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Do you know a singer called Silvia Cappuccina?

2008-01-29T21:40:00.000+01:00

I bet you don't because she doesn't exist. However I saw her in my dream last night. I was in metro going in some direction when appeared a woman and started singing. She sang so beautifully that I was amazed and wondered why such a brilliant singer sang in metro. Then she stopped singing and told her name addressing to the crowd. At first I didn't hear it very well though I was rather close to her and asked her to write it down for me because I wanted to get her records later. So next few minutes we spent looking for a piece of paper to write it down but didn't find anything suitable. Then she repeated her name again and I realized that her name was very easy to remember :) and indeed the name Silvia Cappuccina popped up in my mind this morning when I woke up. Out of curiosity I googled for Silvia Cappuccina and found ... nothing. I wonder maybe someone will read this article and will take Silvia Cappuccina as their scene name, if so my next googling might have better results :). Later that day as I was going home from work the name Olivia popped up in my mind and I thought that maybe this and not Sylvia was her first name and somehow I confused it with Sylvia. On the other hand maybe it was my mind that during the daytime transformed Sylvia into Olivia because the names have something in common. I guess I will never know that but I'm leaning towards the latter explanation.

Today's Election

2007-12-02T20:19:00.000+01:00

So today's election to Russian duma is almost over now. If you compare the composition of previous dumas and forecast for the duma to be it's easy to notice the sad tendency that the party in power becomes more and more prevailing and the number of members and diversity of opposition is constantly decreasing. The United Russia party (UR) is becoming more and more disgusting more and more like the Communist party of the Soviet Union. There is a lot of disgusting Putin-ass-licking in media, some youth organizations, among famous people and so on. Like, a lot of famous people signed a letter asking the president to stay for the third term (kind of petition to a Czar :)) The culmination of the electoral campaign was Putin's consent to head the United Russia party list and his speech at the meeting of his supporters in Luzhniki stadium. When I saw this speech on TV I was really scared and shocked. I never saw him like this, he is usually rather reserved but there he was so aggresive. I'd describe him as a combination of "I'm so cool and tough" and "who is not with us(=those who don't support my program and my party) are against us(=enemies of Russia)" attitudes. And he looked very much like a pop star(and no, he didn't sing, thanks God :)). At first I thought perhaps I was being too sensitive but then I learned that this shocked a lot of people of various political views. Someone even called him Putinbashi (like turkmenbashi). I was never Putin's supporter but I thought better of him. Of course this pop star thing was probably directed at the youth who were the majority there but I think that any normal person would find such behaviour disgusting. Well, maybe it's even better that he finally showed his true face and this will repulse people who hesitated about him. The way UR led their campaign was disgusting but predictable, it exploited Putin's popularity which is higher than theirs and they did everything to be seen "blended" with Putin, for instance they used posters that showed a ballot with a vote for UR and a phrase "for Putin!".
Some years ago the present duma made changes to the electoral system and now to get into duma a party must recieve over 7% of votes, before it was 5%, personally I think that such barrier shouldn't exist at all. Also we now can vote only for party lists, the constituency vote which was an opportunity for a party that couldn't get over the 5% barrier or for a candidate with no party to get into duma has been canceled, actually the question whether this change is negative is arguable because this vote also icreases the number of seats of the majority party . The choice "against all" has been canceled too.

According to election forecasts the United Russia gets about 70% of votes and the only other party that is going to be elected is the Communist party(14%). Another party that is close to get over the 7% barrier is the Liberal democratic party of Russia. Despite the name the party is one of the less liberal and less demoratic parties in Russia - one of the most authoritarian and nationalistic. Their leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky is a special case, he often behaves as an asshole but can be a good showman(people often call him a clown) and is often very funny. Though a lot of people think that he and his party is a joke he always got 10-15% of votes. Some people vote for him only because he is funny. The party Fair Russia has also some chances. They were formed recently and include 3 parties one of which is the infamous Rodina with nationalistic leanings and once they proposed a law against gay marriges and gay propoganda . They call themseves Socialists and Social democrats but they also support Putin and their leader Sergey Mironov is a big Putin ass licker. There exists an opinion that they are only an illusion of opposition and their creation was also supported by the president administration. Traditionally I vote for parties who consistently support democracy, civil liberties and human rights. For current election it's Yabloko (slight but increasing leaning towards Social democracy) for which I voted and Union of Right Forces(more right wing economically as the name suggests but still Ok). They all have a lot of problems and neither has my comlete support but in the current political situation I wish them both as much votes as possible.

Next time you read my mind please be more accurate, OK?

2007-09-04T20:26:00.000+02:00

This summer I spent several weeks in a hotel and also did some research on cheap hotels for my long expected and still yet to come vacation. This inspired some thoughts that it would be nice to make hotels cheaper by reducing the space occupied by a hotel room as much as possible still keeping the facilities (also reduced in space, of course) in the room. That would increase the total number of rooms but would probably leave a lot of rooms without windows unless special small windows are made for that purpose but it's not a problem for me anyway. Imagine my surprise when
yesterday I learned that such hotels really existed http://www.easyhotel.com/ and indeed they have some rooms without windows. However their prices are higher than I expected - especially since there's almost no service as you can see from their site. The cheapest price is 25 pounds(that's 37 euros) a night which is not always available. Actually there are normal hotels that are even cheaper. Well, maybe they'll become cheaper when there are more of them and maybe there are some other chains like this. Oh and it seems to me that their rooms are still bigger than in my fantasy hotel, well, maybe I'll make the drawings of it sometime.
Speaking of hotels, I finished watching "Fawlty Towers" recently. Call me crazy but I wish I could stay in such a hotel I think that would have been a great fun.

Some Nice Comics

2007-05-24T20:19:00.000+02:00

Click on an image to see it full size.

Some Political Craziness

2007-05-24T19:52:00.000+02:00

A few month ago in a Russian forum that I'm reading from time to time appeared an amusing post from someone named Turovsky, a self-proclaimed canditate for the head of administration of a small town Sergeyevka near Odessa. This guy promotes the following idea: to grant the right to mothers to vote for their under-age children and he started collecting signatures to propose this idea to Rada (Ukranian parliament) and one of the theisis of his electional program is to nominate the woman who collected the first 30 signatures for Ukrainian state award. Below are some of this guy's gems:

My idea of letting the mothers vote for their under-age kids will allow the Ukraine to become the ideal state.
If I win the elections then in place of Sergeyevka Pervoslav city will be built -the new capital of the Ukraine.

Pervoslav will have moral authority to become the capital of the world level of life
Peoples and the governments of all countries will be gratefull to Pevoslav and its inhabitans for granting mothers the right to vote for their under-age children.

The right to vote is a right to parasitize. Parasitizing is acceptible only for children and mothers that bring up underage children. In order that men work, drank less, didn't smoke and didn't parasitize they should be denied the right to vote. Then the progress of democracy will begin.

From time to time he continues spamming on this and other Russian and Ukrainian forums.

The Greatest Dilemma of Mankind

2007-03-30T10:15:00.000+02:00

Due to my "Excellent" karma rating on Slashdot, I often find myself with modpoints to burn (literally; I usually don't bother spending them until the day they are set to expire). This morning I encountered a situation I really don't care to be in, but frequently am. What the hell am I talking about? I'm referring to posts wherein a user has attempted to say something funny and failed. Rather than be ignored, this user is sometimes (as in today's case) unfairly marked as offtopic, flamebait, troll, or redundant. It's not that what he/she said accurately falls into one of these categories. If their post was OT, flamebait, trolling, or redundant, then I would ignore it and move on. The problem is namely that their post is fine, it's just not funny. And as in real life when I'm faced with someone who tries to tell a joke but fails miserably, I'm left with the task of making a quick decision whether or not to pretend to laugh. So here I am, staring at this shitty post marked Troll that is 1) not offensive to anybody in the least; 2) completely on-topic; and, sadly, 3) that I don't find funny even in an extremely liberal definition of the word. Shall I bump it up to Funny out of pity to give this poor bastard a break on his karma, even though I don't find it funny at all? Or should I do what I always do: moderate comments based on their value to me rather than as a way of balancing out the moderations of others. It's just a tech news website, after all. A tech news website filled with liberals complaining Slashdot is too full of conservatives, conservatives complaining Slashdot is too full of liberals, Libertarian Party members complaining about everyone, Linux enthusiasts complaining about Microsoft, Windows enthusiasts bitching that every article is anti-Microsoft, and so on. Oh, and 99% of them are Americans and when your English-as-a-second-language post contains a couple of typos, they jump on your spelling and completely avoid arguing the topic. How dare someone outside the United States want to discuss technology? Did they not read this article? Nobody messes with lucky #7, bitches!

Speaking of Windows

2007-03-28T12:41:00.000+02:00

Today I decided to try out qemu and install Windows 98. Here's a screengrab of me putting that hideous beast in a 1gb disk image from the comfort of KDE and FBSD 6.2. For a 833mhz machine, I notice surprisingly no performance dive from using the two simultaneously. Plus when those blue screens of death inevitably appear, I can just close out the emulator window and "reboot" in a couple seconds.

Wine Testing (Don't Forget to Spit)

2007-03-24T00:18:00.000+01:00

I've had to do some job-related learning of the Windows API lately, and while my experiences in that could fill a canyon, it has also lead me to rekindle a long-dead curiosity in the WINE Project. I began my studying by leaving the safe, loving arms of FreeBSD for an XP Pro box with a free edition of Visual C++ Express. I had heard plenty of complaints in the past about the WinAPI, but put them down to lazy Windows programmers not wanting to get their hands dirty. The truth is, the Windows API deserves complainers. It's ugly, illegible, and confusing. If your idea of GUI programming is a clean, object-oriented Qt interface, do yourself a favour and never take a look at a WNDCLASS. The fact that it's called a class is about as close as it comes to object-orientation.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh. After all, the API of Windows specifies not only GUI components, but everything about the operating system. If the FreeBSD kernel, XServer, and KDE were all combined into one disgusting, disorganised, and nonsensical blob, it would be just as painful to program. Fortunately, nobody in the *nix world is insane enough to try something like that. They also avoid wherever possible giving data types confusing and unnecessary names in all-uppercase letters. What's an HINSTANCE? It's a handle. Theoretically naming shit like this is supposed to save you time and prevent errors. It's not a 4-byte int, it's a 4-byte int redefined as a handle instance. Therefore it must be safer. Right. You know what? If you're using functions without reading the API documentation, your code probably isn't preventing any errors or saving any time anyway. And the time it takes to look in that function documentation and see what that integer represents takes all of 1 second.

Nevertheless, I progressed. Despite the fact that Visual C++ Express Edition totally lacks MFC support, which makes it pretty much useless for maintaining existing programs of any decent size that aren't crazy enough to use the Windows API directly, it was all right. But I kept asking myself, "Do I have to use this?" Every hour I spent in XP wondering if the computer would become nonresponsive at any moment or trying to calculate how many emails my undoubtedly bot-infected PC was spewing into the tubes, I could've been doing something cool and interesting in my beloved 6.2-RELEASE baby. After a total of 8 hours using Visual C++, I just said "Fuck it, there has to be a better way," and went back to the BSD box. I installed WINE, which I hadn't done since perhaps late 2005 when I toyed with it for awhile, and discovered the Winelib tools.

I'm not naive. At least not in this matter. I realise WINE isn't a perfect platform for Windows API programming; in fact, I found many a Google site shouting at curious inquirers not to try learning win32 in a WINE environment. You'd have to be crazy, they said. Well, perhaps I am...Perhaps I am.

If you're unfamiliar with the Windows API, a good starting point on the Internet is this site: http://www.relisoft.com/win32/index.htm. It contains a few tutorials that are easy enough to follow. Where they get interesting, for me at least, is in their usage as conformance tests for WINE and Winelib's toolset. So without much further ado, I begin with Test #1 (on the tutorial site this program is called "Winnie"). What follows is basically a lazy and shameless copy and paste of the README I wrote for that archive:


This is a "book testing" approach to Wine conformance using a 
website rather than a standard book.  I've had to modify the 
files slightly, but nothing syntactic.  The proper way to test
whether this works under WINE is to perform the following commands
in the directory of the source:

winemaker --lower-uppercase .
make

If it compiles, you know at least your WINE installation (0.9.33)
can get as far as mine.  Now copy the resulting output (for me
this file is called winnie.exe.so) to somewhere in the WINE
base directory and call it.  For example, on my system it would
look like this:

cp winnie.exe.so ~/.wine/drive_c/winnie.exe
wine "c:\winnie"

If all went well, you should now see a boring white window with
a friendly titlebar.

The source for this test can be found here: http://drlight.multics.org/winetests/winnie_winetest.tar.gz

And here's a screenshot of this exciting, do-nothing application!

KDE 4 Fever

2007-03-02T19:22:00.000+01:00

OK, not really fever, but for some reason I've become obsessed with the next release. I read dot.kde.org news every morning and look for any glimmer of a screenshot showing more than a broken 3.x build. Along the same topic, I have finally gotten my 3.5.x the way I like it. I went through a lot of themes, icon sets, and configurations before I came to a system I feel completely comfortable with. Now all I have to do is install KDE 4 sometime this autumn or winter and completely destroy all my old settings to make way for the revamped features. Here is a screen capture I am particularly proud of (note the gigantic MacOS inspired icons suitable for old people and folks with glasses like myself:

Hey

2007-02-17T23:12:00.000+01:00

Just a quick bitch. You know what I really hate? When websites say at the bottom, "Last updated: " and then insert today's date with SSI. That's lame. If your fucking site is dead, just say so. Douchebags.

Custom GTKSourceView Highlighting

2007-02-15T13:51:00.000+01:00

I recently switched from KDE to GNOME on one of my computers, and while most of the applications had a very small learning curve or "culture shock," I was surprised to see that the syntax highlighting options of Kate offered a much wider variety of source languages than were available in GEdit. I particularly would have liked highlighting for the AVR assembly syntax, but as it was not available I decided to roll my own using the documentation for GTKSourceView. Unfortunately, this documentation seemingly did not exist, and other than some suggestions I found in Google to copy the style tags from an existing language.lang file, I was mostly left to my own devices on how to implement an AVR syntax highlighter. I learned in the process some of the capabilities, and the limitations, of GTKSourceView, and hopefully they will be of some benefit to others.

The first thing one notices when viewing a GTKSourceView language file is that it is written in XML. Simple enough. I copied c.lang to my home directory, renamed it to avr-asm.lang, and with the GtkSourceView Reference Manual in the background I was ready to get started. I decided I would try and support both the Atmel assembler as well as Avra, as an XML specification that uses regular expression pattern matching isn't exactly brain surgery and I could easily write in support for both. The simplest thing to start with were the instruction set. There was already a list of C keywords in my copy, so I cut them out and followed the same syntax to paste in my Assembly instructions. Note that the list of keywords doesn't have to be in alphabetical or any other order, but I figured it would be easier to avoid forgetting something if I had an alphabetically-sorted list.

<keyword-list _name = "Keywords" style = "Keyword" case-sensitive="FALSE">

<keyword>adc</keyword>

<keyword>add</keyword>

<keyword>adiw</keyword>

<keyword>and</keyword>

...and so on...

</keyword-list>

If you're wondering how I knew I could put the case-sensitive tag there, it's both because I saw it in the c.lang file and because a list of all the options are in the GtkSourceTag API reference. To save you the time of looking it up, you can put the following options in a keyword list tag: case-sensitive, match-empty-string-at-beginning, match-empty-string-at-end, beginning-regex, and end-regex. Beginning and end regexes are useful when you know a keyword will always be preceded or followed by a certain pattern. For example, in Atmel's assembler one can use C-like preprocessor statements with a hash mark with whitespace optionally preceding the '#'. Therefore I can make a tag for preprocessor statements and give it an option within the XML element that looks like:

<keyword-list _name = "Preprocessor Definitions" style = "Preprocessor" beginning-regex = "^[ \t]*#[ \t]*">

That is by no means feature-complete, but it does illustrate the use of beginning-regex. The use of the other options logically follows therefrom.

One thing to keep in mind is that, for some reason, keywords that are not purely alphanumeric will not match. When I was making my highlighter spec, I thought it would be enough to create a keyword list and then just type .def, .else, .macro, etc. as I did with the instruction set. Nope. If you want to match a character like '.', you'll have to use a beginning-regex. I also found this happened with some of the built-in meta tags of Atmel like %HOUR%, %YEAR%, etc. For those I created a pattern-item object and specified a regex of %(HOUR|MONTH|YEAR|...et al...)%

Well, the rest is rather straightforward. Any other questions you have about what tags you can or cannot use are answered by the existing .lang files as well as the reference manual in GTKSourceView's docs/reference/html directory. Oh, yes. One more thing. Don't forget when you're finished to put the spec where the highlighter can see it. There is a place in your home directory where you can store it locally, but I prefer to put it in /usr/local/share/gnome/gtksourceview-1.0/language-specs with the others so it's available to all of the accounts. If you've done a FreeBSD ports install of GNOME this is where your syntax highlighting files are. Otherwise the exact location may differ. Try going to /usr and doing a find . -name c.lang to locate it.

