Fnord.

One of our vendors there took us to a very good Korean BBQ dinner. The stack of raw beef they bring out is kind of daunting:

and the array of tasty bits and sauces:

I strongly suspect that I gained some weight this trip. Lots of great food every day!

I just got back from a week in Hong Kong and wanted to write a few notes before my memory fades.

1. As previously noted, get a PCCW SIM card at the airport for use with phone and WiFi. I forgot my old one, didn’t get one at the airport and never did manage to buy one. None of the four 7-11’s I checked had them in stock for some reason.
2. Sam’s Tailor still rocks. I got a blue sportjacket, a couple of shirts and two pairs of pants. And two ties. I am now set for dress clothes.
3. I took my Yes Inca as my sole watch, and as expected it was excellent for the purpose. Dual timezones let me know when to video chat with home, the 24-hour display was nice perspective for the jetlag, and it went well with casual and sporty clothes. Not to mention it was good to wear to all of the meetings.
4. After reading this post, I went across the bay to Liii Liii Couture and am having a couple of pairs of shoes made for me. The guys there are very nice, and very accommodating. I have different sized and shaped feet, we discovered after tracing and measuring the hoofs, so I’m intensely curious to see how shoes made to fit will work. They are making pairs with more padding and high instep, so I am hopeful that these’ll last me long enough to make up for the high cost. I’ve wasted money on several pairs of dress and semi-dress shoes that don’t last.
5. We stayed in the Kowloon Hotel this time, and while it’s OK I’d recommend the Imperial Hotel instead.
6. The already-awesome Octopus card (busses, subway, trams and vending machines) now works some Starbucks locations, so be sure to buy one at the airport. These days, you can even buy an Octopus chip built into a watch! Very cool.
7. We flew Cathay Pacific again, the same 881/882 flights, but the experience wasn’t as good. Flights were completely full, and they now charge $100 per leg for exit row (WTF?!), so I was crammed both times. More room than American carriers, but still coach. Note that:
   1. their video systems are fantastic, which helps, but you need the airline adapter if you want to use your own headphones.
   2. Coach seats have a power jack behind the tray, but it’s HK/UK style plug only.
   3. They limit carry-on bags to a super light 15 pounds, so pack light. Or be prepared to be forced to check.
   4. I paid the $100 for exit row on my return leg, and when I moved up my departure a day they refused to give me exit row or refund my money. Needless to say, I was and am quite pissed about this, especially on a 13-hour flight. Very shitty of them.

I’ll be posting pictures later.

A lot of people criticize Apple for its prices, but I have to say in response that taking the time to polish all the edges and simplify really helps. Consider this: I have had a few Bluetooth mice over the years, from Microsoft, Logitech and Apple. The latest Apple mouse is the only one where today it warned me that the batteries are low:

It’s a little thing, but for once I know to go get batteries, before the mouse just stops working.

It’s a nice mouse even without that feature, but taking a little bit of time to add software and hardware for voltage monitoring, it’s just easier to have and use.

In really high-end watches, the inner bits are polished and finished by hand to astounding degrees, even the parts that will only ever be seen by a watchmaker doing the service. Perfection is it’s own reward sometimes.

One of my all-time favorite CMJ disks was #29. Awesome discography, much better treasure/trash ratio than usual.

Anyway, one of the tracks is ‘Rainfall‘ by a group called Bentley Tock. Every now and then I’d google the name but never found much; tonight I hit the jackpot. According to this blog post:

Bentley Tock played around campus a lot, usually at a place called The Chukker (which sadly closed in 2003) and usually on Thursday nights. There were a lot of super late Thursdays (or early Fridays) when the band played. Me, Angela, Cheryl, Tracy, Billy and whoever else was up for it, would always show up. It didn’t matter to me if there was an exam, or if I had to work… if Bentley Tock was playing, I was there. Somewhere around the time I graduated in ‘91, the band packed up and headed to Austin to make a go of a bigger career. One CD came out, titled Able, but unfortunately not much came of it outside their home turf.

He links to the website of Paco Ahlgren, who turns out to have been the frontman for the group, and better yet has posted all the songs for free!!

So go have a listen and see if you like ‘em too. Can’t beat free, and feel free to comment and denigrate my taste in music.

$23 and a new toy is on the way:

USB footswitch from Brando (click to go to their site).

I’m thinking of binding it to the laser jump in Nexuiz, and maybe setting it up as a boss key at work.

Just kidding. My monitor is visible from outside my office, so boss keys aren’t useful. I’m quite curious to see if I can add feet to a FPS game and have it work – Mom used to play the pipe organ, and I suspect that adding another limb to the action will increase the immersiveness of the game.

Alexander Stepanov is the main driver behind the OMFG-that’s-amazing Standard Template Library for C++. I rather agree with him on object oriented programming (OOP):

I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms of interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you need multisorted algebras – families of interfaces that span multiple types. I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it is not very interesting – saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at all. I find OOP methodologically wrong. It starts with classes. It is as if mathematicians would start with axioms. You do not start with axioms – you start with proofs. Only when you have found a bunch of related proofs, can you come up with axioms. You end with axioms. The same thing is true in programming: you have to start with interesting algorithms. Only when you understand them well, can you come up with an interface that will let them work.

The rest of the interview is quite good as well.

I woke this morning to a slew (here defined as ‘62′) of ssh dictionary attacks:

There were already 20 or so last night. Looks like a new botnet/attack wave or similar. I’m using DenyHosts and quite frankly, you should be too.

If you’re running Debian, there’s a nice package for it that I use and recommend. I’ve set mine to trigger on 3 attempts, but I’ve few users and most use ssh keys and not keyboard auth.

Might be a good time to run chkrootkit and change some passwords!

It took longer than expected, but my new site is now live and public: WatchOtaku.com

Not much there in the way of reviews yet, spent the time building the site, dictionary and layouts. Whew. Please take a look at the manifesto, poke around a bit and let me know what you think!

Since this took me a while to figure out, I’ll post it here. A few of us have been blowing off steam playing Nexuiz, a free cross-platform first person shooter originally based on one of the Quake engines, called DarkPlaces.

Nexuiz is a lot of fun, doesn’t require a lot of learning, and plays very well over a network. There’s a single download, with binaries for Windows, Linux and OSX. (Both SDL and native versions)

After doing some googling, I figured out how to write a short macro and bind it to a key. This one does a laser-assisted jump while you hold down the q key. It looks down, switches to the laser, fires, and when you release the key it looks back up and switches back to the previous weapon. Cute, eh?

alias +laser_jump "+lookdown; impulse 1; +attack"
alias -laser_jump "-lookdown; -attack; impulse 11"
bind q +laser_jump

Seems to work, though there may be a better way to do this. Note that other weapons like the rocket send you higher in the air; this is just a starting point. Save this to

~/.nexuiz/data/autoexec.cfg

and it’ll persist and be loaded automatically. Enjoy!