Ben's · Beta · LJ

I'm sure you can see where this is going.

;; Gnomon - on Thu Apr 17 23:54:52 EDT 2008
;; sha1sum of lastname, firstname, newline:
;; 3952893c66ffbe071f266caa04b25161c1da30a1
;; Because I wanted a version that would Do
;; The Right Thing with capitals and plural
;; cases, and because mixing logic, display
;; and generation code does not satisfy me.

(define (iota n)
  (let loop ((l '()) (i 0))
    (if (> i n)
        l
        (loop (cons i l) (+ i 1)))))
;; See SRFI-1 for a better version of this;
;; my function is backward in several ways.
;; It can also be argued that SRFI-42 could
;; allow an implementation that consed up a
;; bit less temporary garbage. If SRFI-1 is
;; out, though, SRFI-42 is way out. Basics.

(define (plural? n . up)
  (let ((.. string-append)
        (num (number->string n))
        (bot " bottle")
        (ltr (if (null? up) "n" "N")))
    (case n ((0) (.. ltr "o more" bot "s"))
            ((1) (.. num bot))
            (else (.. num bot "s")))))
;; PLURAL? has to merge the logic for cases
;; when the string will be used at the head
;; of a sentence, requiring a capital; when
;; only one bottle is left, which needs the
;; singular form; and when none are left at
;; all, which requires a special case. It's
;; lucky that not all combinations of these
;; cases can be reached, allowing us to use
;; only three of the possible six branches.

(define (verse n)
  (let ((.. string-append)
        (top (plural? n 1))
        (mid (plural? n))
        (nxt (plural? (if (= n 0)
                          99
                          (- n 1))))
        (beer " of beer")
        (wall " on the wall")
        (actn (if (= n 0)
                  "Go to the store and buy some more, "
                  "Take one down and pass it around, ")))
    `(,(.. top beer wall ", " mid beer ".")
       .  ,(.. actn nxt  beer wall "."))))
;; VERSE conses a pair where the CAR stores
;; the first line of the verse, and the CDR
;; the second. There is no sense in using a
;; proper list; we would just waste the end
;; of it anyways. Also: yay quasiquotation!

(define (sing verse)
  (let ((n newline))
    (display (car verse)) (n)
    (display (cdr verse)) (n) (n)))
;; SING exploits the implicit BEGIN wrapped
;; around the body of a LET to DISPLAY both
;; lines of a verse in order. Also note the
;; pleasant symmetry of CAR and CDR that we
;; get to use because of our choice made up
;; above in VERSE to use a dotted pair as a
;; representation instead of a proper list.

(for-each sing (map verse (iota 99)))
;; MAP for effect, FOR-EACH for side effect

It's been submitted for inclusion, of course, with the following lines as an additional note to the site maintainers:

;; The code is long, the comments too;
;; A bit less wrong than version two;
;; No syntax-case, like version three;
;; Just one right place per step, you see.

I'm a little bit in love with the A+ version.

Current Mood:

tired

Sorry.

For a project about which I'll be writing more in a bit, I needed the ability to quickly produce long strings - on the order of a few dozen, and in some case a few hundred, mebibytes. I went through several iterations before I came up with a version that I liked. That version is called rep6 in the below source code; in my personal library file I would just call it rep.

#!/bin/gawk -f 

# by gnomon
# sha1sum of printf "%s %s", firstname, lastname:
# 1110be40263bc427f7906f4e01c0cc218c6daf6e
# Tue Apr  8 21:11:32 EDT 2008
#
# posted to #awk in the hopes of garnering some feedback
# about style, ideas and performance. 

# GPL v2 (but it's not finished yet, so why bother?)

function rep1(s,n,      r) {
# O(n) allocate/appends
# 2 lines of code
# This is the simplest possible solution that will work:
# just repeatedly append the input string onto the value
# that will be passed back, decrementing the input count
# until it reaches zero.
        while (n-->0) r = r s;
        return r;
}

function rep2(s,n,      r) {
# O(1) + O(n) allocate/appends
# 3 lines of code
# The idea here is to generate a string of length n with
# sprintf and then use gsub to replace everything in the
# generated string with the input string. Hopefully this
# will take advantage of some smart internal workings of
# the regex engine to avoid repeated allocations.
# UPDATE: false hope. This is by far the slowest tactic.
        r = sprintf(("%0"n-1"s"),"0");
        gsub(/0/,s,r);
        return r;
}

