Reading
The Kindle
Based on conversations with our Dublin staff, Dublin is very much so not the town James Joyce wrote about.
May 03, 2008
March 21, 2008
Rejection of Continental Drift
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” — Clarke's First Law
The Rejection of Continental Drift examines the early 20th century reaction and rejection of Continental Drift by American Scientists. Excellent detail and discussion of the late 19th and early 20th century Geologists, their science, and philosophy. The book traces development in American thought—avoid grand theories, gather data, consider multiple hypothesis—from the earlier Vulcanist-Neptunist row, how the mathematically convenient Pratt isostasy model quickly became canon, and the endless debates where the two sides accepted only what their model supported, and ignored or explained away evidence to the contrary. Defenders of continental drift even resorted to the phrase “E pur si muove” as their arguments were rejected!
March 02, 2008
Dune Prequel Spoiler
“The Butlerian Jihad did it.” On a completely different note, recently re-read Dune, Messiah, and Children of Dune. With this review in mind, I do see odd characterization—superbeings who yet are variously petulant or hissing at one another—and that the prose cannot match Lessing in Shikasta. I do still enjoy the ideas and imagination Herbert brings: gypsum flats as evidence for prior water on Dune, thoughts on prescience, and the quotes that preface each chapter.
The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backwards; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowning full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: “Now what is this thing doing?”
— Children Of Dune, p. 221.
More on dune, from someone who goes through blogs like Leto Duncan Idahos.
February 11, 2008
Light—Science & Magic
The book Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting is a must for any photographer. As usual, I skimmed a few chapters, then ran off to hardware and art supply stores, and only now revisit the book in detail.
For lighting, start with what you have, or is readily affordable. A few pieces of black cardboard, black masking tape, and a thin opening for a desk lamp creates a nice box to shoot in:
This box helped create:
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The Camersaurus Apertus shot it a bit flawed: overexposed wire, reflection off the too-close black background, and errant blue highlight from another desklamp. On the other hand, I am learning a lot—that steel cable is really difficult to work with—that one should clean and dust everything—that photography is rife with specialized vocabulary.
A few pieces of white cardboard plus a flash facilitate white-on-white shots:
February 02, 2008
Recent Readings
Mostly science fiction of easier or more difficult reading material:
Creatures of Light and Darkness - Temporal Fugue, dueling deities. Too much fun.
Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5 (George Sherban Emissary) - Doris Lessing. Excellent science fiction in the vein of the earlier Dune or later Hyperion series, though with a very distinct style.
Technorati Tags: scifi
December 16, 2007
Recent (or not so) Readings
The Count of Monte Cristo (Penguin Classics). Long, excellent, and different than any film or アニメ adaptation I have seen.
Finally clawed through the unabridged Tale of the Heike. Weed-hacking swords have illustrious parentage, the legendary くさなぎのつるぎ “grasscutter sword” named so after one Prince cut a league of field, then burned the Eastern barbarians. Those were the days!
Spook Country. I liked it, though the reviews are all over the map, depending on the reader.
“Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?” Milgrim heard himself ask this with a sense of deep wonder. He was saying these things without consciously having though them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable. (p.137)
Picked up Word Origins. Fun to browse through.
November 10, 2007
Principles of Geology
The contention of the rival factions of the Vulcanists and Neptunists had been carried to such a height, that these names had become terms of reproach, and the two parties had been less occupied in searching for truth, than for such arguments as might strengthen their own cause, or serve to annoy their antagonists.— Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Volume I, Page 71.
Or Republicans vs. Democrats, or vi vs. emacs, or other—innumerable—dualistic debates. A difficult read due to the archaic prose and sheer breadth of the text. Lyell’s dregs and sediments, as the wheelwright would have it, by necessity goes into great detail of the “causes now in operation” to establish uniformitarianism. Contrast this prose with the visual style in The Orphan Tsunami of 1700, replete with diagrams, photos, and prose. I find my eye wandering over these pages, absorbing information and relationships, a very different experience than Lyell.
October 10, 2007
Recent Reading
On the Nature of Things is a fascinating read. The poem offers on the one hand profound insight into and excellent analysis of the world and human condition, and the other flawed reasoning and rampant speculation. Granted, discovering magnetism and ruling out underground winds as a source for earthquakes and volcanism took humanity a few centuries to research properly. I read a “vigorous prose translation” that predates the all-cataloging eye of the ISBN. Many a florid turn of phrase to machete through, but some gems:
But that which is immortal wills not to have its parts transposed nor any addition to be made nor one tittle to ebb away; for whenever a thing changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before. Therefore the mind, whether it is sick or whether is is altered by medicine, alike, as I have shown, gives forth mortal symptoms. So invariably is truth found to make head against false reason and to cut off all retreat from the assailant and by a two-edged refutation to put falsehood to route.1
O hapless race of men, when that they charged the gods with such acts and coupled with them bitter wrath! What groanings did they then beget for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for our children’s children! No act is it of piety to be often seen with veiled head to turn to a stone and approach every altar and fall prostrate on the ground and spread out the palms before the statues of the gods and sprinkle the altars with much blood of beasts and nail up vow after vow, but rather to be able to look on all things with a mind at peace.2
And, for something completely different, the entertaining classic Lord of Light.3
1 Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Trans. Munroe, H. A. J. New York: Washington Square, 1965. 73.
