Live from Austin!

Incidentally, I believe comments are now working again after I applied a software patch.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before the best-selling Christian porn Left Behind got turned into a video game.

Soon, Left Behind: Eternal Forces will let you play the part of a heavily armed born again Christian. Your mission, to wage armed battle in the streets of New York, wipe out the unbelievers and other forces of the antichrist, and save America.

When Boards of Canada started achieving prominence, it was common for people to post on the Internet about how much they were like Autechre. Even today, they’re often spoken of in the same breath. Yet I’ve come to see Boards of Canada as the opposite of Autechre.

Autechre’s driving force—and crippling problem—has always been their perpetual desire for novelty. Their first album was fairly conventional, at least by the standards of electronica; perhaps because it was really a compilation of unrelated tracks, perhaps because they were extremely limited in the equipment available to them. (Their sampler at the time was a Casio SK-1.) The second album, Amber, had a completely different lush and ambient sound.

But according to interviews I’ve read, Autechre almost gave up music after Amber, because for a long time they couldn’t come up with anything different enough that they felt it was worth doing. When they eventually released tri repetae, it was completely different in style; spare and mechanical. The next album, Chiastic Slide, was yet another complete change, in favor of textures made up of densely packed fragments of digital sound.

The problem is, at some point the quest for intellectual novelty collides with the desire to create something someone might actually want to listen to. In my view, Chiastic Slide was their last uniformly great release. Since then, there have been moments where experimental and listenable have meshed (the title track of Gantz_graf for example), but they’ve been lamentably rare.

So I see Boards of Canada are the anti-Autechre, in that they’ve released the same album five or six times now. If you like anything they’ve released since 1994, then I can confidently predict you’ll like everything else they’ve released since 1994.

Yes, there has been some gentle stylistic progression and variation; The Campfire Headphase had more guitar, and the latest EP is a bit darker. But like Vini Reilly, they know what they do well, and they pretty much keep on doing it.

The new Trans Canada Highway EP is available from bleep.com. They’re selling it as unprotected MP3 files, or as full quality lossless audio in FLAC format.

Also, as a reminder of Autechre’s earlier listenable albums, the Gescom EP The Sounds of Machines Our Parents Used is available as an MP3 or FLAC download. This one is particularly good value, because it’s widely regarded as one of their best, and copies of the hard-to-find original 1995 vinyl release regularly list for over $100. Now for a mere $5.49 you can have lossless uncompressed audio, with no vinyl clicks or pops—just intentional electronic ones.

And if you’re a goldenears type you can buy a Vestax VRX-2000, cut the FLAC files into vinyl, spread a little dust on it, and hear the tracks as originally intended.

If you didn’t see them, check the pictures of our trip to the UT campus for some Extreme Squirrel Feeding.

A while back I read that squirrels need fresh water, and summer was approaching, so we got a water bottle from the pet store and fitted it to the tree. I wasn’t sure they’d take to it, but yesterday evening Buster dropped by for a long drink.

We’ve also had a visit from a mother squirrel who was obviously taking a break from nursing. Unfortunately, Blacktip turned up and stared at her, and she shot up the fence and vanished.

We had a pretty good crop of corn this year, thanks to our furry four-legged gardeners. Fortunately, it pulls up pretty easily.

You know that infamous squirrel picture found all over the Internet? It wasn’t modified with Photoshop, as I had assumed. It’s a genuine stock photo available from Corbis.

One feature the Unix shell offers is customizing prompts. Most ‘power users’ make use of the feature, and it is indeed very handy. However, it’s easy to go completely overboard and end up with a prompt like this:

[21:52:15] [fred@webhost:/var/log/apache] $

The problem with a long prompt is that you quickly hit the right hand edge of the screen and your command starts wrapping. If you use KDE, however, there’s a better way.

Konsole

The xterm program introduced an escape sequence to set the window title. That can help a bit, because now you can put some of the boring info up in the window title, and reserve the prompt for path information.

I use KDE, and the Konsole terminal program in KDE goes further than xterm. As well as letting you change the window title, you can also have multiple terminal sessions in tabs (like Firefox web page tabs), and chance their titles too. The purpose of this posting is to explain the extra functionality in Konsole, and how to make use of it with the bash shell (default in Linux).

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Digital TV means crystal clear reception from an $8 wire loop antenna. It means beautiful sharp images a meter across with no visible scan lines.

It also means occasionally having to reboot your television.

