i finally got around to seeing return of the king on sunday. honestly, it was kind of an exhausting movie; it didn't feel quite as long as the two towers, but it was wearying to say the least. that said, i think the best way to sum it up is 'wicked good'. a good movie indeed, but honestly, it still falls far, far short of the first in my opinion. i probably need to see it again, obviously, but i'm sure both my loyal readers would be disappointed if i didn't have some sort of opinion.

first, the good. number one, all the stuff in gondor was very cool. i think the most compelling (and best-constructed) storyline was that of the humans; the design of the city was amazing, and the hints at the history in their past are very cool. makes me want to get out my castle legos, and that's the best compliment i can pay, pretty much. the big battle was pretty decent; it would have been cooler if it weren't for the one in the previous movie, though--the flow of this one was just less consistent, and the buildup to it was not quite as effective. many complaints were about the end--i liked the end, or ends, even. i thought they tied it up well, and i liked how the end focused on sam. and sam, sam was totally the best part of this movie, to boot. oh and i loved the empire strikes back homage with the elephants. haha. awesome stuff.

as for the bad. i know someone is going to correct me on this, but my first impression is my first impression. the ghost soldiers sucked in my opinion. i'm sure there's some justification for them in the book, and don't get me wrong, they were well and thoroughly explained by the film, but i thought they were a cop-out. a deus ex machina, and with animation noticeably below the standard set by the rest of the movie. pissed me off. and the whole arwen thing. leave or stay, stay or leave, make up your damn mind. saruman's end is profoundly unsatisfying, but that's already been discussed in depth by others who know what the hell they're talking about. the spider was pretty cool, when you could see it, but the scenes in that fight, as well as some in the big battle lacked the clarity of the ones in the second.

all in all, it was a great movie. one i'll see again, for sure. and maybe, if the extended dvd makes more sense to an unenlightened, non-book-reading type like me, maybe i'd get that instead of the normal version. but at the same time, i couldn't help but be left with the feeling of having a discussion in english class for which i'd not done the reading...

proof that orange alerts don't mean jack shit to everyday people: at 2330 this evening, i walked into my office with a small package wrapped in brown paper, said hi to the security guard and briskly walked upstairs. one minute later, i walked out, sans brown package. now, the fact that it was a page-a-day calendar for a colleague (which i'd forgotten to bring earlier today before i left for the holidays) aside, don't you think that should have caused some suspicion?

joyeux noel, tout la monde

so, i'm on phones for four hours this morning, so i'm reading slashdot while talking to people. the thread they had on the big dig is fucking hilarious. it's amazing how many times people can say that the federal government only paid for some of the original estimate of 2.6 billion dollars, and that the remaining 13 or so billion were borne entirely by the citizens of massachusetts, and people still decry it as a waste of the country's money. fuck all those people. seriously. my parents' commute generally is to logan airport probably one day a week (averaged annually). when i first moved here, i remember sitting in the sumner tunnel for two hours because it dumped you at an intersection with a couple of traffic lights while you did a U-turn around and under the supports of the central artery to get on and sit in another traffic jam. the fact that they no longer have to do that makes it worth it to me. seriously. it takes 15 minutes to get to the airport from newton now at rush hour (and just 10 to get to the harpoon brewery to load up on growlers!). it used to take up to an hour. the big dig was corrupt and overpriced, but that has no bearing on whether or not it was worthwhile. it's an amazing thing, and i consider my tax dollars well-spent indeed. i'd like to think that if, say, texas, decided to build some huge, ambitious, but profoundly necessary highway project, i'd not begrudge it to them, and be equally interested in whatever pbs documentaries came of it. it's just too bad they won't give tours of it after it opens, like the hoover dam or something. judging by the popularity of the ones offered before it opened, they could probably recoup some of the costs that way...

big dig pictures (old)

i hear we're on orange alert all of a sudden. how festive. 'course, work's been on red alert for a few days now.

indeed, we've made slashdot and cnet with our little boo-boo. so, we sent out an email about it on wednesday night, and at the same time made preparations to deal with the influx of calls on thursday. we re-redid the phone tree (we had just put the new call center in you-know-where on live on tuesday) so as to make it possible for them to get right through to a special queue just for this issue. i had the pleasure of manning this queue for nearly six hours on thursday. in the first three hours of the day, we took 180 calls on this issue alone; literally one every minute.

all in all, we've gotten off pretty easily so far, though, considering the magnitude of the blunder. callers have by and large been very understanding, and also appreciative of our diligence in making arrangements for a fix. it was literally discovered on the 12th, and publicized practically as soon as it was confirmed. so, much as we tend to hear from only the bad apples and squeaky wheels, by and large, people have been pretty cool about this. particularly given the magnitude of the problem. but we do already have a fix for one, and this week we'll have another. the thing is, while it warms the cockles of my heart to know that the huge effort we've made is appreciated, i don't know how many people have heard about it yet. two years too late, we've still got people using one of two different outdated license codes to call us, since they've been living under a rock and not checking their email. but now we've got just the thing to get them out from under it, don't we? the important thing is, i'm going to be in another state the weekend it all blows up.

anyway, i've probably said too much, but it's not as if i give a fuck anyway. i think i'm coming down with something. it's the most wonderful time of the year. yesterday, some dickhead ran into me with his shopping cart in the grocery store. twice. he'd already pushed me into the conveyor belt, and the cashier was still bagging the lady in front of me's purchases. perhaps this fucker thought that his looking at his watch and asking his fur-covered wife if they were going to make it would prevail upon me to just step aside and let him cut. it was so bad that the cashier noticed it, and pointed out to me that he really seemed not to like me. i fucking hate people.

today (or is it tomorrow?) is the shortest day of the year. it's both a wonderful thing and a sad thing. i like the fact that it's so dark out, but i don't so much like the fact that it's just going to get lighter from here. bah. Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun...

but the darkness matches well the funk i've been in lately. i'll spare y'all the introspective crap that gives bloggers a bad name. but in short, i've been in a bad mood lately. so i apologize for that to those i've been uncommonly surly or antisocial to lately. anyway. merry x-mas.

outPost is a Cocoa-based NCL toolpath postprocessor for ANSI standard CL (cutter location) files. This is my first real programming project since CS 1 in college, and is considerably beyond that. If anyone finds it useful, that will be very exciting, but otherwise, it's strictly for my own amusement. The fact that i am amused by such things might perhaps be considered a little disturbing, however.

DISCLAIMER:Though i am currently employed by PTC, and though this program was designed with Pro/ENGINEER-generated CL data in mind, it does not use any inside knowledge of PTC's products. Neither is it based in any way on the inner workings of Intercim's GPOST software, which i also work with extensively. if i were copying something from either source, trust me, this wouldn't suck so much. In fact, there are many ways (excluding the ways in which this program doesn't yet work) in which it works very differently. It's designed around Pro/ENGINEER CL data, to produce standard G-Code output, both formats of which are very much common knowledge. So there. Short version: please don't sue me.

As of the latest version, outPost works reliably and predictably, and generates decent-looking G-code. Which is not to say i recommend using it for production (not without some serious vetting of the G-code), but it can generate code with support for most major functions of 3-axis work. Just be sure you know what you're doing before you use it.

Version 1214 is now available, with no new features yet, but a thoroughly redefined, and considerably more logical interface. The function of editing the postprocessor configuration (the document) has been made distinct from the function of using the postprocessor. Everything happens faster. The input and output are now in text views instead of oversized fields. The interface has been updated to not look hideous in Panther. Check the readme for more details.

Downloads:
outPost version 1214 zip file
Source code as a ProjectBuilder project
Read Me file.

i expect to have more time to work on this in the coming months. Look for syntax highlighting in the output, better support for TRANS/ROTATE output, informative help files, and other stuff in the future. The source is presently a nightmare, since there's a ton of stuff that is half-implemented, or implemented and not working, and therefore commented out.

Questions? Comments? Flames? Email me

those of you who've hung out with me at any time in the past month and a half have probably grown completely sick of me waxing poetic about halo. i had the opportunity to beta-test the macintosh version of it, and since it just recently shipped, i'm guessing it's okay to blab about how wonderful it is here. did i mention that i liked it? yeah. oooh yeah. for the first time in a few years, i feel an overwhelming need to upgrade my computer to play a game better. it's a good feeling, in a sick kind of way. now, is the radeon 9800 the way to go or the G4/1.47GHz board the way to go? the long and the short of it is, it's real nice to be immersed in the marathon universe again...

in other news, in between helping out with the beta test effort and writing my novel, i've actually revisited my program outpost. it's been seriously fixed to make it look less horrible in panther, and oh, as a bonus, it also is many times faster. i've spent the past 10 or so hours of work on it attempting to get syntax highlighting to work, and i've finally made some process with that, but it's way not done yet.

finally, i've been using my powerbook to teach stuff at work again, and the reaction of the people in the classes to the first time i used expose to switch from pro/e to powerpoint was pretty damn funny.

frog blast the vent core...

according to the commonwealth of massachusetts' webpage, i have until 11 february 2004 to register a party affiliation for the state presidential primary. the question is, precisely how much do i care. this is a problem, though, because i do give a damn; but i don't know if i give enough of a damn to actually register as a democrat. i'm not exactly sure i am a democrat, is the thing. there's plenty they do that i feel is utterly stupid, it's just that there's an order of magnitude less of that on average than republicans have.

so yeah, i kinda do feel that it's important to vote, which of course is pretty obvious. but moreover, it's hard not to feel like a good part of the result in november 2004 will be decided earlier that year. some would say, however, that it's already been decided, that howard dean has already won. i really hope not, though. that's not to say i wouldn't vote for him if it came to that, but unlike the rest of the internet, i don't really see much of a reason for the rest of the country to vote for him. and it's possible that i'm missing something, too, but really, after reading about him, i'm really not sure why he's being hailed as the savior of progressive voters of all stripes. i just plain don't get it.

so, i mean, what are the differences, policy-wise. after a bit of research, it seems that the major candidates are pretty similar when it comes to health care, for one. most of them favor either repealing the bush tax cut, or better yet, reorganizing the tax cuts so as to not fuck over the middle class (this is one thing that kerry has said he'd do), and to make the rich actually, you know, pay some taxes. they're all so much better than bush on the environment as to make any of them a humongous improvement (check this link for more). so really, none of them are going to be a bad thing, compared to bush. so what is this decisive thing, this je ne sais quoi that seems to have gotten three out of four bloggers, salon, and the major news outlets to think howard dean is the greatest thing since sliced bread? i honestly don't get it. i don't see it. i don't understand it in the least. i tried, i'd hoped that the globe's excellent profile series might've explained it. there was a good article on him in newsweek or time or something a while ago, but that was just about him running. not anything of substance. so i still kinda just don't know what's the deal with him except he's pissed.

as i've read it, the decisive thing about governor dean has been his anger, his outspokenness about the suckiness of the war. great. he's pissed. i get that. and so are we. and he speaks to that, but there's got to be more. there really needs to be more than just an unswerving opposition to the war, because once he gets off the internet and out of the realm of people who spend their entire time thinking about politics, he's going to have to convince people that were once convinced that the war was good, and now are thinking of switching sides due to dubya's poor treatment of their boys overseas. just lashing out at the war isn't going to be enough, though. 'cause the thing is, for all his vaunted opposition, really, what's the big deal about it. he wasn't even governor at the time, he was just a candidate, so really he'd nothing to lose by speaking out. and he's used this consistency of opposition to compare other candidates' statements unfavorably to his own. the thing is, most of them had something to lose. if they voted against the war (and pretty much everyone didn't), they ran the risk of being painted soft on terrorism (look what happened to sen. max cleland). they had something to lose, they had to decide if giving the president of the united states the benefit of the doubt or not was worth putting every other form of service to their constituency at risk. dean had nothing to lose, so then tell me, why the hell is he sainted for being an angry voice?

now, i won't pretend i'm impartial. the reason i'm toying with registering as a democrat is because i'm firmly convinced that john kerry's the man for the job. unfortunately, he's run an absolutely terrible campaign. it's really unfortunate that this guy's resume has not received the publicity that it really deserves. his qualfications stand alone (read the 'fuck' interview in rolling stone for a good synopsis)--he's been involved in so much that he begins to sound like a fictional character. an actual war hero who was pivotal in the movement against the war (so much so that nixon wanted something done about him), he was also one of the first to go after the iran-contra thing, and also the savings and loan mess. and what's really a shame is that you don't really hear anything about him at this point besides the words 'aloof' and 'former front-runner'. he's got a distinguished record on the environment in particular, and also doesn't have an 'a' rating from the damned nra. seriously, go read his explanation for why he voted in favor of authorizing force in iraq. it doesn't make a good sound bite, and i still think it was a mistake, but it's understandable, it's defensible, and it was the same decision a lot of legislators made. of course, kerry has the distinct disadvantage of being from massachusetts. for some reason, the rest of the country doesn't like us. but vermont's no better (indeed, both states are probably known by some by being far too tolerant of gay marriage). and kerry has arguably better credentials than clark, with his military experience. so like i said, i totally think it's a crying shame that he's run such a shitty campaign. it's almost identical to what al gore did in 2000; clearly the best-qualified man for the job, he ran a listless campaign, and allowed himself to be dogged by single-word stereotypes such as 'arrogant' or 'stiff' that eclipsed truth about him. the same has happened to kerry, and it's a damned shame, it's really unfortunate. so count me off the howard dean bandwagon for now. it's great, it's truly wonderful that he's energized so many people, but the thing is, those energized people don't necessarily count for three people against bush. he's going to need to earn some votes from people who aren't on the bandwagon, and i'm not sure what's behind the hype. if there's something i'm missing, some article that sums it up concisely, someone point me to it.

phew.

given how warm it had been up until the last week or so, ihad beenmildly concerned that this might be a pathetic and wussy winter. happily, though, there's a kickass storm going on now. and of course, i was compelled to go out skiing. people look at you very funny, of course, when you get on the T with cross-country skis. but despite my typical misanthropy, its quite amazing how friendly people become when there's snow falling. everybody says hello, people frolic randomly in the plow-drifts, and the usual psychosis that besets most people this time of year is gone for a while. there was a group of brazilians that actually wanted to pose for a picture with me in the public garden (i was confused by this, to say the least). shiny happy people everywhere. but anyway, it's always fun to go out exploring, and it's especially nice to ski around downtown in the snow, especially when it's snowing hard. because that way, freshly plowed streets get the perfect covering of snow to make for an excellent skiing surface. all you have to do is put the ipod on shuffle and swish your way down the street. 'course, not everything was perfect. the snow was too deep along the river to make good progress, and it was blowing so hard off the charles as to cover the entire left side of my face in ice. i kinda felt like han solo's tauntaun. i was picking ice out of my hair two hours later. always have a beard when you're going out in the snow for a while. good stuff.

anyway, my camera cheated death again today (it was making really cool grinding noises when extending and retracting the lens for a while), so i took pictures.

i'm an idiot. i figured out what was wrong with my program, and what a shock, i think it was me. so, having survived nanowrimo, i sat down to install xcode for panther, and as i said last time, my behemoth document code (well, it's the most complex thing i've ever written, even if that don't say much) suddenly failed to compile, catastrophically. it seemed like every variable was suddenly complaining it wasn't declared. turns out that wasn't quite true. the only ones that were puking were the ones that i tossed in the declarations for midstream. i kinda assumed when i was writing it that that was bad technique, and i'd intended to clean it up, but stuff happened. but it would seem that now it's intolerable to the compiler. anyway, maybe i'll now be able to update the stupid thing again. so, it worked before, though. is what i did really that bad? is this something i'd know if i'd taken more than 3 credits of programming in college?

in other news, i finally broke down and bought a gamecube, and my initial opinion of the game that was the reason i bought it was one of disappointment. that is, of course, until i managed to unlock the special cup. the courses in the first three are by and large unremarkable (dk mountain is wicked cool, though, as are the city levels), but the ones in the fourth grand prix cup are awesome. i particularly like the wario colosseum. good stuff. the gamecube overall is pretty nice. it's quite agreeably small, and i like the controller a lot (especially the wireless one). i also got a copy of tony hawk 3, because it was $10, and i liked the demo of 2. it's also good stuff, which is kinda funny because i've never set foot on a skateboard (this is why i'm still alive).

espn has an interesting article on whether or not the sox-yanks rivalry is good for baseball. a lot of revisionist crap, and by and large derogatory toward the olde towne team. the general thrust of the article is that with so much coverage of it, does the rest of the country even give a fuck about the rivalry. an interesting theory, but it just plain doesn't bear out, given that in roughly 3/4 of the stadiums they visit, you can frequently hear more red sox fans than those of the home team. and apparently, the yankees and the cubs draw even more fans on the road. so i think it's safe to say the rest of the country does in fact care. is it good for baseball? well, that's a harder question. but surely all this talk of baseball in the height of football season suggests something...

oh, and before i forget, all three of you, tune into tracey's radio show tomorrow at 8am on wtbu, because i'll be making a guest appearance. i don't know if there will be anything like the 'mr. sparkle incident', but we will nevertheless aim to entertain...