function rep3(s,n,      c,n2,r,r2) {
# O(log n) allocate/appends UPDATE: this is a lie!
# 6 lines of code
# Here we trade for faster execution by sacrificing some
# code clarity. We keep a temporary string and a counter
# that we start off at 1, doubling both until we pass n;
# then we start over at 1, and we repeat until exactly n
# is reached. This may be ugly but it is faaaaaaast.
        for (;c < n; c += n2) {
                r2 = s;
                #for (n2=1; n2*2<(n-c); n2*=2) {
                #     APPEND++; r2=r2 r2}
                for (n2=1; n2*2<(n-c); n2*=2) r2=r2 r2;
                # APPEND++;
                r  = r r2;
        }
        return r;
}

function rep4(s,n) {
# O(1) allocate/appends
# 2 lines of code
# A feat - both stupid and naive! Is consing up a string
# to avoid repeated print operations really that bad, or
# can good buffering make a dumb idea actually workable?
# UPDATE: no, it can't. This still handily beats out the
# gsub version, but it's slower than rep1 and way slower
# than rep3. Moral: buffer not the unbufferable!
        while (n-->0) printf s;
        print "";
}

function rep5(s,n,      r,x) {
# O(log n) allocate/appends - *actually true* this time!
# 3 lines of code
# Rather than keeping track of a counter like rep3 does,
# here we just use the call stack and recurse. Turns out
# that I run out of RAM way faster than gawk runs out of
# call stack. There may be a good threshold at which the
# recursion can halt and we fall back to a simple append
# approach like rep1 - but really, why bother? This code
# is simple and fast. Also, the shortest possible string
# is one character, and 32 recursive calls turn that one
# character into 4,294,967,296; that is more than enough
# to fill all available RAM on most current machines. If
# it doesn't, the performance is likely to be limited by
# the speed of malloc() (and therefore sbrk()) anyhow. A
# quick test reveals that gawk 3.1.5 on a 32-bit x86 box
# with 512 megs of RAM can stack just short of 7e3 calls
# before segfaulting; dc -e'2 7000^f' prints a very long
# number indeed: 2108 decimal digits, to be precise, and
# it will presumably take a good long while before every
# normal machine has that many bytes of RAM. We're safe.
        #DEPTH++;
        if (n < 2) x = (n == 1);
        else r = rep5(s,(n-(x=(n%2==1)))/2);
        return (r r (x?s:""));
}

function rep6(str,num,  remain,result) {
# O(log n) allocate/appends - identical to rep5
# 7 lines of code
# This is a much cleaner version of the preceding block.
# For some reason I enjoy reading awk code bereft of the
# optional semicolons, but I enjoy writing it with; this
# is odd, but there it is. It'd be less embarassing if I
# showed only the below without any of the above, but it
# would be less valuable and less honest.
        #DEPTH++; # global var for counting recursions
        if (num < 2) {
                remain = (num == 1)
        } else {
                remain = (num % 2 == 1)
                result = rep6(str, (num - remain) / 2)
        }
        return result result (remain ? str : "")
}

BEGIN {
        #NUM = 10000000;     STR = "foo";
        NUM  = ARGV[1] + 0; STR = ARGV[2];
        delete ARGV[1];    delete ARGV[2];
        if        (ARGV[3] ~ /0/) {
                exit 0;
        } else if (ARGV[3] ~ /1/) {
                print rep1(STR,NUM);
        } else if (ARGV[3] ~ /2/) {
                print rep2(STR,NUM);
        } else if (ARGV[3] ~ /3/) {
                print rep3(STR,NUM);
                #print APPEND >> "/dev/stderr";
        } else if (ARGV[3] ~ /4/) {
                rep4(STR,NUM);
        } else if (ARGV[3] ~ /5/) {
                print rep5(STR,NUM);
                #print DEPTH >> "/dev/stderr";
        } else if (ARGV[3] ~ /6/) {
                print rep6(STR,NUM);
                #print DEPTH >> "/dev/stderr";
        }
        delete ARGV[3];
        exit 0;
}

# FIXME:
# - investigate whether some tactics work better when
#   consing small iterations of very large strings;
# * done: the version that starts at one, doubles until
#   overflow and then starts again at one
# - see if there's some way of making the gsub approach
#   work better: it's too fun to abandon outright;
# - is there some way to use fewer state variables in
#   rep3? The current version is really awkward;
# - is there any way to collapse or compound the r2 and
#   r assignments in rep3 to shave a line or two?
# * sure, but rep3 is a dead end anyway. Reusing the
#   value returned by a variable assignment to remove a
#   reference to it works, as in rep5, but the result
#   is a mess and a waste of effort. Still fun, though.

Current Mood:	tired
Current Music:	Postmaster, from Demographically Unsound by Tettix

I'm tapping away on my phone because there's something I want to get out of my increasingly murky brain before I get so tired that it disappears completely, and there's a good chance that'll happen before I get home.