It’s just the way things are. I have to reboot my cellphone every day or so, or a memory leak eventually causes it to crash. I have to reboot the printer once a month or so. Our answering machine has needed rebooting a few times, too, and the other day I rebooted the car. I haven’t had to reboot my watch, but it does have to sit and calculate for a while when I change physical time zone. I’m sure in a few more years, I’ll be rebooting the toaster whenever it starts burning toast.

Like a Mac, our TV is entirely software controlled, even powering itself on and off when ordered to by the software. There’s no physical on/off switch, just a button that requests that the software turn the set on or off.

Unfortunately, there’s a bug. Every now and again, the software will think there’s no incoming signal, and ask the hardware to turn off the screen to save power. After a second or two it’ll realize it made a mistake, and ask the screen to power up again. It happens very intermittently, I’d guess once every dozen hours or so, but that doesn’t stop it from being annoying. At one point there was a TV episode on the TiVo that would reliably make it happen at a certain point.

So, I wrote to Sharp asking if this was a known glitch with Aquos TVs. They called me back, and had me put the TV into a special hidden maintenance mode. It turned out my TV needed a software update, something to do with a power glitch in Aquos models that support CableCard. I was refered to a local Sharp service engineer, who brought over a couple of flash cards and apparently did the update. So far, so good.

Something about this disturbs me, though. More and more outwardly simple objects that we interact with are controlled by complex software, and we’re apprently still no closer to solving the problem of delivering reliable software. I didn’t feel too bad when the car needed a firmware upgrade, because a car is a really complicated system—especially a hybrid car that needs to control 2 engines at once and trade off energy between them. But TV is conceptually so simple, and it used to involve no software at all. Digital is nice, and all, but because of the need to decode MPEG-2 we’ve quietly lost simplicity of design. And that’s before you even consider the fact that ATSC is a horrible, horrible piece of design-by-committee with 18 different formats.

Lotus Domino 7 has an unfortunate bug which means that you can’t cross-certify with another organization via phone or e-mail, by using the Domino Administrator, choosing Cross Certify Key… and entering their key ID. The bug is documented in the readme.pdf, and is still unfixed as of 7.0.2. It results in server errors saying “The subject’s public key found in the cross certificate does not match the one found in the certificate table.”

[Update 2006-05-17: I'm pleased to say that I heard today they've managed to squeeze a fix for the problem into 7.0.2. This is not an official statement of support from IBM, etc etc.]

This is a problem in situations where you want to cross-certify your server with someone else’s, but for whatever reasons they can’t or won’t give you access to CERT.ID, and can’t engage the cooperation of the owners of their CERT.ID.

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As you may have heard, the NSA hopes to create a massive database of every single phone call made in the USA. They approached the big phone companies, and they all handed over data about your phone calls except Qwest. No warrants, no questions, they just gave the information away.

[Update 2 days later: If you think it's no big deal, consider that the government is already illegally tapping journalists' phone lines in an attempt to root out leakers and whistleblowers.]

If that bothers you, you could rant about it online. Or, you could consider doing something more productive: if you haven’t already done so, you could switch your long distance to Working Assets, and tell your old long distance provider why. Working Assets are the only phone company to have joined the ACLU in filing a lawsuit to challenge the spying.

(Also, if you do switch, feel free to give them my number as a referral code.)

Today I saw a wasp starting to build a nest in the corner of the back porch. I made a mental note to hose him away some time tomorrow.

Then tonight, we came home to find 4 geckos of various sizes gathered on the back porch—and one of them was eating the wasp.

Squirrels don’t hibernate during winter, but they do slow down their metabolism to conserve energy. Research suggests that their immune systems partially shut down as a result. Perhaps for this reason, squirrels often develop mange in winter.

Our resident alpha squirrel, Blacktip, developed a bad case of fur loss over winter. It started on his neck and chest, but soon spread to his belly and thighs, leaving him pink and itchy. Apparently squirrels usually recover on their own once spring arrives, but this particular critter showed no signs of getting better. I took the feed box away so he wouldn’t spread whatever it was to the other squirrels, and considered my options.

After reading everything I could find on the Internet about squirrel fur loss, it seemed pretty clear that the culprit in this case was notoedric mange–the symptoms matched exactly. Further research revealed that there is a common animal parasite medication that is used to treat notoedric mange in squirrels, as well as in rabbits, rats, and other small mammals. It was pretty cheap, too. The information available on the net suggested weekly doses, for a period of 2-3 weeks. It seemed doable.

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