Saturday, December 28, 2002

PreCC: A Prettier Compiler Compiler is an infinite-lookahead compiler-compiler for context dependent grammars. It "can be thought of as yacc with parameters, arbitrarily complex compound expressions, infinite lookahead and a neater way of dealing with attributes"
The Cocktail Compiler Toolbox
Lrc is a system for generating efficient incremental attribute evaluators. Lrc can be used to generate language based editors and other advanced interactive environments.
Micro Attribute Grammar System
FNC-2 Attribute Grammar System
Lecture on Attribute Grammars, more
Attribute Grammars Home Page
Universal Basic Income
ExtroTech Webring
Transhumanist Politics

Thursday, December 26, 2002

"It overcrowds us. We organize it. It falls apart.
We organize it again and fall apart ourselves.
"

--"The Duino Elegies", Rainer Maria Rilke

Word of the Day:
anacoluthon - A grammatical interruption or lack of implied sequence within a sentence
(Thanks to James)
"Only someone completely distrustful of all government would be opposed to what we are doing with surveillance cameras." -- NYC Police Commissioner Howard Safir, 27 July 1999
Hiding the killing in the Gulf War

Katinka Matson

Tuesday, December 24, 2002

Let Freedom Reign
"He who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep
pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom to us
by the awful grace of God.
"
Aeschylus, 525-456 BC
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Thought Police
"In ancient Greece it was a custom to break a slate of burned clay into several pieces and distribute them within the group. When the group reunited the pieces were fitted together (Greek symbollein). This confirmed the members belonging to the group."
Words of the day:
autocthonous - indigenous
quiddity - essence
telos - goal
threnody - mournful poem or song

Sunday, December 22, 2002

Saturday, December 21, 2002

"The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users."
Neural Networks in Plain English
"While it may shock some to hear it, libertarians are philosophically opposed to both liberty and equality... The LP tends to politically support liberty on some issues, but never philosophically... While libertarians champion liberty in some arenas, such as free speech, they do so not for the sake of liberty as a coherent ideal; they do so for reasons of their own convenience." --Liberty and equality: a rebuke of libertarianism

Friday, December 20, 2002

Mathematics vs. Matter: The Philosophic Roots of the Rejection of Physical Causation in 20th Century Physics
1 2 3 4

Thursday, December 19, 2002

Safeguards to be eliminated: "routine oversight; paper records of surveillance; internal reviews of investigations; and publicly available summaries of basic information, such as the number of new probes opened in a year." --NY State of Surveillance
More surveillance

Tuesday, December 17, 2002

Saturday, December 14, 2002

"For decades, [physics] students have been taught to avoid asking probing questions. An attitude of "shut-up-and-calculate" has dominated the field. The result is widespread confusion, and a strange unwillingness to ask clear and direct questions..." --When will we emerge from the quantum tunnel of obscurity?
"Hell is not the place of evil; rather, Hell is the absence of any standards at all." --Kenneth Tynan
The Edge Questions

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

"In The Creature from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin formulates succinctly the financiers' compelling interest in war: 'All that is necessary ... to insure that a government will maintain or expand its debt is to involve it in war or the threat of war. The greater the threat and the more destructive the war, the greater the need for debt.'" --Nicholas Strakon
"We're now in a situation where you've got powerful newspaper executives like Al Neuharth, the former chairman of the Gannett chain making idiotic statements like, 'There are no more secrets in the world.' From the highest mountain to the lowest valley... Pete Williams is now a reporter -- the guy who lied again and again during the Gulf War and lied directly to me. I can honestly call him a liar and never lose a libel suit. He is now a reporter for NBC. Bob Woodward, the hero of Watergate, sits on stories" --An investigative journalist's take on media censorship in the first Gulf War (deja vu)

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

Former attorney general Ramsey Clark tears apart a Pentagon spokesman over America's ten-year bombing of Iraq
Hundred of billions of dollars are going towards doing things like this
If you're sick of hearing nothing but right-wing propaganda on mainstream radio listen to Democracy Now
What I've been listening to over the last few years, more or less in order, from newest to oldest... (mostly EBM)

