Dead Programmer's Cafe

Month: January 2005

  • Hand Chewed

    I just learned from co-worker that I missed a reading by Douglas Coupland over at B&N in Union Square. He signed books and everything! Dang. How I wish Barnes and Noble had an rss feed of all the Meet the Writers events in Manhattan stores.

    Anyway, heads up – Coupland is on his way to Atlanta, SF, Berkley, Portland, Seattle, etc.

    I am surprised Kurt Vonnegut did not think of this first: “hand chewed” book sculptures. I wonder what inspired Coupland – the Spanish Inquisition that forced heretics to eat their books?

    “Generation X”
    Paper and magnolia branch
    First edition English language version of Generation X
    hand chewed by the artist and then formed into a nest
    2004

  • Weyco And Smell The Smoke

    From The Daily Free Press:
    “… Okemos-based Weyco Inc., instituted a no-smoking policy in 2003, purportedly to save on the cost of health care benefits for its employees. The policy forbids employees from smoking both in the workplace, and at home. Weyco offered help to employees trying to quit and has said that 14 of its estimated 20 employees who smoked kicked the habit before the policy went into effect.”

    Somehow I imagine the “help” that this company provided exactly as described in Stephen King’s short story “Quitters Inc.” that later became a part of the movie “Cat’s Eye“:

    First offense – your wife gets some electric shock treatment. Second offense – you get one. Third offense – you get it together. Fourth – your kid gets beaten. And so forth.

    And after you stop smoking you get the bill for 5000.50.

    Quitters Inc is conviniently located right next to the United Nations at 237 East 46th Street, by the way. Don’t forget to ask them about their weight loss plan.

    I bet once Weyco is done with the smokers they’ll go after the fat people.

  • Overheard Inside The Stainless Steel Worm

    A slightly non-standard conductor’s announcement:
    “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a red signal against us” (instead of the usual “ahead of us”).

    Fellow passengers use slang from a certain industry:
    “West 4th is the money stop” (because so many people get off there. Budum-pum.)

  • Dances With The Dolls in Subwayland

    From Randy Kennedy’s outstanding book “Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York“:

    “Despite the laughter and applause that follow Mr.Diaz every time he draws his partner from her suitcase, he acknowledges that many subway riders have never quite known what to make of a grown man dancing with a buxom, life-size doll, even if the man dances very well. “They think that I am lonely or a sad man,” he said. “They make jokes about what I do with the doll when I am alone.””

    My illustration:

    Just now I noticed that my post about top 5 books read in 2004 post has only 4 books because I forgot to put in “Subwayland”. Thank you, attentive readers, for pointing that out. I positevely get the impression that either nobody is reading or my email and comments are broken.

  • The World Is Your Spitoon

    BoingBoing writers don’t seem to be able to shut up about betel lately. This reminded me of a 4th or 5th grade report on India (great friend of the Soviet Union, emerging economy, blah, blah) that I had to do in school back in the Soviet times.

    I remember the teacher get very interested about betel chewing and prematurely praise it as a great habit. Then I reminded her that importing such a thing would mean having to deal with bright red spit all over. It’s not like the Soviet Union did not have its own share of hygienically questionable customs.

    Back then Soviet sci-fi writers promised us Communism with goods being teleported right into our crystal palaces for free from anywhere on the globe. I guess that (and my flying car) did not work out, but today Capitalism brings us the ability to order almost anything from almost anywhere through electronic computers.

    So, if I want to try some betel all I need to do is pick between The Basement Shaman and Shaman Palace or many other fine merchants.

    Who knew that there are so many stores catering to shamans. At leats now I know where the Suburban Shaman.

    Hmm, I guess I could get one of these and try to rid my cubicle of the sick building syndrome.

  • Tring Flickr Bloggng Featurs

    What is it with the naming of websites these days? The harder to type it in – the better? http://del.icio.us and http://flickr.com are just as hard to remember as dastardly regedt32.exe

    The photo is Hotel Pierre at night from Central Park. Everybody’s favorite billionaire tyrant recently bought himself a humble apartment there.

    ruperts_house
    Originally uploaded by deadprogrammer

  • Creative Time Wasting 404

    Dear readers, let me vent some useless thoughts about HTML and share the fruit of my procrastination with you today.

