Older blog entries for ncm (starting at number 237)

I saw Beowulf IMAX-3D last night. The people looked like they were made of putty, and moved like NPCs in video games. The acting was wooden. The 3D added nothing. It was like a full-scale mockup for a movie, released as-is because they ran out of money to finish it. All that can be said in its favor is that the script's interpolations made sense of the original epic.

Some years back (1998, probably) I invented a fragment of spanglish: "hasta you later". According to Google it hasn't caught on yet, but you can help.

On a marginally related note, I just found out that the expressions "curry favor" and "humble pie" are corruptions of (respectively) "curry Fauvel" and "umble pie". Fauvel was a fictional donkey from 1310 that had learned to manipulate important people to brush his hair. Umble means innards. I can't make fun of people who write "expotential" and "lambash" while getting those others wrong myself.

Traditionally, the role of a third-party or independent candidate was to provide cover: a mainstream candidate could point and say, "see, I'm no whacko -- there's your whacko!" That's all turned on its head this year. Ron Paul is pretty wacky, sure -- gold standard, anyone? -- but he's nowhere near most of the "serious" GOP candidates. Even Lyndon LaRouche seems sane, lately, by comparison.

wingo: It sounds like the R6RS people have done something astonishingly sensible and mature, especially considering their constituency. My prediction is that the people who want to write useful programs in Scheme will embrace R6RS joyfully, and the rest will continue doing whatever the hell they've been doing. That seems like real progress.

My brother got one of those Sprint PCMCIA cell modem cards, a "Pantech PX-500 EVDO". Every single page on-line about how to configure Unbuntu Linux to use it was completely wrong. That includes everything about kppp, and everything about WvDial. The right thing was to go to the Gnome menus System/Admin/Network, pick "modem", and set the port as "/dev/ttyACM0", phone number "#777", user "user", and password "user", and turn on all the "Options". Done.

dmarti: Libertarianism is, first and foremost, a fetish. Asking confirmed fetishists to be less fetishistic is never going to work. It would not be good for Linux were it to become identified with fetishism.

Perhaps this is a good time to introduce a new term, “ideole”. (Notional usage example: “He needs to get his head out of his ideole.”) The word’s primary value is the graphic connotation it adds to “ideology”.

That is all.

redi: (1) oshani only has such a high spam score because we are obliged to mark new members as spammers "on spec", just because the threshold is so high. There's nothing to feel guilty about, that's just how the system is rigged. (2) It's no great chore for a new member who has spent no time entering personal data to re-join, and then maybe do things a little differently to avoid being kicked off again. By the way, I hate the "blog" name too, but I don't like "diary" any better; I don't want to know what anybody had for breakfast. It may be asking too much of the name to improve matters, but I'd go for "log". We don't need to remind ourselves that we're on the web.

zbowling: Good news! (Re Apple vs. Java) It's good to see somebody is catching on. Maybe they'll catch on about C# too.

fxn: Thanks for the hint of non-discrete 20th-century mathematics, and for the introduction to Abraham Robinson.

company: Thanks for posting the malloc-failure checking idea. This approach has legs.

wingo: That particular Paul Graham essay has value 0.5. You can compute the value of a PG essay yourself; start with 1.0, and halve it for each occurrence of the word "Lisp". (One of them has value 2^(-85), or, if you prefer, (pow 2. -85)—a remarkably small number—and contains the substring "Lisp Lisp. Lisp".) The latest two essays are worth 1.0 each.

softkid: Boingboing just posted Miro kicks Joost's ass. Dunno... who has time to watch video any more?

apenwarr: GC finalization is always full of fail.

Here's my vote for Best Blog Post Ever. "It's like when you can't decide whether to daydream about being a famous Hollywood star or having amazing magical powers. Why not — be a famous Hollywood star with amazing magical powers!" They suggest, whenever you hear somebody expressing wishful thinking, that you add "... and a pony!". Because as long as you're wishing, why not?