BillSaysThis

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…

Gotta love the artistic imagination. Today’s example mixes up the many colored polyeurethane ’cause’ bracelets with the ignominious Bush Administration secret detention tactics into American Gulag:

Easily worth the $16.95 price, I think, especially since a portion of the proceeds goes “to a human rights organization dedicated to fighting these injustices.”

Pardon me if this entry is a bit trite, the emotions are honest and I’ll try to be brief. Life is a series of coincidences, each built on those before it. Go to this dance on that night or you won’t meet the love of your life, this is a simplistic example.

But it goes much deeper: the hobbies and interests you pick up as a child, along with your school record (and family finances), determine what college you can attend, the college makes a huge difference in what work you can get afterwards. So make sure your kids pick a useful hobby, its too late for us now, eh? Still, this only a moderately complex example.

Today marks five years since first met my sweet Vivian, for which I cannot begin to explain how fortunate I am. But I met her only because (a) I was going up to San Francisco to a party at my friend Joel’s apartment and (b) I was at loose ends in late summer of 2001 and Microsoft had not yet started charging for participating in their chat rooms.

The event path that lead to those two things, including my being available to meet someone new, at just that moment in time is overwhelmingly complex. It’s like the mazes printed on kid’s paper placemats in chain restaurants, except this maze would take all the placemats in all the California Denny’s for the entire month of October. Or at least I like to think so.

No matter. What does matter is that I’ve had five terrific years with Vivian and hope to have many, many more.

I know, the EPL is 25% done and where are my Liverpool posts?! Ask Fox Soccer Channel, who betrayed American fans by selling almost all of the best games to an outfit with trivial distribution and who respond to emails on the subject with a huge line of bull.

“Please bear in mind that one of the primary goals of our partnership with Setanta Sports was to bring even more EPL matches to viewers each week. We cannot say for certain whether Setanta will be available on your cable system any time soon, but we can assure that not all of the marquee matches have gone to them.”

Anyway, this morning we get the Reds for the first time and a decent matchup at that. Aston Villa are the last team in the league, coming in, to have not yet lost a game, three wins and six draws for 15 points and seventh place in the table, and manager Martin O’Neill bringing a similar personal record, having never lost at Anfield.

The first half was all one way–our way! The finishing wasn’t there for the first half hour, with Riise and Garcia putting a few into the stands, but most of the play was in the Villa end and then suddenly the boys pushed three goals in the netting over the next 12 minutes.

Dirk Kuyt got the first one off some nice buildup, tapping the ball down towards the top of the box and kicking it past Thomas Sorenson into the far corner. The pressure continued, giving us a couple of corners, and then in the 37th minute Crouchie lashed out his long right leg just past a defender and banged the football awkwardly inches passed a diving Sorenson’s fingers. The first half scoring ended with Luis Garcia getting free at the far post, the Villans defense completely muddled, leaving the winger to slide the ball underneath the keeper.

Not surprisingly O’Neill made two changes to start the second half, bringing on Didier Agathe and Chris Sutton in place of Milan Baros and Juan Pablo Angel to try to get some pace up front. The switch paid off in the early going as play and possession were much more even and ten minutes in rising young star Gabby Agbonlahor took a nice pass from Sutton at the top center of the 18 yard box and scored. In midweek against Reading in a Carling Cup match the Reds also had a good lead, barely hanging on for a 4-3 win, so I always wonder if there’s such a thing as a safe lead for this team.

Maybe. Certainly the goal woke up the boys though over the next ten minutes their hard work only got them a couple of shots over the top or easily into Sorenson’s arms. A free kick from a hard angle to the right side of goal from Gareth Barry to Sutton’s lunging head did force Pepe Reina to make a terrific stop but the resulting corner was wasted. Reina’s goalkeeping has taken a great deal of criticism this year but today, and in the two Champions League matches I saw earlier, his play has been effective.

Twenty-ish more minutes of very aggressive football through the end but no more scoring. The best chance fell to Robbie Fowler, on as a substitute for his 350th appearance with the Reds, just to the left of goal but he nicked the ball at too much of an angle and it went behind for a goal kick.

An impressive performance by the Reds in front of a roaring home crowd with goals from three different attackers, two good saves by Pepe Reina and very strong defending from what I consider the first choice back line of Riise, Hyypia, Carragher and Finnan. French side Bordeaux visit on Tuesday for a CL match; a victory will give us 10 points on four matches and almost certainly clinch advancement to the knockout rounds, especially if PSV Eindhoven get a result against Galatasaray.

