supporter. When has Moore, or any liberal for that matter, ever claimed that "Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace" or anything similar? On the contrary, well-informed liberals have been critical of Saddam since the 70's and 80's, since even before the time when
the Gipper sent Rummy to shake the old bastard's hand and sell him some weapons.
2004 08 30 - Mon
posted by jack at 21:02 CET in / politics
Garrison Keiller wrote a nice essay with the incredibly long title "
We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore: How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk? -- In These Times" which everybody should read. A choice quote:
[...] angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. "Bipartisanship is another term of date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
2004 08 18 - Wed
posted by jack at 22:21 CET in / politics
An interesting but
huge article explains what conservatism really boils down to (maintaining a ruling aristocracy) and the tricks used to keep this antiquated world-view in power.
Check it out if you've got a half-hour to burn.
posted by jack at 16:01 CET in / politics
Check out William Rivers Pitt's excellent
open letter to George W. Bush. Good stuff from
truthout.
2004 08 13 - Fri
posted by jack at 20:24 CET in / compute / blogging
OK, things have been pretty quiet around here. I've been busy with traveling and ongoing parental leave, but at some point soon I'll get back on track with the nuthole, and hopefully post a new version of
spinvaders soon.
2004 06 08 - Tue
A few small steps forward in the life of
spinvaders:
- Monsters killed with the "super gun" now fall burning from the sky! Prepare to be terrified.
- New sound effects, in stereo! Crank it up!
- Changed player death behavior: If monsters reach bottom, restart level. If player is hit by a bullet, just lose a life and continue the level in progress.
- Gameplay and speeds tweaked to maximize your Fahrvergnügen.
- While the game is paused or switching screen modes, audio output is paused.
- Mac version now has a reasonable (but somewhat incomplete) menu thanks to PyObjC and a proper nib file.
- Windows version now has an icon.
- Internal code reorganisation to make my life easier.
- Added CHANGES.txt and README.txt to distribution.
And here's where to get it:
Installation is the same as before: The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like. The Windows version is a zip file containing a directory; unpack the directory wherever you like, and run it by starting "spinvaders.exe" from within the directory.
Go nuts.
2004 04 26 - Mon
posted by jack at 15:00 CET in / politics
Hmmm. For a long time, I've consistently held the opinion that even though the U.S invasion of Iraq is wrong-headed, that the troops who are stuck in the mess over there are worthy of support, since none of them created this war and are presumably trying to make the best of a tough situation.
But then again, there are things like this
Don't Loot
video that are just scary as all get-out. For those who haven't/can't/won't view that clip, here's an executive summary of this brief clip from
frontline:
- Somewhere in Iraq, looting is occurring. Reporters arrive on the scene.
- U.S. soldiers are there, and have arrested some men for looting. The men have apparently taken a couple armloads of lumber and stacked it on top of their car.
- One soldier explains for the camera that "We tried to stop them from looting, they don't understand, so we'll take their car and we'll crush it."
- A couple of soldiers shoot at the car with pistols a bit.
- The soldiers crush the car by driving a tank over it.
I think that the mental exercise of reversing roles can be a useful thing to do here. What if my country was on the verge of civil war after an invading army had removed a brutal dictator but simultaneously destroyed much of my country's infrastructure? Perhaps lumber would be hard to come by. Perhaps I might take advantage of available resources, particularly if it seemed like they were going unused. I sure don't that that punishing me for this "crime" by crushing my only means of transportation would be a noble endeavor on the invading army's part.
2004 04 20 - Tue
In my copious amounts of spare time (ha), I've recently been teaching myself both
python and game programming using a fine cross-platform library called
pygame. I have some results!
spinvaders is a direct descendant of the old "Space Invaders" type of game. This first public test release, version 0.0.1, is fully playable and may even be fun! The controls for the game are described at the startup screen, everything should be pretty obvious. One undocumented feature of this test version is that pressing "J" will let you jump to any level.
The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like. The Windows version is a zip file containing a directory; unpack the directory wherever you like, and run it by starting "spinvaders.exe" from within the directory.
