Note to Zooko: please stop with the "one year ago today" links. They're interesting, sure, but I already read that material, one year ago, and I can dig it up easily enough if I'd like to remember. I'm vastly more interested in what you have to say today.

Interesting interview with Robert Pelton on Salon (thanks to A. M. Kuchling):

"[...] we have a, like, 120-day window in which we give a shit. After that period, we get bored and we watch something else. I think I saw a shark-attack story on TV yesterday."

"We don't realize that we went from spending zero to millions of dollars a month in a foreign country to prosecute a war and we're really not fighting a war, we're just sending more and more troops over and flying B-52s around in circles and so forth."

Apologies for the brief hiatus in posts. You may notice this becomes blog becoming a bit more rapid-fire and stream of consciousness. I'm starting to try to use the blog as a public whiteboard of what's on my mind, so please excuse the half thought-out and rambly things that are more likely to start trumping what were, by comparison, individual pieces with discrete focus.

What I'm thinking about today (in no particular order):

• self-realization as everyday practice
  
• Elizabeth Shin
  
• education in America and how to make it better, from grade school to college and beyond
  
• affecting Long Now scale effects in human evolution in one's own lifetime as regards the collective benefit for humanity (i.e. "what can I do today to improve tomorrow a hundred years from now? A thousand? Ten thousand?")
  
• REST v. SOAP
  
• web apps
  
• why my newsreader on Windows exhibts odd (read: non-functional) socket behavior when trying to connect to my provider's NNTP server unless I jolt NDIS somehow (like starting and quitting a host-based firewall)
  
• my on-going job hunt, and things that go with it
  
• Eire/UK wanderlust
  
• PHP, due to some work I need to finish
  
• The Middle East, but only in the broad sense of the woefully uninformed (note: I tend to think anyone living in North America having not lived in both a piece of Israel and Palestine with both Israeli and Palestinian friends, for a long time at each location, is uninformed as well).
  
• Toronto
  
• Symbolic and numercial mathematics software
  

[03:13] <tvoj> dnm you must always have a goal when you travel or relocate. i once drove across to prescott, az to buy socks
[03:15] <tvoj> dnm you must go to houston and buy duct tape.
[03:39] <tvoj> ok now that i've read the whole page on houston i think i may have been rash. buy your duct tape in albany, dnm.
[03:41] <tvoj> the vole of justice must hibernate now.

Typesetting. Let's chat about typesetting.

I love TeX. Actually, I like TeX lots, but I love LaTeX, as well as a number of the newer packages like ConTeXt. I would happily spend all day working on typesetting documents if someone would actually pay me to do it. I think that my love of typesetting using TeX and friends comes from a combination of programming and art. I was real big into calligraphy growing up, and I still have my drafting table, pens, inks, and all that. Once I settle somewhere, I plan on getting back into it.

I know what you're really after. Software. No problem there.

On Mac OS X, possibly a typesetter's dream OS due to Quartz and the Unix base, I use TeXShop, iMacTeX, and BibDesk with the TeXLive-teTeX distribution.

TeXShop and iMacTex are both TeX IDEs (with a TeX aware editor, front end to teTeX, and hooks into DisplayPDF for viewing typeset documents), with TeXShop being further along for my uses, but iMacTeX supports more encodings beyond TeXShop's ISO Latin and Mac OS Roman. iMacTeX is developed by Jerome Laurens, who was a contributor to the TeXShop effort, but decided to split off and pursue a different development path.

TeXShop, by Richard Koch and Dirk Olmens, is my general TeXery workhorse application on OS X, and it's great. There's not much more to say. Download it and hack TeX right now!.

Why use two different TeX front ends on the same platform? They're both free and good! Why not?

BibDesk is a nifty tool from Michael McCracken that allows you to organize and use BibTeX bibliographic databases, and comes in very handy when you want to search a ".bib" database and cite papers.

TeXLive-teTeX, by Gerben Wierda, combines the TeX program base of TeX Live (the central TeX development system for Unix) with the package and macro support of teTeX, one of the best TeX distributions around. What's more ubercool are the neato OS X installers Gerben has built.

You might be wondering what compiler I use for all this. On OS X, there's scant better choice than PDFTeX.

On Windows, I use the excellent shareware WinEdt front end with the Windows-built MiKTeX TeX distribution. I'm still on my trial days for WinEdt, and having used it in the past, I quite like it, but I'm sorely tempted to try out a new open source Windows TeX IDE I just found browsing around today: TeXnicCenter.

Don't even get me started on the wonderfulness of the CTAN

I exercised some self-restraint. Total self-restraint, no, but some, yes. I only walked out of Borders with Aaron Hillegass's _Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X_ and it was 30% off. Given the stack I was considering, this is a feat. I've also been suffering from book withdrawl, so this will sate me for a little while.

