tadhg.com » e-prime

Marketese

Tadhg — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 07:46:48 +0000

I find marketing speak very difficult to listen to. I would guess that most people feel similarly, but if so, why does it persist? Even without dealing with the more egregious examples—such as press releases and “on-message” politicians—it simply gets to me.

Its rhetorical aspect doesn’t seeem enough to explain it. The use of language to persuade in itself strikes me as reasonable, even necessary. Hair-splitting and “lawyerese” also don’t disturb me that much. Marketing speak, however, appears to rely on the formation of meaning around phrases or words that in themselves have little substance.

One could say the same about rhetoric, but rhetoric, at least, tends to have emotional content. Marketese doesn’t even have that going for it. Instead, it conveys a peculiar mixture of comfort or coolness surrounding emptiness. Rhetoric could manifest as an intimidating presence, or a seductive temptation, but marketing-speak never transcends the empty shell, the mask without a face, the hollow suit.

Tags: e-prime, language, writing

‘Flow Episode’

Tadhg — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 07:45:45 +0000

I survey the board calmly, without needing to. I know what resides there. I know the available possibilities. I draw a card, and add its potential to what I hold already.

The cards themselves appear muted, but the abstractions they represent shine brightly. These abstractions have almost shape-like characteristics, and interlock with each other variously. Playing with the puzzle, I try different combinations.

The options inherent in these combinations emanate from their represenations onto the board, almost visible. Lines of force, chains of inevitability, circles of pressure. All these overlap, felt by each player—but I discern and understand them keenly indeed.

With the board, and my hand, and the potentialities of my opponent’s hand, my mind moves along the sets of interlocking near-shapes. Like a tongue along teeth, probing for the weaknesses, the flaws. From here, how can I lose? What unwanted realms can my opponent instantiate, with what cards, along which chains of action?

I ineluctably move the game state away from them. Probabilities dwindle for my opponent. Ways out become unlikely, then deeply improbable, finally ridiculous.

I see all of it. The forces at play, the possibilities, the odds. I encompass the game, and nothing else intrudes.

(200 words)

Tags: consciousness, e-prime, fiction, flow, games, microfiction, MTG, writing

A Bad MTG Year

Tadhg — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 05:06:54 +0000

In the 2005 sfmagic Player of the Year race, I stayed in contention until the second-last week, and then only dropped out of contention because I had to miss the final draft. In this year’s race, I have very little hope of even making it into the top five.

The “rawest” stat I track, game win percentage, shows that I have fallen from the extremely high score of 66.12% to the decidedly mediocre 52.16%. I’ve won just over half as many tournaments as last year. The statistics show it very clearly: I have dropped from the ranks of the strong players.

I don’t find this surprising, because I’ve dropped off significantly in terms of both passion and concentration. Where before I avidly read all the strategy articles and thought about how to apply them to my own game, now I read them desultorilty if at all. I have no drive to practice. When I’m playing, I usually have the drive to play well, but not always—even that has waned at times during the year. All of this, plus my not playing online, plus the addition of more strong players to the group, add up to my not doing well.

Partly this comes down to time, too. I spend more time writing, for example. That seems like a good thing. But I suspect that I also lost a certain amount of concentration and drive for it this year. I’ve had a bad year, and that definitely plays a part. Preoccupation with problems has absolutely taken away from my passion, concentration, and enjoyment of the game (and of other things). Even if I continue to spend more time writing and coding, even if I spend less time on MTG, it remains important to bring everything to bear on it when I do play (or do anything else).

A familiar lesson (and recurring theme): do with presence. Engage with the activity. Focus. When doing, that doing should encompass all. And in addition: play. Enjoy the game, for it remains a game.

Do mindfully, do playfully. Do.

Tags: consciousness, e-prime, games, MTG, personal, psychology

Work Versus Play

Tadhg — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 07:59:15 +0000

What separates the two? The question has some hidden depths—especially after reading Play Money last weekend, which details the world of trading virtual assets in MMORPGs. Also, I spent my weekend happily fascinated by JavaScript challenges that a lot of people would have difficulty distinguishing from the “normal work” of a web developer.

The difference between work and play has occupied me for quite a while. I don’t think that play equals flow activity while work equals not-flow activity. But then again, if I manage to hit the flow state while working, I consider that a very good thing, and would often prefer that to a non-flow state when not working.

Still, the difference likely runs deeper. I suspect it has a lot to do with control. If you feel that you have control over what you’re doing, and that your choice to do it was free (and without obligation, e.g. not doing a task as a favor to someone), then your activity counts as play (or, at least, as not-work). Whereas if the task feels put upon you by exterior forces, that makes it work.

Which all sounds fine until you ask closer questions about the nature of obligation… after all, most of us exerted a considerable amount of choice to do what we do. It may not seem that way, but we did. And do. And even the things we have chosen to do, freely, for ourselves, occasionally feel very like work.