Monday, December 09, 2002

How the British created Hinduism
Crime rate in the UK higher than US and most other developed countries.
more
The journalists "just hung around our base all day. Whenever we had some special operation, we'd offer the journalists some facility to go on patrol with our special forces and off they'd go – you know, 'we're on patrol with the special forces' – and they wouldn't realise we were stringing them along to get them out of the way." --What's really been going on in Afghanistan
America's influence on prospective EU members

Sunday, December 08, 2002

"Searched 674 nearby stars, found nothing."
"Searched five closest galaxies, found nothing."
"Searched all sky, found nothing" yet...
"Many people would never consider writing a prisoner. I would have never thought to do so when I was in the free world..."
Refusing military service in Israel

Saturday, December 07, 2002

"May the Lord bless everyone who beats your children against the rocks!" --Psalm 137:9 Contemporary English Version of the Bible
Wacky Uses
"An amateur photographer... was arrested on Tuesday in his home city of Denver - for simply taking pictures of buildings in an area where Vice President Cheney was residing... The agent told Maginnis that his "suspicious activities" made him a threat to national security, and that he would be charged as a terrorist under the USA-PATRIOT act"
The FCC wants to eliminate rules that restrict companies from monopolizing markets.
--how to act--
(Thanks to Jesse)

Friday, December 06, 2002

"Thomas Pynchon on bad acid couldn't dream up the paranoid nightmares now pouring out of Washington..." --Why you should join the EFF right now, by John Perry Barlow
Because of a mistaken interpretation of a Supreme Court reporter's notes in an 1886 railroad tax case, corporations are now legally considered "persons," equal to humans and entitled to many of the same protections once guaranteed only to humans by the Bill of Rights - a clear contradiction of the intent of the Founders of the United States. The results of this corporate personhood have been:

Unequal taxes
Unequal privacy
Unequal wealth
Unequal trade
Unequal media
Unequal regulation
Unequal responsibility for crime
Unequal protection from risk
Unequal citizenship and access to the commons

Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights

To Sell a War
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” - Herman Goering at the Nuremberg Trial

Thursday, December 05, 2002


**************************************************
*********David Fincher is making Hard Boiled *********
**************************************************
Info on the original here

Tuesday, December 03, 2002

"Look more closely, though, and the “us” and “them” distinction collapses. Right-wing Christian leaders like Franklin Graham may denounce Islam as a “wicked religion,” and Muslim fundamentalists may defame Jews, but in fact their visions are far closer than either camp would admit."
"Fox isn't in any conventional sense ideological media. It's just that being anti-Democrat, anti-Clinton, anti-yuppie, anti-wonk turns out to be great television"

Monday, December 02, 2002

"Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry." -- William Butler Yeats

Sunday, December 01, 2002

It doesn't get geekier than this
"Networked minefields detect rude attempts to clear them, deduce which parts of themselves have been removed, and signals their remaining munitions to close the hole using best-fit mathematics"
"The mines, which can hop, then redistribute themselves, frustrating the enemy and quite probably terrifying him in the process."
GoogleCookin
christmas lights - WARNING: For indoor or outdoor use only.
mattress - WARNING: Do not attempt to swallow
Anti-Personal Mine - WARNING: DO NOT EAT
Blockbuster Rental DVD - "Be kind - rewind."
Dumb Warnings

Friday, November 29, 2002

What started out as one article in an obscure journal turned in to a very deep and far-ranging debate, known as the Sokal Affair. I encourage a sequential reading through all of the articles. The debate gets deeper and more interesting as it goes on. Taken together, this is one of the most fascinating things I've read in months.
loop quantum gravity
"The young dolphin gives a quick flip of her head, and an undulating silver ring appears--as if by magic--in front of her. The ring is a solid, toroidal bubble two feet across--and yet it does not rise to the surface! It stands erect in the water like the rim of a magic mirror, or the doorway to an unseen dimension. For long seconds the dolphin regards its creation, from varying aspects and angles, with its vision and sonar..."

