Pepper Spray for the Soul

Best video game moments ever

2011-03-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

I just added a couple of comments to an article by my pal Austin Grossman. The comments are awaiting moderator approval. I am so wonderful, I post them here so you don't have to wait.

=============================

My #1 video game moment.

I can’t describe it here in detail, because it’s a major spoiler. But I can say that it is the moment in Nethack where you find out what you are.

If you’re like me, you probably won’t ever beat Nethack and may only reach this particular moment once, if you’re lucky. So you can read about it it at http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Riders. Search for the string “you are”.

I get chills every time I think about the moment when I apprehended this.

=============================

My #2 video game moment(s):

All the screens in Atari 2600 Superman where there’s nothing there, nobody there, except the sound of the wind.

Peter Landin FTW, once again

2011-01-19T17:39:00.000-08:00

The great Oleg Kiselyov reports yet more things that Peter Landin figured out before Sesame Street existed, like the state monad, world-passing, and treating the semi-colon as a concatenation operator. And more.

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-December/087788.html

Peter Landin was, like, the Da Vinci of programming.

Test post from new app

2010-10-15T13:16:00.001-07:00

Yeah italics

Pardon me!

2010-08-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

I saw an unopened shipping package sitting on a cabinet here at work, and I figured someone left it there, so I picked it up and looked to see who the recipient was.

Turns out, the recipient was the cabinet itself.

I put it back, apologized, and walked away.

People who like this sort of thing will find that this is the sort of thing they like

2010-08-25T07:46:00.001-07:00

If you care about functional programming, you must watch this blog devotedly and read carefully everything he posts. Conal Eliot is the finest mind in functional programming working today.

http://conal.net/blog/posts/topless-data/

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.5.2

Carrots in Ze Love

2010-08-18T17:46:00.001-07:00

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.3.1

Shark

2010-08-16T12:07:00.001-07:00

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.3

Test

2010-08-16T09:39:00.001-07:00

With picture

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.3

Perils of living in a tallish building

2010-08-16T09:19:00.001-07:00

Had yet another apocalyptic dream last night where I watch the city be destroyed from my balcony, but this time the real cause was a madman who dropped an enormous scale model of a city onto NYC.

The model was large enough that out covered the entire city in dust so even Brooklyn looked like Wall Street did in 9/11. But it was a scale model, and not a model of NYC. Got that? So the model must have been of a city the size of Africa. But scale, so it was the right size to cover NYC.Okay. Just so we're clear.

But it started out with strange explosions on the horizon, and then small shock waves. Yet another nuclear dream. Then debris was falling from the sky.

Then a overscale model of an airplane fell onto Manhattan (which I can't actually see from my ninth floor Brooklyn balcony). Yes: a model of an airliner, made of some chalky painted material, but maybe two miles long. Fell into the buildings and broke apart like a melon.

I went to sleep (I'm always sleeping and waking in my dreams), and when I woke up, it still looked like daytime. The sky was filled with dust, and there was still a sun (or maybe distant fires?). Look like those artists renderings of Sunrise on Mercury, a huge oval splotch of white light.

Down below, people were sort of acting normal, going to work or whatever. After all, it was a disaster, but few dead, and no radiation.

Then my alarm went off and I hit snooze and had a dream about my foot.

Tell me

2010-08-10T10:54:00.001-07:00

Tell me how much you like my tests.

Test

2010-08-10T10:52:00.001-07:00

Test

2010-08-04T09:15:00.001-07:00

From my phone.

Armed and In Decline

2010-07-13T11:05:00.000-07:00

Eric Raymond, The Ted Nugent of Software, tells us again how wonderful he is:

During the controversy I described in Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves one of the parties characterized me as “nuts and in decline.”.

[...]

Here is part of what I learned: There comes a point in the development of every reform movement at which it has to kill the founder.

[...]

Yes, this means that more than a decade ago I knew that the day would likely come when significant portions of the movement would dismiss me as a loon, or worse. I accepted that consequence with my eyes open. I view it as normal, healthy, and even necessary that this be so.

Lordy mama, you sure are wise. Wise and also high above the twists and turns of history, thanks to your wide reading.

I would dismiss this as more nuttiness and declension, except for two salient (if mostly unrelated) points:

1. No one said you were crazy because of your views about Free Software. They said you were crazy because you were defending the speech of a programmer who actively promoted misogyny in his source code. (You didn't defend the 'speech' at all, but you weren't defending it against censorship, either.)

2. You are not a founder of anything except your gun collection. Rather, you played the leading role in killing the actual founder (RMS). You sly little agent-of-history, you. And poor crazy RMS, you put him "on a pedestal so high that he can’t actually influence events on the ground". (Except for maintaining GCC and Emacs, of course.)

I did not do what I did for anyone’s approval; I did it because it was right.

The millions you got from the Red Hat IPO was a nice bonus, though, right?

Programming is fucking boring

2010-06-12T15:59:00.000-07:00

There, I said it. It's true. It has to be said. Programming is boring.

What follows is an ill-conceived and poorly-executed rant.

What I really mean, perhaps, is that programming for money is boring. Being a programmer working for a large company is sorta like being a writer working for a company that writes camera manuals.

