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Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things, by Richard Calder

Sado-necro-pygmalion-bondage-fetish cyberpunk. Rereading it because I picked up a bunch of his newer books, and I barely remember the last two books. Moral: Love is death. Death is love.

The Engineer ReConditioned, by Neal Asher

I read every book Neal Asher writes, and so should you. Weird transhumanist space opera action-adventure with Lovecraftian overtones. Moral: If you find a technology from a dead species, you have to consider the very real possibility that the technology is why they are dead.

Different Kinds of Darkness, by David Langford

Poisonous information patterns. Moral: [SPOILER, select to view]

Don't record the brainpattern of a dead person and play it back. What, didn't you see Brainstorm?

Even I need to learn new stuff sometimes.

Head First Design Patterns, by Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra

Yes, I already know design patterns, but their take on it is very entertaining, and it's a good refresher. For anyone who doesn't know patterns, this is absolutely the first book you should read.

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, by Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Freeman

I know a lot about HTML--I've been doing web development since 1993--but even I need to catch up on things sometimes. I'm not very far in it, but as always for the Head First books it's an entertaining read.

Thinking in Java, 4th Ed., by Bruce Eckel

Astoundingly huge, and obsessively detailed. I'm just skimming through the sections on familiar technologies, but then I spend serious time reading up on the newer features. Bruce Eckel's explanation of Java 5 generics is essential reading.

If you don't know what Atom and RSS are, just ignore this.

I'm not going to link to anyone, because they don't deserve the attention (yes, pun intended). But the supporters of Atom are yet again whining about how terrible RSS 2.0 is, that it doesn't clearly define which elements are HTML and plain text, and how great Atom is.

Part of the problem is that they're lying. The RSS 2.0 spec strongly implies which elements take HTML and which do not, and 90% of the feed and reader implementations agree on this, which IMO is extremely good interoperability by real-world standards. The Atom spec is unclear about all but one kind of tag, and real-world interoperability with it is not noticeably better.

And that's why I use RSS 2.0: The creators of Atom are a bunch of whiny, sanctimonious, lying fuckwits, and I believe it is a moral imperative not to support things created by whiny, sanctimonious, lying fuckwits.

RSS 2.0's revised spec, whenever that happens, will almost certainly be more precise, which would be nice. For the most part, it already just works.

I think it's very unlikely that the Atom people will pull their heads out and behave like civilized human beings.

Properties props = System.getProperties();
for (String key : (Set<String>)((Set)props.keySet())) {
    System.out.println(key+": "+props.getProperty(key));
}

Isn't that charming and easily understood? Map.keySet() returns a Set<Object>, but you can't cast that to the more specific Set< String> without stripping off the subtype information first.

Sun, what the hell were you doing when you "designed" this stuff? Great Cthulhu, this is a wretched thing. Java's a very dynamic language, and it's easy to generate classes at runtime. There's no reason you couldn't have done "C++ templates, only intelligently designed". Instead you came up with something that sucks just as hard as C++ templates, but in a totally different way, by THROWING OUT useful type information.

All languages suck, but you didn't have to go out of your way to prove it here.

LEGO has finally got some new information about the upcoming Mindstorms NXT. An article in Wired, Geeks in Toyland, covers the development, and the Mindstorms NXT FAQ answers more questions.

What I don't know yet is: 1) How much memory will it have? "Much more" is not useful information.

2) What real languages can you program it in? NQC was a decent language for the old Mindstorms RIS, but the RCX was so massively limited as a computer it was hard to do much of anything.

pbForth for the RCX was more powerful, but Forth in code again to I refuse. Programming languages should make life easier for the developer, not harder, and Forth gets this in reverse (<- pun for Forth programmers).

The Java environment for the RCX was cheating: the processing happened on your desktop machine, and it just commanded the RCX by IR remote. I want an autonomous robot, not a remote-controlled toy.

LEGO includes point-and-drool "programming" environments in the Mindstorms sets because they delusionally believe they're selling to non-programmers, even though their own sales numbers show otherwise. I really wish they'd just wise up and base it on Java 2 Micro Edition.

Since LEGO wising up seems unlikely, are there any alternatives? A nice J2ME controller, uses USB 2.0 for loading programs rather than burning ROM chips, some kind of mechanical assembly system that doesn't suck?

