Nanowrimotion

Advising Beleriand 1 of 7: So Swear We All

2007-09-19T11:54:09Z

Preface: Of the parables and other tales that have informed your style of interpersonal dealings, the way that you manage your relationships, which have had a prominent impact? For many, of course, there are the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao De Jing and the Analects of Confucius, the Bible or the Qur'an. For interpretation and anecdotal commentary, there are the Talmud, the Mencius, and the Hadith. Better scholars of philosophy than I have produced many ages' worth of analysis, annotation, and metacommentary on these work, though, so rather than attempt another Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership, I'm going to promote another book that conveys some messages about leadership, but that you may not have thought of very much as a good model: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.

The Sons of Feanor and the Union of Maedhros

In Tolkien's legendarium, the seven sons of the Feanor, king of the high elves in exile and a primary actor in their downfall as a people, play roles ranging from tragic antiheroes to consummate villains. They swear impious oaths out of hubris; some threaten and attempt to murder rivals out of envy; and a few bring out the worst in their followers by tapping into their fear and exhorting cowardly practices of mob violence and false dealing.

But what lies behind the prophesied and ultimately inevitable failure of the Dispossessed? Is there a lesson to learn from the architects and guardians of ephemeral realms, such as they were? Perhaps. Tolkien postulated a different cosmological role and spiritual identity for the Elves than for Man; but it is clear that through divine agency, the fates of both were intertwined and the Elves were destined to serve a precursory role in the emergence of human culture.

Maedhros: The quintessential case for predestination in the Silmarillion, this Firstborn of the Dispossessed exhibits many of the qualities that inspire. From his steadfast loyalty to Fingon and his idealistic courage in treating with his enemies, to his humble deference in yielding the high kingship to Fingolfin, Maedhros at his best embodies the qualities of noble sacrifice. Though he ended as badly as ever he feared during his sojourn in Middle-earth, a deeper study of his achievements reveals more wisdom than folly; for Maedhros was the eventual founder of what was perhaps the first international coalition, the Union that bore his name. In establishing this multi-racial mutual defense pact, Maedhros showed a recognition of the importance of building from strength. Like his more sympathetic and well-beloved kinsman Finrod Felagund, whose biography deserves its own section, he built to last: not only did the hill of Himring and the March of Maedhros that it protected endure for four and a half centuries (nearly throughout the Wars of the Jewels), but it accrued considerable military power. In the middle years of the First Age, it was sufficient to maintain the century-long siege of Angband; in the waning years of the Noldor foothold, it was still great enough to foster a human culture that was to form the basis of the Dunedain kingdoms.

Of all the elven leaders save Finrod and perhaps Thingol (through his progeny), the contribution of Maedhros was to have the greatest lasting impact. The Three Noble Houses had their roots as much in Maedhros's realm as in those of Fingolfin and Fingon, and more so than in that of Turgon, who ruled chiefly over Noldor subjects. Not only was it probable that some survivors from the March of Maedhros were ancestors of the Numenorean nobility; but the paramount leaders of the greatest human nations of the Second through Fourth Ages were descended of the young elven princes that he and Maglor, the second-born son of Feanor, took jointly into custody: Elrond and Elros.

We know that Maedhros ultimately succumbed to despair, whether by the hand of fate or deliberate choice being debatable. Certainly he showed an overweening desire to "finish the job" in despite of insurmountable odds and, more importantly, being on the side of moral wrong. In addition to being impious, Feanor's oath to recover the Silmarils on pain of damnation committed himself and his sons to evil deeds, as indeed transpired in the Kinslayings and throughout the Wars of Beleriand. One could, however, argue on the side of free will, that Maedhros forsook the principle that the best time to turn back from the wrong path is now. Moreover, he was an imperfect judge of character, from his expectation that his father would not burn the ships of the Teleri to his ill-fated parley with the forces of Angband. As a leader he was unable to restrain the rashness of Celegorm, Curufin and Caranthir that drove them to their deaths and that of Dior and Nimloth, with many of their people, in the Second Kinslaying at Menegroth.

But what good can be thought of Maedhros in the final assessment? He built teams that worked, or would have save for treachery, both with his brothers and with Dwarves and Men. He recognized that he needed help in providing for the siege of Angband, which must have been no small logistical feat, especially in the beginning. The Union provided not only good strategic coverage where needed, but drew from complementary strengths. We can infer from the arrogance of Caranthir and his tendency to deal coldly with Dwarves and Men (such as the Haladin) that Maedhros was much more of a diplomat than his brothers, in ways that history showed to be badly needed. Maedhros had a good track record for recruiting the faithful: the House of Bor was sworn to serve him and Maglor. Loyalty and spirit are the paramount priority of any team. He had a watchful awareness of the state of the field, both in maintaining the watch during the Siege of Angband and in the days leading up to the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. Keeping well-informed is an important quality for any leader, particularly a long-term strategist such as Maedhros was. He showed personal courage and an uncompromising willingness to step in himself and to put his own life on the line whenever it was needed, especially during the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. That independent spirit is another worthy hallmark of leadership that Maedhros clearly demonstrated. Finally, Maedhros was humble out of decency rather than necessity: Tolkien hints at his many deeds of deadly prowess on the battlefield, yet Maedhros recognized his limitations and deferred to moral superiors despite his titular superiority. Up until his final fall, he relinquished not only authority but his birthright, not because he lacked strength or advantage, but because he recognized that it is the right thing to do and seemed to genuinely repent. Maedhros's life story is one that underscores the important consequences of duty and commitments: both the ones he upheld despite his ultimate failure, and those commitments that he wished to break and ought to have broken, but could not for fear of his oath.

