I’ve heard futility defined as “doing something that failed earlier in hopes that it will somehow succeed this time around.” However, this process seems to be standard operating procedure in the computer industry. Case in point: I was building a system for Sam, and I needed to install the drivers for the network card. I installed the drivers and rebooted… but for some reason we just couldn’t get on the network. I was baffled, until I looked at the hardware settings and realized that no, the network card still wasn’t installed. Disconcerting indeed! So drawing on my vast expertise as a Windows Network Engineer, I decided to… insert the floppy with the drivers and try the exact same thing again. And the funny thing is, it worked. I mean what was going on there? Were some of the driver files like, hiding? Did they need to cajoled or bribed or threatened into doing their job?

Frankly, I think Windows machines can’t be considered “technology” at all. Their behavior is too mystical and arbitrary. Is the Moon in the Seventh House? Then all is well. Is Jupiter aligned with Mars? Then it’s blue-of-death time, baby. Or maybe my conception of “technology” is out of whack? I like to think that machines should have predictable behavior, but maybe that’s too much to ask.

Anywaay… Sam’s machine is up and running, and Sarah’s is as well. And I only managed to short out one power supply in the process. So yay me! What else have I accomplished in the last few days… well, I’ve been mooching meals off of Mike, Sam, and Nancy.¹ Hung out with the family a bit. Saw the new Harry Potter movie, which was entertaining. I think Mike summed it up when Hermione got petrified. “Shoot,” he said. “They’re screwed now — the most powerful wizard in the whole school is out of commission.”²

Aside from that, I’m just trying to keep busy. My poker buddies were unanimous in their advice — when you get laid off, you absolutely must not start sleeping in until noon. So I’ve been setting my alarm clock for 7am, and I’ve been shaving every day. And wearing dark socks with my dark shoes, and white socks with my sneakers. I even played tennis with Mike on Friday, and I have grandiose plans to start running in the mornings. The morning weather on Saturday was fantastic for running — cool and foggy but not freezing cold. Unfortunately I couldn’t find my sneakers that day. Bad luck… or subconscious sabotage? You be the judge.

1. I don’t feel too guilty about this, because Mike and Nancy are really just grateful that Sam has his own computer now and won’t be hogging theirs.

2. And sure enough, shortly thereafter Harry and Ron were surrounded by ravenous monsters and wishing that Hermione was there to save them.

I still can’t help myself… I still read Slashdot, mostly just to get a laugh from the comments on the physics articles. Man, I really need to grow up. Although even I have to admit that every once in a while, a poster rises above the usual level of inanity:

mccalli (commenting on the phrase, “multiple universes”): This is one of my pet hates. By the very definition of the word, there can only be one universe. Or are the definitions now being changed?

SEWilco (in response to mccalli‘s comment): Note to God: Remember to make English better in next universe.

So, Sarah’s computer is looking decent now. At first the system refused to boot into Windows 2000 — it would almost launch the desktop, but then the screen would go blue spit hexadecimal gibberish at me. So I booted off the CD, planning to reinstall the OS, when Windows gave me an option: do you want to repair the OS, or do a clean install? Well, what the hell, I thought. I asked for a repair… and to my great shock, it worked. There’s my old desktop (“Spenser”), perfectly preserved. I’m probably going to wipe it clean anyway, but I feel kind of sad and nostalgic looking at it. I can’t bring myself to kill it now. I should feel glee, or righteous vengeance, or something. (Yes! format c:! Take that, you bastard!) But no… after all these months, my rage has faded. Ol’ Spenser and I have finally made our peace. If only it could have happened under better circumstances.

As mentioned earlier, Sarah’s new motherboard will likely go snap-crackle-pop if I plug in an old 2X AGP video card. Fortunately, I was able to borrow an old PCI video card from Dave (a Matrox Millennium) in order to just get the system working. The thing is, the Millennium is working like a champ. I just plugged it in and it worked, with good resolution, plenty of colors and, most importantly, with no futzing around.

Now Sarah really only wants to write reports, do email, web surf, and so on. She’s not going to be playing Doom III or anything like that. So now I’m thinking… hmmmm… if I go buy a low-end graphics card, the best-case scenario is that I’ll be out $30-40, and everything else will be the same as far as Sarah is concerned. So really, what’s the downside of leaving in the Millennium? The only negative that I can think of is if, when Sarah goes to college next year, she falls in with the l33t overclocking hax0r crowd. Then they’ll make fun of her for her crappy old PCI card. God forbid such a fate should befall my baby sister, but when it comes to college, you have to be prepared for even the worst eventualities.

