I've been missing in action (blogging-wise) since Thanksgiving.
During that time we've packed up the rest of our belongings and put
them in storage and have moved in
next door with Cade and
Becca. I "worked magic"
(using my preferred secret ingredient for working magic:
Tcl) on a high profile Corporate rebranding.
I've been helping my friend Lin typeset his father's magnum opus
into a 652-page book. And I've been suffering from the effects of
pneumonia.
All in all a busy couple of weeks. I have hardly had anytime for
anything else, not even for solving math
problems. But the book goes to the printer tomorrow, we close on the
sale of our house Thursday afternoon, and the antibiotics seem to have
kicked in and are doing their thing...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, December 13,
2005
at 18:46
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This morning I sent my carpooler
a link to this blog post on the joys of owning Potato Guns (and how they can bring
your family closer together!).
Next thing I knew he was getting a big group order together.
Ultimately everyone on both of our teams bought at least one. I'm buying
eight.
Potato Guns are all sold out on Amazon.com but are still
available from other sources. Collectively we ordered 80 potato guns. Factoring
in the cost of UPS Ground Shipping and volume discounts, the per unit cost was
only $1.28 each.
Time to shop around for a ten or twenty pound bag of ammunition...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, December 13,
2005
at 18:55
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It was very disorienting to drive home from work today and see a
U-Haul in the driveway of our house (well, our house up until 4pm
yesterday—unless it was still ours until their purchase funded
sometime mid-morning today).
Our house that we (had) built, that we'd lived in for almost seven years.
I hope they take good care of it. (They seem like nice enough people.)
We have a tidy five-figure sum in the bank (for another three weeks).
It'd be nice if my checking account balance always looked so robust.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Friday, December 16,
2005
at 18:26
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Via a story on Lambda
the Ultimate programming blog comes this tale of
G-Men Called
on W-Hats for WMVD and the (unintended?) consequences of
letting players program their own objects within the virtual
world.
One of the cool things about Second Life is that players can create new kinds of objects, by writing small programs in a special scripting language to describe how the objects should behave, and then launching objects into the world.
Things got really out of hand when the W-Hats created a doomsday device. It looked like a harmless little orb, but it was programmed to make copies of itself, repeatedly. The single object split into two. Then each of those split, and there were four. Then eight, and sixteen, and so on to infinity.
Apparently the creators of Second Life have reported the
Denial
of Service attack to the FBI. My first reaction was "oh,
please." Ed Felten (and others in the ensuing comments) make
the case that doing
so is an appropriate response. I'm not entirely convinced,
but it does seem that there is a good argument that can be made.
I think civil action (think violations of the game's acceptable use
policies or terms of service) is a more appropriate response than a
criminal one considering that only in-game tools were used.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, December 18,
2005
at 19:44
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"Just twelve [five pound] bags of
potatoes and [a bag of Christmas] bows?"
asked the cashier at Bowman's this morning.
"Yes," I replied, "office gifts."
— Michael A. Cleverly
Thursday, December 22,
2005
at 08:56
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Yesterday Alexander's delivered the
thirty-five copies of "Secrets of Success, Happiness, and Failure: Wisdom
Through the Ages" that Lin had published with them.
Overall the book looks very nice. I am sure Lin's father, who spent so
much time working on the manuscript back-in-the-day working on an original
128K Macintosh will be quite happily surprised come Christmas morning.
Naturally when I thumb through the book little annoying details jump out at
me. By and large I doubt that all but the most discerning reader would
notice most of them. If we'd had more time
I like to think I'd have caught and cleaned up most of them. If we were
professionally publishing this book we'd undoubtedly have printed proofs
and then proof-read them before printing the finished product.
This time rather than fight with configuring LaTeX to use fonts
(as I did
in August
while preparing the most recent printing of Mormon's Book) I decided to abandon cross-platform typesetting
and use the Macintosh-specific XeTeX
engine to render the LaTeX+Memoir markup. This made it easy to typeset the
poetry in Poetica and the quotes in Bembo.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Friday, December 23,
2005
at 19:46
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At work today I inserted a DVD that my Macintosh Powerbook didn't recognize.
(It was burned on a Windows machine for what its worth, but that's never
proven to be a problem before).
In any case I couldn't drag the disc to the trash because it hadn't
mounted. I don't see any paperclip-sized hole to manually eject the
disc. After spending some time googling I did discover a way to do it
from the command line without having to reboot: drutil eject
will spit out the disc. (The most common solution I found in my googling
was to reboot while holding down the mouse button and then the disc is
ejected on startup. I didn't want to kill my uptime, though... ;-)
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, December 28,
2005
at 18:17
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