Anthology of Interest

I never really knew exactly what Unicode, UTF-8, codepages, and so on were, until I came across this article. It doesn't go into much detail, but it's a good little intro.

I was googling around for info on how to make sloppy focus work in OS X, since I desperately require it. I'm so used to it on Linux that I depend on it, and as a consequence I keep typing my password into Nitro (Jabber client) windows and sending to all my friends. Gah. Anyway, I can across some neato things, including some sloppy focus tricks.

This guy seems to have a number of tricks on his blog. System wide EMACS key bindings are cool. As are Mozilla (Firebird) EMACS keybindings. Which is neat, because I didn't even think to check if one could set up Thunderbird to have EMACS bindings, yet the lack of said bindings is the only thing I can begrudge it.

On the sloppy focus front, apparently Virtual Desktop 3 has it, although only a beta is available.

I'm also going to try out OroborOSX, which apparently integrates better than either Apple's XDarwin or Fink's X11 packages. For example, Apple and Fink's X11 brings all X11 windows to the front when one X11 window is clicked; OroborOSX interleaves them apparently.

I started playing nethack again. After forgetting to engrave Elberth and dieing at the hands of evil Xorns, playing as a monk, I decided to play as a Samuri, to mix it up a bit. I'm at ninja level.

Since pybloxsom gives me trouble, though no fault of it's own, I have been causually looking around for alternatives. There is a review of a number of different blogging packages, which is quite interesting. Unfortunalty, many of them use PHP, which I have a distaste for, or are proprietary.

On the proprietary angle, the recent changes to Movable Type's licence for version 3.0 have been noted by many bloggers. Dave uses MT, but I believe he falls well within the "free" licence, but I wonder what he thinks of the changes, or if it matters much?

In my quest to learn LISP, I decided to write a small LISP program. I wrote a CGI that describes LISP symbols (but not very well), as inspired by some other guy's site, and then I started writing a bloxsom clone, which will probably give a 500, but you can click here to type it. Yeah, it's not even remotely finished.

I decided to learn Lisp for some reason this weekend. I even managed to write a couple of little CGI scripts with it. I mostly learned from "Common Lisp: A gentle introduction to Symbolic Computation," which is a pretty good book. Lisp is a little different from the languages I'm used to, so it actually took me a little long than expected to become familiar with it. But at least I finally know what lambda notation is and how it works.

Another online book that my be useful to the Lisp beginner is "On Lisp". I haven't had a chance to read much of that one yet.

This page has links to lots more information about Lisp, including a link to the ANSI specification for Common Lisp and a couple of other references. This is the reference I've been looking for!

... to the newest member of the Anderson familiy! (as of two days ago)

Congratulations Dave and Brenda!

Something to add to my reading list... it's about "the fight between open systems for exchanging knowledge and closed systems that see knowledge as a marketable commodity" -

Sounds like it could be interesting...

C++ templates, it turns out, are a Turing complete functional programming language (functional in the computer science / math sense). Now, I don't know what "Turing complete" means, but it turns out templates can be used to do pretty cool stuff, like make the compiler compute prime numbers or factorials or whatever. This was apparently discovered almost by accident.

So, I have this FDTD code. I have six field components that have to be updated at each point in a grid. So right now I get to maintain 6 functions that are almost identical. Each time I add a different type of update, for frequency dispersive material or whatever, I have to modify these functions. Or add new ones. Pain in the ass.

I wonder if I can use metaprogramming and templates to write one update equation "kernel" and drop it into these loops as required? I tried today but didn't get very far. There is too many little subtle differences. Ugg.

I've watched a lot of movies in the last few weeks. I like movies. But most of the movies I've watched haven't warranted their own entry. So here is a little list of what I can remember:

• The Manchurian Candidate - The original, B & W, with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Janet Leigh. Ole Frank smashes a real table in a fight. It's good if you like older classics.
• The Italian Job - The original version, with that British guy. You know, that guy. This one sucked. Skip it and watch the new Italian Job instead. It's sooo much better.
• Wilbur wants to kill himself - This has funny moments, and moving moments. And a nice little love story; a love triangle between two brothers and a former maid. Recommended for people like me.
• Scary movie 3 - If you got nothing better to do...
• Girl with a Perl earring - Slowest. Movie. Ever. A period piece about a guy who paints a picture of a girl with an earring. As far as I was able to discern, nothing actually happened.
• Starship Troopers 2 - None of the cast of the original as far as I could tell. Interesting on a certain level; had sort of a ten little Indians feel to it. So tension was created. Might have been better if I was drunk.
• Panic Room - Jodie Foster. A bit of a thriller. Watched it twice, since Tamara wanted to see it after I watched it when she was out. Had some CGI shots... CGI is so cheap and real now that it's not just for sci-fi and fantasy any more. But it wasn't good enough, because I could tell before the camera did physically impossible things.
• Resident Evil - Like playing a video game, only without the excitement of actually getting to control the characters! I eagerly await the sequel.
• Under Suspicion - I think. A Morgan Freeman thriller about a guy accused of murder. It was decent.
• Paycheck - After MI:2, which has the dubious distinction of been the only movie I've ever been tempted to walk out of, I wasn't expecting much from John Woo. But a movie is an ensemble work, and Paycheck is a pretty good movie. Tamara even liked it.

I came across an interesting article about copyright on someone's blog, or possible slashdot, the other day. It is at http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/writings/copyright.html.

I personally would prefer to see a system where culture is improved by cross-pollination, where people can freely create derived works, and knickers don't get overly twisted with regards to modern forms of mental-product distribution. I'm not sure of the statistics, but I think that most artists generally make more money from merchandising and playing concerts than from album sales. There's a good chance that some of my favorite music is almost impossible to play live, in which case the artist probably does derive most of their income from album sales.

With more draconian copy-"right" laws, is the time far off when we have to pay a license fee to get a book out of a public library? Doesn't that defeat the purpose?