    It occurs to me that HTML code has finally become a third rate citizen of the World Wide Web. Back in the day, there were horrible WYSIWYG editors that mangled poor HTML, raped it by adding their own non-HTML tags and in general produced bloated and unreadable mess. They still exist today. But now most sites are script generated, so rarely do you see clean, beautiful and handcrafted HTML code when you view the source.

    One of the worst offenders is Microsoft, of course. It gave FrontPage, an unholy product of a dying company called Vermeer Technologies (I’ve read in this book that the price of FrontPage was huge and number of copies sold – miniscule) an eternal life as a part of the Office Suite. Other Office programs always produced horrendous HTML. And now, they don’t even want developers to touch HTML directly. They added extra layers – Server Controls (again, plans for VTI extension and FrontPage come to mind) and Web Forms to isolate them from the language that can be learned in 20 minutes and mastered in a few years.

    I can’t say that positive things did not happen. For one, fewer people write in old skool all-caps HTML tags. All lowercase tags are so much more readable.

    Also now it’s probably safer to put little Easter eggs and funny notes in HTML comments. Are there more of those around? I don’t know. But the oldies but goodies are still out there.

    Famous hacker JWZ’s enigmatic page contains this haughty comment:
    <!– mail me if you find the secret –>
    <!– (no, you can’t have a hint) –>

    Smarter people than me tried, but failed to find meaning in in the 404 lines of what seems to be a hex dump. Former Livejournal user mcgroarty, for instance, wasted a good chunk of his time on this. Where is his blog now, by the way? Does anyone know?

    What I noticed though is that the page is not static as mcgroarty probably assumed. It changes with time. More than that, it seems like it is not the same data – it probably cycles through different files. You can clearly see that if you look at http://www.jwz.org through the wayback machine. Meanwhile you can see the old design featuring the Jamie’s cool terminal graphics likeness. You can see the old design get resized, then get replaced with the 404 line nightmare. Then “mail me if you find the secret” gets added. Enough people send emails and JWZ, always eager to save some time, adds “(no, you can’t have a hint)”.

    Are these 404 a cruel joke – meaning not found?

    I suspected that the 404 lines show chunks of the old green image that I mentioned, or are generated from web collage. When I looked at the famous animated compass gif (the one that replaced the Netscape diddler when you typed in about:jwz or went to JWZ’s old homepage in Netscape 1.1 and some other early Netscape version I think) I found another hidden message from JWZ:

    “You have a lot of free time on your hands, don’t you?
    Tell jwz@jwz.org that you found the secret message!

    http://www.jwz.org/
    about:jwz

    “Some people will tell you that slow is good — and it may be, on
    some days — but I’m here toò tell you that fast is better. Being
    shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out
    of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba.”
    — Hunter S. Thompson
    ”

    Oh, Jamie, I have very little free time. But whatever free time I have I usually end up wasting on stupid things.

    This does not seem to be the solution to the 404 line homepage puzzle, but the heck with it.

    Russian-speaking readers can entertain themselves with reading comments over at tema.ru. There are a couple of hints of hidden links, a few sprinkles of profanity, showing off about Photoshop mastery. Outstanding advice to journalists that was there in the earlier version is gone. I also remember seeing a completely blacked out page about his photo equipment there (you needed to do control-a trick to see it) in a very old version of the site. http://www.design.ru has its share of rowdy commentage.

  • Commentatore

    I really hate email these days. Gmail might have solved (at least for me) the storage problem and mostly solved the spam problem (the filter is very efficient), but there is soooo much crappieness in email.

    Email servers and clients are just out of whack lately. Even Gmail checks zip files for executables somehow (neat trick) and refuses to add them. It works ok if you change the extension to .zip.foo or something like that. But this at least is a decent way of dealing with the problem of people sending virus laden executables – warn that you are not sending it and let through people who are smart enough to rename the extension.