Thursday, November 28, 2002

"In Ellul's conception, then, life is not happy in a civilization dominated by technique. Even the outward show of happiness is bought at the price of total acquiescence. The technological society requires men to be content with what they are required to like; for those who are not content, it provides distractions -- escape into absorption with the technically dominated media of popular culture and communication." --Robert K. Merton, 1964

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Of Botflies and Men and a very icky picture
"There is, in a word, far less understanding at the top than successive leaders have claimed, and domestic politics and short-term factors play a much greater role than they will ever admit. The world and now the American people cannot afford U.S. foreign policy's opportunistic and ad hoc character, its wavering between the immoral and amoral in practice but which official speech writers portray as rational and principled" --Another Century of War? by Gabriel Kolko
Dr. Zoe D. Katze, Ph.D., C.Ht., DAPA

Sunday, November 24, 2002

"There once was a man who feared his own shadow and who hated his footprints and tried to escape from them. The more he lifted his feet, the more tracks he made. As fast as he could go, his shadow remained with him. Thinking he was still going too slow, he streaked like an arrow until all his strength was spent, and he died. He didn't realize that sitting in the shade of a tree would do away with his shadow, and living quietly would leave his traces to fade away." --Chuang Tzu
The dangers and effects of nuclear, earth-penetrating weapons

Saturday, November 23, 2002

Just fixed the blog archives. A lot were missing, but now they're back. Browse around... have fun.
Savagery, ignorance, and hypocracy in the persecution of Salamon Rushdie

Friday, November 22, 2002

World Food Program
What "Homeland Security" really means.
New cannabis study
Strange quark matter
"the United States [is] both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists... the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law."
MILITARY AND PARAMILITARY ACTIVITIES IN AND AGAINST NICARAGUA: (NICARAGUA v. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)
Contains the full text of the judgement against the United States by the International Court of Justice, where the US is found guilty of conducting large-scale terrorist actions against Nicaragua and ordered to pay massive reparations.
The United States maintained the court had no jurisdiction in the matter and contemptously refused to even attend the trial. Of course, no reparations were ever paid.
"The young people of today love luxury. They have bad manners, they scoff at authority and lack respect for their elders. Children nowadays are really tyrants, they no longer stand up when their elders come into the room where they are sitting, they contradict their parents, chat together in the presence of adults, eat gluttonously and tyrannise their teachers." --Socrates, 470-399BC

Thursday, November 21, 2002

The Campaign To End Genocide
Noam Chomsky interviewed in India
"Combat situations in Iraq will be lightning fast... with Special Forces coordinating aircraft. It's not going to be large divisions and brigades moving laboriously across the sands of Iraq. It will all be happening before we know where or when it's happening, and the reporters will all be mesmerized at the briefings, and that will be it. It will be total information management and the real reporting will be done in Washington, not on the ground."

"The Washington press corps is complicit... The game that's played in Washington—and it's always been played this way—is the trade- off of access for patronage. If you agree to sing their song, you'll be invited for an audience."

--The state of censorship in the coming Iraq war--

Wednesday, November 20, 2002

Monday, November 18, 2002

disk based caching library
cdb: a fast, reliable, simple package for creating and reading constant databases
freecdb
PureDB
QccPack: Quantization, Compression, and Coding Library
Shaman library provides - Portability, Resource management, Language support, Caching
Ubiqx: list, trees, arrays, db, caching libs
TLTools: large library of misc functions
BetterC: library to help debugging
Mark Malloc: more debugging help
More...

Friday, November 15, 2002

Thursday, November 14, 2002

Truly excellent talk on Iraq by Scott Ritter, former Chief UN Weapons Inspector

Monday, November 11, 2002

Everything you always wanted to know about why Microsoft sucks, but were afraid to ask.

Thursday, November 07, 2002


Raven Graphs
: graphs of the first stanza of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, made with txt2graph and GraphVis
"LZO implements the fastest compression and decompression algorithms around."

Sunday, November 03, 2002

"CONS is a replacement for MAKE. It is not compatible with make, but it has a number of powerful capabilities not found in other software construction systems, including make."
Opt "is a subroutine library which facilitates the convenient input of parameters to a C or C++ programs"
gitty-gitty "is able to generate an already compilable, very sophisticated "hello world" program, written in C or C++ and constituted by a main program, two internal modules (classes), one static and one shared library and one shellscript. All these sources exept the shellscript contain a full set of possible doxygen-comments. And this complex documented "Hello World" is already fully embedded into GNU autoconf/automake."
"Kazlib is a collection of program modules portably written in ANSI C. There is a dictionary module based on red-black trees, an extendible hashing module, and a system for emulating exception handling."

