Craigslist Double-takes: Part 1

I was surfing the Seattle craigslist today, and came across a couple entries that made me do a bit of a double-take...surely not the strangest craigslist entries, but they made me chuckle a bit.

Firstly, under the "event" category was Christian Pastor Needed For Wedding Ceremony:

We are being married on August 29th, and would like a Christian Pastor to perform our ceremony. It is a laid back, backyard wedding, and we are seeking a professional, warm person to marry us.

First of all, I don't understand how you could not have someone that you would want to perform the ceremony - if the Christian community is that disconnected, we have a problem. Oh wait. I have a whole nother blog on that topic. But even if you didn't have a church per se, what brings you to post on craigslist for a pastor for your wedding? Looking for someone to mow your lawn? Sure. Write a website? Great. Maybe even walk your dog? That works too. But legally bind you in holy matrimony to the love of your life? Really? It boggles the mind.

The other was less outrageous, and more of a double-take. It was in the writing section, and the title was Science Blogging. Okay, I figured, I don't exactly feel like writing about plants and animals and cells and chemicals and stuff, but I could...heck, I could even write a good bit about DNA and enzymes and more complicated stuff like that. But then I read the body of the ad:

Looking for self motivated computer savvy person to write a number (2-3) of blog posts for the site:

www.P212121.com

The site's primary focus is on macromolecular crystallography.

If you are interested, please send us an email including your experience in crystallography and a writing sample.

Now I checked out the blog and all, and it's interesting enough. But it's that last phrase that got me..."please send us an email including your experience in crystallography...and a writing sample." Now I only have a vague idea of what crystallography is. It's what Watson and Crick basically stole from Rosie Franklin and went and discovered DNA with, leaving her to die of ovarian cancer, probably exacerbated if not caused by those selfsame X-ray crystallography efforts.* To just casually throw that out there alongside a writing sample, as if it were "please include your experience in operating an automobile" or "detail your accomplishments in the field of eating dinner" is jarring, to say the least. Not to mention simply titling the post "Science Blogging" when the subject of your site feels comfortable sitting around the table with phrases like "electron spectroscopy", "nanolithography", "photonuclear experiments", and "synchrotron radiation source" is just plain mean.

*There are two things you should know about this sentence: firstly, it's a terribly cynical and pessimistic view of events (but not wholly inaccurate), and secondly, it may or may not be gramatically sound. But it's 3:30am, and I'm blogging about a nasty bit of politics surrounding the discovery of DNA because of a craigslist post. At this point, I relax my standards ever so slightly.

A long-overdue explanation

So my girlfriend asked where the name "CommaCommaCrash" came from, and I was dismayed to find I hadn't already written a post on the subject. The name comes from a poem I discovered back in high school, during Web Design A, a class which mainly consisted of sitting in the back row, downloading music with WinMX, and playing ridiculous flash games. Web Design B, by the way, which was the Flash [read: fun] portion of the course, never fit into my schedule, much to my chagrin. But I digress.

The version of this poem that I came across (don't ask me how, it takes me a few attempts at Googling to find this particular version every time) is at the self-proclaimed "Definitive Tech Humor Collection", whose design, in retrospect, is a blight upon the internet (link later, I don't want to ruin it yet). To my credit, I had never actually visited any page except for the text-only poem anecdote, and besides, there are much worse offenses out there.

But more to the point, the poem is a punctuation poem. It goes as follows:

<> !*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<> ~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED

As you can tell, this is no ordinary poem. Which is perhaps why I like it - I am no ordinary person. In fact, I did a metric analysis (is that even what you call it? Nope, Wikipedia says it's scansion) of this poem for A.P. English, since its discovery coincided with the poetry unit in said class. But anyway, it is read as each character's name - sometimes rather arcane, arbitrary, or archaic names, but it only works if you read it out loud, to wit:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.

Seriously. If you got here and haven't read it, read it out loud. Go somewhere where no one will give you funny looks if you must. Then read it out loud, go back up to the punctuation version, and see that it actually does read that way. After a few times, you can read it straight from the punctuation. It's magical. Or maybe it's just me.

Anyway, as you can see (helped by my tasteful emphasis), I lifted the name of this blog straight from the last line, because it sounded vaguely geeky, and is an allusion to a poem that I find quite amusing, and which you do too, now that you've read it out loud. Right?

Oh, and most of the pronunciations make sense, but why "waka waka"? It's an allusion to the sound that PacMan (whose open mouth is implied by the angle brackets) makes as he gobbles up dots. The page I found it on asserts that it was voted as the proper pronunciation, winning out over "norkies".

Also, sidenote: who knew that Pacman's name was originally pakku-man (パックマン), from paku-paku taberu (パクパク食べる), a Japanese onomatopoeia* for the same thing? Amazing the things you can learn on the internet.

You can find the full text over at the aforementioned Definitive Tech Humor Collection. I admit, I lifted the intro to the pronunciation straight from the description, but it's only because that is how I find it (really - I Google "punctuation poem to wit magazine"), and I like to think that I would, left to my own devices, introduce it similarly.

*I totally almost spelled that right on the first try. I just switched the last "o" for an "a". So close. Ah well. Thanks, Firefox spell check.

On Installing

So I am doing a clean install of Vista on a professor's computer today, and there were a few things that, in and of themselves, are not worthy of a post, but together, are a few pet peeves worth mentioning:

That default beep. Laptop manufacturers, you really need to get on this. Every time I install Windows, it of course doesn't come with even the most basic of sound drivers, so when I inevitably do something to anger the computer gods, they let me know with a Thundering Default Beep from Hell. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm never expecting it, or because it really is as earth-shatteringly loud as it seems, but I'm just minding my own business, checking to make sure all of Office is installed, and when I close out of the install, BAM! this horrible noise comes booming forth from depths that I didn't know the laptop had. After almost having a heart attack, I recover to see that it's asking me if I really want to cancel the install. Yes. I do. That's why I clicked cancel. I understand protecting against the accidental click, but there is no need to aurally assault me in the process.
If there's anything good about the situation, it's that I only encountered it twice this time - the second, however, was when I inadvertently clicked the "Network" icon when trying to install the sound driver (the first driver I installed, to avoid these terrible missives), and it once again growled out a terrible warning that I'm sorry, I don't have my tentacles in any network yet. Which I informed it (with a click on the "OK" button) that that was quite alright, because you see, I haven't installed any network drivers yet, and was just trying to install a dad-gum sound driver so that you would stop trying to wake up my roommate when you blasted me with all your might because I accidentally clicked too low.
As a sidenote, I realized as I wrote this that I've never had this problem with Linux in the many times I've installed it, and then I remembered that it's the same reason Ubuntu doesn't come up at 800x600, 16 colors without Internet access or a decent browser. And that reason is because it doesn't suck, meaning it isn't Windows. And I'd forgotten how much better it makes things when you can hear, see, and download things without scurrying off to another computer to download half a dozen drivers. Thank you, Linux, for being awesome.

Speaking of things that come preinstalled with Linux, another thing that always comes up with a clean install of Windows is a PDF reader. Now, on my own machines, I just install SumatraPDF, Foxit Reader, or one of the other fine free, small PDF readers that are readily available. On a computer for a professor, though, I feel the need to actually install Adobe, so that if something goes wrong (they can't fill out a form or something), they can't blame my strange PDF reader.
And every time, I am newly astonished that Adobe Reader is still a gargantuan 41.1 MB download. And this is after being compressed by getPlus Helper, which requires the Adobe DLM (powered by getPlus(R)), a Firefox plugin that is (it assures me) a "sophisticated tool for an efficient distribution of digital goods." I call it bloat, with some nice buzzwords thrown in for good measure. Installing a PDF reader should NOT require a Firefox plugin, a helper downloader, and 41MB. There are plenty of readers that don't require a plugin, because they're small. I could understand 4MB. And 1.2MB is even better. And if someone can do it in 636KB, without a fancy decompressor Firefox plugin, you know Adobe is doing something wrong. And unlike Adobe, none of those dump and then leave installation files on my desktop. If only there were greater consequences for such crimes against computerdom.

