June 29, 2003
You'll Never Find It In Galaxy
Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing...and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand. "Get back from those controls, Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last space trip."Sound familiar? They should. You've been watching Firefly.* So have I, mind you. It's not a bad show. It's also not Science Fiction. It's a Western in space. The thing that nags at me from watching the first few episodes of Firefly is not so much what's there as what's missing. They have faster-than-light travel and artificial gravity — and revolvers and 1950s spacesuits. When someone gets shot in the stomach, the wound doesn't heal in moments as you might expect; instead it's a medical emergency. Vital medical supplies don't have RFID tags on them. People don't even have mobile phones, much less embedded communicators. The Serenity's radar seems to have an effective range of about 300 yards. What's up with that? If you're travelling at interstellar velocities and there's something within 300 yards of you, you're already dead. There's a gas stove on the spaceship, for crying out loud. Did Joss Whedon put this in as intentional self-mockery? Have these people lost the ancient technology of microwaves? (If so, it would explain why their radar is shot.) Also, the Serenity itself looks like the mutant offspring of an Aibo and a camel. In Firefly's favour, despite having spaceships, guns, and a girl in a box, it's not a ripoff of Outlaw Star. Which is something of a pity, because Aisha Clanclan would liven things up no end. * These two pieces were run side by side as an ad in the old Galaxy magazine. It then continued:
Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rim-rock...and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand. "Rear back and dismount, Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts."
Sound alike? They should--one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, you're welcome to it! YOU'LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY! What you will find in GALAXY is the finest science fiction...authentic, plausible, thoughtful...written by authors who do not automatically switch over from crime waves to Earth invasions; by people who know and love science fiction...for people who also know and love it.And that is indeed what I found. It's said that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 13, and that's exactly how old I was when I read my Dad's collection of old Galaxies and Astoundings. Everyone should have this opportunity, to be 13 and to read some of the best SF ever written (and some real crap, too; not even Astounding was immune to Sturgeon's Law**). ** 90% of everything is crap.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:30 PM | Comments (76) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 28, 2003
Great Minds and All That
A Small Victory has similar thoughts to me on the relative value of Harry Potter and Neil Gaiman's Stardust. Comments by her readers show that we're not the only Stardust fans either.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:43 PM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Mea Culpa
For those who don't have the time to read the whole sad story in Perl Bad, the short of it is: I did it.
I blew up Susie's blog. I lost the post that she spent an hour working on. It was I, and not a bunch of monkeys or poltergeists who ate the script. Sorry, Susie. I will now go and feed myself to the sheep. While I'm doing that, the rest of you can read Susie's entry in The New Weblog Showcase - and, of course, link to it on your blog, because it's good. Mind you, the equal first-place at the moment is a rather interesting post (for me, the geek, anyway) about setting up a Web Forum view for a Movable Type blog. You can see it in action at Web Dawn.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:38 PM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
I thought it was interesting too, but I am not geeky enough to really understand it.Perl Bad
I haven't used Perl much since 1998 or maybe 1999, when I discovered Python. Or rediscovered it, I should say; I knew of Python from some prior life but had dismissed it as irrelevant because it uses indentation to indicate program structure.
What?
Well, in most languages, you'd write a loop by enclosing it in markers like this:
for i = 1 to 10:
print i.
end.
Or this:
for (i=1;i<10;i++) {
printf("%d\n",i);
}
In the first example (written in Progress), the end statement marks the end of the loop; in the second example (in C), the loop is enclosed in curly brackets, { and }. Because the beginning and end of the loop are clearly marked, you could write these two examples as:
for i = 1 to 10: print i. end.
and
for (i=1;i<10;i++) { printf("%d\n",i); }
respectively, and the compiler would be perfectly happy. You write in whatever style you like, as long as those curly brackets or that end statement are in the right place.