The thing is this: mikeX, a fellow who hangs out in an IRC channel that I also frequent (#awk on irc.freenode.net), mentioned that he ran a performance comparison between a couple of constructions that ought to be equivalent:

• time gawk '/test/{print $2}' file.txt
• time mawk '/test/{print $2}' file.txt
• time grep test file.txt | awk '{print $2}'

The file^[2] was fifteen mebibytes of short lines with only one line, the last, containing the string "test". The first command turned out to be the slowest by far - about an order of magnitude. The second and third executed at roughly the same speed.

What makes this particularly interesting is that mikeX had just finished skimming through the same paper^[3] that I had coincidentally re-read just the night before - one which compares the merits of several classes of regular expression and regex engines - and concluded that the speed difference was due to a deficiency of the type discussed in the paper (basically, that grep, awk and others use a DFA-style matcher which offers sometimes huge speedups with patterns that do not require backreferences, and that Perl and several other languages use a backtracking matcher with horrific worst-case performance even in those situations when the simpler, hugely faster DFA could be used instead).

One the one hand, this is definitely not the case, since the pattern in question is a fixed string and therefore is both the best case for any matcher and devoid of the kind of backtracking that would highlight the bad behaviour described in the paper; on the other hand, something is causing that performance delta. So what gives?

I seem to recall that grep calls into play some kind of fast-path logic when the pattern is a fixed string (something tricky like Boyer-Moore? Something macho like exploiting CPU-specific string-scanning instructions? Something slightly less macho but more insightful, like taking into account cache fill timings?). I know that mawk is reputed to be a very fast version of the tool. I suspect that the matcher in gawk is quite sophisticated. I'm curious to see how Dmitry Zakharov's busybox awk applet ranks on the speed tests.

What I'm getting at, here, is that I'm about to do some code-diving that I think may yield some very educational results. I'll need some sleep first, though.

Hey, here's my stop.

1

OK, I'm cleaning this up after getting home. HTML editing and linking is way, way too painful to do with T9 and an impoverished text editor.

2

If you're curious enough to want to duplicate the test, you can generate your own test file with the following pipeline:

time awk 'function r(s,n){while(n-->0)print s};BEGIN{s=ARGV[1];n=ARGV[2];r(s,n);print "test case hello world";r(s,n);exit 0}' "Hello world, how are you" 300000 > test-file.txt

That shouldn't take longer than a second or two to run, and should generate a file with the md5sum 9cf078b42b15b6927d04b08c82699e16.

3

Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast, Russ Cox, 2007-01

• A kid, not a day older than sixteen, in a secondhand jacket, sporting a red fitted cap covered in thin black squiggles with a stylized letter F above the bill. His chin crept back to halfway between his underbite and his adam's apple. He fiddled with his iPod as he sat down, then stowed it in his backpack. He pulled a dog-eared Penguin Classic out of his artfully distressed backpack - I couldn't resolve the title - and settled in. Five stops whipped by. It wasn't until he dotted the page that he noticed he was crying.
• Two large guys with identical haircuts and choice of clothing style. They breezed into the subway just behind a very blonde, very leggy lady wearing a very brief skirt indeed, and they all sat down together. The guys both wore very fashionable glasses and expensive clothing that didn't hide that they were both a good bit overweight. They grinned at each other and the rest of the subway and barely paid any attention to her attempts at making conversation. One nudged the other with his elbow and leaned in to crack a joke. They both laughed so hard for so long that they didn't see the lady get up to offer her seat to a swaying, grateful octogenerian.
• A lady in her late fifties dourly poking at the keypad of a Nokia N70 and convincing it to map her keypresses into ideographs. She filled two entire screens, then patiently waited until the subway reached a point on the track where it hit open air and GSM reception. She carefully examined the small cornerful of pixels that graphed her signal strength, waited for it to max out, then hit Send. Once the screen emptied, she stashed the handset in her coat pocket, chuckled, then broke out into a grin so wide that I couldn't help but return it.

To: CBC Radio (via)
From: [excised]
X-from-city: Toronto
X-from-province: Ontario

Dear CBC,

I am addressing the broadcasters and/or administrators, and not the show creators, right? Because if this *is* being read by a show creator, I'm talking to the wrong people. Could you forward it on to the guy with the corner office and the speakerphone? Much obliged. Coffee's on me next time.

Dear CBC,

Canadia 2056 troubles me. I've heard and read excellent things about it. A couple of my friends who got on the bandwagon early enough to catch the first season in its entirety tell me that it's excellent. The premise is right up my alley, and I grew up on Grant Naylor and Douglas Adams, after all.

Dear CBC, why do you make it so hard for new listeners to find this show?

There aren't any podcasts.

There aren't any sample episodes (not even the first one!).

