Category: Personal

This novel from Australian writer Max Berry is a good companion to Iain Bank’s The Business, covering much the same thematic territory but more of an out and out satire and really none of the SF-ish suspenseful undertone. Both are entertaining, well-written and highly readable.

Company shows us a few months in the trenches at Zephyr Holdings through the eyes of newly-hired university graduate Stephen Jones. The cover art, a single large (glazed) donut, seems odd but is quite appropriate as one of the subplots threaded throughout much of the book is the question of who ate Roger’s donut on Jones’ first day.

Corporate underlings expending energy for months over this question ought to give you some ideas on Barry’s style of humor. Its used to illuminate the main plot, a complete mockery of the ever-changing, ever-pointless corporate management fads. Plus there’s lots of orange.

recommended

Tonight being the first night of Hannukah, TS1 and I exchanged gifts. Being incredibly thoughtful she gave me a longsleeve Liverpool FC home jersey with #6 on the back since John Arne Riise is my favorite player on the team these days. Him and his blasting Norwegian left foot! For the record, I gave her an armband sports sleeve for her iPod plus an iTunes gift card and a Green Day live CD/DVD pack, all of which I knew she wanted.

Nothing expensive, much less extravagent, but everything truly appreciated.

On the other hand I am getting truly sickened by the diamond and jewelry industry’s advertising. You know the commercials, such as the one where hubby sneaks out of bed to get a diamond gewgaw to drape artfully on the sleeping wife’s neck so that she wakes up seeing it. The huge expense proves, of course, his incredible love and devotion to her.

Really. Does that mean because I didn’t–and won’t–buy my wife useless rocks that she’s been brainwashed into thinking have terrific value I don’t really love her? Of course it doesn’t and fortunately for me she knows so. We can only wish that soon enough more people do and these sick, slick attempts at separating people from huge amounts of hard earned money stop.

You want to buy diamonds because they look great? Fine, no problem. I just can’t stand how easily people fall for this line of marketing crap.

Me, I’m more than happy with my jersey.

I enjoyed Walter Mosley’s novel, there can be no doubt he is one of the finest American writers actively working today, though I wonder if he reached all the way to the very high bar he set for himself with Fortunate Son. The craft of the book is impeccable, the story nearly as addictive as the more conventionally fortunate of the two main characters.

Mosley claims the book is an exploration of the true meaning of fortune, seen through the lives of two boys, self-proclaimed brothers. This is my only criticism, that in this exploration the author uses too many artifacts, people or events too close to ideal to happen in the real world.

Still, I couldn’t read Son fast enough. Two boys are born around the same time; one’s father runs when he finds out his girl is pregnant while the other’s mother dies in childbirth. The first is born sick, kept isolated in a bubble for the first six months at the hospital where the other’s dad is a heart surgeon. The parents meet and fall in love, sort of, and she and her boy move into the the doctor’s home in Beverly Hills.

Tommy and his mom are black while Eric and the doctor are white. Things are fine, for a few years, though Tommy is often sick or injured while Eric is healthy and a burgeoning athlete, and the boys are close as twins. The mom dies suddenly, in her sleep, and Tommy’s real father demands the child despite not really wanting him nor having the means to care for him. Tommy’s life falls apart while Eric’s shines. One becomes homeless and jailed, the other a golden boy who can have any girl–or woman–he wants.

Heartbreaking, thrilling, simply awesome.

recommended

Forbes.com asks How Much Privacy? in an article on the practices of online marketing research firm comScore. Apparently the firm tempts people into using their software with small rewards (gift cards and the like) so they can track web activity, correlate it with user-supplied demographics and sell the (aggregated) information to some very big name corporate clients. [via Slashdot]

Not my cup of tea but some single digit millions of my fellow Americans are okay enough with it to install the software. This begs the question of how well these folks understand what they’ve agreed to but caveat emptor, right?

Except that comScore goes just a bit further than most anyone but the geekiest will be able to understand. Their software, you see, inserts a root certificate authority into your Windows Registry (yay for us Macsters) which allows them to track your activity into otherwise secure websites. That is, after depending for years on the fact that when you see a URL beginning with https instead of http you’ve loaded a secure webpage for, say, online shopping or banking you no longer can feel so safe.

The root CA allows comScore to intercept whatever you send even over those seure http links. The company, of course, claims that they aren’t going to store or use any bank account or credit card numbers or passwords that passes through their software’s filter–which gets a crack at every page visited by their users. Perhaps they won’t.

