Magic and Loss

Posted on by Alasdair

Daybreak, and in the wires, the angels scream. Pulled from the higher planes, down into our engines of business and communication. People forget, now that modem technology is old and out of date, and they no longer hear the shrieking that accompanies their email. I don’t suppose it’s much of a coincidence that the digital revolution really kicked off just after we managed to make things run silent. Easier on the conscience.

Me, I haven’t forgotten. I keep a bank of old modems set up by my machines. I could use them for all sorts of things, but these days, they’re mostly just a reminder.

Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a sadist, or anything. No more than you are. Just because I can hear them when I want, that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. Quite the reverse. I only turn them on when I can’t stand it any more.

It all started with Dee, of course. His strange mathematical formulae, taught to him by his angel. His angle. Who showed him that everything that is can be reduced to mathematical information, and then thereby changed. Yes, everyone knows that he was the father of cryptography, but who really stops to think about what that means?

Does anyone care what the distinction between encyphering information, and calling down protective spirits to hide it from prying eyes is? Does anyone really care that there are angels shrieking in the stratosphere, at registers beyond hearing, bounced from cellphone to cellphone, carrying our tedious reminders, idle questions and momentary flirtations?

Does anyone even notice the price? That as magic becomes everyday, the world becomes smaller? Starker? As if the soul was leeching from it, being bound away somewhere else?

That’s why I keep my bank of modems. It’s insulation, of a sort, and maybe, just maybe, a little insurance. The planet fills up with violence, with creeping convenience, as it becomes world of desires sated as soon as they’re conceived. Every day, things get just a little worse, as more and more of our better nature is strung out down wires, and spread oh-so-thinly across the globe. And I fear that one day, there won’t be enough left of our higher selves.

So I hide here, with my bank of angels, carefully preserved. I husband them, against this apocalypse of spirit, in the faint hope that one day, they’ll preserve me, as I have them.

One last flight of angels, trapped in cages of wire and diode, waiting for the end.

Copyright and Code

Posted on by Alasdair

Oh for fuck’s sake. It turns out that writing code is now something you can be held liable for. (I am, I admit, putting the cart before the horse. It is possible that the case will get thrown out. Except that the US courts have not shown an appetite to do that in recent years.)

In short: in addition to suing the a company that made P2P software, it’s suing two of the developers individually. If it succeeds, it means that developers can be held personally liable for the use that their code is put to. Suddenly, the open source movement would be in serious trouble. Hell, I personally would have reservations about releasing software to clients, since there is a remote possibility that their use of it might break laws. There’s nothing in any CMS I’ve written that would prevent a client using it to distribute copyright material, and there’s no practical way to make sure there is. And it’s not just their business, or even my employer that’s liable. It’d be me, personally, as the bloke that wrote the code.

Apparently is this case it is the guns that kill people, and not people.

Can anyone please explain to me how this might considered a decent thing to do? I mean, I know there are lawyers reading this journal. And while I understand that they have a responsibility to their employer, do they not, as humans, have a much fucking broader responsibility to not file suits that have the potential to fuck *everyone* in the ear?

I’m not being rhetorical here – somebody, please, answer the question, because I’m utterly fucking stumped. I honestly don’t know how someone can possibly thing that holding developers personally liable for the uses to which the code is put can be a good idea. Can frankly, be anything other that mind-numbingly malevolent stupidity.

Ubuntu!

Posted on by Alasdair

Ubuntu, as we all know, means “scared of this linux stuff that the big kids talk about” in the langauge of some tribe or other.

Still, I’m a bit impressed with it thus far. It’s taken me something under an hour and half to go from “knackered windows box” to something the appears to go like shit off a shovel (or at least, boots in a tiny fraction of the time that my windows gaming rig boots in), is connected to the electrical internet, has had half a dozen new apps intalled, and is generally showing every sign that by this time tomorrow, I’ll have a working development server, with version control and everything set up for my use.

And what’s most impressive about it, is that I’ve got it up and running while drunk.

I could get used to this linux stuff, if it keeps on like this.

Over

Posted on by Alasdair

So, that’s it for The West Wing. A slow shuffle off to the end. There were a couple of lovely moments in the last episodes, but that’s all they were, lovely moments. As much as seasons six and most of seven were a marked recovery from the awful fifth season, the last few episodes had nothing in them. A function of the drama – this isn’t the sort of fiction you can build to an explosive climax, because we all know how it has to end – exactly as it did, with a wind down.

