Page of Moss - bloglet for Tuesday 25 June 2002

I think we've reached the limit of what we can learn about thinking by looking at computers. If we want to learn more about the material aspects of thinking, the thing to look at is the brain. (And yes, there certainly are a lot of people doing exactly that. And of course, it's possible that after we've looked at the brain more, we'll come up with other productive things to do with computers.) _
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07:42:18 PM, Tuesday 25 June 2002

Jaron Lanier may be more intelligent than I'd thought. _
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06:49:06 PM, Tuesday 25 June 2002

We do not even begin to understand what matter is. _
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06:34:49 PM, Tuesday 25 June 2002

Sheep? _
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04:37:16 PM, Tuesday 25 June 2002

There shall be rocking out. Oh yes, there shall be rocking out.

[found via evhead] _
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03:30:32 PM, Tuesday 25 June 2002

Ow! I bit the tip of my tongue! _
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02:40:21 PM, Tuesday 25 June 2002

Beware the ides of July. _
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03:42:12 PM, Monday 24 June 2002

Blah. Forgot to escape things. Fixed. _
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03:37:05 PM, Monday 24 June 2002

To separate an html document into multiple files based on named anchors within the document:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$name = "head";

open ENTRY, ">$name";

while(<>) {
    if (/<a name="(.+)">/) {
        close ENTRY;
        $name = $1;
        open ENTRY, ">$name";
    }
    print ENTRY $_;
}

close ENTRY;

This is useful if, for example, you want to separate all the entries in a weblog into separate files. _
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03:18:45 PM, Monday 24 June 2002

If you put off making a decision long enough, it will usually make itself. Will it be the decision you would have made? Who knows! That's purely hypothetical--there's no reason to worry about it! _
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08:42:44 PM, Sunday 23 June 2002

The idea that global warming is not seriously affected by human activity is considerably more pessimistic than the idea that we are doing a lot to increase it, because if we're not affecting it, then we can't control it, and it's still bad news for us. _
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02:09:42 AM, Sunday 23 June 2002

And this is another, more interesting, test. _
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01:31:07 AM, Sunday 23 June 2002

This is a test. _
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01:30:51 AM, Sunday 23 June 2002

I don't think I want that button on my blog. _
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08:39:08 PM, Saturday 22 June 2002

Yeah, that'll work. _
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08:37:51 PM, Saturday 22 June 2002

hmm... _
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08:37:04 PM, Saturday 22 June 2002

This is a test. _
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08:34:26 PM, Saturday 22 June 2002

This is what a dystopian future would look like if it were designed by Apple. _
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02:19:37 AM, Saturday 22 June 2002

I just saw Minority Report, and I'm very impressed. I think it was a better Philip K. Dick adaptation than Bladerunner, though I'll have to read the original story to say for sure. Certainly it seemed truer to his way of thinking.

This is the future we are building for ourselves. It uses a million tiny gadgets to produce nothing more than madness and degradation, the destruction of all that is subtle and beautiful in the human spirit, and it's all so covered over with plastic elegance that nobody can even see that anything's wrong.

It would be a good movie to think about, but I am afraid few people will think about it. It will be an entertainment, nothing more.

I thought it was a bit weak in some spots, but overall it was real good. Y'all should see it. _
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01:59:34 AM, Saturday 22 June 2002

By way of comparison, my current account on a shared server costs $30/month. _
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05:33:07 PM, Friday 21 June 2002

$89 with 1 year prepay, FreeBSD an option, seems sleazier than the last one but also slightly cheaper. _
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05:28:24 PM, Friday 21 June 2002

This looks interesting. Dedicated FreeBSD server, $99 a month. Nice and geeky. _
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05:22:43 PM, Friday 21 June 2002

Learn about garbage collection.

I tend to write in scripting languages that do memory management for me automatically. I wouldn't want to spend much time doing manual memory management, but it is nice to have a better idea of what's going on behind the scenes when it's automatic. _
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02:58:21 PM, Friday 21 June 2002

I'm pretty sure that I'm going to make Wobble support subnamespaces eventually--multiple named blogs underneath a single main blog. However, it's not important enough to be worth building in the first round. It would only slow me down.