I don’t know the answer, but I consider the question rather important. I certainly think I need more play in my life. If attitude (to whatever activity) defines play, I need some attitudinal shifts; if control over the activity defines play, I need more recognition of my own control of my life, and more exertion of that control.

Perhaps a key facet of play comes from doing without fear, or doing while embracing the overcoming of fear. Those also sound like good ideas.

Tags: consciousness, e-prime, games, philosophy, psychology, work

Enhanced Pricelist Bookmarklet

Tadhg — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 21:15:14 +0000

As discussed in yesterday’s post about multiple AJAX requests, I wrote an enhanced version of my bookmarklet for improving the magictraders.com price lists.

To add it, paste the code from the following link into the location field of a new bookmark (Firefox/other Gecko-based browsers only): sortable_prices_for_motl_multiple_bkm.js. You should assing a keyword to it.

To use it, go to any page of set prices on magictraders.com, for example http://magictraders.com/cgi-bin/set_query.cgi?set=TSP. When that loads, type the keyword into the location bar, followed by the code(s) for the set(s) (if multiple, separate them with spaces) you wish to add—try TSP with this one to get all of the cards in Time Spiral. Then hit enter and wait a few moments. Assuming all goes well, you’ll be presented with a price-sorted table that you can sort by any header. (To see a table for all the cards in the Ravnica block, go to http://magictraders.com/cgi-bin/set_query.cgi?set=RAV and type:

(your keyword) gpt dis

into the location bar and hit return.)

If you invoke it with no parameters, it will make a table out of the prices on the page.

Caveats:
I haven’t tested it in anything except Firefox.
It may perform a little sluggishly, especially if you enter a lot of extra sets
You must enter codes that match the ones that magictraders.com uses

You can also get the commented source.

Valid set codes for the set prices on magictraders.com are:
ABU (Alpha/Beta/Unlimited)
RV (Revised)
4TH (4th Edition)
5TH (5th Edition)
6TH (6th Edition)
7TH (7th Edition)
8TH (8th Edition)
9TH (9th Edition)
AN (Arabian Nights)
AQ (Antiquities)
LE (Legends)
DK (The Dark)
FE (Fallen Empires)
IA (Ice Age)
HL (Homelands)
AI (Alliances)
MI (Mirage)
VI (Visions)
WL (Weatherlight)
TE (Tempest)
ST (Stronghold)
EX (Exodus)
UZ (Urza’s Saga)
UY (Urza’s Legacy)
UD (Urza’s Destiny)
MM (Mercadian Masques)
NM (Nemesis)
PR (Prophecy)
IN (Invasion)
PS (Planeshift)
AP (Apocalypse)
OD (Odyssey)
TOR (Torment)
JUD (Judgment)
ONS (Onslaught)
LGN (Legions)
SCG (Scourge)
MRD (Mirrodin)
DST (Darksteel)
5DN (Fifth Dawn)
CHK (Champions of Kamigawa)
BOK (Betrayers of Kamigawa)
SOK (Saviors of Kamigawa)
RAV (Ravnica: City of Guilds)
GPT (Guildpact)
DIS (Dissension)
CSP (Coldsnap)
TSP (Time Spiral)
TSB (Time Spiral Timeshifted)
UG (Unglued)
UNH (Unhinged)

Tags: coding, e-prime, JavaScript, MTG, tech

Handling Multiple AJAX Requests

Tadhg — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 07:28:06 +0000

In working on an enhancement to my card price list sorting bookmarklet, I ran into a problem: if you want to collate data from a number of sources asynchronously, combine the data, then do something with all of it, how do you do that in JavaScript?

This link covers simultaneous requests, but that didn’t solve my problem, although it helped me along.

I wanted to go to a www.magictraders.com pricelist page, invoke a bookmarklet with an arbitrary number of keywords, and have the bookmarklet grab data from a page based on each keyword, then combine that data with the pricelist on the page in question, and finally turn the whole thing into a sortable table (the last bit I already had code for, thanks to the previous version of the bookmarklet).

My solution involved some JavaScript closure voodoo. It took me long enough to figure out that I think it worthwhile to share a simplified example.

Assume we want to combine the contents of several pages and then show the combined contents in a single JavaScript alert. We don’t want to show multiple alerts, or to show an incomplete alert. Also assume that we don’t know in advance how many different pages we want to combine. For this example, our data comes as text or HTML and not XML. Also, for this example, I haven’t tested in IE, although the overall structure should work fine in it. I adapted some of the code here from https://blueprints.dev.java.net/ajax-faq.html#concurrent_requests.

