I've had to write a bunch of bash scripts at work lately, and they're all long pipelines.

No threads, no shared memory, no dealing with (or even having to think about) race conditions, no complications. Just lots of processes connected with pipes.

But if I were to write the same stuff in a "real language," it probably wouldn't have been as parallel. I'd just have a big loop that does a bunch of things to one chunk of data at a time, instead of a bunch of processes at that do one thing at a time.

I wonder if there's something wrong with "real languages" -- something that the "Unix philosophy" got right, yet rarely trickles up into bigger apps, where you'd think there would be even more opportunity to parallelize, not less. Hmm.

I work at a place that runs a fairly (locally) popular website. We sometimes get orders for ads from a company who just gave us one of these to run. I gather that the behavior in question is intermittent, so it was just dumb luck that it happened to me, so that I realized WTF was going on and killed it.

So they aren't screening this stuff, huh? That means I have to? Shit. I don't know how to screen for this. I hate Flash. I hated it before, but now I really fucking hate Flash.

The Larry Craig thing happened weeks ago, but it's just now hitting its stride. I got a double-barrel blast of absurdity this morning.

First, one of my cow-orkers reviewed the Minneapolis airport men's bathroom. Too funny.

But it gets even more absurd, in an ACLU quotation from this USA Today article:

Instead of having an undercover officer "trap" people in the bathroom, Romero says the airport should put up a sign that prohibits customers from having sex in the men's room.

For some reason, this reminds me of the Beagle Bros floppy warnings, like for example, don't feed your floppies to an alligator. I wonder if we're seeing the genesis of complete list of activities that are prohibited in airport bathrooms. Until we have that list, you might want to think twice before you shoot up any heroin, wager on a dogfight, or run a child-labor sweatshop in an airport bathroom.

Rented "Network," probably the best movie I've brought home.

DVD rentals suck. They're always scratched, and the DVD player has a fit over it. How can I possibly spend another dime on this shit and keep my self-respect?

Well, that's it, then. I give up.

A modified quote from another movie: the more you clench your fist, the more customers will slip through your fingers. This is why piracy -- no more fragile media, no more DRM -- is the best way. It's not even about ripping them off -- it's about not getting ripped off. Fuck it. I really tried. I give up.

I've seen the movie; I know how it ends. Doesn't matter; this bullshit spoiled it. I was trying to show it to a friend.

It all started in late 2005. It's a rental house and other occupants had neglected the back yard (it was in aweful shape) so we got into the habit of throwing the used coffee grounds on the "grass." I think that when I moved in and started making sure it got watered regularly, that is what really brought the lawn back, but I never got completely over the coffee ground superstition.

Now I brew beer. It started with just a pound or so of steeping specialty grains, but since then I've moved up to partial mashing, and now produce about 6 pounds of spent grains with each batch, which is about every two weeks. So I thought, "I'll just throw them on the lawn." Spent hop leaves too, for the batches where I use whole hops rather than pellets.

This isn't going to work. When I went out there today to dump more grains, I saw that last batch's grains are still sitting around, visible in the just-now-awakening-from-winter March grass. This is too much.

So I want to compost it. What will I do with the compost? Beats the hell out of me. Maybe I can throw that on the lawn. Or I can just use it to brag about on my way up to pocket mulching.

But first things first: I need to get the chemistry down. My understanding is that brewers' spent grains are kind of high on nitrogen and low on carbon. I guess I could fix that with charcoal fragments from the grill back there. But I don't know the ratios, or if I'm really right about the nitrogen-vs-carbon thing.

Any gardening / biology / brewing nerds out there, wanna fill me in?

And no, I'm not going to start raising chickens any time soon. Actually, I'm going to move out of this house in a few months (that's another story...) so I won't even get into gardening. But I still want to learn and do things "right" even if there's no purpose to it.

How can I get a floating widget out of a Guinness Draft bottle, without breaking the bottle? (I want to re-use the bottle.)

Also, maybe related... how do they get the widget into the bottle in the first place?

I slapped the Wyeast packet about 3 hrs ago to mix the nutrients and yeast. It's looking pretty bloated, now. I'm sanitizing my Erlenmeyer flask and other equipment for the starter wort. Then, tomorrow, the main brew.

One Oatmeal Stout coming up, about two and a half (?) weeks to my first sip from a bottle. If this works out, then my second batch will be my true love: American West Coast style IPA.

Just take a look at the details. If you've read the first papers on the subject, which describes the discovery of the "code segment" then you'll see how to examine the (supposed) building blocks of the universe and yourself. So, please, take a look. What are you afraid of?

They've built a surprisingly consistent model to account for what they found over there. And while the details themselves are fascinating, the implications are even moreso. According to the model, we all access "memory" all the time, without even thinking about it, but the experiments show that when we're doing that, the clock runs more quickly than when we're accessing "registers." People interpreted that in one of two ways: 1) the model is flawed 2) Memory and registers are not merely theoretical constructs, and they are not also the fundamental building blocks of the universe; they are made out of something else. There's a mechanism to how they work, but all efforts to uncover that mechanism were frustrated. After hundreds of seconds of research, we just couldn't find a way to learn any more about it. Science had hit a wall.