Please try it out and let me know what you think by adding a comment below.
2004 04 14 - Wed
In Swedish,
slutspurt means roughly "final push" and can be applied to almost anything: the conclusion of a sporting event, the final stages of a project, etc.
In English, Slutspurt just sounds like the name of a porn flick. Perhaps even a whole series!
2004 04 05 - Mon
posted by jack at 12:44 CET in / politics
So the glorious
Air America is off to a nice start. I managed to listen to the first few minutes of
Al Franken's first broadcast before Real Player crapped out (I guess the servers weren't quite up for the initial rush), and have so far only heard bits of various shows. For some reason it seems like I mostly hear
Randi Rhodes whenever I tune in, and usually she's griping about the same stuff over and over again. I mean, she's a really good griper and all, but I'd like to hear a little more variation in the griping.
I'm not that happy with the schedule since I'm 6 hours ahead of New York which means that
The O'Franken Factor is splattered right across my early evening, the time of day when I'm busy with giving children dinner and baths and putting them to bed, but what the heck. I'm just totally jazzed to hear talk radio that is actually critical of the Bush-Cheney Axis of Fascism for a change.
2004 03 31 - Wed
posted by jack at 11:26 CET in / politics
Today is the first broadcast day for
Air America, a new radio network with a radical concept: Instead of loudmouth right-wingers commanding the airwaves, let's showcase some loudmouth leftists! I can only welcome this. They only have a few broadcast stations now, but there will be a live internet feed as well, which means even us overseas people will be able to listen to the likes of
Al Franken and
Janeane Garafalo skewering the Bush administration, etc.
Hooray!
2004 03 18 - Thu
posted by jack at 13:43 CET in / humor
My fortune on
orkut today:
You have an unusal equipment for success, use it propery.
I wouldn't mention this if not for the fact that the short sentence contains two misspellings. Perhaps the ability to correctly spell words is my "unusal" equipment. I just hope I'm using it "propery" now!
posted by jack at 08:03 CET in / politics
It looks like some congressmen are taking seriously the threat to American democracy that is posed by non-voter-verifiable electronic voting machines! The
Verified Voting campaign backs a bill, soon coming up before congress, that will require electronic voting machines to be retrofitted with a voter-verifiable paper system by November of this year! Now might be a good time to
go there, and write or call your congressman to promote this important legislation!
The Swedish word
slut simply means "end" in English. This means that you see this word everywhere: Ends of movies, ends of stories, etc.
2004 03 15 - Mon
posted by jack at 09:49 CET in / politics
I wrote
a while ago about the problems inherent in the various electronic voting systems being implemented throughout America. One of the main problems is the lack of a printed record, which would allow people to see and verifty that their vote was counted correctly, as well as allow for recounts in case of close results.
Manufacturers like Diebold have been strangely reluctant to include vote-printing options in their machines. At first they claimed technical incompetence (apparently, attaching a printer to a computer is a daunting task for Diebold), and then when they finally conceded that this technical miracle was possible, they put exorbitant prices on the printer add-ons.
Now comes the big surprise: As
Robert X. Cringely describes in his column, the Diebold machines already have printers! The internal printers are required by law for end-of-day vote tallies at least. Modifying the systems to create user-verifiable printed records would require simple changes to the software, and minor enhancements to the computers' casings to allow the printed receipts to be seen.
Fortunately for Diebold, the major media are still ignoring this story. Blah.
2004 03 12 - Fri
This is perhaps not a "word" in some sense, but rather a proper name of a
store I've seen in Stockholm and an associated brand. I propose that the word "pukeberg" in English should be used to described the splatters of frozen vomit that can often be found on sidewalks near nightclub entrances in cold climates (e.g. Sweden).
2004 03 10 - Wed
Although it seems like the name of a device to help prevent you from passing gas, a
farthinder is actually what we call a speed bump in English.