Looking ahead in the EPL, the Reds have a good chance to move well into the top half of the table (they were eleventh before today but should move to eigth place) by the end of 2006 with the upcoming matches coming against Reading (also being shown on FSC), Arsenal, Middlesbrough, Manchester City, Portsmouth, Wigan, Fullham, Charlton, Watford, Blackburn and Tottenham. Good play and good luck could result in well over 20 of these thirty possible points!

As yet another little programming exercise (using Eris’s Ngeblog library) I created an RSS 2.0 feed of just my book reviews. The intial impetus came from reading Kris Hadlock’s article Creating a Custom RSS Feed with PHP and MySQL though my code is substantially different since I already had the key data in my own table schema and, of course, use the Blogger GData API to pull in the full post body as description.

You may notice that the feed is served through FeedBurner; I used their service to make it more accessible and also because to do so I had to go through the exercise of making it validate, which was a bit of a PITA but just more learning for me.

Enjoy!

As author Vernor Vinge subtitles it, this is a “novel with one foot set in the future.” Though he’s won four Hugo Awards already, two for novels and two for stories, nearly all his work to date has been set in distant futures and Rainbow’s End is Vinge’s first novel set so close to the present, only two decades fom now.

In fact, with minors exceptions, nearly all of his fiction until now has been concerned more or less directly with the Singularity, a concept he named and solidified from various strands of thought that were bouncing around between academics and science fiction authors, going back to John von Neumann 40 years earlier, in a seminal 1993 paper. But this book is not about the Singularity, though perhaps positing some precursors, so I’ll move on.

In Vinge’s near future there are several key technical developments which figure prominently in Rainbow’s End:

• Computing power has continued its march to ever greater speeds, and smaller forms, so that it’s embedded in clothing and projects the display onto special contact lenses.
• Connectivity is ubiquitous and fast enough for realistic telepresence–people on opposite sides of the planet can appear to each other to be sitting across a desk.
• Software allows hundreds or thousands of analysts to work concurrently on the same question without overwhelming the individual ‘manager’ who can even guide and reassign groups of analysts in real time.
• Biotech can cure most diseases, including old age.

Each of these elements come together in this tale as it opens with leaders of several multi-national intelligence agencies fear that someone (or some nation) has developed You Gotta Believe Me, the ultimate advertising biotechnology. Once infected, the name is literally true. The three spies, one each from India, Europe and Japan, narrow the possible labs where it’s being developed to UC San Diego, most likely under the control of the American government. A new, unknown, untraceable individual called Mr. Rabbit agrees to manage the infiltration of the lab even though the spies are very wary of him.

Robert Gu, a reknown poet just barely recovered from Alzheimer’s disease, has moved in with his son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter in their suburban San Diego home. The husband and wife are senior Marine officers and the daughter attends Fairmont High School, where a rejuvenated Robert also studies so he can learn how to handle all the tech and find a way to contribute again to society. Gu was quite the mean bastard before falling ill, driving away his wife and alienating his only son, and Vinge shows us that he was smart enough to understand and take pleasure from being nasty.

Gu and several of his fellow retreads are, unknown to each other, contacted by Mr. Rabbit and agree to work for him in exchange for something of great personal value; in Gu’s case the reward is a medical treatment that will restore his creativity, lost to him in the Alzheimer’s cure.

(Bonus: Excellent interview Vinge gave during the publication publicity tour.)

Vinge crashes all this together magnificently, with cultural and technical complications so profuse I cannot do more than mention the highlights. He doesn’t ignore the political trends seen today in the Middle East but instead shows a rational way in which, for the most part, they’re overcome. Rainbow’s End isn’t a long book, just a few pages longer than Widow’s Walk, but it’s amazingly dense, on par with Iain Banks’ The Algrebraist in nearly every way but much more real.

definitely recommended

White Butterfly is the third published Easy Rawlins mystery novel, originally released in 1992. With it Walter Mosley proved he belonged in the top rank of genre authors as he combines a harsh who done it and the harsh reality of black life in 1950s America. Being white the depths of that reality are difficult to accept but I think that’s exactly the point. Frightening.

Rawlins is no detective but knows both sides of the tracks in Los Angeles so the police call on him to help solve a series of murders. The first three were black party girls and drew little official attention but the fourth, though found in the same bad part of town, is a white UCLA coed whose father is a local prosecutor. Now the cops are very attentive.

