Monday, November 26, 2007

Un Air de Famille


Another good French movie about family relationships. I find
the reviews extremely irritating that dwell on its comic aspects.
In homage to Shakespeare, the comedy makes the tragedy bearable.
A moving drama with sweetness and humor.

Ressources Humaines




I saw an intensely good movie over the weekend called
Ressources Humaines
about a father and son working at a factory in France. The son
is about to graduate from business school, and is doing an internship
for the administration in a plant where his father works as a laborer.
There is a clash between the administration and the union, and the
result is a real and moving clash between generations and ideals.

Ressources Humaines


I saw an intensely good movie over the weekend called
Ressources Humaines
about a father and son working at a factory in France. The son
is about to graduate from business school, and is doing an internship
for the administration in a plant where his father works as a laborer.
There is a clash between the administration and the union, and the
result is a real and moving clash between generations and ideals.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

recent conversation

F: I'm very busy writing my thesis.
S: Wow, you're writing already?
F: I'm writing in the sense that I'm feeling worse and worse for not starting.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

SAVE

Funny story:

Conway wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. The name SAVE was not an acronym, but a feature: programmers lost fewer card decks because they all had SAVE written on them.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Liberty Cabbage

I'm slowly making my way through my high school U.S. history book.
It turns out that our modern "Freedom Fries" have an even more ridiculous
precursor. During WWI, we were calling sauerkraut "Liberty Cabbage".

zone

In emacs, try



(require 'zone)
(setq zone-idle 120)

(setq zone-programs '(zone-pgm-whack-chars
zone-pgm-five-oclock-swan-dive
zone-pgm-martini-swan-dive
zone-pgm-drip
zone-pgm-drip-fretfully
))

(zone-when-idle zone-idle)


These are hilarious. Especially the drip-fretfully.

Friday, September 14, 2007

ML Puzzle

How do you handle exceptions raised at the structure level?

e.g.

structure A = struct val _ = raise Fail "" end


Turns out there are implementation dependent ways to
set a top level exception handler. Sadly, not part of
the Basis.

Monday, June 25, 2007

The Heiligenstadt Testiment













This is the most utterly devastating letter I've ever read. There are many tragedies in the history of art and science. In music Mozart comes to mind. In mathematics Galois and Abel. The tragedy arises in different ways. Some people die too early, depriving all people to come of the lost works of their genius. Mozart is the most crushing example of this kind of tragedy. But from what I know, he doesn't seem to have been particularly unhappy. Beethoven, in contrast, didn't die particularly early. But from the age of 20 until his death in 1827 at age 57, he was almost totally deaf. 37 years of silence to one of the greatest benefactors to mankind the world will ever know. When I feel disappointed in life, I need only think upon this letter to put my sorrow into perspective.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Same Sex Marriage

Happily, the Congress of Massachusetts shot
down a potential amendment to the state
constitution declaring marriage to be between
a man and a woman. According to the NY Times,
the soonest such a petition could be brought
for a vote is 2012. My favorite line of the article:

Senator Gale D. Candaras, a Democrat, voted against the amendment Thursday, although she had supported it as a state representative in January. Ms. Candaras said her vote reflected constituent views in her larger, more progressive Senate district and her fear of a vicious referendum campaign.

Most moving, she said, were older constituents who had changed their views after meeting gay men and lesbians. One woman had “asked me to put it on the ballot for a vote, but since then a lovely couple moved in,” Ms. Candaras said. “She said, ‘They help me with my lawn, and if there can’t be marriage in Massachusetts, they’ll leave and they can’t help me with my lawn.”


Indeed, the biggest indicator of a change toward
pro-Gay rights was if the congressperson had got to
know gay people. Go figure...

Mac not sleeping fix

My Mac stopped going to sleep one day.
It would if you closed the lid, but never
while open, even if nothing but
the Finder showed up as a running program.
I did some experimenting with killing
background processes from the Activity Monitor,
and found that killing the XXX_ButtonManager
processes did the trick. I kill them every
time I restart, and the Mac sleeps like a baby.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Gunter Grass

has written a great essay for the New Yorker about his youth during WWII as
a young soldier.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

iTunes, iPhoto hack

One of the irritating things about iPhoto and iTunes is that it's not immediately obvious how to see all the songs and pictures that are *not* in a playlist or album. A little hack I use that works very well if you don't use the 5 star rating system is to select all songs and set the stars to 0.
then select all your folders and star those songs. Make a new smart playlist that shows songs with a rating of 0.

