Hmmm...

Reading Why Teachers Love Depressing Books--a review of Barbara Feinberg's Welcome to Lizard Motel in the Times. I find myself hoping I'm not guilty of having written a 'problem novel'. They do sound dull.

So far, the test readers don't seem to think so, anyway.

Hey, it's got swords, bows, wolves and dragons. That has to be fun, right? Even if a few people do die in it, here and there.

More seriously, I think in the books I liked best as a kid, there was lots of both anyway. That 'frisson of seriousness' always gave a book a bit of weight--a reason to care about the characters--and a good rousing spirit of adventure made their lives interesting enough to read about. And dammit, everyone's got issues. Can't see why the characters in an adventure novel shouldn't have a few of their own too.

I note also that the Rowling's Potter, the protagonist of the books an awful lot of kids clearly actually like to read, has complications enough to contend with in his life. Potter's an orphan, his step-parents are neglectful (though, granted, the treatment of the ghastly Dursleys is more comic than tragic). And Pullman's Lyra's parents are ripe for a few therapy sessions of their own.

Balance, methinks, is the ticket here--a commitment to emotional realism that doesn't kill the sense of wonder. Good books should make you cry and make you want to pick up a sword and go join the ringbearer's party.

(Heads off to remove a few abusive alcoholic parents from the plot...)

Dubya as an ADD case/Ritalin as a cure-all for US foreign policy

As someone with occasional attention span issues... erm... where was I again...?

Oh yeah. As someone with occasional attention span issues, this bitta dimestore psychoanalsysis on Dubya as a ADHD case could have almost made me like the guy...

Well, no, actually. Now that I think about it, no it couldn't. But it was mildly entertaining, all the same.

Test readers

Getting quite positive feedback from the test readers on the book (see somewhere below re my efforts to sell this thing). I've never written for the demographic before (it's a kids' book, which I suppose some of you may well find kinda a scary thought), thought I'd try to get a few readers in the presumed age range to check it out. My concerns had been it might prove to be either (a) traumatizing or (b) boring. Either, I suppose, would have been bad.

Apparently, neither is of particular concern as yet--I've got a father reading it to his 7 and 9-year old, and a 12-year old reading it for herself, and so far, the feedback's quite positive. Though the younger crowd did find one passage in the middle a bit of a snore, this wasn't entirely surprising (and I'm working on that). For the most part, apparently, they're finding it entirely exciting (good) and don't want to put it down (also good).

Now if I can only sell the accursed thing.

A few of my favourite things

Late dinner (well, they had dinner--I'd already eaten) last night with old friends in our lovely downtown neighbourhood, at the recurring potluck thingy, a table in their backyard, good highly random conversation, wind stirring the candle flames. Thanks Jenn and company for doing this thing... a few hours with old friends beneath older brick walls is essential rehab after too much time spent in aforementioned hermetically-sealed high-tech buildings.

First do no harm

See U.S. Army doctors working at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq helped design abusive interrogation methods, according to Lancet.

Paging Dr. Mengele. Dr. Mengle to the rumpus room, please...

I'm sure, of course, the folk to whom this were done were all very bad men, so it's okay, and the US has still got its ethical superiority 'n all, and won't be seen as having been dragged down into the mud with the rest of the grunting, murdering psychopaths or nuthin'.

And certainly everyone's gonna get that the folk to whom this were done were all very bad men, and it's not gonna make anyone over there mad at anybody over this. Oh no, certainly this ain't gonna go into the curriculum at the Sharia schools or anything like that, nor radicalize the five guys left in the middle East who don't hate everything about the west. Nothing to worry about there.

Doctors. Yep. There's the picture we need. Hello, angry, disenfranchised young men and potential future Islamists... The enlightened west is here, with science, syringes, and catheters. We're here to help you... Let's not anyone get seduced by any eighth-century views of justice, when the 21st century approach is obviously so much better...

Said it before, I'll say it again: if these clowns are our spokespeople for the Enlightenment, the Englightenment is pretty much doomed.

Good news/bad news re climate change

So a British research team (the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, and an Oxford guy) came up with a new method of weeding climate prediction models. Their innovation: use the models to 'predict' observed conditions, weed out the ones that get it wrong. They figure this should significantly tighten up the quality of the modelling, and thus reduce the uncertainties. That's the good news.

The bad news is the now more certain predictions are also rather scarier.

See Nature's article.

You can swim, right?

Working out of a hermetically-sealed, high-tech office...

