"Its like a Mach piece, really"

I was thinking about the robot band Z-Machine today, and wondering why they weren't as interesting as they should be.
They've got wires and bright lights and jerky motions. They have batteries of fingers, salvos of effects. They're about as interesting to watch as a dog sleeping.
Its not their fault - or Kenjiro Matsuo's for that matter. He just doing what so many people have done through the years, trying to push the envelope by going  bigger, faster, brighter.
But that is the wrong approach. You push the records with scale, but you push the envelope with style.


There is a real lack of interesting art robots - visually interesting, that is, as I don't think I have seen a conceptually interesting one since Papert's Turtle. Badly engineered, badly aesthetic, typically they sulk in the no-man-land between Snow's Two Cultures, festooned with dangling wires and blinkenlights. Its sad at a art show, and tends to make the participants interested in the cheap wine and cheese. Its even sadder as musicians. Because we expect musicains to entertain - I beleive Beethoven had some terse and biting things to say about this - and a tangle of pneumatic actuators and aluminium has little entertainment capacity, no matter how many bright lights you employ.

 So ignoreing the fact that several centuries of self-playing instruments exist, and that servos, actuators and sensors are now dirt cheap, why arn't we seeing more unusal machines?

The drummer for Compressorhead*  is probably the most interesting I've found, with his strange hunched spine and almost bobbling head. That is pretty much the best of a sad lot.

Is it because the artists in question are too conceptually hung up on the idea of robotics itself? Strange, but a lot of art robotics remind me of homemade fetish porn, on some level that escapes conscious elucidation.

So, I intend to do something different.

The band will be called Metal Dinosaur ( perhaps spelled Dynosaur?)**
The band is self described.
The band will be robots. Not automata. Not MIDI machines.

The current lineup is:
Ankylosaurus on drums. His 808 is behind him, so he can work it with his tail.
Tyrannosaurus Rex is lead guitar/vocals. As a dramatic touch, when he gets excited enough, his slaver will burn. That's right folks, a robotic dinosaur with a mouth full of flame. In all honesty, I would have given him pulsejets if they could be used indoors. Perhaps the bass player, if the note could be tuned right?
Stegasaurus  on keyboards.

What will they do beyond being cool impedimentia to fill my living room?***
Well. they'll play music. Together. Not in the sense of everyone running through a sequenced series of moves and notes, but in the sense of trying to play a piece of music together, trying to match beat and harmony.

As I am still in the concept phase, this is all broad strokes of

• Dinosaurs seen through eight year old eyes.
• Interactive robotics, with a very heavy emphasis on interaction.
• Music. Fire. Metal. Volume. A complete lack of dangling cords and wires.

I will also never use the term 'cyberpunk' .
I will also consider the project a sucess if they play a set with Meytal Cohen.



...The Yellow Drum Machine is pretty cool, though.

*Who also do not have a mention on Wikipedia...come on, guys!
**Props to the worse names airplane ever.
***Or just lead to tedious dinobot jokes.

What time is it at the North Pole? Thats Odin's 18th secret.

Worldwide, 'pataphysics is unconsciously, but deliberately practised, by two groups of people:
computer hackers, and students of Zen. The hacker uses 'pataphysical heuristics to probe and control hardware in unexpected ways.  Techniques like fuzzing explore state space with conscious understanding; any result that can be made to fit the task at hand is valuable. Its important to note that any fuzzing technique does not explore in any sort of logical or comprehensive way. Equally well, its random approach will often yield nuggets of considerable value.

It is instructive to note that the C programming language makes a nod in a 'paytaphysical direction with its warnings about 'undefined behavior'. Unlike many languages which take careful steps top limit the number and range of possible states a program can create, C merely sketches out the known and (semi) safe paths, recognizing that paradigms of all-encompassing safety are cumbersome and slow.
They have their place: I have no interest in the safety control systems of, say, Bruce A & B Nuclear Power Plants being greatly capable of 'undefined behavior'. It certainly is capable of some: such is the brutal lesson of Turing and Godel.

Zen is famous for its use of koans, vignettes designed to jam the mental structures of disciples. Contradiction, paradox, oxymoron; these are all logical descriptors of anti logical states. Koans encompass them, and more.
It is no co-incidence that many advanced hackers have shown a keen interest in Zen concepts.

Perhaps it is unfortunate that such subtle and advanced concepts have really only be explored as farce, philosophy and espionage; but perhaps Alfred Jarry  would have appreciated the joke that the idea before him could be used to break the most regimented and orderly of human creation: digital computers.

because I can't shut up, consider that Odin didn't gain powers when he hung himself on the World Tree, he gained insight, and he was able to use that insight to gain powers.

"I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run."

 A prototypical strange loop is demonstrated as a sacrifice ' by myself to myself'.
He hangs until the twigs on the ground form the shape of letters, which he reads, and is enlightened.

"Ere long I bare fruit,
and throve full well,
I grew and waxed in wisdom;
word following word,
I found me words,
deed following deed,
I wrought deeds."

What deeds? he is already a god, with godlike powers, but without lists of heroic actions. Odin's actions are manipulative and secretive; he always preferred the indirect course and the hidden way to the blatant exercise of power. His characteristic weapon is the spear  Gungnir, which is a weapon that leaves the hand, and kills with sudden thrust.
In the Havamal he boasts of eighteen charms that he knows, presumably from his quest.

"I know a fourth 

if I should find myself 

 fettered hand and foot, 

 I shout the spell 

 that sets me free,

bonds break from my feet, 

 nothing holds my hands."

That is practically the plot of the Matrix, in a nutshell.

The majority of the charms do things like manipulate emotions and actions. Especially emotions: out of seventeen explicated charms, five of them manipulate emotions. two more are about knowledge, and a third allows him to extract knowledge from the dead.*
This of course leads to another point made ins several different ancient poems, that Odin knew seid which while immensely powerful, was considered unmanly.
Seid might be translated as 'witchcraft' but is closer to what the Oracles of Delphi did, and like the Oracles, these skills may have been seen as acceptable for only women to practise, adding a hint of immorality to his knowledge.
Doesn't that sound like hacking, with its queasy morals and hidden powers?
I know many if-knowledge-is-power-than-a-god-am-I types would rather the cool shapeshifting trickster Loki to be their patrons, and in a way his Coyote bumbling and savage punishments do mirror the real-world manifestation of hackers wannabes.

But the true un-masters, the enlightened of the Rootless Root, have their prototype in the shadowy archetypal world:

Odin - the hidden god of hackers.



*The ultimate undelete.

Goodbye, Egon Spengler.

"What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words."

-- –Robert E. Howard

O.S.I.R (some number n where n is too damn high)

So today I discovered that I needed a Java runtime.

I'll be the first to admit that I've never liked Java*, so I've always left it to scuttle around in the subbasement, doing useful stuff without ever being seen or heard. But like laundry service, 'once gone, soon missed', and today I needed it for the xTIMEcomposer IDE. XMOS was kind enough to send me one of their new Startkits, and its time to start using it.

First, I went to the Sun website and downloaded a .rpm.
While I could unpack it, I'm too naive to get it properly installed, or at least, when the installation failed, I don't know enough to figure out why. Hitting the forums gave me a pile of dead links -- has anyone considered that the Internet might be more useful if it had some sort of ROM like nature? --. and when I found a .pet file, FireFox decided it had no idea what to do.
Which was a blatant lie: the .pet autoinstall on download was the only thing that impressed me to date on this machine.**
Found the symlink, repaired the association. Java installed with a snap, and now the IDE comes up.
...annndddd the IDE unavoidable web login won't login. I've probably forgotten my password.

But seriously, XMOS. I understand the cross-platform choice of Java***, but the login is very close to a deal breaker. I know the concept of 'not being connected to the web' feels like a discussion about buggy whips. I know we are supposed to be cloud/stream/wireless/whatever 24/7/365. I'm not. My machines are connected some of the time, the connections are not always good, and I am not alone in this.
What percentage of people are not well-connected?
Its high.

