Multi-Metaverse with distributed revision control

I'm thinking that carrying around a digital audio recorder will be necessary when I go out with Jean-Paul or Glyph. A podcast would be way easier than a blog. So, Divmod Imaginary.

This is what Imaginary will be in N years: a Guy runs an Imaginary server. He makes an agreement with another Guy running a different Imaginary server to put a portal between their worlds. They want to allow players to take their horses with them between the worlds, but they disagree about the appropriate power of weaponry in their worlds, so while they allow players to carry Swords between the realms they don't allow them to use them to their usual effect.

This should be supported by the infrastructure: code will be transferred to the host that needs it when necessary, and that code will be run with capabilities configured by the contract between the two Guys. Restricted execution is facilitated either but a custom runtime or via a restricted PyPy-based interpreter.

We'll be storing the code in the database, of course, and using bzrlib so it's not just a glob of unversioned crap. So, when Guy B modifies the Horse class so that it supports the new action "pet" and Guy A modifies the Horse class so that it supports various lengths of hair, either guy can "merge Horse from Guy B" or "merge Horse from Guy A" to get the others' changes without overwriting their own.

Is that it? Anyway, please start working with us on Imaginary.

Tree

I took some pictures of The Tree recently.

It is a pretty big tree. If you click it, you will also see a picture of a dog, a bush, and a tree.

UPDATE: The tree is a Magnolia tree.

Only Yesterday, a Studio Ghibli feature film by Isao Takahata

I need to get this off of my chest all at once: Only Yesterday is a beautiful movie, Ghibli is a fantastic studio, and Takahata is a genius at character development. Do you see those italics? I mean them.

Unfortunately, this movie is unavailable anywhere in the US or other English-speaking countries, as far as I can tell, so the only way to legally acquire it is by importing from Japan at extortionate rates (don't worry, the Japanese DVDs have English subtitles). Rather than doing that, I downloaded it from Boxtorrents. But now, now I want to give Studio Ghibli all of my money. -- no, not Studio Ghibli, but instead, I'll give it to Japanese Scientists who will put all of their effort into designing a device that will keep Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata alive forever, as slaves of their passionate fans.

I just can't believe how excellent a studio that is. Hayao Miyazaki is clearly one of the best creators of fantasy ever, and Takahata can give you a character that you have such a passionate connection with. Every millimeter twitch of the eyebrow or lip controls me like a puppet, and every tiny ordeal that the characters go through makes me so sad, like a sad puppy.

Anyway, I think I talked about this stuff before. Basically, Studio Ghibli is the best thing on the planet. Everyone should watch all of their movies.

New tricks!

Two things. First, I learned how to do this:

(click on it to see a video of it).


Then, I did this!





This was after cleaning up. There was lots of blood.

On a happier note

My stick-twirling is improving. I can do fairly fast transitions between in right and out left. Left is still a bit awkward, but getting better. For some reason, spinning in with my right hand is much easier than out, which is the opposite of my expections (and what I was told). I'm now also working on reversing a spin (in the same hand, with various contortions of the body), and doing the opposite transition: between out right and in left.

"A blessing is a curse"

That's poetic, right? So, there are two indisputable facts I have learned today.

1. The OS X bless command's only function is to make a volume *unbootable*. This is a documentation bug, I believe: the man page shouldn't say anything about specifying boot files and such like.
2. Either my keyboard (A 3-year-old "Compaq"-branded USB keyboard) or this Mac Mini device has what appear to be race-conditions or just plain flakiness when it comes to boot modifier keystrokes. I did manage to have "C" boot from a CD today, and "alt" once even gave me the volume-picker menu. But these were isolated cases, in dozens of attempts.

I think, while #2 is certainly very annoying, #1 is the more fundamental problem, here. I pretty much need to successfully bless something in order to install Linux on this thing, unless either the beautiful people at mactel-linux.org or my coworkers create a bootable install CD.

