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Fortunately I am only 39 today

I’ll be offline today.

In other news entirely, I have literally four months worth of photos which I have not yet put on this website. I haven’t decided yet whether to start trickling them online a few at a time or to just flood the RSS feed with one massive dump one night. You’ll know which I decide when it happens.

And in other other news entirely, as long as I’m at it, our universe consists of between 30 to 50 billion trillion stars, and kids have cost me my one shot at immortality:

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Life list

I did a bunch of things this weekend that I had never done before.

In increasing order of unusual-for-me, I

silkscreened a T-shirt,
learned some simple aerial silks moves,
learned how to move a hula hoop from my waist up to my neck and back again,
breathed fire (which is much easier to do than you’d think, but much harder to do well than you’d think),
safetied for a naked woman with dreadlocks and a flaming rope dart (being a safety consists of standing next to someone with a fireproof blanket while they do dangerous things, and if they catch fire putting them out right away),
spun fire (cautiously and inexpertly but happily) three times,
set myself on fire (but only once, and Kate put me out right away),
learned a lot of new poi moves, and
learned that really good poi work is less about the moves than about smooth and musical transitions between them.

I also made some new friends (Heather, email me immediately!) and re-met some old ones — turns out there’s some overlap between Wildfire people and Spiritfire people, which in retrospect shouldn’t have been all that surprising: to describe Wildfire as Spiritfire minus pagan spirituality plus circus sideshow would be inaccurate, but not completely so.

(A better way to explain the overlap: when you arrive at both events, they greet you by saying “welcome home.” And they’re right.)

Photos to come. Video, too. For now: work. Re-entry is always a challenge.

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On some occasions I post a post in which I do not complain about anything

Life’s pretty good.

Last night I played doun doun with Aimee Gelinas’s class for Third Thursday down in Pittsfield. We picked up Stellan early from daycare and drove down as a family; it was a beautiful warm summer evening with just the right size crowd for a street fair. Stellan got to hug a moose while we were getting set up, which Emily tells me was very exciting (for both of them, I think.) And then while we were performing, when the dancers started he came out of his stroller to join them and then ran over and sat in my lap through the rest of the show “helping” me with the drum sticks.

Which two years ago when I imagined what the good parts of having a kid might be like, just the good parts, that would pretty much be it right there.

Afterwards we went to the Columbian restaurant where we all scarfed down an enormous amount of delicious protein and fat and then he put his head down on the table for naptime so we came home and put him to bed.

And I’ve just polished off my half of the leftovers for breakfast, and in a few minutes I’m going to check in a bunch of code I’ve been working on which is if I say so myself pretty solid stuff.

And then I’ll pack a suitcase and head off with Kate to wildfire, where I will breathe and spin fire and fly on silks and try very hard not to burn off any important parts of my body.

Life’s pretty good.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1235.html

OMFG

P≠NP

Proof that P=NP would have been much more exciting, of course. But still. Holy crap. We now have proof that not all problems are solvable.^*

(All math problems that is. In most other fields I think we could take that as given.)

A little explanation for the non geeks reading this: there is a set of math problems — the travelling salesman or the knapsack problem are classic examples — which can be solved, and once you have the solution you can verify that solution quickly. But finding the solution in the first place gets exponentially more difficult as the problem gets bigger. Difficult as in, even if you devoted every atom in existence to computing a solution to a traveling salesman problem with a large number of cities, the heat death of the universe would come before you had the answer. So pretty hard, I’m saying.

(There are more practical uses for NP problems than saving a salesman some mileage or sorting a backpack. All modern cryptography is based on NP problems, for example. So the existence of these intractable problems has some useful real-world consequences; this isn’t just abstract sandcastle building.)

Proof that P=NP would have meant that there is a way to solve NP problems in a more realistic timeframe; we just haven’t found that algorithm yet. (And they’re mathematically equivalent problems, so solving any one would mean solving all of them at once.) Instead we have proof that these problems really are irredeemably complex: hard problems really are hard, and always will be.

Which when you put it that way doesn’t sound all that exciting, I know. Emily was sure unimpressed when I tried explaining it to her. But trust me when I say it’s a Big Deal. Not quite this big, but at least this big. Sure, a million dollars isn’t what it used to be, but it’s still pretty good. Also there’s the whole solving-one-of-the-six-most-important-open-questions-in-mathematics thing to go with it. That’s got to be pretty satisfying.

