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Posts published by “centaur”

So by my math…

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... I've done 29 posts in 30 days, so I have a little catching up to do to meet my post-a-day-in-May goal. But actually I have the following options:
  • Work hard to finish the articles I haven't written yet
  • Write a few short lame posts to finish out the month
  • Leave the month unfinished as a way of motivating me to do future blog posts
  • Recognize that I have many more important things I'd rather do, like writing novels
  • Bail on the goal on the grounds my wrists are hurting, which they are.
Or I could write a short self-referential post that actually counts towards my total while not killing my wrists or taking too much time from my novel-writing.

Hmm ... tempting.

-the Centaur

A lot of my friends are already on Twitter…

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... and apparently use it regularly.

I got my first a computer when I was ten years old (and had actually done some programming before that). When did I turn into such a Luddite?

Oh yeah, that's right ... I went to grad school. :-P

-the Centaur

Aftermath…

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One consequence of finishing a paper is that there's a bit of debris left over...


the piles


Fortunately, now that my library is more organized, it's easier to reshelve:


the mess


No, seriously! Take a look:


the categories


I wuv my library. It feeds my ego. Or do I mean my head? Or both...


-the Centaur


I want to say something snarky about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull…

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... but I'm not.  I really respect what Messrs. Ford, Spielberg and Lucas pulled off and I really enjoyed it, so I shouldn't say anything bad.  And as a couple of friends pointed out, they worked hard to make the movie accurate: they used the 48-star flag as was flying over America at the time of the movie; they used period-appropriate villains (Communists) and monsters (aliens) and I've even heard that they used shots more typical of a 50's B-movie.


But...


A friend who hates a lot of modern movies described the 48-star flag bit as "the only good thing in the film, if it can be called that."  A lot of us made fun of him saying, of course he'll hate the movie ... but when The Last Crusade came out, he hated that movie right away, whereas I was lulled into enjoying it for at least 15 minutes - and that movie has aged very badly (more like milk than cheese, no offense to Messrs. Ford, Spielberg and Lucas).


On some fundamental level, I can take Raiders of the Lost Ark seriously ... and the rest of the movies, I can't.  And I don't think it's just "saw it when I was young" or any such nonsense ... I will argue that the on-call troupe of swinging monkeys that appear in Crystal Skull are somehow goofier than anything that showed up in Raiders, and that cheapened the movie without aiding it.   In fact Crystal Skull has oodles of the same X-marks-the-spot goofiness that makes Last Crusade so embarrassing to watch.


But at least it was a *pretty* movie and was nowhere near as astonishingly gawdawfully craptacular as the Temple of Dumb. And I had a lot of fun, and there are scenes in it which I will probably remember for the rest of my life, particularly the "this is how they should have done it in the Mummy Returns" ending.

But, I recall the snark I made before seeing Kingdom: "Wouldn't it be nice if they made another Indiana Jones movie? Cause they haven't made one yet." At this point, I tend to think, yes, at this point they have now indeed made a second Indiana Jones movie, and I'm glad. Maybe 15 minutes from now, I will go over to my buddy's side and think they still haven't.

Or maybe not. After all, I'm the guy who saw Phantom Menace 10 times in the theater, so what do I know from bad?
-the Centaur


I’ve got 2 hours …

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... so do I blog or work on my next novel?


Sorry guys.  Work calls.


-the Centaur


Unsatisfied…

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So on this last paper ... I spent a year and a half working on the project, six intensive weeks implementing our software doing a crash-course implementation on a testing platform only available for a short time, put the project on hold for a bit during that whole dot-com dancing, and then spent many evenings over the last six months ... and most of the evenings over the last month ... putting together a 10,000 word paper.


End result?  I'm unsatisfied.  I feel like I and my colleagues busted our balls to get this done, and I'm satisfied with the text of the paper qua being a paper ... but scientifically, I think we'd need to put out another 50% more effort to get it up to my standards of what's really "good".  We needed to do many more evaluations (not that we could, as we lost our testbed) but even given that I think the whole paper needed to be more rigorous, more carefully thought out, more in depth.