This quote from John Carmack talking about Quakeworld vs the original Quake engine during Internet play is from the Bronze Age (1990s), but its always stuck in my head as a good admission of a programmers bias:

" While I can remember and justify all of my decisions about networking from DOOM through Quake, the bottom line is that I was working with the wrong basic assumptions for doing a good internet game.  My original design was targeted at 200ms connection latencies.  People that have a digital connection to the internet through a good provider get a pretty good game experience.  Unfortunately, 99% of the world gets on with a slip or ppp connection over a modem, often through a crappy overcrowded ISP.  This gives 300+ ms latencies, minimum.  Client. User's modem. ISP's modem. Server. ISP's modem. User's modem.  Client. God, that sucks.

Ok, I made a bad call.  I have a T1 to my house, so I just wasn't familliar with PPP life.  I'm adressing it now."

Talking about PPP may seem funny now, the problem is still real. For instance, I can't get broadband at my home. And fiber is just a pipe dream, unless I move two measly km.
So I connect via satellite, which I am quite happy with, except the unavoidable lag as the radio signal travels ~24,000 km to geosynchronous orbit(80 ms), gets buffered and then retransmitted to earth(at least another 80ms), gets processed at the uplink/downlink station, and routed onto the Internet. Physics demands her toll of 160ms, and in practise I get a lag greater then 280ms when the overheads are rolled in.

So as you can guess, FPS games are out for me, and the tens of thousands of other satellite modem users. And this isn't going to change for me. Until the phone company decides that running voice-over-copper is a waste of time, and rolls out fiber everywhere. Maybe sometime in the next 20 years, unless a new mitochondrial-telepathy communications system gets rolled out: its always so hard to predict new tech, beyond the fact that it'll usually waste more of our time in new and interesting ways.


*Do I actually like anything beyond home-made ice cream and Frankenstein movies?
 **The whole SFS thing might be cool too, if it didn't remind me so much of a VCD.
 *** Although I would have picked Python instead.

Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage...

Jess Nevins has a interesting overview of what he describes as a historical backlash against the
ideals of physical development that spawned Clark Savage Jr., and his varied companions of the pulps.
"Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage Are Condemned To Repeat Him: The 20th Century Backlash Against Posthuman Bodybuilders,"
While this provides some realworld relevance to the slow decline of Doc's capabilities over the years - especially post WWII - this paper suggested something much more sinister to me.
The question of where Savage went can also be asked about Kent Allard (Lamont Cranston - the Shadow),Richard Wentworth (the Spider), Carson Napier, or Anthony Quinn(the Black Bat).
Were they hunted down and destroyed?
Philip Jose Farmer has suggested that Savage disappeared during a expedition through the 'Gate of Hell' cave system near Quoddy Bay, but its pretty clear that the Russians got him:  Terror Wears No Shoes ends on a uncharacteristically down note:

" Doc Savage had replaced the virus charged money packets in the suitcase, and was inspecting them carefully with a magnifying glass.

He turned his head, said, "You'd better tell them to quarantine this suite and all the prisoners. Have them shut off the air conditioning so air from this place won't be circulated through the ship."

Canta,shocked by how pale his face was, asked, "Do you think any of the packets broke open?" "I don't think so. But we'll take no chances."

"You mean we have to remain in here for the rest of the voyage?"

"That's right. And then we'll have to be segregated for several weeks afterward. That won't be so bad--we'll be in the mountains somewhere, at a laboratory that we'll set up to find out what this virus is and dig up a vaccine or treatment."

"Can that be done?"

"It can be tried," he said. "Go on, tell them to keep everyone out of here, and keep the prisoners in the suite."

She frowned at him. He seemed detached, absorbed in the matter of solving the virus that lay ahead. There was no visible elation about him, and certainly no noticeable interest in her as a woman, and a very pretty one.

Canta felt an odd, helpless sort of rage.

She turned and went out and stood by the suite door, listening to the Captain of the Crosby Square tell expert lies to his curious passengers.

THE END "

Italics mine. 

'shocked by how pale his face was ' Savage pale with terror was a new development. I'm going to have to re-read this book to see if anything can be adduced to suggest that the Commie-spy-spreads-plague plot was actually a plot to catch the Man of Bronze. After all, everything else had failed over the years: poison and bullets, monsters and beautiful assassins.  