I propose a brief hierarchy of writing jobs, and the corresponding programming jobs:

Writing jobs	Programming jobs
Novelist	Free programmer
Writer of ad copy	Commercial systems programmer
Writer of camera manuals	Commercial 'enterprise' programmer

A "Free programmer" is a programmer who gets to work on whatever they think is coolest -- a game, something for a startup, grad school work, whatever.

A commercial 'systems' programmer is someone who writes real things.

A commercial 'enterprise' programmer is someone who glues libraries together.

I made this chart in order to make a point: programming isn't boring because it's commercial. I can live with having a job. I don't have to be an ahtist. Programming is boring because it's enterprise.

Some guy named "Mike Taylor" puts it really well:

A huge part of my job these days seems to be impedence-matching between big opaque chunks of library software that sort of do most of what my program is meant to achieve, but don’t quite work right together so I have to, I don’t know, translate USMARC records into Dublin Core or something. Is thatprogramming? Really? Yes, it takes taste and discernment and experience to do well; but it doesn’t require brilliance and it doesn’t excite.

But let me put it more strongly. Enterprise programming -- impedance matching -- is terribly boring. I don't know how people do it. Well, yes I do, because I do it.

Another quote from the same guy:

Especially, I have learned that anything that has “Enterprise” in its name is so incredibly boring that the people who use it had to shove the name of the Star Trek ship into its title just to keep themselves awake. (I am convinced that this is the case.)

I work for Google, which is routinely described as one of the best places to work. There's a lot of non-enterprise programming there, but I happen to do enterprise programming. The people I work with are not enraged about it, but I think they do think it could be more exciting.

Enterprise programming is terribly boring. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. It's a waste of programmer talent. It consists mostly of the following line of code:

putFieldThing(fieldName, thingObject.getThingField(thingThing));

That line of code, and variations on it, and support for that line of code.

Let me tell you how you can tell that this is terrible stuff.

In enterprise programming, there is something called "business logic". Business logic consists of the rules that define the procedures that you run your business with. Here is an example of business logic: "When you put money into the receiver's account, make sure you remove it from the sender's account." Or "when you mark an employee as 'quit', remove their email account".

That's what business software does. Code that does that sort of thing is called "business logic". It used to be called "programming". Why did the name change?

It changed because a new kind of programming appeared: enterprise programming. Enterprise programming (called it "EP") is the support system surrounding the business logic. Like a ten-pound tumor attached to a tiny gland, EP grows and grows without bound. It takes over the programming. It takes over the programmer, and the programming effort, and the programming schedule, and the programming resources. Now, EP is most of the programming, and the real stuff gets relegated to a new category, business logic. (Call it BL.)

EP doesn't do anything, in the sense that it takes one step forward and at least one step back. There are new enterprise programming systems all the time, each one designed to make it easier, to take away the drudgery, to let you deploy applications quickly and easily. To re-use code. To adapt to a changing environment. Etc etc. EP systems can promise anything, because they don't really deliver anything.

I live in NYC, where, I suspect, a larger portion of programming jobs concerns EP. There's so much of it here, it's outrageous.

I look at resumes of Java programmers, and about half of them have written the same program: delivering real-time financial market data to analysts. Why are these people writing the same program over and over again? Because it's EP. It consists of gluing together pre-made modules and working out the annoying little problems with the glue (impedance matching). Each company, each team has slightly different needs, so it needs its own software to do a slightly different thing. And so there is a job market for a stream of computer science / IT majors to get sucked into.

You have to understand: EP is a black hole. EP is a vague, endless task that everyone is trying to solve, and everyone is on the verge of finally solving it, and yet no one is ever solving it. It's sisyphean. The EP industry creates problems, and then provides solutions. The solutions don't quite work, but soon enough there are twice as many programming magazines with twice as many ads that are telling you about twice as many systems you can buy, or philosophies you can adopt, to really solve your problem.

I have used several EP systems that make everything harder, and nothing easier. I can't imagine how this could be considered an advantage. I have used EP systems where adding a single field to a database table requires you edit 6 files and wait several days. In the same amount of time, I could have made the same change in a system based on pencils, erasers, and index cards.

EP is make-work. It fills all available time.

Proof

2010-06-06T10:29:00.001-07:00

Of course this can be faked. But it's all I've got.

Here is the proof that I invented the phrase "Speedo Calrissian". I put it in a blog entry, and I checked about 7 minutes later and Google had indexed it. (Bing hadn't.)

Here is a screenshot:

"Speedo Calrissian"

2010-06-06T10:21:00.000-07:00

I thought of this funny name. I googled it -- to my surprise, there were no hits!

As far as Google-based reality is concerned, this did not exist before. I invented it.

In just a little while, of course, Google will index this page and it will be in the search engines. It will get one hit. Then I will become incredibly rich and famous. Then there will be a lot of hits. Then someone will claim they thought of it first, and there will be a lawsuit. Then Lucasfilm will get involved, and I will go to jail. In jail, I will write the words "Speedo Calrissian" all over the walls in mold-water, and will scratch it into my arm with my shiv.

"Shiv" is a Romani word. Whaddaya know?

Overheard at work

2010-06-02T07:39:00.001-07:00

"That's a whole bag of worms we have to go down."

Can you spot the well-known expressions that exploded and formed this little pile of language?

