Well, this is convenient

Flickr: Discussing KEXP’s “Rockabilly car show” Sept.29th in Seattle Flickr Meetups:

This is the 20th anniversary of KEXP’s “Shake the shack rockabilly ball”, and as usual the weekend ends with a hot rod show at the Shanty Tavern on Lake City Way. It used to be at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard, but after too much street racing and burnout contests (the hood of my car was covered in shredded rubber!) they had to move it.

the Shanty is pretty close to me, and if the weather cooperates, this could be fun.

some rough beauty there




night work

Originally uploaded by sparkrobot.

Port cities look so different by night than they do by day. A lit-up crane looks like sculpture, a tank farm takes on a sacred appearance, all clean and white.

The generous and talented sparkrobot threw me a lifeline with the gift of his now obsolete Moto RAZR (he’s moved on to the iPhone).

Many thanks for the phone and the excuse to get out of the house and see Georgetown.

Amazon creates gigantic DRM-free music store!

Amazon creates gigantic DRM-free music store!:

Amazon is selling 2,000,000 tracks as DRM-free MP3s! [and they’re 256 kbit files, from what I have seen — ed]

But not all of them as tracks. As noted earlier, Radiohead still insist on selling their material as complete albums (as if we can’t then shuffle or skip the tracks we don’t like as much). Whatever. Don’t know who else does that, actually.
Picture 6-1

And Led Zeppelin? Still a pure analog hold out.

Picture 7

Interesting that the tracks are the same price –US$.99 — while the albums are a dollar (or more) less that at iTunes. Is that competition stuff we keep hearing about?

You have to use their downloader application to get your stuff, but you get a free track as an inducement to download it and set it up (and for them to keep testing and verifying).

Continue reading “Amazon creates gigantic DRM-free music store!”

deal with it

no one made you go to law school, punk:

The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall University — where he says he ranked in the top third of his class — is a “waste,” he says. Some former high-school friends are earning considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt.

Sure doesn’t sound like the law is his true calling, does it?
Continue reading “deal with it”

better to stay silent and be thought a fool

Ahmadinejad speaks:

For those of you who can’t watch video clips from work, a student asked about the treatment of gays in Iran — as a rule, they’re executed — and Ahmadinejad responded, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”

Did you notice the crowd’s reaction? The students were laughing at him. Ahmadinejad became the subject of mockery and ridicule, simply by showing up and stating his ridiculous beliefs.

It’s exactly why Columbia was right to extend the invitation. What better way to make a fool of Ahmadinejad than to offer him a microphone?

Exactly.

links for 2007-09-24

the dark underside of computing

Tim Bray has been experimenting with some new darling of a language — Erlang — and finds it wanting. In the same sense of the “Hello World” application every language offers, he has taken a sample problem of parsing, sorting, and tabulating and for all Ruby’s slowness, it crushes Erlang.

WF III: Lessons:

There’ve been comments and blogs along the lines of “WTF, trying to shake down Erlang using what amounts to a degenerate Awk script!!? This isn’t what Erlang is for! It’s all just I/O! Lines of text are so 1980’s!”

Nope; the further this goes, the more I think it’s a valid line of research. You know all those kazillions of Sun servers out there? Let me tell you, they’re not all running state-of-the-art Java-on-the-net apps. A huge proportion of all those cycles goes into Perl scripts and COBOL batches and C++ meat-grinders and FORTRAN number-crunching. Furthermore, if you look at the numbers from running my Perl and Ruby scripts, it’s obvious that they’re pegging both the CPU and I/O needles; so they’re nicely multidimensional in a simple way.

This is the kind of nasty unglamorous job that a lot of our customers run all the time to pay their rents, and this whole business is making a big bet on many-core computers, and it’s just not on to tell all those people that those are the wrong kind of jobs for the new iron.

As anyone going into professional computing should be aware, you don’t start with a blank slate or new hardware very often. More likely, you’ll be adding a feature or hunting a bug in someone else’s code, probably in a language you hate, with no comments, a raft of opaquely named variables and routines, and trying to work around production jobs on over-allocated hardware.

Deal with it. A lot of these new languages about saving programmer time with all kinds of tricks. Programmer time gets used and paid for once, while execution time on the system might be daily, hourly, maybe constant. That’s where the efficiencies are, for many.