Blog
Will Faught
October 2008
I first heard the song Name Of The Game by Crystal Method in the movie Tropic Thunder. It’s an awesome song and it’s great to play on a loop because the end and beginning meld together pretty well. I’m jamming to it right now.
announcements crystal method life loop name of the game song
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My cat has been sneezing frequently for the past week or so. Is that a problem? Any cat experts out there? Damn, I thought sneeze was spelled “sneaze.”
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I saw the movie Blindness this evening with Heather. The characters were believable, the pacing was good, the plot was somewhat unoriginal and obvious, and there were a couple great effects, although the whiteout effect is overused. It’s quite good overall. The main character annoyed me in the wards where she didn’t use her sight more to her advantage. How about just taking the gun from the leader when he’s not looking?
blindness life movie reflections review
2 minutes
September 2008
Recently a paragraph I had written was described as a “grievous offender.” It’s such a colorful phrase that I’m not even shamed by it.
feedback grievous life offender reflections thesis
1 minute
I’m very intrigued by alpha and beta versions of video games. It’s fascinating to see early incarnations of the final product. It’s like discovering a secret world, the backstage of the game world, that few actually witness. Granted, most of it is rough draft quality and incomplete, but it’s always interesting to see what might have been. You can find tons of screen shots and videos of alpha and beta versions of one of my favorite games, The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time.
alpha beta ideas life reality video games zelda
2 minutes
This Life Brought To You By Toyota
I went with Heather to Discovery Kingdom (formerly Marine World) in Vallejo last weekend. We had a lot of fun. They have several roller coasters in addition to the animal displays and shows that make for an entertaining time. I was surprised at how commercialized it was, though. There were ads everywhere you looked. It seemed like everything was sponsored or brought to us by companies other than Six Flags. They even interrupted the whale show for a thirty second Toyota commercial to play on the jumbo video screen!
animals commercials discovery kingdom life marine world reflections roller coasters six flags sponsors toyota vallejo
1 minute
Human Works As Phallic Symbols
From time to time I hear people characterize human works as phallic symbols, as if the single unifying motivation for the (assumed) men who created these things were their penises. Do people really buy into that kind of Freudian analysis? The more reasonable explanation, in my opinion, is that things worth constructing, like buildings, tools, and monuments, occupy volume and thus take up space, stand above ground, and are probably tall.
freud human life phallic phallus reflections symbolism symbols works
1 minute
Every word in a title should be capitalized. It’s an acceptable form of capitalization and it’s super easy to remember. I don’t understand why most people don’t do it that way. Otherwise you have to memorize all these exceptions for which words can and can’t be capitalized. Who can remember all of that? What about “in,” “to,” or “on?” It’s just not obvious. It’s like putting a comma after the second-to-last item in a list.
capitalization commas english life lists reflections titles
1 minute
Wordpress Question And Feature Request
I don’t understand the difference between categories and tags. Why can’t I just have tags? Having categories makes me try to come up with two dozen descriptive things that I could possibly write about. Tags I can come up with as I go. Also, where’s the automatic upgrade feature? Selective copying is not cool.
categories life reflections tags upgrading wordpress
1 minute
Windows has a way of getting under my skin that no other operating system can. It has a unique blend of interface freezing, printer problems, entropy, and slowdown. It drives me crazy. Actually, on the interface freezing, I’ve noticed that most major OS interfaces experience slow down. Is it so hard to give precedence to windows, widgets, and the mouse? Gah. I’m actually surprised more people haven’t caught onto the fact that life on Mac OS is simpler.
life operating system problems reflections slow windows
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August 2008
It’s been so great to be home these past few weeks. Before I came here I was working on my thesis every day, worrying about it, stressed out, cranky, crazy. That’s no way to live. For the first couple weeks back I didn’t really think about the work much and it was heaven. I can’t believe how much stress can take over your life and make you miserable. I should probably look into ways of dealing with my stress, because I was not going about it in a healthy way.
home life reflections stress thesis
2 minutes
Ah! It’s good to be done with that. It was such a burden, having that hanging over my head. Kind of like the ring of power, except not really cool, or gold. Looking back, I can’t believe how long it took to write. Sadly, there’s still more to do, too. I’m waiting to get feedback from my adviser, after which I’ll probably have to make some changes. I still have to finish up a coding project that goes along with the thesis document, but hopefully that won’t be too much more work.
announcements friends life slo summer thesis
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July 2008
Ikkyu, the Zen master, was very clever even as a boy. His teacher had a precious teacup, a rare antique. Ikkyu happened to break this cup and was greatly perplexed. Hearing the footsteps of his teacher, he held the pieces of the cup behind him. When the master appeared, Ikkyu asked: “Why do people have to die?” “This is natural,” explained the older man. “Everything has to die and has just so long to live.