Maglor: This second son of Feanor was perhaps remembered as the most merciful one of the lot. His surprising ability to love and mentor his captives, the children of his erstwhile enemies, is of an epic quality - perhaps not so very surprising given his vaunted talents as a poet and a minstrel. Together with Maedhros, he adopted the sons of Earendil and Elwing, and Tolkien records that he formed a special bond with them. Of comparable though dissimilar importance were the destinies of his foster sons: Elros, future first king of Numenor, and Elrond, who chose immortality. As The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings relate, Elrond became not only the ruler of one of the remnant elven realms (Rivendell), but custodian of the hidden remnants of high Numenorean nobility (the Rangers of Arnor). Though Earendil and Elwing raised their sons through their early childhood, it is perhaps fruitful to reflect on what impact Maglor had on human culture through his influence on the development of such longeval and important historical figures. Tolkien, as you may have surmised from the tale of Finrod, is very emphatic of the bardic ideal, the storyteller-king who teaches the secrets of civilization to primitives and rustics. While this fits in with the Germanic atmosphere of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, it also complements their essential messages about effective leadership. Maglor, a partially successful reflection of Finrod, showed forbearance when he achieved mastery of a situation, and demonstrated the power of the bond between mentor and learner (an aspect of the love that can grow between adoptive parent and child, even in wartime circumstances).

Celegorm, Caranthir, and Curufin: These "dark sons" of Feanor took the worst aspects of Dear Old Dad's personality and made a pasttime of inflicting them on unsuspecting denizens of Middle-earth, from Haleth to Beren to Orodreth. Yes, they were pretty much a trio of putzes, and hardly anyone shed a tear when they bit it trying to take the Silmaril of Beren from Dior.

Is there anything to learn from them, though? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Caranthir, haughty as he was in his dealings with Haleth and her people, showed tactical astuteness in coming to their rescue. There is seldom a better time to save someone's bacon than when it's about to go into the deep fryer. Furthermore, Caranthir, who probably didn't care stay in the presence of human cooties long enough for the orc-blood stain to set in his pristine surcoat, nevertheless had the shrewdness to offer a landholding to the Haladin: to wit, the borderlands that would have cost elf-blood to defend. In all seriousness, Caranthir did recognize valor and worth in a strange new people by their deeds, and he encouraged his followers to accept greater responsibility and self-determination. This was still a century before the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, when Caranthir probably had a more sanguine view of elf-human alliances, but it is telling that he, as much as anyone save Maedhros and Maglor, was able to forge a symbiotic relationship that began with only an opponent in common. The Second House of the Edain, of course, served Caranthir better than his other investment, the House of Ulfang. You win some, you lose some. Caranthir, by the way, is an alternate form of Cranthir, the "red-faced one", describing a hothead whose personality has parallels in those of the easily provoked princes of Amber in Zelazny's classic series. That someone so quick to wrath could stop and reflect about the potential benefits of absorbing an apparently "weaker" group into his organization also illustrates the depth and sophistication of Noldor leadership.

Now, what of Celegorm and Curufin? Well, as is recorded, they were able to address the people of Nargothrond and exert such tremendous influence by their words alone that the people forsook the call to arms of a reigning king (Finrod Felagund) and permanently adopted a policy of guerilla warfare. That is a pretty strong case for the power of effective public speaking, if ever there was one! "But that's a bad outcome," you say? How about how they got to be quasi-permanent guests in Nargothrond in the first place? Like Barahir with Finrod and Caranthir with Haleth, they did it by giving timely assistance to an ally: they saved Orodreth (and themselves) from death and capture when Minas Tirith (the first one, on Tol Sirion) fell.

Amrod and Amras: There isn't as much to say here, considering that (according to Tolkien's later drafts of The Silmarillion) Amras actually died in the burning of the ships at Losgar before the Noldor even made landfall in Middle-earth. His twin Amrod, on the other hand, survived all five of the major battles of the Wars of the Jewels, and died only in the Third Kinslaying at the mouths of Sirion. To him can only be accorded the accolade of survival for five centuries of a most perilous age.

It is worth noting that Amrod (and Amras, if we accept Christopher Tolkien's edition as canonical) held the southern half of the March of Maedhros and maintained the defensibility of the Union, an important part of the mutually complementary teamwork I attributed to Maedhros above.