I've often wondered how Savage never encountered the eponymous villain Dr. Fu Manchu, although the strange entity answering to the name of Jonas Sown might well have been the Master himself.

Could Dr. Fu Manchu, (most certainly not his real name) been the surreiptious destroyer of the early twenty-century's crop of posthumans? Being apparently immortal, he could undertake schemes that would span decades, centuries even. Being subtle, he could have turned the concept of superhumanity or posthumanity into a laughable comic book idea of capes, tights and Krypton.

And now, behind a spiderweb of international banks, world-ruling corporations, and a global-marketplace of confusion and  incomprehensible wealth, does the Master rule?

Its easy to argue that the superheros destroyed the supervillians before they faded away, but no one can explain what happened to the singular greatest of the villains; tall, lean, with strange green eyes and commanding unknown sciences, the One known as Doctor Fu Manchu (known to be a pseudonym) or Kathulos or Dr. Nikola and possibly before that simply as the Creature, must still walk amongst us.

 

O.S.I.R. Update

I can't keep using halt before a hard power off to stop this system.
Or can I?
As I don't do anything sophisticated, as long as I unmount my drives before halting, what can go wrong?

I'll edit the answer in when I find out.

Hidden Wisdom

       
You can find runes
and meaning staves,
very mighty staves,
very strong staves,
which a mighty sage coloured
and mighty powers made...
       
Do you know how you must cut [them]?
Do you know how you must interpret?
Do you know how you must colour?
Do you know how you must try?
Do you know how you must invoke?

Those verses are from the Havamal, but they could be a warning to a wannabe Linux user. What do I need to make this thing shut off on command? A sacrifice hung on a ash tree, consecrated to Linus Torvalds?

Sense is needed
for the one who travels widely;
everything is easy at home.
He who knows nothing
and sits with wise men
becomes a mockery.

Valentine's Day Spaghetti!

This is what my valentine's look like:

Oh yeah, the Tiny Lab rocks the holiday.

O.S.I.R - 'Nothin' gonna, nothin' gonna , stop us now, stop us now...'

Today I tackled a constant, but annoying problem: the laptop won't shutdown.
That is not the same as turning off - if I hold down the power button for a few seconds, it will do a hard shutdown, and then complain on restart about not being cleanly shutdown.

Menu shutdown just reboots, only this time without my eth0 being active, or even noticed.
Okay, 2nd try:

         sh-4.1#   shutdown -now

         sh: shutdown: command not found

Okay...isn't shutdown a standard command, like ls or grep?
Checking the forums, I find this is a common problem, not
well understood, and attacked with a variety of magical incantations, such as:

          sh-4.1#   poweroff
The screen instantly went back, all hdd and network actvity stopped, but the laptop was still running.
Had to restart by pressing the power button, but on reboot, the network interface was down. Weird.
Back to the forums but all they could tell me is that the problem is subtle, and takes many forms.
Good results are reported with:

         sh-4.1#   rxvt -e wmpoweroff
Tried it, and success! But  why? rxvt is just a console, and -e is a switch, and the command is  wmpoweroff, which is a batch file, er, excuse me, a 'script'.
So why, when I re-start the computer, and just run
         sh-4.1#   wmpoweroff
all that happens is a warm reboot, and the network stops working.  
eth0 can't be found by any means at my command, until I do a hard reset, listen to the machine whine about being hard reset, and ta-da! I can reconnect to the network.
Now, when I try wmpoweroff, it just warm reboots. Great. Just great. So what was packaged as a shutdown script that should do something like:

log what needs logged

unspool whats spooled up

log everyone off

stop everything running

turn the power off

actually does something like:

If number of times run > 0, then {Fuck Shit Up

lose eth0 

log everyone off

restart everything but eth0}

else shutdown

The 'Fuck-shit-up-and-reboot' batch file. I know that polymorphic and self-modifying code is damn sexy, but is self-modifying scripts anything but an exercise in abuse?
One forum posted advises running halt and then doing a hard poweroff. This may work for him, but its about seven keystrokes longer than I'm prepared to type. Not to mention this little note in the halt man page:

"If halt or reboot is called when the system is not in runlevel 0 or 6, in other words when it's running normally, shutdown will be invoked instead (with the -h or -r flag)."

