The Betacantrips Travelogue

Seen on Tor.com: manga farming.

Tor.com says "I’m a firm believer in using books every way possible. Once the stories are consumed, why not let there be radish sprouts."

Saw this image while reading about Punk Rock Mathematics:

Apparently this was part of a project called Superstruct, which is apparently now quite defunct, but at the time was some kind of experimental game, aiming to (as far as I can tell) brainstorm solutions to the world’s problems in some form of social networking/alternate reality schema.

Q: How do I play Superstruct?

A: Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it’s like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we’ll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in.

It’s really interesting to look at some of the entrails of this particular beast. They put up a wikia, with a page called Superstruct Powers, which begins:

Note: By necessity this page will start out with crackpot theories, wrong ideas, and untested hypotheses. The goal is to identify the difference between theories that should be tested, and case studies of actual superstructing that can be evaluated. It’s fine to theorize, but try to protovate your theories as much as possible. Remember your scientific method: 1) Observe, 2) Make a hypothesis, 3) Make a prediction, 4) Test, and back to 1) Observe.

I personally love this kind of future-dialect that assumes you know more than you can know. Also interesting are the Plot Updates, which reflect the above image:

Under pressure from its largest client, Google, the leaders of the energy haven of SeaStar, which offers a combination of abundant clean energy (from wave, wind, and solar power), year-round aquaculture, and high-bandwidth connections to the global Internet, voted today to end efforts to declare SeaStar an autonomous national entity, accepting instead a status of protectorate of the United Kingdom.

The wiki has another page called Screaming 3D Bootstrappers, apparently an in-game clan.

All of this makes for utterly wonderful flavor text — but it isn’t clear what the game mechanics, if any, are. Sure, we can brainstorm solutions. But to see which solutions are the easiest to implement, or the most effective, or the most cost-effective? There’s a video, but right now my bandwidth is not sufficient to watch it. Anyone want to clue me in?

Also, be aware that there’s a "sequel", called Evoke, which is a little easier to grok.

The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems….Players who successfully complete ten game challenges in ten weeks will be able to claim their honors: Certified World Bank Institute Social Innovator – Class of 2010.

The missions (here’s one) tend to encourage exploration of problems and a focus on "innovation".

Your objective: Describe the biggest challenge to food security in your own local community or country — and an innovative solution that is already underway.

Document your local insight with a blog post, video, or photo.

Your objective: Take action to increase someone’s food security near you.

Document your effort with a blog post, video, or photo.

But it’s hard for me to feel like this would be 1. fun (since it feels like a junior-high-school homework assignment) or 2. impactful (since solutions and ingenuity do not seem to be in short supply in the world). Nevertheless, it’s better than underage drinking.

I spent a few hours today dicking with my N900 and thought I’d write up some of the things I dealt with.

For a long time I’ve been using Dropbear SSH client/server on my phone, due to an alleged less-memory-usage. (When your phone starts swapping, it sucks big time.) Dropbear even supports serving SCP, but does not support SFTP. This prevents you from using any relatively-nice "file transfer over SSH" GUI, such as Nautilus’s "ssh" support or gFTP. (I think Konqueror’s fish mechanism would still work, but that is of limited utility to me right now.) It may be possible to use the sftp from OpenSSH with dropbear, but since the Dropbear packages conflict with the OpenSSH packages in the Maemo repository, that’s not especially on an N900. In fact, dropbear-scp conflicts with openssh-common (both provide /usr/bin/scp, which I think is silly, but there you are).

Of course, if you insist on using Dropbear, you can use Bluetooth to copy files over Obexftp (which Nautilus supports nicely). But since this requires Bluetooth hardware to be powered on both the laptop and the phone, I decided to replace Dropbear with OpenSSH.

