mhoye_blarg

http://exple.tive.org/blarg/?p=756

We took the Shinkansen from Kyoto back to Tokyo and it’s fast, it’s OMG fast. The line going the opposite way passes you on rails six feet away and so quickly, just a rush of air, one heartbeat and gone, a quarter-mile of train snapping away like a rubber band.

It’s basically impossible to take pictures of it, but if you like I can show you my white blur collection. I’m used to travelling on ViaRail in Canada, and the Kyoto Shinkansen trip was a bit of a long slow shock. Both cities are huge, Tokyo in particular is vast and high-density and the rail line runs mostly parallel to the coast, so instead of spending your time looking out the window at hours of forests and farmland there’s only about twenty minutes on the three hour trip that don’t feel like you’re rocketing through the middle of a city, scattered around in five-minute chunks. On the trip out from Tokyo, I just kept staring out the window at the passing buildings thinking, Jeebus, does this place ever end?

I’ve never seen a city like Tokyo before, and it’s hard to believe that it can exist at all as it is. 12 million people or so, and it’s clean enough that you could eat off the roads, none of which are in straight lines and many of which don’t even have names or even unique identifiers. But every morning it seemed like a brand new city had been cut out of its shrinkwrap and carefully placed around us, pristine and barely used; I felt like I’d have to be a powerful man with powerful enemies and a shadowy past just to be able to find somebody willing to put gum on a sidewalk.

The thing that kept reinforcing this impression was that a lot of the time Tokyo is quiet, eerily quiet. Step off a main road into any of the narrow, labyrinthine little streets that make up much of the city and you might as well have stepped onto the moon; the background hum you can hear in every city I’ve ever known is gone, baffled right down by the tall buildings and enthusiastically non-Roman road plan. So, is this when the ninjas jump out, I kept thinking? I can’t hear my theme music, so if they jump me now, I might not win.

Sadly I didn’t see any ninjas, but I suppose if I had they’d be sad ninjas indeed. Akihabara was enough of a letdown, I didn’t need to get randomly jumped by a bunch of second-rate martial artists. Next time, I’ll have to pack one of these, which I wouldn’t have thought would ever work, but now it’s hard to believe that it wouldn’t. I don’t think that I was more than twenty meters from a vending machine the entire trip.

But when we did find ourselves on a major road, near a train station or somewhere like Ginza or Harajuku, we’d find ourselves in the middle of a huge, noisy, frothing, enthusiastic mess of people, and every day it felt like I was in crowd surfing in the world’s most polite riot. Harajuku was particularly awesome, some of the finest people-watching in the world. There were weekend Elvises (one of whom had procured an enormous pink ‘57 Cadillac from somewhere), crunchy-looking Goth girls, elaborately coiffed Harajuku Maids, cosplayers and vending machines that served iced coffee and beer.

There was even what looked like an impromptu battle-of-the-bands going on, though whoever won that, it was a pyrrhic victory for sure. From what I could make out, there was some boy-band signing session going on nearby, so the cosplayers were out in force, hundreds where there would “normally” only be dozens. It hit me there that all fashion is a strict subset of cosplay, and that the people who embrace that will be able to push at boundaries the rest of us can’t even see, and make the world a lot more colorful, interesting and fun for all of us.

And it also occurred to me, as I was crossing a bridge beer in hand and patient wife in tow to take some pictures a horde of girls in goth-lolita outfits that life had somehow brought me to a point that I was in Japan with a beer in my hand and my wife humoring me as I went to take some pictures of a horde of girls in goth-lolita outfits, and I just started laughing , because being me is awesome.

jwz

DNA Lounge update, wherein we network with a socialness.

tskirvin
chambana

There are a bunch of good items (many of which are in very good shape, many of which aren't) at my house in Champaign. As I am not in Champaign anymore, I don't have access to them; but I want them out of the house ASAP. So, if you would like any of these, please give my mother (Margie) a call at 377-4554; they will be given away on Wednesday between 5 and 8pm:

• Couch
• dresser
• washer and dryer
• lawn mower (needs tune-up)
• 2 wooden desks
• 1 metal desk
• blue stuffed chair
• office chair
• several stacking padded kitchen chairs
• nightstand
• 2 coffee tables
• round end table
• several plastic patio chairs
• queen sized bed frame and headboard
• queen sized mattress and box springs
• double bed frame & headboard
• small bookcase
• black floor lamp
• brass floor lamp
• small artificial christmas tree
• ladder
• electric clothes steamer
• various cleaning items - brooms, mops
• garden tools

xkcd_rss

http://xkcd.com/423/

jwz

Am I being singled out, or is there a new plague of AIM bots going around? I used to get prodded by these stupid things every couple of weeks, but I've blocked a dozen of them in the last week. This time it's usually a bot with "salmon" in its name.

mhoye_blarg

http://exple.tive.org/blarg/?p=755

We’re home. No disrespect to our gracious hosts but two weeks away is slightly more than plenty, it turns out.