First, the skeleton of our various functions:

combinedAlert = {

        init: function(urlArray) {
        },

        requestWrapper: function(urlArray, theContent) {
        /*The closure inside which we place the XMLHttpRequest call*/

        },

        takeText: function(urlArray, theContent, responseText) {
        /*What gets called after each AJAX request completes*/

        },

        doAlert: function(theContent) {
         /*What gets called when the last AJAX request completes*/

        }

}

We’ll pass the init() function an arbitrarily-sized array of URLs, and it doesn’t need to do much except declare theContent and call requestWrapper():

init: function(urlArray) {
        theContent = "";
        combinedAlert.requestWrapper(urlArray, theContent);
},

requestWrapper(), on the other hand, involves a lot more:

requestWrapper: function(urlArray, theContent) {

        requestObject = makeRequestObject();
        requestObject.onreadystatechange = processRequest;
        /*(Defined below, as functions inside requestWrapper*/

        var url = urlArray[0];
        /*Get the first url out of the array*/

        requestObject.open("GET", url, true);
        requestObject.send(null);
        /*Does the actual opening of the connection*/

        function makeRequestObject() {
        /*This function forks for IE and returns the XMLHttpRequest object.*/
                if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
                        return new XMLHttpRequest();
                } else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
                        return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
                }
        };

        function processRequest() {
        /*This function gets called when the XMLHttpRequest object reports a change in its state*/
                if (requestObject.readyState == 4) {
                /*We only care if it reports the state as 'finished'*/
                        if (requestObject.status == 200) {
                        /*We only want to support actual page loads, not 404s etc.*/
                                combinedAlert.takeText(urlArray, theContent, requestObject.responseText);
                                /*Here we pass the parameters to the requestWrapper function, along with the text from the page we grabbed asynchronously, to takeText()*/
                        }
                }

        };

},

Lexical closures make this possible—without them, passing parameters to any event handlers would involve a lot of messy global variables at best, and might prove extremely difficult even then. The basic form of this kind of closure looks like this:

myFunction(parameters, someEvent) {
        someEvent.hook = handleEvent;

        function handleEvent() {
                doSomethingWithParameters(parameters);
                /*Ha! I have access to the parameters even though you can't pass them to event handlers!*/
        }
};

With requestWrapper, we expand on this a little to pass the parameters around between functions. This gets more interesting with takeText(), which manipulates theContent and kicks off some recursion:

takeText: function(urlArray, theContent, responseText) {
         theContent += responseText;
         /*The basic operation we want to do, adding what we got from the asynchronous call to our theContent variable*/

         urlArray.shift();
         /*since we've gotten this far, we must have finished with the loading of the URL in the position urlArray[0], which we set the XMLHttpRequest object to fetch from in requestWrapper. So we remove it from the array.*/

         if (urlArray.length > 0) {
         /*If, after the shift, we still have URLs to process*/
                 combinedAlert.requestWrapper(urlArray, theContent);
                 /*The core of the trickiness. We now send the altered urlArray and theContent variables back to requestWrapper, which will in turn load the next URL and kick off takeText() again with the responseText from that page load...*/
         } else {
         /*Or, if we have no more URLs to process*/
                 combinedAlert.doAlert(theContent);
                 /*doAlert doesn't care about anything except what we want it to alert*/
                 }

},

Finally, the rather simple doAlert() function. I kept this simple, but obviously we could do all kinds of things to theContent here before popping up the alert:

doAlert: function(theContent) {
        alert(theContent);
}

Combining it all gives us this script. To test it out, try these links:
One URL
Two URLs
Three URLs
Four URLs

Tags: coding, e-prime, JavaScript, web-development

Regret

Tadhg — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:25:18 +0000

What good does it do? I ask myself this question over and over, because I have a terrible regret habit, constantly mulling over past mistakes in my mind and wishing I could undo them.

Of course this cannot be done, but something in my head doesn’t find this obvious (or even convincing). Many of my patterns of thought, especially those around regret, seem based on the idea that I can “step across” to the alternate universe in which I didn’t make the mistake in question. I don’t know where this comes from.

Dictionary.com has two relevant definitions for regret:

* A sense of loss, disappointment, dissatisfaction, etc.
* A feeling of sorrow or remorse for a fault, act, loss, disappointment, etc.

Neither of these capture a key aspect: a sense of wishing to have done otherwise. Wikpedia’s entry does better, including “sadness, shame, or guilt after committing an action that the person later wishes that they had not done” in the description, and also (crucially) including regret of inaction.

Regret can help us learn from past mistakes. Personally, I’ve learned quite a lot from regret, but it still seems that the time and pain involved outweighs the lessons learned. It seems this way because I appear to learn the lessons but then continue the regret, instead of learning the lesson and letting go.

Letting go presents a significant challenge for me, and that may be why my regrets stick around so long. Typically, I’m not sure which of the two (overactive regret or inability to let go) constitutes cause and which constitutes effect.

It remains a struggle for me to shrug off regret and look to the present. I have to fight to keep my mind off of regrets and on the more important (and perhaps the only) question: what can I do right now?