... in a high-tech campus (ie. an industrial park with slightly better landscaping) the lawns all around groomed to within an inch of their lives, a uniform astroturf green in all directions. You know the scene. The windows are large but do not open.

In another moment, I may get right into the moment, get crazy, and undo the second button on my beige, cotton herringbone-weave golf shirt.

Woo.

Schneier weighs in

Scheneier weighs in on the MD5 thing.

What he said, I guess.

Drop the vibrator and no one gets hurt...

Re Federal appeals court upholds Alabama ban on sale of sex toys (a few weeks old now)... I'm going with the obvious comment that I'd really like to know what it is about these things that the Alabama legislature finds so... well... ummm... threatening...

Also in the sex toys department, I got to be Joe Random in the lineup for a plane at Dulles some time ago... as in the security folk went through my bags, made sure I wasn't hiding any nail clippers or anything (apparently, threatening to give a pilot a manicure has brought many a plane to a fiery and tragic end)... I felt afterward it must have been a disappointment to them... I should have packed something a little more... well... interesting...

"Yeah, yeah, that's mine... Listen, I understand that with electronic devices, you also have to verify it works. So do you know how to use one of these, or do you need me to demonstrate?"

Elliptic curves for fun and profit

So I wrote this puppy, for the record.

... soon to be a classic in its genre, if you ask me.

Eco

Rereading The Name of the Rose again. It had been a while.

Eco's one of those few writers I will read again and again. I've also got Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before and Baudolino in here; every single one of them has spent time on night tables, dressers, in the bathroom, to be picked up, read for a few chapters, then put down. It's just possible that despite Pendulum's reputation as the most-bought/least-read novel of all time, I've made up for it by now by reading my one rather worn copy once for everyone who didn't read theirs. Marvellous stuff.

Heard Eco speak once, in Ottawa, years ago. He's (I suppose unsurprisingly) a pretty good speaker too.

MD5 collision confirmed

Well, I guess that's confirmed. Someone just sent me the messages in question, and yep, those are very definitely two different files that hash to the same thing. Still got no idea of course how they did it. But I guess they've proved they have.

Anyone out there looking for a good crypto guy to replace a lotta MD5 stuff, you know where to find me.

Hex dumps of the messages in question, in case you're curious:

MSG1:
D1 31 DD 02 C5 E6 EE C4 69 3D 9A 06 98 AF F9 5C
2F CA B5 87 12 46 7E AB 40 04 58 3E B8 FB 7F 89
55 AD 34 06 09 F4 B3 02 83 E4 88 83 25 71 41 5A
08 51 25 E8 F7 CD C9 9F D9 1D BD F2 80 37 3C 5B
96 0B 1D D1 DC 41 7B 9C E4 D8 97 F4 5A 65 55 D5
35 73 9A C7 F0 EB FD 0C 30 29 F1 66 D1 09 B1 8F
75 27 7F 79 30 D5 5C EB 22 E8 AD BA 79 CC 15 5C
ED 74 CB DD 5F C5 D3 6D B1 9B 0A D8 35 CC A7 E3

MSG2:
D1 31 DD 02 C5 E6 EE C4 69 3D 9A 06 98 AF F9 5C
2F CA B5 07 12 46 7E AB 40 04 58 3E B8 FB 7F 89
55 AD 34 06 09 F4 B3 02 83 E4 88 83 25 F1 41 5A
08 51 25 E8 F7 CD C9 9F D9 1D BD 72 80 37 3C 5B
96 0B 1D D1 DC 41 7B 9C E4 D8 97 F4 5A 65 55 D5
35 73 9A 47 F0 EB FD 0C 30 29 F1 66 D1 09 B1 8F
75 27 7F 79 30 D5 5C EB 22 E8 AD BA 79 4C 15 5C
ED 74 CB DD 5F C5 D3 6D B1 9B 0A 58 35 CC A7 E3

... both hash to: a4c0d35c95a63a805915367dcfe6b751

For you non-crypto folk out there, what this essentially means is that you can modify messages other folk have signed as legitimately having come from them, make it look like they've said something other than they did--in the cases in which the message is hashed with MD5, and the hash is then signed using some asymmetric signature scheme--which is a fairly common thing to do when generating digital signatures. You can't make it look like they've said whatever you please, but you can mess with the message in certain finite ways. You can also alter files authenticated using a published MD5 hash, which could also lead to some mischief--though in practical terms doing anything so complicated as inserting trojans is unlikely to be particularly workable (breaking things by flipping bits here and there, on the other hand, may prove quite easy). The ramifications will probaby be that MD5 isn't going to be in use much as a hash any more, and a number of protocol specifications are probably going to have to be updated to eliminate its use. Since MD5 is an extremely common hash function--one of the top two in use--this will definitely affect a large amount of code.