Even if we’re to trust them, which is an increasingly unlikely proposition, how can one rely on the integrity of their own servers and network when its clearly a juicy target for the criminal types who are attempting to hack into as many potentially useful systems as they can manage?

Further, what if some black hat cracker decided to take a copy of the software, hack it to replace the address of the comScore server with one of their own and then put the package back out for download far and wide? By the time the victims realized what’s happened these criminals will have feasted on the ill-gotten data. Anyone who thinks comScore is going to take liability for such victimization, well, their the most likely folks to download the software.

Posting has been light this week because I’ve spent the time building a new site for the Jewish High Tech Community. First, credit where due, thanks to Andreas Viklund for making so many great designs available as open source as I used his andreas08 package for a very professional color scheme and layout (note that any red/reddish colors were added by me). Second, thanks to Chad Dickerson and his crew at Yahoo! Developer Network as I used the Yahoo! UI library for some nice Ajax effects: the future meetings popup and the in-place RSVP form/error message.

The site, behind the scenes, is much more complicated than necessary given the minimal content but I really was just looking for another technical exercise. All (well, 95+%) of the text you see is stored in a set of XML files, one for the common material and one to hold the material for each specific page. The pages are generated by one of the PHP classes, with common functionality like the header, footer and navigation menu abstracted to a parent class.

Given the nature of the site content, I decided to implement the hCalendar microformat on event pages. For now this is mostly meaningful as a learning exercise for me since the specification is not quite complete nor commonly used, although I expect microformats will gain traction fairly soon and users of the Tails extension for Firefox (or FlockTails for Flock), the Endo OS X aggregator or the Technorati Microformats Search will benefit already. Hat tip to Ryan King for clearing up a couple of questions for me.

I was a bit surprised at how unsimple PHP’s SimpleXML class turned out to be. The documentation could use a boost in explaining how to handle child collections and marked up text. By the former I mean multiple instances of the same type of element nested within a parent such as, in this context, several event elements inside the events element in the XML files that drive the past and future events lists. The latter refers to the near complete lack of mention that a CDATA directive must be used to alert PHP’s processor that the element contains (HTML) formatted text, or otherwise the markup is essentially ignored.

There’s still a bit more work to do but I wanted to push the new pages for the announcement of our exciting January 9 meeting. We have the aforementioned Chad, Evelyn Rodriguez, Anil Dash and Jason Hoffman presenting their forecasts for the likely important events we may see on the web in 2007 and then participating in a panel discussion of them.

Our events are free and open to all, so do join us if you have the time and inclination.

A standalone 1993 science fiction novel from Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background is the story of how Lady Sharrow and the remaining members of her military squad recover the last Lazy Gun before a religious cult kills her to fulfill a prophecy that will allow their messiah to come.

Banks sets this tale just a few years prior to the celebration of 10,000 years of human civilization on the planet Golter, though he makes little of this and the people–limited to the planets and moons of their solar system–seem to know nothing of Earth and think they originated on Golter. They aren’t particularly longlived nor do they seem to have passed through any technological singularity. This seems odd to me, as a literary element, but otherwise doesn’t detract from an excellent book.

As with The Algebraist Banks creates a hugely imaginative tableau and a plot that requires all of it. Golter itself is a huge world, reminding me of Robert Silverberg’s Majipoor in breadth and variety, but the true wonder is on a distant planet called Miykenns.

The not especially small world is home to a plant, a single living thing, naturally born/evolved (i.e., as far as these folks know, humans had nothing to do with its creation) named Extraxrln. This plant is over two million years old and spans several continents and oceans, so huge that after humans developed space flight they built cities and villages within and underneath it.

Sharrow, of course, is smarter than any 28 year old could really be, and her opponents, including one who’s managed to stretch his own lifespan to over 400, far less so. I can’t imagine any of you will be surprised to learn that she manages to survive all the traps and travails, and I don’t think it matters. What does is the meal of adventure we follow, and Dark Background is a sumptuous banquet.

recommended

One of my favorite webpages is the Futon Critic’s When Does (Insert Show) Come Back? This is the best source I know of for finding out when (or if) a particular series will be airing original episodes again. They try to be complete (Tripping the Rift is still listed, for example) though with a few surprising holes (why are some BBC America mysteries listed and not others). Still, there’s no other single page which gives a simple, comprehensive list like this.

