Fandom - uncommon fic for archive

I know of several weird things that happened at SQ.net, but this fic really surprises me. Expecting the usual R/H & H/G I keep getting an increasingly stronger Snape/Harry feeling from a Theowyn's work-in-progress "Harry Potter and the Enemy Within", where Harry keeps missing chances to hook up with Ginny. If this turns into actual explicit Slash, it would be a first for me. Well, actually I've followed and fangirl'd (this verb doesn't have a male counterpart, does it?) one ambiguously-gay fic in the past, but I've stopped reading it when it seemed to turn Slash.

Misc - Update

• Via someone on the AnandTech forums (I'm a much less frequent visitor there than I used to be. It feels stale, but maybe it's just me.) - ThinkGeek's April Fools products for 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. LOL
• When we've read "All My Sons" in school, I assumed the author was long gone (Usually I'm less prone than my peers to cast everything before my time to a single time period, but it happens). Then I hear about Arthur Miller's passing and it rings a bell. At least now I've read the obituary.
• I discovered gerbils are completely unknown to my parents. You must understand my parents know everything (unless it was censored by the Soviet propaganda machine or happened after I was born so they had no free time to keep up), and finding they have never heard of the little critters was strange (they are not mentioned in the Soviet encyclopedia. Why would the existence of gerbils be hushed up in the KGB?). I learned about them in primary school, because they are a very common form of wildlife in sandy Ashdod.
• A programming idiom I've never heard before, but have frequently used: RAII. I'll have to make a little informal report at work, to stir up some thinking about a standard way to handle this in our projects, since I've already seen some less-than-perfect code.
• Have been learning ANTLR for work. Found myself reading about the halting problem for fun. Eek.
• Orson Scott Card's new book "Shadow of the Giant" will be out soon. First three chapters are available on his site. w00t!
• Latest episodes of "Enterprise" are actually better. I've been watching them as 0-day bittorrent releases for a while, and I'm almost sorry it's been cancelled.

Tech History - spreadsheets

It's not-so-common knowledge these days (among my generation, at least) that the killer-application for personal computers (circa 1979) was VisiCalc - the first electronic spreadsheet. Its creator, Dan Bricklin, has a web page (he's a real pioneer blogger, in fact) on which he has a history section. It's very interesting, and it includes a reference manual and working version 1 software. Yes, actual working spreadsheet application for the IBM PC from 1981 (27K download), reportedly works out of the box on Windows. I confirm it does work on my machine (using dosemu) and I guess it should work in dosbox (if you're not on a PC-compatible).

Tech - Groupware

Via Tim Bray, Jamie Zawinski's excellent post on the topic of open source groupware.

Groupware being one of the top reasons I started screaming and shouting every time they cautiously raised the topic of commission*, I completely agree with jwz - it's just not sexy enough to succeed as open source.
Even our managers, who need their link to our Exchange** server more than oxygen, hate Outlook** and all it represents, and although all developers/designers need some collaboration software, to the point where I think it's the #1 most important CASE*** tool beyond the standard issue whiteboard, I too feel more comfortable with wiki, IM and plain email (my "employer"'s approach to VPN is a bit more drastic than Sun's though…).

Apropos software that can get a twenty-something laid:
I've been thinking about reviving the FFDB project as a "for personal use" thing and developing it informally, since I didn't get enough support in an attempt of actual case study or just requirements analysis.

* - didn't happen lately, I think I've made my point clear.
** - it's no secret we're all-Microsoft on the desktop at work.
*** - Rational and Mercury - take a hint. Actually, forget it. I don't care about shelfware anyway.

Nerds - I <3 /.

Self-ridicule is bad for self-esteem, but it is funny.

Fandom - reccs

I'll post here reccs I got while commuting to work today. I do not necessarily endorse those myself, but that's just because I haven't read them yet.

• Kate's fanart on SQ. Pretty darn good!
• Seldes Katne's In the Presence of Angels. See my review here - it's #113596 (silly SQ webdesigner didn't make anchor tags for reviews, no to mention the horrible URLs…)
• Thing1. A long running Lupin-centric series.
• Rabbit's Yet Another Snape Meets the Dursleys Story.
• FernWithy's Shifts. If (you haven't read it yet) {   read it now! (Warning: WIP) } else {   why in the devil's name haven't you told me to read it? }

I'll R/R, and update here. Also, should write down observations about living on less than four hours of sleep per day for weeks. Executive summary: don't do it.

