Mark Time Awards

The Mark Time awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy/Horror audio productions have been announced, with a list of winners, current and past, online. The winner of the SF branch this year was a production called Anne Manx and the Trouble on Chromius, produced by The Radio Repertory Company of America. It is described in the blurb as “A fast-moving 2 hour action adventure with Anne Manx, played by Claudia Christian, as a future detective.” It sounds interesting.

I see from the list of former winners that Atlanta Radio Theater Company has won several times in the past. I’ve been thinking about them lately, partly because the Barnes and Noble I’ve been hanging out at is the one the late Thomas Fuller worked at, and because I’ve ran across former ARTC leader Mickey Desai several times lately. I sure do love a good radio drama.

McWiFi

McDonalds will be putting wifi in some stores. The BoingBoing article includes a consultant questioning whether the McDemographic overlaps with the wifi road warriors as well as with those of Starbucks customers. I can tell you that I’d use it, particularly if it was free with purchase (which seems quite reasonable to me.) I’ve always enjoyed doing work in restaurants and bars. In grad school, I would do a lot of my studying in buffet restaurants or at the very least, ones with free refills on the beverages. Access to beverages, food, and wifi. Sounds good to me.

Geek On

I got a lot of this stuff working on the laptop tonight. I installed Apache, PHP and with both of those, I also got phpPgAdmin up and running. Next up, getting Hibernate talking to my postgreSQL install. The more I work with postgreSQL, the more it seems like Oracle to me. It’s structured mostly the same, the trigger mechanism to do autoincrement type functionality, the stored procedures and such all seem familiar.

More geekworks

Amongst the various stuff I’m doing, I am setting up on my laptop with Eclipse, Jetty, the Jetty Launcher to run Jetty inside of Eclipse. I’m also working with PostgreSQL and generally having a good time with this stuff. I’m fixing to head out for another fun lunch at Barnes and Noble, playing with this and looking up answers whenever I get blocked.

Iranian conjoined twins don’t make it

I’m not sure why this story affects me so deeply, but I’m very sad about the death of Laleh and Ladan. Until this morning I didn’t even know their names, but every time I saw their smiling faces on TV, their heads at the same rakish angle they’d been at for 29 years, I rooted for them. I wanted them to have their normal life and that the pursuit of it killed them both is heartbreaking. RIP, ladies.

Michael Savage Fired from MSNBC

Right wing shock jock Michael Savage was fired from MSNBC. I get a bit of schadenfreude from this, as Savage has made a career out of being hatefully full of shit. The actual statement that got him fired was, while talking to a caller on a different subject and finding out that the caller was gay when he said:

“Oh, you’re one of the sodomites,” Savage said. “You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How’s that? Why don’t you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it.”

This is the guy who wrote one of the books recently about how liberals are ruining the country. Here’s a glimpse into the minds of that set. Nice and full of spastic, kneejerk hate, isn’t it? Hmmm, maybe the reactionary soundbite right (Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity) is full of these types.

Give it away, Give it away Now

Microsoft is giving away free ebooks this summer. It doesn’t do much for me, since other than my PC desktop and laptop I can’t run MS Reader (not having a Palm version and my Palm being my ebook platform of choice). I also don’t have a Passport account and have no intention of getting one. However, for those that satisfy the above two constraints and want some free reading, check it out.

Bayesian Networks for Java

Another to add to the list of cool looking things that I don’t have time to explore as much as I want, the Bayesian Network Tools for Java. From the bit I saw on comp.lang.java.announce:

Second, the Kansas State University Laboratory for Knowledge
Discovery in Databases is pleased to announce the initial pre-alpha
of Bayesian Network Tools in Java (BNJ) v.2.

