On Todd Glass coming out on WTF (a good episode, BTW):
Katt:
Came out like he’s gay?
Me:
Yope.
He’s an established comedian/podcaster.
I’m always amazed people can be secret gay for that long!
Katt:
It must be really hard.
Me:
OTOH, it’s probably sorta cool to have a surprise to unleash on people.
Maybe I’ll come out as Batman.
Katt:
You’re not Batman, honey.
I recently packed my old blog, Notes of Chaos, into a PDF. While slowly re-reading it on my iPad, I came across this review of Autofac.
Short version: If you want to know how it feels to debug a program or hack something, read Autofac.
Capturing realistic technical struggle
2002-06-11 03:47:16

I read Philip K. Dick’s Autofac last night.The Autofacs (autonomous factories) were designed to get humanity back on its feet in the event of a nuclear holocaust (“Total Global Conflict”), which happened five years ago in this story. They do this by gathering natural resources and then manufacturing and delivering all of the goods that people need.
Unfortunately for humanity, there is a huge bug in the Autofacs: they harvest all of the natural resources and will back away from them only when human productivity matches that of the Autofacs’. That level of productivity is kinda hard for humanity to achieve while the Autofacs are taking 100% of the resources. Thus, humans must depend completely upon the Autofacs unless they can be shut down.
Continue reading
I figure that, without context, this works as some kind of William S. Burroughs thing.
Me:
Yo, you gotta crush a lot of content if you wanna be cool like Bowser!
Katt:
Don’t they mean Middlebury?
Me:
He crushed it up into a berry!
Katt:
Also, I guess if your name is Gomer, you feel pressure to be even more cool.
Dragonair ate his Middleberry! His Critical Thinking skill goes way up!
Me:
Oh, man, we gotta play that!
Well, once we get a TV.
Katt:
Pokemon Education Revolution!
Me:
Also, a pro-Bowser blog written by the candy stand guy would be good.
Katt:
Oh yeah. I wonder if Bowser ever visits his stand.
Me:
What? Squirtle is getting a master’s degree?
Probably just to pick up from the vault.
Katt:
What? Ivysaur is evolving!
Me:
He’s, like, yeah, yeah, crunch some candy. Let me see the receipts.
Katt:
Congratulations! Your Ivysaur evolved into UNEMPLOYED MFA!
Me:
deer yahoo answers how come my iveysor power went down
Katt:
u sent him to art scool dumass he needs to be a laywer
Me:
loyer stone is xpencive tho
That was a great fight. Any fight involving two people with perfect proprioception is bound to be. But the outcome bummed me out more than I thought it would.
Don’t read on if you haven’t seen the fight yet.
Me:
OK, I have no interest in playing Battleshoot, but knowing they render croissants makes me kind of interested.
Katt:There’s a game called Battleshoot?
Me:
It’s actually called Battlefield.
Katt:
Awwww man.
At first, I thought, well, Steve Jobs lead a super fantastic life, and I’m usually not in the business of mourning people I didn’t know that have lead fantastic lives. No need to be sad for him. (Which is true, if you, like me, didn’t realize he was 56.)
But today, I’m a bit sad for ourselves, which is, of course, selfish. Around 2007, I had worked as a software developer for seven years and was ready to be done. Shit seemed largely fucked up and unrewarding. But my friend Dan, who had been going on about Linux for a decade, had gotten into Macs lately, so after yet another fdisk/reinstall incident, I took a look in that direction, despite my long-held biases against them.
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Katt: I have never read any Lovecraft.
Me: He’s a pretty bad writer, but some of his stories are great.
Katt: I get the impression they’re all like “Dear readers, I was in Providence for fishing and science, and I learned of the unspeakable horror of the beast known as Harnlthyanahggh.
Katt: He is a blind dead lizard man with tentacles who lives under the sea and makes ominous BLORP noises. One day, when his eternal Game Boy finally runs out of battery power, he will eat the coastline.
Katt: In the deepest reaches of space, there is a hole that leads back to a drainpipe in Queens. Here is where all the antimatter lives, and the Marlaghthtrangh lies eating popsicles.
I’m working on an iOS app right now with a feature that uses images from the Photo Library. This was all solid for me, and I had worked with it for a nearly a month before putting it before my alpha testers.
With a set up like that, you know where this is going: It totally did not work for them. At all. After the users would pick a photo from the library, the spinner letting the user know an image was being loaded would sit there forever, and eventually, this would show up in the console logs:
May 19 14:51:17 THE-MOON SpringBoard[27]
May 19 14:52:00 THE-MOON SpringBoard[27]
{(
)}
May 19 14:52:00 THE-MOON SpringBoard[27]
For the life of me, I could not reproduce this bug on my phone or my girlfriend’s phone. Which, of course, is bewildering. Googling pointed to a lot of problems related to threading, and indeed I was using a dispatch queue of my own making to do the image work.
I know there’s things that absolutely must be started on the main thread: Network calls (which end up on the web thread) and UI stuff. But I wasn’t doing anything with the network or the UI, as far as I knew. And why would this only happen on my users’ devices and not on devices in my household?
I’ll spare you a recounting the red herrings that I surveyed.
