FOB

In 2009, at the Stumptown Comic Festival, I participated in something called the "Instant Graphic Novel" exercise. "Instant" is a bit of a misnomer here: it took about 2 hours. The 15 or 20 participants settled on a genre, story arc, and characters, with the help of the coordinator who provided genre descriptions and character models to choose from. Then each participant selected a page of the storyboard to work on. I had a great time, and thought the result was amusing. My wall of text—er, page—is here.

Neal Skorpen, a comic writer and illustrator I greatly enjoy, has set this up and run it at Stumptown for the last several years. This year, I made it there again, and once again had a good time. [Update: 2011/4/28, 2011/6/6] The result is up. My page is here. The links keep movin', but I keep fixin' 'em. Enjoy.

This is an old joke from the 128K Mac days:

Q: What's the difference between a Mac and an Etch-a-Sketch?
A: You don't have to shake the Mac to clear the screen.

My boy set up his iPhone today so that it goes to sleep when you shake it. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.

I have put up the first of my session proposals for the Open Source Bridge Conference. For those of you who don't know, Open Source Bridge will happen for the third year here in Portland Oregon June 21-24. [Update 2011/04/17: Corrected date as suggested by an anonymous reader. Somehow I had 2010 info on here before. Oops—hope I didn't confuse anyone.] It is a most awesome event, and I can highly recommend it to anyone and everyone.

My proposals this year are:

1. A Tangled Tale
2. Seven Habits Of Highly Obnoxious Trolls
3. Build a DSL *Fast* With M4
4. <Your Favorite Programming Language> Loses

Please feel free to mark and comment them at the OSBridge site.

Hope to see you all there!

You don't need to know anything about TeX, LaTeX or BiBTeX to get this one right. You just have to have better eyes and better reasoning skills than I do. 30 minutes. That's what I get for copying and pasting stuff off web pages.

@inproceedings{ picmet-patch,
  author = "Bhuricha Deen Sethanandha and Bart Massey and William Jones",
  title = "Managing Open Source Contributions
       For Software Project Sustainability”,
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2010
           Portland International Conference
           on Management of Engineering \& Technology (PICMET 2010)",
  address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
  month = jul,
  year = 2010,
  note = "URL~\url{http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~bart/papers/picmet-patch.pdf}."
}

Here's the error.

$ bibtex document
This is BibTeX, Version 0.99c (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
The top-level auxiliary file: document.aux
The style file: plain.bst
I found no \citation commands---while reading file document.aux
Database file #1: bibfile.bib
I was expecting a `,' or a `}'---line 5 of file bibfile.bib
 :   booktitle = "
 :                Proceedings of the 2010
I'm skipping whatever remains of this entry
(There were 2 error messages)

Like I said, anyone could spot this. Anyone who could spot it, that is. (Actually, it's a lot more obvious on this page than it was in the edit buffer where I originally encountered it.)

About three hours ago the ancient AMD box I was using as a gateway machine for my home network bit it. Seems to have been either the motherboard or power supply; I don't really care much which at this point…

There was a nice Discover Magazine article Monday on the IBM Jeopardy-playing computer Watson. The author was kind enough to interview me and quote me extensively and accurately on the topic; I thought the piece as a whole was quite well written and extremely informative. (I also got a silly one-sentence quote in an AP piece that was carried widely today.)

I thought maybe I'd post a few comments on Watson and the just-concluded Jeopardy match (spoiler alert) here…

Several new things on BartForge recently. Haskell code for tries and a Haskell version of xlogo. The Drupal theme used here at FOB. A SAT-based Sudoku solver. Keith Packard's parsecvs. Mick Thomure's and my old machine learning library.

Have fun.

I can never remember the quotient rule for derivatives. You know, (x/y)' = ?. So I got out the computer algebra package Maxima and had this little session:

    (%i56) ratsimp(diff(x(t)/y(t),t));
                                 d                  d
                           x(t) (-- (y(t))) - y(t) (-- (x(t)))
                                 dt                 dt
    (%o56)               - -----------------------------------
                                           2
                                          y (t)

Spot the minus sign next to the horizontal rule, separated by a single space? I didn't. Think it is insane not to absorb that minus sign into the numerator by swapping the terms? I do.

There's a half-hour of my life I'll never get back…

From today's Oregonian newspaper…

You've probably heard about Groupon, the service that offers you deal coupons. You may even be a subscriber. You may have also heard about their Superbowl ad this year, in which they, at best, make light of the plight of the Tibetan people.

They've been defending the ad by saying at least it calls attention to the situation. Yeah. Mocking it ain't such a good way to go there. I unsubscribed.

When you unsubscribe, the unsubscribe page has a comical little video featuring throwing hot coffee in someone's face. Hah hah. I won't be back. Weirdly, the majority of Google hits on this admire how cool it is. Yeah. Sick planet.

What makes this so unbelievably unutterably stupid is that Groupon is doing great. They are making money hand over fist. All they have to do to retain this position is…wait for it…not do anything that alienates a large portion of their customer base.

The kind of stuff they're doing is a risk, in a situation where any sane successful startup would be highly risk-averse. Say what you want about their taste level, but it's bad, bad business…