BNJ is an open-source suite of Java tools for research and
applications development in probabilistic reasoning, and currently
includes the following modules:

  • Exact inference (junction tree, variable elimination)
  • Sampling-based inference (logic sampling, importance sampling)
  • K2 algorithm for structure learning
  • Experimental packages for structure learning
    (stochastic score-based structure search, variable ordering)

  • Format interconversion suite

In an alternate history of my life where I didn’t move from Kansas to Georgia at age 17, I would have gone to Kansas State. I looked at the sourceforge page and this looks like a decent enough package. It supports the XML-BIF XML Bayesian Interchange Format. I still have visions of a service on the computer that can do general classification of any text, that could be used to filter anything – e-mail, news posts, web pages, files, etc. I wonder if this gets closer to that?

More Evil Genii

I ran across another Evil Genius weblog. I noticed it while searching on Feedster to see if I was indexed. I am, and pretty well as posts I made a few hours ago are already the top hits. Interesting stuff. Looking at the heydroid blog, I can’t tell what blogger he is using. Something made me think it was blosxom at first, then I changed my mind.

I got curious with Feedster. Some of my posts were top hits for “evil genius” as sorted by date, but what if I sorted by “blogranking”, whatever that is. Doing that, it took until page 16 (of 42) before one of my posts showed up. I just ain’t got the juice. Oh well, getting in late to Ponzi schemes always costs you.

Clicktrack

Next up in the parade of plugins, I have added Nelson Minar’s Clicktrack plugin to this blog. It rewrites all the urls in the story bodies to 302 redirection urls bounced back off of blosxom. This allows me to track which links people follow out of here. It’s an interesting experiment, just to see if I can get some idea what the exit points are like. It only tracks the links in stories, not on the sidebars, though. I’m not sure if it logs on its own, but I can always extract this information from the Apache logs.

Blagg and blogg

I was looking around at Blagg, which appears to be pretty easy to set up to be used as an aggregator. I’m not sure I completely understand it, though. I guess that if I wanted to include excerpts or titles of articles from my aggregated blogs, then I’d use it or set it up on a cron job to run.

That started a wag that had me looking around at stuff including the blosxom implementation of Necho, an instantion/prototype of the Echo Project. This is an attempt to consolidate and make open the kind of sharing that RSS does, with a common set of APIs and formats supported by all the blogging tools. What got me rolling was looking around and seeing if there was anything that would allow blosxom to accept posts via the Blogger API. There appears to not be such a thing already. I might try writing one. I think it would have to be a standalone CGI rather than a plugin that just writes files to the same data directories as the blosxom.cgi.

Shockwaves and Ripples

I’m going tread carefully here, becuase I’m unsure of how much of this to discuss publicly. It appears my resignation may not stick. As it turns out, several of the individuals who most made me miserable have parted ways with the company and I have been asked not to part ways with the company. I’ve spent the long weekend thinking about it in that zen way, considering without explicitly considering. I am going to go in tomorrow with my negotiating hat on, willing to stay on longer if certain conditions are met. I do believe there is a clear and true win-win path here (as opposed to the corruption of the term most people use, where “win-win” means “I win”) where everyone gets more than they would have on our current path. We’ll see how amenable everyone is to my demands (which are not really hard to meet or expensive, they just require flexibility) and how amenable I am to theirs (which are basically “don’t quit, work longer.”) Interesting times, but ones with more hope than a few days ago.

Plastic Jesus

This morning I finished the copy of Poppy Z. Brite’s Plastic Jesus I got from Fictionwise. I liked the story quite a bit. I’d put it in the top third of Poppy’s work that I’ve read. Not quite Lost Souls or “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” but still very strong. As a fellow Beatles freak, I got some of the same thrill from reading it that I got from watching Velvet Goldmine, playing the scavenger hunt game of recognizing the real life referent for the fictional bits. I’m a little behind of reading Poppy, still needing to read Lazarus Heart and The Value of X. It took me a really long time to get to Exquisite Corpse, which I enjoyed more than I expected to. Since reading Poppy’s work in preparation for my very first episode of Reality Break, I’ve been a fan of hers. Wow, that was more than ten years ago! Jesus Christ, we are passengers on a runaway train. It feels more like 3 months.

