Adventures on the grey market
Look at this picture, and try to guess how many of these cartridges are genuine:
Hint: the correct answer is “not a damn one”.
Rosio Pavoris a blog
2011 in books
Fine, let’s do this. Last year’s entry is here, though both it and that of the year before are still on the front page, too.
Apparently I finished 64 books in 2011. Specifically, these:
2010 in books
Let’s do this while I’m still sort of sober.
Looks like I didn’t blog a lot this year. Last year’s book post is still on the front page. Anyway, I didn’t finish quite as many books this year as I did then, but I surpassed my annual target of fifty; I finished fifty-eight:
Overshot a bit
It’s probably unlikely that I’m going to finish another book in the five and a half hours left in 2009, so I’m going to post this while we’re waiting for snacks.
I don’t have any bad habits, so my only New Year’s resolution tends to be to read fifty books in a year. Last year I didn’t quite make it, but apparently I more than made up for it this year. I finished eighty-eight:
-
The Ancestor’s Tale Richard Dawkins
Snow Crash Neal Stephenson
An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe Leon Trotsky
The Origin of Species Charles Darwin
The Fabric of the Cosmos Brian Greene
Anansi Boys Neil Gaiman
I Am a Strange Loop Douglas Hofstadter
Why I Am Not a Christian Bertrand Russell
Gödel, Escher, Bach Douglas Hofstadter
JPod Douglas Coupland
Your Inner Fish Neil Shubin
Deep Simplicity John Gribbin
On Natural Selection Charles Darwin
Mathematics for the Imagination Peter M. Higgins
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 1 Karl Popper
Atheist Manifesto Michel Onfray
The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie
Yiddish Policemen’s Union Michael Chabon
The Extended Phenotype Richard Dawkins
The Chronicles of Narnia Clive “Staples” Lewis
Freakonomics Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
How to Solve It George Pólya
Failed States Noam Chomsky
Hegemony or Survival Noam Chomsky
Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft H. P. Lovecraft
What We Say Goes Noam Chomsky
Wealth of Nations Adam Smith
Consciousness Explained Daniel Dennett
Life’s Grandeur Stephen Jay Gould
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper John Allen Paulos
The Myths We Live By Mary Midgley
The Tiger That Isn’t Michael Blastland, Andrew Dilnot
The Essential Turing B. Jack Copeland
The Mismeasure of Man Stephen Jay Gould
Faust (Frühe Fassung) Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Paradise Lost, and Other Poems John Milton
Physics of the Impossible Michio Kaku
Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond
The Trouble With Physics Lee Smolin
The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood
De la Terre à la Lune Jules Verne
The Drunkard’s Walk Leonard Mlodinow
Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck
Stephen Fry in America Stephen Fry
The Road Cormac McCarthy
Voyage au Centre de la Terre Jules Verne
De Weduwe Becker Maurice Roelants
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Susanna Clarke
You Shall Know Our Velocity Dave Eggers
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Computer Networks Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
The Fountainhead Ayn Rand
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins
Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen
Dubliners James Joyce
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson
Het Achterhuis Anne Frank
God Created the Integers Stephen Hawking
Shalimar the Clown Salman Rushdie
Nation Terry Pratchett
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Seth Grahame-Smith, Jane Austen
A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
The Penelopiad Margaret Atwood
Dracula: the Un-dead Dacre Stoker, Ian Holt
House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski
The Universe John Gribbin
The Zombie Survival Guide Max Brooks
Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Mark Haddon
Curious Pursuits Margaret Atwood
Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov
We Have Always Lived in the Castle Shirley Jackson
Winnie-the-Pooh A. A. Milne
The Night Watch Sergei Lukyanenko
The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing Richard Dawkins
Unknown Quantity John Derbyshire
A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens
The Yellow Wallpaper, and Selected Writings Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Day Watch Sergei Lukyanenko
The Twilight Watch Sergei Lukyanenko
The Last Watch Sergei Lukyanenko
Lord of the Flies William Golding
So I guess I only need 46 next year to maintain my average.
Reviews for a significant number of those can be found on the Facebook (or here, which is the same place). I’d use LibraryThing, but you need a paid account to have more than two hundred books on it, and I don’t trust them enough to give them credit card information.
If someone wants to send me money for it, though, you know my Paypal address.
Highlights:
Best fiction: probably Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, though Margaret Atwood is a good writer.
Worst fiction: Rand, obviously. CS Lewis is a close second. Even Neal Stephenson isn’t that shit.
Best non-fiction: Nothing earth-shattering this year. I guess John Allen Paulos’s A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper was pretty good.