Here is my AVR Assembly syntax highlighter: http://drlight.multics.org/avr-asm.lang
And here is a version that is browser-friendly: http://drlight.multics.org/avr-asm.lang.xml

Cuteness Time!

2007-01-20T18:35:00.000+01:00

For some more cuteness look here

Holocaust Denial

2007-01-15T14:49:00.000+01:00

Germany is proposing an EU-wide ban on Holocaust denial. While I understand the point of this, certainly now that neo-Nazism is making a comeback in former Eastern European countries (East Germany included) and far-right xenophobia is growing in the rest of Europe, the inherent rights of douchebags to believe whatever douchebaggery they want is at stake--and by extension the rights of non-douchebags to believe anything else is also at risk. So I have a proposal that will fix this whole problem while leaving Holocaust deniers their right to free speech and beliefs: don't ban Holocaust denial--judicially protect Holocaust denier attackers. Anyone who punches someone like David Irving in the face should have the right in court to deny the attack despite any photographic evidence, witness testimony, or confessions by the defendant. Throwing all normal legal procedure and criminal investigation out the window, it should be part of the EU constitution that if you are on trial for assaulting a Holocaust denier, you can use the same pseudoscientific standards for proving your case that the attacked uses to write their books, speeches, etc. Did twenty people see you? Did someone take a cellphone video and upload it to Youtube. Were you recorded giving your name, birthdate, and address, before shouting, "I just struck you! No one can prove it's not me!" It was all part of the conspiracy. Reasonable doubt found. Full acquittal. Case closed.

Sudoku Madness! - Part 2

2006-12-28T20:17:00.000+01:00

The last outline for the Sudoku solver got the very basic stuff out of the way. Fortunately what remains is not much more complicated than what has already been done. If you tried out the source code from the last time, you've probably seen that it does completely solve some Sudoku puzzles using only the basic principles of cancelling out possibilities repeatedly. Unfortunately the puzzles of moderate or high difficulty often require more complicated logic. The upside is that this is all that's needed: pure logic. The trick to solving a Sudoku is not guessing or intuition, but simple logic. The reason they can be difficult is that the human brain's ability to retain all of the possible values for each square and not forgetting to apply some obvious method of cancelling a value out varies person to person. A computer, however, can be programmed to systematically perform all of these procedures in a predictable and repeated manner. This makes the task of solving a Sudoku puzzle of any degree of difficulty--provided that enough clues are given that only logic can be used to solve it--rather mundane.

One of the additional methods I mentioned in the conclusion of the first part of this guide for the next (which would be this one) was analysis of lines. When a puzzle cannot be solved just by eliminating duplicates horizontally, vertically, or by block, the next step is often to look at not what values are given, but what values are missing. As an extremely simply example we have the following (I apologise for the ASCII--this blog's WYSIWYG editor is not so great at handling raw HTML tables without feeling the need to destroy them with ugly CSS):


-------------------
|_|3|_|_|_|6|_|_|_|
|8|_|_|7|9|_|2|_|_|
|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|8|_|
|_|6|_|_|5|_|_|_|3|
|_|8|_|2|_|9|_|7|_|
|1|_|_|_|6|_|_|9|_|
|_|7|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|
|_|_|9|_|2|8|_|_|5|
| | | |5| | | |1| |
-------------------

Assume we've already performed the Matrix::eliminateGiven() function from last time and now we're trying to figure out what to do next. What information, however little, can we gain from these numbers? If you didn't notice, the fifth row has a 9 in the second block, and the sixth row has a 9 in the third block. That means the 9 in the second block (going downwards from top left, starting at row 4, column 1) can only be in the first row (of that block, puzzle-wise it's the fourth row), and as there's already a 6 in the second field, we can be sure that there must be a 9 in either field one (4, 1) or field three (4, 3).


-------------------
|_|3|_|_|_|6|_|_|_|
|8|_|_|7|9|_|2|_|_|
|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|8|_|
|?|6|?|_|5|_|_|_|3|
|X|8|X|2|X|9|X|7|X|
|1|X|X|X|6|X|X|9|X|
|_|7|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|
|_|_|9|_|2|8|_|_|5|
| | | |5| | | |1| |
-------------------

But wait. Taking a look at the third (bottom left-most) 3x3 block, we see that there's also a 9 in the third field of the second (altogether the eighth) line. That crosses the third field of the fourth row off the list, leaving only the first. We've discovered the position of the 9 with simple logic!


-------------------
|_|3|X|_|_|6|_|_|_|
|8|_|X|7|9|_|2|_|_|
|_|_|X|_|_|_|_|8|_|
|9|6|X|_|5|_|_|_|3|
|X|8|X|2|X|9|X|7|X|
|1|X|X|X|6|X|X|9|X|
|_|7|X|_|_|_|_|_|_|
|_|_|9|_|2|8|_|_|5|
| | |X|5| | | |1| |
-------------------

If we ran a puzzle like this (actually this is based on a real puzzle, but unfortunately it--like a lot of Sudoku puzzles--is copyrighted so I can't include the whole thing here) through our solver the first block of that first row would have 4 possible values remaining (9, 7, 4, or 2) and the third field would have just three (7, 4, or 2). Indeed, of all the fields in that entire block, the first field of the first line is the only one who still has 9 as a possibility. This brings us to another way we can eliminate the obvious and figure out what belongs where. If a given field is the only one in its block that has a certain value as a possibility (that is to say that all the other fields in that block are disqualified as potential bearers), then we can safely say that that field must have that value. Going back to our example above, it's true that the first field of the fourth row could be 9, 7, 4, or 2, but no other field in the second 3x3 block has a 9 in its list of possibilities. Thus through the process of elimination we have discovered another definite value for the puzzle and can move on to finding other values in the same way.

Incorporation

So, we need to return now from the land of theory to the land of programming and figure out the best way to put this new method into the existing code. The simplest way in this pre-optimization period to test our new concept then is to include our block test in the eliminateGiven function. That way we can keep our recursion, keep our extremely easy and basic main.cpp unchanged, and most of all make as few changes or additions to the rest of the code-base as possible. Off the top of my head, the algorithm I'm going to write for this block test looks something like this:


for blockNumber := 0 until blockNumber = puzzleWidth
 for testNumber := 1 until testNumber = puzzleWidth
   Integer iOccurrenceCounter := 0
   Integer iOccurrenceValue := 0
   Field fLastFound := nothing
   for field := block[blockNumber].firstField until field = block[blockNumber].lastField
     if field.hasValue(testNumber) and field.getValue() = 0
       if (iOccurrenceCounter)
         break
       ++iOccurrenceCounter
       iOccurrenceValue = testNumber
       fLastFound = field
     ++field
   if iOccurrenceCounter = 1
     fLastFound.setValue(iOccurrenceValue)

Looking at how much I had to write (and it will indeed be longer in the actual code), I suppose I was wrong to assume I could clean up messy source later. Rather than try to cram all of this into the already 26-lines-long eliminateGiven, I'll create a separate, private function, and call it from the former. Matrix::findIsolatedByBlock sounds like a good, self-commenting name for the function. I'll also need to simplify a way of retrieving all the fields for a given block, let's call it getBlock(Integer), so that I can iterate through the block numbers and quickly compare the relevant fields. Since I'm going to be writing a function that's purely cosmetic and for maintenance purposes, I might as well take care of getColumn(Integer) and getRow(Integer). That way I can go back and make my eliminateGiven function a little easier to read and comprehend.

After writing the function above and adding it to the elimination process (see the source code for how I did this; we'll determine later if there's a more efficient way), the Sudoku solver should be capable of figuring out medium difficulty puzzles now. It will still have trouble with the extremely hard ones, but we'll worry about those next.

Using the same logic as a moment ago, can you think of any other ways we can make the range of possibilities for each field smaller? If we can isolate fields by what they share (or rather, don't share) in common with the other fields in the same block, and if the numbers in a block can only be present once, and furthermore if the numbers in a row or column can also only be present once, doesn't it follow that we can do the same thing with rows and columns as with blocks? In other words, we could rewrite our findIsolatedByBlock as findIsolatedByRow and findIsolatedByColumn and probably eliminate a lot more possibilities. If a certain value is only present in one field out of the whole row or column, it's just as valid to assume that it must be that value as it is to assume so when we're looking at blocks. I'll confess now that that was the reason why I wrote the code for getColumn() and getRow() earlier. It saved me time, because now the writing of findIsolatedByRow/Column will be much smoother. In fact the algorithm is identical to findIsolatedByBlock except that we're retrieving a vector of offsets for a row or a column rather than a square. Everything else is the same. That's good news, because it means all I have to do rewrite my original function to take a vector as an argument and change the name to something more generic like "findIsolated." Afterwards I can simply call the function three times in this way:


for n := 0 until n = puzzle width
 findIsolated(getFieldsByBlock(n))
 findIsolated(getFieldsByRow(n))
 findIsolated(getFieldsByColumn(n))

That should take care of all but the most insanely difficult, impossible, or invalid Sudoku puzzles. The program is now essentially done. All that remains is to try and tweak it a little and optimise here and there where possible. But I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

If you want to see the finished (to the extent that I care about it) software, it's available here to download in tgz format just in time for the New Year. I hope this long albeit rushed and unproofread guide is of some benefit to people learning to program and those who just love Sudoku puzzles as much as I do.

So You Want to Solve A Sudoku - Part 1

2006-12-27T22:00:00.000+01:00

This is the first part of a guide I decided to write as an attempt to try and illustrate a) how a Sudoku is solved, but more importantly b) the planning process of developing software and how much one actually needs to think a problem through before sitting down and writing code. I had to learn the latter lesson the hard way through real-life work experience, and as boring as it may seem to those burgeoning programming students out there to have to sit down in front of a pad of paper for an hour (or often far more) without so much as even turning the computer on, it is often the only practical way to solve a problem without spending 99% of one's time debugging and trying to fix the errors created by incorrect, premature, and silly assumptions due to a lack of planning.

A solved Sudoku can be redefined as an n² matrix, where each row, column, and n^1/2 x n^1/2 block (where n^1/2 resolves to a whole integer greater than zero and naturally the area of said block is exactly n) contain all values 1 through n exactly once. In order to create a Sudoku solver that is easy to understand the logic behind--something which requires avoiding messy one-dimensional array notation when possible--it is necessary to use some sort of coordinate system for referring to each field, similar to that used in GUI programming or simple graphing.

Fig 1.1 - 4x4 Sudoku
1	2	3	4
4	3	2	1
3	4	1	2
2	1	4	3

If we assume some class, Field, to be predefined for each value in the matrix, with members Row and Col at the least, and a Matrix class also defined which serves up the field at a particular coordinate, the following pseudocode could be used to find the value at a specific point (NB, I use the top left corner as the origin with all points below and to the right being positive; the origin is 0,0):


// Returns 2nd col, 2nd row

Field myField = matrixSudoku.getFieldAt(1,1);

myField.getValue(); // value is 3

The general outline of a Field and Matrix are defined below in pseudocode:


Begin Class Matrix

  private:

    Vector<field> _vFields

    Unsigned Integer _uiWidth

  public:

    getFieldAt(Unsigned Integer Row, Unsigned Integer Column)

End Class Matrix



Begin Class Field

  private:

    Vector<unsigned integer> _vValues

    Unsigned Integer _uiRow, _uiColumn

  public:

    deleteValue(Integer Value)

    setValue()

    getValue()

    setRow()

    getRow()

    setColumn()

    getColumn()

End Class Field

The reason the value of a field is stored as a vector of integers rather than a single number is because it is much easier to solve a puzzle if one remembers that blank fields can be any possible value that is not already occupied by another field in the same row, column, or block. As the possibilities are whittled down by logical evaluation, completed Fields contain only one value. For the sake of saving time, getValue() returns a 0 if the vector of values contains anything other than one value. This is because the smallest Sudoku can only be a 1x1 square, thus the lowest value for a Field of any valid Sudoku must be nonzero. This is also the reason why I have decided to use unsigned integers rather than signed (as a Sudoku with n negative values and p positive values doesn't really make a whole lot of sense and is no more difficult to solve than one with |n|+p positive values).

Now that I have the basic idea for a class finished, I need to start thinking about the constructors. I think I'll start with Field. So...what do I need to know when I create a field in the matrix? Well, I already stated that each field contains a vector of its possible choices and that those choices include the numbers 1 through n (n being the width of the puzzle). But what about those fields where the value is already given? I need to have some way to pass both. I also need to pass the Row and Column of this field to itself (an explanation of why comes later). I know:


  Field(Unsigned Integer uiRow, Unsigned Integer uiColumn)

  setValue(Unsigned Integer uiValue, Boolean bSingleValue=false)

Now I can specify the row, column, and a value (and optionally a Boolean variable as the fourth parameter). setValue's first argument, uiValue, is by default the width of the puzzle. If, however, the second argument is set to true, then whatever value is passed in the first argument becomes the single inhabitant of that Field's value Vector. If you're wondering why I didn't just lump them all together into a single constructor, you'll understand later on.

With that out of the way I can focus on a constructor for the Matrix class. This brings me to another good problem that I hadn't considered at the beginning. How will I represent an unsolved puzzle in a format readable by the program? A string of whitespaces and integers delimited by commas would work, but is error-prone. Making an ASCII representation of the puzzle would be less likely to have errors in it, but would cause parsing headaches. Perhaps the simplest way from a common sense point of view is not to type in the whole puzzle--blank spaces and all--but rather to limit input to the width of the puzzle and given values. A format such as:


9

0 8 5

3 4 1

...and so on...

would work well and save time. The first line would tell me how many fields by how many fields the puzzle is in all, and every subsequent line is the index of a field with a given value, with the 3rd number being the actual value to insert. By reading every line into a single string, I can pass it to the Matrix like so:


  Matrix(String strSetup)

Rather simple, I think. Now all my constructor has to do is read the first line, set its _uiWidth variable to the value, do some error checking to make sure it's a valid Sudoku dimension, and then create _uiWidth x _uiWidth number of fields. When creating the fields and setting their values, I iterate through the lines of the input first, calculate their offset in the Matrix's Field Vector with some old-school C array math (Row*Width + Column), and set their values first. I then start back at Field (0, 0), check if its value is already set (by checking the size of its value Vector--for blank spaces in the puzzle it should be zero and for given fields it should be one), and fill in each blank field's Vector with the numbers 1 through n.

What Now?

I've set up the puzzle now and it's time to get to work. But where do I begin? Well, usually the first thing one does when trying to solve a Sudoku is cancel out the obvious. If I have a 3 in a certain field, I know for a fact that all the other fields in the same column and row cannot possibly be 3. I also know that all the other fields in the same block cannot be 3 either. The essence of Sudoku puzzles is this type of common sense logic--not brute-force guessing or having a super-gigantic math brain (despite what most people who have never tried one believe upon looking at it, there is actually no math involved in a Sudoku whatsoever). So I need to extend the functionality of my Matrix class to apply changes to the fields in a given row or column. I could save time in doing this by keeping a running tab of the given numbers from the string I was passed originally in the constructor, but for the sake of simplicity I think for now I'll just iterate over all of the fields one by one. For those whose getValue() returns a value 1 through n, I know that the value is locked down and solved, so I can apply my changes to the row and column. The pseudocode for that would look like this:


function eliminateGiven()

  iNumberOfChanges := 0

  for f1 := _vFields.first() until f1 = _vFields.last()

    if f1.getValue() > 0

      val = f1.getValue

      for f2 := _vFields.first() until f2 = _vFields.last()

        if f1 != f2

          if f2.getRow() = f1.getRow() || f2.getColumn() = f1.getColumn() || getBlock(f2) = getBlock(f1)

            iNumberOfChanges += f2.deleteValue(val)

        ++f2

    ++f1

  if iNumberOfChanges > 0

    eliminateGiven()

I threw in the recursive bit at the end there because sometimes deleting the second of two remaining possible values for a field will trigger the need for the function to be called again. It's better not to overlook such steps because it often saves time later on to have already ruled out as many possibilities as one can before trying something else. I don't want to have to do some trickier pattern matching later on just to come to the same conclusion as before simply because I was too lazy to go back and clean up after myself. The reason I used a recursive function call at the end rather than iteration is because a) it's easier to write and if it is more efficient to do something else later I can always change it; and b) it illustrates better the logic I'm using. I keep track of the number of changes I actually made in the loop. If I didn't make any changes, the function exits. If I did make a change, and the change hasn't already been applied to that field, then the deleteValue function will return 1 rather than 0. This one increments my iNumberOfChanges variable so that when I exit the outer for loop I will know exactly how many real modifications to the value vectors have been done. If this number is greater than zero then there's a possibility that I deleted the second to last value in one of the fields (which would make that field "solved")--which would require me calling the function again to get rid of that field's column, row, and block duplicates and so on until I don't need to get rid of anything else because it's already as "figured out" as it can be without applying some other logic to the puzzle.

