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Nelson Minar
Blog licensed under a Creative Commons License
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I hate car stereos. They refuse to have a standard line-in jack,
so plugging in your MP3 player is a terrible hassle. I use a
tape adapter and it boils my blood to hear tape hiss and rattling
wheels. FM adapters are worse.
I'm shopping for a new car and figured I should make having a reasonable MP3 solution part of the choice. I don't want to buy an aftermarket head unit; I live in San Francisco, things get stolen. I found several trunk mounted hard drive players that integrate in various ways. Do you know of something better?
Deep geek post here just for the search engines. If you're playing
Knights of the Old Republic and you're on Tatooine and you try to
enter the Sand People Enclave and you're told
"your entire party has been killed" with no explanation, you've hit a
bug. Explanation below.
One of the hidden gems of E3 was the demo of
Unreal
Engine 3. Unreal is a series of first person shooters that have
beautiful graphics but not particularly subtle gameplay. They
license their engine to other companies that make
interesting
games.
 If you're into this sort of technology make a point of seeing the video. It's a 160 meg download. Thanks to Ryan for pointing this
out
The thing I like best about computer role playing games is
the story.
Alas, most CRPG writing is awful. But
Bioware
does well. They're the spiritual successor to Infocom.
CRPGs have another theme: the acquisition of stuff. You start out wimpy with a tiny little dagger and a loincloth. By the end of the game you're a bad-ass with +7 glowing long swords and titanium power armour. RPG-like games like Diablo make the acquisition of stuff the primary gameplay experience, like clothes shopping with more killing. Which brings me to my idea: how about a game where the goal is not to acquire stuff, but to get rid of it? You start out super powerful with all the geegaws and skullsplitters you could want. In your process of saving the world you learn these things have no power and you have to simplify to find true meaning and technique. It'd require a tricky game mechanic to make work. Maybe in getting rid of things you focus and customize your remaining stuff until you are left with one simple elegant possession which is the focus of your power. 
The end of 24 this season was sucky.
Hey! Ho! Downward spiral in Iraq? Presidential speech failed to
reassure voters? US military officers torturing
prisoners? Executive branch morally bankrupt? Ignore all that, just
BOLO. What, you don't know BOLO? All the cool kids know: just ask the FBI:
"BOLO"--that's BuSpeak for "Be On the Look Out."
Asked about the timing of his new warnings about the suspects, Mr.
Ashcroft said, "We believe the public, like all of us, needs a
reminder."
I truly fear for US democracy.
The Newspaper of Record in the US has issued a
broad
retraction of many stories leading up to the Iraqi war.
[The problematic articles] depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi
informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq ...
Complicating matters for
journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed
by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq.
Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for
misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news
organizations in particular, this one.
They take broad editorial
responsibility for this failure of reporting and cite
several articles based
on faulty information. Examples online.
This admission is astonishing. Usually it's a single reporter to blame; here the NYT as a whole is saying they got it wrong. This article is an important milestone in the US coming to terms with the fact that the war on Iraq was based on false pretenses.
Why do most programmers still work with 80 column wide screens?
Long variable names are a virtue; most of my Java code really
wants to be 120 columns wide.
Why don't programming languages let me put spaces in variable names? whyDoIHaveToDoThis or_this_crud, why can't I just put spaces in things?
for user id in user ids {
if is valid user (user id) and
is authorized user (user id) {
show report(user id)
user(user id).bill for report(one dollar)
}
}
I think it's possible to define unambiguous syntax like the above. Not allowing spaces in identifiers may make the compiler's job easier.
But the days of worrying about compiler overhead are long long gone.
Update 2004-05-26: Bill Tozier emailed to say that
AppleScript does have spaces in some things, although he warns of
usability problems. Here's an
example:
tell application "Finder"
set windowName to name of front window
close front window
end tell
front window appears to be a single identifier with a space
in it. But then again, windowName is camelCase.
From: "Gerardo Weir" <jyyiarimnwzroj@aol.com>
The spam worked, I opened the URL. They claim to be an investment site,
just click on the site and transfer over some e-gold and poof, you get
121% return in 5 weeks.
To: neil@REDACTED.com, nelson@REDACTED.com Subject: Fuck YOU Date: Sat, 22 May 2004 18:23:38 -0500 if YOU WANNA TO LOST UR MONEY ---> INVEST US -->>> http://www.wecareaboutmoney.com/ I know there's a sucker born every minute, but who would fall for this stuff? The particularly remarkable thing is you have to have an e-gold account to even play. Wouldn't you think the few people who have e-gold accounts are likely smarter than to fall for this? Maybe their marks are scammers too and this is all about money laundering.
Since switching to use
an aggregator to read blogs my information gathering life has
improved. I can read more quickly, read more things,
and enjoy easily low-volume sites that have the occasional
high-value post.
But there's one problem with my aggregator lifestyle: it feels like work. Blog reading used to be fun goofing off, nipping off to BoingBoing for a few minutes. Now all my blog reading is compressed into 45 minutes in the morning before I drive to work. It's a morning chore. Worse, my aggregator keeps track of unread items. And that list gets bigger if I don't get around to it for a few days. Suddenly I have a giant backlog of random blog entries I have to read. Another workqueue. 
The story of Brandon Mayfield is very bizarre. A Portland, Oregon
lawyer and a convert to Islam, he was arrested as a "material witness"
and then released. It's possible he was arrested
solely
on the basis of a fingerprint match that later turned out to be
faulty. This is not the way justice is supposed to work in the US.
I've been both horrified and fascinated by the conspiracy theories
surrounding the
Berg
beheading video. Kuro5hin has a reasonably level-headed
roundup
of discrepancies, found via jwz. See also
this MetaFilter thread.