There is a rather pricy CD set available, but it seems that the only place selling it is the online CBC Shop. The high price isn't a showstopper, but the fact that the Shop only accepts credit cards or gift cards which have been purchased with credit cards certainly is.

Dearest Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I understand that there are guild and union complexities here that make distribution challenging. I really do understand it, and I don't mean to downplay how difficult it is to work these things out.

Loveliest and most rose-scented CBC, please also understand, though, that you've got a great show here, and a potentially rabid fan base. The standard deal in these situations is this: you make it possible for your fans to listen to the show, and we in return make it vastly popular, perhaps eventually raising it to the level of a cultural classic. Gobs of money get made, awards get handed out, everyone goes home happy. Isochronous broadcasting models simply don't reach the target audience, here. The good news is that there is a myriad, a plenitude, a veritable cornucopia of alternative distribution channels; and I absolutely guarantee that if there are any motivated fans out there, the show is one five-line crontabbed shell script from being redistributed without you - a win for audiences in only the shortest of terms.

O most inscrutable and confusing CBC - let's do this thing, shall we?

Thanks ever so much.

Slightly creepily yours,

Ben

To: CBC Radio (via)
From: [excised]
X-from-city: Toronto
X-from-province: Ontario

Dear Canadia site maintaners,

There may be a typo or wto on the front pge:

"New on the video page this week. Producer and director Greg De Clute speaks on the creation of an epsiode of the show."

"The first season of Canadia 2056 is now avaiable on CD from the CBC Shop."

I am as excited as everyone about the epsiodes now avaiable at the CBC Shop, but whiskey tango foxtrot - how did those zingers evaid the speelchecker?

Cordially your,

Bne

Current Mood:

annoyed

Very well, then.

The 2K Games BioShock forum has a thread on the topic. It seems that I am far from the only person who feels this way. Also, many of the people I asked for copyediting and proofreading advice mentioned that they would like to express support for my contention; it was not my intention to do anything but send this letter in by registered mail, representing only myself, but I certainly don't mind if others weigh in as well.

My plan is to print out the following next Friday (the 21st), modulo any good content advice received before then; to count up the number of people who respond to this post with anything containing the words "me too"; to include that number along with a link to this page as an addendum; and to send the whole mess to 2K Boston, 2K Games, and Take Two Interactive by registered mail. I'll probably toss over a copy to Elizabeth Tobey over at the Cult of Rapture, since she is keeping in touch with the fanbase.

I don't expect this to accomplish anything specific beyond venting my own frustration. I can hope, though.

Dear 2K Games,

Thank you for BioShock. It has lived up to the System Shock legacy, garnered glowing critical praise, and raised the bar for graphics, gameplay and writing. Congratulations: you've earned it!

On the other hand, BioShock has deeply disappointed me. I can't buy it, and I can't play it. Here's why.

My friends and I are avid, dedicated gamers. We have huge libraries encompassing classic adventures to the very latest console titles. Games are as important to us as books, movies and music; they are points in the history of the gaming industry and in our own lives. It's wonderful to dust off an old game and spend a rainy Sunday afternoon strolling down memory lane in the Great Underground Empire, or Britannia, or Citadel Station, or Hell.

Control software requires us to rely either on publisher benevolence for future replayability or on the skills of the game-cracking underground. I can trust only the latter, since the stance of the former has repeatedly been made crystal clear. I appreciate assurances of future unlocking, but only software crackers have delivered.

I use my computer for serious work, and I write software for personal, pedagogical and public purposes. A reliable, transparent and deterministic computer is a necessity for this, not a luxury. SecuROM makes even installing BioShock a non-starter.

I maintain many computers for my employer, family and friends, and myself; I know too well the headaches that SecuROM causes and I won't pay for that pain. I must refuse to support systems with it installed - reluctantly, since stranding friends is anathema, but refusal is the only reasonable action. SecuROM is not open or reviewed software. Its threat model includes the user performing actions on his or her own machine. It claims administrative control of the user's system. When opaque software does this, the computer can and must no longer be trusted.

I encourage my friends to do their own research, starting with your FAQ. Those who read up on the topic more often than not decide against purchasing your game.

Principle is also at stake. It is wrong and unfair that your ardent, honest fans must jump through hoops - managing activations, juggling discs, surrendering user choice about acceptable hardware and software - while those who play without paying, those whom you ought to discourage and inconvenience, instead enjoy a better experience.

Playing an illegitimate copy would perhaps satisfy my technical and historical objections, but it would neglect the equally important points of system and ethical integrity. I must emphasize that this is not an option.

Control software punishes only users who try to do the right thing. Regardless of intent, requiring that SecuROM be installed treats every user as a threat and a thief, and a lazy one, since cracked copies are widely available. It is technically painful; demonstrably ineffective; offensive and condescending; and it deeply compromises the playability of your game. This is not acceptable.

