Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at August 31st, 2005

Both of our kids are night trained as of this August. They could have been regarded as night trained earlier, but I wanted to use up all the diapers we had left (and wasn’t quite willing to trust their bed linens to fate). Still, the diapers have been dry so once the box was empty, we stopped buying diapers.

So they’re night trained–mostly.

They’re night trained provided I:
1. Don’t allow them extra glasses of water after bedtime.
2. Make sure they use the toilet before bedtime.
3. Am ready at any moment of the night to leap up, turn on lights, open doors and generally get kids into the bathroom the moment a cry of distress is heard. The kids are too short to turn on lights by themselves and we keep the bedroom doors closed because we don’t like cats walking on our heads at 3 am.

I’d like to stress the bit about extra glasses of water. I allowed it last night.

That won’t happen again.

Posted by Jim at August 29th, 2005

This entry is far too geeky for most people to even care, but… I do care. My apologies to the 99.9% of humanity who doesn’t (very few of which are reading this blog…).

I’ve been messing around with my FreeBSD box lately, trying to make it habitable for personal use (as opposed to server use). Thus, I’ve been experimenting with window managers. Window managers (for those of you who don’t know and are yet still reading) are programs that dictate how your computer manages the windows in which programs appear. It manages how they look and all the things you can do with them.

All Microsoft Windows really allows you to do is minimize, maximize, close and switch windows. Some window managers allow you to do more than that. Enlightenment is one of them.

What I like about Enlightenment:
–It looks good. Better, at any rate, than most window managers for Unix.
–It allows you to keep programs on your desktop as the bar on top of the program (you know, the one that says the program’s name), but everything else disappears. Mac OS used allow you to do that, but I haven’t been able to find out how in OS X.
–It allows you a lot of other options as well, but I really haven’t used them

What I dislike:
–The common problem with open source stuff… There are so many options that they intimidate me and I’ve never gotten around to using even a third of them.
–The way it handles multiple desktops. In Unix, after all, you typically have access to 4 desktops instead of just one. If you move your mouse pointer slightly too far to the left or right, you automatically move over to the next desktop, causing all the programs you’re working with to disappear and leaving you to wonder what happened. Undoubtedly this will seem second nature to me at some point, but it isn’t yet. It just makes me think of the stupid windows menu key on my keyboard, something that I only hit accidently, constantly knocking me out of the program I’m working with and into a menu I didn’t want to open.
–Desktop clutter: In addition to the icons that I’ve dumped on the desktop, there are three other windows that are always open by default. Two of them show little representations of what’s open on the 4 desktops available (2 desktops per window–this is, admittedly, kind of cool). The third shows representations of what all your minimized programs look like–also cool. Sadly, I never really need them and thus they just clutter up my screen.

Overall, I do like the enlightenment window manager, but the things I don’t like grate on my nerves at the moment. We’ll see if they do in the future.

That being said, I should mention that the last time I used enlightenment (5 years ago…) it was notoriously unstable. It isn’t anymore (I’m using Enlightment 16 now). It works just as well as anything else.

Posted by Jim at August 26th, 2005

With all the recent attention to Pat Robertson’s ability to say mind-bogglingly stupid things on television, I’ve been reminded of his brief, unsuccessful bid for the presidency.

Robertson won some primaries (though George H. W. Bush ultimately won the presidency) and there was a point in the process where he had momentum. I didn’t ever expect that he would win, but, I didn’t expect that he would get as far as he had either. Anything seemed possible.

It was 1987-88. I was in my first year of college. It was not long after the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert sex scandals. Nor was it particularly long after Gary Hart’s spectacular flameout in the Democratic primaries (I seem to remember that he dared reporters to follow him in order to show he wasn’t involved in scandal–and they did–catching him with Donna Rice).

One evening, I was up late listening to the college radio station (which in a case of exceptionally bad judgement sometimes allowed me to dejay). Liz, a person I knew through Opus (Hope’s literary magazine), was doing her show.

It was late enough that returns had come in from that night’s primary and she was talking about it. Pat Robertson had won and she was not happy.

“Women,” she said, “someone needs to sleep with that man.”

It seemed a lot funnier to me in that moment then it seems now, but, I still smile a little when I remember it. To judge from the past week, there’s a great deal of joke fodder left in Pat Robertson.

Posted by Jim at August 25th, 2005

With fall comes change. It has most years of my life as I’ve been in school almost the entire time I’ve been alive.

This year Abby’s in school–well, pre-school at any rate. It’s strange. It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was up changing diapers and giving her the occasional bottle.

She went for her first full day on Wednesday.

I should have some more observations about that, but I don’t. I just keep on saying to myself, “Wow. That’s strange. Where did the time go?”

Posted by Jim at August 21st, 2005

I don’t generally get to see the movies I’m interested in while they’re in the theaters, but I generally at least know that they’re in theaters. In this case I didn’t know Stage Beauty had even been filmed.