Shows I’m looking forward and their airdates include:

• Rome: Jan. 7
• The L Word: Jan. 7
• 24: Jan. 14/15 (once again, Fox is doing the very neat four hour blockbuster intro)
• Monk: Jan. 19
• Stargate SG-1: March 2 (final season)
• The Sopranos: March 11 (final season)
• Entourage: March 11
• South Park: March 21 (Eleventh season, can you believe it?)
• The Shield: April 3 (final season?)
• The 4400: June 3
• Rescue Me: June 17
• Eureka: July 17

A couple of new shows caught my eye while I was checking network websites just now:

• Dirt, coming Jan. 2 on USA, features Courtney Cox as editor-in-chief of a sleazy celebrity tabloid. Ought to be interesting if Cox (who is also executive producer) can remember this is not just a hatchet job on paparazzi and their employers.
• Tin Man (tentative title) won’t be on SciFi until December of next year but the press release makes me think this re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz will be wild. Written by Steven Long Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle (creators of The Pretender, which I thought was underrated), this six hour miniseries will replace the fantasy of the original with science fiction versions.

Not better than the one JK Rowling gave him. So I’ll just send Rob Fahrni my best wishes on his latest birthday. Maybe she can give him another one next year by not killing off Harry in the last volume of her epic series.

Five straight wins over Notre Dame. 33 straight home wins. 20-0 in November in the Pete Carroll era. Five Pac-10 titles under Coach Carroll. Three of the past four Heisman Trophy winners, even if no one stood out enough this season to even earn a trip to the ceremony.

What a game tonight! Three touchdown drives to open the game before the Fighting Irish managed to get a field goal. John David Booty did have a letdown in the second quarter, throwing a couple of INTs, but cleared his head during the half and lead the crew to another TD on the opening drive of the third quarter.

Mike Jarret on offense–Pac-10 career receiving touchdown record holder–and Dallas Sarks on defense were the standouts, with ND QB Brady Quinn throwing for 274 and running for 74 more battling as hard as he could despite finishing with an 0-4 mark against us. Amazing play of the game has to be Brian Cushing, a linebacker turned defense end, who returned Notre Dame’s onside kick with 3:39 left in the game 42 yards for the final score–he caught the ball on the run and kept going, totally surprising the Irish kick defense.

Can’t overlook UCLA, but we ought to get a shot at Ohio State in the BCS title game on January 8, don’t you think? Fourth straight year we’re in the title mix.

I’m typing this from Caffe del Doge on University Ave in Palo Alto a little before 9 a.m. and I’ve already been awake for 5+ hours on this ultimate American holiday. This is atypical for me but yesterday during tofurkey dinner the Big Guy mentioned he was going to Microcenter to try and grab a 37″ LCD HD TV for $500 (after rebate, natch). He wouldn’t mind the company if I wanted to go along, especially since our 4Runner was a better transport than his Corolla.

So I picked him up at 4:00 a.m. When we arrived he counted off the line as we strolled from the door to the end; only approximately 650 folks in front of us but a salesperson had assured him Wednesday they had plenty of stock waiting. I’d somehow gotten the notion the doors were opening at 5, incorrect, it was 6, but they opened 30 minutes early, a good thing since I wasn’t quite dressed warmly enough for the pre-dawn chill.

Once the line started flowing, and at a decent clip, my spirits picked up (and the Starbucks coffee helped). After moving about halfway to the door we stopped for awhile and I started hearing chatter. The TVs and $199 laptops, the two big draws, were going fast and you needed a coupon store staff were handing out up front to buy either.

I walked up to investigate and found out this was true and that all the coupons were gone–not that any staffers were going to walk back and inform the out of luck crowd. No one wants to give bad news and I can’t blame the low pay employees who’d gotten up even earlier than me for not wanting to deal with potentially angry customers, though it would have been nice.

Stores are finding it difficult to rise above the noise level now that this day has its own name and budding personal traditions. Target for instance hired goofball David Blaine to perform a stomach churning stunt but that alone, the managers realized, wouldn’t be enough so they topped it off with $500 shopping sprees for 100 local poor children if Blaine was able to complete his stunt by opening time this morning. He did, so nice for the kids, but how he handled being spun eight times a minute in a gyroscope is beyond me.

Now I’m waiting for the Apple Store to open in a few minutes. Ear buds for me and a Nano sport jacket for TS1 to be bought. She’s already left on the train to San Francisco for her own indulgences. Happy Black Friday to you all!

