Disorderly Content

Back when I was doing Lisp programmer, when the Internet was the ARPANET and browsers were people skimming volumes in bookstores, there was a joke going around. It was based on the idea that everything in Lisp is an object that you reached by following memory pointers. But you never dealt with the pointers; you looked in a variable and were taken directly to the object pointed to by the pointer. Got that? And now for the joke: Lisp programmers, they'd say, know the value of everything and the cost of nothing. Which is both true and, if you get it, somewhat amusing.

And just as true for Java programmers, who by and large have no idea at the complex things that are being done on their behalf. Which is generally regarded as a good thing; Java coders can focus on the problem they're trying to solve and not get caught up in the kind of implementation details that make programming both hard and time consuming. Except, one may ask, what have we lost by not knowing the cost and the details of the tools we're using?

An excellent question, and one asked by Joel Spolsky in his latest column at Joel On Software. Joel argues that, although Java programmers may be far more productive than workers in C, they never have to face the kinds of concepts that separate the men from the boys. (Or, if you prefer, the women from the girls.) And that's bad. It's especially bad when colleges and universities use Java as the basis of their computer science curricula. Because a lot of folks who don't have what it takes to be good programmers won't be tested and found wanting. Which doesn't do them a favor so much as it just passes the problem on to their future employers.

As a programmer who fought and won his battles with pointers, recursion, lambda calculus and a lot of other stuff, I believe it's vital to know what's going on under the hood and to be able to implement most of it if you had to. Nice to know I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Yeah, I know; the rest of us left for the 21st a few years ago. Still, it's nice to see my favorite country get with the program. (Okay, maybe only my second favorite. But I digress.)

What am I talking about? The powers that be in Canberra are planning to legalize something we here in more modern societies take for granted: the right to tape television shows and rip music from CDs to MP3 players. Yes, it's true; using a VCR or an iPod for anything but prerecorded content is a criminal act in Oz. Which makes most of the country's population criminals. (Shows you how well the law is working, don't it?) Kind of ironic, given Australia's history.

Spotted on Slashdot which got it from the Australian edition of News.com. Of course, being Fox, they may have gotten the whole story wrong.

My friends really do know me. Dave and Carol had me over for Christmas dinner, where we had our usual low key gift exchange. I'd found them a very cool coffee table book full of old maps of various cities around the world, which got a favorable reaction. And they gave me an iDog, surely the best peripheral ever invented for an iTunes user like me.

The iDog is, as the name suggests, a sort of robot dog, a cross between an Aibo and a Tomogotchi. He sits next to your iPod and listens to your music. If you feed him music often enough, he's happy. Neglect him and he whines. And if he really likes what he's hearing, he turns his head, raises and lowers his ears and does a little light show on his face.

None of which can sound half as entertaining as the real thing. My little doggy seems entranced by ABBA and The Police; he likes strong rhythms and tries to keep time. Pretty successfully too. He's nice to have around. And he doesn't shed or leave little presents on the carpet. Just the sort of pet a lazy character like me needs. Did I say that my friends know me?

One of my favorite government traditions happened, I just discovered, due to a misprint. I refer to NORAD's annual Santa Claus radar track, which I first heard about years ago on television news (back when I paid attention to television news) and which has since moved most successfully to the Web. What I didn't know until mere moments ago was that the who thing started by accident. According to the NORAD Santa site, it all began fifty years ago with a newspaper promotion by Sears Roebuck & Co. (Back then Mr. Roebuck hadn't yet been declared an unperson.) The ad included a special hotline number for children of the Christian persuasion to call. Unfortunately, a misprint replaced a number at Sears's Colorado Springs headquarters with that of the Continental Air Defense Command, the predecessor to NORAD. The Director of Operations at CONAD figured out what was going on and had his staff look for and report on any signs of airborne reindeer. And thus was a tradition born(e). The tools have improved dramatically since 1955, but the spirit behind this little holiday event remains undimmed. Kind of nice, even for an unbeliever (but not yet an unperson) like me.

Apologies for the big gap since my last post. Combine a week in Vegas with some of my Scaper friends, a suddenly hyperactive job interview process (unexpected this time of year) and a bout of the flu, no doubt contracted among the Vegas hordes, and I've had too many other things to deal with to be blogging much. But now I'm slowly coming back to life. And the final wrinkle in an interesting civil liberties story couldn't pass without a mention.

I refer to a story that's been making the rounds recently about a University of Massachusetts student receiving a visit from Homeland Security after requesting a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. Various newspapers picked up the story, several people said it sounded like an urban legend but were stuck to explain how a UMass professor confirmed the story, and we all were left wondering if this was an example of government excess gone mad (certainly a likely explanation given this particular administration) or of a hoax taking on an explosive life in the blogosphere. Now we learn that the supposed victim of the DHS visit made the whole thing up. Which of course should give pause to anybody who believes something just because it sounds plausable and appears in a bunch of newspapers.