So, I think Richard Dawkins has finally erased his debt to me

2010-04-14T07:25:00.001-07:00

(his debt for being such a prick)

Richard Dawkins calls for arrest of Pope Benedict XVI

(What does it is really that, plus this:

Richard Dawkins: I greatly admire Lynn Margulis's sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it.

)

You will hope you have Neanderthal Genes.

2010-04-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

Steven Mithen (2006) proposes that the Neanderthals had an elaborate proto-linguistic system of communication which was more musical than modern human language, and which predated the separation of language and music into two separate modes of cognition.[67]

(From Neanderthal Language)

I blush with pride and rememb'rance

2010-04-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

Austin found this post from 2004. He and I worked on this game back in the early '90's. This error, which I put in, is from a Hole song. I was sure it had been removed before we shipped. It hadn't.

>Hi, I'm trying to run the DOS version of Flight Unlimited 1
>under Windows Me. I have installed the patch (from Avsim), but
>I get a page fault after the loading screens every time I try
>to run the game. The exact error message is:
>
>[i]Flight Unlimited vF2.4S has CRASHED.
>(Someday you will ache like I ache.)
>
>Page fault
>EAX: 00000000 EBX: fe000000 ECX: 3f5f8000 EDX: 00000003 TXT: 00000207
>ESI: 0000000e EDI: d01e0000 EBP: 847f1498 ESP: 848ebe40 DTA: 0000020f
>EIP: 8475726f ERR: 00000006 EFL: 00010216 EXC: 0000000e EMN: 846d583c
>CS: 0207 DS: 020f ES: 020f FS: 0000 GS: 02cf SS: 020f

That's a uniquely phrased error message. ;-)
Can't say as I've ever seen one like that before.

So much progress has been made!

2010-03-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

You often hear things like this said nowadays:

An automated data system analysis technique is described.

The technique is designed to alleviate some of the principal

problems that beset current analysis--large data workloads,

long span of time between project inception and system

operational date, the lack of explicit directions for conducting

data system analysis and using the results, and the lack of a

technique to control data system changes throughout its life-

time. The analysis is geared to determining workload, rela-

tionships and storage characteristics of documents in the in-

formation network automatically.

The sad thing is, this was written by O. T. Gatto in 1964.

Yesterday was a Bad Day

2010-01-22T07:54:00.001-08:00

The Supreme Court decided that corporations are very important citizens
Air America announced it was going away

This is why I can barely read newspapers

2010-01-22T07:20:00.000-08:00

I've had a hard time reading for most of my life -- my recall isn't great, I read kind of slowly, and most of the time I have to read stuff over and over to really understand it. Mostly I just accept the fact that I'm only going to remember a little bit of what I read. I can't tell you most of the plot of a book I've just finished, and I almost certainly can't tell you how it ended.

But I have an even harder time with newspapers. The standard journalistic voice is really confusing and infuriating to me. Here's an example of something that's basically impossible for me to just read:

(The third paragraph of http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2466002)

The newspaper was expounding the nationalistic argument now being used in China to counter Google's announcement last week that it would stop censoring its Chinese search engine and may even pull out of the world's fastest-growing Internet market because of sophisticated cyber attacks, originating in China, that resulted in the theft of intellectual property and targeted the g-mail accounts of human rights activists and some businesses.

I mean, come on. If you wrote a sentence like this in middle school, your teacher would tell you that you are really smart, and that you should rewrite the sentence.

Can you really read this sentence just once, at a normal speed, and understand it? Blows my mind. Now, it may be an extreme example, but I find all newspaper writing like this to one degree or another. Even the puff pieces are like this for me. The only stuff that I can really follow are the pieces in the Book Review, because they are deliberately not trying to spray facts at you -- they're discursive, and get to the hard facts somewhere in the middle. In other words, they're not journalistic.

Here's how I would rewrite this:

Sophisticated cyber attacks resulted in the theft of intellectual property, and targeted the g-mail accounts of human rights activists and some businesses. The attacks originated in China, causing Google to announce last week that it would stop censoring its Chinese search engine, and may even pull out of the world's fastest-growing Internet market. The Global Times expounded the nationalistic argument to counter Google's announcement.

I know this is utterly unacceptable for journalistic writing, but it is much easier for me to understand. Am I the only one?

I always assumed that a major reason for the journalistic style is that it's more succinct. My rewrite however, saves one character.

I do see one real problem: "the nationalistic argument" at the end is too far enough from its referent in the previous paragraph. I would therefore want to move the previous paragraph after this one. But that breaks what seems to be another rule of journalistic writing: start with the barest facts, and add detail as you go along. By this rule, the nationalistic argument should be before the context of the nationalistic argument. So I can't fix this, um, stretched reference without making my version a few words longer.

In any case, my version sounds weird, right? It breaks the text up into smaller sentences, which makes it kind of sing-song. It might even feel condescending, in a Dick-and-Jane kind of way. But in the end, it's just another specialized, stylized voice for conveying information rapidly, and one I would find much easier to read.

Overheard on the Subway

2010-01-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

So I'm on the F train trying to concentrate on my Nethack, when I hear two Park Slopey types get on the train already involved in a smarty-pants conversation. The train was noisy, so I wasn't able to catch everything. But I didn't need to.

Cast of Characters:

HE: Mid-forties, hair prematurely grey (but only slightly prematurely), horn-rimmed glasses.
SHE: Mid-thirties, maybe in marketing?