Stage Beauty tells the story of Ned Kynaston, an actor during the 1660’s when women’s roles were played by men. Those who have read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy will be familiar with the setting.

When the king decrees that women can now play women and that men cannot, Ned goes from being one of the most celebrated actors of woman’s roles in London to a virtual nobody. In the meantime, his dresser becomes one of the first actresses and a friend of the king’s mistress.

I’d write more about the story, but if anyone’s tempted to see it on my recommendation I don’t want to spoil anything.

A couple things I will mention though:
–I’d heard that acting during that period was more formal and did not try to be as “realistic” as modern acting does. If that’s true (and I may have heard wrong), then these characters step toward modern acting in the course of this film. I don’t know whether that reflects history or not. Someone who actually knows something about the history of acting might be capable of critiquing that.
–As someone who’s done a little bit of work in the sociology of gender, I couldn’t help but note that the film played around with notions of gender and sexuality. Some people may find that interesting.

In any case, I recommend it.

Posted by Jim at August 18th, 2005

I work for a variety of small non-profits, organizations too small to afford a full time IT person. These sort of organizations generally don’t have a lot of money. Nonetheless, they sometimes need things that larger organizations need.

One example: a calendar sharing program. Once you get to a certain number of people, you just have to expect that you won’t be able to keep track of everybody’s schedule.

Not every office is going to be able to afford (for example) Microsoft Exchange. Nonetheless, pretty much every office is a candidate for Exchange because Outlook comes with Microsoft Office. Unfortunately, Exchange isn’t made for a small office. If your office is going to get its email through another provider rather than having the IT person handle it, you probably don’t want to install Exchange just to handle the calendar. It really isn’t worth it.

The thing is, people in the office are probably already using Outlook’s calendar and most likely don’t want to learn a new one.

What’s interesting is that there are a number of open source Exchange replacements out there. I looked over a few of them. Unfortunately, the office that wants a shared calendar is an all Windows shop including the servers. There are good and bad reasons for this that I won’t get into, but, the upshot is that these Exchange replacements don’t run on windows. They’ll service Outlook clients, but the server won’t run on Windows.

Fortunately, Rainlender appears to be an open source calendar program that can synchronize with multiple clients, runs on windows, and reads a person’s Outlook files.

If it works, it could be exactly what’s needed. I’ll try it out next week, I think.

UPDATE: With a little more research it became obvious that that Rainlendar is really made to allow one person to synchronize multiple calendars as opposed to allowing an office to view each other’s calendars. Sigh… The search continues.

Posted by Jim at August 12th, 2005

A while back, I mentioned that I use Audioscrobbler, a music service that tracks your music use. Having recently undergone some changes, the services related to Audioscrobbler have moved over to last.fm.

One thing that’s cool about it is that you can listen to a stream based on your music choices. This is convenient when you don’t have your music collection immediately available. In my case this means that I can indulge my interests in jazz, alternative rock, ’70’s era progressive rock, blues, classical music and um… Japanese pop?

I don’t mind Japanese pop music, but it isn’t really an interest. One might reasonably ask how that would happen.

My best guess goes like this. Last.fm chooses what you listen to based on not just what you listen to, but also on what people with similar music interests listen to.

Though a genre with worldwide fans, Jazz is not outrageously popular in any particular place. Thus, when I look at the people in my musical neighborhood according to Last.fm, I find people from a lot of different countries: Poland, the Netherlands, the UK, and… Japan.

I haven’t run into much Polish, Dutch or current British music yet, but I suppose I might. We’ll see.

UPDATE: To my amusement, it turns out that there’s a last.fm player that allows you to listen to your preferred music stream. Not surprisingly, the Mac version isn’t done yet while the Windows port is. Strangely though, the FreeBSD port is available while the Mac port isn’t. I’ve never seen that happen before. Even odder, the Mac port is available if you’re willing to compile it yourself while the FreeBSD port is in instantly installable binary form. This will be quite convenient someday when I make my soundcard work with FreeBSD.

Posted by Jim at August 10th, 2005

What I enjoy about role playing games is the opportunity to create a story, specifically the background and situation in which the story takes place. I don’t get any particular joy out of creating rules. When I do it, I do it solely in order to support the feel of the game I’m running.

More to the point, I generally try to avoid creating rules if I have the option of using other people’s. That being said, I haven’t used a commercially published rules system in a game I’ve run since the mid 90’s. Even before then I had a tendency to modify games.

So now that I’ve recently been introduced to some of the ideas used at the Forge, I’ve felt an urge to use them in one of my campaigns. Having looked over the rules of a few different game systems that come out of there, I’m inclined to borrow the core of Vincent Baker’s conflict resolution rules from “Dogs in the Vineyard.”

They require some modification to work though. I’m sure I could use them without modification, but there’s a reason to modify. Dogs in the Vineyard’s conflict resolution rules encourage a person to reflect on how far they are willing to go to win a conflict.

A conflict can move from words to fists to gunplay, but at every point there’s clear point of demarcation, making it clear to the player that each escalation to a higher level of conflict represents a choice on their part.