Then again, with the discovery that Our President (well, somebody voted for him) has authorized the spooks to listen in on any and all conversations, including Internet traffic, in violation of even the incredibly lax laws put in place by the sheep in Congress, it's not surprising that we'd believe a story like this. I'm trying to remember; in the Bush family is George W the Big Brother? Or would that be Jeb?

No, not like that! I've been playing with Frappr, a website that uses Google Maps to let members of affinity groups put pins in a world map to show they belong. My first couple of pins went into maps for Cinecast and Tips From The Top Floor, two favorite podcasts. Then I joined a map for Farscape fans. At which point I thought it might be amusing to create my own map. So if you've read this far, how about marking your location on my map? It doesn't cost anything, and only requires you to enter a name or pseudonym and a location. On the planet, preferably. Dunno what my subterranean readers will do.

And that's a good thing, at least in this case. Over at Google Blogoscoped, there a nice list of the Top 10 Website Euphemisms. Here's number one:

1. What the site says: Under Construction
   What the site means: Check back in a decade. Or later.

I'll let you read the others on the original site; I'm sure he needs the clicks. But I just want to point out that this very site uses not a single one of these euphemisms. I'm euphemism free! (Aside from an occasional use of a phrase like "I have to go to the euphemism", generally reserved for polite company. Which doesn't apply here, obviously.)

...and fruit flies like a banana. But that's not important now. What is important is that a small matter of time got me a parking ticket today. Which means dealing with municipal government, always a happy prospect.

Here's my sad story. I had a lunch meeting in San Francisco today. So, rather than drive in and have to deal with usurious parking, I decided to use Caltrain. I drove over to the local Mountain View station, found a parking space, noted the number and went over to the parking ticket machines to buy a ticket. Put in the number, paid my $1.50 and then went on to buy a train ticket and wait for my ride into the city.

Returning to Mountain View a few hours later, I was surprised to find a parking citation on my car. And even more surprised to compare the space number on the citation and on my receipt and discover that they matched. What didn't match were the times: the receipt said I bought the ticket at 11:01 and the citation was for 10:22.

Something was clearly wrong. I had indeed arrived before 10:22. So why did the receipt have the wrong time? Simply explained when I went back to the machines: it seems they were off by 45 minutes. I called the people responsible for the machines to report the problem. And I've written up the whole sorry mess for the parking violations people. We'll see if they believe my tale.

A $30 ticket? Woulda been cheaper to park in San Francisco...

Update 01/07: Justice prevails! Today's mail included a letter from the parking powers, exonerating me in the great case of the parking ticket from the future. Nice to know that goodness and rightness can triumph, even if it's only in the small stuff.

This time last month I was blogging about how cool it was to have my letter read on the Cinecast podcast. Yeah, it's bragging. But if you can't brag on your own blog, I mean, what's the point in having a blog in the first place? So this is gonna be another of those posts. In fact, it's remarkably like the last one. Yep, Sam and Adam read another of my letters. You can download Cinecast #59 and listen or scroll your way to 28:25. Or you can skip all that other stuff (do you really need to hear about Aeon Flux?) and grab the good parts version.

Sorry for that shocking display of non-humility. I promise the next couple of posts won't be about me. Probably.

As if a website for dogs dressed as bees wasn't enough strangeness for one morning, here we have what used to be world's smallest website, which led to an even smaller contender for the title. Good grief! No, make that Good grief!

"Beedogs.com is the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes."

What more is there to say?

Please do not follow this link if you are easily offended. Heck, don't go there if you think you might be offended. I debated posting this one; I think it's terribly funny, but have no idea how you'll feel about it.

What am I talking about? It's a site called Galumpia that has what look like thumbnails from hardcore porn images. Except they aren't; click on any of the thumbnails and you'll see that all the obscenity is in your own mind. Visit if you dare...

I was ready to apologize for abusing Shakespeare with the title of this posting, until I discovered that I was boldly going where all too many have gone before. But no matter; fractured quotations aren't the subject of this diatribe.

Today I'd like to rant about the evil of bandwidth thieves, people who populate their websites, blogs and forum posts with images stolen from others. But it's not the image theft that I mind, bad as that is. It's the way many people simply insert links to those images, so the owner of the image not only has to suffer the theft, but has to pay for their goods to be stolen. Yeah, it's not as big a problem as spam. Or phishing for PayPal accounts. Or planting viruses or worms. But it's still wrong.