2 Lucretius 151.
3 I can see why folks love Endnote. Or hyperlink stuff.
August 14, 2007
Recent Readings
Light summer reading includes:
- The Children of Húrin. If Greek, a chorus would sing the Hero’s doom. Doom, doom, doom. Doom. Spare, epic writing, enjoyable.
- King Lear (old Crowell critical library edition from a random University district used book store). Annotations variously useful, useless, or missing to spice things up. 乱 [Ran] still excellent, having read King Lear only after watching the movie.
And on slightly less depressing notes, more excellent works by Le Guin:
And I now possess a new stack of “you really have to read this!” books from coworkers and friends…
June 24, 2007
Reading, 乱, and Rostropovich
Winning Chess Tactics (revised) is a good introduction to Chess tactics, though a few diagrams have mistakes, which makes learning difficult.
- Play Stronger Chess by Examining Chess960: Usable Strategies of Fischer Random Chess Discovered covers Chess960 in great detail. Includes easy (and unbiased!) methods for board setup, rules for notation, castling, and methods to reduce the advantage of White starting. Most interesting is the discussion of various layouts with regard to 2nd rank pawn support (or lack thereof), 4th rank pawn support, how the Knights interact, and other considerations Chess960 requires.
乱 [Ran] sets King Lear (more or less) in Feudal Japan: incredibly well done. Been working through works by Akira Kurosawa via Netflix. Netflix very handy, with the nearest movie store being of limited selection, and the rest a fair ways away (and uphill) from me.
Mstislav Rostropovich: Cello Concertos collects concerto and encore recordings from the 1950s. Some tracks suffer from a slight background hiss, though nonetheless excellent and enjoyable music throughout.
Technorati Tags: cello
May 04, 2007
Misc. Blog Links & Books
An article regarding passive versus active verbs, courtesy a random discussion at work. Consider also the text Revising Prose, faulted only by its high price.
RealClimate provides enlightening reading from climate scientists.
April 14, 2007
Recent Readings
Loved The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, much moreso than The Left Hand of Darkness.
The Other Wind, also of Le Guin. Will have to snag the Tales from Earthsea DVD, which should show up at Uwajimaya sometime this summer…
Finally dragged Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed out of the yet-to-read bookshelf. A highly informative and engaging text.
“Why would anyone have built an advanced city in that wasteland…?” p.143-144.
March 25, 2007
Recent Readings
The Art of Practicing - excellent advice on paying attention to yourself, stretching, and how the human body moves.
Concepts of Modern Mathematics - difficult for my rusty and mainly applied math skills to follow. Enlightening look at mathematics and how the various fields relate to one another.
January 04, 2007
Elvenfoo
Recently finished up book three of the Halfblood Chronicles, Elvenborn. Much stronger text than second in series, especially the conclusion and foreshadowing for a hopeful fourth text. First book The Elvenbane remains best in series for me. Overall, a light entertaining read.
December 15, 2006
Recent Readings
Been working through books by Ursula K. Leguin, notably The Tombs of Atuan. Later books in the series (The Farthest Shore and Tehanu) also excellent, though the climax seemed rushed in these. The Left Hand of Darkness covers similar thoughts in a different context, though did not like the coldness of the entire world.
Also working through The Tale of the Heike. Much better than the recent abridged version (being complete, for starters), though not without downsides (such as being complete).
November 18, 2006
The Thinker’s Thesaurus
Speaking of execrable, The Thinker's Thesaurus offers excellent word choices (when you can find a match) along with great example uses of the word. Otherwise, nowhere near the depth of Roget’s Thesaurus.
October 27, 2006
Minimal Perl Review
Reviewed Minimal Perl: For UNIX and Linux People on Amazon. Learned new commands, such as the often overlooked nl(1), and uses for sed(1) and awk(1) had never learned since I started out with Perl.
On a related note, Tim Maher is presenting at Seattle Area System Administrators Guild November 9th.
October 22, 2006
Music on the Brain
Highly recommend Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music. Picked up copy after attending an Amazon Fishbowl lecture on the book: great talk, entertaining speaker.
