Older blog entries for cmiller (starting at number 43)

I uploaded (to Debian Sid) Will Newton's clisp package. Will will make an excellent Debian guy, IMO. He seems adept, both technically and socially. I sent to his Application Manager my seal-of-approval.

kiting

A few weeks ago, I went on vacation with Mary Ellen, spending a lot of time on the South Carolina coast. After a few days, we ventured inland, to Charleston for an afternoon. After exploring for a few hours, I stumbled upon a kite store. Having envied another vacationer's kite all week, and thinking that wasting all that kenetic energy seemed somehow immoral, I bought a blue and purple canvas box-kite. I really enjoyed using it for the remaining couple of days of vacation.

Now, I'm chasing a job to Florida, where there be wind like sunshine, and the prospect of being able to kite again has me excited. I've used plain diamond-and-tail [I'm sure there's a real name -- I'm still learning] kites in the past, and once a "stunt" kite, but I was pleasantly surprised with the good flying behavior of the box kite. It tends to draw a crowd of people (admittedly more hairy old guys sipping domestic beers than bikini-clad females) who aren't sure that there's some trikery taking place with such an awkward-looking device in the air.

Anyway, with such a supply of wind readily available, I think I'll take up building my own kites. I've tried in the past, back in Thomasville (where the wind notably doesn't come sweeping down the plains), to build and fly a rokkaku:

I was feeling ill from some evil medicines administered a few days previous, and I was determined to build something to keep my mind off feeling bad. I endured a WebTV interface to download plans, and spent the rest of the afternoon improvising parts into a reasonably convincing imposter for a kite. I trudged out to an open area, where there was a little breeze, and let a gust of wind take my kite up about 25 feet. The gust subsided, and my kite, evidently too embarassed about its making and appearance, dived to the ground, committing suicide. I was exhausted anyway, and went back inside to take a nap.

Anyway, now I can do that every day! Well, I think it will go better since I'm not home-bound and I'll have more to work with than yardsticks, garbage bags, twine, duct-tape, and no wind.

It seems there's a lot of popular kite designs out there. Perhaps I'll find some seasoned kiter to give me advice when I need it.

I accepted the job in Orlando. Argh -- moving is stressful.

debian

I'm looking at Will's GNU clisp package, and if it's of as high quality as his previous attempt was, I'll upload it to Sid soon. As for my packages, it appears as though FreeRADIUS is nearing 0.6, which I'll also upload. I'll be working on some outstanding reported bugs in others, too.

Quoth tk, Even if Graham wants to sell Lisp, he should at least try to sell it more properly. I say that Java, Perl, Python are progressively more like... Basic.

If you're looking only at how the code looks, ignoring its meaning, then you may be right. From the point of view of someone who cares only about how the language works, ignoring how the code looks, then it's definitely tending toward Lispity... eh, Lispness? Lispfullness?

Ah, I guess if I concretize what I'm trying to say by "Lispness", I center on the word Lambda. BASIC is about as far from having the lambda nature as one can get. (I'm not sure about tail recursion as a "Lispness" necessity.)

I think Graham is saying that because he does care about how those things work; he's viewing the code from less than 3 meters away.

employment

I'm close to accepting a job at my previous employer. It's an okay company, with decent pay and excellent health insurance (about which I can vouch personally). I'd be programming, but not on pretty stuff. Ah well, it's comforting that they want me back. :)

vacation

Mary Ellen and I spent all last week at a beach near Charleston, SC. For the first time, I didn't get a "programmer's tan" -- id est, second-degree burns from Sol's radiation. Some SPF-Bignum sun-block did me well, and I escaped the week with slight sun damage, a bunch of photos, a sweet box-kite, and happy thoughts about the climate of the Carolinas. The weather was considerably cooler than Valdosta, GA, where we currently live. Perhaps it'd be nice to live there.

raph: I'd try to dissuade you from any change to recentlog's all-are-published scheme. It would be hard to find out about new users unless they're visible on the only page that most of us read regularly. I don't have any well thought-out ideas about how to push noise to the background, though. The need to discover new people versus the possibility that a new account is an idiot troller: Which is more important?

Bring in the Clowns!

llan: 2+3: Storm Troopers must not be clones. Star Wars lore (non-canonical stories *) suggests that the Empire conscripts from its "citizens" to maintain its rank and file. Cloning could be just seeding the first generation. Accents? Term limits? C'mon. It's bad fiction at best, and that's picking nonexistent meat from the bone. Point 1 is almost interesting; there seems to be a lot of the same model 'droids about. Why should Vader recognize them?

* Yes, I've read two Star Wars books. Please don't hold it against me. I'm a book slut; I will read nearly anything....

Speaking of which, Salon had a recent article about personal intoleration of some authors, to which I add as my most hated authors list: Henry Miller, Kate Chopin (forgive me, Mary Ellen!), and J. D. Salinger, and Joseph Heller. It's a good article, though.

employment

I had a telephone-interview with a fellow at a central-US company who's looking for C programmers with some kernel-level experience. He called me on the phone number I gave the recruiter, my cell phone. It was going decently, until he asked about the difference "between multi-threaded and multi-processor programs." I knew he mentioned programming for MSFT Windows (of which I have zero experience), so I figured there might really be such a thing, so I sheepishly admitted that I had no idea. He congratulated me for my honesty and started describing multi-process (as in "pid=fork(); if (pid)...") execution. The noise on the cell phone made it sound like an extra syllable on "process" and me to sound like an idiot. *sigh* I politely asked him to call me back on a land-line.