Worst non-fiction: Mary Midgley’s Myths We Live By. I’m not sure it even deserves to be called non-fiction. Runner-up goes to Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.
My dad died.
Edit: Obituary in all major newspapers in Vlaams-Brabant today. And also in Het Belang van Limburg.
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(Spoilers.)
So my dad suffered cardiac arrest
And then he fell down some stairs. He was at a hospital in Brussels when it happened (psychiatric hospital, strictly, but close enough), replacing smoke detectors (he’s a fire safety person), so they reached him pretty quickly. That was yesterday. He’s currently at said hospital, under induced hypothermia (and stable), until later today.
He’d been having heart problems for a while, and after his boss had to drive him back home after he collapsed on a company trip recently, he had a stent inserted into his heart and was on a ton of medication, but obviously he still smokes and he has very irregular sleeping patterns.
I don’t know what his prognosis is, but in general these things don’t tend to go well (though the fact that he survived this far means he’s already doing better than most people).
This left his car unattended in Elsene overnight, though, so obviously someone felt the need to smash the back passenger window. So right now, aforementioned boss is driving my mom and my sister to Brussels in her PT Cruiser to retrieve my dad’s personal possessions and the car, and I’m watching the dogs. Tonight, they’re taking the train back to visit him, because visiting hours are weird and at least he’d probably be awake then.
My grandfather, who’s a bit high-maintenance at the moment for various reasons, is being looked after by my aunt and uncle, who came over from Limburg for moral support.
Last night was also the hottest night in six years, and the whole week has been hot enough that I haven’t really slept at all, so fun times.
More on the story as it develops. I’d put this on Facebook, because that’s where everyone who might care about this is, but my mom’s there too, and she doesn’t need to see this again. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t read my blog.
Update: He was still asleep when they visited yesterday, though they’d stopped the hypothermia treatment. Now they’re beginning to reduce the medication used to keep him unconscious. No real news otherwise, though the prognosis is cautiously good. It’s now Friday morning, and it happened Wednesday afternoon.
My grandfather, who’s in the hospital for being old (nothing life-threatening), will be able to move straight from the hospital to the home where my grandmother is also staying, so that’s nice.
Too many curious people are calling. I’ve answered more phones today than in the rest of my life combined.
Update: Apparently after they cut off the medicine used to keep him asleep yesterday, he got “agitated” and they put him back on it. Now they’ve cut it again, and he should be waking up “within days or weeks”. Hospital drugs don’t fuck around.
Update: Saturday now. He’s still not awake. My uncle (who’s a radiologist) is on his way from Andorra, and an MRI has been scheduled for Monday.
Update: Sunday. My uncle arrived, and already talked to the hospital’s doctor over the phone and is optimistic. My other uncle and my mom are picking him up and driving him to the hospital itself. Apparently they’re going to try to get my dad moved to Gasthuisberg, in Leuven. His doctor there (the one who placed the stent) said the stent probably collapsed (“sheer bad luck”), but he’s in Sicily at the moment, so he can’t be sure.
Haskell is humping my aunt’s leg.
Update: They’re back. He’s breathing on his own and everything, and he reacted to my mom’s voice (but not my uncle’s), so my uncle is making her visit him every day from now on. The stent is fine, it was probably an infarction, and the move to Gasthuisberg isn’t happening for the moment. And apparently it takes five to seven days on average for a person to wake up, so when the nurse said “yes” when my mom asked if it was a bad sign that he wasn’t awake yet, she was wrong. Probably a language issue.
Basically everyone’s optimistic.
Update, Friday Aug 28: I went to visit him for the first time today, and he seems to be doing well. He’s been “awake” since Wednesday, and he was really responsive today. He seemed to recognise us, and when my mom asked him to squeeze my hand when I was holding his he did. He’s still very drugged up, but I think that if it wasn’t for the feeding tube they cut his throat for, he would have been able to at least say our names, if not hold up his end of the conversation.
Brussels is a filthy, filthy town.
Update, Monday Aug 31: He’s being moved to Leuven tomorrow.
Lol Github
I’ve never had much use for source control, but after that one thread broke /prog/scrape I realised it might be useful to have somewhere centralised to put the source code and recent diffs, instead of just having a possibly-up-to-date file hidden here somewhere and having people download that whenever their shit breaks without really knowing if I fixed it yet.
Github was an obvious choice, not least because bandwagons are awesome, but then I lost interest and forgot about it until now.
Incidentally, when you create a new repository on Github, it automatically generates a URL for you to push to, of the form git@github.com:username/projectname.git. The project name can’t have any characters outside [a-zA-Z0-9-], though, so when it does they’re replaced with dashes.