HE
They didn't understand even the most basic things, I mean, you would tell them something, something so obvious --

SHE
heh

HE
-- and they just didn't get it. Anyway.

[At this point I stop listening, and return to my game, which I promptly lose.]

...

HE
... semiotics ...

SHE
... semiotics ...

[Okay, now I'm listening. This should be good.]

HE
... want to promote Semiotics as a ...

SHE
Yeah, Augustus, Aurelius.

HE
... right ...

...

SHE
... Semiotics ... marketing ... Semiotics ...

HE
... marketing ... branded ... Semiotics ...

[Oh my god.]

...

HE
... has a degree, an MA in philosophy from the New School; her boyfriend is really talented, he's in this band, they're getting big, they have songs in Michael Cera films

SHE
... Cera? ...

HE
... baby-faced actor ...

...

SHE
... and I was hoping she would, you know, because I don't want to be alone, I would rather have someone to handle sales ... a company to be in ...

...

HE
... Semiotics ...

SHE
... really marketing ...

HE
... I prefer to call it, promote it as Semiotics ...

SHE
... Semiotics ... I mean, [sotto voce] it's not the *real* semiotics, it's a corrupted form of it.

HE
Of course.

...

HE
... I don't know what kind of assistants I would have ...

SHE
... someone to just ...

HE
... yeah, one thing I want to do, I don't want to manage any of this stuff , I just want to do the Work ...

...

SHE
... vice president of research and development at Google ...

SHE
... friend ... someone who's been at Google from the beginning ...

...

SHE
... they're into a lot of stuff, so If there's anything, I'm trying to think of something I would pitch to them ...

SHE
... real world, I mean it would be out there, in the real world ...

SHE
... totally funded ...

HE
... they can't make any decisions ... have to go to the CEO ... can't do it ... visions ... totally disempowered ...

HE
... Canal Street ...

...

SHE
I cant do it alone... I'm trying to think of a way can do it with, um, *you* ... guys.

HE
... she knows about identity politics ...

SHE
... going forward ...

[They head towards the door of the subway car.]

SHE
... first of all ...

[They get off at Canal Street.]

Come back, email address!

2010-01-20T08:25:00.000-08:00

From: "DR. GABRIEL SAMAD"
YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS WON THE LOTTERY AWARD 2010.

Bye-bye email address, and thanks for collecting my email for me for 15 years...

My Three Components

2009-11-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

This year has seen the 40'th anniversary of three things:

- Sesame Street
- Unix
- Monty Python

It also contained my 40th birthday.

This is fitting, because I think I can say that those three things are my
component parts; nothing else was needed.

The kitten is well, thanks for asking.

2009-10-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Well fed and well rested.

The great Guy Steele on C++

2009-09-24T12:13:00.000-07:00

As for C++–well, it reminds me of the Soviet-era labor joke: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." C++ pretends to provide an object-oriented data model, C++ programmers pretend to respect it, and everyone pretends that the code will work. The actual data model of C++ is exactly that of C, a single two-dimensional array of bits, eight by four billion, and all the syntactic sugar of C++ fundamentally cannot mask the gaping holes in its object model left by the cast operator and unconstrained address arithmetic.

(From Objects have not failed, 2002.)

Quote from Susan

2009-09-14T08:13:00.001-07:00

Hilarious.

"Look at the Woolworth Building -- it looks like a Christmas Bruise."
-- Susan Beal 9/11/2009

Annie's first full sentence!

2009-09-11T07:34:00.000-07:00

Young kitten annie typed her first full sentence on my laptop the other day. I'm so proud!!!

]\l,k
e4555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555Z&&&&ZZ$eeeeeeeeeeeem7555deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee78
45\/.5
"$ ./
k bddddddddGd

They really do say the darndest things.

Annie y Greg

2009-09-03T09:00:00.001-07:00

Here's what I love about cats. They can be comfortable almost anywhere.

In this picture, Annie is on my shoulder. My shoulder and arm were vaguely horizontal at that moment, and she took the opportunity to sit down like it was the floor. It's quite gratifying to be treated as a floor by a small creature; it's hard to explain why, but if you've experienced it, you know what I mean.

She looks like she might be playing here, but at that moment she was taking a break. The break lasted somewhere between 500 and 1500 milliseconds, but that's a decent break for a kitten.

Annie update

2009-09-02T06:56:00.000-07:00

If you saw the pictures of the very-young and very-thin Annie,, you might have been a bit worried about her. We were worried too.

But everything is just fine now.

A bit of legal knowledge from my wife.

2009-09-02T06:50:00.000-07:00

From: Susan Beal
To: Greg Travis
Subject: there's actually a statute about this!

Authority to represent the state as owner of abutt

Who'd'a thunk it?

Google does it to me again.

2009-06-12T09:06:00.001-07:00

Okay, so you may recall that Susan and I made a lego portrait of Nancy, which I placed amongst the other lego portraits here at Google NYC. Here's Nancy next to another famous programmer and Google employee, Brian Kernighan:

The other portraits are other famous people, or the Google founders, etc. But there's this one guy I didn't recognize, shown on the right here:

I see various images of him everywhere here -- on t-shirts, posters, computer screens, etc. The haircut has a late-70's / early-80's look, so I figure this must be another computer luminary whose name I probably know, and who might work at Google.