Tags: e-prime, personal

Favorite Books of 1999

Tadhg — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 05:10:45 +0000

Closer, closer to this millennium…

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami, trans. Jay Rubin (29/01/1999)

One of my favorite books of all time. Top ten, certainly. I don’t think I can really do it any justice with a description. Japanese magical realism with science fiction and historical fiction touches? Just read it. Really.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson (again) (02/02/1999)

An all-time classic, with one of the best opening lines ever. Another must-read.

The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami, trans. Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin (08/03/1999)

Murakami writes short stories rather well, and this collection holds quite a few gems. Again, my attempting description here seems pointless.

If on a winter’s night a traveller, Italo Calvino, trans. William Weaver (again) (11/03/1999)

Calvino’s wonderfully whimsical, insightful, thought-provoking—and also really annoying—classic fit in well with the hypertext theme of my year in 1999 (M.SC. in Multimedia Studies, plus plenty of web development work), and covering it in class prompted me to write this essay.

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis (21/03/1999)

Sadly, I don’t remember this too well, apart from liking it and thinking that Davis did uncover quite a lot of important facets of modern city life. Clearly I need to re-read it—but I remember enough to know I recommend it.

The Art of War, Sun-Tzu (21/06/1999)

I foolishly didn’t note who translated this edition. Like The Prince, in my opinion this text has more or less mandatory status for everyone.

Neuromancer, William Gibson (again) (04/10/1999)

I actually re-read the whole trilogy (in reverse order for some reason), and enjoyed them again. It matters not at all that Gibson was off with his vision of "virtual reality", the plots, themes, and writing remain compelling and relevant.

Endymion, Dan Simmons (22/10/1999)

This and The Rise of Endymion, which I read immediately afterwards, finish the Hyperion series in worthy fashion, although the quality dips slightly from the first two.

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin (09/11/1999)

Another gift from Emilie, who (if I recall correctly) got it from Moe’s in Berkeley, one of my favorite bookstores anywhere. The Dispossessed appealed to me quite a lot—unsurprisingly, given my political views and interest in political themes generally. Apparently I need to read a Le Guin story called ""The Day Before the Revolution", which reveals some background for Anarres’s political situation and philosophy.

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (27/11/1999)

Powerful, evocative, compelling, The Grapes of Wrath deserves its reputation as a masterwork of 20th Century American fiction.

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson (05/12/1999)

Stephenson hit virtuoso heights with this almost-cyberpunk tale of modern hackery and adventure. Definitely worth reading. But it didn’t overcome his much-remarked-upon difficulty with endings.

The full list of what I read in 1999:

Waiting for the dark, Waiting for the Light, Ivan Klima 09/01/1999
The Neutronium Alchemist, Peter F Hamilton 16/01/1999
Winter: A Berlin Family, 1899-1945, Len Deighton 20/01/1999
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami, trans. Jay Rubin 29/01/1999
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson (again) 02/02/1999
Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail ’72, Hunter S. Thompson (again) 07/02/1999
The Image of the Beast (An Exorcism: Ritual One), Philip JosÃ© Farmer (again) 02/03/1999
Blown (An Exorcism: Ritual Two), Philip JosÃ© Farmer 03/03/1999
Shards of a Broken Crown, Raymond E. Feist 06/03/1999
Flesh, Philip JosÃ© Farmer 07/03/1999
The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami, trans. Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin 08/03/1999
If on a winter’s night a traveller, Italo Calvino, trans. William Weaver (again) 11/03/1999
Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis 17/03/1999
Bombardiers, Po Bronson 18/03/1999
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis 21/03/1999
Dead Lagoon, Michael Dibdin 21/03/1999
Inversions, Iain M. Banks 22/03/1999
Of Love & Other Demons, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 26/03/1999
Between Silk and Cyanide, Leo Marks 30/03/1999
Otherland: City of Golden Shadow, Tad Williams 05/04/1999
Otherland: River of Blue Fire, Tad Williams 15/04/1999
The Dragonbone Chair, Tad Williams (again) 16/04/1999
Stone of Farewell, Tad Williams (again) 17/04/1999
To Green Angel Tower, Tad Williams 18/04/1999
A Surfeit of Guns, Patricia Finney (writing as P. F. Chisholm) 26/04/1999
A Plague of Angels, Patricia Finney (writing as P. F. Chisholm) 26/04/1999
Dark Spectre, Michael Dibdin 04/05/1999
Microserfs, Douglas Coupland 05/05/1999
Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby (early-mid May)
High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (early-mid May)
The First $20 Million is the Hardest, Po Bronson 14/06/1999
The Art of War, Sun-Tzu 21/06/1999
A White Merc with Fins, James Hawes 04/07/1999
The God of Impertinence, Sten Nadolny, trans. Breon Mitchell 11/07/1999
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl-Gang, Joyce Carol Oates 04/08/1999
Rabbit, Run, John Updike 15/08/1999
Out of Sight, Elmore Leonard 16/08/1999
Hyperspace: a Scientific Odyssey through the 10th Dimension, Michio Kaku 23/08/1999
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny 24/08/1999
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Early Detective Stories, ed. Hugh Green 04/09/1999
The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac 15/09/1999
Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson (again) 19/09/1999
Count Zero, William Gibson (again) 20/09/1999
Neuromancer, William Gibson (again) 04/10/1999
Tourist Season, Carl Hiaasen (in The Carl Hiaasen Omnibus) 14/10/1999
Double Whammy, Carl Hiaasen (in The Carl Hiaasen Omnibus) 17/10/1999
Skin Tight, Carl Hiaasen (in The Carl Hiaasen Omnibus) 18/10/1999
Ripley Bogle, Robert McLiam Wilson (again) 21/10/1999
Endymion, Dan Simmons 22/10/1999
The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons 24/10/1999
Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson 26/10/1999
Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin 27/10/1999
The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad 30/10/1999
Idoru, William Gibson 01/11/1999
Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson 03/11/1999
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr. 04/11/1999
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin 09/11/1999
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams 10/11/1999
The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams 16/11/1999
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck 27/11/1999
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson 05/12/1999
Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, Robert Anton Wilson, Arlen Wilson, et. al 07/12/1999
Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, Noam Chomsky 11/12/1999
Illywhacker, Peter Carey 16/12/1999
The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter S. Thompson (again) 27/12/1999
Wild Dreams of a New Beginning, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (sometime between November and December)

