Irate Nate's weblog

orthodox restraint

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 21:04:00 CDT

Finally, just a quick word on your “if it feels good, don't do it” distillation of my message. We can dig into this more as we go, but for now I'd just point out that at various times, Christianity--and particularly my own Catholicism, the faith of carousing Irishmen, hedonistic Italians, and “give me chastity, Lord, but Lord not yet” sinners in every time and place--has been scolded for being altogether too worldly, too pleasure-loving, too forgiving of the weaknesses of the flesh. If orthodoxy seems puritanical to you today, maybe it's less because it's inherently anti-fun and anti-feelgood than because we live in a society distinguished by such extraordinary excess--gluttonous, libidinous, avaricious--that what a different era might recognize as a healthy balance between asceticism and indulgence looks like hopeless prudishness instead.

from Ross Douthat, Bad Religion, entry 2

food trademarks

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:11:00 CDT

From Why the U.S. Government Wants You To Buy Fake Foods:

This is not an oversight, as in, “hey, we forgot to regulate the labeling of Kobe beef.” This is part of a pattern of deliberate actions going back well over a century on the part of the Federal government to actively ignore foreign trademarks and intellectual property claims in order to support domestic industries. It has very much been done on purpose, and continues to be done on purpose, at the expense of the American consumer (and foreign producers). It is also stunningly hypocritical, and flies directly in the face of the government's deep pocketed attempts to combat piracy in the arenas of music, film, technology, and software. I think that if we were not the ones who had basically pioneered the computer and software industries, and were not home to Hollywood, and these businesses were based in other countries, we would gleefully produce our own “domestic” versions of foreign software, technology and entertainment without recompense to the countries that had invented and trademarked them...
The Treaty of Madrid in 1891 was among the first major international agreements on the protection of geographically designated food production. These are known today variously as Geographic Indications (GIs), the term collectively favored by the European Union, or by various national terms of geographically protected Designations of Origin (PDO, AOC, DOC, DOCG, etc.). In each case they refer to products so associated with production in a particular place as to warrant protection of that place/product combination. Usually the rationale is a combination of history, manufacturing tradition, terroir, and local law. The product typically grows or is made there better for environmental reasons, like the famously chalky terrain of Champagne or the volcanic soil in which legendary San Marzano tomatoes grow. In many cases the product also has been made there under very specific and unfaltering rules of purity, with strict supervision, sometimes for centuries. As a result, when you as the consumer buys that item, you should know exactly the level of quality and purity you are getting, be it Georgia peaches, Florida orange juice, Champagne or Kobe beef...
Twelve decades ago, the highest profile of the many foodstuffs to come out of the Treaty of Madrid protected was Champagne. Every major power in the world at the time elected to sign the treaty, with the exception of the United States. As a result, the term “Champagne” has been protected in almost every other first-world country since 1891. The Treaty has been revised many times, and in every case since, the U.S. has adamantly refused to sign. This is not an issue forgotten by the rest of the world. The European Union alone has a list of over 600 geographically designated products it protects under law, almost none of which the US agrees with. Despite repeated requests dating back more than a century from the French, and in recent decades the World Trade Organization and European Union, the U.S. has stubbornly and purposefully refused to become party to this treaty or dozens of others like it.

How nice it would be to only pay attention to international convention and trademark law when it was convenient for you.

ritual unveils the infinite

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 20:23:00 CDT

We've been talking in our Christian Teaching and Training (CT&T) (i.e. Sunday School) class about joy at work. The topic of the same old drudgery done day in, day out has been discussed several times. One of the best responses thus far has been Richard Foster: “One of the reasons that ordinary tasks are so vitally important to a spiritual life is simply because most of us spend most of our time here. Frankly, if we fail to sanctify the ordinary we will be leaving God out of a large part of who we are and what we do.”

