A thought experiment

The SCOTUS decision the other day, effectively granting the final piece of “corporate personhood” and allowing corporate takeover of our political system is, you know, bad.

The cynic says, “Obviously the majority ruling was along party lines, and this decision favors Republicans”. But let’s think about this for a moment.

Could you not make the case that the court was simply upholding the body of tort law, and the problem is in fact the years of giving corporations personhood?

Could you not make the case that the dissenting judges were the ones “legislating from the bench”, by attempting to correct the overall thrust of corporate judgements?

In short if the law has been giving corporations various forms of personhood and rights then it’s bullshit to say “oh no, wait, not this”, because that’s the direction the law is going.

I think this ruling is very very bad for our country, but it’s more like the icing on the shit cake. Corporations have had too much power for a LONG time. Yeah, this kicks it up a notch, but don’t act like they haven’t been buying Senators for a while. This just legalizes prostitution.

I was gonna critique this show, but then I got high

So, anyway, I’m watching ‘Weeds‘.

The insta-review of every episode is best summed up by my wife: “She’s being stupid, and pissing me off.”

I like this show, in that it’s a 28-minute long Mary Louise Parker spank-bank download. I am so into her it’s probably criminal.

But the rest of the show befuddles me. It’s as if the writers were so impressed with the novelty of the premise, and the ongoing potential for ridiculous drama, they never bother to follow up on any of the genuine plot points. They churn through story elements and drop them like they’ve gone off their Adderal.

Consider: In the first 13 episodes (about 6 hours of television), we had no more than about 2 or 3 minutes of Nancy expressing any of the stages of grieving. He’s not been dead but for a few weeks or something, we never really establish it (that I was aware of) beyond vague allusion (the ceremony showing the headstone; do you know the lead time on one of those?). Yet she was able to establish her dope-dealing business in this short amount of time, enough to piss off the local dealer.

Working out the timeline is a prerequisite; and they play fast and loose with it ALL THE TIME. Consider season 2 features her marriage to the DEA agent, and we’ve seen them on screen together for about 5 minutes. Her snatch must be magic.

Other examples abound. 2 children are written out after the pilot, Celia’s older daughter and Doug’s son. One assumes they gay, dope-dealing kid was too much trouble and they got the deaf girl who provided more opportunity for “drama”.

Not a single person is likable. Doug and Dean are OK, I guess, but if you imagine them as real people you’d probably not want to spend too much time with them. And as my darling bride succinctly stated, Nancy is nice enough but she acts as if she knows it’ll all work out. She is aware she’s a character in a drama-edy and so never, ever makes any sort of concrete plan, trusting the writers to work it all out. It’s all very clever and novel and the writers are so very, very aware of this.

I don’t even know what role Celia has. She’s the nemesis, the suburban equivalent of a rival drug dealer, intended to provide comedic suburban drama to contrast the very dangerous world of drug dealing. They gave her a tiny, tiny character arc (being a nice person while thinking she’s going to die) but then got bored with it. Have her eternally be a cunt, it’s funnier!

The show just demands you not think about things. I know what my mortgage is: a modest 3 bedroom, 3 level townhome in suburban Loudoun County, bought about a year before the housing bottom, and 2 modest car payments. I made decent but not earth-shattering money; we could get by on my salary, but barely just.

In terms of chronology, she’s in a big-ass California McMansion with a housekeeper and 2 kids. Nancy pays her mortgage and bills by dealing weed to her neighbors. She’s pulling in at least $5k a month dealing dimebags to Doug and Dean? They’d have lung cancer by now.

And come on. I’ve bought weed before: if she was paying for her upper-middle-class lifestyle dealing weed to her suburban neighbors, you can bet your ass everyone would know she’s a pot dealer. Do you know why dealers all live in the ghetto? The Freakonomics guys essentially proved there’s no money in dealing.

I get that they didn’t want to do a hyper-gritty, SoCal version of ‘The Wire’ set in a suburb. I get that they’re doing an “adult” 28-minute sitcom. That doesn’t excuse sloppy writing or a case of ADD the size of SoCal itself.