There's the Radio Shack VEX, but A) I really dislike buying low-quality/high-price parts from RatShack, and B) I don't want yet another custom language, which is what they're using.

There's the Javelin stamp, but A) it's a real electronics and mechanical engineering system, and I'm just an amateur at that stuff, and B) 32K RAM for a Java system is less than useless, it's just cruel mockery. They have a BASIC stamp, too. Eew.

It looks like Apple finally caught on to people like me bitching about iTunes video prices; The Daily Show is now available on a "multi-pass" (Fifth Element: "MOOOOOLTI-pass. MOOOLTIPASS!" "Yes, she knows it's a multipass."), 16 episodes for $10.

Good job, Apple. The Daily Show is the only cable program I care about--the only TV news worth watching anymore--and finding it on BitTorrent and leeching it every day was a pain in the ass. Cable would cost $35/month, minimum, I'd have to either watch it at the right time each day or find blank tapes for the obsolete "VCR" device, and ultimately I don't want cable in my house, poisoning my mind; I haven't watched live TV in months, and may never do so again. $20/month for a constant dose of The Daily Show on the iPod, automatically updated, is about the best deal I'm going to find...

Walter Cronkite vs. the War on Drugs

That's the way it is.

I've released a new version of Utility.py, which is a tiny little framework for building utility programs in Python. It's BSD-licensed, so use it where you need it!

I've released Perilar version 0.4, a new beta to test remaining gameplay issues before I start working on the graphics, sound, and music.

One person wrote in with serious keyboard focus problems in 0.3, which hopefully are fixed by 0.4. If you find any problems at all, let me know.

President's Day is my second-favorite holiday: the day when we celebrate the ability to vote the bums out.

Politicians are exactly like hookers. You don't pay them to fuck you; you can get fucked for free. You pay them to leave.

Malcolm Davis asks: Why Are You Uninstalling NetBeans?, and lately I've been giving Gregg Sporar, Sun's NetBeans evangelist, a hard time about his filthy marketing lies.

And aside from the crappy fonts, which I'd forgotten about, Malcolm hadn't even got to the parts that really annoy me before he gave up. The bugs. The weak feature set. The slow, unbelievably slow, sluggish, bound-in-molasses-frozen-into-amber, not at all fast GUI. Did I mention it's slow? The lack of plugins (at last count of the main sites, 34 plugins for NetBeans vs. 1094 plugins for Eclipse!). Also, the speed, it is not high.

Sun, please stop with the astroturf marketing for NetBeans. Nobody believes you anymore, because they can try NetBeans and see how inferior it is, and it's starting to rub off on your other products, which are generally much better. If your IDE was good, you wouldn't have to astroturf for it.

Here's an opportunity for you, Sun: Borland is selling its IDE division. Buy JBuilder. Replace NetBeans with JBuilder, maybe add whatever little bit of unique value is in NetBeans into JBuilder (do not do this the other way around... NetBeans is not salvageable). You will be loved for this. JBuilder needs a home. You need a good IDE. If you were looking for a match made in heaven for Valentine's Day, THIS IS IT.

I'm told that some people like poetry on Valentine's Day. So without further ado, some haiku to celebrate V.D.:

She: "I want to give
you my love". Venereal
diseases aren't love.

Your heart weighs heavy
in my hand. I take a bite
and spit it out BLEH!

Alas, only Al Capone truly understood how to celebrate Valentine's Day.

I have an early, early, early pre-alpha, not at all ready for real use, test version of my note-taking software ThoughtPad available.

I'd appreciate it if people would pound on it and complain about the lack of features, and about my plans for future features.

Developers working on a baffling problem come to me on bended knee, asking for help. A component isn't displaying the first time a page is viewed, but is on refresh.

I check the log... The value is being set, just like it's supposed to.

So I take a second look at the browser. 50% of the page is scrolled off to the right. Scroll over, and there the component is.

I can debug by using the scrollbar. :)

They will never live this down. "Have you scrolled over?" is now going to be my standard response to all bug reports.

Joey deVilla asks What Languages Should The Farm Cover?. This is how things have worked out for me at present.

The Winners:

Java, of course. If you haven't used Java recently, try it again (pick up a recent book and relearn it, if necessary). Java 5.0 of 2006 is nothing much like Java 1.0 of 1996, or even Java 1.2 of 2000, what with the additions of generics, for loops that don't suck, concurrent programming libraries, decent native Swing look-and-feels, declarative object-relational database mapping systems, scripting language plugins, and so on. The Java web frameworks are astoundingly powerful, and pretty easy to use.