It's like I had to work my ass off just to get it to the point where I could really see how far I had to go.


Depressing.


-the Centaur


Time Capsule One-Point-Oh’d a Little Too Early?

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SO I'm running out of [backup] hard disk space at home now that both my wife and I are computing, and I splurged and got a Time Capsule, Apple's svelte new wireless hard drive, on the theory that I could attach it to my existing wireless network but keep the physical box in a different room so it would be less likely to be stolen if we had a break in. After all, "you can rest assured that it works with other certified 802.11n draft 2.0 products. And it’s compatible with Macs and PCs that use 802.11a, b, or g technologies."


So,what's the problem?   It doesn't work, that's the problem.  The wireless part, that is.  The Ethernet works fine, the hard drive works fine, the blinking light work fine ... except they picked amber and green as the working/not working colors! Gee, thanks, guys! I know those colors are supposed to be ok for most color blind people but really they look the same!  You obviously three bulbs behind the light (amber, green, blue) ... would it have killed you to give all three their own window?


Fume ... so ANYWAY, the Time Capsule gives you three options: take over your wireless network, join an existing wireless network, or go wired.  Well, I couldn't put it in a different room with option 1, and option 3 meant that I would physically have to be able to connect my laptop to the Time Capsule, so I went with option 2. 


And every time I set it up on the network, the Time Capsule disappears.


After repeated retries, hard resets, and careful readings-over of the manual, the PDFs (identical) and the Apple support site (containing the identical PDFs) I figured out that if I hooked the Time Capsule up via Ethernet, I could still access it and debug the problems.  And then I found that there were many problems, but that the software would not actually allow you to correct them - that is, you could change the settings of the Time Capsule in the Air Port Utility, but Air Port Utility would not actually communicate them to the Time Capsule when you tried to apply them; instead it would claim the problem was unresolved.  So there was no way to actually fix the problems ... you could only hit Ignore instead.


Upon some more digging, I found this tidbit on the Apple web site:



Time Capsule doesn't like being part of an existing network (despite what the manual and online material suggests). I've just spend ages, including 75 minutes on the phone with Apple Support to finally work out that Time Capsule simply won't join my existing Apple Extreme network.

I'm lifelong Mac user. This is the first time I've been really disappointed by a Mac product... the product ships with out of date software, does not set up easily, and simply won't do what it says it's supposed to.

If it's not too late for you... don't buy one!



Half a dozen other messages seem to confirm that this is a real problem.  Charming.  If only I had listened to Tim Bray:



I ran out and bought a 1TB Apple Time Capsule, breaking a self-imposed rule: Never buy release 1.0 of anything from Apple. Now I’m being punished.



Well ... at least it has 1 terabyte of storage, and Time Machine, the accompanying backup software, appears to run flawlessly (not that I've tried it yet, so how would I know?  But it looks pretty!) 


[fixed forced grin]


-the Centaur



Wheeew….

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....finished with our chapter submission to the Handbook of Research on Synthetic Emotions and Sociable Robotics.  The book won't come out for another year and a half, AFAIK, but the due date for chapters was yesterday.  Breaking my normal tradition, I'm not going to put up the abstract right now as the chapter is in for blind peer review.  For the past month this has been ... well, you don't want to hear me whine.  But trying to put out a scientific paper at the same time as blogging every day is ... bleah.  Obviously, the paper had to win.


Now, back on track.


You’re a Tiger

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You're a tiger.
You hide
in the tall grass.


You're a tiger!
You hide
in the tall grass.


I scritch behind your ear
and you fidget for me
Can't I see
you have important work to do?


Go now,
defend our home
from the flitting birds


and the tiny lizard
tailless marauder
you bring home again and again
held delicately in your jaws.


-the Centaur