BUT IF I DON'T HAVE SHUTDOWN....what happens? It reboots, I suspect. The next person who tells me that Linux is a mature OS that my grandmother* could use as a M$ replacement is going to get a earful.

Permit me to quote from a smelloftheice  parody:**

Hitler (impatiently): "Well? What?"
Fegelein(in disguise): "Mein Fuhrer, we're here to turn this bunker into a total mess."

*Metaphorically speaking.

**Contains nazis.

The Stupid and the Diligent

"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief." -- Hammerstein-Equord

If Hammerstein-Equord had been exposed to the Internet, I wonder if he would have altered his categories.
Where do trolls fit in this, for instance?

O.S.I.R. #3 - The Playlists of the Gods

After what happened last night, I'm not sure if I should be sad, angry or frightened. I feel like a hysteria victim that has been almost set off, teetering on the edge of screaming or giggling.
All I did was try to play some MP3s on the Linux Laptop.

Let me provide some background. I started using MP3's back in '98. * I like music a lot, and I constantly have some playing. I have found myself more sensitive to commercials as time goes by, so I rarely listen to the rock radio stations anymore. Winamp is usually shuffling its way through my playlists.
AllMusic.m3u is exactly that: 5630 tracks. that includes my wife's music, the kids's tunes, everything.
I have a smaller playlist of 1522 tracks that I consider favorites. Something around 88 hours of playing time.


I've been using Winamp since 1999. I've tried- and  been forced - to use other players over the years, but I keep coming back.** It takes Winamp about two seconds to make that playlist on a 1.9 Ghz singlecore, 1 gig RAM, winXp box.
As the Linux Laptop is a 1.8 Ghz Dual, 1 gig RAM, I would expect similar timings on other programs, right?
Wrong.

I dropped the MP3 archive onto the laptop's hard drive, all 7.4 gigs.
I opened the 'Start Menu', and opened 'Multimedia' Multiple media players were revealed. I started with GNOME MPlayer. Its website claims that it is a "A GTK2/GTK3 interface to MPlayer. The power of MPlayer combined with a friendly interface for your desktop..."
This was heartening. I use mplayerc on my winboxxen for all my video player needs. I fired it up.
Played a test track. Okay, time to build a playlist so I can get one-click*** music.  Find the playlist option.
Find the MP3s. Select All, go baby, go!

Two Minutes go by.......What the hell? This is crazy.
[EDIT: Trying this again, I selected the Load Directory rather than the Load Files.
Took three minute 20 seconds to generate the playlist at 100%cpu load on both cores, and about 50 MB of RAM.  Saved playlist. Re-opening playlist takes nearly two minutes before it starts playing. Unacceptable.]

I'm not even going to try to figure this out: this is Linux, home of the Alternative. I'll try the next offering: Pmusic****.
First attempt at building a playlist using the pmusic sources utility would only display 300 out of 1500 mp3's, and took 18 seconds to give me a playlist. Okay, try again. This time the browser would only display 2 files in a gibbled window. Try again.
Waiting 68 seconds, pmusic sources finally listed the MP3s. This isn't the playlist, this is just viewing that the files are there.

To give you, Gentle Reader, a feel for what I am doing, the system monitor is declaring a ~10% load on both cores, and 119 MB out of 1 GB RAM used. pmusic is playing a single MP3, and has not bogged down or faltered on playback.

Alright. Time to select-all and make playlist. A warning instantly pops up:

Warning Building a playlist with too many songs could affect your system critically
Should all songs be added

There was no punctuation. 1500 is too many? Even Windows Media Player can handle more than that.
I hit 'yes', and the CPU load spooled up to 75% on both cores. Four minutes and twenty-seven seconds trickled past before my playlist appeared. Okay, that was stupid. Good bye, pmusic.

Next up: VLCplayer. The interface was straight forward, and it made a playlist in less than five seconds without complaints.
Perfect. Saved playlist. the file manager is defaulted to no default when clicking on playlist files, so I re-ran VLC Media Player, and opened the playlist it had just saved.
The program then vomited error messages all over the screen and froze.