This is not acceptable.

I write regretfully, but with optimism. If I thought there were no chance of changing your mind, I would not have bothered. You can still do the right thing. I'll be the first in line to purchase BioShock when it is sold in an acceptable format, but neither I nor anyone I can influence will purchase games on your current unreasonable terms.

Your fan,

[me]

(let ((^ expt))
  (* (+ -170
        (* 23 29 101 269
           (- (^ 2 11) 307)
           (- (^ 2 11) 175)
           (^ 3 4) (^ 7 3)
           (+ 89 (* (^ 2 7) (^ 3 8)))))
     (* 2 3 3 11 37 229 (- (^ 2 11) 855)
        (+ (^ 2 15) 645))))

In case anyone else wants to play AACS-Golf, the value you now want to factor is, in decimal:

92214563780560366130661709445338835634

Hexadecimal:

455FE10422CA29C4933F95052B792AB2

Segmented hexadecimal:

45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

Binary octets:

01000101 01011111 11100001 00000100
00100010 11001010 00101001 11000100
10010011 00111111 10010101 00000101
00101011 01111001 00101010 10110010

Binary string:

01000101010111111110000100000100001000101100101000101001110001001001001100111111100101010000010100101011011110010010101010110010

The rules of AACS-Golf: using only the + (addition), - (subtraction), * (multiplication), / (division) and ^ (exponentiation) operators, and the ( and ) (parentheses) grouping operators, construct an expression which evaluates to the most recently compromised AACS processing key; no constant value may have more than N (base M) digits; score is given according to the number of constants which appear in the expression; lowest score wins.

My AACS-Golf entry for 3-base-10, above, nets me a score of 32. I'm sure someone else can do better. What's your score?

So please don't judge my coding, or Scheme, by the quality of the below. I know that the algorithm is braindead too.

(define (find-factors-seeded num . start-factors)
  (let ((bound (/ num 2))
        (decimation (apply * start-factors)))
    (let loop ((factors start-factors)
               (factor (apply max start-factors))
               (num (/ num decimation)))
      (cond ((> factor bound)
             (reverse factors))
            ((= 0 (remainder num factor))
             (begin
               (display factor)
               (display "\t")
               (display num)
               (newline)
               (loop (cons factor factors)
                     factor
                     (/ num factor))))
            (else
             (loop factors (+ 2 factor) num))))))

(define (factor-hd-dvd-processing-key)
; (find-factors-seeded
;  13256278887989457651018865901401704640
;  2 2 2 2 2 2 5 19 12043 216493)
  (find-factors-seeded
   13256278887989457651018865901401704640
   2 2 2 2 2 2 5 19 12043))

First of all, it's a brilliant gaming device. The touch screen, though admittedly still ever-so-slightly tinged with gimmickry, has been used to great effect in a bunch of different games, and developers seem now to have a firm handle on when to use it and when to concentrate on the buttons instead. The games coming out for it are really, really excellent: I've put more hours into Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow than I'd really care to admit, and Portrait of Ruin is edging its way up near Symphony of the Night and Metroid as one of my favourite side-scrollers of all time. The multiplayer aspects, too, are just superb. I've had bundles of fun playing New Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart and Metroid Prime: Hunters; the few times I've had the chance to play Tetris DS with more than three other people at the same time have been laugh riots; and playing over the internet is both surprisingly fluid and a whole lot of fun.

Second of all, the hardware is excellent and the hobbyist coder scene for the device is booming. Sure, there is the normal amount of game stealing taking place - I mean, that pall hangs over every console system - but there's so much original stuff being cranked out for the DS, and the games are so comparatively inexpensive, that there's really not much incentive to snarf ROMs. There is something to be said about being able to carry around a single card instead of a bagful of physical game cartridges, though, and that brings me to the point of this whole deal: aftermarket writeable carts.

Getting the DS to boot something other than an official game is a difficult process, or at least it used to be. There's a whole digital signature infrastructure in place as well as some other hardware- and software-verification shenanigans in place to prevent anything but official games from booting, but we all know exactly what these kinds of measures are worth: if motivated enthusiasts can physically touch the device, it's purely a matter of time before the thing is running Yet Another Tetris Clone and booting some variant of Linux.

Oh, wait, whaddya know?

First-generation attempts to boot user code on the DS were awkward: they involved faking out the verification routines with an actual game, then swapping in the user code using a few neat memory redirection techniques and a writeable cart in the secondary GameBoy Advance port without the DS firmware noticing. Crafty, but clunky.

Then came the PassMe and FlashMe tactics, the former which simply allowed booting of user code in the GBA port without requiring a real game cart and the latter which involved flashing the actual BIOS of the DS - inventive but risky.