Client-side programming in Java is so much better than it used to be. I still mostly write games in raw AWT, both for speed (yeah, I know, turn-based RPGs need *SO MUCH SPEED*, but those fractions of a second make a big difference in the feel of the game), and because all my components are custom, and I'll be switching to some kind of OpenGL layer over AWT at some point. But I'd never write a business/productivity app in AWT, that's what Swing is designed for. If you're skilled with Swing, you can make great native-appearing applications in no time flat.

Eclipse has also made an enormous difference in how Java programming works. Java + Eclipse makes every other development environment I've tried in my career look like Tinker Toys.

If you're at all interested in Mac and Linux users using your software (as well as Windows peons if you insist on being so retro), it's the only serious choice. Whether you program in Java, NetRexx, Jython, or some other language, if you can't compile to the JVM and use the infinite variety of Java libraries, you're missing out.

Python is the clear #1 language for tools and system scripting. It's an easy language to use, it lets me write complex thoughts in a clear manner, and has all the libraries I need for most purposes. Writing a large application (over a few thousand lines) in Python is a nightmare. Never ever ever EVER do this. No amount of testing will make up for the lack of static type-checking. The GUI libraries for it are so so poorly-integrated, ugly, incomplete, and slow that it might as well not have any. The web frameworks other than Zope are all pretty experimental, and I wouldn't put a one of them into production, even if I could find a cheap hosting service that ran Python. Now that Guido's pushing back on the web frameworks, I expect that something good will happen on that front by next year.

I do a lot of text tools and tinkering in NetRexx, but I don't really expect it to conquer the world at this point. Great language, not a lot of public traction. Still, I advise every programmer, expert or novice, to try out NetRexx and ObjectRexx.

PHP is the fast, cheap, dirty way to make dynamic websites, and everyone supports it. If you don't mind fooling around with bare wires, and can memorize the hundreds of badly-named functions in one huge namespace that they use, it's okay. I wrote this blog software in PHP and used PEAR::DB to hook into PostgreSQL, and it doesn't suck much. That doesn't mean I love it, just that it works. PHP5 sucks a lot less than PHP3 or PHP4, but good luck finding a system with it. I would have preferred for PHP5 to be totally incompatible with PHP4 and just fix everything, much like the jump from Python 1.5 to 2.0. As it is, we're still living with a lot of bad decisions and forward-ported code that isn't really correct anymore.

All four of these are totally compatible cross-platform, all four are totally free. At this point if you're paying someone to develop for their platform, you have done something tragically wrong and need to reevaluate your life. They are using you. Independent software vendors do OS companies a favor by writing for their platforms. If a compiler vendor sells me a better tool (for instance, before Eclipse 3, I really liked Borland's JBuilder and IBM's Visual Age for Java, neither of which were cheap), that's fine. If the OS vendor is trying to gouge me on the only viable tool for a platform, I give them the middle finger and stomp away.

The Losers:

C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, Objective C, and Delphi/Kylix are totally useless to me. C and C++ have no automatic garbage collection and no bounds checking (yes, there are add-on libraries that do at least a half-assed job of these; but no C/C++ programmer I've ever met uses them), so they're just trash for anything except writing device drivers. If you use C/C++ for writing applications, you are an enemy of humanity and a facilitator of spammers and virus writers. No, I will not say that nicer. Die, you evil, polluting, syphilitic, pustulating anal sores.

Delphi has partial GC, their Pascal variant's quite nice, and the IDE and GUI library rocks, but it doesn't work on Mac, which makes it irrelevant to me. Eh. I wouldn't object to more software being written in Delphi/Kylix, though.

Objective C has partial GC, but the syntax is ugly, and it's only really used on Mac anymore. The Mac is rich in libraries for it, everyone else is back to the stone age, coding on bare metal again. Nice language, but not worth it.

C# and VB are Windows-only, how quaint, how very 20th Century. Why do people make single-platform software? I use Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD every day, and read work mail off Outlook on a Windoze box (eew). Crippling myself with single-platform software would just be stupid. Even if I used Windoze, I wouldn't use C# to make apps, because I might want to move to a real platform someday, and other people might not want to use Windoze.