I decided to pose myself the challenge of figuring out who it is without asking anyone. I would look at the list of upper management, which includes a bunch of famous computer scientists; I would examine every place I found his face, try to find a pattern. Check out old pictures of people at Xerox Parc back in the day. Look closely at the people I saw around me. And so on.

At one point, someone set up a computer in the Hall of Old Computers running the operating system called Plan 9 from Bell Labs. It used an old-yet-advanced email system that included a little picture of the person sending the email. And there, on the screen, was a bunch of little pictures of people who had sent email to this computer, people I recognized, and they mystery man as well! The little pictures had the usernames under them! The mystery man's picture was partially obscured, so I couldn't see his username. I clicked on the window to bring it to the front -- and it disappeared.

Hmmm.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally figured it out. Strangely, I cannot for the life of me remember how I figured it out, but I suspect that I saw the picture along with the guy's username, pjw. A quick image search for 'pjw' brings up the picture, and from that I got the name: Peter Weinberger.

It turns out, he was a researcher at Bell Labs a while back, and then he was the "Director of Computer Sciences" or something like that. He was involved in early work in digital photography, and he left a head shot lying around and someone scanned it and started putting it everywhere as a joke. It also became a test image for showing off digital image processing.

Apparently, this is a long-standing geek meme. I thought I kept up on most of those, but this is one I missed entirely.

Anyway, mystery solved! So, does he work at Google? I look him up, and, sure enough, he does. I look at the picture on his internal page, and he looks vaguely -- wait -- oh my god.

This guy has been sitting behind me, in the next cubicle-pen, the entire time I've worked here. I even had a conversation with him and some others a while back.

It's a small world here.

2009-06-09T10:47:00.001-07:00

I am big fan of Richard Clarke. He's a capable counter-terrorism expert, honest to a fault, and the only person to apologize for the 9/11 attacks. Which is actually kind of inappropriate, since he tried over and over to get the Bush administration to heed his warnings, and was ignored every time.

Also, he looks like a baby eagle.

Spam of the day

2009-06-02T07:41:00.000-07:00

From: "Tamara Acevedo"
Subject: Pay less for luxury and qualitative watches.

Hmm! Quantitative watches give me a lot of stress, what with all those numbers telling me I'm late. A qualitative watch sounds a lot more laid back.

2009-05-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

I've been developing a new software development system, called TESSA (Tertiary Enterprise System Solution with Aspects). Here it is in action:

Initializing:

Syntax Error:

Compilation Successful:

An especially vivid dream I had last night

2009-05-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

I'm back at Dynamic Logic (my last job), on some kind of official business from my current job (Google). [This is relevant since my departure from DL was acrimonious: I was treated like dirt as soon as I announced I was leaving, and was told that I was making a Big Mistake. And this rather got to me.]

Anyway, I'm back there, and, like all dreams where I am visiting an old company, it's on the 100th floor of a skyscraper and is a ring-shaped office around some unseen core. I'm running around looking for something, and I'm a little self-conscious because I've gained weight (true). Finally I reach the front desk, where I am given some documents or something. People are being really friendly, and by the time I'm ready to go, people are laughing and cheering me, it's all very gratifying.

I go out to take the elevator down. An elevator arrives, and some people get in it, but I get in another one. Like most elevators in my dreams, it's way too big and has furniture in it. This one looks like it's undergoing serious renovations, with construction materials, sheetrock, wiring stuff.

The walls and floors are lined with lit candles which throw off a nice light. Apparently the electricity is not connected to this elevator, so the light has to be from candles. Somehow, though, when I press the button, the elevator starts to go down.

It goes down very slowly. At this point, I decide that this elevator may well be dangerous, that it perhaps isn't meant to be used, so I start pawing at the buttons. I'm trying to hit the '90' button before we've passed the 90th floor, then the '89' button, etc., but I can't get the thing to stop.

A moment later, I look up, and the elevator has changed. Instead of a shambling room lit by candles, it's a pristine, futuristic space with slanty walls and glowing panels. I turn around towards the back of the elevator, and there are three chairs. They are occupied, of course, by the ladies of Dynasty (the prime time soap opera from the 80's)! Linda Evans, Joan Collins, and someone else. (Not a show I watched.)

I think this dream is of good portent.

Another sighting of Austin's book

2009-05-19T10:30:00.001-07:00

Right here in the NYC Google office.

No disrespect to Bugs Bunny...

2009-05-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

This headshot of Sarah Palin always looked really familiar to me. In a flash, I remembered today what it was:

Now that I look at them side-by-side, it's not really the same expression, but somehow the smile-level is identical.

Pretty Pretty Ca Na Da

2009-05-04T14:55:00.000-07:00

View Larger Map

Don't forget to zoom out!

Beautiful spam

2009-05-04T08:13:00.001-07:00

Perhaps I'm just trying to share something that everyone has enough of, but, look, I get some spam that really make me happy, and I just have to share.

From: Champany
Subject: Computerized babies cry, burp at Mexicaan teens

[Followed by viagra ad.]

Careful what you ask me!

2009-04-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

Some poor guy wrote to me to ask me what I meant by the following line from the little 'bio' paragraph I used to put at the end of programming articles:

[Greg is] a devout believer in the religious idea that, when a computer program works, it's a complete coincidence.