Asynchronicity is often underrated. To do my part, I'm going to be reducing the amount of continuous time I spend on IRC and instant message networks. I'm not going away completely, all of my various IM identities and my IRC haunts will still be around, but I'll be popping in more from time to time rather than as soon as I get near an Internet connection. I'm ramping up the amount of work on my plate, both paid and merely personal ventures, and I need to dedicate more time to it. IRC and IM serves as a distraction, and when I'm doing other work, I'm not always paying attention to them anyway, so everyone loses.

I don't want to lose touch with people, though, so continue to chat and communicate with me! Use email! I love getting email from people. As it is, I'm on a number of lists, which while interesting, aren't as fulfiling as getting personal mail. So next time you want to get in touch, email is your friend.

I had meant to post this earlier, but better late than never. Here's an excerpt (with minor edits) of the reply I got from Hazem Sayed on my questions about MCL's new pricing scheme:


[Regarding] your question, there will be an upgrade path to the MCL version running native on OS X, however as we are not yet in a position to fix its release date (in part due to coordination with Apple technical resources), I cannot be more specific about the cost.


You can expect however that the cost will be fair and taking into consideration the time difference between now and the release of the OS X native version (e.g. if you purchased MCL 4.3.1 today and MCL 4.4 was released tomorrow you would not be paying more than whatever price difference between them).


Hazem adds: "We both appreciate and need the help of all MCL users in spreading the word about the new price for MCL. Obviously we are doing it to make it available to more people, but we need many such people for this to be a good decision in the long run."

So there you have it. I'm still planning to purchase MCL 4.3.1 at the $95 USD price as soon as I can afford it and justify it to myself. I have some travel coming up that I'm trying to budget for. But so far, there's not been a day gone by I don't think of plunking down the Visa and ordering up some fresh Lispy goodness from the folks at Digitool.

Fixed the archives link above. Sorry about that. It was a minor Blogger template bug. You ought to be able to dredge up everything now.

Dawson Engler is easily one of the more important people in software systems research today, and he's risen to the top with interesting work and papers in a short time. I was engaged in some serious study of his exokernel and dynamic compilation work as a side hobby when I was working for Viasec in Ireland. Since moving back to the States, all those papers and notes were filed away and boxed up and have been out of my reach until recently. In going over everything again, I get psyched about the exokernel idea. I can't wait until I can put together a prototype exokernel box. Engler's newest work is in metacompilation, where for one example, he modifies a compiler and uses the extensions to find lots (couple thousand) of flaws in various systems in Linux, OpenBSD, and Xok (an exokernel operating system). Ubernifty.

Some links:

Dawson Engler: http//www.stanford.edu/~engler/
Dawson Engler (old site): http//www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/~engler/

And, as always, check ResearchIndex/CiteSeer.

Earthquake!

Around 6:50 AM, the whole house started shaking. A little at first, then getting stronger, peaking, and then falling off quickly. It was pretty cool actually. Moreso because I was already awake, having not gone to bed, and I started feeling it just as the bass kicks in during Chemical Brother's "Come With Us", which I've been listening way too much since finding an MP3 of it earlier in the evening. Or morning, now. Heh.

Since I was killing time on 13 IRC channels spread over three different servers, a friend in Montreal also piped up with the same line I did: "earthquake!". From there, it was a waiting game for one of the real-time seismic update sites to post something interesting about it and a lot of guess on duration, strength, and the location of the epicenter. Other IRC friends from Montreal and Toronto confirmed feeling something as well. And just before 8:00 AM, we have our answer: 15 miles southwest of Plattsburgh, NY. Wowza.

Personally, I thought the whole thing was plenty cool. Everyone else in the house were a bit freaked out. If I woke from sound sleep abruptly in an earthquake, I would probably think it was less cool.


[08:00] <jwz> damn terrorists!
[08:01] <ksandre> now what?
[08:01] <jwz> they blew up plattsburgh! those bastards!
[08:02] * ksandre blinks
[08:03] * ksandre was awakened by what seemed like a tiny earthquake [in New Hampshire]
[08:04] <jwz> it was those damned terrorists, I tell you
[08:04] <jwz> the plattsburgh liberation army


Heh.

This morning's realization of relief: Thanks to the economic downturn/stock market crash/dot-com implosion/what-have-you, Sun is no longer refering to itself as "the dot in .com". I'm breathing easier.

No sooner than I whined about Dave McCusker's weblog does he go and write a brilliant truism:

"Why on earth would I toil joylessly to get more money in my hands?
Work for joy is where I'm at, dude. Money evaporates like water."

-- David McCusker

I forgot all about the test roll I put through the F1 that I had sent in for development before I left. They came back, along with three other rolls of film I shot through my Yashica between being in Toronto, then around Christmas here, etc. The test roll came out alright, I even got one good picture out of it and a few okay pictures out of it. I definitely do want to have it cleaned and calibrated though, especially the film door, where the sealent foam is crumbling off due to age, and which without, I'm likely to always be concerned about dust getting in.