Tags: books, e-prime, reading, reviews

Power to the Users

Tadhg — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 07:50:52 +0000

I spent some time today creating a bookmarklet (copy the contents of this page into Firefox or another Gecko-based browser) and greasemonkey script for enhancing the magictraders.com pricelists. This kind of thing exemplifies what I love about HTML, and why I distrust less open technologies.

HTML lets you see what it is. It comes from the server to the browser as text, and the browser interprets the HTML to present the information included. Translating raw text can be awkward, but also presents a well-understood set of problems. With the advent of a rational Document Object Model, it has become possible to do even better than raw text processing. With a good browser, you can manipulate the information coming to you as you see fit.

Which fits in with my ideas for how information sharing should work. And allows the informed user to alter things as they see fit without having access to the source materials.

While on the niche-geek side in terms of content, the script I wrote today represents these principles rather well. The website www.magictraders.com collates price information about MTG card sales from a variety of sources, primarily eBay. If eBay did not use HTML, the magictraders.com crew would have a far tougher time collecting the data. The magictraders.com pages output dumps of this data, essentially in plain text encapsulated by a basic HTML wrapper. If they used some other format, I would have had a much tougher time (probably too tough a time to bother).

They provide useful data, but I wanted to be able to sort their pricelists. I didn’t want to suck down all their data and combine it with other sources to create a comprehensive card info/card price database (like some people), but rather wanted immediate and simple sorting ability right in my browser. I use my browser all the time, and consider it an extremely important environment—not just a mere application. And Firefox gives me a programming environment (by necessity, since it has to support JavaScript) capable of performing complex manipulations on data. Combining it with greasemonkey makes it simple to automate those manipulations. I started out going to their site and seeing pricelist pages that were static text, and wishing that I could sort them by price. After a few hours of tinkering, I now go to their site and instead see a formatted HTML table that can be sorted by any of the fields—and achieved this without any input or access to their code or servers, or even my own servers. Just the browser. Just the browser to go from this:

to this:

This simply seems the right approach, allowing for user manipulation and distributed improvement, as well as the possibility of plenty of tinkering. It also exposes the true richness of HTML, as opposed to the apparent ‘richness’ (really meaning showiness, most of the time) of things like Flash and various “multimedia” efforts to replace boring old hypertext markup. Control to the users if they want it—as both user and developer, I want things to go in that direction.

Greasemonkey script

Sadly, due to link-length limitations, to get the bookmarklet to work you’ll have to follow this link and paste the contents into your browser’s bookmarks manager. It won’t work in IE. Invoke it on the pricelist page to get it to work.

Tags: coding, e-prime, JavaScript, MTG, software, tech, usability, web-development

Why Don’t I Play MTGO?

Tadhg — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 07:38:33 +0000

I’ve had trouble figuring this out. I love playing MTG. And when I first encountered MTGO I worried that I might spend too much money and time on it. Yet I haven’t logged on in more than a year.

Something about the experience doesn’t appeal, but what? Since I’ve played in more-or-less random drafts offline many times, and done fine, and draft every week with the sfmagic group, I don’t think it’s because of the tougher online opponents. I don’t tend to do well online, but don’t know whether to see that as a cause or an effect of my reluctance to play.