Speaking of blocks, you may have wondered what that getBlock() function in the Matrix object is. After all, I never wrote it in my class prototype earlier. Well, it's a bit trickier to calculate what block I'm in compared to row or column, so I wanted to wait. For the benefit of illustration, I'll write it out now:


function getBlock(Field fn)

  Integer iBlockWidth = square_root(_uiWidth)

  Integer iBlockRow = fn.getRow() / iBlockWidth

  Integer iBlockCol = fn.getColumn() / iBlockWidth

  return iBlockRow + (iBlockCol * iBlockWidth)

If you're asking yourself why I seemingly divided the passed Field fn by iBlockWidth only to multiply it by the result again, it has to do with the behaviour of integer (whole number) math. If fn.getColumn() returned 14 and I divided it by 4, I would get an iBlockCol of 3. Multiplying 3 by 4 again, I get 12, which added to iBlockRow would give me the correct block. If I knew that my Sudoku puzzles would always be the same standard 9x9 size I would simply replace the square_root function call in the beginning with the constant value 3, but since I want my puzzle solver to be as flexible as possible, I'll stick with it (despite the fact that calling a square_root function is typically slow). In reality, when I go and code this baby I'm going to determine the block size in the Matrix constructor anyway to avoid having to call square_root() 4 billion kajillion times throughout the program's lifetime. Until then, I prefer to make the algorithms as simple as possible to read and comprehend without having to go back up and figure out what some private variable I created ages ago was actually intended for or what the hell 400 boolean comparisons are supposed to be determining when they're crammed together in one if-then statement. If you're wondering how I arrived at the arithmetic in my return statement, you can verify for yourself that it works on some paper. I basically just drew a picture of a 3x3 square, plugged in some phony coordinates, and guessed that the algorithm for finding the block was iBlockRow + iBlockCol*x, then figured out that the x was always the width of one block (which in turn is the square root of 9). I then proved it using some more coordinates for a 4x4 Sudoku and assumed the equation to hold for all sizes (this remains to be seen, but I'll worry about that when I'm testing the actual code).

This is a good point, I believe, to start writing some real source. The reason why is because, as primitive as it is, my outline so far is already capable of solving an extremely simple Sudoku (that is, when enough numbers are given that finding the rest is merely a matter of eliminating the obvious from each row, column, and block). I'm going to plan out two more aspects quickly--my i/o and my exceptions--and then begin.

For the i/o I'll just use stdin and stdout, with the expectation that I can add a simple file reading function later on and toss in a command-line switch, -f <filename> or something similar, to support that later. As for exceptions, I need to do some checking to make sure that the given width is a valid Sudoku square, and that each successive line contains exactly 3 integers with proper values (0 <= row, column <= width && 1 <= value <= width). To me that seems to be enough for now, so let's get cracking.

Here's the source. It can already solve a puzzle given enough (perhaps far too many to be a useful solver) clues. To try its abilities out, pass enough hints so that the program already knows all of the values of a row, column, or block save one field. It should tell you what that missing value is.

Well, that's the end of part one. As soon as I'm done writing it, I'll upload the next phase of development: logical analysis of single lines and blocks.

Once upon a time in North Korea...

2006-12-18T21:52:00.000+01:00

Watch the video and you'll see. I wonder who made it, South Koreans? Because if it's North Koreans then I guess it was kind of risky to do that.

Anticipation

2006-11-30T13:13:00.000+01:00

I just bought a UK import of the Collectors' Pack of Family Guy (Seasons 1 - 5) from Amazon. I now am feeling the painful sting of waiting. On the plus (or neutral, cancelled out) side, though I paid 20eu more than I would have had to if I simply bought all of the DVDs individually, I will get them all at once sometime next week. Had I bought them separately, one would've come next week, two would've come in 4-6 weeks, and the others would have come in an unknown amount of time due to not being in stock. I figured it was worth the extra money to get all 5 "auf Lager" rather than mess with this. Not to mention the shipping was free, whereas with different ship dates sometimes Amazon.de will split the shipping costs among the items based on availability thus disqualifying you from the free shipping promotions they're always running.

In other news, I've finished the first stable version of my full-featured playing card library written entirely in ISO Standard C++. I'm working on a separate graphical version using SDL to speed up the process of writing graphical card games (as the card games available in the FreeBSD ports collection for the most part leave something to be desired). Well, let's face it. The games section of /usr/ports in general leaves a lot to be desired. And that time I installed PySol just because it claimed to have "Tarock" only to turn out to be "solitaire with Tarock cards" left me feeling a little burned. My kingdom for a free version of Zwanzigerrufen. It wouldn't be that hard to write, actually, it's just that Zwanzigerrufen (and other forms of Tarock to an even greater extent, but I prefer XXrufen because it has the fewest rules to have to memorise) has a lot of strategy that changes depending on the type of game you're playing.

If you're wondering why I didn't just write a graphical version to begin with, or alongside with the standard version, that's simply because the base library is 100% portable to any compiler that supports the 1999 C++ standard. It doesn't use any non-C++ headers except for two, which are only necessary for randomised shuffling and as they are part of the C standard, there should likewise be no portability problems there. Also there are some cases where it pays to have an object-oriented card handling library, but the actual implementation of those cards is either irrelevant or is better left to the developer. As an illustration of some of its uses in the normal console, the source includes some examples that do simple things such as a Faro Shuffle, the Hi-Lo card counting method that people used to use in blackjack before casinos got wise, and a simple, automated implementation of the children's game War. I'm also working on some examples for the SDL version as I find the best way to test the maturity and stability of a library is to work on actual programs that are built alongside. It's only in that way that one can try something and say, "Hm, that's not working the way I expected," or "Man, I wish this had feature X" or "You know, on second thought I really don't need function Y in this class." One of the benefits of putting all of the card handling into a library is that I don't need to worry about it now when developing a game. If I want to create a standard Go Fish table I just have to do something like the following:

const unsigned int uiHandSize = 5; // number of cards per hand
const unsigned int uiNumberofPlayers = 4;
cards::Deck deckGoFish; cards::Pile pileGoFish;
std::vector vGoFishHands(uiNumberofPlayers, new cards::Hand);
deckGoFish.shuffle();
deckGoFish.dealOut(&vGoFishHands, &pileGoFish, uiHandSize);
...blah blah blah...

As you can see, I've shuffled, dealt out the cards, and am ready to establish the rules of the game after only 6-7 lines of rather easy to read code. The aforementioned War game example took me perhaps 20 minutes to write, produce a Makefile for, and debug.

A Hilarious Youtube Video.

2006-11-17T22:55:00.000+01:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg5_mlQOsUQ
Having fun with the (mostly intentionally) misheard lyrics.

Dialog Between Spammers?

2006-11-17T21:10:00.000+01:00

Recently in our siteburg forums: http://friendy.siteburg.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=140 I wonder if it's the same spammer or just a coincidence.

The Deborah Mystery

2006-11-16T14:13:00.000+01:00

The past week or two I've become more and more puzzled by the fact that almost all of the spam I receive is a variation of the first name "Deborah" (or "Debora"), some last name, and a domain name. Whether it's "deborahwillis@cahuet.com" or "deboraminheirinha@buranet.com" or "deborahsallywobktc@bweiss.com" or "deborahrovai@bytedev.com" or one of the other 4,000 Deborah-related spams, the "From" name is always something random, male or female, but the username is almost always Deborah. Obviously they're probably all coming from the same spammer, or spambot, but I wonder why the script doesn't bother to generate a different first name for the fake e-mail return address. Peculiar.

Sincerely,
Deborah

More news about Charles de Gaulle airport

2006-11-15T09:48:00.000+01:00

From Euronews :
“A union representing workers at France's largest airport, Charles de Gaulle near Paris, have produced undercover footage which they claim shows a fake bomb being smuggled onto an aircraft. The images appear to feature men entering the section operated by Chronopost, the freight arm of the French postal service. A package is then handed through a hole in the fence from the non- secure area to the secure side, with direct access to aircraft.

"This route here can be taken by the Chronopost employees, whether management or workers, or even temporary staff that we don't know that well," said CGT union official Hazziz Faddel. "This passageway here is used by lorry drivers, people not employed by Chronopost at all."

The exposé comes as seven Muslim airport staff, including two from Chronopost, are appealing against a decision to withdraw their security clearance because they are considered a risk. A court decision is due today. The union claims the film shows lapses in security which constitute far more of a potential risk than any allegedly posed by the men whose passes have been revoked.

Union officials claim there have been repeated attempts at dialogue with management and the police over security concerns. Chronopost has declined to comment on the footage.”

Paris: Facts, Impressions, Observations.

2006-11-08T23:37:00.000+01:00

1) It looks like my French listening comprehension (though still bad) is better than my German listening comprehension. I wonder why.
2) I had some practice speaking French here, during my previous trip I almost had none.
3) This time I liked Paris (I mean, it's general appearance) more than the previous time. Previous time it reminded me of Moscow (especially the central part of Moscow) a lot, I guess this had to do with my arriving there straight from Germany, Paris looks rather dirty and gray compared to German towns I've been in, that makes it closer to Moscow :). Actually Paris is very different from Moscow. Unfortunately this time we walked only in the central part of Paris and I would like to walk in different parts of it but I couldn't separate from our group. I've been in metro several times but also only in the center and not for long, I took some pictures and even some videos of trains moving :).
4) People in our group didn't care about modern parts of Paris, personally I like modern buildings and modern architecture so I'm very sorry we didn't visit any of them. Previous time I visited "La Defense" - the part of Paris with modern building and skyscrapers.
5) Eiffel tower. Previous time I was near it but didn't go inside because it was to late at night and the third floor was closed and we (my cousin and I) didn't want to visit just the second floor so we decided to leave it till next time we're in Paris (of course neither of us knew when this next time was going to be). Because this time we were there during the daytime I had no doubt we will visit the third floor. But I was wrong. As we were standing in line for the tickets they wrote on the information board that the third floor was closed. However when we were buying the ticket (for the second floor) the cashier told us that at the second floor we could buy complimentary tickets to get to the third floor. At the second floor our group decided not to stand in line for complimentary tickets because we didn't know exactly if the third floor was open and even if it was it might close again by the moment we would have bought our tickets. Personally I would have waited as much as possible to get to the third floor but ... So again I’ll have to wait for my next trip to Paris to get to the tower’s top :).
6) Our hotel (Britanny Hotel ****, very close to Louvre) wasn't better than the Viennese one, in some ways it was even worse. The only noticeable thing which was better was the fridge in the room. Actually it was this hotel that was booked because there was not much time left, otherwise we would have stayed in a cheaper (and most likely not worse) hotel. Actually there are even 2 stars hotels in the center of Paris, btw the low number of stars doesn't necessarily means the absence of the bathroom inside each room, our director said that once he stayed in a 1 star hotel in Switzerland and it was no worse that ours either and costed 40 Euros a night. Now what I didn't like in Britanny hotel was that the bathroom had a bath but no place to hang the shower and no shower curtain either so to take shower you had to hold the shower in your hands and be careful not to pour much water on the floor, in Ibis in Vienna there was a shower cabin that could be tightly closed and this was very convenient.
7) Food. The breakfast was included and it was a buffet breakfast the choice was pretty much the same as in Ibis but of course there were some differences like in Normandy there were boiled eggs which was great because I like them but no melted cheese as in Ibis which was not great but there were some other kinds of French cheese that were interesting to try. In the afternoon and in the evening we ate at restaurants which I couldn't afford if I was to pay on my own (I guess they still were middle class restaurants, a dish costed 8-14 Euros there), it was interesting to see what it’s like, but it's not something really special. We usually had lunch in a self-service restaurant at the working place were it costed 19 Euros (the whole lunch) and in the evenings we ate in the city, usually near hotel, several times I missed the evening meal because the restaurant portions were too big for me and ate in the hotel the food I bought in the supermarket. If you order meat at a French restaurant it's always half raw and with blood, that was awful so after trying that once I preferred ordering something different, often I would order only a salad. Once I tried an oyster but wasn't impressed, our group also tried snails but I couldn't dare to :).
8) And now the time has come to speak about ... Charles de Gaulle airport. Well, it was not that awful but we still had our little piece of adventure :) Actually I found the staff rather nice (I understand that my experience is not representative since we interacted only with several people), the top of nicety was the woman standing at the departure board who asked if we needed help, first in French and then in English when we looked somewhat confuse, though I'm not sure if she was from the staff. What really sucks at Charles de Gaulle is their system of luggage distribution or whatever it is called and that was exactly the thing that caused our little adventure, as you probably have already guessed when we were back in Moscow we didn't find some of our luggage, to be more exact a box with some of the working stuff and my personal case that contained my clothes and other stuff including French wine and charging devices for both cellphone and pda. To have the lost luggage be looked for you have to fill in several papers and to have the luggage you didn’t lose weighted. That took a lot of time especially since we had to find the check numbers of the lost pieces of luggage and to whom it was assigned because since we were checking as a group some luggage wasn’t assigned to its real owner but to some other member of the group. Thankfully my lost case was assigned to me or otherwise it would be delivered to someone else and I would have had to pick it from there. Yes, having your luggage lost has its bright side because when found it is delivered strait at your address. This gave me an idea: if your bags are too heavy and you are lazy to carry them just ask the staff at the airport not to hurry putting them on the right flight or use some other tricks to have you bag lost. Actually there were a lot of people from our flight who lost their luggage and the woman at the lost luggage desk said that every flight from Paris (and some other cities) is like that, it’s because at Charles de Gaulle they first collect the luggage from different flights and sort them later. My luggage arrived (at the airport) the following day at 5 and something a.m. (my plane arrived at 17:20).
9)While we were filling in the forms next to me there was a French woman who also had her luggage lost but she spoke English with our agents and if I'm not mistaken she didn't try speaking French with them. I wonder if she did it because she thought it was useless to speak French with our agents or they really don't speak French.
10) Extra weight. When we were checking our luggage in Paris it turned out we had 6 kg extra. The agent said we had to pay at the Aeroflot stand a sum of ... I naively thought it would be something like 10 Euros ... of 72 Euros. So we went to the stand and gave her (she was a French woman who spoke very good Russian, I wonder if this is a requirement for all Aeroflot agents) the papers. She studied them thoroughly and asked how many persons there were in the group. For a moment I became scared that she was looking for a way to charge us even more but actually it was the other way round, she said that we don't have to pay anything. That was very nice and I wonder whether it's Aeroflot's general policy or just this woman's attitude.
11)My bag arrived to my appartment on Monday safe and sound, even the wine bottles weren't broken.

P.S. Mike, at Charles de Gaulle I saw the signs showing directions to smoking places, where the people you asked unaware of that or it's something that remained from the past when smoking policy was different?