In Python, though, you'd write it like this:
for i in range(0,10):
print i
There's no end, you see. The fact that the statement print i is indented relative to the previous code tells Python that it's part of the loop. If I follow it with the line:
print i*i
with exactly the same indentation, it will be part of the loop too. If the line isn't indented (or more precisely, is indented to the same level as the enclosing block), then it indicates the end of the loop.Which looks really pretty, but is a bad idea, because if anything happens to your indenting, your program won't work any more. On the other hand, it's a good idea, because it's a very common problem that a programmer will change a piece of code without fixing the indenting, so that the program looks like it does one thing but really does something else.
You can't do that with Python.
But if something does happen to your indentation, your code is toast. The Pythonistas speak of a whitespace-eating nanovirus, but HTML will do the job just fine:
for i in range(0,10): print i print i*i
That's the exact same code, only this time I left it as normal HTML text. Python won't like that at all.
So from a language-design standpoint, it's kind of a problem. From a practical standpoint, though, it turns out to be a pretty good tradeoff. I've only once been bitten by the whitespace-eating nanovirus, and while it was painful I've seen plenty of code lost due to editor accidents or files getting overwritten or good old drive failures, so one lost program isn't really that bad. The fact that the layout of the program always reflects its function really is a blessing - though it still doesn't stop people from writing incomprehensible Python code.
There are a few main points that I like about Python. First, the code is clean. With Perl, you get lines of code like:
my($tag) = @_;
return ("start_$1","end_$1")
if $tag=~/^(?:\*|start_|end_)(.+)/;
That's not even a particularly bad example. That's pretty normal Perl code. And I find it just as nasty as you do. Python doesn't fill your screen with $@_!?^*+/ unless your modem has dropped out.Second, it comes with a nice, flexible and fairly rich standard library. It doesn't have a vast collection of modules like Perl's CPAN, which sometimes seems to have modules for every conceivable requirement, but it does have a decent library, and it's standard. If you have Python installed, you have the standard library. (It's possible to screw this up, but it takes effort.)
Third, Python is dead easy to install on any Unix platform. Download and unpack it, then it's the familiar configure, make, make install dance. Blippy blip blip, and you're done.
Perl's install is somewhat weird. It has a Configure script, but if you don't know about the -d option, it will ask you all sorts of questions that you will probably have no idea how to answer. So you keep hitting the enter key, and after a while you start getting all these strange messages (Python's configure gives strange messages too, but it doesn't bug you constantly). Then it asks if you want to make dependencies, and you say what the hell, why not? Then you make, and then you make test, which takes forever, and then you make install -
And then your friend Susie contacts you in a panic because her blog is toast.
Oops.
But all you've done is updated Perl. Everything MovableType should need is built into Perl by default. But now it's complaining that DB_File.pm is missing in action. DB_File.pm is the code that handles MT's databases; without it you can't update anything, and though people can still read your blog, they can't leave comments.
Not good. So you take a look, and sure enough, you've overwritten every trace of the old version of Perl. Rats. Well, DB_File should have been included, but no problem, you'll just specify it manually: ./Configure -D DB_File -de to make sure this time. Then make, make install...
Which you do, only nothing changes at all. So you Configure again, only this time you actually read all of the text scroll ing past. And you notice this little bit of unpleasantness:
Checking Berkeley DB version ... You have Berkeley DB Version 2 or greater. db.h is from Berkeley DB Version 3.3.11 libdb is from Berkeley DB Version 2.4.14 db.h and libdb are incompatible. I can't use Berkeley DB with your <db.h>. I'll disable Berkeley DB. Removing unusable -ldb from library list libs = -lnsl -lndbm -lgdbm -ldl -lm -lc -lcrypt -lutil
So much for DB_File. Gone bye-bye.
Now you check your libraries. You've got three different versions of Berkeley DB installed (all of them out of date, of course, but not to worry, even fairly old versions work well enough), and some weird links between them, but the default library is version 3.3. So it should work.
Check your library path. It's not looking anywhere weird.
Do a find, to see if there's a copy of libdb.so lurking somewhere strange. Nope.
