Technology Review had a discussion of Charles Simonyi’s intentional programming work. Such a frustrating article. It didn’t say anything — certainly too little about how intentional programming is implemented. Most of the article was just saying, yes, cross layer design is always difficult, abstractions leak (not to mention sometimes abstraction leak is intentional to preserve performance), so on and so forth.

No, the reason this was an interesting article was the biographical part, and of the biographical part was a nugget of a quote by Simonyi:

Simonyi was born in Budapest in 1948. The son of a physics professor, he fell in love at 15 with his first computer–a mammoth Russian Ural II in Hungary’s Central Statistical Office. By the 1960s, the Ural, which received its instructions through cash-register-style keys and had a roomful of vacuum tubes to perform calculations, would already have been a relic anywhere else in the world. But Hungary’s Communist leaders were trying to use the Soviet castoff to optimize rail and trucking schedules. The Ural wasn’t up to the task: there was no way to input real-time data on shipments. “It was completely hopeless,” Simonyi recalls. “It could have been done very easily by supply and demand. Unfortunately, that was politically incorrect.”

An apt observation that the free market is but a machine of humans running an optimization algorithm.

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It looks like the Zune is a flop. At least in the conventional sense of market share against the iPod and portable music players. This is predictable with the kind of PR that came before its release.

However, I highly doubt the Zune was meant to be just a music player. Earthlings know that the industry vision has been that of a central computational and storage hub in the home or on the network, and portable anywhere devices as terminals. It’s old news, but I guess it’s time to get pushy when vanilla home PC’s are already in pretty much every home and old usage models require no more computational power than is already available.

In this context, the Zune is a way to dump a preferred portable devices platform out there so Microsoft can write software for it. Windows Mobile on PDA is another one of those things, but far more people buy music players and cell phones than full-blown PDA’s (I’m guessing). One has to be a bit deceptive about what is really going on when pushing these devices, which is why the Zune is “just” a portable music player, when in fact, it is a big screen with computational capabilities and built-in wireless, so with a software change it immediately becomes a generic portable device. Microsoft has done this before, certainly. The XBox was “just” a gaming console — for a while. Not any more, despite J Allard’s early protests to the contrary. It’s clearly a computational and storage hub that just happens to be accepted in the living room. Intentionally implementing an accepted specialized device within a generic platform embodiment so that the specialization can later be removed is like Trojan horse marketing, I suppose (no revelation here, just a personal reflection), but it remains the case that the Trojan horse must be a gift worthwhile enough to be accepted.

By that measure, the XBox achieved a level of success as a gaming console by having some compelling features, but the Zune did not. The Zune was too similar to practically everything else. Maybe if the Trojan horse were a cell phone instead (iPhone?) or a car-device (GPS+music player?), Microsoft would have had more success. Actually the GPS+music player idea isn’t bad. It is getting pretty popular, but only a bunch of small random brands are selling it, with inconsistent interfaces and idiotic software as a result. There is where Microsoft could have made a difference — as it already has a well regarded PC-based navigation solution and user base from that.

So there you go, Microsoft. Keep the 2-cent change.

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This is fascinating. Most things that sound fascinating at first really are pretty boring, but this is a notable exception in quite a few years.

First there was a seminar (which I missed) with this kind of description

How grid cell neurons encode rat position

Recently it was discovered that neurons in an area of the cortex (called dMEC) of rats, fire on every vertex of a regular triangular lattice that tiles 2-d space. These so-called “grid cells” efficiently encode rat position in a system that can be shown is analogous to a residue number system (RNS). By interpreting measured dMEC properties within an RNS framework, we can estimate the amount of position information stored within dMEC, and show how an RNS-like scheme is particularly well-suited to store and update positional information.

That tipped me off to this really amazing paper:
Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex by Hafting, Fyhn, Molden, Moser, and Moser.
(Read the article)

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The evolution of the Chinese language Wikipedia follows a tortuous path. I suppose I’ve been around since the beginning, but really only to watch from the sidelines. In the beginning it was mostly mainland users who dominated in numbers, but since a year or two ago, with the on-again-off-again filtering of mainland Chinese users, the site has shifted towards more users from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.

In recent months, some changes were made to the site with interesting implications. These changes are fairly unique to the Chinese language site but there is something to be learned from them.
(Read the article)

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This old building needs to go. There are no light fixtures in the rooms, the heat cannot be adjusted, the lobby front door stops opening periodically, and the blasted water gets shut down every half a month. No, it’s not an “emergency” shutdown, but because the plumbing can’t be worked on somehow unless the water is turned off to the entire building! The entire building!