Disclaimers: I am not a mathematician. I understand just barely enough about this stuff to be excited about it; the proof itself is of course completely over my head. And it’s still new, so even real mathematicians haven’t verified it yet, and while everyone seems to agree that this guy isn’t a crackpot (this problem attracts a lot of lunatics, as anything with a million dollar prize attached would) and that the proof looks plausible, some are still skeptical.

In other math news, God’s Number has been proven (by brute force) to be 20, but that seems pretty trivial by comparison. Brute force is boring.

^*OK, yeah, yeah, we already had that. This is a different kind of unsolvable, you pedant.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1233.html

A novel approach to the progress bar

“The upgrade will take as few as 10 minutes.”

Alternatively, it could take all morning, so far. And the throbby “progress bar” will give no indication of how much progress has been made, if any, or of how much is remaining. And there is no way to discover what the 42 updates being downloaded are, or to skip past any you might happen to not need. And you can’t use the machine in the meantime. And there was no warning that it was about to download a gargantuan amount of data, which would have given you the opportunity to run the updater overnight instead of during the work day; in fact it implies that it’s all pre-installed and that all it will have to do is run a quick key verification. And there is no way to pause the download so you can try again later, short of bodily unplugging the machine. And god knows what that would do to the install.

And the only reason you bought this machine in the first place was to test your dev work in IE6, which it turns out the version of Windows that came installed on the machine was specifically designed to not be able to run IE6, or IE7 for that matter, so they can ding you for an extra hundred bucks on the upgrade. Which is how we got to this point.

I FREAKING ♥ MICROSOFT. MY LOVE EXPLODES OVER REDMOND WITH THE FIERY HEAT OF A SUPERNOVA, INCLUDING CONCOMITANT RADIATION DAMAGE AND GRAVITY DEFORMATION

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1234.html

Fire spinning

I got myself a set of practice poi, because I want to look like I’m not a complete klutz at WildFire.

It’s actually quite a bit of fun — it’s a lot like juggling, except that you never have to stop to chase a dropped ball around the house. Instead you periodically get whacked in a random part of the body with a heavy beanbag moving at high speed. Much preferable.

I’ve been using it as a periodic break from work: whenever I get stuck on a particularly thorny coding problem I can stand up and do something physical for a while, which in theory gives me a chance to relax and get myself unstuck. In practice, yesterday I never did manage to solve the particular issue I was working on, but did learn how to do a five beat weave. So that’s something.

Stellan, of course, has been watching all of this, and is in a learn-by-imitation phase; so this morning he politely asked if he could have a turn.^* So I handed him the poi, which are of course about twice as long as he is, so the beanbags just sat there on the ground next to him while he happily started windmilling his arms around just like daddy, repeatedly shouting “ouch! ouch! ouch!” just like daddy.

^*“STELLAN DO IT! DO IT! I DO IT! I DO THAT THING! … peeese.”

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1232.html

My wife has much more interesting dreams than I do.

Me: “I had really weird dreams last night.”

She: “Me too.”

Me: “I dreamed that [my current main client] suddenly started throwing impossible deadlines at me, and we were having all these huge arguments about them.”

She: “I dreamed I was having an affair with Felicia Day.”

Me: “…”

She: “…”

Me: “I approve.”

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1231.html

This year’s lesson from Spiritfire

My comfort zone is too small to hold everything I want out of life.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1230.html

Things I will not do today, because I have real work to do

This is what pretty much every interaction I have with a computer is like:

So I’ve discovered that one of the better ways to combat insomnia is to just remember to turn the brightness down on my computer screen at night. Yeah, go figure, it turns out that staring directly at a daylight-bright rectangle for hours right before bed isn’t exactly conducive to a good night’s sleep.

But I keep forgetting to turn down the brightness on my own, and then it’s two in the morning and I’m not sleepy.

But this is a computer! And I’m a computer programmer! Or at least enough of one to know that other much more talented computer programmers will already have addressed this problem. Except those guys aren’t adjusting the brightness, they’re changing the color temperature of the screen to match the predicted ambient lighting color, which isn’t quite what I want (and I do enough graphics work where accurate color is important that I don’t want the color cast of my screen constantly changing anyway.)

But it turns out the Displays control panel can be controlled by AppleScript, and I know just barely enough applescript to know that I can use perl to bypass most of the stuff about applescript I don’t know, so I could run a perl script every minute or so to check the time of day and trigger the applescript to adjust the brightness. Which would be easy on a regular unix system, but OSX doesn’t have a cron tab and does weird things to the at queue I’ve never quite figured out, but I have figured out that I can use GeekTool to do pretty much the same thing, since it runs in the background and can call arbitrary urls or command-line scripts on a schedule.