Eh. Well, the Configure script actually creates a little test program to see what version of Berkeley DB you have. So you copy that little test program and compile it manually, and it works. Perfectly happy. What? How?
Time to Google. Which turns out to be no help at all. MovableType's support forum isn't much good either; mostly it suggests using MySQL. But there's a mention of recent Linux C libraries including Berkeley DB themselves, and the problems this causes if you want a version of Berkeley DB other than that in the C library.
A clue.
Well, if your program found the right version of Berkeley DB, but Perl doesn't, that must mean that Perl is picking up the wrong version from the C library. So you look at the libraries that Perl is using, and sure enough, the C library is listed before Berkeley DB. Change that and keep your fingers crossed while the whole thing rebuilds...
Success! We're back on the air! After two hours of pointless wrangling with Perl, it's decided to do what it's supposed to. MT is happy, I'm happy, Susie probably won't be happy because I have a nasty suspicion that it ate her post.
The whole thing started because I was trying to set up Image::Magick so that MovableType could generate image thumbnails. Image::Magick requires Image Magick (no great surprise), which of course is not installed. And Image Magick doesn't want to compile because it doesn't like my version of Perl. No problem, that version of Perl is out of date anyway; I'll just fetch the latest release and install that and aaarrgh!
What possessed Six Apart to write MT in Perl in the first place I'll never know. There are people in the world who program in Perl by choice, just as there are people who eat brussels sprouts or live in North Dakota or listen to System of a Down.
If they'd written it in Python this whole hideous mess could have been avoided. Of course, then I'd have had to find something else to rant about.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:17 AM | Comments (79) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 27, 2003
I'm Sorry...
What planet did you say you're from?
"This is a great chicken, a friendly chicken, a chicken that is ready for a relationship," said Kat Brown, deputy director of the shelter.Gravy and roast potatoes make a good relationship. Oh yes, here. (via Fark)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:11 PM | Comments (77) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Non-Transferable
This membership is limited to current incarnation only. Any use of this membership in a previous or future life will result in the immediate termination of this membership and its benefits.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:10 PM | Comments (72) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 26, 2003
One Day
One day I will write the perfect post. Every word will be both a geek-culture reference and a literary allusion, and also a relevant link to another blog. It will form a perfect bricktext at 72 columns, with acrostics on both the left and the right. The post will be in the form of a sonnet and the entire thing will be a palindrome.
Also, it will make some kind of sense.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:11 AM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 25, 2003
Title Fit - I Felt It
The first CD we listened to on our trip was Weird Al Yankovic's new release, Poodle Hat. All good Weird stuff (I particularly like Hardware Store and A Complicated Song), until we got to Bob:
I, man, am regal - a German am IWhat?
Never odd or even
If I had a hi-fi
Madam, I'm AdamOK, I should have caught it by now, but it's a lot easier seeing the words in print than hearing them sung for the first time. Anyway:
Too hot to hoot
No lemons, no melon
Too bad I hid a boot
Lisa Bonet ate no basil
Warsaw was raw
Was it a car or a cat I saw?
Rise to vote, sirI quite like that one, but:
Do geese see God?
"Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod
Rats live on no evil starThe light dawned, and it was blinding. As for those readers (or rather Googlers) who were looking to download Poodle Hat: Just buy the darn thing, willya? The CD contains a bonus Quicktime movie with all the songs, extra mixes, the lyrics (yes, he did say automatic circumcisers) and Weird Al's very own home movies. If you're a nut for a jar of tuna, you need Poodle Hat.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:23 PM | Comments (68) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 24, 2003
Sesquipedalian
The Eskimos are famous - perhaps apocryphally - for having forty words for snow. Cecil Adams once noted:
In my spare time I have been attempting to construct an Eskimo sentence in my basement, such as will be suitable for the season. I have not get it perfected yet, but it is coming along pretty well, and with a little work it might pass for the genuine article. So far I have: kaniktshaq moritlkatsio atsuniartoq. When completed, this sentence will proclaim: "Look at all this fucking snow." At present it means: "Observe the snow. It fornicates." This is not poetic, but it is serviceable, and I intend to employ it at the next opportunity.Since English was invented by, well, the English, one wonders whether it in turn has forty words for rain. Perusing a handy thesaurus, I was able to come up with only 12:
cloudburst, condensation, deluge, downpour, drizzle, monsoon, precipitation, rain, shower, sleet, spit, sprinkleOther than that there are a few dubious ones like mist (not really rain) or sun shower. (They also offered to take me to the 10 most popular sites for "rain", an offer which I have set aside for a fine day.) Which is just my round-about way of noting that, irrespective of all the nice things I have said about Sydney's weather, it is raining again.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:25 PM | Comments (70) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Harry Who?
