Live from Austin!

Spent the afternoon and early evening improving the screensaver and learning my way around Cocoa better. (As opposed to cocoa butter, which would probably have been much more enjoyable if used appropriately.) I now have a preferences sheet with various sliders and a color selector, and code to load and save preferences in the correct way. In the process, I triggered yet another bug; tracking it down revealed yet another way in which the reality of the screensaver API differs from the documentation. This in turn has suggested a possible cause for the “textures vanishing when returning from full screen preview” bug, which I’ll investigate tomorrow.

Also on the agenda for tomorrow is gluing together the parameters set by the preferences dialog, and the actual OpenGL snowflake animation code. Should be reasonably trivial, and while I’m in there I plan to try adding a couple more snowflake textures.

Once all that works, it’ll be 1.1b1. (1.0 was the same as 1.0rc2, for those who are keeping track, but I’m not going to bother making a separate renamed release.) Assuming 1.1b1 works for everyone else, I’ll probably go straight to 1.1 and announce it on MacUpdate and VersionTracker.

Anyway, by 19:00 my brain was shutting down from excessive programming. I was unable to engage in conversation; in fact, I was pretty much unable to engage with the outside world at all. I wonder if I was always like this when I was hacking code all day back in the early 90s? Probably, unfortunately. I suspect that being a highly productive programmer requires a state of mind which isn’t altogether healthy.

We went to the Rosebud, I ate fish since my body was craving it. (Listen to the body, sometimes it knows what it needs and will tell you.) I made a swift return to the human race. We came back, and with the aid of coffee I fixed the aforementioned bug. I rewarded myself with a couple of mince pies and a movie.

One of the disadvantages of NetFlix is that months can elapse between adding a DVD to your queue, and actually watching that DVD. So I know that somebody, somewhere recommended that I watch Gun Shy, but I no longer have any idea who. Anyhow, it was moderately funny, but a bit too tense to be completely enjoyable. I’d probably give it 3/5.

After comparing [Rush] Limbaugh to a “circus clown,” the Arizona Republican [John McCain] apologized. “I regret that statement,” he told an interviewer on Fox News the other night, “because my office has been flooded with angry phone calls from circus clowns all over America. They resent that comparison, and so I would like to extend my apologies to Bozo, Chuckles and Krusty.”

Osama Bin Laden’s letter to America.

Personally, I found the Unabomber Manifesto to be a much better read; if you only have time for one ranting self-justification by a demented and murderous misanthrope, that’s the one to go for.

I don’t really get much feeling for Thanksgiving as a holiday. I expect it’s one of those things you have to have grown up with. Since we’ll likely be heading to Minnesota for Christmas, we’re not going to visit sara’s family for Thanksgiving, and of course my family won’t be celebrating it. So, it’s just us, at home.

Yesterday I came home via Star Market and picked up lasagna noodles. Then I went out again to Bread and Circus and collected the other ingredients for a big vegetarian lasagna. Glad I got the shopping out of the way, as today everything is covered in thick, wet snow.

I’m gradually developing my own set of Thanksgiving traditions, and lasagna is part of it… The other part is sending some money to the Greater Boston Food Bank, so a bunch of people can get a hot meal tomorrow.

Working from home today. I’ve got some final tweaks to make to the PDF flyer for the big conference in January, and then I’m going to try and clean up my e-mail inbox.

It’s just dead in the office this week. Why am I even here?

I’d just like to know who thought it was a sensible idea to try and hold the Miss World beauty pageant in Nigeria in the first place. I mean, where are they going to hold it next year? Angola? The Gaza Strip? Columbia?

Ripped LaTOUR’s self-titled CD yesterday. Listening to it today, I wondered to myself what he’d been doing since 1991. A few quick web searches revealed the story…

William “Bud” LaTour was a DJ for a radio station in Arizona, and had recorded a novelty/parody single that still gets airplay on Dr Demento’s show. His first semi-serious release (People Are Still Having Sex) was a surprise hit, and his first album did respectably well. He released a second CD album and a few more singles, but they all vanished into obscurity. He became the radio station’s musical director at some point, and now has a career as record producer, but doesn’t seem credited on many releases.

In case you don’t know anyone who’s had the misfortune to sign to a major label, I should explain something: a career as an infrequently-credited record producer is generally how you end up if you’ve been fucked over by a record company. A quick search on half.com revealed shelfloads of new and almost-new copies of LaTour’s second album selling for 75¢ each. From this, I’m guessing that he was enticed into the usual eight year exclusive contract, his second album sold many fewer copies than the record label expected, and he was told they wouldn’t release anything he recorded in the future, but that he was still under contract and couldn’t record for anyone else either. (Yes, they can do that—in fact, they do it all the time.)

Anyway, since the first album has its moments, I’ve decided to risk $3.50 on a copy of Home On The Range…

OK, this is lame, but Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara is one gorgeous babe… and the hottest bit is that she has a PhD in quantum gravity. Maybe I’m strange, but I think hearing her talk softly about quantum loops in bed would be a major turn-on.

There’s another major bug in one of the IE ActiveX controls installed as part of Windows. It allows any web site to run arbitrary code on your system via malformed HTTP requests.

Microsoft have issued a fix for this one. The problem is, the original broken ActiveX control is still out there, and is signed as trusted code with a Microsoft signature which doesn’t expire. So nefarious web sites can simply request the old, broken version be downloaded and executed in preference to the new one, then use the old security hole to reformat your hard drive.

So the only real fix is to turn off ActiveX. Microsoft are advising that users remove Microsoft from the list of trusted software developers.

Or just don’t use IE for web browsing.

What a lovely piece of petard-hoisting.

Aliens from another star system land. They have incredibly advanced technology. They say that they have been watching us, and that we’re really quite cute. They’d like to take some of us home to keep as pets.

Those who are kept as pets by the aliens will be kept in an enclosed space, albeit a large and comfortable one. It will be an alien environment, not like our natural habitat on Earth. The pet humans will have space to run around, and things to keep them amused. They will most probably get to share their living space with other pet humans. They will be fed well, entertained, and occasionally petted. The aliens will be able to watch the humans whenever they want to, though there will be a small bedroom area for privacy.

Here’s the kicker: The aliens will look after the pet humans’ medical needs. Because of their advanced medical techniques, the lifespan of a human in captivity will be around 300-350 years.

Would you take them up on their offer?