Installing OpenSSH server on your N900 forces you to change your root password (the default is "rootme"), whether you’ve already changed it or not. Kind of annoying. The user account by default "doesn’t have a password", which I think means all password access is disabled. Folk wisdom suggests that giving a password to the user account "could" cause problems, but I think this is based on an (incorrect) belief that the default password is "blank" (in fact, it’s invalid, meaning there is no phone software that relies on using a password to switch to the user account, so there should be no problem with granting a password). Nevertheless I decided to just drop in a key using authorized_keys. But if you don’t set a password, OpenSSH won’t let you log in (even using publickey access); the log messages will tell you that your account is "locked". The reason is that OpenSSH looks at /etc/passwd to decide whether to let you in using any access methods at all; since the password hash is "!", it locks you out.

This page shows how to fix the "locked account" status.

I just learned of the passing, last summer, of Sam Shapiro, half of the dynamic duo behind Force Monkeys. His family has been erecting memorials: samshapiro.org and Saving Ghandiah (Ghandaiah being his best-known handle). Here is some of his writing:

WITHOUT PERSONAL EXPRESSION, WE BECOME STATISTICS. WE ARE NO LONGER PEOPLE, BUT INSTEAD MACHINES, BODIES MOVING ABOUT AND FUNCTIONING ONLY TO ASSURE OUR BASIC SURVIVAL.

WITHOUT PERSONAL EXPRESSION, WE LOSE PART OF OUR HUMANITY, AND WE LOSE PART OF WHAT MAKES US SENTIENT.

FOR THIS REASON, WITHOUT PERSONAL EXPRESSION, NOTHING ELSE IS POSSIBLE. AS AUTOMATONS WE WOULD LOSE OUR HAPPINESS. AS AUTOMATONS WE WOULD SHED ALL VARIETY AND BLUR TO A SINGLE SHADE OF MONOTONOUS GRAY.

PEOPLE CHERISH THEIR DIFFERENCES, AND YET, SIMOLTANEOUSLY [SIC], TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THEM. WE OFTEN DISCARD THE OPINIONS OF OTHERS AS INSIGNIFICANT MERELY BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT OUR OWN.

IF PEOPLE REALIZED THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF EXPRESSION, THEN PERHAPS CONFLICT WOULD NOT BE SO COMMON.

A lot of his art is really stunning. Here is one that I’m fond of. Look at the eyes in particular.

I saw Emacs Got Git, sometimes called "Egg", listed on the list of git-related software on the git wiki (although now taken down) and of course on the EmacsWiki. I decided I’d give it a whirl. The most recent version I could find was the one listed on the EmacsWiki, the version from bplayer, which seems to still be actively developed. The incumbent here is either magit, which is by far the best user interface I’ve ever seen for any version control anywhere, or VC mode, which was written once to support SCCS and has largely survived unchanged since then.

A brief digression about magit and vc-mode. Magit is a little bit of a challenge to pick up: you actually have to read the manual. But the short version is: M-x magit-status to open a view of your repository, and then TAB things open and closed. You can press "s" to stage files, hunks, or even "highlight" lines using the region and stage only those. "u" to unstage; "c" to start a commit, and then C-c C-c to make the commit. You can create a commit that amends the previous commit by pressing C-c C-a in the log message buffer. It probably offends some that there are already conventions here for VC system integration, notably vc-mode. But vc-mode takes a file-based view of version control, has no support for staging hunks, and in general just doesn’t feel good to use. magit is much better — so much better that it is easily worth the break in convention.

So I thought I’d check out Emacs Got Git, to see if it was any better than magit. This isn’t a detailed analysis — actually I’ve probably spent longer writing this post than I did looking at Egg.

I find a screenshot is worth a thousand words. On my ~/etc repository, magit looks like this:

Magit highlights all the important details: which files are changed? Which are untracked? What commits exist locally that don’t exist on the remote?

On the same repo, Egg looks like this:

This is what we call the "angry fruit salad" school of UI design. Also, it doesn’t have a section for "unpushed" commits.

I’m going to be sticking with magit for the forseeable future.

Seen on LWN, an article about porting an application from C# to Java. Punchline: automated translation. Quote:

The inspiration for this was an article about Boeing and automatic conversion. Well we thought "if Boeing can do it so can we". Sounds stupid? Well it is. Luckily for us we did not think that at the time.

Cute nerd joke: Like, Python.