Programming - Perl, in Latin

Those who think Perl looks like cartoon characters swearing and hate the worship at the altar of terseness that plagues the Perl hacking culture, should consider this: you can write Perl in Latin, and yes it will work, without much loss of language features or performance. That is easily the best way I've seen to write unmaintainable code to ensure continued employment. As the saying goes: Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur. I'm dying to show this to our IT staff... :-)

Fandom - Kokopelli writes more!

He posted a follow up to his excellent summer-after-5th-year story "The Letters Of Summer". I already said I prefer fic written by men, and John does it just right.

Commerce - Ripoff, take 2

Following my previous rant on the topic of hardware prices in Israel, AnandTech published a new mid-range guide so I've made another spreadsheet. Again: this does not describe a full PC, this isn't the best combination of parts (not even price/performance wise) for every task, and you should really talk with someone knowledgeable who isn't getting any of your money before buying anything. Prices include shipping (either in US or in IL, appropriately).

Hardware	Recommended Component	US Price	US price in ISL	IL price	ripoff rate
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 512K 2.0GHz 90nm for 939 (Retail)	200	974	1300	25.08%
Motherboard	MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (NF3 250Gb)	146	711.02	1010	29.60%
Memory	Corsair Value Select 512MB DDR PC-3200 CL2.5 x 2	120	584.4	1400	58.25%
Video Card	6600GT AGP 128MB GDDR3	210	1022.7	1100	7.03%
Hard Drive	Seagate 160GB SATA w/ NCQ	105	511.35	670	23.68%
	exchange rate:	4.87

Finding an AGP video card in Israel is near impossible, and the prices for RAM are really excessive. Also, vendors don't really publish (or know themselves, I kid you not) the correct full specs (or at least the correct SKU) for products, so it's anyone's guess e.g. whether that DIMM is CAS-2.5 or CAS-3. Zap still has problems following the hardware industry, or it seems like their analyst is really lazy - their list or models and features is always out of date, and they don't sort out parts into models all that well (meaning they let vendors lie). This time, the ripoff-rate is the markup for living here, instead of the proportion of local prices to US prices. Oh, and I have to say I'm impressed with the Mac Mini. Not enough to buy one, but still - If it had a G5, a gig of RAM, a 7200rpm hard drive and 6-channel audio (for double the price, let's say) - I'd be all over it.

Leisure Time - Fantasy

I'm a technical person, more specifically a computer geek. I'm good at it, and when I'm not depressed I like it a lot. I used to be hard sci-fi fan. For me, "hard sci-fi" is when the author makes efforts to explain faster-than-light travel, communications, weaponry etc. rather than just assume it all works the way to readership expects it to work and then carry on with the plot. In an imperfect world, the quality of an average product behaves by the rules of zero-sum economy: when you raise the mark on one parameter inevitably you lower it on another, e.g. in a tech-centric book the character development, dialogue and even plot will suffer. I didn't mind. And then I'd read Dune, and Hyperion, and Bujold's saga. So then I figured out, if I can not just stomach but enjoy a romance novel (I mean A Civil Campaign, and I'm sorry if I hurt anyone) - it doesn't matter if it's sci-fi. So now I'm half way through Dragons Of Winter Night. I'm not terribly impressed, but I'll save my review for when I'm done at least with the first trilogy (won't be too long I think). I now have two requests from my own (rather limited) readership:

• Do any of you know of a decent official or fan artwork of Tika Waylan? (say it with me: duh)
• What can you tell me (from personal experience, mind!) about not computerized RPGs, D&D style?

I'd really like to get some feedback. If anyone feels I'm neglecting to read & review on one's blog - it's true I've been slacking, but I do read, even if I don't comment.

Personal - regrets

Some people decide to live their lives with no regrets, sometimes because they believe "everything happens for a reason". I am not one of those people. I'm reading Paul Graham's latest essay, "What You'll Wish You'd Known", meant to be given as a speech to high school grads. My eyes are watery and I'm hitting the chair's armrest. The tragic thing is, even if it had been published six years ago and I was given it to read, I'm afraid it wouldn't have made any difference, because I'm not sure I was ready to "get it" then.

TV - Star Dreck

Enterprise-3x15-Harbinger. So, they finally undressed T'Pol. Ick.

