Out of Cheese

I saw an article on the EurekAlert RSS feed just now entitled "MDCT ‘unwraps’ Egyptian mummy, clearly revealing face of 3,000 year old man". I was puzzled for a minute, wondering just how a modified discrete cosine transform could unwrap a mummy. Turns out there’s another use of the "MDCT" acronym. I wonder how you’d go about encoding an MP3 with multidetector computed tomography.

Richard Posner, who is a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, is the guest blogger at Larry Lessig’s weblog this week. It’s rare to have the opportunity to hear someone as knowledgeable about law and as influential as Judge Posner write about current legal issues in detail and discuss how he feels the law should be designed. His posts so far have been terrific. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the week’s content.

Meg points to the OEDILF — the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form. Very cool.

I should explain the new name. (If you’re not paying attention, it’s "Out of Cheese".) I could’ve registered a semi-standard name-based domain — say, ejalbert.org or e-EricJosephAlbert-biz.com — but those just aren’t very interesting. I spent a while trying to think of something I’d enjoy using and which wouldn’t sound too terribly weird to casual observers. I’m not sure I succeeded on the second part, but it’s too late to worry about that now.

"Out of cheese" is a reference to Interesting Times, of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Among the Discworld characters are a group of wizards from Unseen University. They have a computer called Hex consisting of a few million ants, some male sheep skulls, a waterwheel, and a variety of other bits. You walk up to Hex, pull the GBL (Great Big Lever), and with luck, you get an answer. But it’s a computer, and sometimes things go wrong. And that’s when, at one point in Interesting Times, Hex prints out this message:

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.

That sums up so much about computers, doesn’t it?

Yeah, so you already know that I moved a couple of weeks ago, so why am I moving again? Well, I’m not moving in real space this time; instead, I’m moving online.

I registered my own domain a while back. I didn’t use it for much due to inertia — why tinker with something that works? But over the weekend, the folks at Rescomp decided to upgrade their server without sending out a general announcement. Normally that wouldn’t be too big of a deal except that they botched the upgrade a bit and broke a whole bunch of things. As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing that they broke was my weblog. They’ve since fixed most of it — MT-Blacklist still doesn’t work — but that was enough for me.

The moving process was absurdly painful. You’d think migrating from one Movable Type installation to another would be easy, but you’d be wrong. First, the new server didn’t have any reasonable version of BerkeleyDB installed. Alexei took care of that today. Then the BerkeleyDB exporter choked on three of my databases. Fortunately, the same exporter running on Rescomp’s server worked just fine. Then I spent an hour debugging my inability to log in, which happened because the *.lock files in my Movable Type installation weren’t readable by the web server. (You’d think Movable Type would have good error reporting, but no.) Then MT-Blacklist refused to run because Perl’s Storable module blew up on its data, saying something about a byte ordering problem. According to the Storable documentation that has a straightforward fix — just set $Storable::interwork_56_64bit — but that doesn’t work. (And yes, I checked to make sure the variable was set.) The Storable documentation also tells you that if you have this problem you should migrate your data to a new version of Storable immediately…but it doesn’t bother to tell you how to migrate your data. I took out the big hammer and simply deleted all of my MT-Blacklist data. I’m glad I don’t have any other plugins installed.

So pardon my dust for now. I think everything is working, but I might be wrong. If you come across anything that seems more broken than usual, please let me know. Thanks!

I recently mentioned my search for a new cell phone. The process took a lot longer than I expected. The problem turned out to be that the phone I want doesn’t exist yet, which makes buying it quite a challenge. I’ve heard a lot of great things about the Treo 600, but if I’m going to spend that much money on a phone, it needs to do absolutely everything I need. The Treo comes close, but I need Bluetooth. The way I use my computers, I just can’t have a cable sitting around to use for synchronization, and I’m not about to pay a few hundred dollars for something that I won’t sync.

The phone that I want, then, is the rumored Treo Ace (or 610, depending on the rumor), which allegedly is an all-around improved version of the 600 with Bluetooth added. It’s been rumored to ship imminently since early this year and hasn’t appeared yet, but late fall seems likely if PalmOne wants to have a hot product for the holiday season. Of course, even if it was announced tomorrow I’d still have to wait for AT&T to pick it up.

What to do, then? I could spend $150 and settle for a good phone that I don’t want, but that’s not very appealing. Instead, I decided to spend a very small amount of money for a phone that would at least be OK until the next Treo arrives. I figured I’d be getting a bare-bones phone until I realized the deal I could put together. I qualify through various nefarious means for a significant discount on AT&T Wireless phones, and the site through which I can purchase them also has additional deals if I buy online and sometimes extra deals just because they feel like it. I figured I could get the Samsung X426 for free, the LG G4015 for $40, or the Motorola T721 for $50.

Then I realized that I could use a just-because-they-felt-like-it deal for an extra $50 off. That made all of the above phones free (wow!) and made other phones affordable. I settled on the LG L1150 for $35. It normally sells for much more than that, so I’m happy. I don’t know much about the model because it’s only been available for a few weeks, but the early reviews are good and it sounds like it’ll avoid some of the significant flaws of the other three phones I mentioned above.

It’ll show up sometime next week. Hopefully I’ll like it; if not, I’m only out $35 and I’ll just have to root for the Treo coming out quickly. I suppose I should figure out what to do with my old phone. I wonder if anyone would want to buy a Samsung A500, and for how much.