Older blog entries for forrest (starting at number 56)

This essay by Senator Byrd of West Virginia is really striking in its clarity, and speaks for me completely.

I wonder if Byrd will run for President? I'd vote for him.

Congratulations, raph, on your arrest.

Hey folks.

I found something which really upset me, and I wanted to rant about it, but as it has nothing to do with free software, this wouldn't be the appropriate place.

Instead, I decided to post my first K5 diary entry. Take a look.

I feel like I must have been living under a rock or something. It was just this past Friday I discovered the Daypop Top 40. Wow! So this is the meta-level of blogging, the emergent form.

When I get the technical details worked out, I'm sure I will join the fray.

I worry though ... I only have so much time for this sort of intellectual discussion, and my perfectionism (uhh ... combined with lack of skill, no doubt) makes writing a slow process for me. If I express my anti-war sentiments (e.g. by linking to articles like this and expressing my agreement), will I be able to respond to the criticism of pro-war bloggers? If I don't respond because I'm busy with paperwork or something, will my silence be taken as an admission of defeat? Will I get sucked into a black hole of reading and responding when I should be writing code, or trying to make music, or studying Chinese, or any of the dozens of other things that should make up my life?

This is especially a problem for me, because I have to read over every word I write, like, four times or so. It's a painfully slow process for me to express myself in written words. Everything must be perfect.

zhaoway: That Paul Graham article is very interesting, and came close to describing my own high school experience. But how does it relate to the Chinese experience? It's my impression that the Chinese actually learn stuff in high school, while us 'merkins are doing whatever we can to fight off the boredom induced by classes dumbed-down to the stupidest student's level (and then some). I lost at least a decade (and probably two) of fruitful inquiry to wearing away the extreme apathy which was absolutely essential to my survival of high school.

Tao

The author still hasn't responded to me: I'm going to snarf the entire site with wget in case it disappears. Pretty much everything about this code I have yet to get up to speed on:

• automake and libtool
• lex and yacc
• C++
• OpenGL

Those are all things I should probably learn about, though, so I think it's a very good task for me to pursue.

Are there any free tools out there to analyze C++ code, like, print out a class heirarchy diagram or something? There's next to zero developer documentation for the code, so anything like that would be a great help.

Diary Ratings

I think I would prefer a simple killfile system to the diary interest metric. There's only one diary I really care to ignore (has he disappeared? ... no matter) and I'm glad I have a way to filter it out. Then, I see at the bottom of my recent entries page something like "3 diary entries suppressed". Then I have to go back and scan through the entries to see who was filtered out and figure out whether I want to keep them. The entries which fall off aren't incredibly exciting, but leave open the possibility that the poster may say something interesting in the future, so then I have to rate them. I've been uniformly pulling these diaries up to "4", mostly because I don't want to think about ratings too much. That's a lot of extra work just to relegate one troll to well-deserved obscurity.

zhaoway: Google Groups is fine from here. Is that the Great Firewall in action?

Tao

I got no response from the author when I wrote him before. I fixed the compilation problems: One was solved by emulating the effects of this bison patch; and then there was another dinky tweak.

There are still runtime problems (most importantly, no sound) but I've got "the itch" now, and this progam will work on my computer.

I wrote the author a second time with my positive results and indicated my interest in continuing to work on it. I hope I will get a response this time.

I mean, just looking at the web page ... sooooooo much work went into that project, but then, in mid-2000, everything stopped, and there's no real clue as to why. All that effort shouldn't go to waste.

Advogato Proposal

UTF-8 should be the charset for advogato, so we can use it in our diaries and articles. Zenmeyang?

xing nian hao

I hope the Year of the Sheep will bring us all prosperity. In this crowd, I'm sure it will, because our free software wealth will increase and never decrease.

sound synthesis

Back when I was in high school, my friend Harry played a sustained piano chord at the end of an improvisation which, as it slowly decayed, gave way to an incredibly rich tapestry of beat frequencies. When I tried much later to reproduce this sort of sound, I realized that it must have been a unique artifact of the imperfect tuning of that particular piano -- I was never able to coax a well-tuned instrument to weave such a complex fabric.

The memory that fateful chord planted a seed in my mind which grew into the idea that an entire composition could be made of changing timbres; beat frequencies syncopated through clever synthesis techniques could effectively be rhythm and melody.