This means that I'm going to have to add subnamespaces onto a system that was designed to support only a single, flat namespace. That's a fairly substantial change. Doing it right will be an interesting challenge. I think Wobble is written well enough that it won't be too hard to do, so I'm looking forward to it. _
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02:14:08 PM, Friday 21 June 2002

Showing content first is one of the big reasons I use CSS for layout on my page, but now it looks like there's a way to get the same effect with table-based layouts. I would urge any of you who use tables for layout to do this. If nothing else, it will make me happier when I browse your page in Lynx. _
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01:22:21 PM, Friday 21 June 2002

Just so I'll remember in the morning:
If a simulation is modelled at a fairly high level of abstraction, it will more easily be able to reproduce the phenomenon that it simulates. However, it will also be less likely to realistically model other, associated, phenomena, because it represents less of the common underlying cause. For example, a gravitation simulator based on a Galilean concept of gravity is easy to write, and will do quite well at simulating gravity close to the earth's surface, but will entirely fail to predict planetary orbits. _
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05:42:07 AM, Friday 21 June 2002

Here's the thing about A.I.: I don't think David's love is real, any more than he himself is real. He (it) is a machine, a cunningly made automaton, built to simulate the behaviors that inspire a loving response from others. He is an artificial child, built to satisfy his parents. He has no thoughts, no feelings, no desires, only a complex set of programmed responses to give off a powerful feeling of neediness. So yeah, I really liked the movie, but I think I may have kind of an unusual take on it. It's not David's-story-of-suffering-and-redemption, it's the story of what an artifact like David does to the world around it. It's the story of the mechanicalization of human feelings--the transformation of emotion into sentimentality.

I'm not sure Spielberg would agree with all that, though. _
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10:06:21 PM, Thursday 20 June 2002

Hmm... I find it easier to listen to people than to talk to people, but I find either listening to people or talking to people easier than actually conversing with people. That's interesting. _
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07:58:29 PM, Thursday 20 June 2002

In the not-immediate-but-soon future of Wobble (after I've got the basic program running with its core features in place, that is--probably around milestone 3 or 4 (at some point I need to write up the next couple of milestones, maybe)), I'm planning to make it incorporate its own webserver. This would make it convenient to run a Wobble weblog directly on a desktop machine, which I can see being useful for a number of things. In particular, I'd like to use it at work to keep notes on some of my programming stuff here. Anyway, I've just been looking a bit at Twisted Matrix, and I think I'll definitely use it to do the server when the time comes for it. It's a nice platform because it incorporates a bunch of different servers, so I could incorporate, for example, an instant messenger interface to the data in Wobble. I'll try to put together some notes later on why precisely this seems like such a good idea to me. _
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07:30:24 PM, Thursday 20 June 2002

Are you the brain specialist? _
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06:30:24 PM, Thursday 20 June 2002

What Moss is:
1. writing a cultural history of sport for HarperCollins.
2. a significant improvement over other cheating detection algorithms (at least, over those known to us).
3. an automatic system for determining the similarity of two C, C++, Java, or ML programs.
4. the author of eleven books and three documentaries on cancer-related topics.
5. a columnist residing in Nashville, TN
6. by no means restricted to the snooker table
7. actually a lichen.
8. a punter of Screenarts
9. a member of the IUBMB-Nomenclature Committee
10. Omnifit production director
11. BEAUTIFUL!!!
12. closely related to Spanish moss
13. voted in as President of The Brooklands Society
14. used in the floral industry to line wire baskets and make wreaths.
15. used as a soil conditioner by gardeners.
16. no longer considered a nuisance plant by those in the know.
17. One Proud Bear
18. more likely to be hidden under snow BETWEEN the rocks.
19. a freelance writer

(Original idea borrowed from your friend and mine, Martin Marks.) _
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03:34:40 PM, Thursday 20 June 2002

JavaScript makes me cry. _
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05:22:03 PM, Wednesday 19 June 2002

I'd been contemplating shifting phase for a couple of weeks, but I wasn't expecting to do it without trying. To bed at eight last night ('cause I was too sleepy to do anything else), up about half an hour ago ('cause I woke up). Weird. _
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08:06:39 AM, Tuesday 18 June 2002

"Heavens to Betsy! After all these weeks! My missing sock!" _
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09:26:25 PM, Monday 17 June 2002

My next big hack is going to be written in Ruby. _
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07:04:59 PM, Monday 17 June 2002

From now on, if I ever see a group of people playing the Vampyre LARP, I think I will have no choice but to refer to them as The All-You-Can-Eat Moron Bar. _
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04:51:10 AM, Saturday 15 June 2002

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