Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at October 31st, 2005

Kristen ran a marathon yesterday. Her time was a personal best by 30 seconds or so. So that’s okay. She’d been hoping to break five hours, but didn’t. And that, in her vew, is not okay.

Still, I think she had a good time running the marathon. She does like long runs. Also, the fact that she got an official time was cause for some mild celebration. She’d accidentally skipped a tenth of a mile while running through Millenium Park. It happened early in the morning while she was more or less alone.

How was she alone? Despite the fact that more than a thousand runners went out for the marathon and half-marathon, only 20 or so started at 7 am. Most started at 8 am. The 7 am start is reserved for “velocity challenged” runners.

She ran back to make up for the missed mileage, but as it turned out, she also missed a pad that detects the chip attached to her shoe. Perhaps I should explain?

Most marathons these days have you tie a chip into your shoestrings. With that firmly in place, they can monitor exactly when you begin and exactly when you end. This becomes particularly important in the larger marathons (like Chicago) that have to move 40,000 people very slowly across the starting line and you can end up “starting” 30 minutes after they fire the gun.

Sprinkle a few pads throughout the race and you can tell where each runner is and what sort of time they’re getting. You can also prevent cheating by disqualifying people who don’t show up on all of the pads.

And that’s what got Kristen worried.

With that in mind, getting a time is the cause of some small celebration.

You may wonder what I was doing during that time. Well, thanks to my parents who took Abby and Rebecca for the night, I was not watching kids. This freed me to get up at 5:30 am with Kristen, collect her chip, and watch the race begin.

After that, I did what most spouses do during marathons–kill time. I spent some two hours at Sweetwaters, a coffeehouse that is open all night, has friendly staff, decent coffee and good wireless access. It’s a little more expensive than most area coffeehouses, but they’ve got to pay for having 24/7 hours somehow.

Other than that, I drove around town and waited for Kristen to show up at various aid stations. There, I cheered her on and took her picture. Those of you familiar with Grand Rapids will be able to look at the course map and realize that this was harder than it sounds.

Unlike Chicago, which mostly goes through the city, Grand Rapids’ marathon largely goes down roads that are inaccessible to anyone but the runners. Thus, in Chicago I took the subway from one end of the route to the next, knowing that I could pop out and see Kristen run by. Here, I had only 4 or so places I could reasonably hope to see her. Unlike Chicago, I actually saw her in all but one of these places. It’s a lot easier when there are hundreds rather than thousands of people running by.

Kristen tells me this is her third and last marathon. She told me that after her first too. Someday it will be true.

Posted by Jim at October 29th, 2005

Kristen’s running the Grand Rapids Marathon tomorrow morning.

She’s run the Chicago Marahon twice. She ran her first marathon during the year following the miscarriage (at 22 weeks) of our first attempt to have a child. She ran her second Chicago marathon last year. Her account of running in the first marathon was actually published in the Salvation Army’s national news magazine. I may write about it (and what led to it) myself someday.

Each time, I’ve gone with Kristen to pick up the registration items. These usually include some information, the timing chip, and a shirt. At Chicago, this generally turns out to be a massive event with people from all over the world crowding an enormous room filled with booths and exhibitions. Chicago attracts 30,000-40,000 runners. Grand Rapids attracts approximately 1000.

The registration room was correspondingly smaller. The few vendors were in a separate room. Unlike Chicago, the only language I heard was english. That being said, Kristen and I were amused to run into Deborah Henson-Conant, a Jazz/Blues harpist who inexplicably performs in Grand Rapids every so often. She’s an entertaining musician, and as it happens, we’ve already got tickets to see her the next time she’s in town (November). Apparently she was in town this week and decided to run the half marathon.

In some ways, I would be less surprised to run into a musician I liked in Chicago than Grand Rapids. On the other hand, given Chicago’s size I would never have picked her out from the crowd.

I imagine that size affects this marathon in a number of ways. First of all, I’m betting that the runners will be running to achieve a personal best time as opposed to running in costume as Elvis, a mariachi, or as a cow (all of which I’ve seen in Chicago). Second, I’m betting it will be much easier to take pictures of Kristen here than it was in Chicago where she would often turn out to be one of hundreds in the street at a time.

Perhaps I’ll write more about it tomorrow after the race.

Posted by Jim at October 25th, 2005

As many of the people reading this blog probably already know, Digital Blasphemy offers some of the more interesting wallpaper on the web. Most of it’s available to members only, but some of it is free to all. Those of us who are elderly in web years may remember when it was all free to all. That was before the artist tried to make a living off of it and succeeded (which is pretty cool by itself…).