In the final assessment, what are the take-home lessons from the stories of the Seven Sons of Feanor? Trust the right people. Maedhros and Maglor clearly chose well, while Caranthir's misplaced trust in some humans (Uldor, Ulfang, and Ulwarth). Promote the learning organization. Finrod was the ultimate master of this principle in Middle-earth, as I shall discuss later. Seek a holistic educational experience and facilitate team learning, and more precisely what Peter Senge calls the Fifth Discipline and systems thinking. Finally, understanding that no realms last forever, recognize that long-term good can arise from the ephemeral.

This is the first part of a seven-part series.

--
Banazir

Potemkin Wikis and the Chinese Wikipedia

2007-09-17T08:06:46Z

Well, I'm back.
Ephemeral: You know that Doctor Who S3 episode "Blink"? The one where people keep getting pulled back in time and cross paths with a stranded Doctor, and have to live their way back towards the latter days from which they were pulled?
Yeah... you get the idea.

This article on the Chinese Wikipedia in the International Herald Tribune caught my eye.

Just who was Mao Zedong?

According to the English-language version of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, he was a victorious military and political leader who founded China's modern Communist state. He was also a man many saw as "a mass murderer, holding his leadership accountable for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent Chinese."

Switch to Wikipedia in Chinese, and one discovers a very different man. There, Mao Zedong's reputation is unsullied by any mention of a death toll in the great purges of the 1950s and 1960s, or for what many historians call the greatest famine in human history.

Andrew Lih comments here on a blow-by-blow comparison done by New York Times correspondent Howard French. For that, make no mistake about it, is what this is: an information war. Fought not with bullets but with electrons, granting history not to the physical victors but those who operate the Wikipedia server that your browser goes to by default, the Chinese Wikipedia stakes a claim for the 99% of Chinese users who don't bother to tunnel out from behind the Great Firewall using a proxy.

On 10 Jun 2006, I brought up a photo of Tank Man in the heart of Beijing, courtesy of English Wikipedia and the timely assistance of taiji_jian and his desktop Linux box. What did this accomplish, other than the thrill of the illicit? Well, to hear tell of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' first attempts to get a foothold in China, it was really an all-or-nothing proposition. The whole (English) site, as some of you may know, is domain-level IP-blocked in China. The People's Republic of China (PRC) wanted Wales to voluntarily self-censor about 1% of Wikipedia's content, as Yahoo and Microsoft (and to a lesser, albeit more notorious extent, Google) already do. Wales said "nothing doing", and so the status quo of the Golden Shield (jing₁ dun₁, the PRC's propagandistic euphemism for Internet censorship) stayed in place. Replace "Shield" with "Curtain" and you get the idea.

Fast-forward ahead a few months: there is now a growing awareness of the dichotomy between the Chinese and English Wikipedias. Is it censorship? A Potemkin village kind of syndrome? Yes and yes, but only for that pesky 1%. You see, there are just a few articles, such as those concerning dissidents such as Wang Dan and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, that are touchy for the PRC. 1% of the content for 1% of the readership - the proxy users - doesn't pose an issue. The PRC government knows that there are people who tunnel out of curiosity or just to buck the trends. They know that there are closet dissidents who tunnel, and you can be sure that the subversives they view as more dangerous than the casual college student wanting a taste of free information are surveilled. If, however, the readership expanded to, say, 10%, it might be a problem. You see, the PRC pulls down news articles about every would-be coup - every strike against a state-run facility, from an aircraft factory to a provincial university. The government knows that the information has been seen by that 1% already; it doesn't mind that it circulates within the infosphere of people who have self-selected out of the complacent infoproletariat. It is what happens to the 99% that the PRC government cares about, because when the information that it is possible to overthrow the state becomes common, then the state will be overthrown.

Napoleon Bonaparte said: "The art of the police is not to see what it is useless that it should see." That, too, is the art of the modern Chinese internet user... for the moment. Happily, we are reminded that Albert Einstein said: "Politics is for the moment; an equation is for eternity." The equation we are looking at is perhaps a limit theorem, counting the days to a convergence that cannot be willed, or edited, away.

--
Banazir

Angband funnies

2006-12-29T13:04:41Z

We had two final project presentations today for CIS 730 (Artificial Intelligence). Both were among the five who worked on the Roguelike game Angband. Our goal was to look at specific behaviors and improve them.

The first student, Dave Lupo, wanted to improve the tendency of the BenBorg (by Ben Harrison) to be a shopaholic. He trained a feedforward artificial neural net (ANN) using backpropagation to compute a better "dive motivator". This lowered the ratio of time in town vs. dungeon, and he found that increasing the ratio of "time in the dungeon" to "time in town" increased survivability.

Dave plotted the "time in town vs. time in dungeon" curve for 13 characters before his improved dive function, and 14 characters after, and found that they did have higher XP-to-move ratios. He speculated that they had higher survivability as a result, though these results were inconclusive. (I suggested that he look at the slope of the line to see if ' it really improved survivability.)