Ignore them... you're only encouraging them

Entering curmudgeon mode for a moment here... noting reviews online for two really bad pieces of cinema recently out -- Alien vs. Predator (schlocky pointless violence disappointing even its target demographic of bloodthirsty adolescents thanks to its sheer vapidity) and The Princess Diaries 2 (syrupy merchandising-friendly Disney garbage), the question that enters this author's mind is: does pop culture really have to suck this badly? Why is anyone paying any attention to this vacuous refuse?

Fer cryin' out loud, people, just say no. Ignore them, you're only encouraging them. Stay home. Read a decent book. Don't go. There's no need. You already know perfectly well it's gonna be awful.If (in the case of the latter film) your prepubescent daughters beg and plead, tell 'em it's for their own good. That stuff, it's just junk food for the brain.

(Exiting curmudgeon mode..)

Firefox... s'awright, I guess

Trying out v0.9.3 (as built by the fine people at Backports) on one of my many Debian boxes. I've been hearing so much about this browser, figured I'd give it a chance. And I now run enough sites I figure it's about time I had it around for compatibility testing.

Took some messing about to get it to run, nothing untoward, really, as browsers go. Had an XServer auth problem on first start which is apparently fairly common, had to get a new theme to keep it from crashing out when certain new dialogs came up (I kid you not--if I were so brave as to open the 'Open File' dialog, thump, down she goes, all windows gone, complaints fluttering back into the dialog windows to the effect of 'BadPixMap'.)

(BadPixMap. Bad. Bad. Sit. Sit! Staaaaay...)

Anyway, it was two minutes of tweaking or so to fix it all; I'm an old Debian guy, nothing much scares me. And now it's behaving well enough, and it is a nice little browser.

So s'awright, I guess. But it still ain't Opera. Still seems slowish. And lacks mouse gestures.

I mean this. If you're a serious surfer, for fun or profit, you want Opera. You really do.

(Update: Oh, you can get mouse gestures as a plug-in. That's a good thing...)

Oh my

Now this is what I call news.

... yeah, actually, I mostly make my real money these days being a crypto guy. And this is really cool, in a 'holy shit we're gonna have to change a lotta protocols' kinda way.

That rustling sound you hear is many, many, many developers opening up source code, diking out all the MD5 stuff, and sticking in SHA-1.

Note -- can't find the paper online yet--the program (with the title) is here--the presentation in question in Antoine Joux's.

More rejected query letter excerpts

(...also actually from the email archives...)

... it has a great deal of violence, and very little sex. It's sort of a 'write what you know' thing.

In which our hero writes a letter

So I'm trying to sell a book. Or, more accurately, I'm trying to find an agent to sell a book (as most aspiring authors can tell you, the getting an agent thing is one of life's great key-in-the-trunk dilemmas--as in, you need an agent to sell a book, but you can't sell a book until you get an agent--and the ice cream, in the interim, is getting all warm and squooshy and dripping all over the spare tire... wait... where was I?... oh yes). It's an annoying business. It involves researching the lives and tastes of perfect strangers and then writing them a nice letter saying something like "You seem like a nice person--please sell my book. It's a very good book. It has words in it and everything. Many of them are even spelled correctly."

The part I really hate is the 'tell us why it's wonderful' bit. Partly, it's just that, like a lot of people, I've always been pretty uncomfortable with most forms of self-promotion. I find it awkward. Seems conceited, somehow. I even hate it in job interviews. The poor clown behind the desk says "Now! Tell us what's great about yourself!", and I always want to say something like "Well... ummm... I am off the crack now..."

I mean, assuming I actually am at the time.

Gotta also say I'm not sure I really get the utility of it, either. I mean, doesn't everyone think their damn writing is wonderful? Especially those whose writing is far, far, far from wonderful, and often in terrifying and memorable ways? Don't you kinda need the writing itself to tell anyway?

I mean, I suppose I do see some sense in it. I suppose it's probably partly a project fitting thing, partly a preliminary screening/triage thing. That's to say: if you can't write a decent letter on the subject of why you think your book's a stunning, unprecedented literary masterpiece (or, better still, a shamelessly derivative but marvellously saleable piece of sex-and-violence saturated pulp which will send the agent's kids to as many colleges as they wish to flunk out of), I suppose you probably can't write the book either. Or, at least, not a book anyone other than a masochist would actually want to read (sorta like, say, Conrad Black's memoirs). So if you're truly a dreadful hack, we can actually tell from the letter, and we can all thus save a lot of time and postage by just returning a No. 10 envelope with a short form note in it saying something like "If you send us another such proposal, we're going to file for a restraining order. Go away. You scare us.".

