I just noticed that the initial digits in some timestamps my code logs out looked familiar.
It turns out that for one glorious second about 38 hours ago, the Unix timestamp value (in decimal) equaled my personal identification number.
And I missed it. Drat.
Danish readers born on on September 13 should be prepared!
It seems they're using a website template that wants to have individual descriptions for each product, even if the product has very little individuality to it, leading to such gems as
4' x 3' stage decks are exactly the same size as a 3' x 4' stage deck.
It's amazing.
or (though excerpts cannot possibly capture the surreal beauty of the whole thing. It's like trying to photograph the horizon. Go read in it context, please!)
4' x 4' plexi stage decks are the not as heavy as the 4' x 8' plexi deck.
For some obscure reason, the quiet exasperation of these lines makes me absurdly happy. I can go to bed satisfied now. (Which, considering what seems to amuse me at this hour, must be high time).
Against random individual opponents I will defend the reasonableness of my opinions, but not my moral right to hold and express them. If the latter cannot be assumed granted, then why are we having a conversation in the first place?
(I will, however, occasionally defend the right of others to hold and express their opinions, when it needs doing and does not appear to be too pointless. That's different.)
I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:
In which the Garfield cast enact a Dinosaur Comics pastiche, creating a sort of complement to No. 5 "Qwantzfield".
Art clipped from the strips of 1994-02-14, 1994-04-19, 2001-04-10, 2003-03-24, 2005-03-08, 2005-07-10, and 2007-02-15.
I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:
I drained the colors from the 1995-02-27 Garfield strip and put new ones in. Does it bother you that Garfield is now a gray/white cat instead of an orange one? Should it bother you? Complex issues arise.
First, the strip already has the "token gray" character Nermal, but his appearances are few and far between, especially considering how many gray cats there are in real life. Surely having Garfield be gray in a single strip is just a (small) step towards breed parity in Square Root of Minus Garfield?
Unfortunately, not unambiguously so. Because Garfield already has an established color scheme, any change it is apt to be taken as implying that the change is for the better. Is gray better than orange for cat fur? In my (unscientific) experience it is certainly more common. Is the recolored strip perhaps an attempt to reinforce/perpetuate the notion that a "default" cat is (or ought to be) be gray and that it is meaningful to think of "orange" as a primary attribute of one cat though we would not consider the greyness of another one similarly distinctive?
On the other hand, we must not forget that Garfield is a stereotypically mean, egotistical (and, yes, squirrel-maiming) jerkass. That does not ordinarily reflect badly on all orange cats, because, well, duh, it's Garfield! But once we change his color, it is no more "just Garfield", and the characterization begins to interact with the coloring. In this context the strip seems to say that gray cats are egotistical squirrel-maimers. Strictly speaking it only asserts that some gray cats sometimes maim squirrels. But that was never in doubt to begin with, so it is inevitable that it will be perceived as a statement about gray cats in general.
Of course, one may also take the position that any attempt to use the coloring to make a point, no matter whether in favor of gray or orange, is an unwelcome abuse of the original strip's artistic vision. The counterpoint to that is if you don't even know what the point is, how can you be sure it's being made in the first place? Perhaps it's all just in your head.
On the other-other-other hand, now that the possibility of a gray Garfield has been aired, the cat is out of the bag, so to say. Even if henceforth Garfield is always orange, that too will be taken as a statement of sorts.
So, should you be offended? You decide. But eventually we'll all just have to come to terms with the fact that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:
With apologies to David Lynch.
Original strip from 1994-03-05, with new art cribbed from the 1991-01-03 and 1992-08-09 strips.
Earlier I also did No. 124: Krazy minus Kat, but didn't post about it. And a whole slew of Comment on a Postcard reconstructions.
I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:
Readers who have been away from the Internet for the past several years, please see Lolcats at TV Tropes. Or the Other Wiki.
It's easy enough to create a Garfield lolcat. The trick is to find a framing such that Garfield is kept even remotely in character.
Original strip from 2007-02-14.
