I finished General Wes Clark's Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire last night (which frees up some cycles to read more of Quicksilver, but that's another entry).
I've got mixed feelings on it. On the one hand, Clark writes reasonably articulately (I initially wondered if it was ghost-written, but I suspect most ghost-writers wouldn't feel it necessary to describe bomber payloads in intimate detail). I like political figures to be articulate. On the other hand, the book is half a military history of the Iraq war, and half a bitchfest about the Bush administration's policies. In sum, he seems to be making the point that if you're going to grab any excuse to go and fight a pointless war unilaterally, our armed forces did a great job of it; but once you've reached the end of major combat operations, you need a different approach, and he calls for the formation of a sort of "Department of Rebuilding Countries You've Blown To Smithereens".
Not a bad idea, that, but I get a little hung up on the bit where we went to war with Iraq because the light was better over there.
Anyway. Clark's clearly saner and smarter than Bush. I could live with him as president. Might be better as Secretary of State, if his ego can handle that. I really would like to see the Democratic candidates consolidate into Pres/VP tickets and lists of desired cabinet members, instead of a bunch of individual campaigns. It's more important that we get Bush out of office than what particular candidate we pick. Unless it's Lieberman. Um, anyway, where was I? Yeah. Gephardt/Dean plus Clark as SoS.
A rather - well, let's say entirely one-sided conversation in chat tonight:
/m dodd do you have much experience with trying to schedule things with sub-millisecond precision in win32?
/m dodd i'm trying to fire midi events as accurately as possible (from an automatic music-composition program)
/m dodd first attempt, check time with queryperformancecounter, if not time to do something, Sleep(0)
/m dodd yielded frequent 3-millisecond delays between checks, occasionally worse
/m dodd but sometimes much shorter time between checks, so task manager claimed i was using 99% of cpu
/m dodd i set my app to "high" priority class, but changed the Sleep(0) to Sleep(1), and things got much nicer: typical 1.0-1.3ms precision, and very low indicated CPU usage
/m dodd what I kinda want at this point is Sleep(0.1), but that's not really supported :)
/m dodd apparently, waitable timers can be much more precise but i'm not sure it's worth the hassle
/m dodd i'm also gonna try going to Realtime priority class but with the Sleep(1) still in there, see if it tends to wedge the system
/m dodd hmm, realtime/Sleep(1) works really well
/m dodd i can live with 1ms resolution
/m dodd glad we had this little chat!
(15 minutes later)
<*dodd*> ;)
<*dodd*> glad you got it to work ;)
Hey Diebold: how about links to links to links to links to your memos?
I swear, the next time I want massive traffic to one of my web sites, I'm going to make up some shit about some big company trying to suppress the site. Pretty soon I'll have all sorts of gung-ho web activists linking to it...
I just finished Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude. Loved it. It reads like Kavalier and Clay crashed headlong into High Fidelity and the two landed, irrevocably entangled, in the gutter. Very gritty, very real. Despite the one surreal/fantastic element involved; this is Lethem after all.
I just started Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. I've been seeing about 2-to-1 negative comments about it online, people complaining that it's too boring, long-winded, convoluted, hard to follow. Admittedly I'm now only about twenty pages in, but I'm digging it, and I'm wondering 'why the hell did these people pick the book up in the first place?'
This is Neal Stephenson, folks, the man who devoted half a page to describing the taste of steak sauce in The Diamond Age, who has been writing longer and longer books, more and more complicated books, books whose apparently trivial digressions occasionally become critical plot elements. Quicksilver, all 944 pages of it, is subtitled 'Volume 1 of the Baroque Cycle'; what more warning do you need that this is going to be long-winded, convoluted, and hard to follow?
It's not like Stephenson's plot resolutions have ever been really satisfying. No one's ever going to accuse him of writing "taut, gripping thrillers". I'm here for the digressions, the scenery, the trivia, the geeky in-jokes ("tastes like iridium, as usual"), in short, the Baroque of it.