Good Morning Silicon Valley should be announcing the winner of the GMSV Tagline Contest soon. My personal favorite entry is, “GMSV: To ignorance as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone,”¹ but I have a feeling the reference is a bit too obscure. And maybe too violent. Ah, well.

In Other News: Google has changed their ranking algorithm again, and some people have slipped a few notches. This has stirred up some trouble. (After all, if this particular gentleman isn’t the number one “Dave” on Google, clearly the new algorithm is broken, QED!²)

Mark Pilgrim suggests that Google is now cross-referencing link text with text on the actual page. This change would defeat some of the more popular manipulations of Google rankings, such as Google Bombing. I’m not sure right now whether this is merely a plausible explanation, or if there is any more concrete evidence. To his credit, Pilgrim doesn’t seem particularly bent out of shape that his page rank has dropped. And he does cite some examples of Google returning bad results (blank pages, broken links). If he’s right, that’s somewhat disconcerting. On the other hand, does anyone have a large, non-anecdotal collection of data from “before” and “after”? Oh sure, there’s a lot of gnashing of teeth on the Webmasterworld forums… but I hardly think those people count as unbiased observers.³ Personally, I’ve run into my share of “bad” pages on Google over the years, and I can’t say for certain whether the frequency has increased or decreased recently. Anyway, Pilgrim’s theory about how the new algorithm works is certainly interesting, at the very least.

Before closing, I should note that I really dig Pilgrim’s site. First of all, he has a really excellent web accessibility site. Second, he is that rare beast — a web designer with a swanky all-CSS website that A) degrades naturally in older browsers and B) doesn’t give you a snotty message about how you should upgrade. (Man, that last one just kills me. Who started that gawdawful trend, anyway?)

1. My second favorite: “GMSV: like a group hug without the inappropriate touching.”

2. It is indeed a cold, cruel world that ranks Dave Winer lower than Dave Barry.

3. After all, those folks make their living trying to defeat Google’s algorithms, and naturally they get annoyed when Google changes the rules on them. Methinks the flurry of newly-found Google errors is the result of observer bias, but what do I know?

My alma mater has a bit of inferiority complex. Living in the shadow of Caltech can really grate on you. Sure, you can take it out on them in petty ways: change the Caltech sign on the freeway to read, “Pasadena City College” underneath, steal their 3,000 lb bronze cannon, and so on. But the problem remains. Sure, we have scads of entrepreneurs, Ph.Ds, and highly competent engineering managers all over the nation. But honestly, the only “famous” Mudd alum I’ve ever heard of is astronaut George “Pinky” Nelson. Astronauts are cool and all, but there are, like, hundreds of them fer crying out loud. We can do better, can’t we?

When I was at Mudd in the mid-90s, I heard that the guy who wrote Solitaire for Windows was an alum, and he didn’t get paid a penny for it. I had always taken that rumor with a big grain of salt. But now, thanks to GMSV, I now know that not only did young programmer Wes Cherry not get paid for writing Solitaire, but that he was indeed a Mudder.

What incredible news! Think about it: How many billions of hours have been wasted on Windows Solitare over the last decade? In fact, Cherry might have singlehandedly obviated all of the productivity gains that were supposed to arrive with the advent of the personal computer… at least, before the Internet came along.

I mean, wow. Beat that, Caltech.

Well, now. It turns out that Kathy has had a website for months now. Silly Kathy — you thought you could hide indefinitely, eh? Your clever subterfuge is no match for the power of my referer logs!

Ah, referer logs¹. What’s a “referer”, you ask? Well, according to the W3C, the Referer is “an optional header field allows the client to specify, for the server’s benefit, the address ( URI ) of the document (or element within the document) from which the URI in the request was obtained…” Hey, you! Wake up and pay attention! Where was I? Oh, yes. In short, the referer tells you where your website visitors are coming from. It’s not foolproof, but it works some of the time.

The really neat thing about referer logs is that search engines nowadays list your search terms in the URL or the results page itself. For example, if you search on Google for “Effective Head Noogie Techniques”, the URL:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Effective%20Head%20Noogie%20Techniques

represents the results. This means that if you go to the top listing for that particular search (which happens to be “The School of Physical Violence Course Curriculum“) the webmaster of that site will see that Google URL in his or her referer logs, and will therefore be able to deduce that you arrived at the site by searching on “Effective Head Noogie Techniques”.