And this weather feed includes the daily sunset and sunrise times, so I could have the script call that feed to decide whether the sun is out and therefore what brightness level to use.

But sunrise and sunset only gets me part of the way there: on cloudy days I want to turn the brightness down, too. Which, for that I could use the same weather feed as before, but that would be hard: they use like a billion different text descriptors for the current weather, and I’d have to write something to match against all of them, and there doesn’t seem to be a canonical list of them anywhere so I’d never be sure I had them all, and even if I did that it wouldn’t work that well because, say, “cloudy”, does that mean thick black dark-as-night clouds or light fluffy bright-as-noon clouds? And even if I could sort that out somehow the nearest weather station is all the way in North Adams so it’s not always that accurate for Savoy anyway. So the weather feed is out.

But I do have a much better source of information right here in the house: we use satellite internet access, and the satellite modem has its own web interface which reports the signal strength, which is a really good predictor for how thick the clouds are and therefore how bright it is outside and therefore how bright to set my monitor during daylight hours. So I could write my perl script to check the weather feed to find out if it’s daytime, and if so to scrape the signal strength from the satellite interface, and use all that information to trigger the applescript to control the display panel preferences to set the monitor brightness.

Did you follow all that? That’s five different interlocking software programs, two of which I’d have to write myself, pulling information from two different sources one of which is in geosynchronous orbit.

All so I don’t have to remember to push the brightness button on the side of my monitor.

And I didn’t even include the bit about checking the date to predict whether there’s snow on the ground, which reflects a surprising amount of extra light into the air, especially on moonlit nights (which would mean I’d need to include a data source for the current moon phase as well, which it looks like there are RSS feeds for or I guess I could just calculate it locally.)

It’s a lot of work being a geek sometimes, I tell you.

(The extra-irony part, of course, is that it probably would’ve taken just about as much time to actually build it as I just spent blogging about it.)

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1229.html

Pardon me while I brag

You know your demo went pretty well when one of the stakeholders proposes marriage.

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O-O

I’m finally starting to see that object-oriented programming has more value than as a laborious defensive technique to prevent Larry in the next cubicle from shooting himself in your foot.

Only a bit more, though. It still feels like the long way around most of the time.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1223.html

A curious lapse in vocabulary

Stellan has started picking up language at a startling pace. There’s one word though, that to his mother’s chagrin, he hasn’t got yet.

In the car this evening he was happily chattering away to himself, mostly pointing out other cars (“Cah! Cah!”) and insisting we “Go!” every time we hit a red light. At one point he said “Daddeee!” and Emily asked him, “Can you say ‘mommy?”

“Daddee!”

“Can you say ‘mom’?”

He chuckled, which is his word for “yes.”

“Ok, say ‘mommy’.”

He thought for a moment, then let out a stream of pretty much every word he knows: “Cah! Daddee! Duckie! Doggie! Up! Dowm! Hi! Byeee! Cah cah! Go! Boo-ka! Boo-ka! Two! Five! No!”

Emily gives up.

Because I’m kind of a jerk, I said “Stellan, can you say ‘marble?’”

“Momma!”

“Can you say ‘momma’?”

“Daddeeeee!”

“Mommy?”

“Daddeeeee!”

“Mommy?”

“Daddeeeee!”

Got no explanation for that one.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1221.html

We’ve got to find some better entertainment options

E: “Last night I didn’t care what was going to happen, and tonight I already know.”

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1222.html

I’m gonna have to learn Python

I just discovered the Echo Nest Remix API — looks like an awesome way to muck around with audio files.

If nothing else, these swing versions of White Rabbit and Money For Nothing (which frankly comes out better than the original) justify the existence of the software. I’m also growing fond of this version of Tour de France.

Oh, and I suppose this is obligatory.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1220.html

Mental Health Break

Last night I blew off dinner with friends (sorry, friends!) and did something I haven’t done for a while.

Or, rather, didn’t do things I do all the time: no music playing. No internet. No television. No book or magazine at the dinner table. Just a quiet, empty house; leaves rustling, cool air. I sat in the hammock and watched contrails slowly dissolve above me.

It was invigorating.

Later that evening I stepped on a bee.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1219.html