Friends

jcreed

09:31 pm

Hm, I made a hotel reservation for POPL, and they said it was made, and then they retracted their claim and said they can do me for all but the last couple days. Guess I have to look around again, grr.

jcreed

05:42 pm

Fighting generalized bitrot today again by seeing if I could get sketchup working on my desktop machine. This is in principle harder than getting fontforge working again because (a) it's not open-source, and (b) there is no linux version at all.

So I tried running it under wine. Somewhat impressively, it worked, and pretty acceptably fast, even though I have no hardware GL acceleration on this machine under linux.

...except around every cursor there is an ugly white box, obscuring what you are trying to work on.

Obviously then I dug into the wine source and determined that the following patch suffices to fix the problem:

*** wine-1.1.33/dlls/winex11.drv/mouse.c
--- wine-1.1.33/dlls/winex11.drv/mouse.c
***************
*** 518,527 ****
              {
                  case 32:
                      /* BGRA, 8 bits each */
!                     *pixel_ptr = *xor_ptr++;
!                     *pixel_ptr |= *xor_ptr++ << 8;
!                     *pixel_ptr |= *xor_ptr++ << 16;
!                     *pixel_ptr |= *xor_ptr++ << 24;
                      break;

                  case 24:
--- 521,540 ----
              {
                  case 32:
                      /* BGRA, 8 bits each */
!                 {
!                 char red = *xor_ptr++;
!                 char green = *xor_ptr++;
!                 char blue = *xor_ptr++;
!                 char alpha = *xor_ptr++;
!
!                 if (alpha == 0 && !alpha_zero) {
!                   red = 0;
!                   green = 0;
!                   blue = 0;
!                 }
!
!                 *pixel_ptr = (alpha << 24) + (blue << 16) + (green << 8) + red;
!                 }
                  break;

                  case 24:

robotnik

09:46 pm - The Secret Origin of Canada

John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada is a beautiful book, and it makes an appealing argument which I would really like to be true. Canada, Saul argues, is not a British nation or a French nation but a Métis nation, profoundly if unconsciously shaped by Aboriginal ideas. Almost everything that is distinctive or admirable about Canadian society–modesty, pragmatism, respect for diversity, negotiation and compromise, a comfort with constant tension between individuals and groups–comes, he says, from Aboriginal roots.

Some raised their eyebrows at this argument. Some did considerably more than that. Not long after A Fair Country came out, I was at a fancy sort of dinner where I mentioned the book to a gravelly-voiced veteran reporter from one of Canada’s major newspapers. He was totally excellent–gruff, profane, and hilarious, my Platonic ideal of a gravelly-voiced veteran reporter. I said, “I don’t know that Saul proves his thesis, but it’s a really appealing argument.” He said, “If you can find six other Canadians that believe it, I’ll [eat my hat].” Except he didn’t say “eat”, “my”, or “hat”, and I did a laughing spit take that sprayed daikon sprouts and golden beet soup all over the assembled dignitaries.

Read the rest of this entry »

jimhenley

08:33 pm - I Ate Fred Hicks's Lunch!

Okay, not his lunch, his dinner. Actually, not his dinner, but his recipe. Strictly speaking, I didn't eat the recipe, I suppose. I ate the delicious result of following it. My wife did the actual cooking. We cut the portions way down, but Mrs. Bolton's pastured chuck roast became very, very delicious.

Current Mood: full

jcreed

07:28 pm

Aw dude the contractor dudes that were here a few weeks ago and told me they'd fix the huge (like nearly 0.5in at their widest) air-gaps in my street-facing windows totally just did today. My livingroom is so toasty-warm now.

jcreed

11:59 pm

Hung out with rdore today since he's on xmas vacation still and his family live out in the Philadelphia suburbs not quite an hour away on the R5. Played "Agricola" for the first time and rather enjoyed it --- he beat me pretty handily though. Also played some very abstract game with a pyramid-shaped board I can't remember the name of, which Richard said was Reiner-Knizia-designed, but which can't possibly be the same game as Ramses Pyramid, which involves dice. Anyway it was very interestingly subtle for how simple the rules were.

peaseblossom

08:27 am - Half a decade of music

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

gustavolacerda

01:25 am - identifying primary sources in the news

I think it is well-known that the news media copies stories from each other (presumably with enough changes to not seem too blatant^*, but nevertheless the typical lack of citations would suffice to be hung for plagiarism in any academic field). This process can be described as a DAG in which the nodes are stories and the arrows represent copying, and only some nodes are observed (printed). If you abstract over the rewordings, a diagram displaying merges and splits might not look that different from a version control graph.

Query: What aspects of these networks are public knowledge, and to what extent can we trace the history of an individual news item?

Have people developed tools to help this science of "news forensics"? My hope is that by figuring out who the original sources are and what they actually said, we can cancel out the effect of the replicator dynamics (what you see is what sells), and thus get more objective information.

tiger_spot

06:21 pm - We Appear to have Acquired a Dog

This is a little more sudden than I was expecting.

He's a smallish Lab, about five years old. He was rescued from Hurricane Katrina and adopted out here but then returned because of owners moving (twice). He's been going by "Possum" but we don't really like that name so we're thinking of changing it.

