Benjamn’s Musngs

Yellows aligning

Sun, 03 May 2009 14:04:19 -0800

50mm, ISO 200, ƒ1.4

Flat

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:52:40 -0800

After three thousand miles without a single pinch or puncture, one last fishtail got the best of her.

Preprocessor crusader, I

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:03:27 -0800

5:11 PM me: so I noticed a file with
#ifndef nsBlah_h_
#define nsBlah_h__
at the top

so I set off on a crusade to find that kind of mistake

most. boring. crusade. ever.

Adam: hahaha

5:12 PM that's awesome

in all the codebase?

you could automate that

how did you want to fix it?

5:13 PM me: well

5:14 PM they just need to match

there should be a convention

but that's not even remotely the case

Adam: ohhh

two underscores

didn't see that

me: yea

5:15 PM I guess I don't care

because you'd get compiler errors if you ever did #include that file twice

and then somebody would fix it

5:16 PM Adam: haha

the crusade ends

me: this is like King Richard I saying "I guess I don't care if the infidels refuse Christ; they'll go to hell anyway"

5:17 PM Adam: hahah

exactly like that

In praise of Kindle for iPhone

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:57:42 -0800

Amazon released a free iPhone application for reading Kindle e-books only yesterday, and already a critical consensus seems to be emerging. Feature-wise, the application is undeniably spare, with no inbuilt Amazon store and no full-text search—to name just two of its deficits—but it implements enough of the Kindle’s functionality to make it a usable substitute, in a pinch. As a ploy to encourage purchases of actual Kindling, its release seems a smart move by the book giant.

I own a first-generation Kindle and an iPhone, also first-generation, and I beg to differ with these lukewarm appraisals. In every regard that matters to me, the iPhone Kindle application affords a better reading experience than the Kindle itself. I do not foresee reading another book on Amazon’s device. You can have it for the price of a good reading recommendation.

Cats T. S. Eliot forgot

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:19:01 -0800

Last October, in an attempt to convert one type of pointer to another, a task that calls for a static_cast in C++ terminology, I made an eensy-weensy typo, and the results were so cute that I had to let the whole world know. The whole Internet, at least.

Four months later, I’m delighted to announce that I have the highest Google PageRank for the term static_cats:

Here’s the twitter update in full:

C++ mavens will know of other breeds: dynamic_cats, const_cats, and reinterpret_cats. If you’ve read Old Possum’s Book (or seen the musical Cats), then practical_cats and jellicle_cats may also spring to mind.

What feline characteristics would you impute to static, dynamic, const, and reinterpret cats? If the functions practical_cast and jellicle_cast were added to the C++ standard, what would you have them do?

Speaking of "Creep"

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:15:42 -0800

Saw a presentation last year in cs547 about this technology, so I’m aware that a slightly different configuration of the “Happy” and “Jazz” sliders might have produced an interpretation a little less schizoid. But what would be the fun in that? I for one welcome this new dawn of angst-free music that MSR and Songsmith have ushered in.

Radio Obscura

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:34:29 -0800

At a housewarming party this weekend I had the good fortune to chat with someone as much a fan of Radiohead as I am. I say “good fortune” sincerely, but conversations about bands always kind of fluster me; inevitably the other person starts naming favorite songs, and I just come up empty-handed. It’s not a question I give much thought.

I might be more inclined to produce an answer on the spot if not for the memory of a similar conversation that took place at a high school public speaking tournament. At the awards ceremony I wore my scary bear t-shirt on stage with the other finalists (who were still in their suits), which was pretty awesome in addition to being tacky because I ended up winning the tournament. After the ceremony two girls came up to me and asked about the shirt, and whether I had any favorite Radiohead songs. Anticipating what they wanted to hear—poorly—I said, “Oh, I don’t know, ‘Creep’?” and with an exchange of disappointed looks the girls wandered off.

The day after the housewarming party, back safe inside my fortress of obscurity, I spent some time hunting through my collection in the hope of identifying, once and for all, its rarest gems. Boredom overtook me well before I made it through all four hundred some odd tracks, but I did find a couple of items worth sharing.

First is a concert outtake of “Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any)” from 2002 that makes me smile every time:

Second is a b-side called “The Amazing Sounds of Orgy” off the Pyramid Song EP. If the drum kick-in at 0:32 doesn’t rock you, crank up tha volume:

The girl I was talking with mentioned “Talk Show Host,” a song that appeared on the Romeo+Juliet soundtrack and the Street Spirit single album. Here’s a live version I happened to have:

Mountain tops and coercion

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:18:33 -0800

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, a federal holiday in the United States, a celebration of a man even more brilliant, even more complex, far less idealistic, so much more pragmatic than the portrait habitually painted by the mainstream media. The man whose dream we recall today was not a dreamer. King was interested in what would work, and that singularity of purpose is what connects him most unmistakably with the man who tomorrow takes the presidential oath of office.

I have two bits of Kingdom to share with you. The first is a speech, King’s last. The second is a passage (or two) from Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer prize-winning history Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, that draws a distinction between King’s and Gandhi’s rationales for nonviolence.

Hedging the farm away

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 14:18:06 -0800

Been reading this:

Elementary stuff so far, but simplicity is often the cost of precision, and Ted Cohen’s prose is nothing if not precise. Here he explains the title:

It seems obviously true that a metaphor ‘A is B’ induces one to think of A as B, and this leads to new thoughts about A. How this happens is a wonderful mystery, and the ability to do it, to “see” A as B, is an indispensable human ability I am calling the talent for metaphor.