Personal - observations

Maybe because I'm a geek, maybe because I'm an INTJ, or because I'm socially inept and thus a perpetual outsider, but I often find myself taking an anthropologist's stance with regard to my peers. It's elitist and lonely and kind of sad, but it's the way it is. Anyway, it's a well known fact that females travel in packs to the bathroom. Numerous explanations for this behavior have been suggested over the years, including but not limited to security and opportunity to gossip. Personally I believe the real reason is a combination of a number of them (you're invited to share your $.02). What I have noticed is something else peculiar about girls and the girls' rooms - they believe, on an unconscious level, that the grith they enjoy in restrooms and bathrooms applies to sound waves, as if the door is a portal to another dimension where only females exist, and no physical phenomena travel between the two worlds by means other than the door. I don't know how universal that is, but at work male and female bathrooms and restrooms often share the wet wall, and although the doors may be in opposite sides and far apart, the facilities themselves are in fact very close together, allowing for excellent sound transmission. Men are aware of this, but they don't treat bathrooms as absolutely private – either because it's an unwritten rule of men or maybe because the residual hunter instincts (part of the reason for stalking and voyeurism) caution them. So for the last two years I've unwittingly heard girls I don't know talk about their boyfriends, periods and all kinds of private things. During my last weekend on base I've also endured a horrible rendition of No Doubt's “Don't Speak” in the showers, which led to this post. Now, am I the only one to notice this?

Politics - Economic Freedom etc.

I'll have to think long and hard to formulate and express my beliefs on copyright, intellectual property, business, society and freedom but I'm too lazy to actually do it well and because I'm a perfectionist I won't publish anything that's not done "well" (a pretty high standard to live up to, since the net allows me to compare my work with the best and not just the neighborhood), like for example the three themes(1,2,3) of Tim Bray's OnGoing. So the same way I can't write the perfect fic myself but keep looking for it on archive sites, I can't express my beliefs but I can provide links. As you might know, I use Gentoo and Firefox (exclusively, at last!), and my blog is CC licensed (because I believe in the cluetrain and unprofessional journalism). I've reread Frederik Pohl's "The Space Merchants" and "The Merchants' War" twice, and each time was horrified to find it much closer to reality than fiction than I think it was when written (or maybe I'm just romanticizing). I don't particularly like RMS' very strong style and generally seem to prefer ESR's philosophy as more practical (as in my ability to make a living off the thing I love) but he has been proven right a few too many times, and The Right to Read has touched me. I deeply despise "lock-in" as a business strategy (a free iPod anyone?). Microsoft's and Big Media's attempts in recent years to become Big Brother unsurprisingly lead to P2P pirates becoming "cool" and denying the RIAA and MPAA their money seem almost noble. An ex-pirate myself, today I break copyright law only to watch already-aired episodes of TV series, but I sure do understand the motivation for resisting DRM and other things that make you not the boss of stuff you paid your hard earned money for. Various repeated anti-competitive behavior and aggressive FUD marketing campaigns as well as the revival of McCarthyism only strengthen people's willingness to support Google's "Don't Be Evil".

TV - not quite plagiarism

I googled "canticle" and got the classic SF book reading the reviews of which I immediately thought "B5 4th season finale!" and yup - JMS kind of admits it, though he says he reached that independently.

Tech - IMAGE_DOS_HEADER.e_magic = 0x5A4D

As those of you who have used the computer before Microsoft decided to set "hide file extensions for known file types" default to "on" know, usually the file's extension (the last part after the last period in its name) is used to identify which type of file it is (like "doc" for Word and "jpeg" for pictures). But, that can be misleading as the file's extension is easy to change. So, some software that needs to know the file's type (like antivirus software to needs to scan only infectable files, or multimedia cataloguer that will find pictures in everything) has to actually look into the file and check. While reading and analyzing the entire file is the safest method, it is much too slow and requires the software (or person) doing it to know everything about all the file formats (impossible), so what's usually done is you look at the beginning, what's called the "header", and see if you recognize anything. This method is surprisingly good - Zip files all start with "PK", PDF files start with "%PDF", etc. Some people know that EXE files (programs) since the earliest versions of DOS till today's Windows executables all start with "MZ". What I'm ashamed to admit is I didn't know "MZ" are the initials of one Mark Zbikowski, one of the architects of DOS 2.0. What an interesting piece of trivia! bibliographic references:

• Win32 PE File Format
• Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing's entree for "mz"

Fandom - Kokopelli's The Letters of Summer

Chapter 21 is up on SQ. Squeee!