P.S. I did get Shure E2C ear buds at 20% off and the armband as well.

I try to be grateful every day for the good things in my life, of which there are many, and even the absence of bad things, ditto. Reading Anil Dash’s blog entry about the recent Michael Richards fiasco reminded me that I’m probably extremely unaware of just how many bad things I’ve missed out on from being a white upper middle class American. So thanks, Anil.

Recent issues of Analog have featured quite a few stories that seem to be just this side of metaphorical hammer smashing on head propounding the idea that humanity is reaching/has reached a critical point in our collective social/psychological development–and if someone as dense in this regard as me is picking up on this, they really must be doing it intentionally.

The message I get is we ought to realize that humans have accomplished an incredible amount of good over the millenia of acculteration, despite being emotional, imperfect beings and yet we still depend on the imposition of outside force to avoid our worst natures. That force can be physical, police or military, or psychological, laws or religious teachings or etiquette or group pressure, but without them we’d almost certainly be back to the behaviors of our pre-historic forebears.

In fact, we need to realize this positive aspect and rid ourselves of the reliance on outside control very soon or else. Stories in science fiction magazines rarely position the danger in the form of present-day specifics, using aliens or setting the story in the future, and often tell the tales with a heroic protagonist securing a positive outcome but real world events and forseeable developments are not so easily scripted.

Perhaps I’ve read my own thinking into these authors’ intentions. Maybe I see too much news about North Korea and Iran developing nuclear weapons, the prospect that marine life will die off within 50 years, warring tribes in the Sudan continue slaughtering each other, huge sections of the Antarctic ice caps are calving off and more of the Greenland and Artic ice are melting an not refreezing each summer, children being held captive by sexual predators and the absolutely poisonous political atmosphere here in the USA.

Perhaps all that negativity is exacerbated by my own psychopathology and the reality is that scientists will develop technical solutions to the worst of the potential ecological and military catastrophes. That leaders will finally come to the fore with convincing platforms that bridge the gaps between Republicans and Democrats and Arabs and Jews and rich and poor nations, at least enough to make longstanding conflicts managable.

Perhaps; I certainly hope so. In the meantime I’m thankful for living where I do, as I do and with who I do.

I was pleasantly surprised on answering the phone Monday afternoon to hear that Miami Steve was repaired and ready to come home, the work having taken only three business days to complete rather than the stated seven to ten. I wasn’t as lucky as I might have been as the techs couldn’t save any of the files from the crashed hard drive, but this was not to unexpected.

Firing the machine up everything seemed in order so I began the process of reinstalling all the software and restoring my data. First thing I found was that my backup process had a few holes–none resulting in terrible losses but a few small Rails projects and miscellaneous documents gone and also I couldn’t remember every last application and utility that had been installed. One change I made already is to keep all the downloaded application files for future reinstallation needs.

More significantly, Ximeta NDAS Mac drivers are still in beta three months after I first got a copy. Because of this they are not posted for download but one must request them via email and I didn’t get mine in before they left for the day. So while my backup files were in place, I couldn’t directly access them! I found a workaround, using the connection TS1’s Windows PC has to the box, but it was incredibly s-l-o-w.

The gnarliest problem was bringing iTunes back in sync with Thunder Road, my iPod. Not the music files, they were all on the Ximeta drive, but the playlist which controls my workout music. Apple’s support website was really no help at all in finding a solution–don’t even think that this scenario is covered in the user manual–but I did find some inexpensive or free apps that helped.

The one which really did the best for me is Senuti, a GPL project developed by Whitney Young, which was the one of the three that (as far as I could tell) would recreate the playlist and not just copy the songs. Of course after Senuti did its job iTunes insisted on erasing and resyncing the entire set of files, but what the hay.

A few days ago I asked “Are Americans really this sick?” after finding out that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. planned to publish a book by O.J. Simpson title If I Did It through its HarperCollins unit and air a two part primetime TV interview with the murderer on its Fox network.

Happily, I read this afternoon that the backlash against these inexplicable products has worked, that greed-driven appeals to the most base instincts don’t always succeed. “I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” Murdoch said today.

Then again, perhaps the company was simply acknowledging reality as more than a dozen affiliates decided not to air the shows, one of the major chains agreed to donate any profits to a relevant charity and even its own star staffers announced their disgust along with plans to boycott any advertisers.