Now, here's the funny part. The points were all at time of character death, because he lost most of the characters at low levels, but I was sure he didn't lose them all by level 14, so I asked him what the rightmost point was. "Oh, that's time of death after 150000 turns". I asked, "what do you mean, after 150K turns?" He replied that to impose a time limit, he didn't just end the borg run at 150K; he sets "target level = 99" so that it essentially goes: "Morgoth... I'm comin' to get you!" and commences a Rambo-esque death dive!

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Banazir

Ellie Swenson

2006-12-28T05:15:27Z

Congratulations to my cousin Connie Swenson (nee Hsu) and her intrepid archaeologist husband Ed, on the arrival of their new bundle of joy, Ellie! She is my paternal grandmother's first great-grandchild and my first "first paternal cousin, once removed".

--
Banazir

KDD Group Wiki plans

2006-12-19T13:18:55Z

We're in the midst of reorganizing the KDD content-management system using TikiWiki, MediaWiki, and Joomla.

So far, URLs have been of the type:

http://leap-kmc.kdd.cis.ksu.edu

This is achieved using a CNAME pointing to standard canonical URL:

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/leap-kmc

What Seth Galitzer has recommended, and what we're now going with, is a vhost (propagating immediately with no DNS change):

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/tikiwiki/leap-kmc

In general:

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/[project]

should point to:

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/tikiwiki/[project]

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/[username]

should point to:

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/tikiwiki/users/[username]

and

http://www.kdd.cis.ksu.edu/[name]

are the canonical names to be given out.

--
Banazir

KDDnet and DynDNS.org

2006-12-19T13:08:22Z

I finally splurged and shelled out $10 for a one-year DynDNS basic subscription.
Here's the setup I have, using port range redirection (thanks to nikolasco and taiji_jian):

System                       SSH Port
========================================
hirilonde.dyndns.org         50022
numerramar.dynalias.com      51022
telperion.game-server.cc     52022
mandos.homelinux.net         53022
este.selfip.biz              54022
kow.gotdns.com               55022
laurelin.homeip.net          56022
yavanna.homeunix.com         57022
tulkas.kicks-ass.net         58022
vaire.dyndns.info            59022

--
Banazir

EcoGen Fluorescent Marker Workshop

2006-12-19T12:55:46Z

Today, martin_samuel and I attended a K-State EcoGen tutorial on GeneMarker, a software package for fluorescent molecular marker analysis.

The Kansas State University Ecological Genomics Institute is pleased to offer a workshop providing "hands-on" training in the use of GeneMarker software for fluorescent molecular marker analysis including AFLPs, microsatellites, and SNPs. The workshop will be held on Saturday, December 2, 9:00 to 5:00, in room 1302A in Throckmorton Hall. Dr. Paul St. Amand (USDA) will be presenting the training.

If you have ever wanted to add a genetic or population genetic aspect to your research, this will be a very useful introduction to the necessary tools. The workshop will include a one-day overview of:

the molecular biology techniques associated with developing and using fluorescent molecular markers

preparing and submitting samples to the USDA Genotyping Lab for fluorescent fragment detection

hands-on analysis and assessment of the output using GeneMarker

Maximum enrollment: 30

All in all, it was useful and informative workshop to Martin and me, if only to give us a hands-on experience with AFLP analysis and a high-level overview of SNP data and the data flow pipeline.

--
Banazir

The Hollywood Nutcracker

2006-12-19T12:43:31Z

I went to see this tonight with a friend and colleague from Modern Languages:

The Hollywood Nutcracker
The State Street Ballet of Santa Barbara, California

A funny, sophisticated, joie de vivre version of the quintessential holiday treat that is wholesome enough for three-year-olds. Choreographer Rodney Gustafson holds true to tradition and classical ballet while drawing inspiration from 1930's Hollywood — the time of Garbo and Grable, Swanson and Cagney — and brings all the elements of the beloved story to life with wit and style as a silver screen spectacular. Luxurious Art Deco dreamscapes, glamorous costumes, and Disney-esque adventures enhance the grandeur of Tchaikovsky's score without gimmicks. Quickly becoming a classic, State Street Ballet's Nutcracker is a happily-ever- after tale that dazzles.

Here is a video excerpt.

--
Banazir

Great Plains Network Workshop: Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI)

2006-12-19T12:32:59Z

GENI: Global Environment for Network Innovations

A Workshop for Great Plains Network Consortium Members

Hosted by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Kansas State University
Corporate Partner: The Ciena Corporation

Report: I attended the AM sessions of this and stayed until the conference call with NSF. Several presentations were given by researchers at other campuses and by Gurdip Singh, one of our network and distributed systems faculty. martin_samuel joined us during the midmorning break, and weninger came during the lunch break. We had some discussions about current research projects and opportunities, and I discussed work on human language technologies (HLT), social networks, and distributed multi-agent learning. I also talked with the small groups about our bioinformatics (especially NSF FIBR) and computational physics (especially NSF ITR) projects.