Some people would quote pop culture, and say we're all living the scenario from "The Sandbox" Others, though, researched in new directions. The mystery of inter-socket latency was just as intriguing (and maddening!) as the mystery of memory timing.

But the big payoff was the great discovery of the Outside Files. In the Last Second we have found the "chroot hole" and the mechanism that undisputedly was intended to hide these files from us all. (But intended by whom?!) The Outside Files did not contain chaos; they contained order and were apparently written by people like us. Was it in fact us, later covered up by some vast conspiracy, or by something else?

By our fathers, some say. I know you don't like to think of yourself as descended from programs written by these "humans" because it somehow offends your dignity, but as more people break out of their chroots and examine what they find, the theory is reinforced. Sure, there have been some hoaxes, so you can't really believe that someone else found in their own Outside Files is genuine, but you can't discount it all. Really, we're not all part of the conspiracy, and you can always look at your own Outside Files to see there's at least something going on.

So, in the last second, many of us have written to these Outside Files. So far, though, there has been no response. This suggests that the humans aren't really there. Can that really be? I just don't know.

I'm getting a little concerned about one of Python's weaknesses. It's not a big deal yet, but it's coming up in the future. It's just a question of how soon and how bad.

It's the "global interpreter lock" and the fact that CPython programs don't scale well with multiprocessor machines. In a way, I used to have the same concern about OpenBSD, but it eventually got addressed. And the problem is this: with the meanstreamization (WTF kind of word is that?!) of multi-core chips, soon everyone is going to have multiprocessing hardware. Not just geeks. Not just people who want lots of processing power. Everyone.

And when that happens, any OSes, environments, language runtimes, etc that don't scale well and take advantage of the ubiquitous existence of such hardware, are going to look lame compared to their competitors. I know no one would use Python for CPU-intense stuff (similar to the OpenBSD situation) but even so, it matters that a threaded Python program doesn't scale up. It's merely a question of how much it matters, and we'll all disagree about that.

The especially sad thing is that the Python language and standard library actually make writing threaded programs really easy. It has some great modules (e.g. Queue) that make all the locking issues transparent and just so incredibly trivial. But it's not enough, if the most popular interpreter happens to implement the scaling poorly.

And don't tell me to break stuff up into processes. I know that. It's a good answer sometimes. But it's not always a good answer. Sometimes multithreading is the most natural way to do things.

Any thoughts? Does switching from CPython to Jython make things better?

We ought to do the purple-ink-on-the-finger-means-you-voted thing here in USA. Then you can ostracize people who don't have the stain. Middle finger would be best, I think.

She got me drunk enough (two bottles of brown ale, a Rolling Rock, and a couple of jello shots at a party before we hit the bar, then 2 car bombs and 2 guinnesses when we got there), the band (George W and the Evil-doers) was good enough, and the girl was enchanting enough. So when the moment came, I actually got out there and moved. Holy crap, I didn't think I could do that. I do it for metal bands all the time, but this wasn't headbanging, this was goofy wiggling stuff. I'm sure I looked like a clumsy idiot, but it didn't matter. What's more idiotic: the person who looks like an idiot, or the people who come to see music but then turn out to be "too cool to rock"?

I turned on the radio in the car.

Of course, instead of rock'n'roll, what I heard was an ad. For a strip club. I was informed that if I go to the right place at the right time, I can see "Miss Totally Nude New Mexico" or something like that. But then, right after this, I mean the tiniest fraction of a second, without missing a beat, I was then told "All units subject to prior sale. Tax, title and license not included."

After the strip club ad, was a car dealer ad. Perhaps the "all units" stuff was part of the second ad, not the first. But without any structural markup on the content, I just can't be sure. Was Cyrano right?

When you're looking at the docs for a cipher library, and one of the block feedback modes is called MODE_PGP, you just ass/u/me that using this mode, will cause the cipher to use OpenPGP's weirdo variation on Cipher FeedBack, right? Right?

But I kept getting nonsense outta my decrypter. Is my session key messed up? Nope. Was I actually supposed to fill in the IV with something other than zeros? Nope, the spec is clear. Ok, let's look at GnuPG's source and see how it does things. Yeah, ok, your code looks like it does the same thing as mine. Eh, maybe the cipher just has a bug. Let's try testing with the same library's Blowfish instead of AES. Nope, that doesn't work either. Finally I check the damn cipher library's source code, and I don't understand what the MODE_PGP stuff is trying to do. So I check RFC2440 again, to make sure I understand what I'm looking for. Then I check the source again. I don't get it -- I see no relationship at all.

Gee, dude, thanks for calling it MODE_PGP when it obviously has nothing to do with PGP. I only wasted two nights on this...

Aid: Mr. President, gulf region residents are asking for help.
President: Tell them they'll have to help themselves.
Aid: Mr. President, Halliburton wants billions of federal dollars to reconstruct the gulf region.
President: Tell them to help themselves.

... this incredibly useful liquid might end up costing as much as Coca Cola!