While cool, Dogs is about the use and misuse of authority. My campaign isn’t about that so the slow, building escalation might not quite fit.

Thematically then, what is the game I’m working on about? Primarily about a person’s destiny. My goal is to have the game have a bit of the feel of Babylon 5. Those of you who watched it may remember Londo Mollari’s struggle with his future. Despite having choices, his own ambition brought him toward a rather grim future. By the time he realized what that destiny would really be like, it was too late to turn back. By contrast, another character (Sheridan) also had choices. Though his led him to a future that wasn’t entirely happy either, he knew he’d done the right thing.

I’m trying to create a game in which players can deliberately give their characters destinies to choose from. Mind you, they can also choose a destiny that affects very few people as opposed to one that changes the course of history. The question really is what they’re willing to do to get there.

I’ve got a mechanism for this in the game. During character creation each player gets 5d6. The dice can be applied to one destiny or several (up to 5)–player’s choice. During the game, these dice can be applied to any conflict. The player just has to explain how this conflict moves the character toward his/her destiny.

I’m not sure that the theme of the game needs to affect conflict resolution any more than that.

That being said, conflict resolution should create a feeling supportive of the game as a whole. That’s something I’m still messing with in my head.

Posted by Jim at August 8th, 2005

12:31 a.m. Monday morning–I am looking over an anonymous comment in my blog and wondering how (or if) I will respond.

As I begin, there’s a loud buzzing, a reddish-orange flash from outside, and the power goes out. Soon after, there’s another sound, another flash. The power goes on again, and then instantly off. This time it stays off.

I walk outside.

Across the street, a significant chunk of tree has fallen, held up only by the powerlines. There’s a small fire burning. I notice a man standing on my lawn. He’s not wearing a shirt. I walk up to him and we watch the fire burn out.

He explains that he’s already called 911 and tells me about how he almost parked his car under the tree. I’ve never met him, but apparently he lives in the neighborhood.

While we talk, we hear a rustling, then a shaking. Most of the rest of the tree falls on the powerlines. Realizing instantly, that the powerlines may have enough force to snap in our direction, we run away, me following him. It turns out that he’s better at sprinting.

The firetrucks arrive, followed by the police, city workers, specialists in cutting down tree limbs, and Consumers Energy.

They set up a “Fire Department DO NOT CROSS” line. Soon after that most of our neighbors show up.

It turns out that the power is out at least four blocks around us. The city workers suggest that things will be restored by morning. Kristen and I go to bed, lulled to sleep by the sound of chainsaws and wood chippers.

Well, I’m lulled to sleep anyway. Kristen barely sleeps at all. The power worked by morning though. I’m grateful for that.

Posted by Jim at August 3rd, 2005

Owing to the fact that my master’s project is written in java, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and install native java on FreeBSD.

This is a more complicated business than you might expect thanks to Sun’s licensing restrictions. Basically, Sun doesn’t develop for FreeBSD anymore. They leave that to the FreeBSD project, allowing FreeBSD developers to download the code, make the necessary patches and install it on FreeBSD. This is good. What’s not quite so good is that the licensing does not allow them to distribute the resulting binaries. Thus, you can’t download a working JDK (which would allow you to write java programs) or even just a JRE (allowing you to use java programs).

This is okay bearing in mind that if there’s one thing FreeBSD is good at it’s distributing and compiling programs from source with minimal hassle. FreeBSD just downloads the necessary programs and libraries automatically after you type “make install clean” into the appropriate directory.

Except… Thanks to Sun’s licensing issues, FreeBSD can’t just download the necessary stuff automatically. You have to do it manually. This is not an incredible hassle, but it does make things more complicated than it needs to be.

So… here’s what you need to get java working on FreeBSD:

1. The ports collection. You should have downloaded this during installation, but you can still do it now.
2. Ideally (but optionally), the source code for everything on your computer. You could have done this during installation too. This is just worth doing if you’re going to use ports in general–not a real requirement.

So you go to a JDK directory (for example: cd /usr/ports/java/jdk14) and type “make install clean” and you discover you need:
3. the patch for the current version of this JDK. You download it from here.
4. Then you’ll discover that you need a binary from Sun. They’ll give you a link to it in the error message when you’ve uselessly tried to compile.
5. Then you’ll discover (after another fruitless compile) that you need the actual source code for the JDK in question.
6. After that, you’ll try again and discover that you now need to download a linux binary of a JDK. As ever, the link is in the error message.

Once all these files are in “/usr/ports/distfiles,” you will finally have a halfway decent chance of getting java working.

As I understand it, there is a project that attempts to minimize the hassle of doing all this while simultaneously complying with licensing restrictions. Unfortunately, it only applies to JDK 1.3 at this point. Bearing in mind that my project depends on having JDK 1.4 at minimum, this is not an option.

Sigh.

On the bright side, JDK 1.4.2 is happily compiling in the background as I write this. For the moment life is good–assuming I don’t have to download anything else.