It’s because the first time you try to get stuff out of the Photo Library with ALAssetsLibrary, it asks the user if your app can have access to location data. (Photo metadata can contain with location data.) But it can’t show a UIAlertView from a thread other than the main thread, it can’t, so things will just stall out.
My phone and my lady friend’s phone have had on them previous builds of the app that used ALAssetsLibrary from the main thread. So, back then, that dialog was able to show, and location data access permission was saved. Deleting the app doesn’t revoke that permission. The current build, which used ALAssetsLibrary from a non-main thread, ran into no problems because it had the permission and didn’t need to show any dialogs.
The lessons I can see are:
1. Doing work in helper queues is great, but think twice about whether or not the things you do there are going to lead to UI or network stuff.
If I had read carefully, I would have noted that the documentation says:
When the asset is requested, the user may be asked to confirm the application’s access to the library. If the user denies access to the application, or if no application is allowed to access the data, the failure block is called.
2. Things that affect your app get saved outside of your app and don’t get cleared when you delete your app.
I hope this saves someone somewhere some time.
I was listening to this podcast in which the hosts, Hannah and Edward, discuss how to approach people’s enthusiasm about the long-awaited killing of Osama bin Laden.
The death of Osama bin Laden means quite a bit symbolically, but I don’t think that is going to translate to that much real-world effect, and it sounds like Edward and Hannah don’t think it will, either. If you ascribe to this point of view, it means that a lot of people are confusing the way in which this event is significant.
The question they ponder is: Should people that don’t really think this is going to change much just go along with the people that think this defines the start of a new era? Maybe this is a case in which the enthusiasm and positivity is more important that the reality of the situation, Edward ponders.
I think it’s trouble when enthusiasm is built on a false premise, like I think Hannah was saying. Man, just writing that last sentence felt totally wet blanketesque and possibly sanctimonious! But you gotta be willing to risk sanctimony in order to make sure as many of us as possible are focused on the real deal.
I do agree with them in that there’s no gain in smacking people down for feeling good. You cannot deny the honesty of their reactions, even if you disagree with the conclusions that spring from them. So, it’s a pretty fine line to walk, what with the keeping people you know connected to reality while also not being a shit. I think I’ve settled on, “I am glad you have achieved closure at last! However, feeling closure doesn’t necessarily mean the world is significantly better.” Which, again sounds a bit sanctimonious! I’ll have to work on that.
But better to be sanctimonious than to tacitly help build a false reality from which bad decisions are made. Many of our biggest problems today grew this way. And I know that there’s a lot of people that are mostly interested in believing in whatever what makes them feel good. It is still worth trying, though. Even if it makes you look like a shit.
Ask a Korean translated part of a fascinating interview with a North Korean Special Forces commando that had defected to South Korea.
Mr. Im Cheon-Yong (45) was a captain of North Korean Special Forces. He is relatively short — not quite 170 cm [TK: 5' 7"] — but had unusually large fists, reminiscent of a cartoon character. The fact that this reporter met an officer of North Korean military’s special combat unit became even more real after he explained, “I practiced punching several thousand times a day.” His handshake was firm and heavy.
…
The training for special combat as told by Mr. Im was harsh as expected, and some parts beyond imagination. The training begins on 5 a.m. The fundamental of the training is to turn the entire body into steely firmness, and the basic part is training the fist.
Mr. Im said, “You would wrap a tree trunk with ropes, and keep punching it. You throw 5000 punches day and night — do that for a month, the inside of your fist swells up until you can barely curl your fingers.” He added, “Then you open a tin can and set it up on a stand. You keep punching the sharp part. When your hand turns into mush with blood and pus, you start punching a pile of salt. Repeat it, and your hands become like a stone.” Mr. Im explained, “You punch the salt so that the salt would prevent the hand from rotting away with the blood.” According to Mr. Im, with the hand trained like this “you can easily break 20 sheets of cement blocks, and you can kill a person with three punches.” His hands would naturally make a fist throughout the interview. This reporter had to respectfully ask that he unclench his fist during the interview.
I remember hearing about this kind of thing as a kid. (I was told the rumor was that North Korean special forces could climb brick walls using just their fingers.) Despite the evils of North Korea, I thought it would be incredibly cool if such legendary soldiers existed. Now I’m an adult, and I know they exist, yet I find it sad.
The truth is that this insane training is sadly not that relevant. This is a time in which their opponents will very likely be armed, and those that won’t be would be easy to beat up anyway, without iron fist kung fu. It’s not even that relevant in unarmed combat – as Mr. Im probably knows, punching is not viable or possible in some phases of combat. Some South Korean bodyguard could clinch up with him, and the years of tree-punching go out the window.
Having these rock-like fists is more convenient than picking up a rock or blackjack, but it is still not worth it. That effort and time spent punching trees (and recovering from punching trees and losing fine motor skills) could be spent on other aspects of hand-to-hand combat, or better yet – armed combat or tactics. Even learning about South Korean government and society could help them be better assassins more effectively than clubbing their hands.
This is such a tragic waste of incredible willpower and human potential, even in the context of the horrible field of assassination. What could these guys be doing if they weren’t lead by childish morons?
These commandos are pushing human limits in order to do something that is largely archaic and useless. I’m sure they’re not the only citizens of North Korea doing so, and that is just another horrific aspect of life in that country.