Perl and Ruby are much the same kind of unreadable gibberish. It doesn't matter how good a language is if you can't come back to your programs 6 months later and figure out what they did. I'm of the opinion that Perl was an April Fool's joke that got out of hand:

"Awk without the implicit loop and BEGIN/END blocks! Hah! And functions that don't name their parameters! Ha hah! Nobody'll ever use this crap!"
-Larry Wall

"Oh, fuck, the stupid bastards are using it!"
-Larry Wall, 6 months later

Haskell, Dylan, OCaml, and other functional or semi-functional (heh) languages are interesting. It's hard to write real software in them, but they're fun to play with and solve problems in. But the joy is in figuring out the language, not in actually accomplishing your tasks, so I couldn't recommend them for real work. If you want to just fool around and have fun learning something, you cannot go wrong with any of those three.

As I've mentioned before, aside from the hideous, eye-searing syntax and lack of portable libraries for the free versions, Lisp and Scheme are fine languages. But since syntax makes programmers happy, and libraries make programmers productive, Lisp and Scheme are worthless in the real world, which is why nobody writes code in them.

Hahahaha! There is a little justice in the world, after all: Mac-abusing Windoze fanboys kill their iMac Duo Cores by putting Windoze on them.

If you're stupid or desperate enough to want to run Windoze apps on your Mac and you're too poor to buy some piece-of-crap beige box and a KVM switch, there's Virtual PC, and when the universal binary version of that comes out, it'll be nearly native speed.

It's simply retarded to try to do this, even aside from being disrespectful and disgusting, like taking a shit on the table at a high-class restaurant. Didn't their parents teach them any manners? Filthy Windoze users have to eat out in the alley with all the other crazy people. They shouldn't be allowed to use nice hardware, because they won't treat it well.

I'm just disappointed that all it does is destroy the firmware. Anyone trying to put Windoze or Linux on shiny Mac hardware deserves to have their computer erupt in a fiery explosion and burn their house down, hopefully killing them in the process.

Think of it as evolution in action.

The pricing on iTunes for TV shows is preposterous. $1.99 per 44-minute episode (if you're lucky! Many are 22-minute!)? A DVD box set with good resolution and commentary typically costs $30 for 22 eps, and has no DRM. Why would anyone ever buy a TV show from iTunes? At $0.99, they'd be reasonably-priced; I'd pay $22 for a season of Law & Order that I didn't have to manually rip for play on the pod, but at $44, I'm just going to rent the DVD sets instead.

Music videos are even more insane. $1.99 for 4 minutes of music video. Now, maybe I'm spoiled, since I grew up in a mythical era called "The '80s", when MTV played a dozen music videos almost every hour of the day, every day, for FREE. No, really! They'd have a few "specials" every year (so they were special!), and the only game show was Remote Control (which was to modern game shows as James Brown was to Milli Vanilli). Then back to music videos. Then Headbanger's Ball at night. Yes, I know this seems like an impossible fantasy world to kids these days who've never known an MTV that played music. I guess it doesn't really matter for them, because all modern pop music is crap; Gwen Stefani isn't worthy to lick the fanboy bukkake off Cyndi Lauper's feet. I've noticed that BET does play some hip-hop videos, so music video isn't completely dead.

I'd be willing to go $1.99 for an hour of music videos. Hell, gimme a Best Of MTV Back When They Didn't Suck (all videos, nothing else), and I'll pony up the $1.99 an episode without whining. But an hour of BOMTVBWTDS would cost $24 on iTunes. A "season" of 22 eps would cost $528. Fuck. That. Noise.

This weekend, I grabbed HandBrake Lite to start ripping more videos for my iPod. Movies went perfectly. Naturally, I ripped Blade Runner first, then Serenity [0]. A quick Add to Library in iTunes, update the pod, and I'm watching Blade Runner on a 2.5" screen.

Next I started ripping my Firefly TV series DVDs. No problems ripping the episodes... But I can't find them on my pod. They show up in the All Videos playlist, but not under TV Shows. I've set the Video Kind to "TV Show", but they still don't show up.

In fact, all I can see under TV Shows is a free download from iTunes of the Lazy Sunday video. Its Video Kind is set to "TV Show", but I can't edit it because it's DRM'd. <sigh>

So, either the "TV Shows" listing doesn't work right, or the song settings don't work right.

[0] Track 17 is the Fruity Oaty Bars commercial that sets River off! Watch it over and over again! I did, and it hasn't affected me at all!