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The Most Valuable Thing In The World
Sozan, a Chinese Zen master, was asked by a student: “What is the most valuable thing in the world?” The master replied: “The head of a dead cat.” “Why is the head of a dead cat the most valuable thing in the world?” inquired the student. Sozan replied: “Because no one can name its price.” From Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
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Apple Boss: Hey font guy, are you done yet so we can fire you? Apple Font Guy: Err…no! I still have to do the…um…Braille font! Yeah, and the…um…Cherokee font! I’ll get back to you.
apple braille cherokee fonts life reflections
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I’m going to puke if I read about “the cloud” or “cloud computing” one more time. It’s become popular in the past half year but it doesn’t describe anything new. Sometimes the computer tech industry has more ridiculous fads than fashion.
cloud computing fad life reflections
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I went to the Pismo fireworks show for the Fourth of July with Esther. I had never been before, but our timing was perfect. It was pretty cool, there were tons of people there, on the street near Splash and on the beach on either side of the pier. The place was pretty well lighted and there was plenty of space to sit on the beach. The fireworks were launched from the end of the pier and they seemed to explode pretty close to the ground.
barbecue beach esther fireworks fourth of july independence day life pier pismo stories
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June 2008
The SLO heat wave has thankfully faded away. I think it’s safe to remove my lemonade IV drip now. I don’t think I could have taken another day of 100+ degree heat. It’s terrible when it’s so hot you sweat without even moving. I envy Hawaiians, you can get away with walking around in your swim suit in public all day long without drawing strange looks. I’ve always favored hot weather over cold, but I guess it’s true that it’s easier to overcome cold than heat.
camping heat wave hot life reflections
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I’ve started learning a theorem proving tool to help me with my thesis. It’s called Coq, which has got to be the most unfortunate name I can think of. I think the creators are French, and coq means cock, as in rooster, in French. Why rooster? I have no idea. Why does anyone name anything what they do? I wonder which seemingly-innocent English words mean something equally awkward in other languages?
coq english french life reflections thesis
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I saw The Incredible Hulk tonight and it was pretty much what I expected: light on story, heavy on action. The action scenes looked great, especially the scene on a campus. The end action scene looked too CGI-ish and I kept noticing it. I was looking forward to seeing another movie with Edward Norton in it since he’s usually good (Fight Club!), but he seemed kind of wasted on this movie.
domain names edward norton life movie reflections the incredible hulk
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Battlestar Galactica is the best TV show I watch right now. It never fails to entertain. God I love that show. The mid-season finale had an incredible ending. I think it’s a better show than Lost, even though I consider Lost my favorite show. BSG is a remake of a TV show made decades ago, but they completely transformed it. The writing is incredible. Do yourself a favor and check it out.
battlestar galactica finale life reflections show tv
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From Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs: In a similar way, we can regard the evaluator as a very special machine that takes as input a description of a machine. Given this input, the evaluator configures itself to emulate the machine described. For example, if we feed our evaluator the definition of factorial, the evaluator will be able to compute factorials. From this perspective, our evaluator is seen to be a universal machine.
life lisp reflections universal machine
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I can’t believe graduation came and went already, it all happened so fast. I was so focused on my thesis work that I barely lifted my head to watch the date approach. It’s weird to go through the ceremony and celebrate with friends and family knowing that I’m not really done, that there’s more work to do. But I feel close, I think there’s only a few weeks left before I’m done.
graduation kung fu panda life michelle lee movie reflections
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April 2008
Some people like to work on their computers with the lights off, and I can’t for the life of me understand why or come to like it. You can’t very well see the keyboard, your desk, or anything really. You have to squint into a bright light bulb for hours at a time, which I’ve heard isn’t good for your eyes, and it doesn’t seem to actually make the monitor easier to look at.
dark life lights office reflections
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When a TV show loses an actor or actress, the writers have to replace their character with a new one and make sure it’s all consistent with the plot. This takes valuable time away from what could have otherwise been a kick-ass space battle. I’d be too impatient to artfully work around a change in cast. I wonder if you could get away with doing a half-assed job of replacing the actor or actress but essentially keep the character the same.
actor actress kick-ass space battle life plot reflections tv
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The State Of Operating Systems
Today’s operating systems are horribly out of date. They all follow the same process and file descriptor model and never really change. They may add new services or interfaces over time, but never do their core program semantics change enough to break backwards compatibility. They all follow the process and file descriptor model, where processes are conceptually functions that map input values to output values and file descriptors conceptually compose functions by connecting function outputs to function inputs (also known as filtering).