I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:
Like many other "funny" newspaper strips, the colour in Garfield seldom really adds value to the joke. It seems that colour is just added as an afterthought, because surely the newspapers did not invest in full-colour-on-every-page capable offset machines just to run monochrome line art!
However, for a strip that does not really need colour for its artistic message, we could put the colour process to better use, to wit, saving paper by printing three panels of line art in the space of one.
In this strip from 2004-04-16, the first panel is in cyan ink, the second in magenta and the third in yellow.
I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:
Strip from 1982-11-01. Original dialogue.
Chief Judge Easterbrook swings his trusty cluebat in USA v. Pulungan:
A regulation is published for all to see. People can adjust their conduct to avoid liability. A designation by an unnamed official, using unspecified criteria, that is put in a desk drawer, taken out only for use at a criminal trial, and immune from any evaluation by the judiciary, is the sort of tactic usually associated with totalitarian régimes. Government must operate through public laws and regulations.
Back in 1996 when the web was young I started a website to host my collection of railway track diagrams. It eventually became trackmap.net. It has updated in fits and starts – the last time it did so was in early 2006 – but I still plan to get time to do updates in the future, such as the maps from this summer's Frankfurt trip.
Despite the irregular updates, trackmap.net was probably my main claim to Internet fame, until I wrote xcftools (which, incidentally exists solely because I needed it for producing track maps easier). Up until now, I have updated a static recent changes page whenever I did something – but seriously, nobody is going to look at that very often to see if there's any news, what with the multi-year hiatuses.
But perhaps some readers would find it useful to subscribe to an RSS/Atom feed for updates to trackmap.net and have their feed reader check it quietly for them? That sounds like a plan. So here is what I'll do: Every time I update trackmap.net (or its subsites) in the future, I'll post about it on this very blog, with the label "trackmap.net".
The label search page becomes the new changelog page, and the feed for new updates is here (Atom) or here (RSS). (Note: These feeds will show only posts related to track maps. If you select the Blogger-provided feed link in the navigation bar, you will get my full blog feed where I blather about various other topics at irregular intervals).
Old changes are still at http://dk.trackmap.net/news.
This posting serves to populate the trackmap.dk labels such that the links just given will not be empty.
In EEOC v. Lee's Log Cabin (7th. Cir, 2008-10-06) I read this marvellous piece of logic:
The dissent also asserts that "[i]t is undisputed that at all relevant times, Stewart was not only HIV positive . . . but she also had AIDS. So the allegation in the complaint that Stewart was 'HIV positive' is consistent with the fact that she has AIDS." Dissent, at p. 18. No, it's not, but the opposite is true. That is, an allegation that Stewart has AIDS is consistent with an allegation that she was HIV-positive, but not vice versa. If a person has AIDS she is necessarily HIV-positive; but a person who is HIV-positive does not necessarily have AIDS.(footnote 3). In the kind of logic I was taught, "consistency" between two propositions means that it is conceivable that both can be true at the same time, or (more syntactically) that assuming both will not let you derive a self-contradiction. This is a symmetric notion. It makes no sense to assert that A is consistent with B yet B is not consistent with A.
I wonder whether there is a particular legal meaning to "consistent" which is different enough from the logical one to make the above quote senseful.
Ferdinand Foch is remembered for remarking, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, that it was "not a peace but a 20-year armistice". This was eerily prophetic – he was right to within a handful of months. Foch must have had an unusually precise sense of the forces that make history go.
Or did he? I wonder how many would-be prophets characterized the treaty as an armistice for 10, 15 or 25 years, and were quietly forgotten by history.
It's easy to pick successful prophecies when you're allowed to wait until they come true before you decide which prophecies to point to.
A customer needed to read some simple information out of our server software programmatically, and suggested that a "SOAP API" might be a good way to do that. To me fell the task of researching what that might mean.
SOAP is a lightweight protocol intended for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. Why, it says so right in the spec!
I dread to think of a protocol that the W3C would call "heavyweight".
I found this judgement through a Groklaw article some time ago. Recently I desired to reread it, but it took me quite a lot of tries to remember sufficiently precise search terms to locate it again. Clearly it has not received enough link love.