It never got back to the days of seasons one and two when it won all those awards for a damn good reason, but still: this is the first and only TV show that I can make any sort of claim to have watched end to end (I joined in at the back end of season one, but I got the DVDs as damn fast as I could…). I’ve never actually had a TV show end that I really genuinely was sorry to see go before. It’s an odd feeling. I suspect it’ll be a long time before it happens to me again.

Music in brief.

Posted on by Alasdair

Lilly Allen is a bloody scattershot artist. Most of her stuff leaves me cold, but when she hits the mark, she’s spot fucking on. I still love “LDN”, and now I’ve got to say, her cover of The Kaiser Chiefs “Oh My God” is also bloody fine.

If you haven’t heard of The Pipettes, then you may have been under a rock, so once you’ve checked that you’re not pinnned down by extraneous minerals, you really should educate yourself. One of the current wave of Spector-pop revivalists, head and shoulders above most of the others I’ve heard, as they reach for other touches to it, both contemporary with Spector, and more modern. Top stuff. Must get to a live gig.

Disturbingly, Andrew W.K.’s latest, “Pushing Drugs” is quite a lot of fun, too. (Via NYUB.)

Am I Mouse Or Man?

Posted on by Alasdair

A question that men have struggled with through the ages. Tonight, however, I find it a moot question. Regardless of which I am, my plans have gong[1] agley.

ewa‘s away this weekend, so the plan had been to indulge in chronic anti-social nerdism, and to spend the weekend playing City of Heroes,. moving from my computer only to find the phone and order pizza. But I find that the hot weather and my computer disagree. Specifically, when my graphics card starts to work (as is demanded of it by City of Heroes) the temperature inside my computer hits something like 70 degrees centigrade. So, in self defense, it shuts down. In this heat, it’s running at the very limit of what it can cope with, just running Firefox and Thunderbird. So that’s my plans out the window.

So instead, I have a bottle of very cold white wine, and I intend to watch the second half of the second season of the West Wing. You have to make the best of these things, after all.

[1] I assume that this is the correct past tense…

Answers To Yesterday’s Questions.

Posted on by Alasdair

Short version: There is no correct answer – the test doesn’t give you enough information to come up with a single correct response. What matters most is that you applied a consistent set of rules.

The most likely (read: the ones that I, just about any programmer, and about 75% of you would give/gave) correct answers are (and the programmers will have to bear with me while I explain this in the simplest terms I can think of, and I apologise for patronising anyone):

Question 1: a=20, b=20
Question 2: a=7, b=7, c=3
Assuming that a, b and c are ‘containers’ that start out holding the number values given, and that ‘=’ means (approximately) ‘assign the value on the right, to the value on the left’, and that we execute each line in sequence, changing values as we go.

But, for example, these would also be completely reasonable answers (and was far and away the most common second choice):

Question 1: a=b, b=20;
Question 2: a=c, b=a, c=b;
If a, b and c are not ‘containers’, but values in and of themselves, and equals has the same meaning as above, and each line is executed in sequence..

As would:
Question 1: a=20, b=20
Question 2: a=7, b=5, c=3
a, b and c are ‘containers’, ‘=’ has the same meaning as before, but we execute each line as if ‘simultaneous’ – so changes wrought on line one have no relevance to anything further down.

Or hell, if you want to get really esoteric about it:
Question 1: a=10,b=a
Question 2: a=b,b=c,c=a

If a, b and c are not ‘containers’, and ‘=’ means ‘assign the value on the left, to the value on the right’.

My test isn’t close as useful as the original, which has 12 questions, all in that format. The original was multi-choice, with an optional “other” write-in for every question and provided the cue that the answers at least seemed to be expected to be numeric. I left that out on purpose, just to see what would happen. (And also because I couldn’t be arsed setting up the massive poll it would have been if I’d left the multi-choice in, and besides this test was designed to work even for children educated in modern schools, not the sparkling paragons of intellect on my friends list…)

Approximately 90% of the answers fell into answer set 1 or 2. I suspect had the numeric cue been present, it would almost all have been option 1.

So, what does this prove? Absolutely nothing, of course, but it certainly seems like most of the non-programmers gave answers that a programmer would, and in only about 6% of cases was I unable to work out what system had been used. Draw your own conclusions.