Blowing Up Prolog

2006-11-01T17:42:00.000+01:00

Inspired by terrible movie and television plots involving robots that self-destruct through the superior (or rather, illogical to the point of being superior) wit of human beings, this afternoon I decided to try and make GNU Prolog blow itself apart. After about an hour of typing in the following code and formatting it, I succeeded. The beauty of the program is not that it serves any rational purpose, or that it's particularly well-crafted or even clever, but rather that it a) is based on one of the shittiest songs of all time; b) it will, ceteris paribus, run forever on its own circular logic; and c) will not run at all on most systems due to the fact that it will cause a stack overflow and make your Prolog interpreter crash. If it is useful for anything serving mankind, it is only that it proves once and for all that "There's A Hole In My Bucket" deserves all the scorn it is capable of receiving. If you're really curious what the output looks like were it finite and able to execute, remove the logical checks for "(advises(liza, bucket) ; needs_bucket(henry)) ," in the first complaint from Henry and query the program for any other declaration. To see the entire song once, query "advises(liza, bucket)." With the original grammar, the song would in theory repeat infinitely, however due to the circle of dependent logic, it actually executes never, repeatedly filling up the memory of the interpreter until it chokes. Even computers hate this shitty song, apparently.



boy(henry).
girl(liza).
container(bucket).
owns(henry, bucket).
needs_bucket(henry).
has_hole(bucket).
hole_filler(straw).
too_long(straw).
cutting_tool(knife).
too_blunt(knife).
sharpening_object(stone).
too_dry(stone).
liquid(water).

action(mending).
action(cutting).
action(sharpening).
action(wetting).
action(fetching).

quality(bluntness).
quality(length).
quality(dryness).

has_container_problems(X) :- container(X) , has_hole(X).

complains(henry, bucket) :- (advises(liza, bucket) ; needs_bucket(henry)) ,
 has_container_problems(bucket) , owns(henry, bucket),
 write('There\'s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.') , nl, 
 write('There\'s a hole in my bucket. Dear Liza, there\'s a hole.'), nl, nl.

complains(henry, length) :- advises(liza, straw) , hole_filler(straw) , too_long(straw) ,
 write('The straw is too long, dear Liza, dear Liza,') , nl,
 write('The straw is too long, dear Liza, too long.'), nl, nl.

complains(henry, bluntness) :- advises(liza, knife) , cutting_tool(knife), too_blunt(knife) ,
 write('The knife is too blunt, dear Liza, dear Liza.'), nl,
 write('The knife is too blunt, dear Liza, too blunt.'), nl, nl.

complains(henry, dryness) :- advises(liza, stone) , sharpening_object(stone) , too_dry(stone),
 write('The stone is too dry, dear Liza, dear Liza.'), nl,
 write('The stone is too dry, dear Liza, too dry.'), nl, nl.

advises(liza, mending) :- complains(henry, bucket),
 write('Then mend it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.') , nl,
 write('Then mend it, dear Henry. Dear Henry, mend it.'), nl, nl .

advises(liza, straw) :- inquires(henry, mending) ,
 write('With a straw, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.') , nl,
 write('With a straw, dear Henry. Dear Henry, with a straw.'), nl, nl.

advises(liza, cutting) :- complains(henry, length) ,
 write('Then cut it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.') , nl,
 write('Then cut it, dear Henry. Dear Henry, cut it.'), nl, nl.

advises(liza, knife) :- inquires(henry, cutting) ,
 write('With a knife, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.'), nl,
 write('With a knife, dear Henry. Dear Henry, with a knife.'), nl, nl.

advises(liza, sharpening) :- complains(henry, bluntness) ,
 write('Then sharpen it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.'), nl,
 write('Then sharpen it, dear Henry. Dear Henry, sharpen it.'), nl, nl.

advises(liza, stone) :- inquires(henry, sharpening) ,
 write('With a stone, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.'), nl,
 write('With a stone, dear Henry. Dear Henry, with a stone.'), nl, nl.

advises(liza, wetting) :- complains(henry, dryness) ,
 write('Then wet it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.'), nl,
 write('Then wet it, dear Henry. Dear Henry, wet it.'), nl, nl.

advises(liza, water) :- inquires(henry, wetting) ,
 write('With water, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.'), nl,
 write('With water, dear Henry. Dear Henry, with water.'), nl, nl.

advises(liza, bucket) :- inquires(henry, water),
 write('With a bucket, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.'), nl,
 write('With a bucket, dear Henry. Dear Henry, with a bucket.'), nl, nl.

inquires(henry, cutting) :- advises(liza, cutting) ,
 write('With what shall I cut it, dear Liza, dear Liza?'), nl,
 write('With what shall I cut it, dear Liza, with what?'), nl, nl.

inquires(henry, mending) :- advises(liza, mending) ,
 write('With what shall I mend it, dear Liza, dear Liza?'), nl,
 write('With what shall I mend it, dear Liza, with what?'), nl, nl.

inquires(henry, sharpening) :- advises(liza, sharpening) ,
 write('With what shall I sharpen it, dear Liza, dear Liza?'), nl,
 write('With what shall I sharpen it, dear Liza, with what?'), nl, nl.

inquires(henry, wetting) :- advises(liza, wetting) ,
 write('With what shall I wet it, dear Liza, dear Liza?'), nl,
 write('With what shall I wet it, dear Liza, with what?'), nl, nl.

inquires(henry, water) :- advises(liza, water) ,
 write('With what shall I fetch it, dear Liza, dear Liza?'), nl,
 write('With what shall I fetch it, dear Liza, with what?'), nl, nl.

NB: I don't want to make it seem as if it's difficult to get Prolog into this sort of situation. In fact, almost any recursive predicate can do the same damage. But I figured a non-recursive demonstration would be easier to understand and the only thing worse than this song is the German version "Ein Loch ist im Eimer."

Knowing J2ME, Knowing J2YOU

2006-10-10T13:54:00.000+02:00

I've been working on a project for about six months now (including a three-month "freak-out quitting and doing other things" period in the middle) and thought it was about time I share with you some advice in case you're considering a similar project in the future.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the J2ME environment, Java, or programming in general, allow me to explain. J2ME is a toolkit I use for developing programs (MIDlets) on cellular phones running SymbianOS (it stands for Java 2 Mobile Edition). Because a cellphone isn't a computer, the Java libraries are not exactly as full-featured or robust as those in the standard Java library, but when it come to development this is only a problem in certain areas. For most purposes the reduced libraries are, for lack of a more descriptive word, suitable. When it comes to finding and fixing bugs, especially in a threaded environment, however, you're better off taping every possible solution to a giant wall and throwing a knife at the right one blindfolded.

The good folks at Sun are easily bored and must live very dull lives, because it would seem from a debugging standpoint that the exception handling abilities of J2ME were a cruel joke to provide them with brief amusement and the programmer with nothing. Normally when an error occurs and the code catches it, an exception is thrown and one is able to view the procedural stacktrace to track down which function caused the problem. Despite the performance loss due to having to include dozens upon dozens of try {} catch {} statements, Java's exception handling saves countless hours of scouring a very large program for errors. And indeed, as some may have noted while reading this, there is a printStackTrace() method for Exceptions in J2ME. Let's compare the output of two stacktraces: the first is one I pulled off the web that illustrates how well a bug or unexpected error is documented by the JVM, and the second one illustrates why mobile programmers often take three month freak-out vacations from a project:

Standard stacktrace:


java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
MESSAGE: 8

STACKTRACE:

java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 8
        at com.mysql.jdbc.ByteArrayBuffer.readInt(ByteArrayBuffer.java:224)
        at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.unpackField(MysqlIO.java:607)
        at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.getResultSet(MysqlIO.java:414)
        at
com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.readResultsForQueryOrUpdate(MysqlIO.java:1962)

        at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.readAllResults(MysqlIO.java:1419)
        at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.sqlQueryDirect(MysqlIO.java:1728)
        at com.mysql.jdbc.Connection.execSQL(Connection.java:2988)
        at com.mysql.jdbc.Connection.commit(Connection.java:2161)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
        at
com.ibatis.common.jdbc.SimpleDataSource$SimplePooledConnection.invoke
(SimpleDataSource.java:946)
        at $Proxy0.commit(Unknown Source)
        at
com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.transaction.jdbc.JdbcTransaction.commit(Jdbc
Transaction.java:66)
        at
com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.transaction.TransactionManager.commit(Transa
ctionManager.java:83)
        at
com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.impl.SqlMapExecutorDelegate.commitTransactio
n(SqlMapExecutorDelegate.java:759)
        at
com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.impl.SqlMapSessionImpl.commitTransaction(Sql
MapSessionImpl.java:133)
        at
com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.impl.SqlMapClientImpl.commitTransaction(SqlM
apClientImpl.java:110)
        at
com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.impl.SqlMapExecutorDelegate.autoCommitTransa
ction(SqlMapExecutorDelegate.java:866)
        at
com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.impl.SqlMapExecutorDelegate.insert(SqlMapExe
cutorDelegate.java:451)
        at
com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.impl.SqlMapSessionImpl.insert(SqlMapSessionI
mpl.java:81)
        at
com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.impl.SqlMapClientImpl.insert(SqlMapClientImp
l.java:58)
        at net.saf3.biblio.Test.main(Test.java:265)

Simplified mobile stacktrace:

Are you asking yourself where the second stacktrace is? That's a coincidence - so am I! It turns out it's sent to the error stream, which is defined by the System class. In regular Java you can easily view this stream because it prints to your console or wherever you have it piped. You can even use a method called System.setErr to send it somewhere else! In J2ME there is no such method, so the only way of retrieving it is to view the error stream. Where is that? Good fucking question. It turns out that for anyone using SymbianOS 7.0 prior to Feature Pack 3, there isn't any possible way to view the error (or the standard output) stream (for those using FP3, you still can't change it; you can, however, download an external program to run in the background and capture the error stream). So why do they have an error stream you: a) can't view; b) can't change; and c) provide as the only means of viewing useful error messages considering points a and b above? Those are three good questions that deserve answering. But considering this is Sun Microsystems, the answers probably cost $3,000USD for a 4-hour executive programming seminar to learn.

If that weren't bad enough, for security reasons you do not even have access to FileStreams. In other words, if you want to try and do your own debugging and save it to a file, you have to use binary-format RecordStores that slow your program down to the point of making debugging real-time apps where milliseconds make a difference almost worthless.

Did I forget to mention threading? What a fun place to track down bugs. It's difficult enough in the World of PCs and Servers to quickly debug multi-threaded applications. But if you ever get cocky and think it's not so hard, try it on a platform where a synchronising error crashes your program with an extremely helpful message from the OS along the lines of: "java.comms.38af01@ab5550f Monty Thread -7"

Is -7 the error code or the thread number? If it's the thread number, can I just send a list of all the threads to the RecordStore I'm using to make debug logs with and track the error down within that particular thread? Sure, but ask yourself this: is the inclusion of all that expensive RecordHandling having an effect on which threads are created in what order, or is it the same order as without? Will the error appear again or did the addition of all those costly debug lines make it just squeak by this time exception-free? The fun thing about J2ME is, you haven't got a fucking clue if your program is running fine or just dependent upon a careful balance of shitty, slow code that gives the illusion of success. Have you ever watched a slapstick comedy or a cartoon where a character is unknowingly in danger but keeps bending over or turning around at just the right time to avoid some sort of attack or peril? That's essentially a very elaborate flowchart for the design of most multi-threaded mobile applications.

But we Java mobile developers are not completely without assistance with these strange messages. There's a handy little program called Panix one can download which runs in the background and, upon an error such as this, will provide you with some useful information. Of course, a few times I've tried to run it after getting an error like this the added cost of having a second program running in the background has altered the behaviour of the program I'm trying to debug so that the error doesn't appear anymore. Close Panix and try again, and there's the error just as before. Ah, the magic of threaded programming. One change in timing and your programming suddenly appears bug-free until some date later in the future when the alignment of the stars causes it to show up again and disappear just as quickly.

Perhaps some of you, most likely Java programmers who haven't had the misfortune to have to develop mobile apps, are shouting, "What an idiot! Why doesn't he just use the emulator to debug?" Ye poor, naive bastards, ye. While the emulator is handy (no pun intended) for working out the early-stage bugs, when it comes to things like Bluetooth or networking under changes in signal strength, the emulator either doesn't support it at all or would be completely unreliable as an accurate test of the real hardware. You end up commenting-out the unsupported objects and methods just to keep the emulator from exiting with an Exception, which creates a much different application from the one you're attempting to roll-out.

In conclusion, I'd just like to say that you people who use your cellular phones blindly, complaining about how Program X is always crashing or not giving a fig about what kind of work went into developing something that isn't always crashing...you people can kiss the biggest part of my ass. If it were up to me we'd all go back to using old-timey wooden telephones with hand-cranks and Java would go back to being put to use where it is best: making shitty games for Yahoo and BitTorrent programs that require tons of RAM.

Limbo Security

2006-10-06T18:32:00.000+02:00

Because my comments posted to BBC News almost never get accepted (I believe my success rate in the past 3 years is something like 1 out of 8 with 7 unexplained rejections), I'm going to save it here for the benefit of the newsreading public:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5406552.stm

The Pope may be about to abolish the notion of limbo, the halfway house between heaven and hell, inhabited by unbaptised infants. Is it really that simple?

Here is my comment:

I welcome these changes for one. For too long have babies been living it up in limbo while the rest of us non-Catholics go to Purgatory or Hell. For anyone who says they're free of sin, have you ever tried getting a full night's rest or enjoy a weekend with one of these criminal masterminds around? Pack your bag, infants. Your "get out of Hell free" card just expired.

Let's see if it actually makes it. I am not going to be optimistic.

More Political Nuttiness

2006-10-06T12:03:00.000+02:00

The right-wing anti-immigrant party the BZÖ has encountered some more hilarious trouble. A few weeks ago a top party official quit and started saying a lot of shit about them. Her PR man just happened to be in a pub-restaurant in Vienna where a lot of right-wingers go, when Peter Westenthaler (the spokesman of the BZÖ) came in with his bodyguards. He told his bodyguards to "get this asshole out of here," after which they picked him up, kicked the shit out of him, and threw him outside. Oh, I forgot to mention something: Peter Westenthaler, while being anti-immigrant to the point of comic tragedy, is really named Peter Hojač. He switched to his mother's maiden name to hide his origins.

I've said it time and time again, and how many times must I tell people? When you let right-wing parties led by short men pretending to be German come into your pub, it only causes trouble.

Edit: I forgot to include this hilarious image taken in Vienna of the still (for now) chancellor of Austria, whose party lost the elections on Sunday: Click the image for a bigger version.

Parliamentary Elections

2006-10-02T11:32:00.000+02:00

The elections are over (barring any surprises from next week's completion of the yet uncounted 400.000 mail-in ballots). The Socialists are celebrating their "victory" over the conservative party, which in a way is deserved. Technically they did get the most votes out of any of the parties. But if you look at the change in numbers since last year, the victory seems a little smaller. Did the SPÖ win because more people voted for them than last year? No, they won because the ÖVP got -8,1% compared to the last election and the SPÖ only got -0,3%. In other words, both parties lost votes, but the conservatives lost 26 times more than the centre-leftists. That's not really very impressive, is it? It's like winning on Jeopardy despite the fact you've got a negative amount of money just because your two opponents have even larger negative amounts of money. That is only a "victory" in a very semantic interpretation of the word.

Where did those votes go, I wonder? Well, as it turns out, the two Nazi parties, the FPÖ and the BZÖ, gained since last election (technically the BZÖ did not gain anything as their party wasn't in the 2002 elections), as did the Greens. Most surprising (to me) of all is that the Communist Party also gained considerably, although they are not as media-interesting as the Nazi parties and they did not win enough votes to capture a seat in parliament, so nobody really talks about them. It's worrying that the two nutty parties floating a mixture of National Socialist welfare programmes and anti-Turkish sentiments (two of the slogans of the Freedom Party were "Daham [Viennese dialect for "Daheim"] statt Islam" and "Mut zur Heimat" which loosely translate as "Our Home instead of Islam" and "Courage for the Homeland") should gain so many votes.

For me the best outcome of this will look like this: in a week the ballots from Austrians who are living out of the country will be tallied, none of them or very few will be for the BZÖ, which mathematically will push them down from 4,2% to under 4% (the bare minimum for getting a seat), which will kick them out of parliament and they'll lose their 8 seats, the Greens will gain at least a few fractions of a percent, enough to be able to create a Red-Green coalition with the Socialists and force the conservatives and the Freedom Party fascists into a weak minority incapable of pushing through the conservative platform of privatising everything in sight.

Ireland - Day One (11.09.2006)

2006-09-30T17:43:00.000+02:00

Our ten-day voyage to Ireland began at 4.30 in the morning. Neither of us had gotten more than two or three hours of sleep that night, which made the schlepp from Gablitz to Vienna-Schwechat for a five-hour (or so we thought) flight to Dublin as fun as possibly possible in the realm of possibility. With absolutely no hassles or problems arising at the check-in counter, my wife and I were duped into believing the vacation would go very smoothly from the start.

Perhaps it was the fact that we chose Charles de Gaulle as the connecting airport, or maybe just because we thought it would be a good idea to take a plane trip on September 11th of all days, but for some reason our flight to Paris was delayed for 40 minutes and, as usually happens, it took another 20 minutes for the pilot to drive around on the tarmac in first gear until he realized the passengers on-board might have somewhere else to be at that moment. Or maybe that's just how the flight crew struggle with the all-too-common problem of having absolutely nothing to do while waiting at the airport. "Merde, Pierre! I do not fly again for anozeer two oweers! Turn on ze autopahlot and wedge my shoe under ze steering yoke to make constant raht turns. I am going to take a dump and do ze, how you say, Sudoku puzzehl."

Now, before you get angry at me for making anti-French comments, let me say that prior to this trip I had a very open mind about the French people. Now not so much. Perhaps they are all very warm-hearted, decent, down-to-earth persons who just happen to hire the absolute thickest shitheads for their transportation needs. But more on that in a moment. So as I was saying, our flight was approximately one hour later than it should have been, which made the ten-minute "don't look now but strongly anti-human bears are behind us and they learned how to drive the luggage cart" gauntlet through Charles de Gaulle's massive, disorganized, and crowded terminals in a vain hope of catching our connecting flight all the more pointless. It had already left long ago, and the staff had even gone to the trouble of shutting off the computer (the one they pretend to type into when you need assistance) for a symbolic, final, "You are, how you say, too late for dis flaht, mes amis!"

