Superhumans on the Rise - Orson Scott Card and Ayn Rand

Really, this should be a review of my latest read, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow. After thinking about it for a while, though, I realized any review would be meaningless if it didn’t look at things from a broader perspective. I changed the scope, changed the title, and you know the background.

Over the years, I’ve met plenty people that were fervent enthusiasts, passionate about Orson Scott Card’s novels or Ayn Rand’s own ones. Oddly enough, there was little of the typical polarization that usually goes hand in hand with passionate fervor. Instead, the majority of people I spoke with remembered both or either writer as an also ran.

Linux and the Polar F6 Heart Rate Monitor

Well, if this is not a telling example of how things are progressing in the world of open source… I recently bought a heart rate monitor, since I realized there was something wrong with the calories burnt displayed on exercise equipment. Never one to leave out a geeky detail, I ran to the closest sports equipment store (in my case Sports Basement) and checked out the latest gear.

My geek heart was pounding for the latest and greatest, of course: the Garmin Forerunner 405 was beckoning, a GPS-enabled masterwork that seemed just made for my nerdy self. It had everything you’d want from an exercise watch, and I had already used the Forerunner 201 to great satisfaction in my cycling days.

Making Inkscape Do Nice Things

The more I am using software for the KDE system, the more I like it. I mean that literally: very powerful applications that can do pretty much everything you would need from them, but they are inscrutable and unless you spend a ton of time with them, you won’t get much benefit at all.

KDE is not alone there. I guess the single most needlessly inscrutable application ever written by mankind is Blender, a monstrosity from a user interface perspective that looks like it is a sysadmin tool written for glitz effects and pretty pics. The novice that handles Blender (= me) is utterly lost at first and it’s quite impossible to tell what to do and how.

Frida Kahlo @ SFMOMA

Frida and I go way back, to ancient times where she wasn’t this popular icon of feminism and empowerment she’s become ever after the movie with Salma Hayek. I had seen a panel of hers, a monstruous affair with a crippled woman at the center held aloft in the sky and held together by braces – an icon of pain bursting forth in a starfield of passion.

Having grown in two cultures, I have always felt the duality of the passionate Italian and the rule-bound German curse me. As I saw the panel, it struck a chord within me, almost talking to this conflicted side of mine, speaking of the inner anguish that comes from having to live by two very different sets of rules.

Comparison Shopping: Tcl, Perl, PHP, Python

I have always been fascinated by programming languages, and scripting languages have always had a particular place in my heart. After all, they allow you to develop without much encumbrance, starting from nothing to program in no time. There are no lengthy build and compilation cycles, and sometimes you can even use dynamic language features to make your changes to a running application – neat!

For me, it all started with Forth, which cannot really be called a scripting language at all. It compiles functions into bytecode as soon as they are defined, and the only feature that reminds one of scripting languages is just how easy it is to write and rewrite. Since Forth reacts dynamically to changes and is interpreted,

Europe mon amour

As far as a 2 week trip can be called a lightning blitz, that’s exactly what I have been doing in the past two weeks. London, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Stuttgart, Rome, Tuscany, and then unwinding back. If I stayed longer than one day in one place, it was an utter surprise!

But then, I managed to see all my family, and I am really happy that I did. First time with my younger brother’s two sons, and reconnecting with my older brother’s daughter and son, who are now becoming wonderful humans – all of them. Visited father, aunt, everybody, and still managed to get to the beach for some “sightseeing”.

Web 2.0 Databases

One thing I noticed in interviews recently is the shift in focus for the candidates. It’s been a while now that tech has shown itself resilient to the overall downturn in the economy, so we have been living in and with a candidate market (vs. employer market). One of the many reasons cited by people to turn you down is simply lack of technological fit. In particular, people are really fond of their infrastructure.

Gattaca (1997)

Another Netflix suggestion – I would love this movie because, after all, I loved 12 Monkey. Well, stinking suggestion engine, the only thing the two movies seem to have in common is a fondness for naked males, otherwise they couldn’t be any farther from each other.

I had the first inkling of catastrophe when I read “Written and directed by Andrew Niccol”. Movies written and directed by someone frequently have this crusading tone, and the mixture of crusade and science fiction is usually lethal.

Adding Google Maps behavior to Weight Table

I woke up this morning and checked a bug report on the Tcl weight table utility I wrote. I have now several years of (admittedly intermittent) weight data, so now the utility loads a little slowly, and then you have to grab the scrollbar to move around the many years.

As you quickly learn, idioms and paradigms move on the Internet. I remember the day I picked up a mouse in a computer store in Germany, not knowing what to do with it, in a scene reminiscent of Scotty in Star Trek IV. Nowadays we are so used to a mouse, we don’t even know how to use a computer without it (nor is there a realistic way to use X or Windows or Mac OS X without one, thanks to keyboard-hating developers).

Four Novels of the Sixties (P.K. Dick)

The Library of America (loa.org) decided it was time to honor Philip K. Dick and published four of his most famous novels in one volume. Good choice, since Dick’s novels are in general quite short and publishing only one would have left the reader dissatisfied, given the tomes that are usually produced in the series.

The 60es were a crazy time by anyone’s reckoning, at least in the United States (in Europe, the 70es would assume the same significance). Philip Dick, who was genuinely mentally troubled, works well as a paragon of the time – Dick and the Sixties, a match made in heaven.