It would seem that I have been labouring under a misapprehension and Harry Potter is not in fact the colonel who commanded the 4077th in later episodes of M*A*S*H. He is, it would appear, the hero of an absurdly popular series of books by one J. K. Rowling.
I dropped in today on a friend of mine who runs a bookstore here in Sydney. Not a small bookstore, but not a huge one either. He ordered in 600 copies of the hardcover edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - and sold them all in three days. Now, I don't begrudge Ms. Rowling her squillions... Alright, I do begrudge her her squillions, but not to the extent that I begrudge Microsoft theirs. But I'm at a loss to explain the popularity of these books. They're not bad, but - I have a collection of Fritz Leiber's short stories; I bought it because it contained some stories that I'd never seen collected elsewhere. Total world-wide print run of this book was 80 copies. Why? There's no question, none at all, that Fritz Leiber was a better writer than J. K. Rowling. Why wasn't he a squillionaire too? Leiber's work isn't for children, but a large proportion of Harry Potter readers are adults. I don't mind at all that adults read and enjoy Harry Potter, but why aren't they also reading Dunsany? Or in a similar vein, Neil Gaiman's Stardust, a beautiful and wondrous tale almost flawless in its tribute to Dunsany's style. It's good to see that Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books are being kept in print, but where oh where is The Silver Eggheads? Why, if adults find they enjoy fantasy, are they not reading masters of the weird and wonderful like Tim Powers and Michael Shea? Why not Lois Bujold, who can create characters who sometimes seem more real than my own family, or C. J. Cherryh, who writes so well that a hundred pages can pass with no action and you barely notice and care not at all? When will we see a movie version of The Anubis Gates or Nifft the Lean or The Curse of Chalion or Gate of Ivrel? Why are they not reading Ursula Le Guin? Why not T.H. White? Why not - well, actually, Terry Pratchett is doing pretty well. And Stephen Donaldson - his novels may not appeal to all, but do try his short stories in Daughter of Regals and Reave the Just. As for me? Well, since I couldn't buy the latest Harry Potter epic, it may be time for me to finish my own novel and maybe, just maybe, make some squillions of my own.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:13 PM | Comments (68) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 23, 2003
Ex Cathedra
This lovely cathedral with its wooden belltower was in, um... Wangaratta, I think.
Yes, Wangaratta.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:07 PM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 22, 2003
Cheesecake Photos
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:37 PM | Comments (88) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Tastes Great
My cousin Melissa encounters wasabi for the first time.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:17 PM | Comments (71) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 21, 2003
Power Saving
We unplugged the cat and it went into sleep mode.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:24 PM | Comments (73) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Named Sevi, after Sevi Ballesteros, because he plays golf. The cat does. At least, I think that's the reason.Uh, Skipper?
I think the GPS is on the blink again...
(I think I may have been on this submarine once, back when it was still in service when I was in the Cub Sprouts. There's not enough room on one of these things to swing even the smallest and most uncomplaining of cats.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:30 AM | Comments (71) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Perfect Weather
We left Sydney at 5:30 AM on Saturday morning. Ignore everything I've said previously about how delightful Sydney is in winter: This morning it was cold, dark, wet, windy and generally miserable. (Of course, after we left it cleared up and turned into a delightful day. One of my colleagues described it as "beach weather".)