EMERGENCY
HOT WATER SHUTDOWN
TODAY FEB 1st
3PM TO 6:00PM

Date: 2/1/07
Day: WEDNESDAY
Time: 3PM TO 6PM
System: All domestic water (hot and cold)
Duration: 3 hours

Reason:
Replace shut of valve on the 11th floor

Effect:
Loss of hot and cold domestic water. This means that no bathrooms, showers, kitchens and drinking fountains will be operational during this shutdown.

Suggestion:
Fill bathtub with water for duration of shutdown. Use this water to flush your toilet. Fill a bucket from the tub and dump it into the toilet bowl. This will force the toilet to flush.

Warning:
To avoid flooding, please be sure all faucets are off and stay off for the duration of the shutdown. If you try a faucet and find the water is still off, turn the faucet back off.

Thank you for your patience

Manager

Previous reasons have included leaky pipes on the 4th floor, the basement, the lounge, and various other places. Maybe I’d be content to fill a bucket of water from the village well and dump it into the manure pile if the rent were cheap and I were a sharecropper, but clearly…

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Uh, I don’t know … the Matrix?

No? Oh it’s money, I see. Except it’s money promised in spam, and spam from the military. How did I get on their list, I wonder. Maybe because of this guy?

Sorry, fellas, but warm, soft direct-deposits from the NSF sounds a lot better, especially because I kind of like my unextreme unadventurous life. And life is the key.

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Army Pfc. Ming Sun, 20, Cathedral City; killed while on patrol in Iraq
By Tracy Weber, Times Staff Writer
January 28, 2007
(Read the article)

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Ever since the makers of Ghost got bought by Symantec and Symantec got bought by Norton (or is it the other way around?), I have had an inkling of what Ghost might have become through the unfortunate experience of having used Symantec/Norton Antivirus (8.0, I believe it is that MIT offers?)

I got a chance to use Ghost again. Ghost 10.0 that is. Unbelievable! What a piece of crap! I just wanted to image a disk, but now you have to run the ugly yellow UI in Windows — wait, you have to first install it in Windows so it can “help” you “automatically” “define” “restore points” so you can “backup your computer.” What does that user-fuddy gibberish mean?! Oh look here, I can be an “advanced” user and make a straight disk-to-disk copy (no disk to image?) but every time I click the button it wants to install .NET Runtime 1.1 first, what the …? And it keeps wanting me to activate the product and get “LiveUpdates.” Umrghh! Booting the CD up by itself gives me a patchy “recovery console.” No option to image disks in sight. Needless to say I junked the CD.

Fortunately the package tucks in another CD called “Ghost 2003″ for “older” computers. So it turns out Ghost 2003 is the Ghost that I remember. Man, thank goodness for older computers… Snorton has totally killed Ghost. Caveat emptor.

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Seattle is really long in the north-south axis. Not only that, anybody who has been in Seattle for a while will notice that lots of interesting geographic features run along the north-south axis, like, hills, peninsulas, and lakes. I’m just guessing that retreating glaciers had something to do with it.

Hills, yes.

Yesterday I drove up a fairly steep hill called Phinney Ridge (really quite steep, but not super steep by Seattle standards). I was also going west, so suddenly I was reminded of this geographic and geologic fact of Seattle and thought … “Yeah, I must be hitting a large gradient against one of these hill-spines. Gee, it’s even called a ‘ridge.’ Wonder if I can skirt around it,” and so on.

In fact there are lots of descriptive place names that didn’t register with me — like, what is “Capitol Hill” anyway? — until I saw this image. I cut it out of the USGS data site, where you can play around with such things to your heart’s content. (I also took two looks at topozone.com but decided they sucked.)

Seattle is supposed to be built originally on “seven” “hills,” (c.f. Rome) and I labeled them here in red numbers 1-7: First Hill, Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, Magnolia, Beacon Hill, Denny Hill (razed early on), and Crown Hill. I call BS on the seven hills theory. Not only do some of these “hills” not look like distinct hills, some of them aren’t even that impressive. There are lots more hills around … and Crown Hill looks sorely out of place, like an after-thought to make the number 7.

I haven’t really been everywhere in Seattle, so I can’t say where the hills are the steepest — they probably keep records of this. Where I have been though … some parts of the eastern ridge of Capitol Hill (green 1), the Downtown (green 2), and Magnolia have made for hair-raising experiences in a manual transmission car. By comparison, Phinney Ridge (green 3) really isn’t so bad.

The only really flat part of Seattle is the industrial/stadium/international district along the shores of the Duwamish River, which can be seen in the image, flanked by West Seattle and Beacon Hill. Seattle could have developed along the only river in the city: Seattle was almost called Duwamps, after all … but no, people had to go live on hills instead of flat land (yeah ok fine, there was too little of it and it was an Asian ghetto from the days of Chin Chun Hock).

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I heard this on the radio today, and it is true. If you stole in 2006, be sure to report your income.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p17.pdf

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