Speaking of crimes against computerdom, I had to, of course, install anti-virus software, and then check for updates. Before forgetting that Vista has it built in (thank heavens, the click twenty times, restart the browser, download an ActiveX control or two, twiddle your thumbs, click twelve more times, restart again, and wait twenty minutes to be told you need to update to .NET 6.0 was getting tiring), I typed windowsupdate.microsoft.com in Firefox, not thinking, and got an error page (it's from a redirect, so the link will work in any browser). A text-only, "thanks for trying, but you need IE" page. I would think Microsoft would make a little snazzier than that...but hey. At least it's not bloat.

VirtualBox: Reliving the Glory Days

I cut my teeth on good old DOS, with Word Perfect 5.1. I have distinct memories of watching my dad in his office, and vividly remember watching him type on his laptop and have words come up on the screen - I thought it was fascinating, and always wanted to play with this machine - something about pushing the buttons and having them come up on the screen was just mind-blowing to my 4-year-old brain. And this wasn't any old computer - it was a laptop! A good old Bondwell B200 - it had a 3-color screen (blue, white, and bluish-white), dual 720k 3.5" floppy drives, and no hard drive. What a wonder it was. We had two of them - I think, hope, perhaps, that we still have one somewhere in the garage.
As I grew in my tinkering, I remember seeing e-mails (on the Windows for Workgroups 3.11 machine we had back home) where you scrolled down, and the text would animate itself, and recombine...the one I remember played with the "GOD IS NOWHERE"/"GOD IS NOW HERE" trick (I was a preacher's kid), and some other things. I figured out how these worked, and dabbled with creating them myself, of course on the good old Bondwell. Unfortunately, the scrolling was far too slow and choppy to actually accomplish anything.
I also would make shapes (crocodiles, I remember particularly) out of the mysterious "Blocking" that Word Perfect 5.1 had, and was confused as to why they never printed out. I also still to this day don't know how to get the menu to show up - Helen, my dad's secretary, always had it up, and I could never remember how she did it, which was the cause of much vexation.
I even wrote poems and stories - one in particular I remember involved Betelgeuse and stegosauruses. Even now I can't spell either one, although I'm pretty sure I got it right back in the day. I'm going to have to dig through some old hard drives and floppies, to see if I can find any of this stuff.
But anyway...what inspired this trip down memory lane? Well, I have for a long time used the excellent VirtualBox to run Windows XP inside of my Ubuntu install, but recently decided to meddle around with trying to get some older OSes running on it - initially Window 98SE, just to have a smaller, faster OS for basic stuff. Well, I still don't have 98 up and running, but thanks to the awesome folks over at VetusWare, I have managed to get my old friend, WFW 3.11, up and running. It took a bit of doing, because the download included folders for each disk, but I needed floppy images to mount in VirtualBox. Since I'm in Linux, however, that's not too difficult of a procedure:

joel@geekmobile:~$ dd bs=512 count=2800 if=/dev/zero of=floppy.img
joel@geekmobile:~$ mkfs.msdos floppy.img 
joel@geekmobile:~$ sudo losetup /dev/loop0 floppy.img
joel@geekmobile:~$ sudo mkdir /media/floppy/
joel@geekmobile:~$ sudo mount /dev/loop0 /media/floppy/

Line by line, this:

1. Creates a 1.4MB floppy image file, initialized to zeroes (copy 2800 blocks of 512 bytes from /dev/zero into floppy.img)
2. Initialize it with an MSDOS filesystem
3. Set up a local loop with the new image
4. Create a mount point for it
5. Mount the new loop at /media/floppy