So my wife sat in a chair suffering a mild heart attack from the mad dash across the airport while I went to the staff at the next gate to find out if we could get onto a later flight. I approached the desk and was greeted with a warm smile and a very amicable "Bonjour." I should have known that the next words out of my mouth are as poisonous and belligerent in French society as "Do you have any ketchup?" What I said was, "Bonjour. Do you speak German or English?" The warm smile soured and he said in a huff, "Onlee a leetehl." Yes, and why wouldn't he speak "onlee a leetehl" English? After all, Charles de Gaulle is only one of the largest international airports in the world. How useful would a language other than French be in a place like that? So I struggled to explain the situation in as clear a way as possible, and he struggled to pretend not to understand me to emphasize the nonexistant importance the French language still had in the world, and we both came out of the struggle victorious.

I gathered the curled-up ball of a wife and we went to another desk further down in the enormous terminal to get a new flight, at which point we made the mistake of asking again, "Do you speak English?" This service agent was somewhat nicer, although she continuously left the computer where we desperately waited to get out of that hell-hole to go in the rear of the office, stand behind another agent, and pretend to be checking something very important. Of course, what she didn't know was that from my angle I could see perfectly well that what she was doing was checking her cellular phone for text messages, but I suppose finding out if Jean-Pierre can come over tonight and butter her croissant is far more important than helping out someone stranded in the wrong country. Eventually she finished, presumably after getting a reply or running out of T-Mobile anytime minutes, and we were issued new tickets and two hours to wait for the next flight. Before leaving Eva politely asked if there was a place inside of the airport for smokers. "Oh, no! Eet ees forbeedayn to smoke anywheah eenside te beelding. You must go outsahd to smoke." "OK," my wife continued, "and how far is it from here?" "Ho-ho," the woman laughed smugly, "you must want to smoke it so badly, eh?"

Rather than continue the conversation and risk my wife getting into a fight with the lady, we went through customs and were greeted by another comradely "Bonjour," another angry "Onlee a leetehl" (I guess in the department of the airport responsible for interviewing and monitoring all incoming travellers from around the globe it is even less important to speak a second language), and then we sat around trying to find something to do to kill time until the noon flight. Eva made the mistake again of mentioning cigarettes, this time to the customs' agent, and he explained how to exit the building the quickest way. "So we can come back in through the same doors, or do we have to go somewhere else?" "No, when you are feeneeshed wis your leetahl cigarette," (he made a gesture with an invisible cigarette, but I'm not sure if it was to take the piss out of her or just to help translate one of the few French words everyone in the world already knows), "you must come back eenside but zen go upstayrs to ze Terminal F."

We went outside, came back in, bought a muffin and something to drink at a little food counter on the top floor, and finally found someone who wasn't rude to foreigners. Sadly enough the woman was Arabic, so she hadn't assimilated into French culture well enough to realize that it is the only culture which matters. She also hadn't learned that when a French businessman standing in front of us wants his mandarin orange smoothie, he wants it right now and without any sass, God damn it! I suppose it's also possible that le charme discret de la bourgeoisie simply does not extend to Muslims peddling semi-frozen beverages and muffins the size, but not the shape, mind you, of a baby's head.

In any case, we got on the connecting flight, which was also delayed, and in order to make up for the lost time the pilot promised to fly at top speed. It's anybody's guess why they don't simply fly at this speed all of the time and make the flights much shorter for everybody. Although if that were the case the pilots would probably have even more time to try and fill up with tarmac strolls and Sudoku puzzles. Arriving in Dublin we at last believed the terrible experiences with Air France were behind us. Here was the conversation that followed with the baggage handling desk:

"Good afternoon."

"Afternoon. Our luggage seems to be missing."

"Tickets, please."

"We missed our original flight and were put on a later one, but the woman who issued us the new tickets said our bags were still in the airport and would be put on our new plane and would arrive when we did."

"Yeah, they say that. I've personally never seen it happen, but they say it all the time."

Thinking the man was French because he was working at the desk for Air France's baggage service provider (I guess she wasn't able to detect his Irish accent or the fact that his last name was Irish), the wife proceeded to tear into him despite his cheerful disposition and seemingly sincere desire to help us.

We filled out some forms and picked the bag out from the little laminated poster "usual suspects baggage line-up" every airport has in case you're too incompetent to describe your own suitcase. I'm forming a scientific (but as of yet unproven) theory that they use this as a way to defuse your justifiably angry attitude by making you feel like a child selecting what he wants to eat from an illustrated menu.

"How fucking complicated is it to pick up something with a handle built into it and put it onto the right airplane at the right time? I could understand if it was, say, a large, awkwardly shaped, unidentifiable, lubricated egg. At least then you would fumble with it and go, 'W-w-woops! These things sure are tricky to load into an airplane! And which one is this going in anyhow?' But it's got a god damn old-fashioned stock ticker attached to it with my flight number and information printed on it right on the top."

That's what you'd say if you weren't forced to stare at illustrations of luggage with numbers. But instead you meekly point to a picture of a little green bag and say in a pathetic voice, "Yes, that's my clothes monster, sir. He ate my shirts and then got into the wrong big metal bird and went away into the sky."

That evening we met a friend of Eva's who used to live in Ireland, had moved back, and was now on holiday in Dundalk for two weeks. We ate at an Indian restaurant, went to the ugly, grey beach north of Dundalk where her friend explained the popular youthful pastime of stealing someone's car, driving it around on the beach till the tank is empty, and then setting it on fire so it cannot be towed back when the police find it. Ah, the joys of youth. We finished the night by going to a pub (I forget the name) on the quay where we met two of my wife's friend's friends (did you get that?). They were a strange couple, the one seeming rather introverted and nice and the other being completely extroverted and almost bullying. It'd be very easy to hate the latter if she wasn't so hilarious. Often a person can be a complete asshole, but if they're funny you find it really doesn't matter. It's the bastards who aren't funny you have to watch out for.

Because of Ireland's laws against smoking, I, Eva, and the introverted friend, Jackie, spent most of the evening going back and forth from the pub to the little shed against the side with no door where the smokers and their friends sat around old barrels with a 120-watt bulb swinging above and offering the only warmth against the rain. It seemed a bit of a culture shock for someone used to Vienna's complete lack of regard for nonsmokers, but Jackie said most Irish didn't mind it because the pubs and restaurants smelled better inside. I suppose when it's not raining or cold it's not so bad to have a little private room in the open air either. But when it's 11 degrees and pouring you don't really give a flying fuck about nonsmokers. She offered to let us stay with her on the night before we returned to Dublin Airport, what with the Ryder Cup filling up every place in the East and ruining our plans to travel to Wexford and the Wicklows before we left. It was a very kind offer considering we'd only known her for two hours or so, and Eva wrote her phone number down in case we needed to take her up on it. Around midnight we left, went to sleep, and hoped with cynical reservation that our luggage would be there in the morning and we would be able to take a shower and recharge Eva's quickly-depleting cellphone (we had no alarm clock and the recharger plug was in the lost bag). The sleep came quick after such a long day (despite the somewhat damp and mildewy smell of the room), and the next morning we would begin our second day with a renewed optimism and problem-free vacation...that would not last much beyond the late afternoon.

Ireland and Video Games

2006-09-29T17:53:00.000+02:00

First let me say that my trip to Ireland was great, and will be posting the first installment of a full summary of the 10-day, 3.000km trek soon. Next I want to talk a bit about the newest GTA-related lawsuit. I'm not going to blab about whether it's terrible or great that people sue gamemakers because their kids were nutjobs that played it all the time then went out and killed somebody.

Instead I'm going to prove how stupid children are through the power of anecdotal evidence. It all goes back to when I was a lad of nine or ten and had just watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. You may remember a scene when Indy is escaping from some Nazis on a motorcycle and, as a knight of yore might do in such a situation, plucks a barricade pole he drives past and jams it into the wheel of a Nazi causing the bike to flip over (and if memory serves explode). My parents were at a pub down the street called the Lockport Street Cafe which a friend of theirs was considering buying, so in my boredom I had the sudden brilliant idea to see if what he did really worked. So I went outside, got on my bicycle, and began riding it down the sidewalk at a fast speed. Taking my foot off the pedal, I jammed it into the spokes of the front wheel and much to my surprise I flipped right over the handlebars onto the sidewalk, my foot still behind me in the wheel. Fortunately I wasn't injured, but I sure did learn a lesson or two about life imitating art. That lesson is: children are stupid, and when they don't hurt somebody else or themselves imitating what they see or read, it's merely out of good fortune.

Creative Way Of Using Things

2006-09-23T17:23:00.000+02:00

http://www.atelier-v.ch/index.htm
Turn the pages by clicking the respective numbers. The site is in German.

Bush Dead?

2006-09-01T15:32:00.000+02:00

A new pseudodocumentary about the assassination of President Bush will be aired soon. It's causing problems with some people, but I found this criticism of it particularly good:

John Beyer of UK TV pressure group MediaWatch said the film was "irresponsible".

He said it could even trigger a real assassination attempt and told the Daily Mirror: "There's a lot of feeling against President Bush and this may well put ideas into people's heads."

Put ideas into people's heads? Yeah, like someone's walking around going, "Man, I fucking hate George Bush with a passion. If only there were some way I could get rid of him before he leaves office. But how? File a petition for impeachment? No, that will never work. How can I get rid of him? Argh! Hey, what's this show on tv?" and then comes out of it thinking, "That's it. I never considered killing someone I hate before. Wow, thank God this tv show came on and showed me the solution. I was just going to write him a lot of angry letters about Iraq and leave burning bags of dog shit on the front porch of the White House. I wonder why no one's tried to assassinate a president before."

For Masha

2006-08-29T21:30:00.000+02:00

You wanted to see them, so here are the pictures of the backgammon table I built a few weeks ago.

The pieces are made from Fimo. They kind of look like little cinnamon buns, or as I've pointed out to the dismay of my wife (who made them), small coils of glossy dog crap.

To give you an idea of how shitty the web camera I took this with is, the chair the backgammon table is sitting on looks greyish blue and solid in the photo. It's actually red with gold designs embroidered on it. So, there you have it.

Terrorlicious!

2006-08-26T15:47:00.000+02:00

These are some (terrible) webcam shots I took of a box of candy from Iran somebody brought over. They aren't very good but not necessarily bad. There's very little sugar so they don't really taste like candy. It's more like something you'd eat when you are hungry but don't want to spoil your dinner. You can see in the last photo that they're hand-puppet approved.

Real Shitty

2006-08-21T01:25:00.000+02:00

Because my wife is studying Gaelic and the course materials use .ra files, I was forced the other day to do what I had long avoided: install RealPlayer for Windows. Now, I don't mind the Realplayer plugin for Firefox in FreeBSD. I just build it and go. But in Windows, it's almost as if Real is competing against Microsoft for World's Most Invasive Media Player. Just to run the damn thing, every user account in Windows who launches it is required to fill out a registration form within the application (including a username, password, e-mail address, etc.). Generally I like to just fill in whatever bullshit comes to mind (unless I am required to respond to some sort of authorization e-mail in which case sdlfkjsdflkj@lsdkjfsdf.fi and things like that don't work too well). To my surprise, I got this (see image) error message. It would seem that: 1) my fake e-mail is not very original; and 2) I am not the only one who is annoyed by having to register online and fill out a form (whatever happened to just having to pretend to read an End-User License Agreement?) just to play 2 second clips from a language website.

Also, I recently had an idea for a way to end inflation forever. Stop reading if you fear it might blow your mind. We take the basic unit of money, in my case the Euro, and make it equivalent to 1 kilogram. So 5 cents is 50 grams, 1 penny is 10 grams, and 10e is 10kg. You also forbid all non-cash forms of payment, like credit and bank cards and checks and so on. What happens? Well, obviously people aren't going to feel like lugging all this heavy shit around with them everyday, so they will carry less of it. This will cause the prices of all goods to drop, and simultaneously boost the healthiness of most citizens (as they will now find themselves doing moderate exercise every time they wear a wallet or purse). Not to mention that really wealthy people will all end up with painfully bad backs, which means more money for workers in the healthcare and luxury cane industries. Is your mind blown? I'll be here waiting patiently for my award, Nobel Prize Committee. If you need my home address, send me an e-mail.

Negative Besucher

2006-07-27T12:08:00.000+02:00

Insgesamt kamen in der bisherigen Sommersaison Mai bis Juni 342.000 US-Bürger nach Österreich, das sind 366.000 mehr als im Vorjahr.

(s. 19, Kurier, 27.7.2006)

Offensichtlich haben -24.000 amerikanische Touristen uns im vergangenen Jahr besucht!

Semper retarded

2006-07-21T15:19:00.000+02:00

Occasionally the ulcers in my stomach and various tumours I undoubtedly have from a constant diet of cigarettes and liter upon liter of Diet Coke recede and I feel the need to torture myself further until they return. Today was just such an occasion, and fortunately I found this thread on a US Marine Corps messageboard to cure (or uncure) what ailed me:

http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31729

Some farmer in the US hung a flag upside down on his property and here we have the stormtroopers making calls to "string him up" and sodomize him (one poster asks if there's any snipers on the messageboard living in the same area as the farmer). This doesn't really surprise me, as I already knew most people in the US Marines were the dumbest, most reactionary group of people in the entire armed forces of the world. Not all of them, but it seems to be a prerequisite for most positions. If you're too smart, you get discharged. If you're smart, they give you a job at a computer. If you're stupid, you get promoted. If you're dumb as shit, you go to the Pentagon, and those who have the misfortune of being even dumber than shit apparently spend too much time on a marine corps messageboard proving why if anyone should be strung up, it's the still-pregnant mothers of half-retarded hayseeds like this. If the crazy terrorists really wanted to defeat the US military all they'd really have to do is secretly replace all of their fragmentation grenades with baby-proof aspirin bottles. By the time half the service-men figured out how to get the tops off and rejoice, they'd only have a moment to realize they've already been killed ten minutes ago.

As for the farmer, it seems like he was just pissed off about his stupid loan money being taken away by the courts, and needed a gimmick to draw media attention to it. I bet he doesn't give a flying fuck about the state of medical care for soldiers.

Putin's Internet Conference of July, 6th (this is not a serious review, just some impressions).

2006-07-15T15:59:00.000+02:00

Someone here called it a disappointment of the year, that's certainly an overstatement and I think it was really stupid to expect much from it, but yes, it could have been more fair. The questions that were asked were those chosen by moderators that left some of the most poplar questions (the ones that got the most votes) unanswered, not that I think those unanswered questions were important, I don't see the point in asking Putin most of these question anyway, I just think that since it's called "internet conference" they should have been asking questions in order of popularity (omitting the similar ones, of course). As a reason for leaving out some very popular questions they pointed out that their popularity was the result of flashmobbing. Well, probably it was, but the popularity of a question on the internet doesn't necessarily reflects it's overall popularity and probably all questions with the rating above some certain number are a result of flashmobbing of some sort, I guess it's just the way those kind of internet conferences are.

I also think that his first reaction to the following question was weird and stupid:
"I voted for you but the country is deviating from democracy, there's no strong opposition, almost no elections, no TV and radio independent from the state. When are you going to get back to democracy? "
Putin: "Honestly speaking, and we are having an honest conversation, I doubt that Vitaliy [the name of the question's author] voted for me. It is possible. I don't exclude it but I doubt it ..."
Well, even if he doesn't like the question, how on earth can he make that judgment. If a person who didn't vote for Putin wanted to ask the same question I see absolutely no point for him to say that he did. :/

On this page there's a list of stupid and funny questions to Putin that were asked on the net, they are in English and though English there is rather bad, I think it's mostly understandable. If there's something you don't understand, ask me and I'll be glad to explain.
Oh, and the most popular question about G.W. Bush was: "Do you think that Bush is a fool?"

Btw, if anyone missed the results of "What Does It Mean", it's in the comments to the respective post.

Mick Looks Even Smaller in Person

2006-07-15T02:04:00.000+02:00

Just got back from the Stones concert in Vienna. I wouldn't have gone, but the ticket was free. I'm glad I went. I think Keith Richards forgot all their new material after getting that coconut to the head, because they played only old classics the entire performance. Sympathy for the Devil isn't really one of my favorites, but they built up to it with drums for about 3 minutes, with some fireworks suddenly going off and flying behind the stage, then smoke machines billowing clouds out onto the stage and into the audience, with two gigantic fireballs erupting out of the top into the opening of the stadium ceiling. Even sitting so far back, one could feel the heat momentarily. I don't know if it was an act or not, but another thing weird about Richards was that during his solo songs he seemed to forget the words (or in one case the title when introducing it until Ron Wood helped him out) and often to play the guitar or sing altogether. To sum it up, it was altogether a great show, although at the same time it felt a little fake as if we were all extras in a concert DVD to be sold at a later date rather than an audience at a rock show, and were the tickets not given to me for free, I wouldn't have bothered going. It just seemed like an opportunity I should consider taking, so I did. And I do not regret it.