So yeah, ouch. But I think an even better response is articulated in Christopher Hitchens and Groaning During Sex, to wit:

But he [Hitchens] got this right: If Heaven is merely an eternal choir, it may as well be a Hell. Any action infinitely repeated would be intolerable. I swear, if I get handed a harp and am told to “start playing, never stop,” I'm pulling a Paradise Lost, Book 6.
Thankfully, it's a ridiculous understanding of Heaven. (I'm surprised Hitchens never stopped to realize that the only people agreeing with his interpretation were literalist Christians.) He should have paid less attention to bad theology and more attention to having sex.
A sex life is monotonous. It is repetitive. It is ritualistic. It is the carrying on of certain motions that lead to certain results, again and again, forever and ever, till death do you apart, or some other tragedy occurs. It is a routine (more and more so as the children grow up, I imagine. (I know a girl who at 20 just figured out what her parents daily nap-time was all about. (Sorry if I just scarred any one for the rest of their lives. (Please still read my blog.)))) But you'd be slapped -- and rightly so -- if assumed that all this monotony means that the act is boring.
Sexual union in its fullness -- and unfortunately I can only go by literature here -- is not a limited thing, but an experience of infinity. No couple views sex as a finalized experience (it's this awesome and no more), but as an attempt at infinite joy. Thus everyone, atheist or otherwise, naturally gasps things like “more,” “God,” and other such infinities during the act. Ritual unveils the infinite.

sloth

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 20:12:00 CDT

Sloth is one of the seven “deadly,” or more correctly, “capital” sins. This doesn't just mean it is quantitatively worse, but that it is a “source sin,” the kind of structural derangement from which other sins arise. As Roman Catholic theologian Josef Pieper remarks, sloth does not mean mere idleness, as though hyperthyroid activity were its antidote; rather it means that man “renounces the claim implicit in his human dignity.” In medieval terms this means that the slothful man does not will his own being, does not wish to be what he fundamentally and really is. This is why sloth is such a dangerously fertile sin. It tempts man to other expressions of inhumanity. It leads toward what we might today call estrangement.
God through history summons man to affirm and celebrate what God wants him to be: Man, with all that implies. As Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche saw, to be a man involves personal, social, and cultural initiative and responsibility. It means accepting the terrifying duty of deciding who I will be rather than merely introjecting stereotypes that others assign to me. It means opening my eyes to the way power is distributed and wielded in a society and assuming a full measure of pain and temptation that goes with wielding it. It means defying any image of life which discourages criticism or undercuts human creativity. Metaphors which are allowed to become metaphysical become monsters. To be a man means to care for and name the fellow-man Eve, and with her to have dominion over the earth; to name and care for the creature whom God places in the human world of freedom. To weasel out of any of these privileges is to commit the sin of acedia, to relapse into sloth.

from God's Revolution and Man's Responsibility by Harvey Cox

political influence

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 20:05:00 CDT

It is thus quite evident that images of timidity, abdication, and irresponsibility should figure just as prominently in a biblical doctrine of sin as do images of rebellion. Why then has our theological tradition concerned itself so obsessively with insubordination as the chief expression of sin?
Part of the answer can be given in the single word, politics. Theologies always develop within a particular political context. There is a political, or perhaps an ideological factor which explains in part why images of protest and revolt became so central in the Christian doctrine of sin. With the conversion of Constantine, Christianity became the ruling ideology of Europe. As such, one of its main function was to provide the symbolic confirmation of imperial authority and thus to assure the maintenance of social order. It did so with noteworthy success for more than a thousand years of relatively unified western European “Christian” civilization. It did so by de-emphasizing sloth and accentuating pride as the worst form of sinfulness. Pride, of course, was equated with insubordination.
When the Reformation came, the magisterial reformers--Luther, Calvin, and the Anglicans--largely retained this emphasis. Since they had to rely so heavily on state power for carrying through their programs, they necessarily preserved the dominant image of sinful man as disobedient, fractious, and insubordinate. There can be little doubt that the opposition these reformers experience from the more radical reformers--Muenzer, Servetus, the Levellers--encouraged the identification of piety with passivity in their own minds.

from God's Revolution and Man's Responsibility by Harvey Cox

dissertation copyright

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 21:52:00 CDT

Ben Schwartz recently wrote about Harvard's new requirements for dissertation submission:

This spring, for the first time since Harvard began granting PhDs in the late 1800s, the dissertation of record is no longer a printed, bound manuscript. Instead, the digital version is primary (with a printed copy filed away only for apocalypse insurance). Crucially, the digital copy will be available online for the whole world to read...
I was shocked to find that by far the most common questions concerned how to make one's dissertation less available. Two main motivations stood out, both to do with copyright.