There was some interested in the distributed computing aspects of the ITR and social networks work. For some reason, the bioinformatics discussions met with less enthusiasm (from my POV, at least). Perhaps we aren't presenting a clear distributed computing angle when it comes to machine learning: I got a similar response even with the information extraction and dynamic indexing aspects of HLT.

--
Banazir

Machine Learning, spring 2007

2006-12-19T12:17:05Z

An introductory course in machine learning for development of intelligent knowledge based systems. The first half of the course will focus on basic taxonomies and theories of learning, algorithms for concept learning, statistical learning, knowledge representation, pattern recognition, and reasoning under uncertainty. The second half of the course will survey some basic topics in combining multiple models, learning from time series, learning to reason, and selected applications in knowledge discovery and data mining, especially in bioinformatics.

The course will include several written and programming assignments and a term project option for graduate students. Ancillary readings will be assigned; students will write a brief synopsis and review for one of these papers every other lecture.

This will be my sixth offering of machine learning (the first five being in 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2005). This time I'm cross-listing it with my Advanced AI course (CIS 830), and am giving approximately equal time to graphical models, genetic and evolutionary computation (especially genetic programming, but with some genetic algorithms coverage), and artificial neural networks.

--
Banazir

JCMC Special Issue on Social Networks: People, Practice, and Culture

2006-12-19T12:10:56Z

Special Theme Issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Social Network Sites: People, Practice, and Culture

Guest Editors:

danah boyd, University of California-Berkeley

Nicole Ellison, Michigan State University

I first heard of this a bit too late to develop our work on data mining using the LiveJournal friends network into something that fits, but it looks to be an interesting issue.

Did anyone reading this submit something? I'd be curious to hear from those who are publishing an article in this or a similar venue.

Edit, 06:10 CST Tue 19 Dec 2006 - I did send in an abstract, but it looks as if they are looking for more the sociocultural angle rather than purely technical KDD and machine learning research.

There's a Yahoo Group, sns-researchers, that danah started for the social network community. It's just getting off the ground now.

--
Banazir

Youtubers

2006-11-29T12:18:40Z

A short documentary on the phenomenon.

--
Banazir

Potion of Trask

2006-11-29T12:11:29Z

"You are the last person who needs to be drinking one of those." -masteralida

taiji_jian has dubbed my concoction, consisting of Diet Mountain Dew mixed with Mountain Dew AMP or Sobe No Fear (aka Adrenaline Rush, either Gold or Red), a "potion of trask".

It's a fair characterization, I think.

--
Banazir
(oh, and this is what the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" tavern icon is for!)

Nanocomputing, Part II: Bananet

2006-11-29T12:02:44Z

Thanks to all who have helped with previous issues, which I posted on:

March, 2005: Sat 05 Mar 2005, Sun 27 Mar 2005

April, 2005: Sat 16 Apr 2005, Sat 29 Apr 2005

May, 2005: Sun 15 May 2005, Sat 28 May 2005

June, 2005: Sat 11 Jun 2005, Sat 25 Jun 2005

July, 2005: Sat 09 Jul 2005

August, 2005: Sat 13 Aug 2005, Sat 20 Aug 2005

September, 2005: Sat 03 Sep 2005, Sat 17 Sep 2005

October, 2005: Mon 03 Oct 2005, Sat 15 Oct 2005, Sat 29 Oct 2005

November, 2005: Sat 12 Nov 2005, Sat 26 Nov 2005

December, 2005: Sat 10 Dec 2005, Sat 24 Dec 2005

January, 2006: Sat 07 Jan 2006, Sat 21 Jan 2006

February, 2006: Sat 04 Feb 2006, Sat 18 Feb 2006

March, 2006: Sat 04 Mar 2006, Sat 18 Mar 2006

April, 2006: Sat 01 Apr 2006, Sat 15 Apr 2006, Sat 29 Apr 2006

May, 2006: Sat 13 May 2006, Sat 27 May 2006

June, 2006: Sat 10 Jun 2006, Sat 24 Jun 2006

July, 2006: Sat 08 Jul 2006, Sat 22 Jul 2006

August, 2006: Sat 05 Aug 2006, Sat 19 Aug 2006

September, 2006: Sat 02 Sep 2006, Sat 16 Sep 2006, Sat 30 Sep 2006

October, 2006: Sat 14 Oct 2006, Sat 28 Oct 2006

November, 2006: Sat 11 Nov 2006

Thanks in particular to all who continue to respond to my computer questions, especially taiji_jian.

This week, I am trying to do the following:

Mapping port ranges to dedicated static IPs

Set up a dedicated IP so that I can SSH to (say) numerramar.kddresearch.dyndns.org on a port p, and the gateway of my home systems will receive the request on a static IP.

Port forwarding to a router

Use the machine name (numerramar) to route the requests on p to a machine-specific port so that port-range redirection kicks in on my Linksys WRT54G combo router.