Interesting trivia: the Catholic Church at some point banned polyphonic music (two voices somehow challenge the unity of God) and augmented fifths (C to F♯ or a tritone or Diabolus in musica). However, the 6% increase in frequency between each semitone of the Western music system makes any sequence such as C-C♯-B-B♯ represent three sixes of change. Diabolus in musica, indeed.
Music by Bach delightfully polyphonic, so will have to research the bans in more detail. Some searching turns up the motu proprio by Pope Pius X on Sacred Music.
October 09, 2006
Strange Earthquake
Earthquake, or something else? No significant nearby historical seismicity, and depth pretty much at ground level. Brushing off Geodynamics and my rusty math skills yields an explosion of around 51T. This calculation pretty accurate when used against the seismic events resulting from the nuclear tests in Pakistan. To verify my numbers, energy (E) in Joules given by: log10E = 1.44M + 5.24 where M is the magnitude (4.2 in this case). From there, calculate Kilojoules, then work out the volume of TNT by the arms control definition.
October 08, 2006
Amazon おまかせ
Testing Omakase links…
Apparently will display (somewhat?) random links until learns the site and users better?
October 07, 2006
KILL only if not already dead
Process restart scripts on Unix will normally send TERM (-15) signal via kill(1) or kill(2) then move on, or send a brutal KILL (-9). Neither approach should be used: a TERM signal may leave a process running, and a KILL must only be sent as a last resort. KILL prevents cleanup of shared memory, temporary files, and other open resources. Instead, send a TERM signal, then check whether the process has exited properly. If not, only then use the KILL signal.
The following script will help test processing killing code. The script ignores the default TERM signal, requiring some other signal to stop the process, such as INT (-2, or ctrl+c) or KILL. The perlipc documentation contains more information on signal handling in Perl.
#!/usr/bin/perl -l print $$; $SIG{TERM} = 'IGNORE'; $SIG{INT} = sub { print "whoa"; exit }; sleep 3 while 1;
GNU ps contains options to match running processes, such as:
pid_check=`ps ho pid $pid` if [ -z "$pid_check" ]; then echo "info: process not running: pid=$pid" fi
However, these options do not work on other ps(1) implementations. Inspecting the result of kill -0 $pid should be more portable, though must be tested on each new flavor of Unix. Example shell code to kill a process and ensure it exits:
#!/bin/sh # Returns 0 if supplied pid not found, # 1 if still running. Back-off delay # allows slow processes to spin down. confirm_process_exit () { PID=$1 for delay in 0 1 2 3 5 8; do echo -n . sleep $delay if ! kill -0 $PID >/dev/null; then return 0 fi done return 1 } # Kill process, then ensure exits kill $1 confirm_process_exit $1 STATUS=$? if [ $STATUS -eq 1 ]; then kill -9 $1 fi
The Portable Shell Programming book covers ps(1) and other shell portability concerns. If possible, use Perl or another modern language, as the loop handling code around kill(2) will be more testable and portable than the equivalent shell code.
Slow to exit applications will also require special handling, as they may take upwards of a minute to spin down. Java embedded with Oracle… uggh.
On a somewhat related note, ensure new application code load tested before seeing production use. Systems often exhibit unexpected behavior under heavy CPU or memory load.
October 03, 2006
Of Dictionaries
Never indoctrinated with American dictionaries, so favor:
The Chambers Dictionary. If I only had one English dictionary, it would be this one. Plenty of eclectic words, reasonably portable, and without the mind numbing depth of the
Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Now a tall tome, rather than the old two volume set. Comes with half-sphere magnifying glass that must be slid across the pages, and thus hard to magnify definitions near gutter. Eight entries for grue, numerous pages dedicated to salt, and much, much more. :)
Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Simply fun to browse!
The Dictionary of Lanaguages includes very interesting coverage of world languages. Includes example words for comparison, shows geographic distribution of languages, and many interesting facts. Highly recommended.
The Highly Selective Dictionary For The Extraordinarily Literate - good starting point for dictionary searches. Most useful for its word use distinctions.
Use the DICT Development Group or the taxing-on-the-ad-blocker Dictionary.com for online lookups. An OED subscription would be great, though costly…
September 29, 2006
RSA data length limits
The length of a RSA signature varies in direct proportion to the RSA key size, not the amount of data encrypted. The Perl script below demonstrates the length of signatures for several RSA key sizes. Also, larger keys allow more data to be encrypted with RSA, minus overhead for various encoding and security measures. Large amounts of data should be encrypted using a symmetric cipher, and the private key for this cipher encrypted via RSA.