The first motivation makes a certain amount of sense, but the second motivation is an excellent example of copyright gone wrong. Harvard has agreed to work with the first motivation; I will be interested to see what they do with the second.

christian social policy

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 19:09:00 CDT

From Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind by Mark Noll:

The contingency of the incarnation and the work of Christ would seem to justify a related commitment to empirical procedures as a way of learning about the world. If we come to know God best by correcting our prejudgments about what God can or cannot do through experiencing what God has actually done, it follows that we learn about the world by opening up our prejudgments about what we think the world must be like to how we actually experience the world. The principle is that if we want to know something, we must not only think about that something, but actually experience it. God may be able to think his way to reality, but we cannot. If we know God by experiencing him, so also do we come to know the world...
During World War II the archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, recommended a similar empirical approach as the best strategy for churches to handle social or political issues. In particular, he thought that churches should not pontificate on “any particular policy,” since experience in the world was the crucial element in adopting any specific way ahead: “A policy always depends on technical decisions concerning the actual relations of cause and effect in the political and economic world; about these a Christian as such has no more reliable judgment than an atheist, except so far as he should be more immune to the temptations of self-interest.” Temple did not mean that Christian principles or truth claims were unimportant; he did mean that knowledge of a particular situation gained by experience with that particular situation was critical for determining the best public policies.

And a little later on:

For social science, theories must be incomplete if they view the solution to human problems as arising only from a manipulation of environment. The solution to genuine human problems must involve attention to the moral state of humanity as well as to human circumstances. Since humans are moral creatures defined in substantial part by the coloration of sin, the best social science will always considers intrinsic moral nature as well as extrinsic material influence. Visions of humanity that begin with human innocence--whether from Rousseau, or from Marx, or from rational choice capitalism--will never be adequate as a faithful account of social reality.

technological prayer

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 18:38:00 CDT

A part of me sure wishes God were that responsive. I say my prayers, I ask God for things, and I wait and I wait. But with Google returning millions of answers to my queries in the blink of an eye, prayer seems so slow. Of course, the questions I put to Google are of a different order than the ones I put to God, but the rapidity of the Tech is most definitely taking its toll on my expectations. In the years since the Tech has reached its current lightning-fast speed, I have come to expect everything quickly. I have come to expect everything at my fingertips. And I have come to expect everything to be packaged in small, digestible bites. Indeed, the worth of things is derived less by their value and more by the ease with which people can access them. Because I have grown up saturated in the Tech, I am conditioned to expect quick, easy access to information...
Humanity has spent its entire history creating systems designed to meet its needs: the false gods of wood and stone in the Hebrew Scriptures, the class system, slavery. But never has a system reached the pervasive coverage of the Tech, which is in the process of rewriting the human code so that we depend on it for everything. And whether I like this new code or not, it affects my relationship with God. If the Tech is built to respond to my needs, then shouldn't God be built for the same purpose? Furthermore, God seems so much less responsive than the Tech, so why should I bother with God at all?
And right here is where I notice how the influence of the Tech has led me astray. From the time God formed me in my mother's womb, I was never meant to exist primarily for myself. I was meant to exist for God. The Tech might be attempting to rewrite my code until I believe I am a king at my keyboard, isolated from everyone, yet with the world at my fingertips. But God is the original writer of the human code, and no matter how much reprogramming I undergo, that base code still operates uncorrupted. From within me, God continues to whisper that God does not exist to respond to me: I exist to respond to God.

from Digital Disciple by Adam Thomas

ironclad 0.30

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:08:00 CDT

I've released Ironclad version 0.30; you can get it from the usual place. This version features several performance improvements for x86oid SBCL, as well as an optimized implementation of MD5 for Lispworks. The usual assortment of bugs have been fixed, including some packaging and reader bugs, and there have been a few convenience functions added for various things.

This version of Ironclad is the first to depend on nibbles, a library for accessing “machine word”-sized data in various forms, either from vectors or streams.

Please note that various bits of Ironclad and nibbles depend on “recent” versions of SBCL; I believe the first version of SBCL that supports the necessary features is about a year old at this point. If you haven't upgraded, let this release serve as a perfect impetus to do so.