Anyway, for the moment the Halloween Gallery is free to all including one of my personal favorites of his wallpapers.

Posted by Jim at October 21st, 2005

After picking up our kids from my mother in law, who had looked after them for a few hours, we drove up Division toward home. Division, for those of you who do not live in Grand Rapids, does not have a great reputation. Formerly the main highway/street through town (in the 50’s/60’s and earlier), it is now a street of used car lots, dirt, weeds and boarded up buildings. To be fair, there are growing spots of life, but it’s not a great street. Back in the 80’s-90’s, I’m told that it was the street for picking up prostitutes and buying drugs.

I’m sure it was a great street back in the 1890’s. Some of the boarded up buildings have classic architecture from the period.

Tonight though, it is a horrible street. We came through at about 10:15 pm, passing through a section where construction constricted traffic to two lanes from the normal four. As traffic got back to normal, we were passed by a group of three motorcycles traveling fairly quickly down the road.

I don’t know what precisely happened next (they’d managed to pass the cars just ahead of us), but suddenly we saw a shower of sparks and realized that a motorcyle lay on it’s side in the left lane. The car in front of us left our lane, passed around the motorcyle, and drove away. At that point, I came to a stop.

Just ahead of me in the right lane lay the motorcyclist, flat on his back and unmoving, his left hand pointed up at the sky.

My wife called 911. As she was talking to the operator, I realized that a girl lay face down on the sidewalk to the right of us, hands outstretched, blood on the sidewalk near her head. She did not move either. In the dark, she didn’t appear to be more than her early teens (UPDATE: see below).

A girl about the same age came around the corner and started screaming, followed by an older man and other kids. The older man pulled the screaming girl into his arms and led her away.

Even as Kristen hung up her phone and informed me that someone had already called about this, the fire trucks, police cars and ambulances began to arrive. Knowing that we had seen nothing that would help explain the accident and had done what we could, we drove away.

According to our local NBC affiliate, the girl is in the hospital with life threatening injuries. The man is in another hospital. His injuries are unknown.

UPDATE: The woman who got hit turns out to be 43 years old. She’s still fighting for her life. The motorcyclist appears to be in better shape. You can read (a little) more at TV 8’s website. I wonder who (if anyone) will be blamed for the accident? The motorcyclists seemed to be traveling pretty quickly, but trying to cross a dark street that’s filled with traffic isn’t a very good idea either.

Posted by Jim at October 20th, 2005

Originally when I started doing my master’s project, I wanted to do something that included peer to peer capabilities. One way of doing this was jxta. Jxta is a platform/protocol for doing peer to peer. Making use of XML, it is implemented in multiple programming languages (Java, C, Perl…) for multiple platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows).

I spent a couple weeks trying to understand the Java version of the library. Then I spent a couple more trying to implement something with it.

Last night I gave up and decided to write my own system (in Java) for filesharing among groups.

I probably should have known better than to even try Jxta, but I’m big into the idea of code reuse and the Jxta project is doing exactly what I need. In retrospect, however, there were a number of warning signs that should have scared me off earlier than they did.

1. Some other guys in a class I took tried to use Jxta and then gave up. From the questions they’d asked in previous classes, it had always seemed to me that I knew more about networks than they did and so I thought I mgiht be able to make things work. What I managed to conveniently forget is that it was also apparent that they were better programmers than I am.

2. Jxta focuses on creating a flexible combination of tools as opposed to solutions. Thus, there is no “share_files()” method. There are, however, many different types of pipes–and many ways to configure them. Again, this fits into Java’s way of doing things, but personally I’d rather have some standard solutions and then come up with strange configurations only if I need to rather than by default.

3. There’s a project based on Jxta called JAL. It does exactly what I just described I wanted out of Jxta. Unfortunately, the project was abandoned last year. I gather that the developers (who work at Sun) were frustrated with Jxta as a platform.

So now I’m reinventing the wheel. Hopefully my wheel will be less elaborate, but give a smoother ride.

Posted by Jim at October 16th, 2005

Occasionally I address Significant Issues of the Day in this blog. What follows does not qualify for that label.

My first car had no cup holder. Originally bought in the late 80’s (though not by me), it was designed without them. If I was careful, I could put a cup into the area originally set aside for change. After that, of course, quick stops and starts were not an option unless I wanted to spill my drink. The increasing stickyness of the “change indentation” attested to the fact that I was less concerned with this than I ought to have been.

During that same period, if I remember correctly, people were making those mugs with the really wide, flat bottoms with a semi-sticky substance that allowed them to grip the floor or dashboard. Not coincidentally, these mugs also usually had caps because they were probably going to flip over at some point.