There's no pictures to post, however. I'm such a tease.

Yesterday's entry is late because I stayed up late and because TextRouter seemed to have some trouble logging into Blogger. Such as it is, I'll write at least two entries today.

First off, as noted by John Wiseman, MCL is now $95 USD. I have this twitchy impulse buying urge singing it's siren song to me, and it's still only 4.3.1 (which means it runs under OS X, but in Classic mode)! I'm thinking about emailing Digitool and asking what their upgrade price will be when 4.4 comes out. Digitool also got rid of the lame subscription model and made tech support per-incident with a yearly coverage option, which I think is smarter. The executable redistribution options and compiler redistribution options are still significantly pricey, but that's okay with me. MCL is such high quality work, I'm hoping this starts a bit of a price war amongst Lisp vendors. For years, the only sane economical choice for a decent Lisp on Windows has been Roger Corman's labor of love, Corman Lisp, which is actually quite good, but not as "professional" seeming as Franz's and Xanalys's offerings. Franz's insane pricing scheme is well known and has lead users of their admittedly good tools to port to lesser Lisps (like CMUCL) just to avoid going into development budget bankruptcy. It'll be especially interesting on the Mac OS X front since CLISP runs there, as does a beta of OpenMCL, as does an alleged version of Allegro CL 6.1, and soon, MCL 4.4.

There was an abortive attempt by me late last night to book another trip out to California with Southwest. You see, thanks to a friend, I've graciously been invited to a conference in May, and Southwest was running a weekly Internet special - $99 to San Diego from Albany. I was trying to fly from ALB to SAN ($99 USD) and from SAN to SJC ($53 USD) for around $152 USD excluding taxes and charges. I actually got around to finally deciding on doing it just before midnight Pacific time, and apparently, as I clicked to submit my order, the bell tolled for my special fare and I was out of luck. I don't mind though. I may not get another good deal before I'd like to be out west for the conference, but at least I don't have to scramble to try to contact people ahead of time to hastily work out airport pickup schedules and what not.

I wrote a four page long to do list for April 11th that I'm still working through. It's pretty varried, but at least I'm crossing things off, albeit slowly. A number of the items seem to be revising my generic resume into more specialized versions for various job opportunities. I'm not sure if I'm getting better or worse at doing that.

I'm referncing this entry as a work in progress in IRC, which means it's time to post.

I have a new favorite fixed width font: Anonymous by Mark Simonson. I've replaced, everywhere I could manage to, Andale Mono (a previous monospaced love) with Anonymous, but annoyingly a number of apps in Windows, one being PuTTY, don't see Anonymous as a fixed point font, and so they don't let me select it.

Back in Upstate. I actually extended my stay in the Bay thanks to Jordan from the 4th to the 8th. A weekend in the city was nice, and I was able to attend a last minute impropmtu p2p-hackers meeting as well, which as Steve mentioned, was very cool.

I didn't get to say all my proper goodbyes to everyone before I left, which was a shame, and is something I plan on correcting. Thanks to everyone who made my visit so enjoyable. I hope to return soon to more thoroughly see what San Francisco and the Bay Area has to offer. A special thanks to Janie for helping me out last minute with getting to Oakland Airport! Being able to avoid BART at 4 AM was a godsend.

In the process of talking about the n-many projects I've given myself over the past few years, the ad-hoc consensus was that a BEEP implementation in Ruby, which I started back last summer, was what should be given highest priority. I agree. To that end, I'm re-starting the SourceForge project site and pestering people who expressed interest to pester me. Hopefully I can attract some developers with better Ruby skills than mine and some neat ideas. It's looking good.

Still working on some local contract work which is proceeding apace. Still need to get paid more and paid quickly. The job hunt continues on all fronts, but I'm positive about a number of prospects, especially after the San Francisco trip.

I've been contemplating some stories and poems recently, some which I started ages ago (on my Visor, of all things) and hadn't gotten around to drafting out completely, editing, and then declaring some version of each finished. Also considering posting those here. Not sure yet. Guess you'll find out.

David McCusker is a really interesting person, I'd like to know more about him and his work. His journal format really irritates me though, and the occasional swaps into fantasy-land with his cast of characters, while interesting on one hand, really turns me off from reading his journal. It's not that I want all techie content, it's more that I can't perform fast enough context switches into the realms of Dave's more fiction-centric material, and I'm not sure I have enough background to provide me with some stable footing as to what's going on and where the interesting bits are, what the jokes where, and why it's cool. Having said that, I wouldn't want Dave to change his format in a million years. It's infuriating at times, but so was much of e. e. cummings, and I still like him. Distinct without being pretentious. I look forward to dinner with Dave sometime in the future. We seem to have lots of similar geeky interests.