Eh, what do I know. Like I said, I just started the damn thing. Maybe it'll wear on me.
Changed cubes at work - with project done, and team diverging into, count-em, four different new projects, we're putting all the engineers on a given project together in one place rather than spreading them out according to what subsection of the game they work on. Right now, that just leaves me in a different ghost town than the one I'm used to, as lots of people are taking a lot of time off to recover from the previous project. Me, I'm just taking a lot of 3-day weekends, spreading my comp time out. I was out of work for a year; I don't need a month off. The new project is using the same engine as the previous one; from the tech standpoint it's very much a continuation of it.
Anyway, the cube move was compounded by the fact that the guy who used to be in the cube I moved to is on vacation and so didn't pack for his move, and the AA who said she was going to take care of packing everyone who was on vacation... was also on vacation and somehow missed packing him before she left. So I threw the poor bastard's crap randomly into a couple of moving boxes and humped it over to his new cube.
Then I set my sound system back up. Working over in the audio pod, a 5.1 surround rig with a big fat amp and a big fat subwoofer was just, y'know, the minimal level of deterrence required to compete. In the core engineering group, it feels a little, I dunno, like overcompensating.
The technical director for the new project has his office about 20 feet from my new cube. He dropped in this afternoon and said "you're over here now! I went all the way down to the other end of the floor to find you and they sent me back here!" We talked a bit about stuff I'll be working on. I think I'm going to be taking more direction from him than from my nominal manager, who doesn't seem as fully dialed in to the technical issues involved. We'll see how it plays out. It's a little odd; I came to the previous project when it was halfway through, so I always felt like the newbie. Half the senior engineers from the previous project are going on to the other projects, though, so suddenly I'm one of the key old hands. I suspect that means I'm not going to get much more slack time - but y'know, I got about a month of slack, so who can complain?
Swarthmore college caved on the Diebold thing. I wonder if I can get sued for linking to a page that links to a page that Diebold doesn't want you to see.
I'm shocked, shocked to learn that someone's sueing over a video-game-inspired killing. Again.
Grand Theft Auto 3 is rated "M" by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, by the way, for "Mature", i.e. not to be sold to minors. The kids had the game for a year. I presume the parents were aware of its content. How do 14 and 16 year old kids not understand that guns are dangerous and that shooting at people is wrong, illegal, and stupid?
Thompson does this a lot, by the way. (2 Live Crew. The Basketball Diaries. Doom. Quake. Resident Evil. Everquest. America's Army.) It would be uncharitable of me to assume that his sole motivation is his share of any settlements:
Mr. Thompson said he will file his petition in Tennessee soon, and that he hopes to have a result by this time next year. He said he hoped that punitive damages "in eight figures" would be ordered.
Are you suing the parents of the perpetrators, Mr. Thompson? If not, why not? Could it be that they can't possibly yield eight figures in damages?
How many times does Thompson have to lose in the 6th Circuit before his lawsuits can be assumed frivolous?
I swear, I'm gonna make a mod for a first person shooter that has a bunch of unarmed lawyers and other stupid annoying people in it.
"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws."
- John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."
- W. Somerset Maugham
I'm fighting a gradually rising sense of panic over the 2004 elections. The more I hear about the problems with all-electronic voting systems, the more I worry. If you haven't heard any of this stuff yet, go here and read up. No, really, go read the whole thing, take your time, I'll wait.
The interviewees in that article are choosing their words very carefully to not sound like hysterical tinfoil-hat types. That's probably wise of them.
Is it hysterical of me to just point out that Diebold Chief Executive Walden O'Dell wrote to Republican campaign contributors in August that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year?" Does this squick anyone else like it does me?
I'm of two minds here, but I'm going to try and show that whichever way you reason, we have a big problem here.