2004 03 09 - Tue
posted by jack at 15:05 CET in / humor
Not particularly new, but this
hilarious audio cut-up of America's greatest gas-bag has him hurling his venom at himself for a change. Incredibly funny for Limbaugh haters and lovers alike. I bet Rush would even like it himself, especially when he's all
hopped-up on goofballs.
Today's funny Swedish word is
fart. This means "movement" or "speed". Fortunately for English-based humorists, this is used to build lots and lots of compound words seen in road signs, shop windows, etc. Stay tuned.
2004 03 03 - Wed
Today's funny Swedish word is
fukt. This means "moisture".
posted by jack at 10:50 CET in / compute / blogging
Holy smokes, it's been almost a month since I last posted! Well, hey, I've been busy, traveling, sick, etc. And I missed the bus. And my dog ate my homework.
2004 02 05 - Thu
I stumbled across this interesting
interview with one of the creators of the STL for C++. Now, I haven't used STL extensively, in fact mostly I've just seen it as a headache when porting other people's software onto barely-supported platforms. And I am no big fan of C++ in general. But, there is some interesting stuff here.
Stepanov seems fairly skeptical of OO, and is mainly a proponent of C++. He created the STL as a tool for doing what he calls
Generic Programming; As an example, he offers the example of implementing a simple
max function in C++ using Generic Programming, and claims this can't be done in Java:
My approach works, theirs does not work. Try to implement
a simple thing in the object oriented way, say, max. I do not
know how it can be done. Using generic programming I can write:
template <class StrictWeakOrdered>
inline StrictWeakOrdered& max(StrictWeakOrdered& x,
StrictWeakOrdered& y) {
return x < y ? y : x;
}
and
template <class StrictWeakOrdered>
inline const StrictWeakOrdered& max(const StrictWeakOrdered& x,
const StrictWeakOrdered& y) {
return x < y ? y : x;
}
(you do need both & and const &). And then I define what strict
weak ordered means. Try doing it in Java. You can't write a generic max()
in Java that takes two arguments of some type and has a return value of
that same type. Inheritance and interfaces don't help.
This is the sort of thing that I've always disliked about Java. Interestingly enough, this is pretty easily implemented in Objective-C. I also love his answer to the question, "What do you think of Java?":
I spent several months programming in Java. Contrary to its authors prediction, it did not grow on me. I did not find any new insights - for the first time in my life programming in a new language did not bring me new insights. It keeps all the stuff that I never use in C++ - inheritance, virtuals - OO gook - and removes the stuff that I find useful. It might be successful - after all, MS DOS was - and it might be a profitable thing for all your readers to learn Java, but it has no intellectual value whatsoever. Look at their implementation of hash tables. Look at the sorting routines that come with their "cool" sorting applet. Try to use AWT. The best way to judge a language is to look at the code written by its proponents. "Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas" - and Java is clearly an example of a money oriented programming (MOP). As the chief proponent of Java at SGI told me: "Alex, you have to go where the money is." But I do not particularly want to go where the money is - it usually does not smell nice there.
He also has some choice words about OO in general:
STL is not object oriented. I think that object orientedness is almost as much of a hoax as Artificial Intelligence. I have yet to see an interesting piece of code that comes from these OO people. In a sense, I am unfair to AI: I learned a lot of stuff from the MIT AI Lab crowd, they have done some really fundamental work: Bill Gosper's Hakmem is one of the best things for a programmer to read. AI might not have had a serious foundation, but it produced Gosper and Stallman (Emacs), Moses (Macsyma) and Sussman (Scheme, together with Guy Steele). I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms of interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you need multisorted algebras - families of interfaces that span multiple types. I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it is not very interesting - saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at all. I find OOP methodologically wrong. It starts with classes. It is as if mathematicians would start with axioms. You do not start with axioms - you start with proofs. Only when you have found a bunch of related proofs, can you come up with axioms. You end with axioms. The same thing is true in programming: you have to start with interesting algorithms. Only when you understand them well, can you come up with an interface that will let them work.
The thing that strikes me reading this is that in spite of Stepanov's hostility toward OO, I think that his concepts are really orthogonal to OO concepts, and that perhaps these ideas could be combined. In fact, I think that the problems he has with OO are based on a mixture of misunderstanding its uses, and exposure to inadequate OO languages. Let's take those one at a time:
I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms of interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you need multisorted algebras - families of interfaces that span multiple types.
Well, that's not so hard to handle. Regular polymorphism as seen in all the various OO languages gets you part of the way; If you're using Objective-C, the use of protocols gets you all the way! I don't remember off the top of my head, but I believe this is handled quite well in Smalltalk and somewhat in Java as well.
I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it is not very interesting - saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at all.
It seems that exposure to languages that are not "OO-complete" has blinded Stepanov to the possibilities of the technology. OK, turning data structures with associated specialized functions into objects amounts to little more than syntactic sugar. But the interesting things start to happen when language elements such as method names and implementations, chunks of code, and class definitions themselves are also represented as objects. C++ and Java offer very little in this way, compared to Smalltalk and Objective-C.
I find OOP methodologically wrong. It starts with classes. It is as if mathematicians would start with axioms. You do not start with axioms - you start with proofs. Only when you have found a bunch of related proofs, can you come up with axioms. You end with axioms. The same thing is true in programming: you have to start with interesting algorithms. Only when you understand them well, can you come up with an interface that will let them work.
I think this demonstrates that Stepanov has never had the opportunity to be knee-deep in an OO design project. "Starting with classes" is fundamentally
unlike "starting with axioms". A different analogy could be that classes correspond to proofs, and axioms correspond to complete applications. In any case, OO technology is generally used in a top-down approach for building applications that someone might want to use, so in a sense, yes, you are defining an outcome (the "axiom" you're shooting for) before you work on the pieces (or "proofs"). But then, OO programming isn't mathematics, and I think it's not very helpful to frame it that way.
I may be going out on a limb here, but I think that for most OO programmers, the algorithms we were taught in school have little use in real-world applications. Certainly there are specialized algorithms for all kinds of specific uses (in finance, graphics, encryption, compression, etc), but IMHO most OO technology these days is used for moving and reorganizing data, and presenting it to the user. When you do need to massage data with any advanced algorithm, you're generally dealing with data that is fairly homogenous (as far as type is concerned) and often packed into a structure you've designed specifically to optimize the algorithm in question; So what's the point of genericizing algorithms?
2004 02 03 - Tue
posted by jack at 15:30 CET in / humor
One of the funnier uses of Legos I've seen,
The Brick Testament depicts loads of famous bible scenes using Lego bricks and minifigs. In addition to a graphic depiction of
Adam and Eve copulating, you'll also see
Moses building the Ark of the Covenant,
Mary's encounter with the Holy Spirit, and of course
the crucifixion. As if that weren't enough, you can even get this in
book form. Time to throw out your boring old text bibles!
2004 01 23 - Fri
posted by jack at 13:46 CET in / compute
OK, I don't really think
iTunes is evil. In fact, I think it's a pretty darn great application for its original purpose: Organizing and playing mp3 files.
What
this site points out however is that the iTunes Music Store, Apple's marvelously successful online music store, unfortunately does little or nothing to improve the situation of the artists who are screwed every which way by the giant record labels (a situation described surprisingly well years ago by
Courtney Love).
2004 01 21 - Wed
posted by jack at 15:07 CET in / politics
I've been wondering about Michael Moore's assertion that Americans tend to be more progressive than is commonly acknowledged. I figured it could be instructive to find some online tests, the kind of thing where you are asked a bunch of questions and then are shown where on the political spectrum you actually lie.
Here are some of the tests I found:
- Where do you stand on the liberal-conservative spectrum: A quick test that answers the stated question
- The Political Quiz Show: This test is nearly a decade old, but the questions on it are still pretty useful in today's political context.
- World's Smallest Political Quiz: This very short test test seems to be hosted by a libertarian organization. Perhaps its questions and results are skewed to move everyone that direction, who knows?