I sometimes get questions about articles I wrote (many years ago), but no one had asked me about this line, so I was pleased to respond. But the poor guy didn't know what he was getting into, because I just went on and on and on:

> I haven't thought of it before. and I know it may sound silly, but I'm
> curious to know why you think so..

Not silly at all! I've gotten many emails about my articles over the
years, but no one asked about this most-important of topics.

In programming, we use so many methods to try to control the
complexity, but in the end, I, at least, feel like I don't have a
handle on the whole system, and when something works, it *feels* like
I just got lucky.

When I first wrote that bio, I was just a year out from writing
DOS/Windows games. It drove me nuts -- one bug and you have to reboot
your computer. It really frustrated and traumatized me, so that I
would be crossing my fingers every time I ran the program. I guess I
needed more reliability than that, which is why I was quite pleased to
switch to Java.

If I think about the enormous complexity of the whole system, it
boggles my mind. I write this code running inside emacs, an ancient,
huge program that, itself, contains a lisp interpreter; my code is
compiled by a huge program that itself was compiled by a huge program
that, itself, was in turn compiled by a huge program, going all the
way back over the years to someone who wrote a tiny assembler and
punched it into the front panel of some primitive computer.
Meanwhile, the compiler is reading from disk spinning at who knows how
many RPM, with a magnetic head floating just above the fragile
surface. The disk sectors are being read, possibly out of order, into
memory buffers, probably inside an interrupt where some special pin on
the chip halted the processor in the middle of decoding some zany
machine language that looks like

0a 62 6f 67 67 6c 65 73 20 6d 79 20 6d 69 6e 64
2e 20 20 49 20 77 72 69 74 65 20 74 68 69 73 20
63 6f 64 65 20 72 75 6e 6e 69 6e 67 20 69 6e 73
69 64 65 20 65 6d 61 63 73 2c 20 61 6e 20 61 6e
63 69 65 6e 74 2c 0a 68 75 67 65 20 70 72 6f 67
72 61 6d 20 74 68 61 74 2c 20 69 74 73 65 6c 66
2c 20 63 6f 6e 74 61 69 6e 73 20 61 20 6c 69 73
70 20 69 6e 74 65 72 70 72 65 74 65 72 3b 20 6d
79 20 63 6f 64 65 20 69 73 0a 63 6f 6d 70 69 6c
65 64 20 62 79 20 61 20 68 75 67 65 20 70 72 6f
67 72 61 6d 20 74 68 61 74 20 69 74 73 65 6c 66

but also, since it's DOS (or Windows 3.1, same thing), the memory is
being paged around by some crazy 'dos extender' which has all its
interrupts going; all of this data is being parsed by a crazy state
machine with hundreds of states, and turned into a code tree and
analyzed and rendered into more '79 20 63 6f 64' and written to an
executable file with interlocking code sections; and then that file is
read into memory which does the run-time linking, relocating pointers
or whatever the hell it does, and don't forget that we might be
triggering page faults and reading from and writing from disk, and all
of this is written in a language that is almost certainly not Java,
all of this is running inside a little chip of silicon, tiny currents
running through tiny wires, right next to humming power supplies and
spinning fans, and any single component might go bad and a 0 changes
to 1 and you'll never never ever ever know...

I'm telling you, I get freaked out thinking about it, and when my
program *doesn't* print "Segmentation Fault: core dumped", it seems
like I just got *really lucky*.

So that's why.

In the morning, my code feels to me like it's a nicely-designed
bicycle, with a few well-understood moving parts, and I have to adjust
this or that and get riding; by the end of the day, it seems more like
an off-shore oil rig slowly toppling into the sea...

Put another way, in the morning it feels like science, and in the
evening it feels like religion.

It is not cool that a google search for "c" brings up Citigroup as its first hit

2009-04-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

It really isn't.

In Soviet Russia, Fir Tree Uproots You!

2009-04-15T09:19:00.000-07:00

Some guy in Russia went to the doctor and they found a little fir tree growing in his lung. Would this be the first creature born to a male animal?

Susan came and told me this, and we were both filled with a feeling of reverence. I would honored if a tree would grow in me. However, it sounds like it was rather painful; I would probably pick some other place to grow it.

For added fun: this news story actually has a list of 5 related articles. Um, this news story is not related to any other news story that has ever been.

View larger.

2009-04-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

I love how "view larger" really means "resize my browser and show me the same image".

When will people realize that pop-up windows are for programmers to impress clients with, not to help the user?

Tiny tiny kittens

2009-04-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

I just have to post this picture of Becky and Tessa as tots. I look at it several times a day. I imagine there's a "well, are you going to take us home" kind of look in their eyes, so it kind of tugs at my heart. But then I remember that I did bring them home, and now they are jolly, healthy cats, are are by no means the same size anymore.

Bad ad targeting.

2009-04-10T11:57:00.000-07:00

Really bad ad to show on the Baby Chick Cam...

Primitive art not so primitive after all?

2009-04-10T10:02:00.001-07:00

I found an "office cave painting" the other day: a coffee splotch on a counter that looked like a hippo. Note the sophisticated use of foreshortening that makes this young hippo seem to be walking away from us.

test

2009-04-10T09:58:00.001-07:00

test via ping from phone

2009-04-10T09:28:00.001-07:00

Test from ping.fm.

Do what now?

2009-02-17T07:08:00.000-08:00

I keep my to-do 'list' in the form of many small scraps of paper in my back pocket. Every morning I rifle through them to see what I need to do. I throw away (recycle) the ones that I have done or that no longer need to be done. I look sheepishly at the ones at the bottom of the stack that have been in there for 5 months, the paper turning into a silky mess. I take a few out that I plan to do that day, and often wind up just putting them back. Sometimes I can't read what I wrote on them.

The other day, I was writing some task down on a slip of paper, but I was distracted by something else. The next day, I was looking at my slips of paper, and there was one that just said, "Karma".

What's my action item here?

The truth about 'classical music'

2009-02-14T10:48:00.000-08:00

Someone replaced the the music of the Yo-Yo Ma performace at the inaugural address.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka-sHA74N40

I think this proves that the way people look when they are listening to high-art music is the same as they way they look when they are either (1) listening to something terrible, or (2) listening to nothing.

Stop resizing my window!

2008-12-16T10:09:00.000-08:00

Hey all you javascript programmers out there, and all you html people who copy and paste:

Stop resizing my browser windows!

Why do you want me to have less room to read your nice information? Why do you take a nice page that fits completely in my browser window, and put it inside a window that's too small to show it all, so that I have to use the scrollbars?

A browser is not a paint program! Web pages don't have edges! Stop it!

I love Klaatu

2008-12-15T09:05:00.001-08:00

I saw The Day The Earth Stood Still and was quite pleasantly surprised. I loved it. I love Klaatu. Only Keanu could play Klaatu.

I bought the tickets online, and the site then sent me a link to some reviews. The reviews bothered me, so I posted my own review:

This movie was just wonderful. I found myself desperately wishing Klaatu was really on his way. This story couldn't be more relevant, and no one could possibly have played Klaatu other than Keanu.

I'm saddened to see a lot of reviewers here who didn't like the movie because it had too much Environmentalism and not enough Bone-Headed Action-Adventure Stupidity. This movie is thrilling and terrifying, if you just pay attention to the story, and to what the story is a metaphor for.

Maybe you weren't able to really enjoy the movie because you're running low on American Exceptionalism Vitamin. Unacceptable! Print out this handy cheat-sheet and bring it with you to the theater the next time you see a movie that you suspect might not satisfy:

Get on the horn! The president is waiting! Scramble the jets! Put your hands in the air! Put down the gun! Get a life! Bring it on! Over my dead body! Won't get fooled again! Cold dead hands! I'll be back! I'll be back, Bennett! That's no moon! This is Sparta! Say hello to my little friend! Resistance is futile! They'll never take our freedom! Yippie Ki Yea Mother Fucker! Steers and Queers! Do ya, punk? Get away from her, you bitch! I'll tell you about my mother! Get off my plane! I am your father! Hasta la vista! I am the law! There are always two deaths! Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn! Shaken, not stirred! This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun! You're an errand boy! I make this look good! Fly, you fools! It's sex with someone I love! Life is like a box of chocolates! Elaine! Red Rain! Ma, I love him awful! You wouldn't like me when I'm angry!

Sadly, there was a 750-character limit, which I didn't find out until I tried to post it. (I should have been tipped off by the insistent message "minimum length reached", perhaps.) And they they detected the "profanity", although I think they were referring to the potty-language, so I had to work around that. AND it gets reviewed first, so I'm thinking they might not actually put it up there.

Lego Nancy: Scandal!

2008-12-10T07:33:00.001-08:00

So I come in to work today, and I get my coffee, and I look over and see if Nancy is still there, and today she isn't.

She's on a table. She's kind of separated into two pieces, and there is a column of about 6 1x1 pieces taken out. What the fuck?

Now, it might have fallen off the shelf. The other portraits seem to be glued to some kind of stiff backing. Now, I remember, from my childhood, that there were some kids who would glue their legos together. You know, the kind of kids who might glue anything to anything, and they glue their lego to a barbie head, or to other lego.

Now, I'm all for kids gluing things to other things, but gluing lego is heresy -- a misuse of a great thing. Not just a misuse, but a misuse with a certain painful irony. Like Using a macbook for writing a screenplay, or using set-car!.

So I had affixed Nancy to a piece of cardboard, and held it all together with some large binder clips. Since the binder clips were on the bottom, it gave the whole thing a tendency to slip. So it might have slipped off. That's easier for me to believe than the other possibility, which is that someone came along and needed some 1x1 pieces and figured the easiest way would be to take them from the middle of one of the portraits.

I didn't restore the missing pieces -- let the crime show! But I pushed the two halves back together. And, MacGruber-style, I deftly scared up some rubber bands and cleverly wrapped them about the binder clips so they wouldn't slip again.

I went to put the thing back on the high shelf, and it just wouldn't quite fit. There was something in the way. There's some random lego junk up on that shelf, so I kind of pushed, and it turns out that there was some stupid 80-page marketing booklet up there, which, when moved, knocked a big chunk of lego off the shelf. A piece of some older project that had been stuffed up there. So that fell off and shattered all over the place.