I noticed this first on Google–though I’m sure Yahoo! and Microsoft will get it in place soon enough–a development in online maps that impresses me as the most truly useful since they figured out how to show driving directions. Click to call in Google Maps means when you search for a location and then look for nearby businesses (hotels, hardware stores, pizzerias), you can have Google make the phone call to any of those businesses for you.

The first time you have to enter your own phone number but the Big G stores it for future use (in a browser cookie, so using a different PC means re-entering it). The House of Larry and Sergey also picks up the cost of the call, local or long distance, although cellphone airtime charges are on you. Calling residences through Click to Call doesn’t seem to be a possibility, at least for now, and according to the related privacy party they don’t store your phone number or who you call any longer than necessary, presumably this is the same standard as with storing search history.

One could argue that mashups, like Zillow or Chicago Crime, or the addition of satellite images were huge innovations and I wouldn’t disagree, but none of them seem as fundamentally, generally useful as searching for businesses by geography and with one click getting them on the phone.

No, I’m not intentionally referring to Richard Adams’ classic novel. Miami Steve, my less than three month old MacBook, which was doing so well, pretty much, shut down last night. None of the diagnostics helped and reinstalling the system software wasn’t an option since the hard drive isn’t visible to the Installer DVD.

In fact I had to bring it to the Apple Store this morning where it will–at the least–get a new hard drive and internal top case. Miami Steve suffers from the discoloration malady, might as well remedy it as well while the repairmen have it. Given my multiple deaths experience with Little Steven, the Toshiba laptop I previously used (and am temporarily booting now as well), I sure hope the tech does deep diagnostics to determine what caused the failure.

While the computer failing so soon after purchase is disappointing enough, I’m also seriously unhappy that, considering I paid for the extended warranty, for the 7-10 day quoted repair period Apple does not supply a loaner. I’ve been using iBackup and so hopefully the restore won’t be too painful.

The significantly less expensive Toshiba/Fry’s extended warranty provided for one any time the box was in their hands more than 24 hours. With the two day Thanksgiving holiday coming up in seven days, the odds that Miami Steve will be home to celebrate with us seem sadly small.

Fox has announced they will air a two part special in two weeks during which OJ Simpson will explain how he would have murdered Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. If he’d been the actual killer. Rather than had a highly paid team of lawyers who used every trick in the book to obfuscate the truth of what happened (I’m not saying he’s guilty, though I think it highly likely, but that we’ll never really know because his lawyers made it impossible).

Speaking of books, the reason for this special, or at least the timing of it, is that the next day HarperCollins, Fox’s publishing division, will release If I Did It, in which OJ goes into book-length detail his theories about the crime. The TV show has him interviewed by Judith Reagan, the book’s publisher.

Another straw in the basket. I won’t be watching the show or reading the book and I sure hope none of you will.

After a strong run the Reds came up against another of the big 4 and were once again bodyslammed. The team were able to hold Thierry Henry and Co. at bay for 40 minutes, allowing the Gunners most of the possession but no strong goal chances and making the most of their counterattacking opportunities.

Then Spanish teenage star Cesc Fabregas slid a cross to the feet of onrushing Mathieu Flamini and he pushed the ball the last two yards in, with Pepe Reina having no chance at a stop; the other two goals were from the two center backs, Toure and Gallas, on some very poor defending. Meanwhile the Reds best chance was from Peter Crouch, who knocked one in from an offside position and for the rest really never troubled last-minute sub keeper Manuel Almunia.

The result continues Liverpool’s terrible away form in League matches. The team’s only managed one goal in six matches, for a draw against Sheffield United on opening day–one point out of a possible 18–and leaves them 14 points off leader Manchester United and completely out of the title race once again. One does wonder whether Rafa Benitez will finally settle on a consistent first choice XI, with Gerrard in the center, now that Sissoko is out for months and Zenden is clearly better suited on the wing.

Fortunately the Reds are only four points back of fourth place Aston Villa, with all the teams in between reasonably climbable, and remain within reach of Champions League qualification. Though of course they can repeat their 2005 CL trophy hoisting and qualify through that route too 😉

But are network TV commercial breaks getting longer lately? I try and use Tivo as much as possible to at least start watching 10 minutes or so into an hour show but it isn’t always possible. Tonight, for instance, I’m watching Heroes in a hotel room and the breaks seem just endless. More on why I’m in a hotel room another time, though it isn’t for any bad reason…