Sometimes I suspect the time commitment. A draft, if it goes well, takes about three hours or more. This seems like too much to me, most of the time I think about it. But I happily spend that much time playing MTG with friends when given the opportunity.

I think intangible elements, such as the inability to see and talk to one’s oponnent, plus the non-tactile nature of the cards, push me away from it. But it represents a major path to improvement, and I would have an easier time getting better if I played online.

Perhaps, though, I should consider this a gift horse. In a conversation about hobbies with Steven R. Donaldson and my friend Lev a week-and-a-half ago, I realized that over the last few months I’ve spent significantly more time writing than I’ve spent doing any MTG-related activity. I don’t want to play MTGO instead of writing, so it might be unwise to perform any more oral examinations.

Tags: e-prime, games, MTG, personal

‘The Gift’

Tadhg — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 07:30:03 +0000

Before they got me, I programmed. Software development. I did fine. But I got bored, ennui creeping into my life, my work, my own projects, everything. Everything suffered under a fog of lethargy and angst. I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t seem to do it. So I went looking for more exciting positions.

I found one. Excellent pay, advanced and challenging work, low entry requirements. I took it.

Orientation lasted under two hours—the time it took them to sedate me and implant something in my head. When I woke, I could feel the tender scar at the base of my skull. I didn’t want to stay, and tried to leave. Or tried to try. It turned out that I didn’t really want to.

Instead I devoured their training materials and started working at my desk. And I didn’t go home, instead bunking at the office like the others.

They could make us do what they wanted. And when they did, we kind of wanted to ourselves. Whatever they put in our heads controlled our volition, our motivation. We wanted to do what they wanted, and we did it. Intellectually I knew I didn’t want to. But that didn’t matter.

I couldn’t break out of their control, and nor could the others. We couldn’t talk about it. They didn’t want us to talk. I could think, though. I don’t know if the others could.

Two years. Two years of coding for them, doing more work for longer hours than ever before. Not to the bone—we got food and sleep. But the rest of the time, we worked. All through that time, working diligently away, I kept a part of my mind thinking about escape.

I watched, waited, plotted to get more information. They got complacent, but we all had to keep working.

Then, finally, a break. I heard a supervisor say a fire drill was coming up, and managed to drink enough water that I had to take a bathroom break at just the right time. At the alarm, they simply commanded everyone present to leave. But I stayed in the bathroom long enough that they were gone before I emerged.

And they left a door open.

I had to trick my mind, my self, which wanted to go back to code. Every step involved torturous logic and self-deception. But I made it. I made it, and inside: a control box.

Once I had that, I escaped. I had to get far away in the first few days, but managed it somehow. And then I started a new life.

Since then, I have achieved whatever I decided on. I could do anything I wanted—I just ordered myself to do it with the control box. I used it to focus on any task I chose, learning languages and dancing and martial arts and innumerable other skills. And I could do it whenever I wanted, and I could make myself happy. So I did, and still do.

(500 words)

Tags: e-prime, fiction, microfiction, science-fiction, writing

Why I Like RewriteRule

Tadhg — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:45:41 +0000

I’ve known about Apache Rewrite functionality for quite a while, but have only recently started to think about how much better it can make web applications.

I like friendly URLs. I fully support the trend over the last several years to make URLs more comprehensible to the end user. I also hate dead links and think that web designers and developers should simply never tolerate them. Rewrite rules can help with both of these areas.

Rewrite rules take a request from a browser and then “rephrase” that request before giving it to the server. The browser never sees the change (making rewrites different from redirects). So you could have a rewrite rule to make http:/my.domain.tld/somereallylongfilename.php?q=WithSome&p=Ridiculous&p2=Parameters&numExpl=AndNumbersThrownInAsWell&nums=200611191559 accessible as http://my.domain.tld/RidiculousExample. The latter seems a lot easier to remember…

You can do this in Apache by setting up RewriteRules, which can go in httpd.conf (including in VirtualHost declarations) or in .htaccess files. I prefer .htaccess files. Basic RewriteRule syntax looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule [Stuff to match] [Stuff to insert instead] [other parameters]

(Although it might seem otherwise due to linebreaks below, every individual RewriteRule must go on one line.)