So where does this leave me? This is a ridiculous situation. Each of those players played a single file without any problem.
A playlist is just a text file containing paths and filenames: winamp adds some metadata as well, but nothing more than a line of text. How long does it take to do a directory dump? Not very long at all, which begs the question as to what pmusic and GNOMEPlayer are actually doing.

I'd guess that they are assessing each file in turn, perhaps grabbing the ID3 info from each file? Winamp typically does that at run time. Clearly I am going to have to find another media player: perhaps winamp has a  Linux version. I know there used to be a DOS version, back in the day (good old DOSAmp...with the 'right' wrong setting you could slow songs down. It could be an entertaining party trick.)
 
Time to hit the forums, I guess. 
[EDIT: A forum suggested Audacious.
I installed version 3.2.3. No  problem with the playlist: under ten seconds, no real cpu hit.
Tried to save playlist, and it threw a weird error:

Cannot save file:///kwanlo/blah: unsupported file extension

I tried entering a .m3u extension. Saved with no problem. Opened it again with no problem or delay. What weird programming is needed to fail on saving a file due to unrecognized extension? Why the hell not append the right one? Or at least suggest the right one?
Quick bonus: it even was a winamp classic skin.*****
So after six hours of screwing around, I am satisfied.
Now to uninstall the other players without breaking anything.]

* A quick check of what MP3's that I remember getting that year are showing modified dates around Nov 1998.

** Once you get a taste of the Llama, you just can't stop.

***Okay, double-click "one-click"

****Perhaps an unfortunate choice of name.

***** For a given value of 'classic'...its ice blue, not orange.

Paging Dr. SAMBA, paging Dr. SAMBA...

"Cancel that last page. Paging Dr. SMBD, Paging Dr. SMBD..."

Just a quick update, as I am not irritated enough for a full case of O.S.I.R.
The clock has counted off 5 hours, and I still don't have a connection between my winXP PC and my Linux Laptop. I can't hold that against anything except my inexperience at this point. I thought I was getting somewhere last night, but merely destroyed my network connection, so I called it a night.
I'm getting some error messages that look informative without actually telling me anything (R_LIMIT is the wrong size?), and I can't make it admit which of the four different copies of smb.conf it is actually using.
At any rate, I remain confident that its merely ignorance on my part that is holding me back, and another session with Google straighten everything out.

By way of comparision, it took me six hours to network two win95 boxes together the first time, and I couldn't begin to tell you how long DOS took the first time...although in the end, the problem was with the ARCNET hardware.* Lets just pretend that problem was a simple as the Dilbert cartoon about losing the token when the network plug was pulled out.

EDIT: The connection wizard automagicly solved the lack of internet. I was impressed at how smoothly it repaired. Still no Samba, though.

*Good old days? There were no good old days. Oh god, the nightmare of harddrive replacement alone...

O.S.I.R. # 2

Oh my God...

Single-click navigation has to be turned off in one place for file navigation, and another for desktop?
And somebody thought the logical place to put the single-to-double-click-toggle was at  the end of
(Click on random icon) ->ROX-Filer -> Options...-> Pinboard ?

Because the pinboard* is a groovy invisible thing that is between me and my desktop.
Because my desktop is not the desktop I'm used to, its actually what I would have called my Background
Because my Background is more than my Background; it has surpassed mere bitmaphood via pinboarding; it has been powered up by the invocation of Xwindows, and turned from Adam Wimpy to Pinhead He-Man.

So it makes perfect sense to be in a situation where I want to single-click a desktop icon (I'm sorry, I mean a pinboard shortcut, and then when the file manager opens up, start double-clicking to navigate?

But 5 minutes later, when I open a .tar file and double-click(absent-mindedly) on a file, I get this error message:

" Double-clicking doesn't work until you set your default handler using the
'set double-click default handler' flag  in the 'open with..' dialog."

GAAAAAAAH!