Our protagonist has his own problems to deal with, a growing void at the heart of his marriage, his eight year old adopted son still refuses to speak and some cutthroat real estate developers who want to cut themselves in on a block of land he owns. Yet he understands that the cops will hurt him, directly or through friends, if he doesn’t help catch the killer. Plus he can’t get the image of the third victim’s body out of his dreams.

Mosley is masterful in building his characters. Easy Rawlins, in his mid-30s as this story unfolds, rushes from fire to fire but always keeps his eye on what’s most important to him. He’s also the narrator of the story so we get to read his eloquent thoughts, quite frequently on how the color of his skin is factored into everything else. But Mosley does not tell a dreary tale, all complaints and hardships, his writing is powerfully emotional.

recommended

Spenser is the ultimate in modern hard-boiled PIs. A former cop who works for anyone that needs an answer, he knows Massachusetts and fine cooking as well as he does the Boston underworld. He loves Susan Silverman above all, though the truth seems to run a close second.

Widow’s Walk is a story that tests his allegiance to both. Right at the start he’s hired by Rita Fiore, the beautiful lawyer who won’t give up on wooing him away from Susan, to help her defend Mary Smith against the charge that Mary murdered her older, very wealthy husband. Will Spenser do what his client needs or confirm what his old pals on the Homicide squad, Quirk and Nelson, believe?

Spenser novels are not intended to challenge the reader unless one insists on trying to guess the twists that Robert Parker always includes, which I’ve never felt was a good way to enjoy a book. They are savory confections whose pleasures come from witty, and sometimes poignant, dialog, intense local coloring and a heaping serving of comeuppance from characters who may not be guilty of the crime in question but are definitely arrogant enough that Spenser or Hawk need only apply a bit of pressure to take a fall.

recommended

I’ve been working closely with Eris all week on moving his new class library to production quality, and he’s now put out v0.1. Its been really enjoyable, not the least because he’s very open to my feedback and code suggestions. If you’re still using the class library that Beau Lebens and I put together a few years back I highly recommend you grab this and start moving your code over. While your client code will definitely change you should be able to keep all existing functionality.

Joe Haldeman summarizes this novel thusly: “Camouflage, published in August 2004, is a hard-sf novel about a couple of aliens, a couple of people, a couple of cultures — and the uncoupling of reality from something larger.” I have to say, the last segment of his sentence took a bit of thinking for me to agree with, and while it is true it hardly seems worthy of such a large fraction of the whole.

Haldeman has interesting conceit for this story but I’m not sure he used the best approach to tell it. Two immortal aliens, unknown to each other and apparently from different worlds (we’re only given the origin of one), are able to take human form and change it more or less at will. One has spent eons in the oceans as various forms of aquatic life and comes ashore in California in 1932; one has been around since pre-historical times and can only be human form, he’s been pretty much everything under the sun but in the post-WWII era lives in the US and accumulates a huge fortune.

In 2019 a Navy sub goes down in a deep Pacific trench and during the rescue an Admiral, also a famous oceanographer, discovers an impossible artifact beneath a mature coral reef. A sphere the size of a tank, metallic, so heavy its material density is at least three times that of uranium. The Admiral resigns his commission and partners with the owner of a company which specializes is surfacing large sunken objects and they bring it ashore in Independent Samoa.

Whatever this thing is, it cannot be of human or natural manufacture. The scientists make many attempts to cut off even a tiny piece of it and then try to communicate with it, all unsuccessful until just before the end of the book. I’m not giving a spoiler to say that the object belongs to one of the aliens as Haldeman makes this clear in the opening chapter, but the twist is that the alien doesn’t remember it. Eventually, of course, it does and the two aliens have their only confrontation.

There are three key weaknesses in Camouflage even though its an enjoyable read. First, I think the third person omniscient is the wrong perspective because it removes much of the potential emotional energy. Second, the book alternates between the ‘present day’ (2019-2020, that is) and retelling the adventures of the alien who came ashore in 1932 and, aside from the physical possibilities offered by it’s shapeshifting, has little originality to offer compared to most ‘stranger in a strange land’ stories; as good a writer as Haldeman is, he doesn’t come close here to competing with Heinlein’s novel of that name.

Finally, the climax is tepid. The two aliens briefly tangle, exchange a few barbs, the one who came in the ship says just the right thing and the ship reacts, ending the confrontation. And Haldeman never explains why it happened, other than a short sentence saying the losing alien “obviously shouldn’t be allowed to stay here. We’ll take him home for study.”