Whoever wrote that piece of code, though, forgot that project names apparently also can’t start with a dash, so when you try to push to it, it just gives you an unhelpful error message:
Invalid repository url. Make sure you include the .git, e.g. git@github.com:defunkt/ambition.git
And then it breaks the connection, which is particularly nice when your first experience with git involves pushing a project named -prog-scrape.
Anyway, easy enough to fix. I do like that it uses ssh, so I don’t have to type my password every time. I’ll probably be creating additional repos for my many, many other projects that people find useful.
Statistics and shitty graphs
gnuplot is nice when you’re trying to do something it was designed to do, but kind of painful when you aren’t. Anyway, I made some graphs out of visitor data collected since July last year (all of this is just my blog, not rotahall.org as a whole).
The X axis is always time, with the far left being July 2008 and the far right being March 2009 as of today. The Y axis is the percentage of people using a given thing, so that the whole length adds up to 100%. The white area is always unknown and/or others.
The first is the operating systems used.
The white is “unknown”. In reality it’s mostly phone browsers and spiders, but fuck it, I want an ethernet-enabled typewriter. Red is all of the BSDs combined. There seems to be exactly one person using FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.
The number of Windows users is higher than expected. I blame idiots googling for pictures of axolotls.
The second is the distribution of Windows versions within the Windows users group. I expected more people to use XP than Vista, but it’s nice to see Vista isn’t even growing much anymore. There are a few people still using Windows 98 (that’s the red outline right above 2000) and 95. I’m pretty sure the one guy using Windows 3.1 is spoofing it, though.
I didn’t make one of these for the Linux users, because most of them end up being “other distro”. There are suprisingly few Ubanto users, though.
Next is browsers. I’m not sure what “Mozilla” is in this context, and I really don’t know what Netscape is doing there. Terras thinks people from 1996 are reading my blog, so: hi! Sell your stock in 2000, and don’t vote for Bush!
Finally, IE versions used by the IE users. This is abysmal. I’ve stopped showing content to IEs older than 7, so with luck they’ll go away. Again, though, I blame random googlers, not regular readers.
The bit of blue at the bottom is IE 8. I’m surprised how early they started coming, since the beta was only released earlier this month. Spoofed user agents, probably.
Anyway, just in case anyone’s interested. Making these was fun, but too much effort to turn it into a regular thing.
[.∴( ･)∴.( ･)∴]
My keyboard is broken. It’s hard to reform þe ſpelling of þe Eŋliʃ laŋguage wiþout a workiŋ Alt Gr kī.
(It’s even harder to write code in a C-like language, because AZERTY is retarded.)
Fail
So I didn’t quite reach my goal of finishing fifty books this year like I did last year (or my personal record of 200, in 2004). I blame the dearth of good books I haven’t read yet in the various bookstores I frequent, and the fact that I started taking my laptop to school instead of books, now that the wireless internets finally work throughout the building.
I still finished sixteen:
- Irreligion John Allen Paulos
- Math Hysteria Ian Stewart
- Introduction to Cryptography and Network Security Behrouz A. Forouzan
- Barking Tom Holt
- The Goldilocks Enigma Paul Davies
- I Am Legend Richard Matheson
- God Is Not Great Christopher Hitchens
- Making Money Terry Pratchett
- Animal Farm George Orwell
- God Explained in a Taxi Ride Paul Arden
- Jippus et Jannica Annie M.G. Schmidt
- The Red Queen Matt Ridley
- Flatland Edwin Abbott Abbott
- Collapse Jared Diamond
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick
- Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities Ian Stewart
Most of those were either relatively unremarkable or utter crap. And no, Snow Crash isn’t on that list, because it was too shit to finish.
Χριστούγεννα
I gets presents! All of them came from ThinkGeek, because apparently nobody else ships to Belgium in less than three months.
I got an Einstein action figure, Tetris magnets (weakest magnets I’ve ever seen, though they’ll hold up a single piece of paper adequately), an RFID-blocking wallet thing, two of these (brain cell (which isn’t technically a microbe) and sleeping sickness), and these, which look really good on my copy of Origin but smell like death.
I was also supposed to get Real World Haskell, but apparently Barnes & Noble sucks and it hasn’t arrived “yet”. This only goes to confirm my suspicion that Haskell isn’t a real programming language, but rather a very elaborate running joke. You nearly had me with GHC, guys.
Anyway, I updated progscrape to address two nitpicking complaints and one marginally more serious one (though that post is mine), as well as fix the fact that it didn’t extract e-mails at all (despite claiming to).
The thread-parsing code could still do with a desucking, but I’m not going to do it.