Outernet?

2006-07-09T18:18:00.000+02:00

If anyone was wondering/caring, the reason I seemed to disappear is because about 75% of the sites I normally go to, including servers for AIM and ICQ, are inaccessible. I cannot get any information on why, but from tracerouting and pinging for the past 30 minutes I've been able to hazard a crude guess: aorta.net's bridge between New York and Europe is offline, and thus the vast majority of servers in the United States are cut off. At first I was kind of paranoid because the sites I attempted to view were political magazines and such, but then I realized I couldn't even get to McDonald's website so something must be up.

Here is what a typical attempt to connect to a US computer gets me:

11 us-nyc01a-rd1-pos-6-0.aorta.net (213.46.160.154) 131.476 ms 132.556 ms 135.873 ms
12 213.46.190.178 (213.46.190.178) 134.788 ms 136.798 ms 136.052 ms
13 * * *
14 * * *

After the 213.46.190.178 the attempt times out for almost every site located in the US (Google, Blogspot and GMail excluded; CNN, Slashdot, Counterpunch, Infoshop, Libcom.org, *.gov websites included). Hopefully when I get back I won't have an inbox full of hundreds of spam e-mails. Then again I'm more worried that I'll have to rely on the mainstream press for my news in the meantime.

What Does It Mean?

2006-06-26T18:06:00.000+02:00

What does this weird expression on his face mean?

The author of the best version gets an award. :)

Democracy and the Euston Manifesto

2006-06-11T16:15:00.000+02:00

So you don't have to spend as much time as I did studying this roll of toilet paper, I'm now going to review and summarize the Euston Manifesto for anyone who hasn't yet read it. I'm sorry that I cannot include the entire thing as I planned, but it's apparently under copyright protection (talk about freedom) and I don't want some asswipe complaining to me about it. One has to wonder how such a thing could ever become so popular. Well, after reading it the answer is quite clear. It follows the same liberal practices of criticizing the wrongs of society and its current government while attaching a "with all due respect, that is, my Lords" to the end for safety before sitting back down and continuing the act of complicity. It's similar to a child shouting for a toy in the store in the lowest possible whisper and then bowing to its parents and conceding that it doesn't in fact need or really want the toy, but felt it absolutely had to speak up about it:

The Preamble

The interesting thing about the opening statements are that they surprisingly contain the most accurate declarations about leftists and liberals.

Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values.

As we will see, this isn't accurate in the sense that the drafters believe it is. Rather, it's completely spot-on in a reflexively ironic sense. The intention of this statement is to separate those leftists who quickly abandon what leftism is supposed to be about when it becomes favorable politically or economically. Perhaps to the dismay of the Euston group who are using here to attack other types of opportunism, just about every "Labour Party" or social democratic organization in history is a good example. In fact, one could extend this attack to practically every political party in history, as the necessity of staying in power once you're there makes a political organism chew its own leg off to escape the trap of democratic uncertainty. Where this statement strays from reality is in precisely which group of people the authors are discussing. As is clear from reading the rest of the manifesto, they are talking about those on the left who betray the concepts of democracy, rational, open discussion on all topics, and a firm grounding in reality. As the manifesto's body gains a fuller anatomy, we see this exact betrayal occurring in the Euston group's own positions on several topics.

The preamble also goes on to talk about the need for a wider range of opinion in mainstream media and discussion, and how most of the serious global issues are only discussed on the Internet because of the nature (my words, not theirs) of non-independent information outlets.

Statement of principles

For democracy. - Basically a rehashing of the US' first amendment. Nothing particularly good or bad said here that isn't said already. Pay attention, however, to the call for "separation of state and religion." It will be funny later, I promise.

No apology for tyranny. - They refuse to "indulgently 'understand'" (their quote, not mine) anti-democratic regimes that oppress their people, and distance themselves from "left-liberal voices...quick to offer an apologetic explanation" for these types of governments. This begs the question what makes a regime, what makes it anti-democratic, and what constitutes oppression. Every country in the history of the world is subject to at least one of those accusations. The intent here was obviously a reference to Stalin and friends, or those that argue that things are worse off in Iraq under Bush than under Hussein. But it could fairly apply to anyone because of the vagueness it is mired in and depending entirely on the definition and interpretation of "anti-democratic regime" and "oppression." Was the Alien and Sedition Act anti-democratic and oppressive? To me it was. I guess that means anyone who tries to understand or defend John Adams is a freedom-hating thug according to the Euston Manifesto.

Human rights for all. - Once again, nothing original but keep in mind the position of the paper for later amusement and tragedy.

Equality. - Argues for democratic trade unions, gender equality, etc.

Development for freedom. - Envisioning a kinder, friendlier globalization.

Opposing anti-Americanism. - Remember when I said you'd have a laugh? Here we are halfway through the declarations, with one explicity denouncing people who justify anti-democratic regimes that oppress their own people, and now we have the Euston group spewing bullshit like, "That US foreign policy has often opposed progressive movements and governments and supported regressive and authoritarian ones does not justify generalized prejudice against either the country or its people." Too true, one shouldn't wantonly hate the citizens of any nation just because most of them are kept ignorant of all the criminally terrible actions of its government. However, notice the careful wording of the "No apology for tyranny" declaration juxtaposed with this one. I guess because the US has only systematically oppressed and destroyed democracy (through assassinations, coups, spending millions on right-wing paramilitary groups, etc.) in other countries, it gets off scot-free under criticisms of anti-democratic regimes that oppress their own people. Unless of course you consider keeping a population of nearly 300 million people as stupid as fucking possible a method of oppression.

For a two-state solution. - Advocates allowing both Palestinians and Israelis to have their own countries.

Against racism - Vaguely asserts that some people on the left are only claiming to be against the crimes of Israeli settlers against the people who were living there before as a cover for their secret hatred of Jews. I don't know specifically who this is referring to, other than perhaps certain world leaders, but then I wouldn't exactly call them part of the "left and liberal circles." Ahmadinejad is in more of an Octagon than a circle. By the way, remember when I told you to hold in the laughs until later? The concept of Zionism, that is, the belief that Israel belongs to the Jewish people for Biblical reasons and that they should have a nation to call their own that will always be a safe place for them to flee to when other countries are hostile towards them, seems remarkably at odds to me with calling for a "separation of state and religion" as the manifesto did earlier. Israel is in fact little more than a theocracy, albeit a much more pluralistic one than, say, Iran or the Vatican.

United against terror. - More of the same stuff. Sort of a time-placement-device required by history much like a "committed to fighting global Communism" statement a liberal manifesto would contain during the Cold War.

A new internationalism. - Look out, Coalition of the Willing: your burden of proof just got a few milligrams heavier.

A critical openness. - Basically tells leftists not to cooperate with anti-democratic movements, people who defend Stalin and Mao, and so on. This is what the preamble was hinting at. Note that it's ok to cooperate with liberals that defend the shitty, anti-democratic governments in the US, UK, et al. because they at least give the illusion that your vote means anything.

Historical truth. - Stop lying about stuff that happened to score points for your agenda. Not a bad statement.

Freedom of ideas. - Freedom of speech unless it defames someone, is libelous, or incites others to violence. I believe under this definition most of the literature preceding the liberal revolutions of the Enlightment and thereafter would be impossible. "Shut up, Thomas Jefferson! We're trying to have a Food Not Muskets meeting! Nobody wants to hear your terrorist concepts of how to change society for the betterment of the small merchant class!"

Open source. - Perhaps the weirdest part of the manifesto. Discusses patents and open source software. Not opposed to its ideas, just not really sure why it's in here.

A precious heritage. - Eurocentric world-view stuff. Praises the "democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century" and ignores all the attempts at democratic revolutions in the "Danger! Brown People Crossing" regions that have been suppressed and replaced with dictatorships and cruel authoritarians by the democratic societies of Europe and the US for the benefit of the businesses they serve.

Elaborations - In a nutshell: Attacks anyone criticizing a government if it is considered "democratic," concedes democracies have problems too but downplays them; pays lip service to poverty but distances itself from authoritarian leftists; attacks people who say the US deserved 9/11 or that it was understandable from a global foreign policy perspective and puts all the blame on crazy Islamic nutjobs; makes vague statements about how the war in Iraq was either good or bad depending on how you look at it; attacks leftists who criticize the governments who supported invading Iraq while not criticizing "the ugly forces of the Iraqi 'insurgency'"; more stuff about European anti-Semitic vandalism and violence, and anti-Zionist intellectuals all being secret Jew haters with no plausible qualms against Israel; one sentence about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo with a minute mention of the extraordinary renditions by the CIA and then a large paragraph about leftists and groups like Amnesty International criticizing the human rights violations at these places and daring to compare them to Soviet Gulags. They're right. I'm fairly certain nobody had a digital camera in the gulags to take photos while the soldiers raped and humiliated the prisoners and made them smear shit all over themselves. And it's hard to get someone with a dog eating their genitals to hold still for one of those old-timey cameras with gunpowder flashes.

Conclusion - The author(s) bravely take back the word liberal from those who usurp it by dominating every conversation and movement with talk of anti-imperialism or anti-Bushism.

My conclusions: weak, afraid to be confrontational or express concrete solutions, apologetic while denouncing apologism, a desire to be overly polite and civil in matters where people's lives are at stake because it makes them seem more rational and intelligent than the rabble...am I talking about the Euston Manifesto or the stereotype of liberals in general? One gets the feeling from reading this thing that the pub they supposedly formulated it in was serving brandy snifters and broadcasting the explosively radical programmes of BBC4.

The problem with liberalism in general is not its ideas of freedom or reason, but that it is too comfortable with its own living situation to ever take those ideas to the limits of their potential. If the government commits an injustice, it's not the government itself to blame but the party in charge. So you vote in a new party. If that party screws you over, the solution is to wait patiently till the next election and vote someone else in. And so on and so on. Anyone who dares to say the system itself is the cause of the problems is written off as insane and ignored, despite the liberals own claims to love and protect freedom of speech and the open discourse of all ideas. This love turns tough when the convenience and comfort the liberal enjoys is ever threatened in any serious way.

We are partisans of these values. But we are not zealots. For we embrace also the values of free enquiry, open dialogue and creative doubt, of care in judgement and a sense of the intractabilities of the world. We stand against all claims to a total — unquestionable or unquestioning — truth.

...except of course, the unquestionable truth of parliamentary government with a judicial, legislative, and executive branch with pluralist treatment of political parties as set out in the beginning of the manifesto. In other words, the current system of government found in the UK, US, and most of the rest of the world is the end of all human political development and achievement and nothing exists beyond it that is worth looking into. That is the philosophy of the liberal which disgusts me most, for it not only refuses to acknowledge the inherently anti-democratic nature of such hierarchal, easily and inevitably corruptible power, but goes a step further in considering it the magic solution to all of the world's woes when it has, historically, been either the cause of them, or in conjunction with greed, the means with which to cause them. Give me a manifesto which says "No one is more or less powerful than anyone else" and I'll give you something that truly celebrates a love for democracy. Better yet, I'll write it myself right now:

The Ghostzart Manifesto of Democracy

Preamble

In our current society, there are some who have and some who do not have. In capitalist societies those who have are the wealthy that enjoy the fruits of others' labor, the politicians and judges that they eat dinner with, and the plethora of small peanuts managers who do all of the real supervisory work for them. Everyone else gets the stones and the peels. In so-called socialist or communist societies, those who have are the bureaucrats and state loyalists that slime their way up the ladder in a way not entirely different from the capitalist managers. In fact, the biggest problem with statist control of capital is not that it is too socialist, as some liberals accuse, but that it is the absurd extreme of capitalist monopoly, where everything is owned by one board of executives and there exists no means to recuse oneself from participation save running away, being imprisoned, or the coffin. The biggest problem with these two systems in respect to democracy is that they cripple and tear away its foundations at every turn.

Statement of principles

A. Individual rights

Every person who lives in a particular place must, due to the necessity of having a social harmony in order to maximize the happiness of all, sometimes compromise his/her own freedoms for the sake of everyone's shared freedoms. One person may wish to have the freedom to murder his neighbors and consider any attempt at preventing him from doing so as an invasion of his will. He is right, of course, but his neighbors would consider their freedom to continue living equally if not more important. Therefore a democracy must find a balance when making decisions between the will of the individual versus the will of society. A society which legalizes murder will probably find itself without citizens very soon, as most will either pack up and leave or end up being killed. While this sounds absurd, it serves to point out that some rights can be ascertained as "natural" (for lack of a better word) and necessary. It is a matter for discussion which of these should be crystallized and protected in the future and which should be left to individual societies to decide upon. But for the most part, they can be safely agreed to contain: the right to live, the right to believe anything and express those beliefs, the right to move somewhere else, the right to work, and the right to refuse to work. All in all, one can sum basic human rights up with: "What I do that harms no one else directly or indirectly is entirely my own affair. What I do that harms one directly or indirectly is not automatically right or wrong, but depends upon the circumstances and the prevailing notion of ethics in my time and location, and thus is subject to public discussion and equal consideration of different viewpoints."

B. A real democracy

A real democracy is not something to be found in the governments of the world. At best, a representative government serves some of its constituents some of the time, and more normally it serves a few of its constituents rarely--usually right before the next election. A true democratic society would put all of the decision-making power back into the hands of the public itself rather than depend on the honesty of a group of people who have not historically been the most honest of society. While pretending to depend on and serve the will of the majority, republics and parliamentary systems do little more than show contempt for the masses by removing any ability to make decisions from those who these decisions affect the most. If the will of the public is to be served, why not put the decision-making into their hands directly? If the reason is that the will of the public is untrustworthy and illegitimate because it sways and changes rapidly and needs a republic to provide stability, what argument can be given to legitimize the officials the public chooses? It is as if their ability to make decisions on who can tell them what to do is valid, but any attempts at making other decisions are invalid because they are too stupid to comprehend the issues they are deciding. Who then, I wonder, makes them this stupid in the first place?

C. An end to private/state capital

Not capital in the hands of the state supposedly made to serve the whole people, nor capital in the hands of a few made to serve nobody else but the owners. All capital in a given society belongs to the society as a whole, and when decision-making is put back into that social area then the development and use of that capital becomes part of the list of decisions. While capital is and ought to remain socially owned, the specific implementation of resources is up to the particular society and should be determined by what is fairest to the society and its workers, ecologically wisest, and most efficient for production and consumption rather than ideologically enforced. In any civilization where the productive capital of the people is allocated privately or by a government, democracy is undermined in favor of catering to those who the society considers "most important." Only when an abundance of wealth or higher position within a hierarchal rank is abolished will all citizens ever truly be equal to one another in respect to making decisions.

Conclusion

Capitalists, statists, and anyone in between can go fuck themselves. With all due respect, that is, my Lords.

Creative Acts of Warfare

2006-06-11T11:29:00.000+02:00

The suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amount to acts of war, the US military says.

The camp commander said the two Saudis and a Yemeni were "committed" and had killed themselves in "an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us".

If killing yourself in a prison where you've never been brought to trial or told how long your sentence will be after 3+ years is an act of warfare, it's no wonder the war on terrorism is taking so long and yielding so few results. It's time the US got tough and declared a war on suicide. Do what the UK used to do and make attempted suicide a crime punishable by execution. That's the only way these "self terrorisers" are going to learn that if anyone is going to kill them, it's going to be someone else.

Hitler cat

2006-06-10T22:55:00.000+02:00

There are more of Hitler cats here but this one is the most perfect. I saw this cat before I knew to what this page was dedicated and my first thought was "Hitler".

Friendy visits Vienna, Whoa! Mozart's Ghost visits Berlin

2006-06-04T10:09:00.000+02:00

That's right. Last week our very own Masha came to visit Vienna. My wife and I showed her around the city and she took about 8 billion high-definition, super-gigantic photographs of everything. They will be up as soon as I can shrink them all down. There is also a video of me pretending to be overcome with grief at Falco's grave in Zentralfriedhof.

Then Friday I, the wife, and some others went to Berlin. We were at the fucking place where this crazy guy stabbed all those people and one ended up having HIV like 2 hours before it happened. Talk about in the nick of time. ...I'm going to Hell.