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Lone Scherfig





I saw two great movies recently, both by Danish director
Lone Scherfig (who sadly lacks a Wikipedia entry).
The movies are Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and
Italian for Beginners.

Wilbur takes place in an anonymous town in Scotland.
The plot focuses on the suicidal Wilbur and his kindly
brother Harper who own a used bookstore. After
yet another botched suicide attempt, Wilbur moves
into the bookstore, Harper's home, so he can be watched
over. Things get messy when Harper falls in love with
a bookstore regular and they are married.
While the plot is a thought-provoking one, the real
intensity of the film comes from Wilbur's extraordinary
complexity, contrasted with Harper's somewhat self
deprecating goodness of heart. I was going to try
to write more, but after reading A.O. Scott's review,
I realize I should just point you there. I could do no
better, and certainly much worse. My favorite line
in that review:

"In less sure -- and also less dry -- hands, the story of two
brothers dealing with the fact of death might have melted
into sentimental slop, one of those life-affirming pictures
that make you want to kill yourself. Instead, ''Wilbur Wants
to Kill Himself,'' which begins with a suicide attempt and
ends in a graveyard, with plenty of trips to the hospital
in between, makes you glad to be alive.

Italian for Beginners is a beautiful Dogme film, revolving
around a group of Danish adults taking a beginning
Italian class. There is almost no plot but for
a humorous and touching development of at least 6
intriguing and delightful characters. Drama is always
shocking to me in that, unlike in opera, so much can
be done with so little. (I'm thinking particularly of
Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman). Here in
Italian for Beginners, with the Dogme (lack of) effects
that make it seem like anyone could pick up a camera
at Best Buy and make a great movie. A heartwarming
thought.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

The Humble Programmer

This weekend I spent an enjoyable 15 minutes reading Edsger Dijkstra's 1972 Turing award lecture, entitled "The Humble Programmer". It is an entertaining collection of stories, advice, and philosophizing from one of the pioneers of theoretical computer science. The most relevant piece of advice from a more modern programming language perspective is "... the requirements that no loop should be written down without providing a proof for termination nor without stating the relation whose invariance will not be destroyed by the execution of the repeatable statement." Even when not strictly using Hoare Logic to reason about code, the advice is good. Indeed, my advisor seems to have this ingrained in his programming. Much of his code is instrumented with invariants. He asked me last week why a particular list of inference rules for eta-expansion of a term terminates. While the termination seemed so clear I didn't even think about it before, actually finding a measure of termination helped me understand the judgment better.

A nice observation is that we should "restrict ourselves to the subset of the intellectually manageable programs". This made me smile. On the one hand it seems obvious. How could we do otherwise? But then recalling a few of the programs I myself have written, I felt chided and humbled. The thing I liked most about the paper is the respect for the difficulty of programming. His last paragraph is worth repeating: "[The computer] has already taught us a few lessons, and the one I have chosen to stress in this talk is the following. We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers."

Monday, May 28, 2007

shulman

I heard a great viola concerto last week by the composer
Alan Shulman .
It was his Theme and Variations arranged for string orchestra.
His son was at the performance, and gave a short speech beforehand.
Shulman played cello for the NBC orchestra under Toscanini.
According to his son, Toscanini was very supportive of the outside
(musical) activities of his musicians. He was at the premiere
of the Theme and Variations, and was recorded to say, in response,
(in my phonetic Italian) "Semplice ma belle", "simple but lovely".

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Dishabille

Dishabille. What a great word to describe the unfolding of
Spring in Pittsburgh. "The state of being only partly or scantily clothed."

"New Yorkers shed their winter garb — the Ugg boots, the turtlenecks, the long skirts, the overcoats, the parkas, the gloves, the hoodies and the fedoras — and exchanged them for flip-flops and dishabille." -- NYTimes, 4/22/07

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Kontroll



I was looking at French movies at the Carnegie Library the
other day, and picked up one that looked kind of interesting
in a nearby section. It turned out to be a Hungarian movie
called Kontroll. The cover is a pretty bad picture of a guy
running in front of a train, but it won a bunch of awards,
and the blurb on the back was by A.O. Scott, who called
it a "A tour de force. A gritty and stylish debut." So I
got it. It's directed by a young (33) director named Nimrod
Antal. He's got a movie in postproduction called Vacancy
with Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson.
The movie is wonderful. Funny, charming, peculiar,
and clever. It's about the guys who check to make sure
people have purchased tickets in the Budapest subway, and
the underground subculture.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Brahms I


I went to hear the Pittsburgh Symphony last night. It was
the first time I've heard them do anything big. Mozart 25,
Death and Transfiguration, and Brahms' first concerto with
Emmanuel Ax.