#!/usr/bin/perl -wl use strict; use Crypt::OpenSSL::Random; use Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA; Crypt::OpenSSL::Random::random_status() or die "single and thine image dies with thee\n"; my $string = 'foo'; KEYSIZE: for my $ks (qw{512 1024 2048}) { my $pk = Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA->generate_key($ks); my $sig = $pk->sign($string); print $ks, ' -> ', length $sig; } __DATA__ 512 -> 64 1024 -> 128 2048 -> 256
Technorati Tags: coding, cryptography, Perl
September 12, 2006
Curious Cook
Curious Cook - blog of Harold McGee, author of the excellent On Food and Cooking text.
Technorati Tags: cooking
September 07, 2006
Magma Crystallizes Hotter
New trigger found for volcanic eruptions - the more magma crystallizes, the hotter it gets. Meanwhile, Mt. St. Helens spews away. For great background information on Washington State geology, consider Roadside Geology of Washington.
Much still unknown in Geology, with major changes (and arguments over) in thinking since the beginning of the science. Great Geological Controversies provides an excellent background on the various controversies.
September 06, 2006
Thyme Management
Disclaimer: this article has nothing to do with herbs. With that said, I use the following spices heavily:
- Ajwain - good complement in moderation with Coriander.
- Black and White Pepper - mixed together in pepper mill.
- Cardamon Seeds - wonderful when ground fresh, though fades quickly.
- Coriander - excellent base spice for Indian dishes or with quinoa.
- Ginger - fresh, ground, crystalized, it’s all good. Use in both Asian and Indian dishes, and also my smoothie spice mix.
- Poppy Seeds - complement for Cardamon based spice mixes.
- Turmeric - mainly for curry mixes and the health benefits. Not so keen on the orange stains it leaves everywhere.
For curry mixes, I also pick up any number of other spices. Be sure to buy spices fresh, or failing that, try ordering whole spices online. Like coffee, spices must be ground and used as soon as possible. Unless the spice requires industrial equipment to process, such as Mace.
For equipment, currently have a Kitchen Aid blade grinder, a small mortar and pestle, a pepper mill, and a hand crank coffee grinder. Kitchen Aid good for quick mixes of softer spices. Mortar and pestle has smooth sides, so hard to grind spices with. Coffee grinder handles hard spices such as Coriander best, though this task could also be handled by another pepper mill. If only buying one item, purchase a large mortar and pestle. Ensure it has rough sides, as smooth ones allow the spices to escape.
My favorite spice book came from the local World Merchant’s store: The Contemporary Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices: Seasonings for the Global Kitchen.
Technorati Tags: food
September 05, 2006
Chess Books
Trying out a series of chess books by Yasser Seirawan. Started with Winning Chess Tactics, but quickly realized lacked the fundamentals covered in first book Play Winning Chess (force, time, space, and pawn structure).
For extra practice, installed chess board at work. Great time waster (and developer snare). Run open games where anyone free to play. This leads to odd chess games, where one side dominates, or numerous tactics changes as different players cast their opinion.
Technorati Tags: chess
August 26, 2006
Two Religious Texts
My recent reading included the following recommended texts:
Father Arseny, 1893-1973: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father. Collection of letters, notes, and essays surrounding Father Arseny. Includes memoirs from a Soviet prison camp, and his life thereafter.
The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. Excellent introduction to Zen Buddhism. Sprawling history, covering the Indian origins, migration and evolution through China—take one part Buddhism, one part Tao, then mix well—and the various Japanese adaptations. Very clear and insightful prose.
August 22, 2006
The Flavors of Olive Oil
Highly recommend the book The Flavors of Olive Oil. Covers buying and tasting techniques: great advice when faced with rows of olive oil in a store. The tasting notes and the list of vendors provide a starting point for exploration. Also includes many helpful asides on food products and cooking methods, for example saba—an ancient grape must sweetener. Need to try some of the many recipes…
Technorati Tags: cooking
August 08, 2006
Time Management
System administrators must read the book Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli. A quick read with excellent advice including the “keep your e-mail inbox empty” rule and how to prioritize tasks. David Allen’s longer Getting Things Done provides a complete workflow that encompasses both work and home.
I am currently experimenting with both the Kinkless GTD method (great for a Mac OS X laptop), and a Moleskin (great for accidental drops, unlike a fragile and expensive PDA). At work, trying Outlook, though the projects-as-contacts hack makes creating new projects difficult. Outlook otherwise good (when not being slow or crashing), as can quickly convert e-mail into tasks. Probably will have to write my own time management script, as current software not scriptable1 enough. For example instead of manually polling e-mail, have a script do the check. If a significant amount of e-mail needs attention, the script would create an action item to check my e-mail.
Other sites to watch for time management tips include:
Next week: Thyme Management.
1 While Kinkless GTD uses AppleScript, I would write my utility in Perl. AppleScript a difficult language for me: nearly impossible to create code from the dictionaries provided, time consuming to integrate into a working script. </rant>