Bob Avakian - The L Ron Hubbard of American Maoism? (An Even Longer Countdown to Further Betrayal)

2006-06-03T17:38:00.000+02:00

The Curious Counterpunch Article

In the June 2nd, 2006 online version of Counterpunch.org's newsletter appeared a more or less accurate warning from Sunsara Taylor about the futility of cooperating with mainstream, Democratic Party machinery and political groups to achieve the end to the war in Iraq, the growing amount of government intrusion into civil liberties, and the question of impeachment for George W Bush among other things. That is all well and good, and I find very little to disagree with in the author's essay about the uselessness of trusting the Democratic Party and its faithful liberal base to solve even one of these problems--especially when the Democrats have in reality been complicit in the creation of these problems since Day One. The article she wrote is entitled "Countdown to a Betrayal: Making Change Without Democrats" and can be found here: http://www.counterpunch.org/taylor06022006.html

However, as serious as the tone of the article was, I couldn't help at times from cracking a smile or forcing myself not to laugh as I read it. Not because I find things like warrantless wiretaps or waterboarding amusing, but because the author of this attack against torture, civilian spying, etc. is a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, and also on the Advisory Board of World Can't Wait, the RCPUSA's fake anti-war group which exists solely to reel in fat little anti-war fish from the bigger streams. If you aren't familiar with the RCP, they are a self-described Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political party which grew out of the West Coast radical movements of the 60s and adopted tactics like infiltrating other left-wing groups' leadership to gain support, as opposed to the less-popular method among Leninists of actually openly stating up front what your plans for the future are and then waiting for the laughter to die down to take a vote.

This in itself wouldn't be so bad. After all, there are plenty of crazy, authoritarian hardcore leftist groups in the world--even ones who advocate Stalin-style dictatorship--and are rightly relegated by the public to the dumpster of insane garbage where they belong. What makes the whole thing hilarious, if not tragic, is their Dear Leader who the party refers to as, I kid you not, "Chairman Avakian." But rather than muse on what kind of sheer ego this guy has (or how poorly his title rolls off the tongue compared to something with more zazz, like "Chairman Mao" or "Uncle Joe")--if you're curious as to the fanatical devotion of the RCP to their glorious visionary just browse their online publication at http://www.rwor.org. It reads like any other "newspaper" with a cult head of state guiding it. Personally I wonder why they don't take it to the next step and highlight all of his quotes in red letters like in the Gospels. At least in this context the color choice would make more sense.

Returning to the article, and with all of this in mind, perhaps you can understand why I found passages like, "As for the war, the police-state spying, and the widespread networks of torture, Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Dodd put it well when he described the Democrats' strategy not to run 'to the left of President Bush on national security but to the right.'" Thank goodness we have a group which defends Stalin and Mao to decry the horrors of police-state spying and widespread torture for us. Otherwise we might think a party that spends half its time glorifying those two would have no problem with such behavior.

A Broader Look at the RCP

In another article from RWOR, entitled "The Outrageous Equating of Communism with Nazism," is an introductory paragraph which states (text is reproduced exactly as published):

"One of the lies about communism that has been repeated over and over again is the equating of the Soviet Union under Stalin with Hitler’s Germany. The comparison rules socialism utterly out of order, paints it as a nightmare, rules it off the agenda.and is a total lie!"

This article, like the one by Taylor, is again more or less on-the-ball in its criticism that comparing Nazism to Communism is dishonest. Although not mentioned in the article, Hitler's Mein Kampf even goes to the trouble of declaring Communism one of his main targets for destruction. And the private sector of Germany in the 30s and 40s, while often forced to "support the war effort" and so on, was never controlled or regulated in what anyone but a pure laissez-faire supporter could fairly call an anti-capitalist way.

But an interesting after-effect of this article is not the valid point that hastily comparing one ideology to another is dishonest and pointlessly lumps two separate ideas together and thus poisons them both (whether or not they deserve to be poisoned is beyond the scope of the point I am attempting to make). No, the really interesting thing is to be found in the Taylor article and its support for something called "The Call." The Call is a formalized statement from the RCP front group World Can't Wait which Taylor's article suggests anyone seriously opposed to the war or the President should sign, encourage others to sign, and promote as publicly as possible. Included in The Call is this curiously funny statement:

"People look at all this and think of Hitler — and they are right to do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act now; the future is in the balance."

Oh, dear. What is this? An unfair comparison of two separate ideologies? Why, that almost seems intellectually dishonest to me. But then, I suppose it's all right to make unfair and false comparisons when they don't tarnish your side. Don't get me wrong, under the most liberal interpretation of the word "fascist," I consider Bush, Stalin, Mao and Hitler to be all pretty much good candidates for the distinction. But as much as I dislike George Bush and don't put it past him to, say, create a secret police force to whisk people off from their homes at night for making a joke at work about him, or have members of his own party killed for disagreeing with him (I don't put such abuses past anyone in a position of unchecked power, however), to his credit he's the only one on this list who hasn't done either of these things (yet).

A funny second point before I leave this article is this statement further down:

"With respect to the Jewish people, the revolution in power immediately took strong measures to combat and uproot anti-Semitism. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Jews were subject to constant pogroms—mob massacres by peasants who were told absurd lies about the Jews. This was overthrown in the socialist revolution, and the confinement of Jews to certain geographic areas and discrimination in employment were ended."

Interestingly, my Russian friend's parents still have their old Soviet identification cards they were required to carry with them at all times that state, in clear terms, the fact they are Jews. These cards were used unofficially to curtail the number of Jewish citizens in the USSR who attempted to study stereotypically Jew-filled areas in the universities, such as medicine or law, presumably so that there would not be such a strong, how can I put it, Jewrageous flavor to these fields. Pop quiz: Which other leader required Jews to be properly identified as such in their government ID papers: a) George W Bush; or b) Adolf Hitler. If you answered B, you're correct. If you answered A, you're wrong, but possibly capable of reading Bush's innermost thoughts, and thus creeping me out beyond belief.

Before I get back to the broader look at the RCP, I want to spend a little more time focused on this "Call" I mentioned earlier. Taylor's article spends half its time praising the World Can't Wait movement (actually, the article is little more than a brief, pseudojournalistic criticism of the mainstream political movements with a predictable second-half advertisement for WCW and its Call), so it deserves a fair amount of attention:

"As the Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime says, 'There is not going to be some savior from the Democratic Party. This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into leaders' who tell us to seek common ground with fascists and religious fanatics is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people.' And this too has proven prescient and comes into sharper relief every day."

Personally as an anarchist I would have worded that paragraph to read, "There is not going to be some savior from any party. This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into leaders [rest omitted] is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people." However historically more accurate my version might be than theirs, that would create a conflict with the RCP that secretly controls them through its control of World Can't Wait--control through a completely unelected group of "advisors" and "steering committee chairs" that are mostly RCP members, mind you. How the fuck Howard Zinn got on WCW is beyond my ability to comprehend.

"If the millions who are truly sickened by the direction of this regime could organize and start setting the dynamic, if people who feel this way begin acting in their masses, then a different future becomes possible."

I couldn't agree more. If only there were some way to motivate them to organize so they could replace our current system with something resembling a real democracy, but what does World Can't Wait suggest?

"World Can't Wait has issued a call for massive action on October 5."

Oh, more vanguardist bullshit leaking through the facade. Nevermind then. Masses, I am issuing a counter-call ordering you to go back home and wait for Playstation 3 to come out this autumn!

Here is perhaps my favorite paragraph from the article, if only because of the historical allegations of the RCP's anglo-centrism and homophobia (although, let's be fair, most early Marxists considered homosexuality to be a symptom of bourgeois decadence and a psychological disorder, so we can forgive them for being a little late in the race):

"Right now, there are young people, looking for a life that matters; immigrants, who have so bravely taken to the streets; women, and men, shocked to life by Alito and then South Dakota; Black people and others for whom the word 'Katrina' is still a raw wound; GI's who are sickened by the butchery they are being ordered to conduct. They are hanging out in gay bars and libraries, in movie theaters and on street corners, in huge cities and tiny towns, day labor corners, and yes, even mega-churches and military bases--waiting for you to find them."

Eerily that paragraph seemed tacked-on as a last minute gesture of goodwill. It also reminded me somehow of the Republican "party of inclusion" shit from a couple years ago. But in all seriousness, this is the most beautiful poetry I have ever read. What inspiring words. What psychologically curious Tale-of-Two-Cities-esque juxtapositions. The Maoists of America are ready to embrace you with open arms, whether you're living in a huge city or a tiny town, whether you like to read books or you're just someone who "hangs out in gay bars." I could go on taking things out of context and then mocking them, but that ignores the really weird thinking behind this call to action. The author is sort of subtly suggesting that potential supporters of the movement can be divided into demographics of historically left/progressive/Democratic groups in a way similar to what marketers and advertisers do when planning to go after target consumers:

* "immigrants, who have so bravely taken to the streets" - Code words for "Mexicans"

* "women, and men, shocked to life by Alito and then South Dakota" - Abortion supporters who, I can only guess, were according to the RCP in a state of cryogenic sleep for the past 30 years rather than being vocally and publicly visible ever since Roe v. Wade but marginalized and ignored. Note the placement of men as an afterthought. This is another psychological slip of the finger, as it betrays yet again the RCP's beliefs that the masses are in a state of hybernation and need a strong vanguard to wake them up and lead them to victory.

* "Black people and others for whom the word 'Katrina' is still a raw wound" - I wonder, out of curiosity, how many "black people" are in the RCP.

* "They are hanging out in gay bars..." - This is a great line if you know the history of the RCP. Up until only 5 years ago, they held a forked position on homosexuality. On one hand, they stated against discrimination of homosexuals in their vision of a future, Maoist society. On the other hand, they combined that with a statement in their Programme that "...at the same time education will be conducted throughout society on the ideology behind homosexuality...and the struggle will be waged to eliminate it and reform homosexuals." They've changed their position somewhat, as you can read for yourself from this supplement to the New Draft Programme online (http://www.rwor.org/margorp/homosexuality.htm). Note how long it takes them to apologize for their previous position while attempting to defend parts of it simultaneously. Here's some advice to all those potential vanguardists out there on how things can be simplified greatly if you plan on telling people what they can or can't do in the privacy of their bedroom:

My Checklist to What You Are or Aren't Allowed to Do
in Your Own Home

1. Have you finished pubescence? Yes/No
2. Has your partner(s) finished pubescence? Yes/No
3. Are you and your partner(s) completely willing to do this
without any coercion from the other whatsoever? Yes/No

If you answered No to any of these questions, what you're
doing is probably pretty uncool. I mean, you're either having
sex with a child or raping somebody. Or else you're a child or
getting raped. Either way, Chairman Michel forbids it.
If you answered yes to every question on this checklist,
congratulations. In his infinite benevolence, Chairman Michel
permits you to proceed with your sweet love-making. Remember to
think of him as you near climax, as the rewards will be that
much greater.

Isn't that a lot simpler than hundreds of pages of bullshit supplements and tiptoeing around the issue? Making your statement on homosexuality, transgender issues, etc. should be done as briefly as possible, otherwise you get weird stuff like this excerpt from their supplement:

"Lesbianism is in many ways a response to the oppression of women in class society, but in and of itself it is not a fundamental solution to this oppression."

Oh, really? I thought lesbianism was women who liked fucking other women. Saying it's mostly an attempt at fighting male hierarchy sounds like something Bill O'Reilly would believe. Yeah, they're just pissed off man-haters who are going through a little rebellion phase. But wait, it gets better (or worse):

"What will sexual practices be like in the future and will homosexuality still exist throughout socialism and communism? Who knows?"

What the fuck kind of question is that? The things state socialists ask themselves really boggles my anarchist mind sometimes. Somehow I doubt Karl Marx was ever sitting at his writing desk one night with nothing more important to wonder about than, "Hmmm, when I am busting my nut in this great society of the future, will I be holding another man's cock or a luscious titty in my hand? What? Not now, Engels! I have more important things to do than worry about finishing Das Kapital! I am trying to figure out what gender my interior decorator will be after the transition to socialism."

"Applicants for admission to the Party who are homosexual must meet the same criteria and standards as anyone else. They must wholeheartedly dedicate themselves to serving the interests of the international proletariat and ultimately of humanity as a whole, placing these above the interests of any individual, special interest group, or sub-section of society. Applicants are therefore expected to move beyond such things as nationalism, anarchism, feminism, or sexual 'identity politics' in the process of making the leap to becoming communists and members of the Party."

You heard them. No special treatment, fags! Only white middle-classers get the helping hand in the RCP. Notice the peculiar last sentence. 1) why the fuck would an anarchist want to join a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political party that advocates creating a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the first place? 2) feminists, gay rights activists, and so on must abandon all of these less important issues in order to struggle for the greater good. Once again Marxism shows how utterly stupid it can be when it comes to political activism by reducing the scope of every issue to class struggle. Racism is caused by capitalism, shitty treatment of women is caused by capitalism, homophobia (except that practiced by the RCPUSA prior to 2001, I mean) - capitalism, and so on. And since they can all be blamed on the current capitalist system, merely opposing that system is enough to bring all of its problems into public focus. Unless of course the party you belong to just pays lip service to the problems and doesn't consider them a high priority. But that won't happen, right?

The Real Countdown - Or What All This BS Means

The real countdown is not the elections of 2006, when, as is very likely to happen, voters hopelessly go to the ballots and vote in a new set of liars or reelect the old ones and nothing gets fixed. That countdown passed the first time this country had elections over 200 years ago. No, the real countdown to watch for is what happens if somehow there ever is an actual revolution in the United States and all the people who trusted World Can't Wait, ANSWER, and all these other front groups slowly get fucked over by them when the wolves take off their sheep costumes. If it's a historical tendency for a left-of-center political party to screw over the radical leftists who cooperated with them (study the Democratic Party's enthusiastic response to the Cold War witch hunts for just a little sample), it's no less a tendency for the far left parties to totally fuck over their own people. The reason for this is that a party like the Democrats is run by people obsessed with power. They may have ideals and beliefs, but nothing is supreme to their desire to be in charge, enjoy the fruits of that authority, and stay there no matter what--which means if it's profitable to pretend to be Republicans, they'll act Republican, and if it suddenly becomes politically suicidal not to distance themselves from the Republicans, they'll stop, as if by magic, and become liberals again. This lust for power often derails many grassroots movements that get co-opted or obliterated by their naivete and pitiful faith in "the system" to cure any of its own symptoms, but on very, very rare occasions it somehow works out.

But when one trusts a group like the RPCUSA, the Bolsheviks, and their ilk, you had better hope you fall under their radar when their machinery really starts moving. How many anarchists in Russia, China, Spain, etc. trusted these groups, put their differences aside, and worked together to overthrow the old regime, just to end up against a wall somewhere in front of a firing squad the next month? I am not saying all Marxists support this, but the systems they've put in place or make latter-day defenses for have murdered more "infantile ultra-leftists" (as Lenin calls them) than capitalism ever has. That's why the real countdown is not the number of days until the November elections, it's how long you manage to elude the secret police should a group like the RCP and its "Chairman Avakian" ever satisfy their lust for authority and total control of the public. The difference between the RCP and groups like them from Democrats or other parliamentarists is not this desire to be in charge, wealthy, and have privileges no one else has. The difference is that a group like the RCP has the fanatical devotion to ideology normally only found in organized religions. And combining religion with politics is never a healthy mixture, especially when they have such a cult-like godhead as Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, or even Avakian.

New America's Army

2006-05-18T12:20:00.000+02:00

The US Army is making a game based on real soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it isn't a recruitment device! Honest!

My favorite part of the BBC article on it is this:

"The majority of the public is not touched by the war," said Major Jason Amerine, who served in Afghanistan and is one of the nine soldiers appearing in the game.

"It is dangerous to have an army overseas fighting and for a public to become so disconnected that they don't realise that we are not automatons over there. We're real people,"

I don't think it's the "majority of the public" they need to worry about. Maybe the White House should play this game if the point is to make people who try it realize that the soldiers aren't "killing machines" and "automatons." But then, of course, if the point of the game is to lure people into joining the military they wouldn't have much luck with the Executive Branch considering it's packed with a bunch of stupid chickenhawk mother fuckers.

Oh, by the way, no soldier in the history of the world is purely a mindless "ours is not to reason why" automaton bent on pointless destruction. Not even crazy terrorists. But I wonder how three-dimensional they bothered to make the brown people you're shooting at in this game. Also, why is it every sniper game tries to be realistic by making your scope move as you breathe. I think if I wanted to shoot somebody with a sniper rifle I'd remember the fact that my brain is capable of holding my breath for me for a few seconds so I can steadily aim the gun.

My First Game In Ruby.

2006-05-14T16:20:00.000+02:00

The game is called Fortuneteller and is based on a game (not a computer one) we really played as little kids. It's extremely simple, doesn't have any random elements and most likely will bore you after you play it twice or more. Anyway, I'm glad I made a software version of it.

lsdkfjlsdkfj

2006-04-18T13:49:00.000+02:00

From BBC News:

Catholic group Opus Dei has asked for a disclaimer to be placed on the film of The Da Vinci Code, released next month.