We, on the other hand, followed the miserableness south. By mid-morning, the rain had mostly stopped, the darkness had lifted, the wind had died down, and though it was still a touch chilly, we had otherwise perfect weather for a long drive in the country.
Perfect except for the impenetrable fog, that is.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:30 AM | Comments (73) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Signing Off
I'm signing off now, hoping to catch fifteen winks before we set out on our road trip at five o'clock. (I didn't realise that there was a five in the morning. At least, not as a time where one wakes up, as opposed to stays awake 'til.) Then I'm off, and unless my WiFi card suddenly decides to work, you probably won't hear from me until Tuesday, when I will be presenting Pixy Misa's Big Adventure: Twelve Hundred Miles Sharing The Back Seat With A Two-Year-Old.
So's you don't get lonely (and taking the opportunity for a swipe at Orrin Hatch), here are some completely legal mp3s for you to download: Crunchy Frog Blues, What Dance Dance Kitten Did On Her Holiday, and Return of the Return of the Electric Ant. All are written by the brilliant [And modest. — Ed.] young composer, novelist, programmer and blogger... Uh, that is, me.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:13 AM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Campbell's Condensed Geek
Neverwinter Nights, Bioware's fairly nifty multi-player Dungeons and Dragons game, is now available for Linux!:
CD-Key: You will have to purchase a copy of the game to get a valid Neverwinter Nights CD-Key. Of course, with this purchase you also get a lovely Neverwinter Nights mapkin, a spiral-bound game manual, and three plastic-coated aluminum-reinforced W1nd0z3 brand coasters.Yay! And Shadows of Undrentide, the first Neverwinter Nights expansion, is expected to arrive in Australia next week. Yay! And there's another new hardcover D&D rulebook out: Ghostwalk:
Ghostwalk contains everything needed to run a stand-alone campaign in and around the city of Manifest, or to integrate it into an existing world, including rules for playing ghost characters and advancing in the new eidolon and eidoloncer classes, several new prestige classes, over 70 new feats and 65 new spells, three complete adventures, four highly detailed encounter sites, and fourteen new monsters and templates.That makes, what, 24 official 3rd Edition hardcover rulebooks? Not counting unofficial stuff, softcover stuff, D20 stuff...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:46 AM | Comments (71) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 20, 2003
Internet Time
It would seem that Apple accidentally leaked the specs for their new PowerMac G5 systems, due to be officially announced on Monday.
So far, business as usual. The interesting thing is that within hours of the accident, someone set up a CafePress store selling items that would only appeal to true geeks. Nice specs, tho'.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:53 PM | Comments (70) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Midwinter Montage
As a change of pace, I thought I'd post some pictures I took on my way to work today. This is Sydney in the middle of winter.
The view from my front door.
Crows can't read.
You're not supposed to walk through here, but everyone does. The alternative is to climb three flights of stairs to the road above, and then walk back downhill until the roads join up again.
The Department of Lands building.
The Department of Education building. This is Sydney sandstone. The whole city is built on this stuff, and many of the older buildings are also built of it. When it's kept clean, it's a wonderful golden colour, particularly in the afternoon sun.
The State Library, which is just across the road from where I work. Sadly there's nowhere to stand to take a good picture of it unless you want to get run over. (This is the only photo I took with a significant degree of zoom. It's quite noticeable, isn't it?)
Two great big marbles. The guy on the right is holding a Grace Bros bag.
The Domain. This park is directly across the road from my office. Unfortunately, the street is in shadow and my camera couldn't quite cope with the contrast here. I'll try taking more photos earlier in the day. Just off to the left are the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Sydney Opera House, so there's lots more photos to take. And a couple more that I didn't take this morning:
A waratah by night. The waratah is the State Flower of New South Wales. This example is in my brother's garden.
A hundred-foot tower made of sticky tape being destroyed by fire.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:08 AM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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