Okay, everybody clear on this?

Good. Because I’d like to share some of the more… interesting searches that have brought visitors to this site in the last month.

• The male equivalent of “mistress”. Several web denizens were just as flummoxed as I was in coming up with a gender-neutral term for this. I’m sorry to say that neither I nor M’ris could come up with anything better than “gigolo” or “paramour”.

• Where did Vinnie from ‘Sarah and Vinnie’ go? Honestly, people, I don’t know where Vinnie went. I couldn’t really follow that radio show for much longer than ten or fifteen minutes at a time anyway (although that beats my Howard Stern record by at least a factor of three). My friend Mike told me that Vinnie had a nervous breakdown and they had to throw him off the show. I don’t know if that’s true, but it certainly makes sense. Vinnie never struck me as particularly stable, even by morning-radio-DJ standards.

• Harvey Pitt’s religious status. There were a surprisingly large number of searches of the form, “Harvey Pitt Jew” or “harvey pitt is he a jew”, etc. I’m not sure why so many people want to know the answer to this question, nor do I know why the queries are not in the form, “Is Harvey Pitt Jewish?”, which would be the non-Aryan Nations way of asking the question. Frankly, it’s all a bit disturbing. Let’s move on.

• EverQuest character hacks. It’s been a long time since I’ve played EverQuest. Even when I did play, I didn’t know of any character hacks. And even if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have wanted them used or spread around. So bugger off, you wannabe EQ hax0rs! I like you even less than the Harvey Pitt-searching people.

• Petra, Petra, Petra. A few months ago, I wrote an innocent little blurb about former Playboy Playmate Petra Verkaik, and how she took young Toby Hocking to his high school prom. Well, now I get around ten searches for Ms. Verkaik a month, even though there are thousands of sites that reference her, and mine is buried somewhere in the middle of the pack². Now, some people might accuse me of purposefully seeding my site with racy words, as a cheap trick to get some extra traffic. To those people, I say: what kind of boob do you think I am? The naked truth is that those sorts of accusations make me really hot under the collar. Let me be perfectly clear: there are no nude photos of Petra Verkaik on this site whatsoever. Good, that’s settled now.

• Dada Engine and OS X. Well, I do know something about the Dada Engine… although I compiled and ran it on Linux, not OS X. If you have new Dada Engine scripts, I’d love to see ’em!

• Importing Outlook PST files. I actually did manage to successfully convert all my Windows Outlook Express .mbx files to standard .mbox format, and once you’ve done that, it’s fairly straightforward to move them to Apple Mail. Unfortunately the first part is not easy, and there’s also a lot of misinformation on this process out there on the Internet. I should probably write it all down someday… if I can still remember how I did it. As for Outlook .pst files… that’s a tough one. There’s a SourceForge PST to MBOX converter out there, but I haven’t tried compiling and running it.

• Burn Rate, the Game. Great game. Go buy it.

• “photogenic wife” ‘Fraid I don’t have one at the moment. Sorry.

• “Postmodern Marketing +professors” Errrr…

• “tricks on getting pregnant” Ummmm…

I think it’s time to quit while I’m ahead.

1. Some of you might be wondering, “Shouldn’t ‘referrer’ have another ‘r’ in there? Well, that’s the difference between you and the titanic intellects that are responsible for our Internet standards. You know how to spell.

2. The only logical conclusion is that there is a large community of web surfers out there that is spending a considerable amount of time looking for porn! Yes, I was shocked too.

In the last entry I mentioned that XSLT seemed to lack minimalism in its design, citing as an example the difficulty of creating “for” loops. In retrospect, that’s a bit inaccurate. The reason that it’s difficult to do a for loop in XSLT 1.0 is because they left that facility out of the language, and you have to kind of sneak around the restriction in a roundabout, complicated way. So I guess in one sense, XSLT is more minimalist than other languages that do have explicit for loops. I guess I was confusing minimalism with simplicity. Oops!

(That said, XSLT’s verbosity is intolerable. In a sensible language, you declare a variable with a statement like “int x=1;“, or maybe even just “x=1“. In XSLT it’s “<xsl:variable name="x" select="1" />“¹. I mean, yuck.)