As always, feel free to report bugs and file feature requests at Ironclad's github page.

baleful cat stares

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:26:00 CDT

Our cat sleeps in the basement. Since time immemorial, we have enticed her downstairs with some sort of treat. Sometimes that worked immediately, sometimes it took a little longer; lately she comes immediately when she figures that we are getting her treat.

But every time, as she steps down the stairs, she pauses before starting to eat. She looks back up at us before we close the door as if to say, “Aha! You have tricked me this time, but tomorrow will be different!”

the machines are winning

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 20:19:00 CDT

So, without realizing what has happened, the physician in the last two centuries has gradually relinquished his unsatisfactory attachment to subjective evidence--what the patient says--only to substitute a devotion to techonlogical evidence--what the machine says. He has thus exchanged one partial view of disease for another. As the physician makes greater use of the technology of diagnosis, he perceives his patient more and more indirectly through a screen of machines and specialists, he also relinquishes control over more and more of the diagnostic process. These circumstances tend to estrange him from his patient and from his own judgment.
quoted in Technolopy by Neil Postman

When I talk to people about my cardiac arrest and subsequent recovery, the question “How are you doing now?” always comes up. And despite my physical presence in front of them, which for all appearances looks perfectly hale, a simple “I feel great” seems inadequate. I feel the need to justify the picture of health by citing some evidence from a recent cardiologist appointment, or my (fabulous!) echocardiogram from late last year. Even Tricia and I tried to push my cardiologist to order said echocardiogram sooner than he might have otherwise and were a little disappointed when he didn't order one straightaway on our wishes.

The machine tells me that my heart function looks OK. I could have told you that! And yet, we treat the word of the machine as the revealed truth, rather than the physical evidence before us every day. Something is wrong here.

handyman

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:37:00 CDT

Some people blog about the five-piece bedroom set they built from self-harvested hardwoods from the jungles of Brazil. The wood was obtained, and the set assembled, using nothing more than a screwdriver and a hatchet.

Some people blog about the mother-of-pearl inlaid tile they laid all over their bathroom and kitchen. Said tile was painted by artisans on some far-flung Pacific island.

Some people blog about the basement they re-finished themselves after excavating it over a three-day weekend.

Me? I blog about making the toliet seats not wiggle by tightening the plasic widgets holding it to the bowl. Because that's how I roll.

the politics of the cross

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:29:00 CDT

I have been reading The Politics of the Cross: The Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder recently. I admit that I am skeptical of Yoder's position, so I have been reading the book as a partial corrective to my opinion. (I also read The Politics of Jesus several years ago; I think I must go back and re-read it after this book.) Reading what Yoder says is quite challenging, not because he writes in a complex way, but because his style is disarmingly simple. Samples:

...the most important error of the Christendom vision is not first of all its acceptance of an ethic of power, violence, and the crusade; not first of all its tranference of eschatology into the present providence with God working through Constantine and all his successors in civil government, not its appropriation of pagan religiosity that will lead to sacerdotalism and sacramentalism, not its modeling church hierarchy after Roman administration, nor any other specific vice derived from what changed about the nature of the church with the epoch of Constantine. Those were all mistakes, but they were derived from the misdefinition of the place of the people of God in the world. The fundamental wrongness of the vision of Christendom is its illegitimate takeover of the world; its ascription of a Christian loyalty or duty to those who have made no confession, and thereby, its denying to the non-confessing creation the freedom of unbelief that the nonresistance of God in creation gave to a rebellious humanity.

The question is not how we want the whole world to be or how we want our society to be but rather how we are to behave in a society that for the time being wants nothing of us of our faith or our Lord.

If we were to carry on that other, traditionally doctrinal kind of debate, I would seek simply to demonstrate that the view of Jesus being proposed here is more radically Nicene and Chalcedonian than other views. I do not here advocate an unheard-of modern understanding of Jesus. I ask rather that the implications of what the church has always said about Jesus as Word of the Father, as true God and true Man, be taken more seriously as relevant to our social problems, than ever before.

on minimalism

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:46:00 CDT

Every so often, I mention to my wife that we have too much stuff and we need to get rid of it. Every time, she agrees and suggests that we start getting rid of stuff. And every time she says we should start with my books.

NOOOOO NOT MY BOOKS

We usually don't talk about it any more after that.