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." --George Bush

Monday, October 28, 2002

want less pain...
Exhaust: a redcode simulator
"You might think these Christian activists represent the furthest shores of American politico-religious wackiness. The politicians don't think so. This conference began with a videotaped benediction straight from the Oval office. Some of the most influential republicans in Congress addressed the gathering including - not once, but twice - Tom DeLay, who is hot favourite to take over as majority leader of the House of Representatives after the midterm elections on November 5, thus becoming arguably the most powerful man on Capitol Hill." <-- sadly, this is not a joke
Differential Evolution

Sunday, October 27, 2002

Some prices of protest:
> Exorbitant bails -- some as high as $1 million -- keeping peaceful protesters in prison.
> Felony charges used to threaten or punish protesters with loss of voting rights and jobs.
> Federal RICO and domestic terrorist legislation employed to stigmatize peaceful protesters.
> Permits to protest denied for legitimate protests by activist groups.
> Trespass and other false charges fabricated by police.
> Police granted immunity from lawsuits, leaving them free to abuse protesters' rights.
> "Zero tolerance" rules which expel students who participate in nonviolent protests.
> Long sentences in overcrowded and inhuman conditions meted out to protesters
> Seizure of organizations' bank accounts so that members who protest can be fined.
> Protesters arrested and held without charge, preventing them from further protest.
> Legal distinctions blurred between violent and nonviolent protest, so that all protesters are demonized as "anarchists," "hoodlums" and "domestic terrorists."
> Pre-protest surveillance, infiltration and investigations to identify, arrest and detain nonviolent protesters prior to protest.
> Police entrapment used to fabricate grounds for arrest and charges.
> Permits denied to activist groups to keep them from gathering on public lands.
> And nonviolent protesters barred from talking about their causes or motives during trial.

Saturday, October 26, 2002

VoteNoWar
"We argue a connection exists between the restrictiveness of a country's civilian weapons policy and its liability to commit genocide upon its own people"
More...
"Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity."

Friday, October 25, 2002

"Eleven years ago, I spent my summer holidays as a guerrilla in northern Iraq. It was the end of my second year at university and the Gulf War had just finished. I neither wanted to go inter-railing nor work in Waitrose. So I went to Iraq with a friend in search of Kurdish guerrillas. Both of us had recently been dumped by our first serious girlfriends and had read too many French post-war novels. We met in Istanbul and hitched across Turkey towards the Iraqi border. It was a phenomenally stupid thing to do. I'd like to say it was because we deeply believed in the Kurdish cause, but actually we just wanted some good stories for the college bar."

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Armchair Anthrax Investigators
ccache: speeds up your recompiles 5-10x
"The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act"
(Thanks to Mike)

Sunday, October 13, 2002

Check: a unit test framework for C
Compilercache
False - "Programming language with two main goals: confusing everyone with an obfuscated syntax, and designing as powerful a language as possible with a tiny implementation: this compiler executable is only 1024 bytes, written in pure 68000 assembler."
Ashcroft's guidelines for limiting the Freedom of Information Act
Military is not even bothering to be subtle when fiming antiwar protestors

Friday, October 11, 2002

Scientific Applications on Linux
Ploticus
xldlas can do data summaries, OLS regression, ANOVA, line plots, scatter plots, and histograms.
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics

Wednesday, October 09, 2002


Escher via LEGO
Balcony
Belvedere
Ascending
(Many many thanks to Mike)
Fenris is a set of tools that include a high-level tracer, library fingerprinter, debugger, and a data exploration interface
Design and learn access controls in networks, systems and applications with Access Road
Memphis can be used for the definition of abstract syntax trees and the implementation of tree walkers.
Use Cqual to add type qualifiers to C
...and Mpatrol to diagnose run-time errors that are caused by the wrong use of dynamically allocated memory

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

"The Paste-Code Service on Profett.Com is meant for users of IRC (or similar) where pasting large amounts of text (e.g. source code snippets) is a universal 'no-no' since it disrupts discussions"