- Political Compass: This seems to be the most well-thought-out of the bunch. Rather than smashing everyone onto a one-dimensional left/right line, your answers place you on a square grid, where left and right correspond to the economic ideals of the left and right (controlled economy vs free enterprise), and up and down correspond to authoritarian vs libertartian social policies. Using this notation, George W. Bush appears in the upper right, Saddam Hussein in the upper left, with Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama keeping me company in the lower left.
Take some tests, you may be surprised at the results! And feel free to post your results in the comments here if you like. All these tests easily labeled me as the wacko commie liberal I am, so no surprises there.
posted by jack at 12:54 CET in / reading
I finished reading
Dude, Where's My Country a couple of days ago. It's a very quick read, and pretty much follows the mold of Michael Moore's
other books
, but there's some interesting new content in there, including:
- The concept of Dead Peasants Insurance. This was a new one to me, and if you haven't heard of this before, prepare to be disgusted: Large corporations including Disney, Dow Chemical, and Walmart routinely purchase life insurance insurance policies for their employees - wherein the company is the beneficiary! So if you work for one of these companies and have no life insurance of your own, and you have the misfortune of dying, your widow and children will be left penniless while your erstwhile employer rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars! I understand that this kind of thing is legal (so far), but man, that is sleazy.
- Moore claims that numerous polls show that Americans are, on average, more progressive on most issues than commonly believed. My standpoint is to initially assume that he's accurately citing poll data (based on the principal of "innocent until proven guilty"), so I'm not going to bother looking up this poll data. However, I'm really curious about whether people I know (family, friends, etc) might not also actually be more "leftist" than they consider themselves to be! More on this later.
posted by jack at 12:08 CET in / life
After nearly a year of visiting my doctor to try to find out what mysterious condition was causing bizarre patches of flaky skin on choice locations throughout my body, I was able to finally visit a dermatologist who looked at me for a few seconds and said, "No question, you've got
psoriasis." Bleah. Well, at least I now have a diagnosis and a treatment plan; Prior to this, my regular doctor was just making it up as she went along, prescribing a random array of creams and ointments to see if any of them did anything.
Anyway, if you notice my hair is all flaky and it looks like there's been an isolated snowstorm on my shoulders, now you know it's not just run-of-the-mill dandruff or bad grooming (although that can't ever be ruled out either), I've actually got a diagnosed medical condition, bub. I just hope I can get it under control before I drown in a sea of skin flakes.
2004 01 16 - Fri
posted by jack at 12:02 CET in / life / pictures
New pictures of
Beanie and
Squiggly are
online!
posted by jack at 11:53 CET in / compute / blogging
Thanks to the plethora of plugins available on the
blosxom website, I've added more new features to this site. The most interesting is the ability for you to add comments! Now anyone and everyone can comment on the stories posted here. Feel free to let me know what you think!
2004 01 09 - Fri
posted by jack at 15:17 CET in / reading
I just finished reading
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. I really liked her previous book,
The Secret History when I read it a decade ago, so I figured I'd give it a go. It's a good read, with some really gripping moments and highly believable characters. The only complaint I have with the book is that the ending doesn't really tie up all the threads that are laid out during the telling; I suppose that's the whole idea, that the book is primarily a character study, but it's a shame that a fine, nicely written story has such a lackluster conclusion. It almost feels like the first four-fifths of a book rather than a complete work.
2004 01 08 - Thu
posted by jack at 09:33 CET in / compute
Check out this
technical overview of Mac OS X. It's written primarily for Linux geeks, and gives a nice wide picture of how the system is laid out, what happens during the boot procedure, etc. The author sums up with a little
opinion piece explaining the pros and cons of Mac OS X vis-a-vis Windows and Linux.
2004 01 07 - Wed
posted by jack at 21:06 CET in / compute / blogging
Finally!
After nearly two months offline, nuthole.com is now once again available to the teeming masses. The story of our absence is the all-too-common, sad tale of broadband companies failing to live up to their commitments, which won't be retold here.
Anyway, we're now back in business. Let's celebrate with a link to a slightly aged article by Molly Ivins entitled "Is America Texas?" about the impending Texafication of the nation.