I'm gonna go all meta, but what I find interesting is what the
speculation says about ourselves.
Today's NYT, a story about
fraud
in online job listings.
Ms. Haloulos would accept payment for the software company's domestic
sales, then take that cash out of her PayPal account and wire it, via
Western Union, to the software company's contacts in Ukraine. Ms.
Haloulos would keep 5 percent to 20 percent of the payment as
commission.
Unfortunately for the poor Ms. Haloulos, those payments turned out to
be fraudulent. "I feel like an idiot", she's quoted as saying.
Forgive me for being harsh, but, um, yeah. Your "job" consists of accepting credit card payments in a PayPal account, skimming 20%, and then wiring the cash to Ukraine? What did you think you were doing? Here's a hint: payment processing jobs do not involve an individual's private account. And another hint: Ukraine is essentially jurisdiction-free when it comes to the Internet.
I've been grooving on
Star
Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It's a single player RPG set
way back in the Jedi past.
And unlike other Star Wars games this one doesn't suck: they make
great use of the franchise with
fun aliens,
worlds, lightsabers, lots of use of the Force.
 
I finally watched
Kill Bill vol. 1.
What a tedious movie! I generally love obsessive geekishness and
formalism in making art, particularly movies.
But it's important that the movie also actually be about
something. That it have a point.
That's why I liked Jackie Brown so much: Tarantino could indulge his obsession to homage while actually telling a meaningful human story. You know what would be brilliant? A Dogme 95 Quentin Tarantino film. Have the filmgeek boy make a movie without all the lighting and editing tricks. Restriction is freedom.
This may not have been the best idea, but I found the
video of Nicholas
Berg on ogrish.com and
watched it. I suggest you think carefully before watching it yourself, it is
more disturbing than you might think.
The difference between the actual video and the limited images in today's papers is astonishing. The newspapers pictures look calm, quiet. The video is swift and horribly brutal. The most disturbing thing is hearing the murderers shout "Allahu Akbar" over and over again. I watched it because I think it's important to view the truth of things. I hate modesty censorship of news. But there are some things you may prefer not to see.
Update: this BBC article
is about the news media's attempts to explain the video
without actually showing it.
When I was in high school the really cool outcast kids all smoked,
drove old VWs, and listened to Sonic Youth. I was mostly a nerd, but
sometime around my junior year I got a bit cooler and started listening
to KTRU and hanging out at
The
Axiom.
But I never quite felt cool enough to listen to Sonic Youth. It was just a bit too raw and punk for my nerdishness. Now I'm an adult and my music doesn't identify me and I'm glad to say Sonic Youth still rocks. Sister, Evol, Dirty, even Washing Machine are all just great. I feel both alienated and hip. I continue to look for a copy of their first album. At this point I'm almost ready to rip an 18 year old cassette tape. The advertisement said the pleasure's everlasting.
The day the
Bin
Ladin Determined To Strike in US memo was launched, I looked at
the
redacted original and wondered how good the redaction really was.
You can see the size and even the shape of some of the words.
 The demonstration was at Eurocrypt. Le Monde seems to have the first news report (translation). More: Nicolas, Kos, Slashdot, an earlier deredacting attempt.
If you've bought a PC video card in the last year you owe it
to yourself to get Far Cry, at least
the demo. This is the first game to take real advantage of pixel
shaders and insane polygon counts to deliver fantastic graphics.
 Two glitches to be aware of. The copy protection is user-hostile. And on my GeForce Ti4200 the game crashes regularly unless I underclock the video card 5%. Weird thing is it doesn't seem to be heat related. 
Tom Toles
comic on the
Bush response to Iraqi prisoner abuse is worth a
look.
Negativland's 1987 song "Christianity is Stupid" was influential for me in high school. The overt anti-Jesus message wasn't
really the point, but rather the ridiculing and reuse of the blatant
propaganda chant "Christianity is stupid / Communism is good".
Distribution is via BitTorrent
As seen on MetaFilter
Super-cool science:
vibrated
shear thickening fluids. In particular, see
the movie.
 
The guys who run the MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies have posted a
fascinating
look at their artificial economy. Graphs showing money flowing in and
out, analysis of what it means.
Edward Castranova has some excellent
comments. MMORPGs are a unique economic laboratory.
I got to play with an
eInk
display today, fresh from Japan. Not the one pictured
at
engadget, but the same
idea.
It's cool. The most apparent thing is how bright the display is and how it looks good from any angle. Passive lighting is a good thing. The redraw rate is horrible and the algorithm is weird: does some sort of inverting of the screen. This all makes this generation of tech useless for most computing applications. But as an ebook, it's good.
When The Times opts for CD's rather than CDs, it's considered house
style. But if a shopkeeper mislays an apostrophe, the kind of people
who worry about whether anal-retentive has a hyphen are quick to
criticize.
I'm one of those kind of people and I'm also quick to criticize the Grey Lady's
"house style". CD's and
DVD's are bad enough, but how about the
typographic nightmare of G.I.'s and
C.E.O.'s? Talk about punctuation
proliferation! On the same Op-Ed page as the above article they get
it wrong, writing C.E.O's. Inconsistencies
left and right, who can keep these
rules straight anyway?
I can. The apostrophe rule is simple. An apostrophe never marks a plural. The rule about CEO vs. C.E.O. is less clear. The NYT style guide probably has a list of where you don't use dots. I think it's better to never use dots at all.  As seen on MetaFilter
I liked Tim's graph
of bloglines readers so I copied him.
  Python makes doing things like this such a joy. Here's my hack code. Ugly, but simple.
Update: the big jump in February Bloglines seems to
be correlated with when I turned on full RSS.
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