Recent blog entries for harrisj

Coming soon. Crossposting from my regular blog to here as well...

Long time no visit. But I've been busy...

Because of time constraints, I will not really be on Advogato much anymore. I need to set up my own page, and there might be a diary there. I also will be contributing more to the H2G2 site. It's been lots of fun, and I'll see you around. If you want to contact me further, you can mail me at Schizopolis.net. Ciao.

This World Must Be Destroyed

Forget the atom bomb. Leave the TV out of this. The Stereo System is the worst invention of the modern era. No other device enables assholes to annoy as many people as possible. And I seem to be surrounded by quite a few. There's the oaf across the way who fancies himself a house DJ and has to play the most repetitive music possible at MAXIMUM VOLUME while sitting in his window in underwear and smoking (some people should wear lots of clothes; if he laid on the beach, Greenpeace would try to push him back into the water (if you get my drift)). And then there is the stoner downstairs who decided that last night was the perfect time for bass-heavy rap. All night long. And let's not forget the young toughs who cruise the neighborhood blasting their music out of their cars.

There is a certain fascism to loud stereo playing. The feeling that your music is not only superior, but that you MUST force it on all around you. And it only seems to involve a certain type of person. Young egotistical men who feel they are superior to everyone else. Maybe they should have a special background check for stereo equipment... I'm sorry, we'd love to sell you the Bose, but our psychological check shows you're a vain prick... Ah well, I can dream.

Buying a place in Brooklyn is starting to look more attractive all the time.

vab, sorry to hear about the bilirubin scare. I have Gilbert's syndrome myself, which means that I always am somewhat jaundiced. It's not too noticeable unless you look at my eyes when I'm stressed and hungry. I also have to tell doctors when I get blood tests so they don't freak out. I sincerely hope that's the problem and not anything else. I have never had jaundice that severe, so I am concerned for you. Of course, I'm not a doctor and my opinion should be taken with a boulder of salt.

Eyes Pop - Skin Explodes - Everybody Dead

Had a relatively awful weekend after a busy week. Listening to FSOL's ISDN and it is pretty cool. Broadcasting improvisational concerts at home to radio stations via ISDN was a pretty wacky idea back then (1994), but now I suppose it's relatively painless with streaming audio from a web site. Funny how technology changes.

I've been reading The Slate Diaries, a fascinating book of diary entries written by various figures for Slate magazine over the last few years. While it is interesting to see what famous people like Beck or Benazir Bhutto or the Simpsons head producer write, I find the entries by the classified ads staffer or the surgeon more interesting. And it's interesting to see all the different "voices" the text has as a result. It makes me view the diary entries here in a different light.

Otherwise, next week is Thanksgiving.

Another Monday morning. Got out of a cab downtown this morning and a homeless man shouted "Uh oh! Here comes the KGB!" about me. I know the black leather coat may seem a bit menacing, but the idea of me being an ominous agent is laughable (I don't really have the build for it). Girlfriend gets to go to an arts reception at Peter Norton's (of Utilities fame) swank New York apartment tonight. I'm a bit jealous.

rsousa, I would have to agree about "Dancer in the Dark". At first, I alternated between thinking it was brilliant and idiotic. By the end, I was left speechless. It's really like nothing else I've seen, although some people hated it. It certainly doesn't seem like it should work:

1. Musical about a poor immigrant losing her sight
2. Untested actor (has Bjork been in anything before?)
3. Grainy and jerky digital film
4. Several depressing plot twists
5. Complete lack of ironic detachment
6. Did I mention it's somehow a musical?

But it does work. Amazing. I also think that Bjork is the best evidence that aliens live among us.

Hmm, I made it into the stats page's undeserved master list. Fair enough, I pointed out my problems with it months ago myself. I think it's a fault with any popularity-based metric; very popular people can elevate others with a single vote. Funny this comes up around the same time as the Google scam discussion (another popularity metric). If you care, you can read my older diary entries.

Yesterday, I was out at dinner with a few friends when I was asked whether I ever meet any programmers outside of work. In all honesty, I think it's been 3 times total. I wind up talking more to writers or architecture professors or gallery owners. Of course, this was one of the reasons I moved here instead of San Francisco. I don't like talking shop much. And it's nice to be in the minority (and know it's not indirectly my fault that rents have become insane). I don't mind developers, but it seems that programmers are often a bit more narrowly focused that other people I meet. Of course, when I meet any people who could ONLY talk about abstract art or post-modern architecture, I find them boring too.

Find is such an incredibly useful command. I honestly don't know what I'd do without it sometimes. Now it's helping me to clean up several gigs of month-old files on a disk. If it weren't for MKS Utilities, NT would be completely useless. Incidentally, I have become quite peeved at how NT crawls to a halt whenever there is any serious disk I/O. At least my UNIX systems get it right.

Enough random thoughts for now...

Halloween turned out to be fun. Went with some friends visiting from Boston to watch the Village Halloween Parade. The crowds were reasonable, the weather wasn't too bad, and the parade itself is always fascinating. I think they had a good time. It apparently was broadcast on cable, and I'll see what the tape has on it. It's nice to live so close to the parade route, except that I always get to hear the horns of idiots who drive into the city and expect the traffic to somehow vanish in front of them.

Today has been a bit of a bummer though. November is just a bleak month, and I'm a bit sad that National Spooky Month is over. I suppose that listening to Bjork's "Dancer in the Dark" soundtrack doesn't help... ;)

XML is actually quite cool for similar reasons to those outlined by agntdrake. Here at the company, we needed to re-engineer our infrastructure to support computer-driven downloads of data, load balancing, and a bunch of other neat things while maintaining backwards compatibility. We managed to build a system based on XML in a few months that we have been using ever since. Basically, all of our data is encapsulated inside of Business Objects which respond to certain methods. Our clients like getting data in XML, and it even works through firewalls. It was SOAP before there was SOAP. Now we are working on metadata. Allowing people to get information about the data in our databases is interesting, but it raises all sorts of new challenges (besides understanding Schema standards).

Why the Web Needs Groves is an article that XML heads might find interesting. It identifies some serious problems with the current XML programming model (eg, DOMs) and proposes an interesting solution.