Apple's recent announcement of Boot Camp (and specifically the newly-released technologies which enable it) was a glimmer of hope, but not as much to me as to others, as I have already spent countless (5) nights having my hopes crushed by this tiny, tiny machine. In fact, after installing the Firmware update from Apple, my computer did do an interesting thing: Startup Disk now lets me select the stock Dapper installation CD, and I can successfully boot it! Very interesting. The video is almost complete corrupt, though, and after about 5 seconds of spewing bootup output, the screen goes black. Now, I appear to have gotten the thing into a Legacy Mode (BIOS) which it refuses to come out of, no matter what keystroke coaxing I attempt.

got OS X booting

Ok, so I'm back in an original-ish state. But now, it appears I can't boot anything but my hard drive! Why does Apple hate me. They love me when I want to use their software. Why can't they love me just for using their hardware?

So, on this Intel Mac Mini, I do not clearly remember ever having used any of the boot-up keystrokes successfully. Option? What's that? I think it's Alt, on this Windows Keyboard. Holding the Alt key down while I boot gives me no boot menu. Why do you mock me, The Web? Why do you tell me that it works? (yes, I've also tried the windows key, but I'm pretty sure that's Command, not Option). Same with "c". I booted from this CD on this very mac not 60 minutes ago -- to boot OS X when it wouldn't boot automatically. Then I got OS X booting by default again by selecting the volume in the Boot Disk. Now, I cannot boot from that very CD that saved me, no matter how furiously I depress that semi-circular letter. Maybe Apple has some secret conspiracy to not honor bootup keystrokes executed on that most hated of competitor's keyboards?

Ok, so *somehow* I booted that Live CD on this machine, what seems like ages ago -- it might have been with a C. But maybe by that time I had already destroyed the alternative method of booting.

I guess my next option is to destroy the bootability of my computer again, thus forcing the beast to look for an alternative in the optical drive. But my real goal is to get it booting from a USB stick. An impossible task which is monumental, even from this far-off vantage.

Twirling a Stick

I can twirl a stick forward and reverse quite smoothly and quickly (for having picked it up this week) with my right hand, and kind of choppily forward with my left hand. I can't do reverse with my left hand yet. My next milestone will probably be a smooth reverse-right to forward-left transition, which I can clumsily do now. Then, once my reverse-left is reasonable, forward-right to reverse-left.

Then: TWO STICKS AT ONCE.

I guess I will have to find another stick.

Maa maa maa! Oh toh toh toh!

Note to self: when you visit Japan, make sure to learn How to eat Sushi in Japan.

Frickin' Cool [mac mini]

So apparently whatever I've been doing to my new device has caused it to entirely refuse to boot from anything that isn't a CD-ROM. Like, my hard drive. Even after reinstalling OS X. Seriously. But hey, that's better than nothing! I can still boot from CDs!

If only rEFIt (the one that's built into the mactel-linux live CD) had an "eject CD" option, I'd be able to use the elilo.efi on my USB disk, swap in my dapper install CD, and go for life. But no such luck!

hurkle

intel !mac Mini. Linux

I have a mac mini that contains an Intel Core Duo™ central processing unit (CPU). It also doesn't have a BIOS. It has something else, which hase some mumble relationship with the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). What this means is that it won't boot from the Ubuntu install CD. The lovely people at mactel-linux.org have invented a CD that is bootable on these devices, and they were even sensible enough to base it on the Ubuntu Dapper Live CD. It works! I can boot this device and get a graphical user interface (GUI) and everything. The thing that lets you install from a Live CD (espresso) totally just freezes up, though. I was able to manifest an actual installation onto the hard disk drive at one point, but that moment was fleeting. It involved "debootstrap".

Now I'm trying to somehow bootstrap into the Ubuntu installation CD by using some combination of malice and a USB stick drive. I haven't figured out how to actually boot from the USB stick drive, yet. I may have to reinstall that operating system which I so gleefully deleted from the hard drive two days ago, when the machine arrived. If you know of an incantation to rid me of my sickness, please bring it to my attention.