Actually, we do. She then points out that we don't have a lot of stuff, which I think is debatable. We talk about that for a little while and then drop the matter.

At least I have been learning to live with something more than minimalism in other parts of my life. Packing for trips, for instance. I like to pack compactly: not insanely compactly, but I will take a rolling suitcase that fits in the overhead bin for trips of a week or more.

Packing this way does not work when you have multiple children and go to anyplace more involved than Chick-fil-A.

I used to get really annoyed when we'd pack the car for trips to see our parents. “What? Another bag? What's that for?” “Why do you have to take three dolls and a box of blocks? You have toys at [destination] to play with” Now I just breathe, make little yoga motions with my hands, and carry the bag out to the car. I am at peace.

But I'm still really happy when we can get rid of stuff.

no sharing for you

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:43:00 CDT

There was an item in my Facebook news feed saying that two of my friends had shared an article via the Washington Post Social Reader. OK, click on the article name to try to read it.

Hm, that takes me to a page where I'm supposed to sign up for the Washington Post Social Reader. That's odd. Maybe I clicked the link for the reader thingie. Back to news feed. Click.

Nope, still at the signup page. Never mind, you've made linking to your articles easy, but actually reading them tremendously hard. No thanks. This is not how the web works, folks.

(Yo, I hear you like social networks, so I put a social network in your social network so you can network while you network. Or somesuch.)

taking struggles seriously

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:47:00 CDT

I love Francis Schaeffer's writings and outlook. For instance, this quote from a series on Schaeffer's “compassionate engagement”:

As Schaeffer spoke across the United States at various colleges, he would not only impress listeners with his engagement with the wider culture and his ability to make Christianity appear intellectually tenable and relevant to the contemporary era, he also demonstrated a notable compassion for those whose works he would analyze and interpret. This latter characteristic of Schaeffer's approach to intellectual engagement was illustrated vividly when, after reading a nonsensical poem by an unbelieving author, rebuked the laughing crowd, saying,
I get so tired of Bible believing Christians who laugh at these people—who laugh at them when they look at their tortured paintings. Do you laugh at a man at the door of hell? When evangelicals learn to stop their laughing and take such men and their struggles seriously then [evangelicals] can again begin to speak to our generation (Hankins, 77).

I offer this in juxtaposition, from Karl Schroeder's musings on the Fermi paradox:

The mystery deepens almost by the day, because we've now identified 700 extrasolar planets and the count is increasing rapidly. We should shortly be racking up lists of Earthlike worlds, and we're closing in on good estimates of how many there must be in our galaxy. And the number is in the billions. So one central argument against the existence of alien life--the 'rare Earth' argument that environments to host it must be rare--has been more or less disproven. And that, just this year.
As possible explanations dwindle, we are being drawn inexorably toward the one explanation that is no explanation: that we really are alone. Why should this be? As Wiley shows, all it would take would be one alien species with our capabilities appearing, sometime in the past couple of billion years, and for that species to surpass where we are now technologically by, oh, say, a couple of hundred years... and the evidence for their existence should be present right here in our own solar system. It's an astonishing conclusion.
So are we alone? Well, there is one other possibility, at this point. I've lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke's Law (which originally said 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. (Astute readers will recognize this as a refinement and further advancement of my argument in Permanence.) Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

my summer vacation

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 21:44:00 CDT

I always disliked the inevitable “My Summer Vacation” assignment in grade school. Not that I had not enjoyed my summer, mind you, but I was never the kid who went hunting for lions on the Serengeti or the kid who defended a small Brazilian village from ant hordes with a hoe and a glass of water. My summer vacations always sounded rather boring in comparison, even when compared against my classmates who had done virtually the same things: a family vacation, maybe some swimming or tennis lessons. Maybe I do not have a flair for the dramatic in my writing.

My big news this summer was starting a new job; I left my position at CodeSourcery for a quite different position at Mozilla, working on things related to Firefox performance. I flew to California for a week of orientation, raided the bike room for company shirts, came back on my first red-eye ever, and headed to Gamefest 2011 to spend a great time with old college friends. (And we are getting old.) The summer was off to a good start.

A week later, one of the aforementioned company shirts had been sliced open after I went into cardiac arrest, Tricia's mom called 911, and Tricia and her dad performed chest compressions until the paramedics came to intubate me and shock my heart.