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It’s a shame how much software is rewritten all the time. Incompatibilities of language, interface, and execution platform and the proprietary nature of most software development seem to have doomed us to forever reinvent the software wheel. The number of linked list implementations out there must be staggering. In a perfect world, someone would decide a linked list would be a nice thing and implement it, and then everyone else would use that one implementation from then on.
incompatibility interoperability life modularity reflections reuse software
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Damn this San Luis Obispo weather! It’s always stabbing me in the back. It was supposed to be 65 degrees today, it’s actually 61 degrees right now, but I’m hot as hell in these pants, shoes, and long-sleeved shirt. I can’t win.
cold hot life reflections uncomfortable weather
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March 2008
I bought the Nintendo Wii game Super Mario Galaxy when it was released and I’ve almost finished it (ten stars left to get). It’s a superb game, with beautifully-executed graphics, sound, game play, and level design (IGN gave it 9.7/10). It’s the best game on Wii right now and I’d recommend it to anyone who liked other Mario games or wants to see the Wii controls done right. However, it does have a couple faults.
camera level design life nintendo reflections review super mario galaxy wii
3 minutes
This year is the first time I’ve been in charge of paying an electricity bill. Even though the bill is split four ways, I alone seem to go out of my way to turn off unused lights and electronics. I don’t go so far as patrolling the halls, but sometimes I feel like you could stand outside and see where I am in the house by the windows that go dark.
electricity bill life pay reflections
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I gave a fifty-minute lecture on the lambda calculus for a class last week. It was a topic I understood very well, but had never taught to someone else before. The length of the lecture was daunting enough, but I was surprised at how difficult it was to create a lesson plan. I could clearly see the ideas and their implications in my mind’s eye, but it was hard to impose an order and a rationale on them that would make sense from the perspective of someone new to the material.
hard lambda calculus life reflections teachers teaching
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February 2008
Your Phone Conversation Annoys Me
When I answer the phone, I usually move into another room for privacy and so I won’t distract others. This seems natural and reasonable to me. I talk in a normal tone and no one has ever complained that they couldn’t hear me. Others seem to either think differently or don’t realize they’re being obnoxious. They’ll sit right next to me and carry on their one-sided conversations at a heightened volume.
annoying conversation life phone reflections rude
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Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of the programming language PHP, came to Cal Poly yesterday to give a two-hour lecture on PHP and related web technologies. I didn’t know anything about him, but I was pleased to find he’s a very intelligent, pragmatic, and humorous person. He spoke at length about the transition of PHP into an open source project, the evolution of the language, and some security and performance topics that I found very interesting.
cal poly javascript languages life php programming rasmus lerdorf reflections web yahoo yui
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I was in Seattle last night. I had planned to fly home to San Luis Obispo at 7:20 PM and ultimately arrive at around midnight. But the fates had other plans. Katherine dropped me off at my hotel and I was already running late. I ran through the glass doors, up the stairs, and entered the elevator. The elevators there required guests to slide their room keys to operate them. Judging by the title of this post, can you guess if my key worked?
delay flight katherine life microsoft seattle slo stories
3 minutes
January 2008
It seems to me that political debates nowadays are a waste of time. Two people come together to debate an issue and wind up either talking about different things or don’t address what the other person is saying, much less provide concrete support for their arguments. There’s just too many tricks to fudge your way out of really committing to something and sticking to it. I blame the dependence of our electoral process on audio/video media.
arguments debate discourse discussion elections ideas life online politics words
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I see backticks (`) used quite frequently as an opening quotation mark online and in program output, as in “You named it `Carl’ “. Is this some kind of quiet leet development that people don’t talk about but just pick up, like slang?
backticks latex leet life quoting reflections
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LaTeX is a tool used almost exclusively for formatting academic Computer Science papers. Instead of formatting your paper through traditional what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) means, LaTeX is a markup language that is interpreted and formatted for you. For example, instead of highlighting a word and clicking a bold button to make the font bold, e.g. bold, you embed a markup notation that is transformed into the intended formatting at the end, e.g. \textbf{bold}.
bad documents latex life reflections wysiwyg
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James Koman recently wrote an opinion article in the Mustang Daily, the student newspaper of Cal Poly, entitled Why I hate white people. The article contains very racist and ignorant thoughts about white people, in case you couldn’t tell from the title. The newspaper was flooded with protesting letters to the editor in the following days. I just read the article and found the last sentence amusing, which is ironic since the rest of the article wasn’t:
cal poly ignorant james koman life mustang daily quotations racist reflections
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I threw my back out in class today. I sat down and felt something go. I’m writing this with only my left hand, so I’ll be brief. Ouch! How old am I? God. I can hardly move without sending a spasm of pain down my back. Okay, I just slowly and painfully and switched into a crossed-legged sitting position that feels pretty good on my back, once I settled into it, so now I can type with two hands.