Just as that happened, a whole bunch of Google Dudes were arriving, and one of them said, "heh, yer fired", and they all laughed and walked on. (Make no mistake, the nerd world has its own frat-boy stratum.) I ignored them. Another guy came in and, while talking on his cell phone, awkwardly picked up some pieces for me. That was nice.

I cleaned up and checked that Nancy wasn't going to slide again, and that was my breakfast!

Nancy

2008-11-10T11:43:00.000-08:00

Google NYC has a Lego area, as is publicly known. In particular, there are some lego portraits of luminaries who work at Google. However, there was room for another lego portrait, so I took a bunch of lego home and Susan and I put one together.

First, you have the two founders, shown at the top of this NYTimes photo:

(Recently, another one of Eric Schmidt has been added.)

Up on top of the lego storage shelves, on the left side, you have a couple of dudes whose names I don't know:

On the right, you have Brian Kernighan, who co-wrote my C textbook:

And, finally, ours:

So far, there's been no indication that anyone has even noticed it. But that's okay, I did it for my own delight.

Phone System 2.0

2008-04-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

I realize the phone system is an example of a system that Just Works. It's got a pretty good interface. And I know that there is a lot of high tech behind a dial tone that still sounds like it's made from cans and waxed string.

However, here's an idea for a new version of the phone system interface. Useful, perhaps, not just for itself, but to inspire other ideas.

* If two people call each other at the same time, instead of 2 busy signals, how about just connecting them?

The 'how to' part is left as an exercise.

2008-01-10T09:53:00.000-08:00

The Death Star suddenly makes sense to me -- it's what you get when you build a skyscraper in zero gravity:

	On Earth	In Space
Candle
Building

2008-01-10T07:18:00.001-08:00

So, now I work at Google. It's pretty great.

When I told my boss I was leaving, the first thing she said was, "you are making a BIG mistake". I was aghast, since we had had a good relationship during the four years I was there.

She went on to give a few vague reasons, but nothing that really explained the reaction. It kind of freaked me out, because I was already nervous about making such a big decision.

The next two weeks were rather bad. She told the other programmers, and it seemed like she convinced them, too, that it was a "big mistake". With one exception, no one congratulated me at first, and when they did, they sounded mournful, like I was leaving to live in an iron lung.

The same day, or maybe the next day, another programmer quit -- he'd been there for a long time, and was well-liked and essential. My boss announced that he was leaving, that they would really miss him, that he had done great work, that he was just so wonderful, that she would give him a 'quitting bonus' if she were allowed to. He was going to love his new job where they did things the way he liked, and so on.

Not a word about me, nothing. It continued to freak me out. My former boss is quite charismatic, and it doesn't really surprise me that she was able to turn their feelings against me.

It's not like I left in the middle of a project. I mean, you're always in the middle of a project, that's true for everyone, and everyone who had quit before had been sent off with the best wishes. It was even company policy that people are encouraged to grow and improve, etc. etc., and if that meant moving on to a new place, that's fine.

But not, apparently, for me.

Anyway, my code was working, it was mostly complete, it was in a usable state, etc. What did I do wrong? I know that they didn't really like my code, since it used lots of functions and had unit tests and all that annoying stuff, but so did the other guy who quit.

I was nervous about coming to Google, but I just wanted a change of pace, and Google certainly seemed like that. I've never worked at a big company (except for some contract work), and I didn't know if I would like it. I didn't really look forward to writing C++. I had once been a C++ pusher, but now I'm a die-hard functional programming pusher. What would become of me?

My wife and other family members were excited, because everyone's heard of Google and it's a big deal and all that. I felt some pressure, so I tried to play it off like it wasn't a big deal, what's all the fuss. But after about a day here, I must say, it's pretty great.

Before I decided to come here, I looked around on the web for blogs or mailing lists for disgruntled former Google employes. Those can tell you a lot about a company. I would have taken it with a grain of salt, because I know how they are biased and bitter, but there's still useful information to be gotten.

I couldn't find one. I think I found something someone said about working on something that never got used, but that's it. I was amazed. Nearly every place I had ever worked at, or even contracted for, had some place you could laugh about your former company. But not Google.

Now, I can tell why. There's just not that much to complain about. It's eerie.

I could go on about this place, but the highlights: it's good for programmers; it's casual; people are smart; there's free, high-quality, healthy vegetarian food every day.

So, let's all feel terrible about my

Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design.

2007-12-23T14:42:00.000-08:00

When I first started using unix when I got to college, when you would log out, it would print out a 'fortune'. This is the output of the famous unix program called, well, 'fortune'. They weren't really fortunes, although some of them sounded like snide fortune cookie fortunes.

Then, one day, I got this one, which I did not understand:

Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the center of the dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will usually know what's wrong.

I didn't understand it, but I found it so compelling that I never forgot it. Who was this Ken Thompson? Surely this story wasn't literally true; but what had he done that someone was compelled to tease him in this way? Did Ken Thompson feel bad about being teased like this?

I now know that Ken Thompson was one of the creators of unix. In this fortune, the car is unix, and the giant '?' is the dreaded 'segmentation fault' error that plagues beginning unix/C programmers and which provides no useful information.

I have always felt a little bit bad for him, being teased in this way (and why does Dennis Ritchie get off so easy?). Apparently, though, Mr. Thompson and I work at the same company now, so maybe I will have a chance to comfort him.