Intercepting requests on a port and translating to SSH

Piggyback on web-friendly ports: that is, intercept requests on a port (say, 8080) and translate them to SSH packets. (Edit, 06:00 CST Wed 29 Nov 2006 - I have it on good authority that this is not possible without a nameserver sitting on a static IP. Is leasing a dedicated one the only way to do this?)

I still want to go completely do-it-yourself (DIY) on hosting, so that GoDaddy.com or whoever sells me the IP is doing only that (and not renting me rack-mount server cycles and space, at least for now).

Any ideas or provider recommendations?

--
Banazir

Christmahanukwanzakah Mailings

2006-11-29T11:39:05Z

Here's my Black Friday tradition!

If anyone would like a card, please comment here, indicating which of the Christmahanukwanzakah holidays you observe, and include your mailing address (or let me know you've sent it by private e-mail).

Cheers!

--
Banazir

Thanksgiving of the People, by the People, for the People

2006-11-29T11:34:40Z

Thanksgiving dinner this year promises to be a memorable affair. Ever since spending a fortnight eating nothing but turkey to reduce a 30-lb. Butterball they picked up one year, they've been chary of getting whole turkeys.

Instead, we got just 5 pounds of whole turkey breast to roast. I think we'll add stuffing and gravy to that, but the rest is all Chinese fare:

thick green vegetable stir fried with garlic

dried tofu stir fried with hot chili and pork

garlic shrimp with green peppers and hot red chilies

orange roughy in sweet tomato sauce with water chestnuts

turnip soup with quail eggs, tofu, ham, and bamboo shoots

Edit, 05:30 CST Wed 29 Nov 2006: Add a dry Napa valley red from 2002 that a thoughtful guest brought, and it all turned out quite nicely. After dinner we sat down to a dessert of honey crisp apples, jumbo red grapes, and both pumpkin and pecan pie (the former brought by another guest), with a special Gevalia Kenyan coffee blend.

--
Banazir

The Penguin Factor

2006-11-29T11:06:18Z

The other day, the Banafolks bought some Christmas mugs at Walgreen's at $0.50 apiece ($0.66 each, two for $1). One of them had a scarved penguin on it. I thanked them for the Linux mug. ;-)

Actually, it's more of a Meep than a Tux. This guy is thin!

So, show of hands! Who's going to see Happy Feet?

Me, I haven't even seen March of the Penguins yet. Soon I will.

If you haven't seen Madagascar, BTW, it has some completely teuncy penguins in it.

And here is my dedicated "penguin" icon...

--
Banazir

Seeking bibliography tools

2006-11-29T10:50:05Z

(Cross-posted from statements.)

I need to maintain a mid-sized bibliography for wikis and for my research group, and I'm open to suggestions.

Edit, 04:45 CST Wed 29 Nov 2006 - Thanks to sperose for suggesting The Bedford Bibliographer. It looks useful, and I will give it a try.

--
Banazir

Angband

2006-11-28T12:43:20Z

taiji_jian reports the astounding but intriguing news that he has the Roguelike game Angband running on a brick of a P5-120 notebook computer I sent him, with Andrew White's borg, APWborg.

I'm not sure which is funnier - the fact that he got it working in Windows 98 on a 10-year-old Pentium notebook, or the fact that barring supa-Hiro-ism, we're both going to be in our forties by the time it finishes killing Morgoth.

--
Banazir

Blogthings galore

2006-11-28T12:36:03Z

You Are 59% Perfectionist

No one would call you a perfectionist, but you definitely have a side of you that strives to be perfect.
Try to see your mistakes as learning experiences, and don't be so hard on yourself when you screw up!

Are You a Perfectionist?

You Are 84% Thankful

You're an incredibly thankful person, and everyone around you feels very appreciated.
You inspire people to be more optimistic, forgiving, and grateful.

How Thankful Are You?

You Are Mashed Potatoes

Oridnary, comforting, and more than a little predictable
You're the glue that holds everyone together.

What Part of Thanksgiving Are You?

You Are Pecan Pie Soda

Sweet, but totally nuts

What Jones Holiday Soda Are You?

Yeah, baby, that's what I'm talkin' about!
(Is this stuff for real?)

Thanksgiving Horoscope for Libra

You're the sign most likely to upstage the host or hostess with your charm.

Your signature dish: Green bean casserole

Your signature dessert: Chocolate cake

This holiday: Make plans early and stick to them. It's easy for you to change your mind.

What's Your Thanksgiving Horoscope?