Speaking of the last entry, I have more buyer’s remorse to share. I finally used up my five lb. bag of rice, so I went to the store and bought a ten lb. bag. It was the smallest size they had aside from the nasty Uncle Ben’s boxed stuff. When I got back home, I realized that I had an unopened five lb. bag shoved in the back of the pantry. It took me two years to finish off the last five lb. bag. I’m going to be thirty-four years old by the time I finish off everything. Unless there’s an insect infestation. Let’s all pray for insect infestations. Well, maybe I can return the bag at the next food drive.

Finally, I’d like to share this C|Net article by C|Net editor Charles Cooper, “Why Larry Lessig Gets an “F” in Software“. Professor Lessig has written a couple of books on the intersection of software and the law. The first, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, argues that unless we start caring about our rights in cyberspace soon, bad things are around the corner. The second, The Future of Ideas, is basically Lessig’s “See, I told you so” book. Both are good reads. Anyway, Lessig has been getting a lot of attention in techie circles — buzz on weblogs, enthusiastic cheers at O’Reilly conventions, that sort of thing.

Naturally, here comes the backlash. The American Prospect’s excellent weblog TAPPED calls this phenomenon the “Didn’t Like ‘Dances With Wolves’ Club“:

Here’s how it works. Some new book/movie/TV show, usually pretty good compared to most of the pap that passes for quality mass entertainment, emerges — David Eggers, West Wing, what have you. The newspapers, newsmagazines, and other arbiters of middlebrow culture rave about it. And then, a few months or TV seasons later, some smart, sharp, lacerating young critic — usually at Slate, in the New Republic’s back of the book, or in some other venue prizing critics who hate what everbody else likes — goes to town and explains why the book is awful, the movie is trite, or the TV show sucks. All the cool kids are doing it! Including some of Tapped’s favorite writers. We’re thinking of Chris Lehmann on why he hates West Wing, Franklin Foer explaining why Steven Soderbergh should win an Oscar for the feel-good Erin Brockovich instead of the critically-acclaimed Traffic, and Dale Peck on why Rick Moody is “the worst writer of his generation.” And now Slate’s Emily Nussbaum says Six Feet Under — an acclaimed t.v. show that by any reasonable measure is far better than your average sitcom — is not so good after all.

Looks like the pop-art world is a lot rougher than the pop-law world, because Lessig’s critics are neither smart nor lacerating. Charles Cooper argues that if you lower the length of software patents from seventeen years to ten, what will you get? Albanian communist dystopia. (Eeek!) Either that, or you’ll entrench Microsoft and Oracle (I didn’t quite follow this one), leading to… West Coast hyper-capitalist dystopia, I suppose. Anyway, there will be some kind of dystopia somehow, sez Cooper. Plus the Founding Fathers didn’t have any software², and Cooper will be damned to see how silly old relics like the U.S. Constitution have anything to say on the matter.

And then of course you have the enraged Europeans (double eeek!) who proclaim, “Damn the Constitution: Europe must take back the Web!” Compared to this piece, Cooper’s article seems quite Moussaoui-reasonable:

[I]f they decide to run their part of the Net according to the principles laid down two hundred and fifty years ago by a bunch of renegade merchants and rebellious slave owners they [should] not be able to force the rest of us to follow suit. If they want a First Amendment online, or to let some gun-toting nut argue that writing viruses is the online equivalent of carrying a concealed weapon and so counts as a constitutionally protected right then they can go ahead – the rest of us can do things differently.

Protecting European and Chinese and Iraqi sovereignty online is certainly possible: it simply requires writing code for an entirely different network that has constant identification and authentication built in at every step of the way. This is the future that Lessig warns about, but the article’s author embraces the concept wholeheartedly. I’ve never seen a more perfect encapsulation of the Cartman “Screw you guys! I’m going home” mentality³, but there you have it. What I don’t understand is why Europe isn’t more freaked out about authoritarian control than we are. They’ve suffered its consequences much more keenly than we have. But I guess it’s more fun to pile on “renegade merchants” than to step back and take a look at the big picture.