First of all, I went at the last minute, and
was late (as usual). I walked up to the box office at 7:56
and asked for a student ticket, thinking I had about %10
chance there'd be any seats left. For $14 I was given perhaps the
best seat in the entire house for a piano concerto, E9,
right behind and to the right of the pianist. It was
perfect to watch Ax, but more on that later.

The concert began in a stunning way. After the usual
reminder to turn off cel phones, a member of the viola
section started speaking into the microphone. I was
annoyed, as I figured he'd be talking about a pledge drive
or something. On the contrary, one of the violists,
Peter
Guroff
, had died earlier in the week, and this was a homage
to his memory. He was very young, probably mid 50s. He was
diagnosed with lymphoma 15 years ago, yet after that managed to win the
PSO audition and play for 14 years with the orchestra. The
speech was very moving and they left his chair (on the
outside of the orchestra) with some flowers on it, empty for
the concert. I could see the empty chair easily from where
I sat, and it added an ethereal poignancy to the music that
would come for the next 140 minutes.

Since I'm a big snob, and normally drive 3 hours to hear the
Cleveland Orchestra instead of driving 10 minutes to hear
the PSO, I didn't really know what to expect. It didn't
start out very well. The Mozart was mediocre. For much of
the first movement the strings and winds were a tiny bit
off, which for most any other composer would not be a big
deal, but it drove me crazy during the Mozart. I kind of
gave up hope of anything good until Ax came on. But then
they started Strauss' Death and Transfiguration. It was one
of the first pieces I played in youth orchestra, oh, about
15 years ago. I hadn't heard it for probably 10 years.
They played it marvelously. The sound was rich, the brass
powerful without crassness, and the oboist was great. (To
be fair, I should mention he was great in the Mozart as
well.) The empty chair during that piece, written by the 25
year old Strauss as a tone poem on death and transcendence,
was eerie, but added an ineffable weight to the time. I
recall Strauss pithy comment "I'm not a first rate composer,
but I'm a first-rate second-rate composer." It's hard to
think of him as a second rate composer during that piece
(though I don't share that sentiment for most of his other
works.) I was also reminded of Van Gogh's constant
self-denigration, and thus was reminded to take artist's accounts
of their own work with a grain of salt.

The highlight, though, was certainly Emmanuel Ax. He
radiated lift, kindness and mastery from the moment he
stepped onstage. He warmly shook Cardenes' hand, and the
piece began promptly. This has, over the years, become one
of my favorite works. So much of it that is so profoundly
great that, with my second-rate second-rate vocabulary and
eloquence, I couldn't possibly describe it. Amazingly, he
was only 27 or so when he finished it, and even more
amazingly, not only the public and the orchestra of the
first performance (Gewandhaus Leipzig) hated it as well.
It's so hard for me to imagine them preferring the long
forgotten empty firework-concertos of the day for this
work. I found myself continually wondering how many new
pieces I've heard (and scoffed at) that will be the great
pieces of 50/100 years from now.

Ax was energetic, communicative with the conductor (Jahja
Ling), and sensitive. The orchestra clearly liked him, and
responded in kind. They got out of his way, and I could
actually hear him almost the entire time he was playing.
It was an amazing gift to hear him.

There was a middle-aged conservatively dressed man
sitting next to me. He may as well have been at a
rock concert for how excitedly and exuberantly he listened and
applauded. I don't know who enjoyed the concert more.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Watchdog

Here's a website where you can look up a company's environmental and
ethical practices. I was sad to see Apple rated very poorly.

A Christmas Memory

Listen to Truman Capote read his story A Christmas Memory.
Really powerful. Unabridged, unlike the TAL version.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Vegan Food Network

Just read a funny article in the Times about a punk-rock
vegan food network
. The food looks really good, and there
are free videos resembling (loosely) the Food
Network. Except when making fun of Rachel Ray (how could
you?!), it looks really good. Keep your eye out for the add
for Herbivore Magazine, motto: Putting the "F.U." in tofu
since 03.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Google Checkout

I bought, among other things, a hard to find textbook on Google Checkout today, and got $10 off for my first order. It's really convenient. There are many stores participating, and it's nice because you can check the status of all your orders and your total order history in one place. Though Google has dozens of services now, and I don't usually notice when they market a new one, this is really worth trying.