I've finally gotten around to following up on this a bit, and I'm looking at various sound synthesis packages. I had played with it a little before in CSound but I ended up writing perl to generate the complex .orc files I wanted to experiment with. It was just too clunky; not the right tool for my job.

So, I've been poking around the Linux Sound Pages looking at other synthesis packages to see if I can find anything more suited to my purposes.

I was quite impressed with the sound samples and web page for Tao but the latest version is labled 1.0-beta-30Apr2000 and sadly won't compile on my Debian "sid" box. I'm guessing this is due to some differences in g++ 3.x, but it errors out on a .yy file.

I wrote the author to see if he was still active with it, but have yet to receive a response. I guess the next thing to do is to make it work and send him a patch.

There are some other programs I'm looking at, but I've blathered on enough already.

If anyone has a suggestion about a sound synthesis program I should investigate, I'd be interested to hear it.

art thang

I have been working on an "art intro" page for www.abstractfactory.org, and put a preliminary version up at http://www.abstractfactory.org/arttest/.

Please imagine that all the "clever saying #n" statements are actually filled with text, along the lines of the bastardization of the famous George Clinton quote you see on the opening page.

I hope it works on Macs -- I've got no clue.

advogato sociology

It's funny that our resident troll rating everyone who ever reacted to his political rantings down to "1". I always thought that the intent of trolling was to provoke such responses. Oh well, I guess he actually inhabits a different advogatan planet than the rest of us. That's just as well.

I do wish we could stop our insane president from starting this ill-concieved war, though.

ghostscript

Will Ghostscript ever work on VMS again?

Ghostscript has been a big proof of open source at my place of employment. There are still a lot of people who think that if they pay thousands of dollars for a software solution, it must be better -- but Ghostscript has been used in production for years there, and that's proof that open source works. Colors had been less than optimal -- a constant source of complaints from gs detractors -- until -dUseCIEColor was introduced in 7.x. I thought things were great for a while, then I discovered an eps which crashed when that switch was used. The problem has been fixed in the latest 8.x, but somewhere along the way VMS support got broken. I kind of stuck my neck out advocating our use of gs; now I've got to fix this one way or another before the "I told you so"s start coming from the other camp.

I made a new release of Hanzi Quiz today.

Most of the work I put into it was getting it to work on Mac IE5. This thread shows what I went through to get a dynamically-generated select box which works on Moz, Win IE5+ and Mac IE5. I'm wondering what, if any, Javascript bugs I should submit to the Mozilla project from this. I'm happy I found something that works, but I'm clueless as to what is or isn't "supposed to" work.

I also modified the code so it remembers the answers to recently-asked questions and doesn't present them as choices in subsequent questions. Besides having more quiz data (which I hope someone else will do), this is the only request I've received.

My implementation of that feature was broken on Mac IE as well. I finally discovered that Mac IE Javascript arrays don't implement the "splice" method -- and trying to call it didn't generate an error; it just caused the browser to hang. I rolled my own.

I have to keep calling friends of mine with Macs -- "can you check it?" -- what a pain. There's still a problem rendering one of the pinyin accent marks in Mac IE, and those characters just show up as boxes. I assumed there must be a font install to fix this and rolled on with the release.

A friend of mine checked it in Safari and the question and all of the choices are blank. The (empty) choice buttons are rendered fine and work, though -- you just don't know what you're choosing. Sounds like another browser adventure I'll save for another day. If I'm lucky, they'll fix their code before I get around to trying to "fix" mine for their browser.

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

I went back to GA for Christmas, where my mom has an iMac with OS 9 and my brother has OS X.

I discovered this bug with IE5 for Mac. Whack!

I wanted to avoid browser detection and just look for document.getElementById() but this bug throws a monkey wrench in that stategy.

Well, raph, I asked an authority (who is also an anarchist poet) about your family motto, and this was his response:

Try "Felix, Adhaerens, Viridis"

The 1st & last words are pretty straightforward. The middle word is kinda, well, sticky. "Adhaerens" is about the most literal translation, but it's not very elegant for a family motto. You could also use "Tenax" or "Lentus" which can mean sticky, but have other overtones besides.

And even color words aren't always so straight forward. See my gloss on "X/lwpotepa" 14 lines down on http://www.mindspring.com/~jcsiii/Sappho_index.htm

(Hmmm ... looks like I have to fix some javascript for him on that page he referenced)

Now maybe someone can tell me what's happened to FSF-CHINA's web site.