Nowadays there are slick devices like the DS-X and the M3 DS Simply. The DS-X (around $120) looks like a normal DS cartridge with a pair of LEDs and a USB port on the top of it. Plug it into your computer and it shows up like a 512-megabyte flash drive, just waiting for you to copy over whatever programs or games you want to run on your DS; plug it into your DS and it will boot into a program launcher, ready to fire up whatever you've copied into its internal store. The M3 DS Simply (closer to $45) does exactly the same thing except that it lacks the LEDs and has no internal storage: instead, it accepts MicroSD cards (which, these days, can hold upward of two gigabytes apiece and which cost approximately Who Cares, They're So Cheap It Doesn't Matter).

Devices from the previous generation - the ones that slot into the secondary GameBoy Advance port on the DS and need a (Pass|Flash)Me to boot (like the Supercard Lite or M3 Perfect/Pro, usually around $40 these days) - are still useful for two reasons. One, if you opt for a full GBA-sized cart, you can also use it in your actual GBA hardware (which may not sound like a big win until you remember that the GBA has a serial port that the DS lacks, making it much easier to plug hobbyist hardware into the older system); two, earlier models accomplished their boot-and-switch tricks by having a small amount of internal RAM - usually about 32 megs - that they would copy code into before running, and this RAM can be used by DSLinux for its own nefarious ends... like running IRC clients, web browsers, SSH clients and so forth.

Hmmm, Forth... Perhaps even Scheme, too? Mwahahaha!

So for about eighty bucks - two games - plus the cost of a MicroSD card or two, you could be running all kinds of nifty programs and carrying around your entire collection of GBA and DS software, and all in a slick colour-matched package that makes your game machine look like it was made that way.

(via jwz, of course)

Things went from bad to worse for the young man as his actions and inaccurately expressed and acted-upon belief in The Right Thing curried equal parts of favour from those who needed help and ire from those who wished that he would just butt the hell out. Involvement, curiousity, belligerence and self-righteousness raced to the boil in both groups. More and more important people got drawn in on both sides, and eventually towering spires of political, economic, electronic and pyrotechnic power were grabbed and swung by both sides like snapped-off pool cues. The fallout left the young man and woman bruised and aching, but their friends, families, psyches, hometowns or personal lives were permanently scarred or destroyed.

After a lull conveniently timed to last just long enough for the grieving process to progress from despair to incandescent rage, the young man and woman marshalled their resources and draw upon a couple of heretofore concealed or unavailable reserves of information, inspiration or firepower to mount one final offense against the enemy before Time Ran Out. They would have succeeded, too, except for just one or two subtle but vital flaws that, in their haste, they had neglected to iron out of their plan. Just when all hope was lost, however, the young woman revealed both the extent of her commitment to the cause and the depth of her feelings for the young man by sacrificing herself for him, incidentally providing just the opportunity that he needed to secure Final Victory against the antagonists and, in the ensuing chaos and upheaval, race off with her to the nearest medical facility.

He was too late. He had won the day, but the cost was terrible. All he could do was take solace in the fact that the young woman had wanted it to be this way, and that all of his actions, no matter the cost exacted upon his entourage by choice and by chance, were The Right Thing To Do At The Time.

The knowledge was cold comfort, though, and despite the crackling fire in his getaway cabin, his warm rug, his cup of tea and his purring lap cat, the winter seeped into his mood and his bones. He was no longer so young a man. He couldn't shake the feeling that things weren't supposed to end this way. Where was the triumph? Where were the fanfares, the necessarily secret but vastly powerful favours and debts owed to him by highly placed allies? He heaved a sigh, raised his steaming mug with both hands and inhaled, long and slow, a curl of steam that smelled of bergamot and home and her. He stood, weathering the cracking of his joints and a reproachful feline yowl, and paced over to the immense library that covered the entire wall of the cottage. He stared out the window for a while, studying snow blowing through moonlight.

Then he turned resolutely to the As and started looking for a new story.

