the frig blig

The frog’s brain managed to defeat five opponents in a row at last weekend’s Portland Go tournament held at bucolic Lewis and Clark College to take first place in the single-digit kyu division. Coming from behind to win not one but his last two rounds, this is arguably the high point of 8 kyu Brown’s go career to date. He took home a fancy solid wooden goban as prize and is still on cloud nine.

Jaron Lanier presents a though-provoking essay digital maoism on www.edge.org in which he presents wikipedia as an example of the evils of the hive mind.

Ferns don’t just grow on trees ya know… or do they? It’s a walk in the park (discover the park and you could win big).

Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge was famous for that… Iraq under Saddam Hussein… Nazi Germany of course… Communist China (which even today has a worldwide rep for spying on and imprisoning dissident citizens)… and we might soon be able to add America to this list, as President Bush has mobilized the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team (BCT) to serve as an on-call federal response force for NORTHCOM.

“Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks” according to an article in The Army Times, which also goes on to state “They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control”.

This plan to utilize federal troops for missions within the United States would be a violation of Posse Comitatus, a federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385) passed on June 16, 1878 which generally prohibits federal military personnel from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress.

I feel safer already…not.

(Thanks to DW and RZ for passing this along.)

I don’t code in c# everyday, so that’s my excuse for forgetting that c# does not support assigning default values to method arguments. That’s by design according to a Microsoft tech. Well OK, I write another method with the same name but no arguments (creating a different signature) — that’s legit in c# — and in it’s body call the original method passing in my default values. A workaround that’s a bit silly but not too painful.

Until I try to call this method from a client app. Did I mention it was in a web service? Apparently [WebMethod]s do not support methods with different signatures. They compile and build with no errors and you can publish them on your IIS server but when you try to add them as a web reference to your vStudio client app they throw runtime errors. Yo, what kind of coding environment is this? They’re not making it easy here. Oh well, another day another challenge.

My iPod was crashing after I tried to load a playlist after adding additional playlists. It drove me crazy for a few days, examining the playlists in detail, they were all valid…but I finally figured out the problem. After downloading the source code (Rockbox is open source) I discovered that the file playlist_catalog.c defined MAX_PLAYLISTS 400. I had 430 playlists already — clearly I was trashing memory. I changed the value of MAX_PLAYLISTS to 512, rebuilt rockbox, reloaded it onto my iPod and what do you know — no more crashes!

I submitted my mod as a patch to the Rockbox project, and it was rejected (rightfully so) since it’s not an actual bugfix but a kludgy hack. This is correct. But in my case the memory it adds is minimal (112 ARM pointers == 32*112 = 3.5k bytes) and since I’m running it on a 64M iPod that’s no concern. Before I add a hundred more CDs I’ll have a better solution in place.

The root cause why I have so many playlists in the first place is because my method of ripping CDs creates music files that match the actual track name. If I modify that to prepend the sequential track number, rockbox won’t need a playlist to play the album in the proper order. That’s probably a pretty simple fix, and I’ll be able to delete 90 percent of my playlists. It’s on my to-do list.

This morning’s Doonesbury comic strip — nice work, Trudeau: