Beware of the ‘Black Swan’ fallacy. Deductive logic is tautological; there is no way to get a new truth out of it, and it manipulates false statements as readily as true ones. If you fail to remember this, it can trip you – with perfect logic. The designers of the earliest computers called this the ‘Gigo Law,’ i.e., ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’

Inductive logic is much more difficult – but can produce new truths.

—Lazarus Long


The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising

January 24th, 2012

CyanogenMOD, the third-party, fully-open, bloatware-free port of Android, has recently passed a million installs. And there’s talk of creating an underground Market app for CyanogenMOD to distribute apps that the cell carriers and the MPAA/RIAA don’t want you to have.

Set this against Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil new Eula for iBooks, and it couldn’t be clearer what the ultimate stakes in the smartphone wars are.

Even in the short term, CynogenMOD’s numbers, and the plan for the Underground Market, and the wideapread revulsion against the iBooks EULA are a big deal – they’re going to crank up the pressure on cell carriers and various other malefactors in interesting ways. But maybe the most important thing CyanogenMOD’s numbers tell us is that there is, in fact, a mass market for freedom.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another bite of the reposturgeon

January 23rd, 2012

Five weeks ago I wrote that direct Subversion support in reposurgeon is coming soon. I’m waiting on one final acceptance test before I ship an official 2.0; in the meantime, for those of you kinky enough to find the details exciting, description follows of why this feature has required such a protracted and epic struggle. With (perhaps entertaining) rambling through the ontology of version control systems, and at least one lesson about good software engineering practice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Site statistics are enabled

January 20th, 2012

I finally got around to installing a site statistics plugin on this blog, about 20 minutes ago. There have since been 94 views.

I’m mainly interested in the order of magnitude. Do I have 1K readers per day? 10K?, 100K? My wild-ass guess is on the order of 10K. Now we’ll see.

Hollywood vs. Obama

January 19th, 2012

The huge groundswell of opposition to SOPA and PIPA is having some interesting ripple effects. Barack Obama announced he would veto these bills if they came to his desk, and now it seems that Hollywood is pissed off over this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Calling all hackerspaces

January 15th, 2012

This is a shout out to all hackerspaces and engineering schools within easy reach of Philadelphia. I’ve got a nice little design-and-build project that would do the world some good, but I don’t have the skills or facilities to do it myself.

The problem: build a ruggedized special-purpose test enclosure to be mounted on a roof or utility pole and host a bunch of GPS sensors. The tricky part is that it needs to be outside and not under top cover (for good skyview) and thus weatherproof, but also transparent to the GPS radio frequencies. Another part of the design problem is getting data and power cabling back to my development computer.

UPDATE: I’m now pursuing a different path – trying to figure out how to build a GPS repeater on the cheap so I can effectively pipe the RF from a roof antenna to be retransmitted in my office. This has the obvious advantage that the GPS test rack will be able to live inside, near my desk, rather than outside in an enclosure that can only be reached with a ladder. So now I’m looking for a hackerspace frequented by radio hams.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sugar is in ultrasound health

January 15th, 2012

This is a status update for those of you among my regulars who have been following the saga of Sugar, our cat. She had her 90-day followup ultrasound today.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Smartphone Wars: Dinosaurs mating?

January 5th, 2012

Just when you thought the smartphone industry couldn’t get any more soap-operatic, everybody’s favorite pair of aging drama queens – Microsoft and Nokia – may be at it again. There’s a rumor, from a gossip with a good track record, that Microsoft intends to buy Nokia’s Smartphone division.

Read the rest of this entry »

Through a mirror, darkly

January 3rd, 2012

Today the New York Times is carrying a story on Chinese fears of “cultural encirclement”.

“We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Mr. Hu said. “We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond,” he added.

This quote reminds us of something too easily forgotten, which is that Communists have always taken ideological struggle seriously. Communist theory teaches them to believe that the most effective way to break the will of the opposition is to de-legitimize its ruling class, degrade its culture, destroy its confidence in its own institutions and its own way of life.

Hu Jintao believes that the West is waging a conscious memetic war against Communist China – because he knows that Communists including himself have been waging a conscious memetic war against Western civilization since the 1840s. Sadly, this is not yesterday’s news.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism

December 29th, 2011

One of the recurring features of American intellectual life is hand-wringing over “anti-intellectualism” by, of course, intellectuals.

One of my regular commenters has pointed out that the term and concept of anti-intellectualism are used to describe several distinct phenomena that are relatively easily confused. He’s right, and I think it could bring some clarity to the murkier corners of the culture wars to develop the point.

Note: The term “intellectual” is not infrequently applied to me. By the end of this essay it should be clear why, though I recognize the justice in that application, I’m not completely happy with it.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Smartphone Wars: a bit of Christmas cheer

December 28th, 2011

On Google+, Andy Rubin reports: “There were 3.7M Android activations on 12/24 and 12/25.”

That’s a 170% spike over the 700K activations per-day Rubin announced on 20 Dec. I’ve previously observed that only about 1 in 10 of Android activations show up in the smartphone statistics for the U.S. so Android is probably looking at about 370K new U.S. smartphone users for Christmas, the way comScore counts them.