These are the most glaringly weird or ironic searches that have hit my site recently. I suppose a few dozen freaks out of thousands of sane searchs is okay, but... No, who am I kidding, this is just weird:

• ace or delusional parasitic
• anime where they reload their guns with their breasts
  (Okay, I know what this is talking about... But still, WTF?)
• bird personality based on birthday
  (Who has time to remember their bird's birthday?)
• chimps matingcinis rpg -elementi -pulvisque -rpg chat -hic
  (Chimps mating? RPG but not RPG chat? WTF?)
• clear liquid with red specks that burns to a grey metallic metal
• cross dressing and role playing as a sexual fantasy
  (Not so much of the cross-dressing in my RPGs...)
• description of different type of fetishes: /~kamikaze/DUDE/Hack.html
  (You're gonna get a hell of a fetish from that...)
• differentiate geocentric theory and heliocentric with its meaning
• free online adventure sex games
• free online adventure teen drama games
  (At least it wasn't teen sex games...)
• free online dragon role playing games where u can make your own dragon and play the role playing game with him
• free online sex role playing games
• free role playing games teenage girl
• girl hot rpg game roleplay
  (Yeah, those elf chicks are totally hot. If they weren't fictional, I'd do 'em.)
• how did mark hughes die
  (Rumors of my demise have been slightly exaggerated. I'm just really tired.)
• how to seduce your sister
  (You! Get off my goddamn web site right now!)
• how to make ninja poisons
• i havent seen my friend for ages jane hughes i have not seen my friend jane hughes liverpool for ages
  (And I'm sure this is best possible place to start.)
• killer pussy maneater
  (I... really hope that's about tigers or something.)
• lawnmower pulling game
  (No game's gonna make that fun.)
• list of odorless tasteless liquid poison causing heart attack
• mail to mail sex wab sights: /~kamikaze/RPG/wrong_adnd.php
  (More like chain mail to banded mail!)
• mark is stupid
  (Your wife is ugly.)
• merchant fat rich or rich fat or fat and rich or rich and fat
  (That should pretty much cover it...)
• play a online rpg with like warrior and bow and magic
  (And they shoot guns PEWPEWPEW!!!)
• quickest acting poison
• reed is a grotesquely ugly podiatrist who drinks a poison to commit suicide
  (Poor Reed. He's just misunderstood.)
• renouncing science: /~kamikaze/Cyberpunk/Text.php
• seduce sister
  (I told you to get the hell out, sisterfucker!)
• short free indian exotic story: /~kamikaze/Text/beginning_cli.html
• sodium benzoate enlist the functions
• sorority role playing games
• transportation trucking sherry hughes fucking
• truth and technology dog pissing
• underworld kill all the monsters painkillers
• usually nude in front of my dad
• what are explosives

It's not bad enough that they send thousands of our troops off to die in the desert. It's not bad enough that they trashed our economy--going from one of the best economies in history under Clinton to disaster under Bush. It's not enough that Bush's incompetent crony appointed to FEMA allowed an entire city to be destroyed. It's not bad enough that they promote this Flat Earth, Intelligent Design, and Jesus Died For You nonsense. It's not bad enough that Bush is the most incompetent and actively malicious President this country has ever had in 220 years, and that every day he commits crimes that ought to have him impeached and convicted of High Treason.

No, on top of that, they must show their true hatred for all that is good and decent in this country... By spamming me. Fuck you, Republican National Committee. Fuck. You. Better dead than red (state).

From: "Chairman Ken Mehlman" <kenmehlman@republicanvictoryteam.com>
To: <<kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>>
Subject: Join President Bush on January 31st
Message-Id: <20060112233711.BC8B7B5642@sm3.republicanvictoryteam.org>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 18:37:11 -0500 (EST)

On January 31, President Bush will deliver his State of the Union Address, laying
[...]
**************
To Unsubscribe:
http://www.http://www.republicanvictoryteam.com/rvt
**************

Paid for by the Republican National Committee.  http://www.republicanvictoryteam.com/
  Not Authorized by Any Candidate or Candidate Committee.

#1. The unsubscribe link doesn't work (the "http://www." at the start is extraneous), showing that they're technically incompetent.

#2. The fact that they're spamming shows what they think of you: that stealing your resources and wasting your time by spamming you is an effective political technique.