So the default handler is set by default to complain about not being set by default? Not to mention that I clicked on the README.TXT file. So even if  Xarchive isn't smart enough to look at the desktop's default configuration, or at the file manager's default configuration, its not smart enough on its own to default to display?
I am willing to bet that README.TXT is the most common file found in archives.  I am willing to bet that display as text (or even as a hex dump) is probably the most basic action anyone would ever want and any time. Anything is better than nothing! (unless anything is 'delete everything' or 'shoot user')**
Permit me to quote a relevant passage from the GNU Org's Autoconf manual:***

"By default, configure sets the prefix for files it installs to /usr/local.The user of configure can select a different prefix using the --prefix and --exec-prefix options..."

Why /usr/local ? because its the most-likely-guess. Why 'display-as-text'? Same reason, with the added point of that this is Linux --the OS is built out of text!


*Nothing apparently to do with Pinterest, or a form of torture invented by Pinhead.
**I understand that both are switch options when using emacs. (--suffer and --killhuman, I think)
***Perhaps the closest thing to a standard?

O.S.I.R. - Operateing System Induced Rage #1

Here is a toolchain.

MS-DOS 4.01 with DOSSHELL -> MS-DOS 5.0 with DOSSHELL -> with Norton Change Directory (NCD) ->Windows 3.11 ->

LIFETIME FORK DECISION, 1998

Do I go with Windows 95 or with Slackware Linux? I am holding both, I am looking at a secondhand beige Pentium.

Win95 is supposed to be an improvement over the clunkiness of Win3.1, but Linux is the coolest and niftiest thing in the world.

I try both.  Neither work well out of the box, but Starcraft runs on Win95. Not to mention I am just in a sophisticated shell: I can always drop down to the command line to manually weed out problems. 

When bugs rear their ugly heads, quite often the many years of DOS experience comes to my aid.

I have fun. I tinker a lot. I run GUI-less versions, I run tiny versions, and I play a lot of Starcraft.

The cruel hand of Fate plucks me away from this, and I am back in win3 hell for a couple of years.

So win3.11 -> Win95 -> DOS 7.0/ win3.x -> DR-DOS -> Win98se ->Win98Monstrous

I don't upgrade to 2000 or ME, but I do the transplant hacks that can graft a lot of  functionality (Like Spider Solitaire) into Win98.

At this point,I try Linux again. Not the multi-floppy Slackware archive, but a CD-ROM 'Storm' Linux.

Now if I'd had that CD when I was trying win95, I wouldn't have touched the Microsoft product. It was relatively smooth to install, and worked well. I crashed it a lot, but hey I crashed win products a lot too.

Long and short was that it served me better than win95, but not better than win98. And there was this little thing called USB that was getting more and more important...

Outrage one afternoon involving the XWindows server and my favorite monitor drove me into the arms of winXP.

And there I've stayed, occasionally flirting with FreeDOS or Ubuntu long enough to repair a disk or get a limping machine going. After a exhausting round of spyware in 2007, I took Ubuntu out on a couple of dates, fooled around a little...we had a love of the commandline in common, but we quarreled on one 'dark sad night' over user permissions.

This is a sore spot of mine: its my damned computer, it should obey. I understand that Linux is a clone of UNIX , the best thing to come out of Berkeley since LSD*, but I'm not into fantasizing about running a mainframe.

But here I am in 2014, with the horrible prospect of migration to Vista, Windows 7, 8 or 9, or buying a dozen red roses and re-installing Linux.

My testbed for this is a HP Pavilion Laptop, which had been percussively modified by its previous user.
I've got an installation of Puppy Linux,and right out of the box, I can surf the net with Firefox via ethernet.

Okay, that is the first and second milestone passed. Now to start finding problems.


Screen is too dark: the laptop's hardware keys apparently map to software and won't brighten.
Puppy Package Manager does not seem to have any sort of screen brightener software. 'Start' Menu doesn't have one either, but it does list four different audio players and a Personal Banking application.
Ah, the familiar and strangely schizophrenic feel of Linux's 'More-is-better' philosophy.
I checked google, and found a forum of complaints on the topic of dim screens, and was pointed at a nice program. The integration between the package installer and Firefox was very smooth.

The screen looks a lot nicer bright.

Next up -> a shared files connection with my winXP system to suck all my useful files across the network.
Something tells me that this is not going to be as easy.