Sadly this is the second novel of his I’ve read this year which gets my rating of:

not recommended

I’ve been involved with the Blogger API since it first became publicly available well before Google bought Pyra Labs but it never really got the general availability seal of approval. After Google bought the company it decided that ATOM was preferrable, being more of an industry standard. This was back when ATOM was at the 0.3 stage and even though 1.0 was approved quite some time ago Google didn’t move to it very quickly.

However, now that the Blogger overhaul is in beta they’ve unveiled the Blogger variant of their GData API, which is closely based on ATOM 1.0. I was going to take a whack at updating the old class library but Eris Ristemena has got a PHP implementation out already, saving me the trouble. Since the Blogger folks have said that the support for the old Blogger API will be going away shortly after Blogger goes out of beta this is very definitely a good thing.

While the initial release did not include the ability to retrieve a single specific post, which is my primary use, this morning he let me know the 0.0.2 version was published and has this function so I rewrote my utility function to use it. You can see it in action on the Book Reviews page (just click any book title to see the review open in place) or on any single review page (for example), though the code does seem to need a little more testing–not sure if the problem is with the Blogger server side or Eris’s code, but there is definitely an inconsistency over different posts.

Sweet!

Skinner Layne, in an article from June that escaped my attention until now called The Post-Modern Rhetoric of High Technology, does something that truly amazes me: He uses the philosophical break between the Enlightenment and postmodernism as a model for the murk which is Web 2.0. In general, the Slashdot snarksters were not impressed with Layne’s analysis and never having really grasped postmodernism myself I will not attempt to counter them.

Still, the argument does seem to have some legs in two regards. First, my own confusion regarding this school of thought is fairly common; Web 2.0 is similarly confusing and difficult to define consistently. Second, if something is “post-modern,” what does it say about that thing that it’s own proponents cannot proffer a name that defines the thing on it’s own terms? Web 2.0 is also not defined by its core attributes but by what came before.

Mostly I’m just impressed that a geek would have conceived of the connection, though a just out of school a 24 year old involved in both politics and web development is probably the most likely to do so.

Just something to do while watching a fairly uninteresting Everton-Sheffield United match (thanks again, FSC), I made up this short conversation between our old beta fish Zorro and a friend using Teh Bubble Generator:

In a clear sign of his maturing talent, Ken Macleod put aside the hard-edged singularity science fiction that is the hallmark of his earlier novels and focused on the emotions of human interaction in 2005’s Learning the World. His effort was recognized, as the novel was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the sf equivalent of the Best Film Oscar, and won the Prometheus Award (okay, not quite as prestigious, this is given to the best libertarian science fiction novel of the year).

14,000 odd years from now humanity has spread through solar systems spanning hundreds of light years but never cracked the light speed barrier so that travel and communications are effectively one way. Thousands of people contract together to travel to new systems in huge world ships, journeys of several hundred years but since lifespans are measured in the thousands this is not too great a commitment. No children are born along the way until a couple of decades before the end, when the “ship generation” is sired (or decanted, actually).

The ship generation are bred with the desire to get out and build as soon as the destination star is reached, having spent their upbringing conceiving and architecting a myriad of habitats and production facilities. The founder generation spend the voyage in intellectual ferment–though this is but lightly covered by MacLeod–and then provide the capital required by their children’s construction plans.

The third group aboard are the ship’s crew, whose lives are not that intertwined with the voyagers and who rarely alight into the new system but travel time and again as the ship is restocked with resources and immigrants. They are, however, signatories to the contract that defines the governance and control of the massive vessels.

In all these years and journeys, no multicellular life has been encountered, directly or through active emissions. Not until But the Sky, My Lady, the Sky! arrives at Destiny Star and finds an Earth-like world populated by bat-like beings at approximately the technology level of 100 years ago or so (in our real world).

MacLeod subtitles this “A Scientific Romance” which was an early name for the speculative fiction genre and I think he’s constructed the book to reach back, in part, to those initial efforts by splitting it in two parallel threads. The main thread covers actions, confrontations and conspiracies of the shipboard folk, much of it through blog entries of a teenage girl, while the other is set on the alien’s world, focused on three scientists who discover the strange new light in their sky.

If I had one disappointment with Learning the World (the title of that girl’s blog, if you’re wondering) it would be the last chapter. MacLeod has written a satisfying, intriguing tale that could have ended without this postscript but apparently could not let go without a metaphysical explication.

recommended