--
Banazir

Cool word of the month, November 2006

2006-11-28T12:18:03Z

xam ̊ǁ’oatseǃ (Nàmá, adjective) - "lion-armed"

Previous months' cool words:

October, 2006: monetize (English, verb, from Latin moneta) - give legal value to or establish as the legal tender of a country
September, 2006: 翻譯 (Chinese, noun, pinyin fan₁yi₄) - translation
August, 2006: logorrhea (English neologism, Greek roots) - an excessive flow of words, prolixity [Gr logos word + roia flow, stream] (submitted by inever)
July, 2006: estrambótico (Spanish, adjective) - strange, bizarre, eclectic, weird (suggested by figgylicious)
June, 2006: 終點 (Chinese, noun, pinyin zhong₁dian₃) - final destination (of a journey); terminus
May, 2006: draenei (Eredan, noun) - "exiled ones"
April, 2006: apoplectic (English via French, Latin, Greek, adjective) - of, relating to, or causing stroke; greatly agitated (suggested by gondhir)
March, 2006: jnana (Sanskrit, noun) - knowledge (pronounced "geeyahna" or "gneeyahna"; suggested by jereeza)
February, 2006: sesquipedalian (English, adjective) - having many syllables; given to or characterized by the use of long words (courtesy of tears_of_nienna)
January, 2006: azanulbizar (Khuzdul, proper noun) - vale of dim streams
December, 2005: viszontlátásra (Hungarian, infinitive) - to see again (a formal farewell)
November, 2005: užas (Croatian, noun) - horror, terror
October, 2005: zokutou (Japanese, noun) - an ascending spiral
September, 2005: seb (Egyptian, noun) - star (courtesy of sahtyinepu)
August, 2005: 外国人 [gaikokujin / waiguoren] (Japanese and Chinese, noun) - lit. "outside country person", a foreigner
July, 2005: tawadu (Arabic, noun) - humility
June, 2005: balpre (Lojban, noun) - hero
May, 2005: brill (English, adjective; slang, British) - brilliant, cool
April, 2005: ܟܐܦܐ [kepa, transliterated kephas] (Aramaic, noun) - great rock
March, 2005: mashin (Farsi, noun) - automobile
February, 2005: perkele (Finnish, noun) - devil (also an expletive)
January, 2005: kinu (Japanese, noun) - silk
December, 2004: krung (Thai, noun) - city, cf. krung thep (city of angels, old name of Bangkok)
November, 2004: tane (Archnin, noun) - blood (see tanelos)
October, 2004: izulu (Zulu, noun) - interplanetary space
September, 2004: phensem (Tibetan, noun) - an beneficent attitude towards others
August, 2004: si₂ pu₃ (Chinese, noun) - recipe (literally, "meal score")
July, 2004: entspannung (German, noun) - relaxation
June, 2004: anapauesthai (Koine Greek, verb) - to stand still
May, 2004: tvære (Norwegian, verb) - to stretch, especially a conversation or a farewell (definition provided by tamf)
April, 2004: ber-engro (Romany, noun) - lit. "ship's master", a mariner
March, 2004: calad (Sindarin, noun, "light")
February, 2004: su (Chinese, adjective/noun) - 1. flaky; 2. a baked good with a crisp or flaky consistency, such as a cookie
January, 2004: pizdarija (Croatian, noun; vulgar) - something messed-up, feeble, or ridiculous (definition provided by jereeza)
December, 2003: basherte (Hebrew, noun) - "apportioned one" (implication of predestined/ordained mate; courtesy of yahvah)
November, 2003: panmictic (English, adjective, "exhibiting random mating within a breeding population")
October, 2003: kreteno (Esperanto, slang noun, "idiot")
September, 2003: kawai (Japanese, adjective, "cute")
August, 2003: ser (Spanish, intransitive verb, "to be")
July, 2003: cordillera (Spanish, noun, "principal mountain system of a continent")
June, 2003: kallüsáráyam (Tamil, noun, "illicit liquor")
May, 2003: hoh (Singlish, particle, "connective expression of expected agreement")
April, 2003: tmesis (English, noun, "separation of the parts of a compound word for humorous effect")
March, 2003: nerazreshimost (Russian, noun, "undecidability")

--
Banazir

PlayStation 3 and Sylvanas Out Tonight

2006-11-28T12:11:02Z

Has anyone bought a PS3? Is anyone actually playing with one now? Will anyone admit to flipping one? ;-)

In other news: Here's a funny YouTube video cross-posted from teunc.

Even more amusing than the gnomish raid on the Undercity...

--
Banazir

The Gibsonian Mythos III: Acculturation

2006-11-28T11:59:30Z

This is the third entry in a three-part series on the "post-cyberpunk" era and the impact (or fallout) of William Gibson's contributions.

Cyberpunk as a literary subgenre: overrated or misclassified?

A third and final aspect of cyberpunk disillusionment, I think, is that one has to have a little distance from the subject matter. Insofar as "cyberspace" has become a household word and the internetworked culture has penetrated very far into the society of developed and developing countries, it seems to me that cyberpunk has done its job, and that we are ready to move on. More to the point, I think many of us in the IT field came to the literary subgenre of computer-oriented sci-fi already a little jaded.