*paraphrase of a much better apothegm

Complaints Department # 2

Dammit, Mozilla!

After 26 versions --apparently to tweak every pixel--can't you get  your bookmark display right?
I have hundreds upon hundreds of bookmarks. Scrolling to the bottom of the list can take a non-trivial amount of time.
Now I know that people must have complained about this, so that you added a MRUD style menu option, and I understand that its limited to 10 entries for logical& humane reasons. but I might store thirty bookmarks in a given day. So why the hell can't there be an option to menu-list bookmarks in reverse order? Most recent on top? So that I scroll down to go backwards in time, rather than scroll down to go forwards.
Its frusterating, its counter-intuitive,and its probably the most common irritation I have with Firefox.
It bugs me on a daily basis.

...Perhaps I'm 'holding it wrong.'

"We'll be alone,all alone in this wilderness...I can't stand it...!"

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter(1966)

"We shall" Maria Frankenstein snaps, "Soon see which one of us is insane."

No one is, really. Except perhaps the lug that chose the title. This is a movie about Frankenstein's granddaughter.
When the movie opened with a sobbing Spaniard drinking from a wine bottle full of orange juice, I had high hopes: hopes that were dashed, watching a slow, and largely dull movie. A pair of murderers from Vienna are violating the human rights of local folk, deep in the Wild West, when Jesse James and his inexplicable beefcake (but fetchingly simple) sidekick cross their path.

The Igor is played weak-and-vacillating, but at the same time inexplicably murderous; the Inga is a fetching young village girl; Frankenstein herself would be a good depiction, if not for the mind control helmet.

There are only two details in this movie worth seeing:
The brightly striped anachronistic US army helmets rigged with neon-tube lightening bolts and short Jacob's Ladders that serve as re-animators and mind control helmets.
The other is the activation of the artificial brain: the addition of a vial of crystals, and it begins to pulse like a heart!

As a odd touch, the  beaker that the poison is stored in is a vacuum filtration flask with a side entry port! Considering they had the budget for a rack of glassware on the other side of the lab, this is a odd choice.
The lab itself was rather boringly furnished, and the sound mixing was bad. Maria Frankenstein's main monologue was almost drowned out by a really loud rotary switch.

This is a movie which had some promise. You can see that the filmmakers were trying to stay true to the Frankenstein Film Mythos: its just to bad that they mistook tedium for realism. No mugging at the camera, careful and consistent use of accents, no gratuitous nudity*. They even minimized the creature's Stiff Servo effect. They put them into castle by making it an old mission, but missed the 'profaning sacred ground' possibilities inherent in such a locale.

I'll forgive the excessive eye-widening for emphasis.

In RenegadeMime's tautology, 'If it hadn't been a poor movie, it would have been a good one.'


*Okay, the beefcake took his shirt off more than necessary, but he did have a nice physique.

Gorilla-Based Programming.

“The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.” -- Joe Armstrong

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." -- Ephesians 6:12


As a programmer, I find these two quotes work very well together.

In my grim old QBASIC* days, I could keep in my head all of the language, which is pretty useful when stringing together a solution. I had the banana.

With C, the 'reserved' words are easy to remember. I would like to think I know most of STDIO, MATH, STRING, STDLIB and TIME. Everything else I have to use via endless man page checks, and header file examination. This gives me the banana and maybe the gorilla's arm.

Am I right in assuming that if I took up Java, I'd get the jungle as well? I'm having enough trouble with the 800-lb gorilla as it is...

How many programmers have the gorilla memorized?

Perhaps a tool could be written to analyse command usage - and I understand that a 'function' isn't really a 'command', but conceptually it is - and determine if most programmers merely understand a subset well, and prefer known commands to unknown ones...

This may only be analyzable by studying where bugs appear. I am quite willing to believe that there will be more bugs when programmers use unfamiliar command sets.
Stack Overflow and Google, while useful, are poor substitutes from actually internalizing the code.



*I learned QBASIC from altering a crude BASIC implementation of Donkey Kong. Or at least it was some sort of monochrome (not grayscale) game involving flaming barrels, bananas and pixelated tantrums.