It makes you wonder, are the writers high?

Hey, I had this idea for this round thing, it’ll totally kick ass

So anyway, my brother-in-law was playing some stupid tower defense game, and I gave it a whirl. Great visuals but like most TD games it was horribly balanced: every level had the same solution.

I started thinking more and more about elements of TD and how to improve it, and especially how to balance the game better. I scrawled a few notes down and then went back to work.

But over the course of the day little ideas kept popping into my head, and I kept adding to my notes. The basic premise was conceptually simple: open field (like the original DTD) but with hexes instead of squares, with a fixed point of defense (the “castle”). The schtick I added was the castle moves; I called it a “starbase” and adopted a Star Trek motif. Your starbase orbits in some manner through the map and you fight off creeps (enemy ships) while building your own ships (towers) to defend it. You give your ships movement orders, little paths they follow.

I kept scribbling notes, and ideas. A bit later I looked back over them and realized, I had essentially reinvented Starcraft.

Dammit.

Profiling

As expected the dimwit bedwetters on the right are now back to harping louder than ever that “Not every Muslim is a terrorist, but nearly all terrorists are Muslim, so time to accept profiling”.

So what you’re saying is, the fact that exploding-testicles-guy bought a one-way ticket with cash, and had no luggage, and was already on the generic watch list, isn’t enough. We have to bring up Muslim. We might as well bring up 2 shades darker than Liberace.

Look, I hate to break it to everyone, but the fact is you could make international travel SO DIFFICULT it required a personal visit by the TSA to your home or destination in the US to have a US Citizen who passed a complete lifestyle poly to vouch for you, and eventually, someone would get through and attempt to blow a plane up. Terrorists are not super villains but if you’ve got nothing better to do all day but watch and plan, eventually you’ll have a good idea. It’s simply human nature.

What we need is sensible, sane, and methodical police work. Someone should have noticed asshat before they even made it down the list to “Muslim from Yemen”. Too bad the bedwetters can’t risk anything.

Great Hacking Music

The other day on TEH TWITTARS, I said:

fischerspooner is great rails hacking music. great php hacking music is updating your resumé to go get a better job.

Which is of course (-1, Flamebait/Trolling). It was sort of intended to be. That’s what Twitter is for.

That said, I did have a bit of a point.

I have lots and lots of problems with PHP, but right now my biggest one – and one I think a lot of the PHP community agrees with but also doesn’t like to confront – is that there is a huge gulf between state-of-the-art best practices and the reality of on-the-wire PHP. In other words, rather a lot of PHP is crap and even the best PHP devs spend too much time coping with

• Apps that started off as PHP4 and had a thin PHP5 coat of paint slapped on
• Apps that act look like the developer just learned about some idiom eg OO and are painfully overusing said idiom
• Apps that started off as 10-minute hacks that became Business Critical Production
• etc

Yes, a lot of that applies to Java and Perl and Ruby and Python and C++ and … well all programming, really. It’s possible that it’s just the “circles” I travel in, but I see a lot of those apps.

But you read the PHP blogs, and you see great posts about how to do good OO, and how to properly sanitize against XSS and use small ad-hoc MVC frameworks and blah, blah, blah.

I rave and rave and rave about the awesome technology boner I get from Ruby hacking. Truth be told, I get it from using Zend Framework; but we spend 99.9999% of our time on shit PHP4 apps. At the end of the day I think it’s better to just dispense with PHP altogether.

How To Win At Top Chef

My wife and I love Top Chef. We have a few theories, here summarized conveniently in list form:

1. Failure to properly season a dish is very bad; but failure to properly use salt and pepper is almost certain dismissal.

2. It is always better to memorably execute a simple dish, than improperly execute a complex dish, eg The Perfect Hamburger stands a better chance of winning than some epicurean monstrosity.