The new code is here (diff), and since running that on your old database will cause all kinds of interesting errors, a new database is here (15.0 MB, 59.9 MB uncompressed). I could have written a script to just siphon data from the old database into the new one, but instead I rebuilt it from scratch so I could time how long it took:
real 123m19.681s user 4m45.306s sys 0m22.145s
That’s for 6,826 threads and 173,390 posts.
The main advantage is that it’s now possible to do things like
select * from posts where thread = 1228980536 and id = 50;
which used to require
select * from posts where thrid = 1228980536 order by time limit 1 offset 49;
which is considerably less secksy.
Ceterum censeo Rasmus Lerdorf is to be beaten to death with a hardcover copy of SICP.
This semester was too long
But at least it’s over now. Exams start January 8th, Dynamic Websites project is due December 31st. I’ve done all my Christmas shopping, and the first family Christmas party isn’t until some time around New Year. I’m just not going to leave my bed for a week, I think.
In unrelated news, apparently the people recommending Snow Crash were trolling.
That may be too generous an assumption, but the alternative (that someone would actually like this book) is a bit too hard to believe. It reads like Jargon File fan fiction co-authored by Cory Doctorow and Shii.
The protagonist is a weeaboo half-Asian nigra Hacker™ (the last one, naturally) who wears a black leather kimono and carries around two Japanese Nipponese swords, being the best swordsman in Second Life the Metaverse (he doesn’t get credit for “predicting” Second Life; this was written after the invention of the Internet and right in the middle of the first 3D gaming hype). His sidekick is that classic cyberpunk archetype, the 15-year-old technoslut who takes off her clothes in her very first character development scene. The storyline is basically masturbatory techomysticism catering to 15-year-old wannabe Hackers™.
It’s one of those books where the author tries to disguise the fact that he has the vocabulary of a third-grader by making up half the words, and where “deliberate” shit writing is supposed to mean that he has a self-deprecating sense of humor. I’m sure the over-the-top stupidity is just parody, or something.
I really want to like cyberpunk. The concept is great in theory, and it tends to make for pretty visuals. If this and William Gibson are the best it can do, though, maybe it’s time for the genre to die.
Old pictures are awesome
As you may remember, my grandfather died a few months ago, and one of the many, many things we inherited was a vast collection of pictures spanning well over a century (the oldest ones are 130 years old). I promised I’d scan some of them and post them, but that never happened, mostly because my uncles made off with them.
They’re back now, though, and I’ve scanned a few of the ones that weren’t glued down. That doesn’t, unfortunately, include the very oldest ones, but it still goes back quite a way.
Click pictures for bigger, though some bigger ones are missing because I fucked up while resizing. I’ll fix it later tomorrow eventually.
I’ve resized and cropped, but made no effort to fix the colors. This is the state these pictures are in.
One of the older ones to start off. Presumably these people are related to me.
I think the guy with the beard on the left is Baron de Buisseret, my grandmother’s grandfather. I’m not sure what his first name is, but he had a bunch of kids, including a daughter named Marie-Louise, who married some guy named Stouffs and gave birth to my grandmother. So unfortunately, no noble title for me.1
TINY DOG
950 € for something barely bite-sized. Apparently purebreds are expensive.
But yes, we finally went out and bought a new dog. It’s a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, not a cocker, but because it’s purebred and the names of this litter have to start with H, it will still be officially registered as being called Haskell.
Though my mom intends to call him Baziel, apparently.
Born August 10th, so we won’t actually be getting him until mid-October.
In which /prog/ makes me feel slightly better about having a French exam tomorrow
,
____|____
.-` `.
.-` `.
.-` .`
'-._ .-` _______`
`.__ `-_________---`` ,-.`-, AVEZ-VOUS LU
`''-------' ( p ) `._ VOTRE SIPI
`-' \ AUJOURD'HUI?
`\ ,-\
. ``` \
\---..,--'
................._ --...--,
`-.._ _.-'
`'-----''
I’ve probably been complaining about how ridiculous it is that I even have a French exam too much lately, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
I’ve also been posting too much about programming lately, but most of the sciencey things I’ve been dealing with lately have been about the evolution of sex and sexual selection, and too much of that requires too much background, or doesn’t have straightforward answers that can be summed up in two or three sentences, so a blog isn’t a terribly good medium for discussing it.
I’ll see if I can think of something interesting, though, but it’ll have to wait until after tomorrow (French is my last exam) either way.
Also, today is an anniversary, but it’d surprise me if anyone remembered which one.
ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING CANCER
You wouldn’t believe how glad I am never to have to touch COBOL ever again.
To give you some idea of the cancerousness of the language, this is part of what I wrote on my exam today, as pieced together from my notes: