Joe Ganley [http://ganley.org/]

Writing code since 1979

I have been a professional software engineer for over 10 years. I have written many kinds of software, but my particular strengths are interactive graphics applications, compilers and interpreters, and algorithms.

I also enjoy writing, woodworking, and home improvement. Also this.

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Thursday, September 28, 2000

A little while back I was lamenting the fact that I couldn't find something I've come to call "ReplayRadio" - a device that provides the same functionality as ReplayTV, but for radio. Well, I'm still looking for a stand-alone device, but I found an FM tuner that attaches to your PC, whose accompanying software can record from the radio at a set time.

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I'm trying to port some code to some platforms other than my development platform. However, I'm too lazy to actually set up a build environment on those platforms. Thus, I find myself checking the emailed errors from the nightly builds, making a few changes, and then waiting for the build email the next day and repeating the process from there. Batch programming, just like in the bad old days when we used punchcards!

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Wednesday, September 27, 2000

Why is it that the Olympic coverage covers sports like shot-put and Greco-Roman wrestling, which as far as I know no-one really watches, and covers every insignificant qualifying heat of track and swimming, and broadcasts 15-minute-long biographies of obscure American athletes, while there is zero coverage of the sports that I'd really like to see, such as fencing, table tennis, and martial arts? (After reading today's excellent Slate article, add to that list Korfball; we played a very similar game in high-school gym class, which I believe the teacher called "fungo-ball".)

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Day before yesterday, I looked down at the clock in my car and it read 3:60. I stared at it, puzzling whether there was some way it could show these numbers if it was displaying the CD counter or a radio frequency, but after a few seconds it switched over to 4:00. Now I find myself wondering whether it has always done this or just recently, and whether it happens every hour or just at 4:00 - and I find myself staring at it when the hour changes, trying to catch it happening again. (I was looking at it when it went from 8:59 to 9:00 yesterday morning, which it did without passing through 8:60.)

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Tuesday, September 19, 2000

Grrrr. You would think, in this age of relative maturity of e-commerce, that it would be possible to search for a product using a simple boolean query. But no, not one of the couple of dozen e-tailers I've checked today (including comparison sites like mySimon) can find me 2-line phones with caller ID. 2-line, yes. Caller ID, no problem. But searching only for phones with both is impossible. Furthermore, on Amazon, if I ask for just multi-line phones, and then look for "similar items," I get multi-line phones that weren't in the original list. Get with it, folks. By the way, I just got Uniden EXS9966, which I love, but I need two more and was hoping to get somewhat cheaper models. Sadly, I have a couple of nice 2-line phones without caller ID, but a 2-line caller ID box is $65, and I can replace the phones for less than that!

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Monday, September 18, 2000

Jeanne Marie Laskas's column this week was about having a bat in her house, which reminded me of my own bat experience in college. A bat somehow found its way into our dorm, and presently was flying up and down my hall. As you might imagine, a dorm-hall full of guys thought this was highly amusing, and a number of them were chasing it around. It found its way into the stairwell, and apparently the door into the next floor down, which was populated by women (our dorm was coed by floor) had been propped open. We knew this because, as perfectly as if it had been choreographed, seconds after the bat left our floor, we heard a perfect cascade of shreik! - SLAM - shreik! - SLAM - shreik! - SLAM - ... progressing down the hallway below ours as the bat made its way down the hall, and the ladies slammed their doors to keep it out of their rooms. Eventually the bat found its way outside without harm to itself or anyone else.

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My favorite radio show, TechRadio, airs on Saturday afternoon, when I am never listening to the radio. I looked, but have been unable to find, a device that will timed-record from the radio, as a VCR does for TV. Surely they must exist, and I haven't looked that hard yet, but it surprised me that I couldn't just find one right away. Taking this idea further, it seems like you could make a Tivo/ReplayTV-type device for radio, a lot more cheaply than for TV (since audio data is so much smaller than video). An MP3 player can store 4 hours of voice, so one should be able to get (almost?) that much talk radio in a solid-state device. Indeed, many portable MP3 players contain a radio tuner, and so I would hope you can record radio, so all that's lacking is the timer. Perhaps I could hack this design to add a radio tuner and a timer.

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Friday, September 08, 2000

Now that's clever: a one-time-use credit card for making online purchases. (Though I still insist that the risk of your credit card number getting stolen online are no higher than the risk of it getting stolen by some surly waiter or retail employee.)

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Thursday, September 07, 2000

Shopping for satellite TV for our new house. No way I'm giving Cox any more of my money for their 20-year-old two-cable technology. Anyway, shopping for satellite is a pain in the ass: two providers and thirty different receivers, many of which I can't differentiate from one another. It's like it was in 1995, trying to decide which of the twenty or so available Macintoshes to buy. Update 9-18-2000: Let's hear it for technology momentum: I gave up and got cable after all. The fact is, I just couldn't find the value-added of satellite over cable (even Cox's sorry cable system), and the price is just about the same.

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Still more on Stephen King and his e-publishing experiment The Plant. Firstly, the publicity surrounding this has prompted me to revisit some of his older work that I've already enjoyed before (currently reading Nightmares and Dreamscapes, with The Dead Zone on deck). Secondly, though, I just saw this recent note on his web site about the future of The Plant. Specifically, quote:

Installments one, two and three are going to be available for $1. Further installments up to 8 will be available for $2 each. In other words, you complete financial liability for the first 8 installments of this story will be $13 or about the cost of a trade paperback or a hardcover novel offered at 40% discount in a chain bookstore.

Give me a break. When I buy his books, I don't buy the hardback or trade paper versions; I buy the mass-market paperback for $7. Furthermore, I rarely buy books; typically I get them from the library. Also, consider that whatever margin the publisher typically skims off is going right in his pocket. In other words, there's no way I'm paying $13 for this book. I love the idea of publishing electronically, but I'm afraid I consider $13 for the electronic version of a novel outrageous.

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Wednesday, September 06, 2000

Kevin Fox's AOLiza sets up the old Eliza program to talk with unsuspecting bozos over AIM. I'd like to hook that up to a speech synthesizer and have it answer the phone when telemarketers call. "What would it mean to you if MCI was my long distance carrier?" Hey, maybe I'll just simulate Eliza myself when they call. Or better yet, Racter.

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I'm not much of a fan of any of the mainstream sports, but I just love ESPN-2. Right now they're showing a Magic: The Gathering tournament. Yesterday it was a poker tournament. Plus, of course, the X-Games. All sorts of wacky stuff; too cool.

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A friend of mine just returned from NYC with a bottle of espresso soda. Now, I love coffee, but this just scares the hell out of me.

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My WuName is "Curly-Haired Slacker," and my Metal Gear Name is "Hydrogen Scorpion." Somehow I don't see either of those catching on.

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I always wished I had a nickname. For a while in college, a lot of the guys on my hall were calling me "Cujo," but it never quite reached critical mass. And, of course, you can't give yourself one, alas.

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Tuesday, September 05, 2000

Clearing a bunch of backlog:
- Andrew Glassner. Lots of cool stuff. including some excellent Celtic knotwork.
- RoShamBo [Rock, Paper, Scissors] Programming Competition.
- TechRadio, my favorite radio show.
- Blasts from the past: Emulators for extinct web browsers, screen snaps of extinct versions of Micros~1 Windows, and the Vintage Computer Festival.
- 405, a very cool 3-minute movie produced by a couple of guys in their spare time.

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A while back a guy who had read some of my writing on this site emailed me asking my advice about a job offer he had gotten from a company in Silicon Valley (he currently lives near his family someplace in Michigan). We swapped a few emails, with him explaining his background and priorities in life and me giving my opinions on how those priorities fit (or in this case, didn't fit) Silicon Valley. Some time later, I got an email informing me of his decision (he stayed in Michigan) and thanking me for my advice, with a $15 Amazon.com gift certificate. How cool is that?!?

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My four-year-old was sitting in my lap, and we were perusing the NickJr web site. We had a few moments of confusion, which I figured out after a few moments were due to her expectation that we could go watch the Dora the Explorer TV show right there on the web site. It occurred to me what a natural thing it is to expect that when you don't understand the limitations of the technology, and it also occurred to me that for her children, it'll probably work just that way. That is, while the medium may not bear a recognizable resemblance to either TV or the web, it seems certain that the services those two media provide will ultimately be unified.

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I had a movie idea the other day. The movie Crossroads was a great, if not especially original, story that was made into a very mediocre movie. The basic plot is a quest (the specifics not overly important) which culminates in a blues-guitar competition between the protagonist and a representative of Satan, with the stakes (of course) being the protagonist's soul. The idea is to make a movie with this same basic plot, except that the musical genré is rap. The obvious choice for Satan's rap star is Eminem. I'm too long out of touch with rap to have a good suggestion for the protagonist.

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Monday, September 04, 2000

Like many geeks, I am a long-time fan of Eric Harshbarger's LEGO sculptures. The desk that got him his most recent notoriety is cool, but the coolest has to be the clock. I mean, sculpting in LEGOs is an accomplishment in itself, but making a working clock mechanism out of LEGOs is in a whole different level of accomplishment.

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Very cool online history of the genesis of the Macintosh.

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Sunday, September 03, 2000

There was an article in the August 13 New York Times Magazine about Stephen King, and in it he indicated that he wanted to be considered a "real" writer of literature, an achievement of which he is robbed simply because he writes horror. This struck me as interesting, because I've always seen it sort of the other way around: he has the potential -- sometimes realized, sometimes not -- to be a great author, but frequently lets the supernatural aspects of a story take over from the more basic human aspects that make for great literature. The best example of this is Needful Things. This begins as a fairly straightforward story in which a newcomer to town pits the townspeople against one another by playing their distrusts against one another. This wonderfully addressed some themes of trust, betrayal, and revenge among citizens of a small town, much like Stephen Dobyns's excellent The Church of Dead Girls. (Incidentally, I know King is a big fan of Dobyns, and of this book in particular.) However, rather than follow these themes further, the book degenerates into the usual King-style festival of horrors, with the bad guy being exposed as some sort of demon, and all manner of occult action ensuing. King is a great writer, and a great author, but too often falls back on horrific action instead of pursuing the human element of the story. My favorites of King's are those where he avoids this pitfall -- those with minimal (or no) supernatural element: The Dead Zone, Gerald's Game, The Stand, and even Roadwork, to name a few. I hardly think King needs writing advice from me, and he has said many times how he has little choice as to what he is inspired to write about, but his work would be so much better if he could avoid that horror crutch; or at least, avoid letting it completely overcome the rest of the story as it often does in his work.

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