Voder-Vocoder

I loaned someone my copy of Data Structures & Problem Solving Using Java by Mark Weiss a while back. I forgot who, and I want the book back.

UPDATE: It would appear that Chris Wilson has it.

Convoluted Story:

I had an hour or so to kill on the westside between shifts this week, so I stopped in the big bookstore they have. Glancing through the new fiction paperbacks, I saw Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Someone had recommended it some time ago, saying “it’s more political than I would have expected.” I forget who.

So I picked it up, read the first two chapters, and fell asleep in the comfy chairs they have. After they called me back into work, I bought the book.

I don’t know why I liked the book, but here’s a guess: the protagonist is flawed in ways that I can identify with.

I wanted to read up on the source material, which has fallen into the public domain. So I downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg.

The best way I have to read ebooks is on my palm m105. I can do this flat on my back, which is how I like to read anyways. I’d get a fancier PDA, but I can’t justify spending money if all I do is read books on the damn thing.

The m105 has some advantages and disadvantages. It was relatively cheap at the time it was released, and made a nice graduation present from my parents. It uses 2xAAA batteries, so I don’t have to worry about the lifetime of a rechargeable.

On the other hand, it uses old-fashioned RAM for its memory and when the batteries die, the memory is all lost. So every time that happens, I have to reinstall databases and applications. I’ve tried to make that as easy as possible: The directories $HOME/Palm/Docs and $HOME/Palm/Apps contain PalmDoc ebooks and Palm applications. The pilot-link tools make re-installing everything easy. PILOTPORT=/dev/ttyS0 PILOTRATE=115200 pilot-xfer -i ~/Palm/Docs/* ~/Palm/Apps/*

I do wish I had one of the models that relied on a removable Flash drive and not RAM.

I just read Stephen Baxter’s Manifold Space. I picked it up on the theory that it wouldn’t be as depressing as Baxter’s other novels. I’m not sure why I expected that. The ending was just as just as morbid as the others. Plot summary: life sucks, then you have depressing adventures in space, then you die, then the human race becomes extinct, then the universe is destroyed.

It’s the anti-startrek.

I picked up Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper’s Building Harlequin’s Moon. I’m only a third of the way through it.

Impressions:

1. It reminds me a bit of the brainstorming I was doing the other week, without the aliens.
2. It sets up a situation where you can almost understand why people create an abomination: slavery. Until, of cource, the protagonist gets sold down the river.
3. It also has a theme of a society that has found that it can not safely advance its technology anymore. If the technological singularity exists and is to be feared, then this is a theme we need to think on.

“For all these years I thought we lived in paradise”

Finally finished Stephenson’s trilogy. The good news is: we know the secret of Enoch Root. The bad news is that it’s over.

I’m reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? right now. Why didn’t I ever read this before? It’s such a deep book, while still readable.

I should listen to Christopher Wilson more often; he recomended I read this a while ago.

I just read Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division today. It was good enough for me to finish in a day. It makes me think. Why the hell do we pay people to serve us drinks? I can make my own drinks, thank you! I’ll pay for the materiel, but emplying somebody just seems like make-work.

Goldstein

Herbert Goldstein. Classical Mechanics (2nd Edition) (1980).

almost new

$35.00

Reif

F. Reif. Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics (1965).

good condition

$45.00

contact me, Hal Canary, at hal at ups dot physics dot wisc dot edu, or at 608-347-5844.

I was confused by this story this morning. It would seem that William Gibson (1914-) is not the same person as William Gibson (1948-), even though they are both writers.

I must admit, I’ve never managed to get through a Gibson novel anyways, so why would I care?

Neal Stephenson is obsessed with money. I’m reading
the Confusion right now, and as always, Eliza is trying to figure out what money is in order to learn how to get more of it.

It’s one of those subjects that I just don’t get. What exactly backs a US Federal Reserve Note?
I still can’t figure that one out.

Originlly, the dollar was 24.06 g Ag or 1.60 g Au.
Then it was 1.5 g Au. Then 0.89 g Au. Then 0.82 g Au.
Now it’s a piece of paper that can be taken to the loacal tavern and traded for alcohol. Good enough for me, I suppose.

UPDATE 2004-08-11: Also note that the ratio of the dime to quarter is 10/25. Why? They were both originally siver coins, like the dollar itself. They were worth exactly thier weight in silver.

I’ve been using Ziegler’s Linux Firewalls (2nd Edition) to teach myself iptables syntax. I’m not sure that it’s the best book for getting started building firewalls and routers, bcause it advocates really compliated rulesets.

There are some basic facts about the way iptables works that aren’t explained well. One of them is the diagram on the left. Everyone always draws it funny. The way I draw it, all packes travel downward.

Compare the giant scripts in Ziegler to Rusty’s Really Quick Guide To Packet Filtering

When I was done confguring my router, I had a 61 line iptables script that blocked most ports, did SNAT and DNAT. I didn’t feel the need to, for example, DROP packets on the OUTPUT chain.

Ziegler could use a chapter on troubleshooting with tcpdump and other tools.