Thursday, October 03, 2002

A cop pulls over Heisenburg. The cop says, "Do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenburg replies, "No, but I know where I am."
SPLINT: Annotation-Assisted Lightweight Static Checking Secure Programming Group
Gimpel: PC-lint and FlexeLint will check C/C++ source code and find bugs, glitches, inconsistencies, non-portable constructs, etc...
"My attempts to have Americans enter into discussions about double standards [in regards to the US stance on nuclear weapons] have been an abject failure - even with highly educated and engaged people," Mr Butler said. "I sometimes felt I was speaking to them in Martian, so deep is their inability to understand."
"I confess, too, that I flinch when I hear American, British and French fulminations against weapons of mass destruction, ignoring the fact that they are the proud owners of massive quantities of those weapons, unapologetically insisting that they are essential for their national security, and will remain so."
"Inspectors" will really be invaders
"In a leaked proposal for a UN resolution drafted by the US with help from British officials, the Bush administration is seeking to transform the inspections process into a coercive operation."

Wednesday, October 02, 2002

Doxygen: source code documentation system
Browse through source code with CScope
Cross-reference it with cxref
GNU Global source code tagging system
Exuberant Ctags
ID Utils makes searching through source easier
(From GCC Hacker)
GraphVis: an amazingly useful graphing tool

Monday, September 23, 2002

A troll and his point...
"Even more serious concerns have been raised by the discovery of secret biodefense projects that push against the limits of international prohibitions. It was recently revealed that an Army laboratory in Utah has been secretly making weaponized anthrax for some years. Another secret project involved the construction of bomblets designed for dispersion of biological agents, although the Biological Weapons Convention explicitly prohibits developing, producing or possessing "means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes." Such projects have raised suspicions abroad that the U.S. continues to develop biological weapons"
A Right to Argue the Justness of Laws

Sunday, September 22, 2002

blackblackblackblackblackblackblack
blackblackblackblackblackblackblack
blackblackblackblackblackblackblack
blackblackblackblackblackblackblack
blackblackblackSUNblackblackblack
blackblackblackblackblackblackblack
blackblackblackblackblackblackblack
blackblackblackblackblackblackblack
blackblackblackblackblackblackblack
UN Security Council resolutions get violated all the time

Saturday, September 21, 2002

America vs the International Community
"True courage is often nothing other than the expression of a metaphysical conviction, so to speak, of our own superfluousness." --Arthur Schnitzler
Master's Thesis on Genetic Programming Unreal Tournament Bots
Question: "What were the circumstances that led the U.N. weapons inspectors to leave Iraq in December 1998? The Bush administration and the media often repeat that Saddam "kicked out" the weapons inspectors, and that's why we face the necessity of war today."
Answer: "Nothing could be further from the truth. The Iraqis did not kick the inspectors out in December 1998. The Americans ordered the inspectors out, and then bombed Iraq using intelligence information gathered by the inspectors to target Saddam Hussein and his security apparatus."
From an interview with the chief weapons inspector from 91-98
US 'backed Saddam's use of chemical war on Iran'
"Right-wing governments may sap some people's will to live and result in more suicides, conclude studies in Britain and Australia. The researchers speculate that losers are more likely to kill themselves in the individualistic, "winner-takes-all" societies favoured by right wing governments, because they are left to fend for themselves. Wide disparities in wealth also sharpen any sense of hopelessness, the researchers argue..."
What's your pleasure?

Wednesday, September 18, 2002

"De Certeau sees ordinary people as developing 'tactics' (an 'art of the weak') that he contrasts with the 'strategies' of the dominant élite, tactics for carrying out 'raids' on the dominant culture... Tactics are the response of the powerless. De Certeau sees ordinary people as 'poachers', pinching the meanings they need from the cultural commodities which are offered to them."
The Truth For Youth

Friday, September 13, 2002


Real Estate - Mati Klarwein

Ernst Fuchs

Karel Demel

The Crowbar and The Egg
Laurence Caruana

Oldrich Kulhánek

Daniel Broening

Boleslas Biegas

indio

Lorena Guzman

T. Gebhardt

Elizabeth McGrath

Socar Myles

Luetke

Cem Gul

David Aronson
Sixteen Tognues

Daniel Oullette

Bad Kitty - R.S. Connet

Andre Freitas

Rick Shelton

Scott Radke