A floppy then shows up in my Disk Mounter applet (highly recommended, otherwise it'll be in your Places menu). I can then copy the contents of each folder into the floppy, copy off the image file somewhere (I created a "WFW311" folder in a "Source Images" folder in my ~/.VirtualBox folder, to keep things nice and organized), clear the floppy, copy the second folder in, rinse and repeat. This gave me image files for all eight setup floppies. After installing DOS 6.22 from a Boot Floppy image, I mounted each WIN311 image and ran through the install fairly painlessly.
I did hit a couple snags, though. After a bit of work, I got it to support 1024x768 using some handy instructions over at the VirtualBox forums. The instructions there for CD-ROM support, however, were less helpful, which was unfortunate, because my next quest - installing the infamous Microsoft BOB - required more than just a floppy could handle.
I finally got it working, and I think the thing that made it work was just throwing the CD-ROM driver in C:\, and not any subfolder. The significant parts of my final CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT looked like this:

===CONFIG.SYS===
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
DEVICEHIGH=VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:CD001
===AUTOEXEC.BAT===
PROMPT /NOSTALGIA/DOS622/FILE://$p$g
LOADHIGH=C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:CD001

A few things to note:

• The thing after the /D: is just a string. It can be whatever you want. "MSCD001","IDECD000","KITTENS"...anything, as long as it matches in both CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, and isn't more than 8 characters.
• I ended up using VIDE-CDD.SYS, which you can find in this list, under "ACER". I think the one I found came with a setup program, but I can't seem to find it again. Just the driver should work, though.
• I thought perhaps just copying it into the C:\ directory had fixed it, but it appears that VirtualBox still hangs, at least with the OAKCDROM.SYS that I tried. So stick with the VIDE-CDD.SYS
• The PROMPT line is just for fun, it modifies the classic C:\> prompt. I remember our computer had some scripture I think, it's always fun to play with. See the ancient article over at Smart Computing for more info on that.
• I'm not sure if the EMM386 part is necessary, but it doesn't hurt anything.

Now, I will note that I did actually try "KITTENS", and it does indeed work. Here's proof:
Something about "Drive D: = Driver KITTENS unit 0" makes me chuckle a bit. I think I'll leave it that way.
Anyway, once I got the CD support working, it was pretty straightforward to install BOB - VetusWare, of course, had it available, so I unzipped it, created an ISO out of it with Brasero, the default disc burner in Ubuntu, by simply creating a data project, hitting "Burn", and telling it to make it an ISO (putting it, of course, in my "Source Images" folder). Mounting that CD in VirtualBox and running the Setup from DOS automatically booted Windows and, after hitting Ctrl-Alt-Delete and Esc (the 1024x768 setup is troublesome, but that little hack fixes it), and telling it my name (which is only slightly creepy), I was greeted with this happy little button: I cheerily clicked it, it did the install with ads telling me how wonderful it would make my life, and how great of a company Microsoft is, I found a program group for Microsoft Bob. Double-clicking it opened up a very trippy, very long display test of some sort, that I'm convinced is actually designed to mess with your brain to get you ready for the experience that is MSBOB. These little red tubules squirmed and jiggled...it was quite the experience: Once it started up, after some annoying input validation, I selected the Sun Room for my private area, and went in: A quick scan through and...WHAT IS THIS? GEOSAFARI? I have very fond memories of real, physical GeoSafari units from my childhood...this Microsoft Bob thing might not be bad after all! After some fiddling, I realized I hadn't enabled sound in VirtualBox. After setting VirtualBox to SoundBlaster16 and ALSA output, I installed the SoundBlaster 1.5 driver in Windows 3.1, with Port 220 and IRQ 5, and hurrah! It speaks! After a rousing game of GeoSafari (which was obnoxiously slow, I might add, and kind of creepy) involving, oddly enough, the capital of my birthstate, it's time to head to sleep...the little square clock in my sun room informs me that it is approaching 5:00am. I bid farewell to a sad little puppy, and look forward to adventures with my old friend Word Perfect 5.1 to come.

