The Fugue

So Blosxom spits out an RSS 0.91 feed by default, which is fairly despicable. For one thing RSS 0.91 doesn't allow for attaching dates to posts. So I grabbed an atom feed template. Now if you want a decent feed you can point your feed reader at http://hans.fugal.net/blog/index.atom.

I whipped up my own replacement to "my blosxom" tonight using camping. It was fun and frustrating, as it always is when working with both ruby and html. It's a little slow, unfortunately, I'll have to profile where the time is. I hope I won't have to run yet another FastCGI process, I don't have the RAM for that. Hopefully some filesystem and pagination optimizations will do the trick.

Pagination was the whole point of moving away from what was already working, and a desire to escape from school and work for just a bit and do something pointless. Learning camping seemed good, because it can be even easier to whip up something small in camping than in rails.

Yeah, it's not exactly working yet. e.g. permalinks and category links don't work. I'll get to it.

Update: After sleeping on it I switched back to blosxom until I get the time to polish up the camping version.

I don't remember where I first came across "aluminium", but it was not more than a year ago. Thankfully I've never had to endure someone pronouncing it, and it's rather easy to ignore the extra I. Today I somehow got on the subject again as I was aimlessly surfing, and decided to find out just what the real story is. You see, the Brits will swear up and down that aluminium is correct, and most North Americans are oblivious to the fact the the rest of the English-speaking world prefers aluminium over aluminum.

As I see it, they're both correct, but aluminum is preferrable. They're both correct because standards bodies say they are. Some group of important people in chemistry in the US declared aluminum correct, and likewise in England aluminium was declared correct. International groups prefer aluminium but recognize aluminum as a variant.

So shouldn't I do the cosmopolitan thing and accept aluminium in spite of my American blood? No, because the Brits named it aluminum in the first place. Ok, the one Brit who discovered it and had the privilege of naming it: Humphry Davy. He first named it alumium, but then changed his mind to aluminum, to match the Latin root. Then the equivalent of a high-brow Anonymous Coward Slashdot comment in the Quarterly Review (a British political-literary journal) strong-armed the usage of aluminium because it sounded "more classical". I kid you not:

Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound. (Q. Review VIII. 72, 1812. Cited in OED.)

Davy didn't stick up for his original spelling, and apparently used both interchangeably. So did the rest of the world for 30 years. Then aluminium became commonplace everywhere, including America. I've heard conflicting reports as to why we went back to aluminum, but go back we did and I say it's at least as correct as the other spelling. You can tell any Brit that won't concede that point that he's a 19th century couch taxonomist. That ought to be fun.

But the real reason I prefer aluminum is simply that it's so much easier to pronounce, and my tongue is lazy. Forget what you grew up with for a moment, wouldn't you rather have four syllables over five? Aluminium is also a bit tongue-twisting, but of course the British love a good tongue-twisting word so that's not a good argument.

Well anyway, there you have it: more than you ever cared to know about aluminum. A nice good authoritative-looking reference without all the opinion and babbling you find here can be found at transporteon.com.

I was convinced that the iRiver iFP 795 was the player for me. Then I literally stumbled across a post on a web forum somewherer that said if you think you like the iFP 795, you really want a Samsung YP-MT6X. I decided to investigate that claim, and from where I sit it seems to be true. The YP meets all my criteria: OGG, long battery life, USB mass storage. It does this better than the iFP, too. The iFP supports OGG, but apparently there's some minor glitches with it including heavier battery consumption and clicks between songs. The Samsung also puts in a little plug for OGG in their manual, rather than just a footnote on some technical specs page. Samsung claims 42 hours, vs. iRiver's claim of 40 or so, and the reviewers say they got close to 40, whereas the iRiver reviewers say they were really only getting 20 or 30. The Samsung is USB mass storage out of the box, but the iRiver requires a firmware upgrade.

Apparently earlier firmware of the Samsung player had some issues with navigation, but those have been cleared up. The Samsung looks better, in my opinion. It's classier and not a weird shape with weird protrusions. The Samsung manual reads slightly better, too. So the Samsung looks just a bit better in almost every way, and is $10 cheaper in most marketplaces.

The odd bits where the iRiver has an edge: the YP-MT6X records voice to WAV, which means it's pretty worthless for long recordings. It records FM and line-in to mp3 though... maybe a future firmware will let you choose mp3 for voice recording. The iFP also has a limited FM recording timer. It's only one timer, so it wouldn't be incredibly useful (although I could make sure never to miss cartalk again), but it is something.

GnuCash has some pretty nifty features for small business these days. Herman Oosthuysen has a good writeup, although it is a bit dated. I wouldn't follow it step-for-step since many of the details have changed and GnuCash has a good set of basic business accounts, and I'm not in Canada. But it's a good read.