There's one consolation, however, and that's that the abused party has the power to take revenge. Because you see, it's not at all hard to replace the image being stolen with another image entirely, one that tells the world what you've done. I used to do that to thieves of my own priceless imagery; now I have things set up so the full resolution files are replaced automatically with their thumbnails. But revenge is so much more fun.

Witness the story of Paul Ford, one of whose images was used by Business 2.0 magazine without his consent for an article on Google's new Google Base service. You'd expect better from Business 2.0, but they went ahead and linked directly to an image on Mr. Ford's site for their story. And he decided to have a little fun with them. I'll let him tell the story, which is truly a cautionary tale for our time. And finish by reminding all those bandwidth thieves out there that the punishment could be so much worse than the crime. A word to the wise, as they say.

"...but I know what I like." Yeah, and sometimes I'm dead wrong. Like now.

My novelist friend Barry is a big fan of Quentin Tarantino. It shows in his writing, which has a way of making violence on the page seem both horrific and balletic. I'm okay with it on the page, but not so much on the screen. So although he's tried enough times, and I've indulged him, I can't share Barry's enthusiasm for Tarantino's films.

But I have watched them. I got through Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, finding much to admire but little I'd call pleasure in the experiences. Tried to watch True Romance but gave up before the half way mark. And Kill Bill sat around for months, taunting me but remaining unviewed. Until last night, when in a fit of boredom I decided to inflict a little of the ultraviolence on myself.

Okay, I was wrong. No, that's not strong enough; let me say that my ability to prejudge entertainment is fundamentally flawed. For the record, Kill Bill is an amazing piece of filmmaking, one I enjoyed more than I can say. It's cartoonish, it's strange, it's violent beyond words. And yet it hangs together brilliantly. And my fears about the blood and gore that are the hallmark of Tarantino's work were groundless. Kill Bill is so stylized, so carefully over the top that the violence seems both real and not real.

Having seen only the first volume, I know what has happened but have little idea of why it happened. Which is why I just made a stop at Tower Records. I hear good things about volume two.

Last night I finally got around to something I've been planning for a while: taking pictures of the holiday light displays around my neighborhood. I had a few different purposes in mind. First, I wanted to feed my stock photo portfolio. Seasonal images seem to do very well, like the candy corn shots I did just in time for Halloween. And I hear Christmas is a big deal among the Goyim, so maybe if I get something good I can sell a few.

A second reason is that I hadn't shot much of anything recently, at least not since the photographic orgy that was my annual Farscape convention. I needed to get myself motivated again. And third is that I've done very little night shooting over the years. I find the best way to assess my skills is to try something and see how badly I fail at it. And unlike model photography, where there's someone to see me screw things up, shooting people's front lawns at night seemed a safe environment in which to test my ineptitude. Well, safe until you consider cars cruising along that may or may not see me before it's too late. Which, not to eliminate the suspense, didn't happen. Well, they did cruise. But they didn't miss me. Or rather, they saw me and avoided any untoward incidents.

Anyway, I found lots of impressive displays within a short drive of here, including one short street where everybody seemed determined to outdo everybody else. And I determined quickly that my tripod sucks (time to upgrade!), that I had the wrong lens with me (my 24-120mm VR would have been a better choice) and that I might as well set the ISO up to the max if I have any hope at all of getting anything. Don't worry about noise; that Photoshop plugin you bought a few months ago will do a pretty good job of cleaning it up.

I got a few good shots, a couple of which are up on my Flickr account. And I expect I'll be out again tonight, armed with the right tools this time. But I have to laugh at the coincidence (at least I assume it's a coincidence) of an emailed ad I just received from Ritz Camera. Among the attempts to sell me P&S cameras and memory cards and the like was a particularly timely article. Its title? How To Take Great Photos of Holiday Lights. Which, unless I'm deluding myself, suggests I know more about the subject than I thought.

The St. Peterburg Times has a deeply disturbing story about an executive Wal-Mart tried to have arrested. His crime? Purchasing while black. I can't decide if it's worse than an incident like that can happen or that the people who perpetrated it, upon learning of their mistake, didn't fall to their knees in apology.

This is really cool. Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has been keeping tabs on the case of now former Congresscritter Duke Cunningham, who has pled guilty to bribery in getting defense contracts for various sleazebuckets. At the top of the list of beneficiaries is Brent Wilkes' firm, ADCS. Earlier today Josh had the story about ADCS selling its corporate headquarters. But now he notes that The ADCS company website is an empty shell; it's just a homepage with no links to any content whatsoever. Better look quick; who knows how long even this much will be available on the web...

Credit to someone named Gisela for expressing the sentiment at right. (And to Boing Boing for getting the word out.) Sony have been very bad boys and girls and are deserving of lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings this year. Go read the reasons on Mark Russinovich's blog, on the off chance you've been living in a cave the past few weeks. And spread the word: No Sony for you!