    On the other hand I’ve encountered every type of nastiness – from silently dropping emails to stripping the attachments (again, silently) to bouncing the email back with absolutely unintelligible error messages.

    Filter stupidity similar to what excellent Joe Grossberg is describing here is also rampant.

    Oh, and trying to send out an email in Russian. Fugedaboudit! The extra bits in Unicode or KOI-8 get chewed off every which way rendering my laboriously typed and spelling error infested emails unreadable half the time. If there is a way to reliably send Russian encoded emails without using attachments – I was not able to find it yet.

    Worst of all, you sit there waiting for a replies wondering – are people just ingnoring me? Did the message get silently dropped, swallawed or chewed up on the way? Did it get lost amongst spam about Ciagra and Vialis? (As a side note, my co-workers were joking this morning about how I should write on my cubicle dweller’s box that contains vitamins, painkillers, antiacid and caffeine pills “V1A8RA” in marker). Did the person mean to answer me but forgot lately? Did something happen to him or her?

    But you know what I hate even more than email? Public comments in blogs. Letting my own often illiterate and/or stupid comments spill out onto the Information Superhighway and having them fester and petrify there for future generations is not a good idea. From now on my policy is not leaving any comments whatsoever. I’ll use exclusively email from now on. If you want to leave me a public comment in Livejournal – go ahead, but I’ll probably answer via email. I do try to answer most comments.

    Also a part of this policy is not reading or writing any private posts in Livejournal. Nothing good ever comes out of them.

    In other news, I am thinking about leaving a little note at the bottom explaining obscure puns in my topics. For instance this one is based on the Sopranos Episode 204 title – “Commendatori” (Knights). Babelfish tells me that “commentatore” means “commentator”.

  • The Tree Is Still Up In Rockefeller Center


    Zamboni is such a funny word.

    This is the best photo of the bunch: it looks as if the tree is actually inside RCA building’s offices.

  • Phi, Spongebob?! Phi !?!

    Probably the easiest way to dramatically improve your snapshots is to learn about the rule of thirds. You know, divide what you see in the viewfinder by two lines into thirds horizontally and vertically and try to get more interesting parts to roughly be either where the lines cross or on the lines themselves. If your picture did not come out like that, you can usually fix it later with a crop.

    Rule of thirds is actually a rough approximation of the golden ratio which is very well explained at Wolfram’s website. The pictures will look even better if you will use lines that are conforming to the golden section.

    Just a crack of a difference: fat lines are thirds, thin lines – golden mean (I did not use the plugin when I cropped the photo).

    I was playing around today with a plugin that renders golden rectangles, spirals and triangles. I checked some of my old photos – many seem to follow golden mean rather than the rule of thirds.

    I was also thinking about writing my own Photoshop plugin like that (that one does not look like it’s worth 32 bucks to me), but Adobe has draconian new rules about who gets the SDK. So instead I decided to write this post.

    I ordered a book about golden mean and related stuff from Amazon. Helpful Amazonian electrobrain is suggesting the movie Pi. The dang thing is pretty smart.

    Meanwhile I got kind of curious as to how appealing the golden rectangle actually is. Let’s see.

    Things that are strangely appealing. Spongebob Squarepants. Yep, the golden section cuts straight across his weird little belt. It’s also interesting to note that he is almost always drawn kind of sideways – in front projection the proportion would be off.

    The Greek cup (about which I wrote at length before and mentioned in probably the only poem which I ever wrote. Yep, it roughly conforms to the proportion and “to serve you” is right at the division.

    Now, let’s see. Ugly things. That picture of one of the ugliest buildings in Brooklyn. It’s waaaaay off. And so is the SUV in front of it. The older house on the left is good though.

    Cars are tricky though. The most beautiful car that I know is Tucker Torpedo. It does not fit a golden rectangle either. But it roughly fits two. I tried to fit two rectangles onto the SUV in the picture and to the Scion xB, which is jarringly boxy. No go. Let’s see, but Chrysler PT Cruiser, a car which I actually like, fits two rectangles also.

    This is all terribly crude and unscientific, but might hopefully be useful to you.