I like Natan Last

So a week ago, I was making my way through a NYT crossword (April 13th, to be specific), and was pleasantly surprised when the very first clue ("Best-selling computer game in the 1990s") turned out to be the much-beloved "MYST" that I still haven't come close to completing, mostly for lack of trying. I didn't think anything of it, and the other geekier clues, until 37 across: "Widespread Internet prank involving a bait-and-switch link to a music video". The answer, of course, was RICKROLLING (link is just YouTube, no worries). I was duly impressed - who was this crossword author, that had the guts to rickroll (well, sort of) over a million NYT readers? And that's not all. There were some other geeky clues, varying from catering to a geekier crowd to an outright reference to geek culture:

28D: "Nick at ______" (NITE)
33D: "Jobs at Apple" (STEVE) - this is why I love crosswords.  Little puns and twists like this.
 1D: "Owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on 'The Simpsons'" (MRBURNS)
30D: "'2001' computer" (HAL)
64D: "Letters at the end of a proof" (QED)

I looked up the guy, and it turns out he's a now 17-year old crossword genius. Which makes the geeky clues make a lot of sense.
The end result being I quite enjoyed solving this puzzle, and it made me smile a bit. Kudos to you, Mr. Last.

Zuckerberg leads one-man raid on Twitter

In a move not entirely unexpected that some had seen as inevitable after Twitter's rejection of a buyout, and the more recent layout changes to Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was seen advancing on Twitter's San Francisco headquarters in an FV432 armored personnel carrier on Wednesday. His demands are not entirely clear, but it is presumed that he is trying to enact a hostile takeover of the company of under 100 employees by force. Witnesses report Zuckerberg shouting phrases such as "Got you now, suckas!" and "I'll show you not ready!" Tweets from various employees inside the building now under siege generally had a tone of bewilderment and shock, although they generally were still not ready to give up their company to the marauding Zuckerberg. "Has he finally lost it completely? Is that a tank? Can he do this?" "Should we call the police? The army? What do we do?" "Zuckerberg can't have our company until he flattens it" were a few of the tweets coming out of the building. Meanwhile, rumors of an internal coup back at Facebook while Zuckerberg is away have also been floating around, due to the percieved distates for Zucerberg within his own company.

Cloudy with a Chance of Fail

I felt the need to deviate from the usual geeky tone of this blog to alert you to a terrible occurrence. Many of you may be familiar with the beloved children's book, "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." Well, they're making a movie of it.
I'm calling for a 98% chance of fail. Probably not financially, because America is stupid. But in every other aspect. For those of you not familiar with the original book, you will probably not understand. But if you have, watch the trailer, if you can bear it:
My response was as follows.
If the trailer is any indication, this movie heartlessly and mercilessly destroys and mangles the soul of a children's book that was and still is and always will be treasured by millions of children, including myself, for what? A cheap, two-bit 3D cheesefest, because Jimmy Neutron has already been done.
Gutting a book of all meaning, spirit, and substance for a bunch of gaudy pictures is hardly new to the movie industry, but rarely is it so perpetrated so thoroughly and shamelessly, to such a beautiful, precious target.
Now, I could be wrong. The movie could turn out okay. The scenes that are lifted straight from the book are decent. All they would have to do to avoid crushing the soul of countless children is cut out the first 75%, turn down the color saturation about 80%, cut out the main character or two, and re-frame the entire premise.

The idea of this movie just makes me sad. And angry. And upset. This book could conceivably be a movie, but it would have to be made carefully and lovingly by the likes of Tim Burton, à la Big Fish, not raped and pillaged for financial gain, because we can do stuff in 3D now.

I think I finally know how readers of V for Vendetta feel, and I apologize for enjoying that movie if it was anywhere nearly as heinous and adaptation as this.