David Poland writes about the lack of sex in recent movies:

The Devil Wear Prada is the poster child for the sexlessness of Summer 2006. Here is a movie about women who want are obsessed with their bodies, about men who are obsessed with these women, and the things people do under stress. Directed by a Sex & The City director, starring the rare lead actress who isn’t shy about showing her stuff, who is “living with” Entourage’s Adrian Grenier, who still ends up sleeping with Simon Baker in ParisÖ and yet the film is a chaste as Monster House (less than Monster House in 3D).

Note to USA censors: hey you guys, how about you introduce this brilliant new idea named having an MA-15 rating, so you don’t have to tone down the fun stuff so much that you’re forcing your movie to be PG-13?

(To all the anti-censorship zealots out there, please don’t take this as a statement that I’m in favour of legally restricted censorship.)

If you had to run a war and wished to communicate something to your generals, why not just use PowerPoint slides with bullet points? It does save you from writing all those pesky “report” things, after all.

For those who haven’t seen the awexome South Park Character Studio yet:

Ice cream in the left hand, skis on the feet. Aww jeah.

(Warning: formatting is borked. Sue me for being lazy with copy’n’paste.)

Your brain: 25% interpersonal, 15% visual, 25% verbal, and 35% mathematical!

Congratulations on being 100% smart! The above score breaks down what kind of thinking you most enjoy doing. It says nothing about how good you are at any one, just how interested you are in each, relatively. A substantial difference in scores between two people means, conclusively, that they are different kinds of thinkers. Matching Summary: Each of us has different tastes. Still, I offer the following advice, which I think is obvious: Don’t date someone if your interpersonal percentages differ by more than 50% . Don’t be friends with someone if your verbal percentages differ by more than 60% . Don’t have sex with someone if their math percentage is over 50% . Update, April 2005: Try my new test, the 3-Variable Purity Test .

Paul Graham has a new article titled How to Start a Startup, which is an excellent article for hackers who are interested in business. There’s lots of gems in there, but I particularly liked this one:

It’s worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use. Hackers are so used to computers that they have no idea how horrifying software seems to normal people. Stephen Hawking’s editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you’re riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn’t just increase your sales 10%. It’s more likely to double your sales.

Maybe Graham can get through to hackers where Jakob Neilsen and other usability experts have failed. That one paragraph is a concise summary of a point that Neilsen has been trying to advocate for years: spend the time and money on improving your software’s usability, and it’ll turn out to be a net profit.

Boring summary: the ever-entertaining Jamie Zawinski talks about why groupware is stupid.

Fun summary: Jamie Zawinski vs Nat Friedman, awesome JWZ-style swearing throughout the article, paying out on stupid managers, and, as usual, telling us how crap Netscape went from version 2 to version 4.

(Props to Joel on Software for pointing out the article.)

Which File Extension are You?

I’ve seen Volumes 1 and 2 now, and it’s looking like it’s going to be a really good anime series. It’s rather difficult to compare it to the quintessential Cowboy Bebop series since I haven’t got to the ending yet (and Bebop went from great to awesome after seeing its memorable ending), but the episodes so far seem to set up a very, very promising storyline indeed.

Aside from that, the theme song (“Inner Universe”) by Yoko Kanno just absolutely rips. Her soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop showed that she’s a genius, and her consistent, continued awesomeness in the soundtrack for Standalone Complex shows she’s a true prodigy. Arguably one of the best musicians of this entire century, in my totally overrated opinion.

I like Apple’s sense of humour :)

• In one screenshot of the Stock Ticker dashboard app, Microsoft (MSFT) was the only company in the shot which had their stock price going down.

• The calculator app in this Dashboard demonstration shows the number 1.337.

• And, of course, the most excellent Introducing Longhorn poster!

14:48 < Pseudonym> Riastradh: With a mind like that… ever considered a career as a C++ luminary?
14:48 * Riastradh throws a pointy template at Pseudonym.
14:49 * Pseudonym carefully places it in a smart pointer container
14:49 * SyntaxLaptop frees it
14:49 * Riastradh dereferences Pseudonym.
14:50 < SyntaxLaptop> sorry, delete
14:50 < Pseudonym> Why do I feel like I’ve suddenly accessed some of my uninitialised memory?
14:50 * Riastradh unsafePerformIOs Pseudonym.
14:51 < DeezNuts> just trying to run the prebuilt version of ghc 5.04.3 it bitches that it can’t find “libgmp.so.3:”
14:51 * Pseudonym FFIs Riastradh
14:51 < DeezNuts> err thats “libgmp.so.3”
14:51 < Pseudonym> Do you have GMP installed?
14:51 * Riastradh DEFINE-FOREIGNs Pseudonym.
14:52 * Pseudonym reinterpret_cast<>()s Riastradh
14:52 * Riastradh Obj.magics Pseudonym.
14:52 * Pseudonym GOTOs Riastradh
14:52 < Pseudonym> Riastradh considered harmful.
14:52 * Riastradh reflects Pseudonym.
14:53 * Pseudonym reifies Riastradh
14:53 * Riastradh shifts Pseudonym with no reset in place to delimit the shift.
14:53 < Pseudonym> Careful with all my bits.
14:53 * Riastradh converts Pseudonym to base three!
14:54 * Pseudonym pushbacks Riastradh
14:54 < DeezNuts> blah
14:54 < DeezNuts> could u explain?
14:54 < Pseudonym> Careful with my trits!s
14:54 * Riastradh throws Pseudonym.
14:54 * Pseudonym raises Riastradh
14:54 * Riastradh signals Pseudonym.
14:54 < DeezNuts> fine! linux-ppc won’t be getting a build
14:55 * Pseudonym kills Riastradh
14:55 < jameson> This is getting just a bit surreal… at least no one has used pointer arithmetics or ‘memfrob()’ yet…
14:55 < jameson> DeezNuts: Well, you have to install libgmp.
14:55 ! monotonom [trebla@130.63.90.200] has quit [“Do not join the channels joined by all who join all channels you join.”]
14:55 < jameson> It should be a dependency for the ghc package.
14:55 < Pseudonym> jameson: How dare you suggest such a thing.
14:55 * Riastradh throws himself and unsafely kills Pseudonym’s thread.
14:55 < Pseudonym> memfrob() is banned by the Geneva Convention
14:56 * Pseudonym cancels Riastradh’s thread and reaps his zombie children
14:56 * Riastradh throws across a process boundary and terminates Pseudonym’s process with a SIGSEGV.
14:56 * jameson makes sure that his lambda lifter and CPS converter are fully charged, just in case
14:57 * Pseudonym marshals Riastradh down a pipe and maps him to anonymous memory
14:57 * Riastradh incrementally lambda-lifts jameson before he gets to put his inferiour lambda-lifter into action.
14:57 * Riastradh comes out the other end of the pipe in yet another process and ANF-transforms Pseudonym.
14:57 < jameson> Keep playing guys, but keep in mind: No side effects on my memory!
14:57 * Pseudonym unsafeCasts jameson
14:58 * Riastradh throws into the kernel and twiddles jameson’s memory carefully.
14:58 * Pseudonym transfers Riastradh’s control over a superblock boundary
14:58 * Riastradh traps Pseudonym into one process, having full access to the kernel, and patches the scheduler so it doesn’t transfer control to that process ever.
14:59 < Etaoin> pwned
14:59 * Riastradh jumps down into the firmware, off into a firewire cable, emerges from a nearby hard drive, and unplugs the firewire cable, causing a kernel panic.
14:59 < Riastradh> HAH!
14:59 * Pseudonym loads a modular scheduler from flash and disables all interrupt threads
15:00 < Pseudonym> You forgot I was running Solaris, didn’t you?
15:00 * Riastradh picks up a sledgehammer and blowtorch and turns the computer upon which Pseudonym is barely staying alive into a pile of beaten slag.
15:01 * Pseudonym transfers himself to a different NUMA node to recover before disabling Riastradh’s processor set
15:01 * Pseudonym severs the backplane connection just in case
15:01 * Riastradh was reified, so he is no longer constrained to the internals of a computer.