Here’s how to do our example from above:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^RidiculousExample$ /somereallylongfilename.php?q=WithSome&p=Ridiculous&p2=Parameters&numExpl=AndNumbersThrownInAsWell&nums=200611191559$

To make it even easier on the user, we could add that case doesn’t matter:
RewriteRule ^RidiculousExample$ /somereallylongfilename.php?q=WithSome&p=Ridiculous&p2=Parameters&numExpl=AndNumbersThrownInAsWell&nums=200611191559$ [nocase]

If for whatever reason you change your directory structure, you can use RewriteRule to move your users to the new location:
RewriteRule ^/olddirectoryname(.*) /newdirectoryname$1

(If you’ve moved the files permanently, you should probably do:
RewriteRule ^/olddirectoryname(.*) /newdirectoryname$1 [redirect=permanent])

A further advantage: if you use RewriteRule early, you can abstract the structure to an extent that allows you to change your underlying code without disrupting the user or creating 404s (404s BAD!). I’ve just started down this path with sfmagic.org, and I like it a lot. Some examples of the very ugly URLs I use, followed by their now far better “friendly” accessible versions
/show_results.php?year=2006, /2004.
/show_results.php?superset=MRD, /MRD or /Mirrodin (and casing doesn’t matter).
/show_results_playerl10_print3.php, /seedingprint.
Also, all player pages, with ‘real’ URLs like /show_player.php?playerid=23, allow access via player names like /Tadhg O’Higgins. The RewriteRule for this is:
RewriteRule ^(players/)?Tadhg[\ ]*O’Higgins[/]*$ /show_player.php?playerid=23 [nocase]

I like that, but really appreciate the freedom that it gives me—now, if I changed to an entirely different technology and structure, the URLs for player pages would remain the same. I’d simply have to change the rule to reflect this. Moreover, when I change the underlying “real” URL, I could do something like this to encourage browsers and search engines to understand which is the canonical URL:

RewriteRule ^/show_player.php\?playerid=23$ /players/Tadhg\ O’Higgins [redirect=permanent]
RewriteRule ^(players/)?Tadhg[\ ]*O’Higgins[/]*$ /playerDetails.php?id=23 [nocase]

The first line tells the browser that /players/Tadhg O’Higgins has superseded show_player.php?playerid=23 as the canonical URL. The second line does the standard rewrite as explained above. (With as many players as the group has, I should probably consider using RewwriteMap rather than lots and lots of RewriteRule lines.)

In essence, I love RewriteRule (and its companions) because it allows a web developer to shield the end user from the messy details, whether those details involve terrible URL strings or potential broken links.

Tags: coding, e-prime, tech, web-development

Hawk Hill Cycle

Tadhg — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 07:53:03 +0000

For the past few Saturdays, I’ve joined Seth on his cycle to Hawk Hill, located in the Marin Headlands.

I’ve had trouble making it up the hill, but I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and intend to keep doing it. It takes us about two hours there and back. I think you can see our destination point at this Google map link.

Seth takes photos of the view with his camera, but until he gets around to getting those off the camera and giving me access to them, I clearly can’t share them. So you’ll have to make do with the following low-quality phone shots:

Tags: e-prime, photos

UCLA Campus Police Brutality

Tadhg — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 19:53:29 +0000

Here’s a cellphone video of a UCLA student getting electrically shocked by police after refusing to show ID in a library—shocked apparently to coerce him to leave after they had already subdued him.

After seeing incidents like this one, I feel hopelessness and despair. First disgust and anger, but then that washes away, because it seems that apologists and authoritarians never fail to crawl out of the woodwork.

I do not care if the student refused to cooperate by going limp. I do not care if he shouted. I do not care if he made it difficult for the police to remove him easily after they subdued him. None of that makes it okay for them to shock him repeatedly. They can be heard clearly telling him that if he doesn’t stand up they’ll taser him again.

Think about that. He clearly presents no danger to them, since at that point he has already been handcuffed (and shocked). Even treating his refusal to stand as active resistance (rather than a lack of ability to stand given previous treatment), what does this make him to them? A threat? Not at all. It makes him an inconvenience. It inconveniences them to have to deal with him while he doesn’t cooperate.

On that video, you can hear him scream in pain when they shock him. I suppose the possibility exists that he’s exaggerating, although it seems unlikely, and in any case I’ve never heard any reports that electrical shocks don’t cause a lot of pain. After all, if they don’t cause a lot of pain, the officers wouldn’t bother threatening him with them.

So, these officers apparently regard it as just fine to inflict significant pain on someone who inconveniences them. I don’t see how any other conclusion comes out of this evidence.

Hence the anger and disgust. The hopelessness and despair show up because lots of people defend the police action. I have difficulty comprehending this. I have difficulty not drawing conclusions about the apologists that seem disturbingly ad hominem—primarily that they lack empathy. But what other conclusions can I draw? That the defenders have some need to see authority as intrinsically morraly righteous? That they have internalized an obedience morality that justifies violent coercion (what else do you call inflicting pain to get someone to do what you want?) in the name of authority? That they have effectively rendered themselves blind to abuses of authority because it disturbs them too much to see them, never mind to consider their implications for society?

Power and authority tend towards abuse. We requires checks and balances to prevent this abuse. If we treat power and authority with reverence and submissiveness (particularly morally or intellectually), we will fail to prevent abuses. Therefore we should (must) err on the other side, and treat power and authority with skepticism and distrust.