back bus class life stories threw
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December 2007
Computer Science Is Not Science
Is Computer Science really a science? Computer scientists don’t apply the scientific method. Testing is currently essential for implementing software correctly, but only because we’re either too lazy or incapable of verifying correctness beforehand due to the extreme complexity of the systems and tools we use. It all boils down to manipulating an abstract machine, in most cases a register machine, which is a mathematical construct. The colors that appear on your monitor and the data written to your hard drive are merely side effects of the mathematical operations we compute.
abstract machine computer science ideas life mathematics register machine scientific method
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I’ve had an idea for a story for a while now that I think would be pretty interesting to write. In the future, a computerized virtual world would be accessible to most people like a utility, much like the internet. Users could interact with the virtual world like a virtual reality game, where your sight and hearing are tuned to the virtual world, not the real one. Its use has become so pervasive that people do many things in the virtual world that are currently done in the real world, such as playing games, meeting people, conducting business, collaborating, performing financial transactions, etc.
economics factions game ideas life story virtual world
2 minutes
It seems to me that large wildfires like that of southern California are unavoidable. I’m not an expert, but it’s my understanding that wildfires are a natural phenomenon that play a useful role in the life cycle of the environment. They can clear out thick underbrush and smaller trees that can come to choke larger trees and in doing so they enrich the soil with the ashes they leave behind. In fact, Yellowstone has a policy of letting small natural fires burn freely because its management recognizes these benefits.
california containment ideas life reflections underbrush wildfires yellowstone
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Damn it! I was just sitting here, watching the end of Return of the Jedi on TV. You know, the party on Endor after the big climax where the music plays and they’re all dancing and hugging. They changed the ending! The music was much quieter and less energetic and they now have that dude who plays Anakin in Episodes 1-3 standing there as a ghost instead of the older version of himself.
anakin bad changed ending george lucas ghost life music reflections south park star wars
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Just In Case I Have To Kill My Dinner
I went to a shooting range several weeks ago for my friend Jose’s birthday. I had never been to a firing range before. There were about ten of us and the range was divided into five lanes. Each lane had a different pistol and boxes of ammunition that you used to reload the weapon when it was your turn. I had never fired a pistol before, but I was still surprised at how nervous I was to fire a pistol.
birthday guns jose life pistols shooting range stories
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The Christmas card poem that didn’t make it: Greetings Bill and Maria! I had a great idea To send you my love via … I’m writing this in a pizzeria In a galleria in South Korea I hope I don’t get diarrhea In their bathroom I could get gonorrhea
bill card christmas ideas life maria poem quotations
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November 2007
I’ve been doing a lot of Java development with Eclipse this past quarter and this past summer. Eclipse has a really neat code formatting tool that you can kick off with a quick Ctrl-Shift-F or Command-F to tidy up your code. When I use Eclipse, I regularly format my code along with saving it. Now I find myself reaching for the format shortcut when I write for my fiction writing class.
eclipse format java life reflections
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I finished the game Portal a little while ago. I think it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. The game play is very original and exciting and offers many opportunities to stump us with environmental puzzles and brain teasers. But on top of that, the writers have infused it with a sense of humor I’ve never seen before in a game that totally works. At times it’s subtle and at other times it’s hilarious.
game half-life 2 life portal reflections review valve
3 minutes
October 2007
IPod Video Transcoding In Linux
I’ve cobbled together a pretty good tool for transcoding video in pretty much any format into the MPEG-4 format that iPods play. You have to have the VLC media player installed because it does the actual transcoding. So in other words, I’ve researched a program that was already out there and made an easy wrapper script. Damn I’m smart. Yay modularity! Seriously though, there aren’t a lot of guides out there that are easy to follow.
ideas ipod life linux mpeg-4 transcoding ubuntu video vlc
1 minute
Congress is concerned that peer-to-peer networks may make users susceptible to identity theft. Apparently, some users share their sensitive information with others and then get upset when their identities are stolen. That’s Darwin at his finest, in my opinion. Why does Congress have to fix things that aren’t broken? Users have to explicitly choose to publish files to the network, be it the web or a peer-to-peer network. What the peer-to-peer program shares by default is irrelevant; the burden is on the user to understand what they’re doing.
bittorrent congress identity theft internet life p2p reflections
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