Update: It was the final chapter (epilogue expected Q1 2005), so those of you who have so far deterred from reading it because of its WIP status no longer have this excuse.

The story wasn't perfect, in fact I felt it skirted the edge of the "too big" trap (I've tried to formulate a coherent definition several times, but I can't even name the phenomenon. I've blogged about it previously, but in short it's when the character's special abilities and the associated special effects completely overshadow all other aspects of the story, it enters a kind of arms race and gets farther and farther from believable till it resembles a bad comic book or maybe a manga cartoon (not to bash illustrated novels, of course)) but it always managed to stay more or less IC for the characters and settings created by JKR and (almost more importantly) never ceased to entertain. It successfully incorporates non-Potterverse Fantasy elements (a popular thing in fandom, but hard to pull off) and a PG non-soapy romantic arc. I must stress how much the high level of English contributed to my enjoying the story (remember how I raved about Amberite!Draco ?) - after all, it's not every day you see a word like "amanuensis" in fanfic! (albeit misspelled) *hats off to the editors for a marvelous job*

Now, for the more important part of this review:

As you might know, although I personally resent the concept of organized religion (I believe it always becomes political and thus immoral) I have the utmost respect for people who genuinely Believe and live by decent moral codes as it seems to be very healthy for individuals and society in general, as long as their belief is non-viral and especially if it does not claim exclusivity on the absolute truth/afterlife/whatever it promises its devotees (something that Judaism for example miserably fails at, but at least it was never evangelic…).

So, while I don't believe Harry will ever find Jesus (whose circumcision I plan to dutifully celebrate in best Soviet Russia tradition) in canon (JKR, like Prof. Tolkien before her, won't mention her belief by name, the same way she can't say the word "Nazi", but it doesn't mean we don't understand what she's talking about), and although this subplot didn't contribute much to the main plot arc nor was it extended enough for me to grasp the hero's spiritual development, I see nothing wrong in the author's inclusion of an obviously important to him aspect of life into the story, especially as it's really not pushy and works plot-wise (better at least than the notion of Nymphadora Tonks being a flashy Cordelia Naismith knock off common in a certain kind of Honks stories).

In conclusion — keep up the good work John, and don't mind the flamers.

Personal - Ill

I've contracted some kind of flu. It's a real pandemic - everyone seems to get it. My nose leaks like a tap and yesterday I've lost my voice in the middle of a presentation if front of school kids (very scary and very funny afterwards). I got three sickdays I can't really enjoy because my head hurts so much (oxygen deficiency probably). And just as we got a new toy! That's about it I think.

Web Design - wow

Just look at 1976design.com/blog! I feel so inadequate. Time to rewrite blog.

Commerce - ripoff

If I were in the market for PC hardware today (I'm not 'coz I'm poor), this is what I would be shopping for (listed is barebones system only, this is not a full computer!).

The system is "most bang for the buck" oriented, for general work (actually it's supposed to be the best for anything but multimedia encoding (not creation, mind!)) and mild gaming (actually, I'd leave my fanless Radeon 9000 as I'm not running any games at all), the processor would get overclocked as far as it would go while being rock solid during Israeli summer using standard heatsink and fan combo (or a cheap & quiet alternative), and of course you need two identical DIMMs (pieces of RAM) - I just couldn't decide which.

I only used reputable vendors I know, prices include shipping & handling. Exchange rate is for December 17th. Spreadsheet work done using OpenOffice's Calc.

category	part description	USD	rate	US price in NIS	price in Israel incl. VAT	ripoff rate
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (939, 512K)	159	4.34	690.06	1040	150.71%
Motherboard	MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (nForce3 Ultra, 939)	139		603.26	1175	194.78%
RAM	Corsair PC-3200 512MB XMS (DDR400, CL2)	105		455.7	865	189.82%
	Corsair PC-3200 512MB Value (DDR400, CL2.5)	75		325.5	685	210.45%
HDD	WD 200GB, 7200rpm, 8MB, SATA	125		542.5	734	135.3%
Video	ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB	230		998.2	1225	122.72%

I've used www.zap.co.il for local prices as it's the industry's standard here, but I have to say the site is horrible compared to Anand's. Numbers are fairly reliable, though.

I write no conclusions, as this is self explanatory.