Even now, it sounds surreal to write those words; I have no memory of the actual cardiac arrest or the time spent in the ICU in a medically-induced coma. (A bit bummed that I have no “I saw the light” stories.) As near as the doctors could figure out, I suffered from streptococcal myocarditis, an infection of the heart by the bacteria that causes strep throat (which I had and was taking antibiotics for). The doctors said this sort of disease is not supposed to happen in the states; it's common in the developing world, but antibiotics tend to prevent complications like mine from ever showing up. (We called the on call cardiologist one night later on and he said he had never heard of such a disease.) I did not have a heart attack; there was no blockage in my arteries, my heart merely stopped pumping properly and sat there quivering instead.

As you can imagine, this turned life quite upside down; my father-in-law recalls Tricia saying, “Stay with me, Nathan!” as they both gave me CPR before the paramedics arrived. Things were a bit touch-and-go in the ICU; Tricia posted a lot of updates on Facebook and got many, many well-wishes and prayers through doing so. Neither of us knows the full extent of the network of people we had praying for us; I'm sure the circle was much bigger than both of us imagined. Fortunately, I did come out of my medically-induced coma with no brain damage, spent a few days in the hospital (a boring hospital room was quickly enlivened with numerous drawings from my daughters), had a pacemaker put in, and came home rather weak, but expecting a full recovery.

And thanks be to God, recovered I have! I went through seven weeks or so of cardiac rehab at the hospital: walking/running/biking/weights three times a week (with which, I must say, we've been grateful for the extensive help from folks giving me rides and whatnot to help Tricia out). I'm happy to say that I showed steady progress through those sessions and have come out of them feeling in about the shape I was prior to hospitalization. As far as we can tell, I've had virtually no memory loss or other mental issues, which is great. I went back to work at the beginning of August (I needed a doctor's note to resume sitting in a chair and staring at a computer screen all day, which I found funny) and I've resumed running. I generally feel like nothing happened, except that I'm not supposed to drive until Christmas and I have a small metal saucer embedded in my chest.

Well, almost nothing. Me being my unemotional self, it was hard for me to even think of anything really bad happening. Sure, I went to the hospital unconscious in an ambulance, was in a coma for a couple days, but I could see myself improving in the hospital, could watch myself getting stronger in rehab, and so forth. Of course I was going to come through! Sure, we had to deal with a strep relapse about a month after, and I seemed in rough shape then (they took my blood pressure as something like 80 over 55 at the clinic), but I took drugs and they worked that time! What, me, worry?

Until about three weeks ago when Tricia's parents came to visit for the weekend; they had thankfully been here the weekend of my cardiac arrest and were extremely helpful in getting me to the hospital and probably for keeping Tricia sane as well. We went to Taste Cafe for breakfast, as we had done that previous weekend, and as we were going home (or maybe shortly after we arrived home), Tricia's dad said to me totally in jest, “Don't take another three hour nap now!” (Fatigue is one sign of heart problems.).

I freaked out. I still can't really explain what was going on, just this vague sense of dread that something bad was going to happen and I couldn't do anything about it. That Bad Things Happening was just going to be The Way Things Were when Mom and Dad visited. Or when we went to Taste for breakfast, or whatever. Wisely, Tricia told me go off and introvertly recharge for the afternoon, and after that and talking to Mom and Dad about that weekend, I came out of things feeling much better. And then my Mom and Dad came the weekend after that (they flew out the day I was hospitalized) and I was able to talk with them too, which helped some more.

And then there was this past week, when I went to California for my first Mozilla All-Hands. Sure, flying across the country is routine, but the circumstances surrounding the last flight certainly gave us cause to worry. (And I flew out on 9/11, which was just great from a superstitious standpoint.) I took strep-battling drugs with me just in case, and was anxious the first day or two out there, but gradually relaxed and treated things as Just Another Business Trip. And I wound up having a great time in California.

In any event, the stress/anxiety of the past couple of weeks have certainly given me a new appreciation for what exactly went on three months ago (tomorrow will be three months since I went to the hospital). We also now know that I don't always get sick when parents come to visit, I don't always go into cardiac arrest when I get strep, and shortly we'll be reassured that I can fly to California and not get sick the week after. All in all, we're doing pretty well; God has blessed us in our crisis.

