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!

While I usually try to be nice, I know I'll always have at least a little taste for wrath and vengeance. I prefer to build, but sometimes I have an urge to destroy. And this "meme" abuse has got me thinking.

George Jetson's gay old time was rudely interrupted by someone calling him a homosexual. This wrong was never righted, but it was avenged. Gay farmland was salted, gay wells were poisoned, and gay huts were burned, for: as early as the mid 1980s, I saw the word "gay" used as a generic pejorative. A fellow student objected to a homework assignment, and exclaimed "that's so gay!" He was thrown out of the classroom by a teacher who, while correctly identifying the student as disrespectful, probably incorrectly thought he was being accused of putting his tab into the wrong slot. The point is, gay took on a generic usage. If George Jetson can't have a gay old time, then nobody else can, either.

We lost the battle on "hacker" so let's deny it to everyone. Let the word henceforth mean, "any bad person." Hitler wasn't just gay; Hitler was a gay hacker.

I'm not 100% sure that the battle for "meme" is really lost, but it probably is. I'm thinking we could use it to just mean any sort of communication.

Throughout my sordid past, I have:

• [x] Stared at a so-called "meme" and tried to find the reproductive hook.
• [x] Executed/copied a meme even though I couldn't find the hook.
• [x] Fondled the reproductive hooks of three memes at the same time while being videotaped for a direct-to-DVD release.

I realize some people will copy any idea, but if the motive to copy doesn't come from the idea itself then is it really a meme?

That used to be such a cool word. *sigh* I'm trying to sweep back the tide with a broom, aren't I? Meme has already become one of those words like "hacker" and it's too late to save it.

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a robot; someone had uploaded their signaure for my pgp key to biglumber's key exchange escrow service. That's not terribly unusual, but it raised the question, "who is this guy?" It was someone I had never met, who shouldn't have been signing my key. I emailed him and explained that I couldn't sign him back, unless we met and I checked his id and got his fingerprint from him in person. (And I want to meet him, to "correct" his behavior, but be as diplomatic and nicely encouraging as possible -- overall I'm glad a newbie dived in. We just need to get his signing standards up a bit.) Fortunately he's a fellow Albuquerquean so meeting was perfectly viable, and I got the idea to call a general meeting in Albuquerque so I could get someone else I had missed, as well as start the newbie off with several good connections. The upshot of all this, is that I had a keysigning meeting yesterday.

Unfortunately the newbie who started this, didn't show up. But fortunately, I'm now just two hops away from my hero, PRZ. ;-)

Anyway, after uploading a few new sigs to the keyservers, I started surfing around and found some keyring analysis websites that I hadn't been previously aware of. Henk Penning's site has some good tools for tracing paths through the WoT, and also showed me some one-way links from my key, indicating that some people I signed, never uploaded my sig to the keyservers. But best of all, it linked to Thomas Butter's website which has some graphs.

There's the MSD graph of my key, for example, which shows drops of my MSD (average distance to other keys in the strong set) a couple weeks after each keysigning meeting, and one mysterious drop that I suspect is caused by someone near me (?) having a particularly good meeting. It's fun to try to track down what happened. The ranking graph is interesting too. It has drops that correspond to the MSD dropping, but combined with an overall trend of my ranking to get worse. As time goes by, everyone else's keys are getting closer together, so whenever you just sit there and don't do anything, your relative closeness tends to drop. Neat.

(Oh, BTW, about the weird glitchy-looking thing on the MSD and ranking graphs, showing some spikiness around June 2004 -- it looks like everyone's graphs show this spike. I think something weird happened with the keyservers back then.)

([Update] Oh, and there's another "bump" in my graphs in June 2005. I finally figured this out -- it's from a friend's key expiring. So my rank and MSD suddenly get worse, but then they get better again a few weeks later, apparently due to this keysigning meeting.)

But the surfing went on, and I totally hit the jackpot. Behold Jörgen Cederlöf's brilliant Dissecting the Leaf of Trust. This thing is just full of interesting things, showing how if you look at a chaotic graph (I mean the Wot, not the pictures) the right way, then you can find consistent trends. Check out the "German double cross" (I don't know what else to call it, but that seems like a nifty name) and the top-level domain sorting.