artm

INFECTED Trailer
just earning my points for when Scott takes over the world…

Lies is as good as truth if it leads to enlightenment.

Robert Reed, Eight Episodes

The first rule about . . [macros] is: don’t use them if you do not have to. . . almost every macro demonstrates a flaw in either the programming language or in the program.

Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language

I find it unbearably restrictive to program in languages without macros…

Paul Graham, Succinctness is power

We’re rewriting the Ei4 game engine now, under the new name - V2_ Game Engine. It features scheme bindings which are written in a dangerous mix of c preprocessor macros and C++ templates. Came across these quotes while looking for some spells on internet.

See also: c++ marxist subversion (you can’t do that in java :-P)

with all the audio books available on torrent sites, it’s difficult to keep up with my podcast subscriptions. luckyly JC and Sigler are in hiata for a time being while I’m listening to some cyberpunk classics. it all begun with an audible.com ad on twit - anyone who would go to http://audible.com/twit and subscribe to their service would get one credit worth of a book and if you unsubscribe in time - you won’t ever pay nobody. I had a hard time choosing anything, so I ask evo and she happened to read Diamond Age at the moment so I downloaded that.

The book rocks, but nobody doubted that, I’m probably the last one in my 1st order circle who haven’t read it yet.

After I unsubscribed from audible I did a couple of torrent searches and found some books long in my toread list in spoken form. Also legally free “Free Culture” by Laurence Lessig is available and I never managed to get very far into the PDF, so I got it as well as Neuromancer, Scanner Darkly and some books I never heard of but they were in the same package so they could be interesting, right.

While searching for audiobooks, I also found that many English books I ever wanted to read are available as OCRed torrents all over the darknet - sort of English speaking (reading) analog of http://lib.ru/ . I got some of the collections and have enough reading matter to cancel library membership for the rest of my life.

Which made me think of my parents. They have a large library, I read some parts of it and I contributed most sci-fi / fantasy to it as well. In a single torrent there is more books then the library they’ve collected over the many years - and much cheaper if you don’t mind to read off the screen, which I don’t. In the eighties my parents were making their own books - they would get forbidden books from I wouldn’t know what sources, they typed their copies and spread them further. My father made hardcovers from “Foreign Literature” magazine, sorted by country or continent, he probably was on a KGB watchlist because he was one of a few subscribers to the magazine in the town we lived in at the time. He even made his original book - a biography of Vladimir Vysotsky, a friend typed two copies of the text, my father made the copies of the photographs (where did he get them from?) and bound the books. I have vague memories of DIY book binding lessons from him which tought me skills I never ever used.

It did do something to my world outlook though. I have a coscience a size of a planet, yet I never feel bad when sharing intellectual property.

Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging, it should be possible to solve problems for less than half the cost that would be required without such a system.

“Preliminary Report: Specifications for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslation System FORTRAN.” Programming Research Group, Applied Science Division, IBM Corporation, November 10, 1954.

Apparently, they’ve never spent four of five hours standing in line while Starvation Trucks dispenced food to an entire city of hungry people.

From “The Rookie” by Scott Sigler (episode 25)

Life like Elephant - Mamallapuram near Chennai,
originally uploaded by Hi Pandian.

“OMG. Amazing!” And whatever else you’re supposed to say on teh interweb.

One of the case studies in the Dive Into Greasemonkey is called Dumb Quotes and does just what I wanted - converts all the “correct” typography into plain old ASCII. What a relief.

They look like fish, they swim like fish, they live in the water like fish, so they are fish.

Their breastfeed their young, so they are mammal fish.

For a biologist such classification is useless and hence they decided that an animal is either one or another, you can’t be both at the same time.

For an educated designer web typography is wrong and he’ll whine about it at conferences like anybody cares. I need a wordpress plugin that translates typographically correct apostrophes to feet and inches.

Sólo porque alguien no te ame como tú quieres, no significa que no te ame con todo su ser.

Gabriel García Márquez 13 líneas para vivir

Which reminds me of the discussion yesterday in the V2_lab’s kitchen: about how Rui hates all the bad art out there. Rui, just because you don’t like an art, doesn’t mean the artists didn’t made it con todo su ser (it doesn’t mean the opposite either). It would be so boring if all the art was great to you and you won’t have to look for something that speaks to you - just go to a gallery or cinema or a website and enjoy. That some art stands out, for you, on a background of the other only makes it appeal more, after all:

Quizá Dios quiera que conozcas mucha gente equivocada antes de que conozcas a la persona adecuada, para que cuando al fin la conozcas, sepas estar agradecido.

May be God made all the “bad” art so that when you finally encounter the good one you’ll be greatful. You can substitute “art” above for just about anything.

Update

Pretty much the same sentiment as Rui’s but applied to open source software:

Rotten Flesh

The antithesis of sweetcode.org, rotten flesh highlights the genericity endemic in the “Open Source community.” Rottenflesh is a satirical attack on http://freshmeat.net/, an index of free software and a major Open Source institution. The big problem with freshmeat.net is that it’s inflicted daily with piles of half-brained nonsense; broken MP3 taggers, dodgy CGI scripts and (of course) software to manage your video collection. There is plenty of good software there too, but it often drowns in the muck.

So go to http://unpythonic.net/~jepler/cgi-bin/rottenflesh.cgi Browse the point releases of obscurely-named applications, their menubars and theme systems described as distinguishing marks, their recent change history hinting at feverish, over-caffeinated brains locked away in student digs for long, long nights of unbound hacking.

Then open up http://freshmeat.net/ as a comparison. Wish that some of those free software authors took note of rotten flesh before thinking about what they should contribute to the world. Hope also that they aren’t discouraged totally from working their keyboards to more productive ends.

Alex McLean’s write up about Rotten Flesh project by Jeff Epler.