Let's indulge the paranoid fantasy for a moment. Take a hypothetical: (some) Republicans are planning to rig whatever elections they deem necessary to keep a Republican president in the White House and Republican majorities in legislature. Totally, utterly unacceptable; the minimum sane response to this, from all Democrats and all ethical Republicans — please, please tell me that's a majority of the population of this country — should be to ban the use of any voting machine that doesn't leave a voter-verifiable, recountable paper record of the vote outright. And maybe for good measure, insist on automatic manual recounts for every single election in the country, down to Dog-Catcher of Fresno, just so that we can all feel confident that the will of the people is being implemented.
Okay, okay, maybe that's just paranoia. But here's another scenario. Let's say there's no organized plan to rig elections, but we have another Election 2000, a closely contested election — maybe one in which a Democratic candidate was slightly ahead in the polls on election eve. And let's say Bush is fairly re-elected in 2004. By a very small, disputable margin. A recount is called for — but is now impossible. Last time, we were able to settle this with lawyers. A few people even remarked at the time how great it was that in any other country, something like Election 2000 would have been settled with guns and blood but America does things in a civilized fashion. But this time, there will be no recount, no way for the right to prove to the left that no cheating took place. A possible result of this scenario: massive protests, riots, violence, and death. I am sick at the thought. The more people who care, the more death there will be.
Neither scenario is acceptable.
Caesar's wife must be above even suspicion.
Voting must be recountable and auditable.
Update 10/21: I'm not the only one worried, it seems.
You know something's weird in the world when I'm finding myself respecting Bush I.
Or maybe this is in some impossibly convoluted way related to Schwarzenegger. Who knows?
So like I've said before, if you buy Dell, you want to do two things: (1) spring for the three-year warranty, (2) keep the customer care phone number close at hand.
A couple of weeks ago, the hard drive in my laptop started making horrible loud clicky sounds, as if it were trying to seek to cylinder minus-three or something. It would CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK clickaclick and then carry on normally. Usually. Then it would sometimes CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK for as long as I could stand to listen before powering it off.
These are not good sounds.
A ScanDisk surface scan would usually get only partway done before going into CLICK CLICK CLICK. I started backing up the stuff I cared about. It seemed like it might be heat-related because it wouldn't start with the clickies until the machine had been running for a while. I eventually managed to get it to go all the way through a ScanDisk, with no hard errors detected, one cool night.
I told myself "OK, next time it happens, I'll call Dell and get them to replace the drive." That happened today. The customer service guy, after I described the problem, wanted to make sure it was the hard disk. Sometimes a fan can sound like a hard disk, you know. Uh, okay. I physically dismounted the drive from the machine and powered up. I had explained to him repeatedly that the problem happens after several minutes to hours of use. I explained that I wasn't going to be able to use it for very long without a hard drive installed. (meriko laughs from the other room.)
He made me do it anyway. "So is it making the clicking noise?" "Um, no, it's pretty much silent now." (meriko laughs some more.) We sat on the phone for a few minutes in silence. "Still not making any noise." Finally he had me shut it off and replace the drive and power up again. "Now, press Control, Alt, D." Ctrl-Alt-D? Never heard of it. I do it anyway. Nothing happens. I do it again. Nothing happens. I tell him nothing happens. He asks me if I'm pressing them all at once. I say yes, and explain that if it's some Dell diagnostic thing, I uninstalled most of that crap ages ago. He asks me to press it again. I try and ask him if he knows what the name of the app it's supposed to bring up is. As if he hasn't heard me, he asks me if it came up that time. Sigh.
Eventually he agreed to send out a replacement hard drive. See, the policies over there are pretty good, it's just the staff that's unbearable.
There were more annoyances about the call. I'm gonna just let them go instead of fuming over them, though.
I can't tell the difference between real news and satire any more.
Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.
What can you say? To quote Penny Arcade, "it's like trying to make fun of a clown. What, are you going to make fun of his tiny car? His floppy shoes? It just doesn't work."
Update 10/21: White House press secretary Scott McClellan, of all people, has managed to do it. See the very end of this transcript. Well done, Scott.
I offer this link with minimal comment.