It's about a young couple who bought a house and cut down a mulberry tree which leanend over the backyard but actually belonged to their new neighbour. The neighbour sued. Fairly banal case, except that it is presented with hilarious wit.
I give you Thayer v. DeWolf, memorandum order by Magistrate Judge Goodbread, who I think would make a good hacker. Respectfully recommended for your reading pleasure.
In 2003, after I completed my PhD dissertation in Copenhagen, I moved to Edinburgh to work as a post-doc for Joe Wells. Joe was rather eager to have me start as soon as possible such that I could receive a braindump from to the previous occupant of my position, who would be leaving soon. The plan ended up being that I'd complete and deliver the dissertation on Friday, and start work in Edinburgh the following Monday.
I arrived on Monday with a suitcase containing several changes of clothes. Meanwhile, my parents were cleaning out my flat in Copenhagen, packing my stuff into boxes and having it shipped to Scotland. (Thanks, Mom and Dad – you're the best!) Note to self: such tight schedules can not be recommended for future job changes.
The first thing I was told to do after I arrived was to go a bank and open an account into which my first salary could be deposited. Salary payments must be prepared some weeks in advance (paying out money always seems to involve red tape in proportion to the size of the organization), and I was arriving near the end of the month, so payroll needed an account number for me post haste. Otherwise they'd have to, I don't know, special-case my payment or something. That, apparently, would be a Bad Thing.
The Royal Bank of Scotland had a branch right on campus. I went there and they created an "instant access savings account" for me. A few weeks later I discovered that this was not quite the type of account I wanted; I'd rather have a "current account". I don't remember what the difference was. Presumably I had good reasons for switching.
For some reason, my existing account could not just have its type changed; I had to create a new account of the right type instead. Once I'd gotten the account number at payroll updated, I went to the bank and asked to have the savings account closed and its balance transferred to the current account. This happened.
Except that the savings account turned out to be not quite closed. At the end of the year I received an account statement for it. It had earned 6 pence of interest by containing half a month's salary for a few weeks, so its balance now read £0.06. There didn't seem to be any way to react to this that was worth the trouble, so I didn't.
![[My letter to RBS]](http://henning.makholm.net/blog/images/rbs12large.jpg)
Time passed. Every so often, the monthly statement for my current account would be accompanied by another sheet reminding me that I had £0.06 in the savings account. In 2005 I moved back to Denmark. I had the current account closed (successfully) and its balance wired to my Danish bank.
But that poor savings account kept sending me statements for the same £0.06 several times a year. Each statement probably cost the bank at least ten times the outstanding balance to print and mail. But I'd become less than satisfied with the Royal Bank of Scotland's service (for reasons that I may blog about later if I find myself in a particularly petty mood one evening). Anyhow, I figured that they deserved it, somehow.
But perhaps three years is enough to forgive and move on. Today statement #12 arrived in the mail. I have just spent about a pound in stamps on returning it with a request to have it shut down.
Ain't I a nice guy?
Here is a poster I saw in the storefront of a travel agency in Frankfurt. I don't know which projection this world map tries to be, but if that isn't a barrel-shaped world it depicts, you can call me a barrel.
But just what do these references actually reference? I find them mildly funny because they evoke memories of the Xkcd episode "Blogofaire", as well as the small print in "Online Communities".
On the other hand, I don't get out much. For all I know, Doctorow might be famous for being an avid balloon pilot in addition to a writer, and that's what everybody are alluding to. On the other-other hand, I cannot seem to google up any non-humorous Doctorow/balloon juxtapositions.
So perhaps it is all an in-joke referencing the xkcd strips, or perhaps xkcd was itself referencing some ur-joke known to only a few initiates (or, alternatively, to everybody but me). Impossible to know, really – when an Internet meme reaches a certain critical mass, half of those who pass it on have no idea what it refers to, anyway. Close to nobody ever played Zero Wing, but that does not prevent the all your X are belong to us snowclone from being productive.
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Henning Makholm is a computer scientist and software developer living in Copenhagen, Denmark. Find out more about him on his personal website.