The organisation said it had written to Sony Pictures executives in Japan to ask the studio to emphasise that the film was a work of fantasy.

Based on Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code claims Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and had children, which was covered up by the Catholic Church.

Sony has said it is not a religious film, and is not meant to criticise.

"Some media have written that Sony is examining the possibility of putting at the beginning of the film an announcement to clarify that it is a work of fantasy and that any similarity with reality is purely coincidental," Opus Dei said in a statement.

This is typical. How come when my group, Opus from Bloom County, tried to petition the Catholic Church to put a similar announcement at the beginning of every Bible and sermon, not a single newspaper reported it?

Good news on "Baptism Of The Rats" And The Best Music Review Ever

2006-03-29T21:00:00.000+02:00

My friend who read the play says that it's very good and professional. I had a rather stressed day today but this piece of news really made me very happy.

The music review is here: http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/steveandabe/britneyspears.html
It's a must to read, even if you don't know who Britney Spears is (or wish you didn't know ;))

Sisyphus Unbound, Sexy Parties Abound

2006-03-28T14:47:00.000+02:00

Two releases today: One is the very short story Sisyphus Unbound!, which, despite the fact that it came out of my imagination, depresses me when I read it. Yet for some reason I keep reading it and being even more depressed. http://drlight.multics.org/lit/fables/sisyphus.html

In other release news, here is a program I wrote inspired by Stewie Griffin's Sexy Parties. Basically 3 little @ symbols dance around at random within the confines of map.0 (or map.1, or whatever you want them to dance around within the confines of, if you have a compiler and the ncurses library). It was basically just something I did out of boredom and being curious about how video games do bounds checking. http://drlight.multics.org/crawler

More Ridiculous Shit

2006-03-21T09:10:00.000+01:00

I already had a disgust for the hypocrisy of mainstream journalism and what it decides the public does or doesn't need to know, particularly the Associated Press, but this article just made it worse:

http://www.counterpunch.org/weir03182006.html

"Russian Socialists And Anarchists After October of 1917" Project.

2006-03-07T20:41:00.000+01:00

News I got from www.hro.org - a Russian human rights portal:
On March 10th there'll be a presentation of a new website - "Russian socialists and anarchists after October 1917 : history, ideas, traditions of democratic socialism and lives of the members of the left opposition to Bolshevik regime" - http://socialist.memo.ru (the website is up already, unfortunately it's only in Russian, if I have time and enthusiasm I'll try to write its English summary) as well as of two books under the research program of the historical human rights society Memorial "Socialists and anarchists - the members of the left opposition to Bolshevik regime".

Not dead! New story

2006-03-06T22:31:00.000+01:00

Hi, I'm not dead, just busy the past couple months. I wrote a story this afternoon entitled The Diner. It's only seven pages long, so you won't be too angry if you don't like it. You can find it here. Mahlzeit.

Old, But New For Me

2006-03-01T19:10:00.000+01:00

I keep stumbling upon rather funny old news.
This is an amusing article about Bush's music taste. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4435639.stm It has funny reader's comments as well, my favourite is the one by Gerard from Dublin and the very next one by Tim from Bangkok.

Another one is about a Dutch pastor who celebrated a Harry Potter mass for children. http://archives.tcm.ie/breakingnews/2002/01/13/story36273.asp

Disturbing

2006-02-27T21:18:00.000+01:00

The recent public opinion research showed that 75% of Russian residents support death penalty and only 4% support it's complete abolition (the other support the present moratorium on it). I find this very disturbing though not surprising. I also find disturbing that some people are against the death penalty only because they think of it as being too easy of a punishment. :-'(
Some other issues that piss me off have to do with the vice-head of the president's administration Vladislav Surkov. He said that the United Russia party should maintain their position as a party in power for at least 10-15 years. I also found another rather old (summer of 2005) article about what this guy said at the gatherings of the pro-Putin youth organization Nashi (Ours) that summer. He said that it is necessary to protect our youth from western influence and also said the following: "come soon[to us, into power] and we will hand you Russia" - so they don't even hide that their goal is to raise new political elite out of the people they tame. :-(

Russian Echo Of The Danish Cartoon Scandal.

2006-02-21T20:55:00.000+01:00

The Volgograd officials (Volgograd is a city in Russia)ordered to close down the newspaper "Gorodskiye Vesti" (City News) because of it's publishing a cartoon with Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed and Moses. Now guess who is initiator of this close down. Religious people? Not at all. Even some muslim religious officials commented that the decision was too harsh. The initiators were the local department of the United Russia party (the pro-Putin party in power that's becoming more and more like the CP in the Soviet Union) and some other political organizations. The cartoon itself is completely inoffensive and has a peacefull message.

A newspaper in another Russian city Vologda "Nash Region"(Our Region) was closed down by the owner of the media corporation it was a part of because of its reprinting the Danish cartoons. He said he did that to avoid the impending scandal and accusations and will form another periodical with the same staff. The editor in chief of the paper Anna Smirnova is being prosecuted according to the clause 282 of the Russian criminal code for promoting religiuos hatred/animosity. Actually the newspaper published the cartoons as an illustration to the article that presented various opinions of journalists, scientists, religious leaders and so on about the Danish scandal so I think printing of the caricatures was even necessary in that context and clearly there was no intention of offending anyone. Even if this intention existed I think such measures are totally unacceptable and anti-freedom of speech though I personally would disapprove the intention. As an acceptable measure for preventing scandals like this one I see having a disclaimer on the first page that would inform the reader of contained controversial material indicating its location and also to try locating the material so that it would be easy to avoid it for those who want it. Of course this won't stop religious fanatics but I would like to hope that more moderate people will appreciate it.

I Wish That Game Really Existed :)

2006-02-21T18:30:00.000+01:00

http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/001561.html

Gun-nuts - now in Russia.

2006-01-26T22:52:00.000+01:00

Today on my way home, on a metro train door I saw an ad for a weapon legalization seminar (with free entrance). It contained some awful propaganda phrases, like, “good guys should have weapons” and “only for real men”. I wanted to take a picture of it with my PDA camera but it came out blurred because I always feel awkward taking pictures in public places because that may attract attention to myself, for the same reason I decided not to make another try. Anyway, I'm posting that picture I took, the ad I'm talking about is the bigger one. Btw, this is a typical Moscow metro train door. Enjoy.

"Out of Their Element" Finished

2006-01-21T19:32:00.000+01:00

Here is the link to the newly formatted, finally completed play. Included this time are some older versions of the play from when I originally wrote it about 3 or 4 years ago (don't really remember) as well as all the notes and outline revisions from the second go round starting after Christmas 2005.

http://drlight.multics.org/lit/plays/element.pdf

Finally done

2006-01-19T12:29:00.000+01:00

After almost a month of working on it, the alchemist play is finally finished. As soon as Masha is finished formatting, the link will be posted to the pdf.

My Sister's Photo Art

2006-01-17T22:48:00.000+01:00

My sister creates beautiful photo art. If you want to see it, here is the
page: http://kaplja.photosight.ru . Most titles are in Russian, but if you'd like to know what any of them means I'll be glad to translate it for you if I can.

Forum

2006-01-16T20:01:00.000+01:00

Now this blog has its own forum category on friendy.siteburg.com. It has two sections for now: Discussion - for discussing the issues raised in and by the blog and Other Stuff for I don't know what.

A Rebel Police Dog

2006-01-16T18:31:00.000+01:00

Random And Cute.

2006-01-13T03:02:00.000+01:00

Randomly stumbled upon this:
http://caroandcats.blogspot.com

God Hates Faggy Coal Miners

2006-01-11T18:31:00.000+01:00

News item #2 for the day is this weird story. Thanks to my brother, Aaron, who pasted this link to me and its crazy supplement:

http://www.therecorddelta.com/main.php?story_id=3924&page=23
http://www.godhatesfags.com/fliers/jan2006/20060104_twelve-dead-miners.pdf

News item #1

2006-01-11T18:03:00.000+01:00

From the BBC:

Israel punishes US TV evangelist

Israel is pulling out of a $50 million deal with US TV evangelist Pat Robertson after he said Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine retribution.

Tourism Ministry spokesman Ido Hartuv said Israel would not sign a contract with Mr Robertson to build a biblical theme park by the Sea of Galilee.

You know, the greatest tragedy of this news is that now we won't be able to hear about the 500 people killed on the park's opening day when a suicide bomber disguised in one of the park's Giant Jesus mascot costumes snuck past security and blew himself up on the octopus ride. It would have been like that song from Frasier: "Dead people and steel tentacles all ovah my face. Yeah!"

More Pearls of Wisdom from Steph

2006-01-09T14:53:00.000+01:00

In part eighteen of our study on the great minds of West Virginia, I provide you with this log of Ronald and Steph` from #colond, who, after starting her freshman year at some college nobody's ever heard of in South Carolina of all places, has decided the next logical step in her career is to begin talking like Ariel Sharon no doubt will when they remove him from his coma. Enjoy. (Editorial comments in bold)

[06:00] roni> rofl and what school do you go to
[06:00] Steph`> Coastal Carolina University
[06:00] Steph`> For obvious reasons
[06:00] Steph`> coastal.edu
[06:00] roni> that sounds like a really elite school steph
[06:00] Steph`> I didn't say that my school was any better
[06:01] Steph`> But I am saying that her school is no less than mine, either.
[06:01] roni> really
[06:01] Steph`> Truly.
[06:01] roni> i was going to say nc state is probably 20 times better than a liberal arts college in buttfuck sc
[06:01] roni> but whatever floats your boat dood
[06:01] Steph`> And anyway, I know that people that go to USC are able to schedule their classes in the same fashion as mine
[06:02] Steph`> Perhaps your friend is just not very talented in the ways of turning things in on time. You say she does not work - obviously her ambitions cannot be so great

Up until now, Steph` had avoided talking like a Jedi from Star Wars. Unfortunately, it all gets worse from here.

[06:02] Steph`> Myrtle Beach is not buttfuck SC
[06:02] Steph`> Nor is it a liberal arts college
[06:02] Steph`> Though it was for a time

Interesting, considering Coastal Carolina University's "About" webpage describes it as an "undergraduate liberal arts institution." (Source: http://www.coastal.edu/about/)

[06:02] Steph`> it has since been accredited accordingly
[06:02] Steph`> and while we're pointing fingers, Ronald
[06:02] roni> it says it right here on their page
[06:02] Steph`> I think we should analyze your two year studies
[06:02] roni> State funded liberal arts university in Conway, South Carolina.
[06:03] Steph`> Well, as of recently, we are no longer simply a liberal arts, though we were
[06:04] Steph`> And not that Coastal Carolina was my first choice. I am by no means lifting it up to any higher light than you would. I disdain it as much as any. I came here for the exboyfriend, because he was too stupid to get into USC.

It was here I first noted that apparently it is more important when having an informal conversation on IRC to use words like "disdain" and phrases like "lifting it up to any higher light" than to consistently capitalize and punctuate one's sentences. You won't win any sixth grade poetry competitions remembering how to use commas and periods, folks!

[06:04] Steph`> But as that has since dissolved, as I should have prospected, I am stuck here in this university that I hardly like at all, but have had the pleasure of falling in love with a good many of its professors, finding them diamonds in the rough

I assume here she wanted to say "as I should have expected" but found it much smarter and more impressive to simply invent a new definition for the verb prospect instead. From the dictionary:

v. tr.To search for or explore (a region) for mineral deposits or oil.
v. intr.To explore for mineral deposits or oil.
v 1: search for something desirable; "prospect a job" 2: explore for useful or valuable things or substances, such as minerals
(Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=prospect)

Alas, Steph! If you had only searched for mineral deposits in your relationship it might not have failed! Someone has listened to Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" one too many times, I think.

[06:05] Steph`> and I benefit greatly from them. After all, it isn't an undergraduate school that really makes a difference in the end, anyway
[06:05] Steph`> It is your graduate school that really dictates
[06:05] * Quits: JoeHigash (JoeHigash@20132188200.user.veloxzone.com.br) (Ping timeout: 248 seconds)
[06:06] Steph`> And from there, I guess, it is where I intend on staying for a spell, as my doctorate will take a while.
[06:06] Steph`> So, I guess professional student will be the fill-in on questionnaires for a while.

I wasn't aware one could be a professional student. Professional implies one is already skilled in doing something (and usually making a living off it), not in the process of learning it.

[06:06] Steph`> As for you, Ronald, I suppose you couldn't hope to study for anything more than a teacher's aid, is it? What is our ambitions these days?

Yes, what is our ambitions these days? Try as she might, Steph can't escape the poor speaking habits of a typical West Virginian. The tragedy is...her chosen major is English. Maybe the god of irony and humility will reward us all for putting up with her presence in #colond by convincing her to title her graduate thesis "What is our ambitions these days? Can we as but mortal mans ever hopes to reached them?" Maybe she can even include a few insightful words of encouragement from her mentor, Smeagol from Lord of the Rings.

[06:06] Steph`> Or do we live under the wing of our obsession?

OK. What the fuck does that even mean?

[06:07] roni> lol what
[06:07] roni> this isn't about me steph
[06:07] Steph`> You certainly didn't make scruples of turning the conversation my way. I was only repaying the compliment :)

Translation: You, sir, are a cad and I demand satisfaction! Muskets at dawn! Good day to you! I said good day, sir!!!

[06:08] roni> well if i really have to explain the conversation we just had
[06:08] roni> that you started about nc state being lackluster
[06:09] roni> and how i realized beforehand you'd be like OH WELL YOU GO TO COMMUNITY COLLEGE
[06:09] roni> then you probably also realize why i'm not chatting about it
[06:09] Steph`> I was saying that it was not an ivy league school, nor one that had any more credentials than any other university in North or South Carolina. It is, I may state, even a public school. No different than mine. As you were implying my school was somehow lacking, because of the flexibility of scheduling?
[06:10] Steph`> Then you probably shouldn't have started the conversation. You do not have to defend the honor of someone who would likely not return the favor.
[06:10] roni> no i obviously wasn't insulting your school's flexibility of scheduling
[06:11] roni> rofl i think i was actually defending the honor of nc state
[06:11] roni> as crazy as that is
[06:11] Steph`> If you attended any public school, you'd know they're all one and the same a joke in their own rights.
[06:12] Steph`> Or any such smaller private school for that matter..
[06:12] Steph`> Education has left it lacking in challenges these days, I've found.

Steph forgot to add, "From my 18 years of experience with the education system as a student in the middle of nowhere in one of the poorest states in America."

[06:12] Steph`> Where you manage to find a connection with human beings in general is the real reason for it.

George W. Bush once asked, "Is our children learning?" I think the answer is clear: they certainly is. And what's more--and what relieves me to know having two brothers in school in America--is that they also is having a lots of ambitions.

The Death of Sokrates

2006-01-08T18:26:00.000+01:00

The Death of Sokrates is something I wrote soon after Baptism of the Rats. It was actually an idea I had two years ago when I had the bad idea of reading a lot of Platon. My experience with Platon left me with two impressions. The first was, "Wow, this guy sure is a stupid asshole." The second, specifically the stories of Criton and of Sokrates' trial in Athens, was, "Yeah, right. What a load of bullshit." This play addresses the latter (mostly Criton).

Synopsis:
After drinking away the bribe meant for the guard of the prison where Sokrates is being held before his execution, Criton panics and runs to the house of Platon--who subsequently hatches his own plan for improving his status in Greek society and getting rid of Sokrates for personal reasons.

Notes:
This was a brief play and I finished it in about four hours. The formatting took about thirty minutes.

Baptism of the Rats

2006-01-08T18:17:00.000+01:00

Baptism of the Rats is slightly under the standard length for a full three-act play. However, after writing it I could not see any way to make it longer without adding unnecessary scenes or dialogue. Therefore, at 76 pages, it is not quite a full-length play--even a short one--but I like it nonetheless.

Synopsis:
Loosely based on people I actually know (as well as myself) here in Vienna, the story focuses on a small group of young artists and phony intellectuals and their struggle to retain some grain of truth in a world full of phoniness. In the end, they are faced with the only two options anyone really has: living a lie and knowing it, or living a lie and not realizing it because the liars are too good at their job and you aren't too keen on finding out the truth. To take the edge off how maudlin and lame that sounds, I tried to make it a comedy. Enjoy!

Notes:
Once again, this wouldn't be in the shape it's in without Masha Rubina's skills as a formatter and proofreader.

Don't Get Me Wrong, Please

2006-01-08T18:09:00.000+01:00

I hate blogs as much as anyone. But I'm just too lazy/busy to bother writing HTML for a site. This is so much easier and saves me the limited bandwidth on Multics.org that I need for the actual content.