1F 8B 08 00 13 CE 6C 45 00 03 65 94 4D 76 DB 30
0C 84 F7 3D 05 76 3E 17 44 42 26 2B 92 60 F9 13
45 3D 7D 07 94 D2 E6 BD 2E 12 DB 12 04 7E 98 19
C8 0B 7B E2 60 FF FB 68 D2 3B ED EC 86 36 2A B1
08 C5 57 A6 A2 27 05 49 35 96 37 0D A5 D1 38 16
1A 41 A8 C8 49 EF 79 91 DA 4F DC ED F8 E0 41 81
3F A4 BC 06 6D 22 85 6A D3 2A 2D 5D 24 9F 35 E1
41 F1 D6 23 A3 F3 AA B3 1F 87 48 A5 59 E9 8C 23
90 7E 48 A3 3D E2 4E 98 C5 37 94 4B E6 98 3A 31
79 BE E8 0C 31 09 75 6D 63 D1 04 C9 C4 CE 69 F3
0F 5C 6D 51 5B 1C 17 71 F1 E4 85 93 5D 5F 8D 0D
78 07 70 EC 7D 4A C7 F1 8E 0B 10 8A 47 3F B6 A1
FB B0 CF 30 33 17 E0 56 ED 3D 6E B8 97 2F EA C9
08 BB 0B E2 27 AE C4 0E 00 8C D0 3B E8 C0 BD 86
8E D4 45 A8 8A 56 AB 28 C0 ED EA 22 27 72 5A 86
7C 0E 88 E4 70 10 9D 22 07 C5 7D 09 9B A6 3B 2E
7C C3 B0 6F 1D 86 8F E2 83 74 82 A4 29 C6 C7 B8
90 30 2B D0 9E CE DC 50 2B 63 4D 1F 14 32 EE 4D
33 9D DA 0E D8 34 8C EB A1 F1 6A 16 48 59 84 9B
58 3D D3 6F CD 5B 94 C7 3B 30 99 A2 9B 38 9E 5D
EE E7 4E 9D C9 D3 CF 89 03 93 2C 7B 50 9A F1 93
1B 8C 28 23 36 81 36 20 C3 77 0C 9F 04 A4 49 91
93 59 1C A8 37 FB 7B FA D9 8C 0F C5 5B 6D B6 CD
BC E4 15 85 A2 F3 1D 56 0E E0 06 09 2C BF AC C9
B0 69 FF E5 C2 B7 08 35 4C EA E9 02 A4 D9 77 59
D7 41 03 7F 93 B4 F1 AD D3 E3 E4 F7 1C C2 B9 37
5C 6D 1A 01 DB 21 19 DC 40 78 1D C6 8C C5 23 02
A3 4B 02 65 C1 E3 0C 48 84 08 91 38 4C 47 4B 4F
FF 35 45 7E 23 2A D8 85 CC D7 76 4B F4 EA B7 3C
26 CC B3 2F 56 8C D0 00 29 81 BE 21 74 98 F1 E4
B2 1C F5 BA F2 12 21 0C BB E3 8E 22 AF 20 EE 2D
8A 61 58 7B D8 D0 14 2D DB DD CD AF 15 63 C2 CA
0D FA 5A 45 BB B1 14 B2 3A 01 47 83 09 EB AA 13
9C BC C5 94 EE A7 1D 5B 6E BF FD 0E 2D F6 91 F9
E9 CD 39 83 26 DA 24 01 B6 62 DD 6C A9 AF BA C4
EB 8B D0 12 58 61 E9 98 3C 22 B6 1B 08 BD B2 BB
57 0E 93 AE 29 CC 6C 5E 39 81 1C 07 0A 8D C9 69
FE 7A 4D E8 09 54 CD DA DA 7A 7F 2C 64 33 4A D7
8B 04 17 88 A7 8F AB FF 11 DD 01 3A 68 D9 C1 36
30 E3 25 1C FE C3 E5 B4 56 A1 23 30 60 7A B9 A4
50 F4 EB 88 75 1F E2 7B EC 6B E0 75 86 ED A6 E5
0E 8D 96 B8 30 4C 33 23 4B E3 84 20 06 50 FC 53
81 77 D4 2E 6E C0 B8 80 24 E2 90 73 AD 11 96 F4
F1 F3 F6 1A 11 E6 CD D4 81 50 01 63 F5 20 2F 68
3F F8 40 E0 87 65 FE 09 E0 1D FC 0A AD AC FA AF
0C A6 59 C4 3B D3 62 F3 65 E3 8A 93 C5 FF 44 AC
41 B3 23 9C F6 D4 8F 3F 95 FF 5F 91 9A 05 00 00

Current Mood:	stressed
Current Music:	Big Rude Jake - Buster Boy (Walk Tall)

So why do I have this furnace of directionless rage boiling away inside? What the hell is the deal with that, anyhow? I keep hoping and trying to grow up and get to know myself well enough to figure these things out and deal with them, but I seem to be just ever so slightly better at inventing twisty mazes of internal logic than at navigating them.

Bah. Time to hermit for a bit until it passes, I guess.

Current Mood:

enraged

Hoo boy.

That is to say, I'm three sheets to the wind, thank you very much.

It's Sam's fault. I knocked back a half-dozen glasses of quite potent drink before switching to tumblers and repeating the performance. The party was both spectacular and low key. It'll be what I remember when I think back on Ottawa.