An important special case of this talent, for Cohen, is the ability to see oneself as another person. The identification of A with B, where A is I and B you, then, becomes a sort of archetypal metaphor whose grasp is essential to the grasp of any other. Unfortunately, Cohen seems so impressed with his “wonderful mystery” that he’s content to leave it unexamined:

I am claiming only that some times, for some people, in some circumstances, it is incumbent upon one to attempt metaphorical identification. Which are those times, those people, those circumstances? I do not think any rule can be given for this.

Though I’ve only just started, I must say I’m curious to see how the book will survive this seeming crippling of its central thesis. Perhaps a whole new thesis will emerge; this one, for what it’s worth, has my vote:

A leading aim of many metaphor-makers is the communication of some feelings they have about the subjects of their metaphors, and the often hoped-for inducement of similar feelings in those who grasp their metaphors.

Big Fibbin'

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:00:00 -0800

This afternoon, on a hunch, I wrote a short C++ program to compute Fibonacci numbers. Hardly a remarkable accomplishment, but here’s the catch: by the time this program begins executing, its result has already been computed.

Just to be sure we’re speaking the same language, you may want to review the mathematical definition of the Fibonacci sequence. We define the infinite series according to the following rules:

Thus , and likewise , , , &c. My program takes ARG as a compile-time parameter and prints _ARG at execution time. For example:

    > g++ -DARG=40 fib.cc -o fib40
    > ./fib40
    102334155

A slightly more roundabout way of compiling programs with g++ is to generate the assembly code and then assemble it:

    > g++ -S -DARG=40 fib.cc
    > g++ fib.s -o fib40
    > ./fib40
    102334155

Think of the intermediate file fib.s as containing a version of the original program stripped of all abstractions. Each line corresponds to a single machine instruction, and all that remains is to translate this barely human-readable shorthand into the binary language the processor understands.

Now, I’m sure you’ll agree that is a pretty peculiar number, a number you wouldn’t expect to find lurking inside fib.s unless my earlier claim were true—unless the result of the fib40 program really had been computed before fib40 began executing. It would be like finding your social security number written in blood on the bathroom mirror at the scene of a serial murder. You’d want answers, and you’d want them right away.

    > grep -n 102334155 fib.s
    22:    movl    $102334155, 4(%esp)

OH MY GOD THERE IT IS!! Okay, okay, just—everybody calm down. We’ll get out of here together.

Just great copy

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:46:53 -0800

First of all, how great is this shirt? Second:

Shirts will ship in one to two weeks. A wise man once said that you’re only as creative as the obscurity of your sources. In general social circles you don’t get much more obscure than House Industries, and this obscurity is compounded by a House Industries shirt that doesn’t say House Industries anywhere but on the label. So you’ll be walking down the street with one of these shirts draped just right to hide your slightly flabenning middle, and this random hot designer chick will come up to you, grab the back of your collar to see who exactly made such a simple but elegant garment. What an icebreaker. We can’t guarantee that this is going to happen and we can’t assume that you even want it to happen, but it’s a nice shirt nonetheless.

The hypothetical street scenario has sadly disappeared from the product page since August, when I first noticed it, and I think the ampersand fad may have blown over in the meantime, too. If you know of any up-and-coming glyphs, I’d love to hear about them; we can make our own shirts and write zany overpromising copy for them.

LaTeX in Markdown, again

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 13:30:36 -0800

Google Analytics tells me that queries containing some combination of “latex” and “markdown” are the biggest source of traffic for this site, and that my previous LaTeX in Markdown post is the most popular page on the site besides the front page. I apologize to everyone who viewed that post, because it boasted of my success incorporating mathematical notation into Markdown without providing any instructions for replicating that success.

Fortunately for you frustrated visitors, another benefit of using subversion to track Movable Type updates is that I now have an easy way to share the changes I’ve made to the default files.

MT 4.23 upgrade: worth the trouble

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 12:11:21 -0800

Great news! The Movable Type-on-Dreamhost performance problems about which I complained and for which I offered a partial remedy in this post have been mostly alleviated in the latest release, version 4.23.

To upgrade, I followed these instructions, with two modifications:

I replaced steps 2 and 3 (downloading/unzipping the release) with a checkout from the sixapart subversion repository. See this announcement for instructions. Now I can update to the bleeding edge whenever I want by simply typing svn up and visiting mt-upgrade.cgi.
I performed a fresh installation (the alternative mentioned in step 4). You’ll want to copy over your archive directories, too; not just the mt-config.cgi file.

Your mileage almost certainly will vary. Be sure to make that backup.

Slake, slake, slake

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:13:11 -0800

If yesterday's post left you with a burning curiosity about the elevation profile of my daily ride to work, mundane as it is, go ahead and slake your topolust:

Adam noticed this awesome Alaska-Russia visibility tool made by the same people who do these profiles for me.

Low way, high way

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:00:14 -0800

Here’s an elevation profile of the first thirty miles of my Thanksgiving ride:

And here’s a profile of the Skyline to 9 route that I could have taken:

Note the scale (the first seven miles, for example, are the same). As you can see, I took the road less steep, and it made a difference.

I used the HeyWhatsThat Path Profiler to generate these profiles.

Edit: equalized the horizontal scales and made the first seven miles actually identical.