More than this, of course, we must reject the casual application of violence in any scenario, and recognize that we really desire the elimination of violence, not its monopolization by certain groups.

Tags: e-prime, politics

Tiptronic transmissions

Tadhg — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 07:27:09 +0000

I’ve had a chance to drive a few of these recently, and I consider it a good thing that they exist.

“Tiptronic” (also known as “sportronic”) transmissions give you a kind of “clutchless manual” mode, where you can shift the gears manually but without a clutch pedal. Under the hood, the car’s computer systems give the (automatic) transmission strong hints about what gears to use. It doesn’t give you the same control as real manual, but it gives you more control than automatic. I definitely find them more fun to drive.

I still prefer driving a manual transmission, with a clutch, but not by that much.

I’ve driven the Mazda 3, the Mazda 3 hatchback, the Mazda 5, the Mazda 6, and the BMW 325 with Tiptronic transmissions, and find them unquestionably more fun than any automatic. I’ve driven all of these with Zipcar, and the fact of their availability makes me much more sympathetic to Tiptronic transmissions. Most critics of this kind of transmission point out that it doesn’t compare with true manual, and I agree—but in the U.S. it appears impossible to rent a car with manual transmission, and Zipcar certainly doesn’t have any that I know of. Given a choice between automatic and some bastardized, simplified form of manual, I’ll still take the latter every time. Without it, I’d find a lot of the Zipcar driving far less fun.

Not that Tiptronic transmission differs from semi-automatic: with the former, the engine has a torque converter just like automatics do; with the latter, the system is just like a typical manual car but a computer does all the clutch adjustment (eliminating the need for the clutch pedal). F1 cars and the Bugatti Veyron have semi-automatic clutchless systems, which tend to appear in rather more expensive cars than the Tiptronics…

Tags: driving, e-prime

Gaming and Temper

Tadhg — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 07:56:21 +0000

I seem to find it difficult to remain calm when losing at games. Not always, more casual games rarely disturb me. But games I feel competitive about, well, there I have trouble. I become emotionally involved, and when things go against me, I turn surly.

Surly, and irate, and graceless. I feel particularly vexed when everything seems to go right for my opponent. I keep spawning right next to them, they curve out perfectly, I somehow cannot play the Z while they have Q and U, the ball keeps drifting to a halt right at their 3-man, we start our super moves at the same time but mine ends just before theirs… those all hurt. And when these things happen I seem to have difficulty not going on tilt.

This despite knowing this. I know that I should remain calm, that I shouldn’t let it get to me, that concentrating on controlling what I can control—and letting the rest go—gives me the best chance for success (not just in games, either). Yet my mind recoils away from calmness when these things happen. Feeling under pressure already, the strain pushes me into a space where I focus on the string of tiny random-seeming things that had to occur in order for me to suffer in this way. I can’t see anything but the putatively unlikely chain of events that appears to have me as its victim. Its undeserving victim.

Naturally, I (when calm) consider this nonsense. I don’t believe in luck, certainly not in the long term, and I have played all of these games enough times that “luck” would even out. I apparently cling to some idea of ill-fortune dogging my footsteps, persecuting me. Do I believe this, perversely, because it allows an excuse for failure? I suspect that this could be the case, ironically, as it clearly contributes to the likelihood of failure.

No malign forces shadow my game-playing (or my life, unless you wish to count global warming, corporate capitalism, etc., but these seem rather less personally-focused). Luck, good or bad, strikes me about as often as anyone else. The idea that the vagaries of chance somehow manifest cruelty, or injustice, strikes me as ludicrous—unless I’ve already gone on tilt, at which point it strikes me as fact.

I need to remind myself of this, to breathe, to realize that no victimization is occurring, to see that the walls are not actually closing in, to remember that in any game (and in life?) my responsibility begins and ends at playing to the best of my ability—beyond that, I must accept the slings and arrows.

Tags: consciousness, e-prime, games, personal, psychology

Bookmarking Project

Tadhg — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 01:14:38 +0000

For a while I’ve toyed with the idea of building an application to track my browsing. Something along the lines of del.icio.us, but with files saved to my server.

I do a lot of reading online, and hate it when I can’t remember where I read something. Browser history isn’t enough for this, partly because it doesn’t go back that far, partly because it isn’t centralized, and partly because it stores everything, not just things I consider worth saving.

Some things I want it to support:

* Tagging
* Saving the HTML
* Storing metadata in a database
* Ease of use—probably through a bookmarklet
* RSS or other feed technology for recent additions

I have two key use cases: easily finding something I don’t remember clearly, possibly from years ago, regardless of whether or not the original site/pages has disappeared; tagging things I read as “recommended” and then linking to a list of recent recommended articles from my blog.

It doesn’t appear that difficult. The bookmarklet part seems easy, and the backend looks feasible.

Tags: coding, e-prime, JavaScript, tech, web-development

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