I haven’t seen one of those mugs in stores in a while. I don’t think people need them much anymore.

My wife’s first car (from the early 90’s) had two cup holders. I was awed by the luxury. My wife’s current car has four cup holders in the front seat alone–two in the middle section and one in each front door. There are two more in the back seat.

You may wonder where cupholders will be put next. Hats? Sadly, that one’s already been done. Ditto chairs. Just from those two examples alone, it should be pretty clear that they’re everywhere now. I’m not going to be surprised to discover that someone’s building them into pants (”Is that cup holder or are you just happy to see me?”).

I can’t help but wonder what’s up with this? Are we all just drinking more water? Are product designers diet Coke junkies?

Whatever the case, just take a look at the wagon my parents bought my kids. Look closely. Yeah. That’s right.

Cup holders.

Posted by Jim at October 13th, 2005

I watched Schultze Gets the Blues last weekend.

It is a good film–though not a “hollywood blockbuster” sort of film. It’s a German independent film about a retired miner who’s also an accordian player. As he’s adjusting to retirement, he develops an interest in Zydeco music and Cajun culture, surprising his friends and the people in the small village he lives in.

It’s not slow moving, but it’s filled with pauses, shots of unmoving objects, and shots of Schultze traveling down the Mississippi in a boat. There’s no noticeable soundtrack. There are no car chases. There are plenty of scenes in which Schultze encounters things that are new and strange to him. There’s also a lot of quiet.

Thematically, the movie plays with the idea that it’s never too late to change and enjoy your life. It does a good job at that, making an interesting contrast between Schultze (an old man who’s life is changing) and a younger man who reads poetry while tediously operating a gate at a bridge or railroad crossing (I can’t remember which).

It’s the theme that dictates the ending. It’s exactly the right ending, but there are some things about it I disliked. Alas, I can’t write about them without spoiling the ending of the film.

The thing is though, they still bug me enough that I want to write about them. Thus, I’m going to do so. Those of you who might want to watch the film and are bothered by spoilers should consider yourselves warned.

Here goes:

When I took courses in creative writing, my writing profs would encourage us to spot points in the story at which things didn’t make sense. Stories are better when they don’t have glaring plot holes.

Near the end of the movie, Schultze dies. He’s in Louisiana on the Mississippi Delta. He’s visiting a women and her daughter on their houseboat. While with them, he goes to a dance. A Zydeco band there plays the song that started Schultze’s interest in Zydeco. While dancing, he slumps.

Here’s where the problem comes in: Rather than taking him to a hospital (or even referencing a visit), the woman takes him home and puts him in a chair on the top deck of her houseboat, covering him with a blanket. He is dead by morning.

Apparently this woman is the only woman in the United States who doesn’t look at an older, overweight, slumping man and think, “Heart attack!” That or Louisiana has no hospitals, something that also seems unlikely.

I’m aware that the scene of Schultze drifting into death on the deck of a houseboat fits the feel of the movie better than a trip to the hospital, lots of doctors, and machines with blinking lights would have.

Still, I can’t imagine anyone who actually lives on a river in the US leaving anyone out on the deck of a houseboat at night. Beyond the question of hospitals, there are mosquitos. They’re very unpleasant and last I heard, they live near water.

Anyway, the death seemed gratuitous to me. I couldn’t help but think that it happened just so that they could have the funeral scene in which a German brass band does it’s best to play a New Orleans style funeral (somber music on the way to the grave, joyful music as they leave it). It is the straightest, most German Zydeco you will ever hear.

It’s cool in that it allows Schultze’s life to affect his friends and village, but I’d have rather seen him come back to Germany (or choose not to) and get some hint of what comes next.

In short, I’d rather see people live with change than die just after having one.

Don’t get the impression that I disliked the movie from this. I enjoyed it and I can see what the director/writer made the choices he did. I’m just making some observations.

Posted by Jim at October 9th, 2005

Here’s a book I’d like to read if something like it exists:

A book that traces eating and not eating through history and pays attention to the cultural and resource related reasons that people eat or don’t eat. In an ideal world, it would attempt to relate food taboos (for example: keeping kosher), vegetarianism, diets, anorexia/bulimia and fasting. It might also consider the Temperance movement.