1. Let’s not even get in to the whole mess about XSL “variables” actually being constants. I’m too tired.

2. Primitive man pages for vi(1) found among Thomas Jefferson’s personal effects notwithstanding.

3. On re-reading this, I realize that the Cartman metaphor is doubly apt. Not only do you have the “Screw you guys, I’m going home!” mentality, but you’ve also got the “Respect mah authoritaaay!!” aspect to go with it. My subconscious works in mysterious ways…

An impulse buy at the supermarket, and I am now the proud possessor of a fourteen-piece knife set. Actually, the box only had thirteen out of the fourteen knives. Maybe that’s why it was discounted half off. I’m still six knives ahead, the way I figure it. Regardless, I can’t complain, because really I only wanted the chef knife. My philosophy of cooking says that if it can’t be done with an 8″ chef’s knife, it’s probably not worth doing. Maybe a serrated bread knife. But that’s it. What am I supposed to do with six steak knives? Do you know the last time I had half-a-dozen friends over for steak dinner? Never, that’s when.

At work I’m doing a fun little project that requires me to learn SQL. Now I hear you asking, “What kind of self-respecting web guy can go this long without learning SQL?” My response: see the key word, “self-respecting”. (Not only that, I don’t know a damn thing about Perl either¹. So there.)

Fortunately, SQL is a lot of fun. The simpler SQL queries almost sound like English sentences… just add a couple articles here and there. “Select all names from the employee database where the title is “Admin” and age is less than 40.” Of course you can make things much more complicated, but the point still stands. It seems pretty natural and simple to me. I guess that’s how they wanted to do things in the 70s back when SQL was invented. Compare that to a more “modern” language like XSL/XSLT, with all those long command names and where trying to do a simple loop requires tail-recursion and ooooh, my head is already starting to hurt. Minimalism, I tell you. It’s a good thing.

1. To qualify my statement of ignorance a bit, I have to admit that this page has a small Perl wrapper. And of course the 404 page for this site uses Perl to select the random message. So put me down for “near-ignorance”. Sorry about any confusion.

An addendum to the previous entry: I had referred to my pseudo-nephew Evan as “energetic and very drooly”. Mom writes to remind me that “Just so you know, drooliness, well, spitting up more than drooliness, was one of your salient characteristics throughout most of your 1st yr.” Point taken. That and crankiness, of course. How little things have changed.

My dial-up ISP, Bowienet, had always given me a headache. I stuck with them for years, over the strenuous objections of Pat and Sam (who cleverly and subversively dubbed them “Slowienet”). I finally got fed up last week with their latest fiasco and switched to cable modem. I don’t care so much about the extra speed, but I like the fact that the connection is always on and people can call me at home when I’m connected. (Mom at least should be happy.) The “always on” thing freaks me out a bit though, so I configured the built-in OSX firewall. (The default firewall configuration is just to let everything through, which, in my primitive understanding of network security, is not good.) Also, the cable outlet is pretty darn far away from where I want the computer to be. Good thing I’ve got lots of CAT-5 cable just lying around. Knew it would come in handy some day.

As an added bonus, I’m also switching my local phone service to AT&T through the cable. I’ve been waiting for this moment for nearly three years. Pac Bell earned my ire by charging me for DSL that I didn’t have and never asked for. It took half a year to straighten things out. Then they did it again for another six months. Not to mention all sorts of minor irritations, like losing phone service because of faulty street wiring. (I took a look for myself — the sheaths had mostly rotted away.) And the lying. Let’s not forget the lying. The customer service people are wonderfully polite… but the lying — that really hurt. If you can’t trust a faceless representative from a giant corporation, who can you trust? Pat told me he’s surprised I’ve let this fester so long. I understand the Talmud advises us not to hold a grudge for longer than 24 hours, but I think the rabbis were talking about people, not companies. Besides, revenge is a dish best served cold.

In Other News: Laura and I took a tour of SLAC yesterday. (You kind of have to be on the same wavelength to know that when you ask someone to go on a date with you to see a particle accelerator, they’ll say “yes.”) It was a lot of fun. The grad student tour guide was very enthusiastic in a geeky sort of way, and he did a great job explaining some tricky physical concepts. The labs were of course bigger than anything I remember from Santa Barbara or even Lawrence Berkeley, but just as cluttered and messy. That’s the one thing the movies get wrong. You never see concrete floors, rusting rebar, long-forgotten pallets, or twenty-year-old workstations still humming away. Still, SLAC did have a five-story shaft with a catwalk, which is kinda like the movies. All they need to do is replace our tour guide with Matt Damon, add some chrome, spotless white corridors, and blinky flashy lights, and they’d be all set.