One thing I had a hard time with was figuring out how to pay myself and how to account for things I bought for the business with personal funds. The magic word here is Equity. Paying yourself is debit equity, credit asset. Paying for a business expense out of a personal account is essentially a form of investing in your business, so it is debit expense, credit equity. I use GnuCash's Equity:Retained Earnings account for taking owner draws, and created an Equity:Owner Contributions account for investments.

I've been windowshopping again, this time for mp3 players. I've decided that this is the one I want: the iRiver iFP-795. It has everything I require, and I think I would be quite happy with it. It also comes highly recommended from several friends.

Here is what I require (at least, if I'm the one shelling out the dough):

• OGG Vorbis. Most of my music is encoded in this format. Incidentally, I think I would use an mp3 player mostly for podcasts and listening to new music. The made-with-linux music scene is 75% OGG Vorbis, so this condition still holds. Plus, I want to buy from a company that does OGG.
• USB Mass Storage device. Anything else is likely to not work well in linux.
• At least 512MB. Actually 512 will probably be about perfect based on my intended use: not to store my entire music archive in and have eternal shuffle, but to give me a chance to listen to new music and podcasts during the bus commute.
• Affordable. Ok, it's not actually within my budget at the moment, but it's not insanely expensive ($130 new).

In addition to the above, here is what I really like about the 795:

• Standard AA battery
• USB 2.0
• FM Tuner and Recorder. I wonder if it's programmable; I have a tendency to forget when Car Talk comes on.
• Line-in and voice recorder. This will come in handy for recording interesting sound sources to later become Musique Concrète.
• Decent battery life (~40 hours)

Erin and I saw Bewitched the other night, and we liked it. My critical review of the movie can be boiled down to one statement:

Nicole Kidman is not Meg Ryan.

Not exactly rocket science, I know, but this observation takes on more depth when you realize that Norma Ephron also wrote, directed, and/or produced You've Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle.

My wife and I enjoy the occasional game of Scrabble. We have too much fun trying to fake each other out and making each other laugh to bother with keeping score. One of the best things about playing Scrabble this way is the words that you can discover. I will often try to play a word that I know nothing about, but very imaginably could be a real word. It makes me look smart, or funny, depending on whether it really exists. (This same tactic works just as well, perhaps better, in Boggle.)

It was in that way that I discovered quoits tonight. I had thought horseshoes started out with horseshoes, but it turns out to be much older than that, and in fact is directly related to the discus.

This variant of Clue will make the game more challenging without making it less fun. There are two differences from the original: how you move and who may show you cards to disprove suggestions.

Throw away the dice, you won't need them. You can move your token anywhere you want, or stay in the same room for as long as you want. There is no restriction on moving. But you will want to be more careful about where you go, as you will see.

Take a moment to notice how the Clue board is laid out around the perimeter of the mansion. Closeness of two rooms is defined in terms of rooms around the perimeter. So the Hall is two rooms away from the Dining Room, and the Kitchen is three rooms away from both the Billiard Room and the Hall.

When you make a suggestion, only the closest players may show you a card, and each of the closest players must show a card if they can. For example, if you are in the Ballroom with one other player, only that player may show you a card. If you are alone in the Ballroom, with a player in the Conservatory and two players in the Kitchen, then those three players may show you cards. All of this is calculated after you make the suggestion, so if you suggest Miss Scarlet did it and one of the players is Miss Scarlet, then only that player and any other players already in the room may show you a card.

That's all there is to it. The resulting game is more challenging because you get less predictable and less complete information, which means you need to be more creative in your deductions. It is less boring (or at least not more boring) because you don't have to worry about getting stuck walking in the halls or across the board from where you need to be.

My brothers and I have played this way a few times with exciting game play to the end each time. Usually when we play normal Clue the game ends quickly, before anyone feels like they've had a chance to do any serious thinking.

Scorched 3D is a fabulous modernization of the classic DOS game Scorched Earth, "The Mother of All Games". It features 3D graphics and gameplay, LAN/Internet play, and in most ways it is faithful to the memory of Scorched Earth.

Scorch, as we used to call it, was one of our favorite games growing up. With 7 kids all wanting to get in on the action, it was one of the few games we could play cooperatively. It was a favorite tactic of mine, when it became obvious that I might get kicked off the computer to let someone else have a turn, to suggest we play scorch. It usually worked, too.

Scorched 3D is wonderful in every way that scorch was, and then some. The only fault I can find with it is that the computers are too dumb. Surviving in a match with 5 true cyborgs bearing down on you was one of the true joys of the original scorch. Oh, and for some reason things go haywire unless I turn off the water, but I can turn it off, so that's ok.

Scorched 3D runs on linux, so I don't think I'll be playing classic scorch much anymore. I rank this game right up there with BZFlag and Liero, taking the place of its noble predecessor.