He's very calm, and mostly ignores people he doesn't know (i.e., us). Just now he's lying on the floor by the couch happily chewing a stick of dried something-or-other while Cathy reviews the dog training book.

Current Mood: optimistic

jcreed

11:17 am

Terrence Tao has a post about probability theory that made me puzzled at first, but I'm growing to like it more and more as I digest it.

There's an important insight to be had somewhere along the line that probability theory is "just" measure theory, that you can stop worrying about what words like probable "really mean" and get a significant amount of work done by just thinking of probable events as just "taking up more space" in the measure space of all possible worlds.

But Tao is making a further point, that even the set-theoretic underpinnings of measure theory are somehow excessively concrete. We don't have to go so far as to philosophically settle what randomness "really is", but we do benefit from building up a more first-class intuition for the concept of measure than it being just a map from sets to reals.

I like his point that extension (or what might also be called "refinement") of a measure space by observation of new experiments/events is the thing-which-concepts-must-be-robust-under for probability theory, just as change-of-coordinates is the thing-which-concepts-must-be-robust-under for linear algebra. Is there a category-theoretic way of saying this, I wonder? It's not immediately occurring to me, but I suspect I'ma feel dumb when it does, or when someone points it out.

The thing I'm getting stuck on is that change-of-coordinates (or homeomorphism, or algebraic isomorphism) are all, well, isomorphisms. They're two-sided, bidirectional, symmetric. Extension of probability spaces is directed, so it doesn't seem to make sense to say that the theory should quotient out by it.

jcreed

03:01 pm

Here's a quick little monocase font named after the CTA Brown Line terminus. It is intended to be what it would look like if Gotham and Clarendon had a baby. Color scheme is stolen from one of 0436's that I liked, and then washed out a bit.

jcreed

08:49 am

About ten years ago, at the end of the calendar year 1999, I got into bed around at my dad's house in Madison, WI at a little past 9pm, thinking I was going to just take a quick nap before going back downstairs for the big y2k roll-over.

I slept through it, of course. And woke up a half-hour later to wander down and find the world hadn't exploded.

I just reenacted the event last night for the sake of tradition. Well, it was more like 10:30 when I went to sleep, and had no illusions that it was just a nap, and was woken up just at midnight by the neighbors cheering, but it felt right somehow anyway.

jcreed

09:51 pm

About ten years ago, in the beginning of the calendar year 2000, 19-year-old me took some classes including "15-312"^* and "Category Theory", and finally got around to experimenting with a thing called "dating".

A highly auspicious time.

Conclusion: it's been a good decade for me, personally. I've learned a lot.

(^*for the non-CMU people: a very formal-methods-centric course on the principles of programming language design and type systems, the gateway drug to essentially all the research I've done since.)

peaseblossom

04:57 pm - Slice + bake

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

gustavolacerda

05:06 pm - medical history questionnaire needed

Suppose you're getting someone's genome sequenced and you're interested in predicting the health of their family members in the long term. Which medical history questionnaire would you use?

robotnik

08:09 pm - The Red Peril

Snarkout’s annual post is as keen as ever: an appreciation of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians becomes a link-happy history of literary invasions right back to Saki and Wells.

jcreed

06:01 pm

I went back to trying to get fontforge in a pleasant working state, and learned a few minor but interesting facts about fvwm. This is because one of the main obstacles to it being in a pleasant state is that on this dual-head setup, it keeps tossing windows right on the seam between the two monitors (i.e. right in the middle of the two-screen virtual screen). I succeeded at stopping it from doing this by saying

Style "lt-fontforge" !UseUSPosition, !UseTransientUSPosition

in my .fvwm config file. One thing of note is the string "lt-fontforge". I thought the first argument of the fvwm Style command had to be a string matching the title of a window, which would be a real pain in the case of fontforge, because it does not include any one reliable substring in its windows' names. Fortunately, Style is actually matching (according to the manpage) "a window's name, class, visible name, or resource string", with "class" and "resource string" being afaict conventionally application-consistent strings supplied to X11 somewheres in the guts of the window creation process. I was able to find out the one fontforge uses by running FvwmIdent. Dunno what "lt" stands for.

Again citing the manpage, what !UseUSPosition does is it

suppresses using the user specified position indicated by the program (USPosition hint). It is generally a bad thing to override the user's choice, but some applications misuse the USPosition hint to force their windows to a certain spot on the screen without the user's consent.

little__one

04:53 pm - Great Day

This conversation happened between me and Madeline this morning, after she wanted to play in my bedroom.

Me: Maddie, I have to go eat something and then I'm getting my tattoo.

MGW: No. You can't have both. You have to choose food or tattoo.

Me: Hey! That's rough.

MGW: Sometimes life is rough when your name is Amber. Or Sophia.

( Who wants to see pics? )

jcreed

03:55 pm

Back in Philly, 8 hours door-to-door from Chicago. Feels good as fuck to be back on my bike fighting headwinds off the Schuylkill. Had a sudden worry that the rent check I already wrote to my rental agency was going to bounce because of the national city/PNC buyout, but I called them and they said no, only the checkcard expires, and national city checks are still good.

jcreed

10:30 pm

Wound up seeing "Avatar". Definitely the most beautiful episode of "Captain Planet" I've ever seen. ( spoilers maybe ) (7/10)