I’m guessing Apple won’t be releasing the corresponding number, because on previous trends it would only be about 185K Christmas users for their smartphone – and that wouldn’t look good. Well, it could be worse; they could be RIM.

UPDATE: My spike-percentage calculation was wrong. Way too low.

A Christmas cat

December 25th, 2011

The best Yule present my wife and I are getting this year is that our beloved cat Sugar is not dying.

Read the rest of this entry »

Are threads still a menace?

December 21st, 2011

An interesting question question showed up in my mailbox today. So interesting that I think it’s worth a public answer and discussion:

In chapter 7 of The Art of Unix Programming, you classified threads under the section “Problems and Methods to Avoid”. You also wrote that with the increased emphasis on thread-local storage, threads are looking more like a controlled use of shared memory. This trend has certainly continued; recent programming languages like D, Scala, and Go encourage the use of threads as mostly isolated lightweight processes with message passing. Observing this trend, I have often wondered, why not go all the way and use multiple OS processes? I can think of two reasons to use threads in this newer, controlled way rather than using full processes:

1. Portability to Windows, which doesn’t have an equivalent of fork(2)

2. Performance, particularly because message passing between real processes requires serialization and deserialization, whereas message passing within a process can be done with shared memory and (maybe) locks

So what do you think? Are threads still a menace to be avoided in favor of full OS processes? Or has the situation improved since 2003?

I think it has, and I think you’ve very nearly answered your own question as to why. Bare threads were dangerously prone to deadlocks, livelocks, context-trashing, and various other sorts of synchronization screwups – so language designers set out to encapsulate them in ways that gave better invariants and locality guarantees without sacrificing their performance advantages. I think Scala’s transactional memory stands out as a particularly elegant stab at the problem.

I don’t develop for Windows or communicate much with people who do, so I’m not equipped to judge how important Windows portability is in motivating these features. But the performance issue you called out is real and quite alive on Unix systems.

UPDATE: Matt Campbell, who has materialized in the comments here, send the original question and has given me permission to cite him. Thanks for a good question!

The Smartphone Wars: Andy Rubin brings the news

December 20th, 2011

Over on Google+, Andy Rubin says:

There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day…and for those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don’t count re-sold devices), and “activations” means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service.

This does clear up some points people have been wondering about, but it raises larger questions. Like, why aren’t those users showing up in the comScore statistics?

700K users per day ought to translate to about 21M a month. But Android has only been gaining 2M U.S. smartphone users and change per month. If comScore isn’t way undercounting, that implies than a bit less than 9/10ths of daily Android activations are tablets or overseas.

That percentage seems pretty high to me. But I don’t have any alternate theory.

SOPA and the oblivious

December 16th, 2011

A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away from you – including your Internet freedom.

That’s the thought that keeps running through my head as I contemplate the full-scale panic going on right now about SOPA, the “Stop Internet Piracy Act”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Coming soon: reposurgeon does Subversion

December 12th, 2011

For those of you who have been following the development of reposurgeon, a pre-announcement: the next version, probably to be numbered 2.0, will directly read Subversion dumpfiles and repositories.

I’ve got this feature working now – it’s why my blogging has been scant recently – but I intend to have a really good regression-test suite in place and at least one large repo conversion done before I ship it for general use.

Note an important limitation: it will not write Subversion repos. So it will be useful as a conversion tool but not directly as an editor.

Fear the reposturgeon!

Why I love Walmart despite never shopping there

December 3rd, 2011

In a discussion thread that wandered to the subject of Walmart and its enemies, I said “Scratch a Walmart-basher and you’ll find a snotty elitist, a person who hates capitalism and consumption and deep down thinks the Wrong People have Too Much Stuff.”

The commenter replied: “You know, I don’t think you need to be an anti-capitalist in order to disdain over-consumption and its enablers.”

No, certainly not. My own preference is to live simply, getting and spending little and putting my energy into creative work. Much of what we think of as “normal” behavior in a consumer society strikes me as wasteful and vulgar. But it’s a disdain I tend to keep quiet about, for at least two reasons:

Read the rest of this entry »

Bad at languages?

December 3rd, 2011

I had a very international childhood – lived in Venezuela and Rome and London, and visited lots of other places in Europe (Paris, Athens, Venice, Barcelona). The cause was my dad working for a multinational; the result was that I learned and forgot three languages before I was thirteen.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Smartphone Wars: A Night in the Lonesome December

December 2nd, 2011

The December comScore results are out, covering up to October 2011. I’ve updated my page on smartphone marketshare statistics.

Read the rest of this entry »

Seven Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science

November 27th, 2011

I’ve written before about scientific error cascades and the pernicious things that happen when junk science becomes the focus or rationale of a political crusade.

The worst example of this sort of thing in my lifetime, and arguably in the entire history of science, has been the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) panic. Now that the wheels are falling off that juggernaut, I’m starting to hear ordinary people around me wonder how I knew it was bullshit and hot air so much in advance…

Read the rest of this entry »

Breaking into writing

November 24th, 2011

I just tried to post this as a comment on Sarah Hoyt’s post about breaking into writing. Dunno if it went into moderation or just got eaten

Sarah, who I esteem very highly and is full of pungent and sensible advice on writing and other matters, left out two rules:

Read the rest of this entry »