#!usr/bin/python
# My first Like, Python script!

yo just print like "hello world" bro

I’ve been spending a bit of time steeping myself in EmacsLisp these last few days. I’ve been looking for information on elisp "best practices" — specifically, is it OK to rely on (require 'cl)?

Here’s one page wondering the same thing. There’s always a ton of interesting stuff whenever you go poking at emacs packages; most surprising to me this time around was ELPA, the Emacs Lisp Package Archive. Perl has CPAN, Python has PyPI, Ruby has Rubygems.

I also found the blog emacs-fu pretty interesting looking — approximately one post a week, I think. Lots of stuff I wish I could absorb better.

Emacs Coding Conventions from the Elisp manual is also pretty helpful. To this point (about CL), it says:

Please don’t require the cl package of Common Lisp extensions at run time. Use of this package is optional, and it is not part of the standard Emacs namespace. If your package loads cl at run time, that could cause name clashes for users who don’t use that package.

However, there is no problem with using the cl package at compile time, with (eval-when-compile (require 'cl)). That’s sufficient for using the macros in the cl package, because the compiler expands them before generating the byte-code.

For me, this is enough, because I want to use dolist. But there are programmers out there like David O’Toole, who writes in his interactive guide to the GNU Emacs CL package:

Despite what people say about still being able to use the macros while complying with the policy, in my opinion the policy is still a discouragement. You have to memorize which of its features you must abstain from using (and therefore lose the benefit of those features) if you are to have any hope of someday contributing Lisp code to GNU Emacs.

I think the GNU Emacs maintainers are hesitant to allow use of a package, like cl, which isn’t "namespaced". I bet if all the functions in cl were prefixed with cl-, nobody would mind…

[Update, 2010-Apr-27: From an email on the magit email list:

There's also the small matter that many of the function implementations in cl, striving for the full generality of Common Lisp (much of which is completely useless in Emacs), turn out to be horrible.

E.g., for a fun time, dig down through

(find-if pred list :from-end t),

and look at what it ACTUALLY does when you finish macroexpanding everything. It tests every element of the list against the predicate, not just the rightmost ones stopping when it finds the first match. Once it determines the rightmost match, it then retains NOT the element itself, but its ordinal position N, which then gets used in (elt list N), meaning ANOTHER listwalk, just to get the element back in order to return it. Nor is the byte-compiler anywhere near smart enough to optimize this away (I'm not sure any compiler would be...)

I'll grant cl has some useful macros in it, but it comes bundled with a lot of crap and you need to be really careful about what you use. For many things, you're better off rolling your own functionality using the standard routines available (e.g., while, mapcar, and reverse are all written directly in C).

And you most definitely do NOT want to be foisting the crap on everybody else, hence the need to keep it out of the runtime.

Thanks!]

I told myself I wasn’t going to post a link to today’s post on 8bit today, but as usual, some of these are really good, and it takes all of twenty seconds to flip through them.

—Felipe Cama

—Tomby

Seen via JWZ: this story, called "Raj, Bohemian".

"Is someone paying you to say that stuff?"

She giggled. "Sorry, babe, it just pops out sometimes. I didn’t mean to pitch you. I’m supposed only to do it to my girlfriends."

"What?"

"Ignore me. You know how hard it is to keep track of one’s placements."

"Placements?"

"Placements. Why are you making that face? You’re looking at me like I’m some kind of freak."

"You have a lot of — placements?"

"Oh, don’t get on your high horse. You don’t work, either. What do you do for cash? If a girl doesn’t want a straight job, she has to monetize her social network."

This sounds a little reminiscent of a piece that aired once on Wemmick’s Temporary Sanity (beware: aggressive ads that got spidered by archive.org; you’re gonna need to stop your browser from completely loading the page).

After kissing the wife and kids, I headed off to work. Ninety percent of the population now shares my job, but I can proudly say I was one of the first viewers. Viewers are people who are paid to watch enormous video walls that run commercials all day long. We are allowed to eat, work out, and even play games while we watch, but we must pass a comprehension test before we are allowed to leave at the end of the day.

Is this a real problem as we move into the post-scarcity economy? I’m not sure.