Cafe Warrior

I’m writing this in the Barnes and Noble near Perimeter Mall. I’m trying to test out the efficacy of an idea that I had. When you try to do new stuff (in my case, learn to use WebSphere and PostgreSQL) in the computer arena, a typical first step is to buy a book or two. It’s always tricky whilst browing in the store to know which would be best. My idea was to, rather than buy the books first, spend some time lounging in the bookstore. Browse the books, try to do the work you want. When you run into problems, grab a book off the shelves and look up the answer. Keep going until you run into another problem. Some have thought this sounds a little scumbaggy, but I don’t see it. It’s actually a pretty pleasant way to work, and cost effective. You can tell which books are good, because you tried to use them to solve actual problems you had. If you only need the book for one thing, it wasn’t something you should have bought anyway. If the book solves many problems, I’ll be buying it. Meanwhile, I’m drinking $3 lattes at the Starbucks (or Raspberry Mocha Kisses if I’m at the Seattle’s Best inside of Borders – yum!) While I wanted to dry dock the idea, I stupidly forgot to install the Cygwin version of postgres on this laptop, so there ain’t that much I can do. My thought was to do this as much as I can during the days I have no job. I have some projects that I want to make headway on, and one of the nice things about doing this is that it maintains some discipline of the workday – you get up, shower and go somewhere – but completely on your own terms. If this joint had wifi, I’d be downloading postgres, which would be convenient for a moment but might ultimately be a step backwards in efficiency if I ended up browsing instead of working. I am at this moment wildly ready to be unemployed. I’ve been thinking about my project, prototyping, and generally getting myself ready to hit it. I’m now enthusiastic to cut loose.

Get Rich Slow

Excellent Dave favorite comic book writer/artist Scott McCloud, a guy I have long read and admired and was lucky to once interview, has talked about the lack of good micropayment schemes. He seems to have found one he likes, and is giving it a shot by releasing a three chapter comic at $0.25 a chapter. I just might fire this up. When I was 16, I went nuts for the then brand new Zot! comic. One thing to point out, Fictionwise has a fine micropayment scheme that I use all the time, so such things do already exist. I think he really means a generalized one that can be used across multiple retailers.

Via Boing Boing

XBox Blackmail

Here’s an odd one: a group of Australian hackers are attempting to hold Microsoft hostage with respect to Linux on the XBox. They have cracked keys that will open up the box to pirated software, but if Microsoft will sign their Linux bootloader and allow it to be run on uncracked XBoxes, they won’t release their cracks. If MS fails to do so, they’ll release the cracks into the wild. Crazy stuff, including protecting their code with an EULA so that the Microsoft engineers that looked at it are bound by it – to dispute that is to dispute a core of how MS does business. Also, this practice of modding the XBox has apparently been ruled legal in Queensland, so unless some legal shenanigans can happen, these guys appear to be operating within the bounds of their local laws. Interesting to see how this plays out.

You dropped a Bomb on Me

News of my bombshell drop is causing basically the reactions I would have expected. Fellow developers are happy for me, the receptionist is sad to see me go. My boss surprised me a little by announcing my departure in the daily meeting. As often as not, bosses seem to be very secretive and want to keep these things quiet. Since I’ve known that yesterday was the day for a while, it was kind of a relief to be able to get it over and now talk about it. I am good at keeping secrets, though, so this was not a thing people knew. Now, on to the next thing.

The First Day of the Rest of my Life

This is the first morning where I’m going to go into my job as a lame duck. Really, I have been for a while but it hasn’t been official. It’s funny that I have a dentist appointment so I’ll be in a little late on this first day. Maybe everyone will assume I’m really at a job interview. The reactions of the people that found out yesterday were exactly in keeping with characters, as to who wanted to know why and who didn’t care and who seemed relieved to see me go. I guess I’m a polarizing kind of guy. Some people really love me and some really hate me. Interestingly enough, during our daily status meeting yesterday when my boss was giving me shit about something, several of the other developers leaped to my defense and then came later saying that they didn’t really know the issues involved but they assumed I knew what was up and supported me. Isn’t that how the boss is supposed to feel? This is pure nonsense out of Peopleware and further supports my feeling that I must be going. I will step on the gas and wipe that tear away, because one sweet dream came true yesterday.