Thanks for all of the well-wishes and prayers posted on Facebook and otherwise; thanks for all of the meals, lawn mowings, and offers of random help over the past couple months. We've both been astonished, grateful, and humbled at the outpouring of love and support we've been shown during this time.

speeding up emacs saves

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 21:12:00 CDT

For a while now, I've noticed that saving files (maybe loading files, but saving files especially) was ridiculously slow in emacs. The busy cursor would come up for a good second or two when saving files. For a while I attributed it to the hard drive noticeably spinning up on my laptop (which it's doing now as I write this), but then I noticed--or got really annoyed--by the same behavior on my desktop. Particularly when editing files in a GCC git checkout, though I think it happened to other files as well.

Investigating, I could tell via strace that emacs was spinning off several processes (!) every time I saved a file. I tried using edebug, but that didn't seem to be working. (Somebody suggested that the routines I was trying to trace might be called directly from the C code in emacs and not go through whatever hooks edebug inserts into the system. This explanation sounds plausible, though quite unusual for emacs.) Finally some kind soul--cmm, I think--on #sbcl, where I ranted about this, suggested inserting:

(setq vc-handled-backends nil)

into my .emacs. Wow. It was like getting a computer upgrade, perhaps as radical of a change as an SSD might be; saves were now lightning fast compared to their prior speed.

I haven't poked into emacs's source code to see what was going on. And the puzzling thing is that this doesn't seem to be a consistent problem; James Knight/foom told me that he was dealing with large-ish git repos, as I was, and VC wasn't causing him any heartache. And clearly other emacs users aren't having similar problems--or perhaps everybody's silenty disabling VC and using more performant solutions. I did find a similar story to my own, but only with searching for vc-handled-backends explicitly, rather than other search terms (“slow,” “saving,” etc.).

So, hopefully search engines pick this post up and other afflicted people will find this solution and rejoice. Even better, somebody more knowledgeable about emacs than I will tell me what was really going on...

final fantasy youtube videos

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:06:00 CDT

A while ago, once of my colleagues recommended Hayseed Dixie as an enjoyable bluegrass cover band. I went looking for them on YouTube and found a cover of AC/DC's “Highway to Hell”:

Why yes, that's a bluegrass cover of a rock'n'roll classic dubbed over a Final Fantasy video. Excellent.

Seeing this reminded me of my all-time favorite Final Fantasy video, set to The Offspring's “Staring at the Sun”:

And finally, because I clicked around after finding the Hayseed Dixie cover, I discovered this well-done video set to DHT's “Listen to Your Heart.” I'm not a huge fan of FFVIII (am a fan of the song, though), but the ballroom sequence at 1:12 is particularly sparkling.

introducing nibbles

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 22:48:00 CDT

Steven Haflich, in an old Usenet posting, said:

The most pernicious failing of the ANA in my opinion is the refusal to admit the reality that computers deal in numeric bytes and characters with specific formats and codings. A portable ANSI CL program cannot write binary information to a socket or disk file that would be portably readable by another language platform, even a different Common Lisp, and even on the same system. A portable CL program cannot write characters and/or binary numbers of varying format to a single socket or stream. C and Java have no such problems, and portable programs can interact (modulo a little care about endianness byte order)...
If the language were redesigned today, I would like to see the definition get a lot closer to the realities of underlying platforms -- recognize that 8-bit-bytes have an important reality unshared by 9-bit bytes, recognize that real streams have endianess and need to have arbitrary varying datatypes passed through them,...

I have been writing a small library, nibbles, to address some of the shortcomings of Common Lisp in the above area. Specifically, nibbles features accessors on octet vectors for 16-, 32-, and 64-bit signed and unsigned integers in both endiannesses, and readers and writers from octet streams for the same. On x86oid SBCL, it also features efficient, optimized inlined versions of the vector accessors for simple vectors.

Code for reading and writing floats in various endiannesses is also present in the library, but has not been tested and is not exported in this release. Such support is planned for a future release.

Please check out the library, send feedback, and send patches if there are features you'd like to see added or bugs that need to be fixed. (It'd be great to have optimized inlined vector accessors for CCL, for instance...)