As usual, it's past midnight, well into the morning hours, and everyone but me has turned in for the night. I'll be out of the city soon. Wednesday's coming up quickly. The new job starts next Tuesday. Am I ready? Not hardly.

Not fucking hardly.

I'm listening to scratchy jazz, kicked online through 33 1/3 RPM motors, brush-and-coil motors, electromechanical pickups, unremarkable cables, what sounds like an altogether middle-of-the-road amplifier, a halfway decent sound card and some custom-compiled version of LAME; I'm reading and agreeing with arguments by Pilgrim ("Juggling Oranges") and Hoye ("I Want A Big Toy") about how, in the long run, data longevity trumps pretty much every other technical concern [and I'm amused by how part of the discussion following the latter post has turned to audio output rather than input: how easily we come full circle, when we look hard enough]; I'm preparing to leave behind pretty much everything and everyone I know; and the only thing that manages to follow the sweep and stay squarely in the spotlight of my wandering attention span is how dearly I wish I could tell them how much they mean to me. How much they still do.

Morning will slam shut the portcullis again, of course, and I'll look back on this and think of myself as an idiot, but my opinions about data longevity will stop me from deleting it. Screw you, future self. Manuscripts don't burn.

(she looked at me and said)

Time for sleep, it seems. I've got more thinking to do and more packing to finish, and tomorrow promises to be a long and memorable day. It flies like an arrow, and - there's that full circle again - I'm living on a series of timers.

Also, I'm moving to Toronto either next Tuesday evening or next Wednesday morning. There's a Unix system administrator position in Markham with my name (and signature, natch) on it. I start on 2006-09-05T0830h.

Yay?

A more responsible me would patch the bug and submit the patch. The selfish me, however, considers the behaviour useful.

Because of the quantity of spew that ends up in these Away messages, and because it's sometimes interesting to go back and take a look at what braindump ended up in there - those messages are even less edited than this text spigot - I usually save the post-crash text. Here's an interesting one; time of death was saved as Tuesday, July 18, 02:08:26 EDT 2006:

Thursday: meeting up with Cor at the Rideau Chapters at 1400h; hanging around downtown for a bit; working on porting my weblog over to PyBlosxom (if only for mod_python support - the Perl interpreter overhead from my current CGI setup is murder) as well as WordPress, then letting the two duke it out (I'm secretly rooting for PyBlosxom); finishing up the core of my Forth-to-JavaScript static/inlining compiler, then readapting it to the problem of generating fast, dynamic Imari code sequences.

Ephemeral, inconstant, drawn in sand
Seedlings on the breeze, comments made offhand
Words said in haste and just as soon forgot
The barest few take root, but most do not.

Bits sent down the wire, forming messages,
Stories, meaning, laid out in passages
Awaiting just interpretation,
A little thought, evaluation.

But the words are out of joint and control
Entropy steps in and exacts its toll:
The thread is cut loose, misunderstanding
And impatience prolong the fighting

But a patient thought, and its expression,
In just the right spot brings resolution.

Friday: work, 1200h-2000h; then Rob Woolley's birthday party {UPDATE: 0127h: doing laundry so I have some white shirts to wear tomorrow. Or at least one white shirt. One usually suffices)

Saturday: Aliens Fest at Alec's place, starting at 1200h (and running through until the late evening, but I'll be leaving after the first film); then work, 1600h-2215h (during which I'll be briefly meeting up with Gord); then immediately off downtown to meet up with Alec et al for his DJ gig at Helsinki; then back home for some much-needed shut-eye.

Sunday: work, 0900h-1500h (which implies a painfully early alarm time, probably around 0730h); blues dance workshop downtown (111A Rideau Street, studio #3 upstairs - Dance Network Studios), 1600h-1800h; then dinner, then glorious, glorious rest.

Monday: meeting up with Mike Hoye for lunch at 1230h at the Rideau Second Cup; then work, 1645h-2230h

Tuesday: work, 1400h-2000h; then having pho with Stefan and anyone else who wants to come out.

Well, it was interesting to me.

You should see the nonsense that flies forth from my phone. It's staggering how many useless bits a mind, an appendage, an input device and a transmission medium can generate.

Current Mood:	exhausted
Current Music:	Humming fans

Rich in dignity and grace,
Bride and groom strode down the aisle,
There to seal with an embrace
Commitment made in classic style.

Mike, Arlene, the blessed pair,
With their friends and family,
Joyous music in the air,
Resplendent in finery,

Lit the day and eve with style,
Shared their joy generously,
Had the band play on a while
Then retired graciously;

As the candle-wax grew cold
Friends and family made bold
To toast the pair, to make heard
Their sentiments; in a word

The love that in that quiet hall
For them both was felt by all.