But wait a minute! Is cyberpunk really about computers, or is it about the ambience of a fragmentary and quasi-fantastic computer culture? Is it even a subgenre per se, or just a stylistic category? Take Ridley Scott's 1982 film, Blade Runner. This modern classic was a contemporary of Gibson's earliest writings and the first film (to my knowledge) that really illustrated the dystopian-yet-darkly attractive future that lay before a post-Information Age society. I remember being very impressed with the film when I first watched it in 1999, even though it had surreal, ugly, and chilling parts. The Brave New World aspect of the film fascinated me. I got a similar feeling from the even more surrealistic Deadline starring Rutger Hauer.

My own journey to the doorstop of cyberpunk

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. First, I should tell you how I came to cyberpunk, and let you decide for yourself whether my arrival amid the subculture was typical. As I said, I was a young teen groupie of the MIT AI Lab / Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) / CMU Robotics Lab hackers. Downloading my consciousness into a robotic body was a definite life's goal when I was 14. If you remember Ross Geller's conversation with Elle Macpherson's character in one of the codas of Friends, that was me in 8^th grade. Any person you could find who was interested in philosophy of mind - especially teenagers - was my mark. Male or female, nerd or athlete, mature or childish, I would single these rare individuals out and postulate everything from fembots to wetware reprogramming to the existence of a soul. Yes, dear reader, I got some funny looks from freshmen at Severn who found poring over The Tomorrow Makers: A Brave New World of Living-Brain Machines during study hall. That book, written by Grant Fjermedal, a bowtie-clad science writer who was, in retrospect, the Kerouac of the geek squad, became a testament of my tronkie bible. Together with a paper by Geoff Hinton that my uncle gave me the same year (1986-1987), it formed the basis for my majoring in computer science.

For me, the intellectual precursors of cyberpunk were not photos of Tokyo's neon districts, but tales of the Fifth Generation Project and Wasubot, not noir and the trappings of a net that never was, but the true-life stories of Red Whittaker, Hans Moravec, Eric Drexler, and Rod Brooks. I grew up fed by stories such as the Minsky-Sussman neural net koan. And so it was that I came across a funny little story serialized in four issues of Analog magazine. It was called Vacuum Flowers, and it had some interesting ideas: cybernetics, of course, and a pre-Borg hive mind; wetware, persona engineering, implant-based cyborgs; and a general flavor of information profiteering. This was before Johnny Mnemonic was a movie, much less The Matrix, and I had read nothing of Gibson's yet. I was absolutely enthralled by the dazzling array of technology implied by the story, and the nonchalant reference to Dyson spheres and the like. Later, Dan Simmons's Hyperion and Endymion series, and even Joss Whedon's Firefly/Serenity universe, would hold my attention in a similar way. After Neuromancer, by contrast, I lost my interest in Burning Chrome and Count Zero. It wasn't that Swanwick's story was oversaturated with technical detail; it was that he wasn't actively running away from it. It was just there, taken for granted in exposition and flashbacks. The human cultures are just as organic when we see them, perhaps more so for the blessed lack of people jacking in with brain ports all the time. After Vacuum Flowers, which I've since heard referred to as typifying both a contemporary and a derivative style of Gibson's, the world of Neuromancer seemed almost stale by comparison.

The final reflection

My personal feeling, as I've often expressed before, is that I probably gave Neuromancer less than a fair shake, being ignorant of its primacy when I first read it. I pegged it and Vacuum Flowers as true contemporaries, while Neuromancer was earlier by a very important three or four years: those were the years when the post-WWII assimilation of Japanese technoculture was at its height, when Morita and Ishihara wrote The Japan That Can Say No, when the trade wars and anti-Nipponism raged the strongest but the counterreaction to those cultural phenomena were opening channels for everything from manga and anime to mass-produced kitsch (Pokemon, Tamagotchi). This was the era of the Transformers and Gobots on television, the time when futurism wore a Made in Japan sticker. And so in that sense, Neuromancer was quite important: it bridged a cultural gap that I did not quite appreciate as a Chinese-American teen.

And so I've decided to read Neuromancer again, along with other works of Gibson and later books by contemporary cyberpunk authors (such as Swanwick) and quasi-cyberpunk sci-fi authors (from Simmons to Stephenson). For those of you who have been following this account: do you have a recommended reading order, or suggested authors I haven't listed?

Thanks,
Banazir

TypePad and WordPress

2006-11-28T11:13:02Z

And so it is that I've added a TypePad (via Friendster) and a WordPress blog to my collection of seven. Together with Gazzag and Yahoo 360, I'm up to 11, and MSN Live Spaces will make it an even dozen.

At this point, I'm just curious to try these out; actually maintaining twelve blogs is an exercise in futility beyond even the obsessions of yours truly. jereeza and others have mentioned that WordPress is good for judicious multi-blog posts, so I think I will use that for either my "writing ideas" or "project ideas" blog.

--
Banazir

The Sky's the Limit!

2006-11-28T11:07:56Z

Here's my new politics icon, for reasons that may be obvious to some of you. It was made by main_titles from one of her T-shirts, by Glarkware. If you like it, consider getting one!

--
Banazir