15:02 * Pseudonym insert a nonassociative morphism into Riastradh’s category
15:02 < Riastradh> AAAAAGH!
15:02 < Riastradh> NOT THE NONASSOCIATIVE MORPHISM!
15:02 < Pseudonym> Now you’re inconsistent!
15:02 * Riastradh helplessly slumps to the floor…
15:02 < Pseudonym> Haha!
15:02 * Riastradh paws about for any weapon with which to retaliate…
15:02 < Pseudonym> You thought being abstract would save you.
15:02 * Riastradh picks up a monad and a comonad…hmmm…I wonder what happens when I cross the, er, duals.
15:03 < Pseudonym> No! DON’T CROSS THE DUALS!
15:03 * SyntaxLaptop tosses Riastradh an arrow
15:03 < Pseudonym> That comonad is unsafe!
15:03 < SyntaxLaptop> s/tosses/throws
15:04 * Riastradh straps the comonad onto one side of the arrow and the monad onto the other, and throws it at Pseudonym.
15:04 * Riastradh homomorphisizes Pseudonym!
15:04 * Riastradh uhohs as he realizes that that attack wasn’t sufficient.
15:04 * Pseudonym left-cancels the arrow
15:05 * Riastradh hides under a catamorphic syntamorphism.
15:05 * Pseudonym retracts the monad, but realises too late that it’s idempotent
15:05 * Riastradh plots coalgebraically while Pseudonym cannot find him.
15:06 * Pseudonym searches for Riastradh on an endomap
15:07 * Pseudonym flips off the safety on a terminal object
15:07 * Riastradh whets an eslupherum as he monofunctorializes his handy exomorph.
15:08 * SyntaxLaptop eats some syntactic sugar
15:08 * Riastradh watches with revulsion as SyntaxLaptop gets semicolon cancer.
15:11 * Riastradh qopas Pseudonym and stuffs him into a monadic canister, sealed tightly with a polyfunctorialism disguised as a monofunctorialized exomorph!
15:11 * Pseudonym claims this channel in the name of Free Constructions
15:12 * Riastradh forces coalgebra upon Pseudonym so that his constructor fails.
15:12 * Pseudonym gets out through a safe destructor
15:12 * Riastradh duals Pseudonym so both his constructor and destructor fail.
15:13 * Pseudonym hops on a natural transformation into a free functor
15:14 * Riastradh impales that free functor with an extrintolphoric arrow.
15:15 * Pseudonym stops the arrow with a terminal object
15:15 * Riastradh terminates Pseudonym’s terminal object and lets the arrow continue.
15:16 * Pseudonym turns it around with a contravariant functor
15:16 * Riastradh cocontravaries Pseudonym’s functor, negating the effect completely.
15:16 < sam-> oh god make it stop
15:16 * Pseudonym adjuncts it into the Herbrand universe
15:17 * Riastradh discojuncts Pseudonym hyperbolically.
15:17 < Pseudonym> Ooh, kinky.
15:18 < Riastradh> An irrelevant statement! I win!
15:18 * Pseudonym traps Riastradh under a cocone
15:18 * Riastradh treaps Pseudonym in a cacao bean.
15:18 < Pseudonym> Never! Irrelevancy is always part of the game.
15:19 * Riastradh catamorphs Pseudonym into a simple seed!
15:21 * Pseudonym notes the seed is isomorphic to a human, so what’s the big deal?
15:21 * Riastradh squishes it and ends the big deal, having triumphed.
15:22 * Pseudonym notes the gooey mess is isomorphic to a large cauldron of boiling oil
15:23 * Riastradh takes it off of the burner and then dips chips in it to enhance their flavour.

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS/SS d?>! s+: a-->---@ C++(++++) UB++++ UL++++ P+++ L++++ E(-) W++(--) N o--
K w(---) O+++ M++ V PS PE(+) Y+>++ PGP>++ t+ 5 X+ R++(*) tv-- b+>++++
DI++ D+++>$ G(-) e*>++++ h r++ y**>+++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

If you’re not e-1337 e-nuff to know what this means, run it through the Geek Code Decoder by Bradley Kuhn. Enjoy!

You can find the online version of my cirriculum vitae here, if you’re curious: it’s accurate and updated as of February, 2006.

It’s currently available in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) and PostScript (ps) formats; the Acrobat version contains hyperlinks.

• Acrobat version: andrep.pdf
• Postscript version: andrep.ps