I’m well behind on my blogging, of course, and have to sort through several thousand pictures to figure out which ones are worthwhile, but the last few days in Japan and a week in Hong Kong are on the way.

patrissimo

Reality testing ... involves performing an action with results that will be different if the tester is dreaming. By practicing these tests during waking life, one may eventually decide to perform such a test while dreaming, which may fail and let the dreamer realize that they are dreaming. Common reality tests include:

* Looking at one's digital watch (remembering the time), looking away, and looking back. As with text, the time will probably have changed randomly and radically at the second glance or contain strange letters and characters. ...
* Flipping a light switch. Light levels rarely change as a result of the switch flipping in dreams.
* Looking into a mirror; in dreams, reflections from a mirror often appear to be blurred, distorted or incorrect.
* Looking at the ground beneath one's feet or at one's hands. If one does this within a dream the difference in appearance of the ground or one's hands from the normal waking state is often enough to alert the conscious to the dream state.

sueg

The ladybug Docs sold for $41.99.

caladri

• If you are going to use and require a programming style which is necessitate extra whitespace for aesthetic or "readability" reasons, it is absolutely key that you be entirely consistent in the use of that style. Once somebody warps their brain to accept the bizarre infix indentation of expressions, it will be jarring for them to run into code within, say, the same translation unit (i.e. file) which is different. One of the key requirements for implementing non-jarring, reliable code style rules are to come up with rules that are aligned with the syntax of the language itself, and which can be explained in a breath or two. For example, "newline at the end of every statement, no excessive parentheses, whitespace after any reserved keyword not at the end of a line and after commas and between all pairs of non-comma operators and non-operators, indent nested statements and blocks" is fairly logical and straightforward. "Newline at the end of every statement, excessive parentheses, whitespace after any reserved keyword not at the end of a line and after commas (ideally newlines after commas, with indentation to the same level as the opening parenthesis or brace the commas are inside, but sometimes not), whitespace after and before parentheses that "do something" (i.e. which are used to invoke a function or which are part of an if statement) and indent some assignments and all declarations to the same level as nearby assignments and declarations," however, is a bunch of shit that people will screw up and which reflects all sorts of things other than syntax, like a lot of indecision about whether to write if statements like a function call.


• Duplicated code has duplicated bugs. Duplicating code from a common code-path to an uncommon one leads to duplicated bugs that never get fixed in the uncommon path. You're old enough (i.e. over 12) to be able to architect your code to avoid duplication. Shim layers that always perform sets of calls to lower levels with a consistent set of checks in between, now single functions which are nearly identical can instead use systems of passing flags around, and an interface more granular, to require only implementing the real logic for each module. At the very least, reduce diffs between the common and uncommon code if possible. For example, don't do gratuitous variable renames (from the generic InfoPtr to the specific BlahBlahBlahBlahBlorkBlaxPtr) and reformatting of comments. Please. You'll thank yourself.


• You can create wrappers for any system feature you want in the name of portability, but I beg of you: do not create your own threading model. Unless you are laughing at the memory of all the bad home-grown threading models you've seen, you aren't ready. If you don't realize how futile and perilous it is, you aren't ready. Especially don't do it within a kernel that's had a good threading model for a few years and which has had a wonderful process model that you could've used instead since inception. Oh hooray yet another "cooperative threading by way of lots of macros and you-don't-want-to-know under the surface." I thought those were banned in the Geneva Conventions.


• Add an error code for "not yet implemented" for anything that can be triggered trivially by the remote end rather than an explicit panic of the system. Some of us don't like losing all of our work because (1) your tool didn't check its arguments (2) your kernel code didn't check its arguments (3) your kernel code has things unimplemented which it could fail on gracefully. Don't have a good error that it could return per the spec that you are so laboriously implementing? Have you met my friend SIGSYS? Fantastic! Much better than a panic. Kill the user process in a way that it can catch and turn into "huh, feature not yet implemented, chum" rather than fucking me over.

four

html(
  head(title("ryan's web page")) 
  body(
    h1("sign my guest book!")
    form(action="/guestbook",
      p(
        label(for="name", "name")
        input(name="name", type="text")
      )
      p(
        label(for="msg", "msg")
        textarea(name="msg", "")
      )
      input(type="submit",value="sign")
    )
    h2("here is a list of numbers!")
    ul( 5 repeat(j,
      li("item number #{j}" interpolate)
    ))
  )
)

jwz

smason wrote:

I wrote a Missile Command clone for the multi-touch wall at Obscura Digital. Just like the original, except you can fire by touching the wall with your fingers. Save the Golden Gate Bridge from ICBMs. Fun for the whole family!