After that, he asked me to describe a previous project, and I did it really poorly. So much for effective communication skills.

So, I stomped his first-impression of me into the ground. Since I got that out of the way, I did okay for the rest of the interview.

I did use Wiki for a bit, while browsing tk's work. The only "help" II gave was that I added a note on the Carl Sagan node. It's the first time I've used a real Wiki, and I like the idea. It seems less formal but more structured than "Everything". Both remind me of something I made some time in the last millennium -- well, 1997. On the scale of usefulness, mine was about as far from Wikipedia as it could get.

I feel raph's bad-web-browser-behavior pain; that was part of the impetus to write advodiary (the rest, being to try out XML-RPC). I too want a web browser that behaves better. I was delighted to find that AbiWord allows one to switch to VI keybindings for movement and (very) simple editing. I'd like to be able to do the same with mozilla. I doubt I'll find the time to produce a patch, though.

Well, no job yet. Two leads. Kernel programming (yow!) and jack-of-all-trade programming for a previous employer of mine.

I'm ready to kick Woody out the door. The hanger-on, ne'er-do-well!

employment

The company for which I work is gasping its terminal breaths, so I must find employment soon. I've resigned myself to having to relocate, as where I live is woefully lacking any programming industry. I'd love to stay near my family, here in the southeast U.S., but it might also be nice to move away (even emigrate!) for a few years.

I love Unix/Linux, and don't want to battle Microsoft bugs at part of my job, so no programming in Visual-{BASIC,C++,COBOL,Ada}, or whatever. As pie-in-the-sky, I recently (re-)discovered Lisp, so a Lisp-friendly company would make me very happy, but I really don't expect it. Good health insurance is my only really big requirement. I'm good at problem-solving, and hate to be bored. I don't like to deal with hardware problems, and I make really good chicken quesadillas. Surely someone could use me.

Since most jobs are found via word-of-mouth, I thought that I'd mention it here, to fish for leads from fellow Advogatoians. If you hear of a need for someone with my interests, then mail me at <employment@chad.org>. I'll reply with my resume.

photography

I collected together my negatives and slides, and am beginning to organize them. I got a few packs of three-ring-binder sheets for 35mm film negatives and for mounted 35mm slides, and started filling them. I'm dumbstruck at the amount of pictures I must be taking. Sure, I carry my camera (a 20-year-old Canon AE-1) around with me a fair amount, but I was amazed to compile all my output together and wind up with such a large stack of stuff. I'll need to buy more sheets and maybe a filing cabinet. I have to do some counting and math to decide if it's even feasable to scan all the picutes to large, good-quality JPEGs and store them on disk, as I was planning to do.

In looking over the older stuff, I'm pleasantly surprised to find that some of my earlier stuff is better than I remembered it was.

I liked the "fuzzy" border on ayan's scanned slides so much that I abandoned ImageMagic for my image processing, and wrote a Gimp plugin that resizes a JPEG to fit into a given square bounding box, creates a [crisp or fuzzy] [20]-pixel [black] border, and annotates the bottom left corner with some arbitrary [text] in [light-grey]. (Options are bracketed items with the defaults listed.) Oddly, it seems quicker, at 3200 MHz-seconds, than ImageMagick did. Maybe I'm comparing apples to antelopes, though.

tk's Baloney Debunking idea is hard to implement. People believe wierd things, for myriad of reasons, and I think it's folly to think anyone can address a significant fraction of them. Still, as long as one pushes the oddball metaideas to a higher, less specific node in a topic tree, it should be easier. "Don't believe Man has visited Luna? First, click _here_ if you're a Solipsist. Et c." So, tk, got a Wiki tree free? Let's give it a try!

Being good at Science and being good at public-relations rarely exists in the same person. In recent memory, only a very few people have stood against the populist anti-science tide. Richard Feynman, physicist, and Carl Sagan, cosmologist, are among the greatest thinkers and Science publicists of the last 50 years, and they have been dead for many years now.

Yesterday, Monday, one of the last great publicists of reason and science, Stephen Jay Gould, died in his home of cancer. Gould, a palentologist, evolutionary biologist, professor at Harvard, and author, was instrumental in helping keep pseudoscience out of public schools' Science cirricula.

Recently, I was in the toy section of a department store. While looking for a copy of Pente, I encountered a girl of about nine years who was vigorously shaking a "Magic 8-Ball" and peering into the little window. My presence broke her attention to the sphere and she walked to me and asked (in broken English) if the ball really foretold the future. I was too flabbergasted to answer.

Requiescat in pace, Gould. I'm sure I won't sleep as well, without you in the world.

I'm afraid that Man isn't birthing scientists at the rate we're losing them. Please help do something about it. Take the time to read to a kid when they're really young, help with homework when they're older, and always, always, always insist on the rationality of the Universe.

aeden: It's common, these days. I'm getting a few bounced emails a week about it. Come the Revolution, the author will be first up against the wall.

ME and I went to see "Star Wars: Bring in the Clowns" yesterday. 'Sokay. I especially liked it when Saruman says "Join me or die!" and started whoopin' ass with his voodoo hands.

(set! hottie-list (cons "Natalie Portman" hottie-list))