3. Dysfunctional teams always lose.

4. Corollary: The team captain of a dysfunctional team will be sent home, all things being equal.

5. There is no evidence that contrition ever hurt anyone’s chances; if you fuck up, take the blame. Arguing rarely seems to change the minds of the judges.

6. Gamesmanship is of little use. It is better to concentrate on your own dish than working to hinder someone else’s chances. Throwing someone under the bus rarely seems to impact the judges decision.

7. Molecular gastronomy never works. Don’t rely on it.

8. If you don’t leave home with at least 1 desert recipe, don’t leave home at all. Every season someone gets tripped up by not being able to bake a cake or make mango sticky rice or something.

9. Relative to rule #2, above, remember that you are competing in a game and you must adhere to the criteria of the challenge. Making a fantastic curry when the rules call for impressing 8-year-olds won’t fly, even if it’s a good curry.

10. The winners seem to win through consistency, attention to detail, and a low/relaxed personal profile; in other words, things that make for a successful chef.

THIS LIST GOES TO 11:

11. Don’t fucking argue with Tony Bourdain. Just … don’t. His shtick is being an asshole, and he’s been doing it longer.

Yeah that’ll happen.

http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411

I give up, I will always hate Star Trek.

The latest Star Trek wasn’t bad. I think Roberto Orci should hire an intern to remind him of how many times he writes scenes with the main characters weapon being knocked off a ledge (only twice in this one).

Anyway: I finally came to the conclusion that I can never truly like Star Trek. There’s that critical fork in the road of scifi fandom, and I just go the other direction. I’m a Firefly/BSG type. I just can’t take gross, mind-blowing inconsistency as a core part of the universe.

Well that’s depressing

I realized today:

* I have not owned an Intel architecture PC since probably before 2000.
* I have never personally owned a computer with a clock speed equalling or exceeding 1.5Ghz. (By way of comparison, this year’s bottom-of-the-barrel Dell features a 2.3Ghz CPU)
* I have never personally owned a computer with multiple cores or multiple physical CPUs.
* I have never personally owned a computer with the ability to dual-head.
* I have never personally owned a computer with more than 2GB of RAM (2GB of RAM is standard on the Dell mentioned above.)
* I have never personally owned a computer that is 64-bit (Although in fairness 64-bit-ness “across the board” is relatively new, only post-2005 at the business level and post-2007 at the consumer level)
* I have never personally owned a computer capable of playing, even at the minimum, video games released in the Xmas season of the time of purchase.

I don’t generally play games or do A/V processing/editing. I know that having a PC capable of running Doom 3 w/ maximum graphics is in no way conducive to making better jQuery code, but sometimes it’s a total fucking drag when I think that the sum total of computer horsepower I have owned in my adult life will soon be eclipsed by the average smartphone. Which I will also never own.

Still. I’ve never had a computer that can play a Youtube video without sputtering. My work computer, an original Intel Macbook Pro, has dual-cores and a 2.1Ghz CPU, but is not a Core 2 Duo or whatever (no 64 bit, so no Java 6) and its mobo is still in the “what the fuck?” phase of AAPL hardware design, so I can’t put any more RAM in it (already maxed at 2GB). It can view Youtube w/o sputtering provided HD is off and nothing else is going on.

It’s kind of depressing. I’m at a point where I’m going to switch to Windows just to get access to cheaper hardware.

I think they’re trying to tell us something

A few data points for your consideration:

• The 1.3.x branch of Apache was last updated in January 2008, making it going on 2 years old. 2.2.x is about a month old. (Source)
• You are still advised to use Apache 2 prefork MPM or Apache 1, by a large scary red-on-red box at http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.unix.apache2.php.

Look, I’m not saying the world can’t turn without threads, and to the best of my knowledge there are no outstanding security problems with the latest Apache 1.3.x. It is unlikely that the threaded MPM will be the thing that people remark about on your site.

Still.

I understand the value of not chasing every last trend in the technology world but sometimes it feels like PHP is standing athwart progress, shouting ‘NO!’.