What’s interesting about the topic:
1. For example: In the past, when people were often only just barely above starvation, fasting was a common religious discipline. Today, in an age of excess food (at least in the US), fasting is uncommon.
2. Is anorexia/bulimia a modern problem or did it happen throughout history and only now has become recognized? Also, are the people most likely to diet a different demographic group than the people most likely to have anorexia or bulimia? Is the process of a person becoming convinced to go on a diet similar or different from the process of developing an eating disorder?
3. In the past, food taboos came about for various reasons, some of them cultural/religious, some of them related to available resources. For example, people refusing to eat meat dedicated to a god not their own would be a cultural/religious reason. Refusing to eat snake because catching a snake uses more calories than the actual snake provides would be a resource related reason.

By contrast, today’s food taboos are totally individual. These range from losing weight (by avoiding carbohydrates/fat/only eating special soups/only eating cabbage and beans…) to attempting to change the world via your change in diet. Examples of the latter can include vegetarians of all stripes (vegans, raw foods, macrobiotic diets…), but can also include people who don’t eat processed sugar or other foods with labor practices they disapprove of.

Similarly, in the relatively recent past, the Temperance movement pushed people not to drink alchohol. Part of the reason for this was reasonable: in an industrial society (one with factories) drinking causes accidents with heavy machinery. Also, alchoholism can cause people to waste money that could be spent on rent or food. Of course, that’s not the only reason people were into the Temperance movement. There’s a lot of evidence out there that the push to stop drinking was also an effort to control immigrants (Irish, Swedes, Norwegians, Polish…) of the period as they were percieved to be likely to drink a lot.

There’s got to be a way to pull this together into an interesting, popularly accessible narrative.

Posted by Jim at October 5th, 2005

Here’s something that those of you who do any kind of web development might want to know about:

Email Injection

OK. Some of you, perhaps everyone but me, know about this already. Email injection is a way of putting header information into a form for email that will allow someone to:

Add headers
Replace “To” and “From” information
Add attachments
Send spam to other people via your online email form and from your smtp server

This, for obvious reasons, sucks.

I know that you can do this via a php based form, but hijacking forms written in other languages seem possible too. If you’re interested in more of the technical information, feel free to check here. There’s also some more information in the onlline php manual.

I don’t pass this along for idle entertainment. Someone appears to be attempting to do exactly this with a form that I created. Amusingly, it doesn’t seem to be working. Apparently my php coding style is idiosyncratic enough that the usual ways of doing things don’t quite work. On the other hand, they are obviously trying… So, I’m rewriting the code to make things as close to impossible as I can.

Posted by Jim at October 4th, 2005

On the off chance that Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius comic has not been plugged enough, I figure I’ll mention it here. It’s a great comic.

There are two forms of it available online. First, Girl Genius 101 which is issues 1-13 of the printed comic, reprinted on the web. Second, there’s Girl Genius Advanced Class which takes up where Girl Genius 101 leaves off. The difference is that everything in the Advanced Class is appearing for the first time. I’m not completely sure why they chose to do it this way, but I’m going to guess that it involves money. Specifically, I’m betting that they’re likely to make more of it if they sell printed graphic novels as opposed to individual issues. Plus, they’re likely to expose themselves to more potential buyers online than in comic stores.

From this point forward, those sensitive to spoilers should stop reading. I’m reading both comics simultaneously and for the first time and don’t get bothered by that at all. As such, I don’t feel like pretending not to know stuff. Thus, spoilers likely start in the very next paragraph. Be warned.

Here’s the gist of it: Agatha Clay lives in a version of Europe in which mechanical engineering dominates technology. Thus, mechanical robot servants follow people’s commands, but there’s no plastic, no transistors, and no computers. At the same time, there are people traveling by horse and carriage. In short, technology seems to have passed by the majority of people, being mostly used by the nobility, some of whom are “sparks.”

Sparks are people with an almost magical ability to create/fix machines.

Agatha begins the story living with her guardians and going to Transylvania Polygnostic University. Unfortunately for her, Baron Wulfenbach (ruler and uniter of numerous germanic kingdoms) visits the place causing a series of events that ultimately result in her being expelled from the university, taken captive at Wulfenbach’s castle, and learning that she’s really a great deal more significant than she thought she was. She’s a spark, of course (and a fairly major one), but also descended from some popular but mysteriously vanished heroes.

Hence she’s got not only the ability to defend herself, but also good reason to fear for her life.

There’s more going on than just this, but I don’t want to make this an extremely long post. I just thought I’d mention it since it’s one of the comics I look forward to these days.

P.S. I love the Jagermonsters (artificially constructed soldiers). They’re hilarious. Also, they have a lot of teeth.

P.P.S. Apparently Phil and Kaja are working on a Girl Genius GURPS supplement. I’d love to buy it–even if I end up ignoring GURPS and just using the supplement as source material for my own game.

UPDATE: All Katja’s changed to Kaja in an effort to be accurate…