Or maybe something actually mildly impolite. Like "Aaaaarrrggghhh!!! My eyes!!! My eyes!!! It burns!!! It burns!!!"

Anyway. Sensibly or not, the "tell us why it's wonderful" thing always gets my sarcasm circuits going. And so, from the letters I'm always writing in my head:

WHY MY BOOK IS WONDERFUL--TAKE ONE

Dear Sir: I am writing to request your assistance in selling a novel. It has a great deal of kinky sex in it, and I expect it will appeal to the juvenile market...

WHY MY BOOK IS WONDERFUL--TAKE TWO

... it's a powerful, thought-provoking work. Sorta like when Mel Gibson played Macbeth...

WHY MY BOOK IS WONDERFUL--TAKE THREE

... only better. This book is more like Keanu Reeves playing Lear...

WHY MY BOOK IS WONDERFUL--TAKE FOUR

... because it's about real people, and about real life. Before the book is over our protagonist will experience joy, pain, fear, love, lust, betrayal, devotion, self-loathing, rickets, shingles, pneumonia, the bends, athlete's foot, and a painfully overextended groin muscle...

WHY MY BOOK IS WONDERFUL--TAKE FOUR

... I envision the hero as a complicated amalgam of many types... sort of a Popeye meets Anna Karenina character...

Anyway.

F.A. Hayek's 'The road to dim-sum'

(... from the sent mail file... the Dubya bit reflects a comment to the effect that the sitting president of the US has an IQ of roughly four ...)

Speaking of Koyaanisqatsi, I've heard Reggio is gonna be pulling a Deepa Mehta-Hollywood/Bollywood, and doing something lighter after the Qatsi trilogy, but sorta in the same vein -- was gonna call it Hopi-long Cassidy, or something like that...

Damn. I really wrote that, didn't I?

Send help.

Mehta's 1947 Earth, to digress again, to my mind, is a simply great film; one of the few I recommend effusively and at random to total strangers on the street who don't even speak my language. A great film, with some really good sex. Which, I suppose, is redundant... (Was Behind the Green Door a great film? Could Debbie Does the 100th Sequel be anything less? Let's not get too deep, here...) Seriously, Earth: partition, blood, violence, nastiness, persons of varying ethnic backgrounds learning to hate one another passionately for reasons first masked behind, then aggravated and accentuated by nationalist/ethnic abstractions -- nasty observations about humanity -- all the stuff I love almost as much as a six-Martini lunch. Must-see, if you haven't. Mebbe check the double bill with Big Top Pee-Wee, coming soon to a truly weird rep theatre near you.

Regrettably haven't seen anything quite that good in some time (no, not even as good as Big Top Pee-Wee). Did finally see the second (or fifth, or last) Star Wars. Have to say I'm terribly disappointed. Watched the whole damn thing waiting for someone -- anyone -- to say "Send in the clones". Lucas just doesn't know an opportunity when he sees it.

And more sadly still, if he had worked this in, it woulda been the best thing about the experience.

As to Dubya's IQ... okay... mebbe I'm selling him short...

Eight. But that's my final offer. Take it or leave it. Until I see him actually eat a pretzel successfully with no advisors present, that's the best I can do.

I note that the IQ scales with the truly pejorative descriptions are now no longer in use. It's sad, really. You can't even officially call anyone a 'moron' anymore. Or at least, not and have it considered a diagnosis. At most, you can call someone 'profoundly mentally retarded', if you're using the DSM-IV scale, which is something, I guess. But sad, still. I note also that 'dullness' was once on the IQ range scale...

Dear me. My social life is of subnormal intelligence.

This, now that I think about it, isn't so much of a surprise.

(Oh, as to that title, the original message went on to natter about a social event myself and my lovely wife had been invited to, which a number of economists could be expected to attend--I'd suggested I might show with a T-shirt emblazoned with the message "Friedman's a wanker"... but ya probably hadda be there)

Rejected endings to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"

(... also from the sent mail file ...)

"My God, it's full of Twinkies!"
"My God, it's full of vague, quite possibly meaningless symbolism!"
"My God, one of the grips fell asleep in here!"
"My God, it's full of nougat!"

In other news, I just realized I wrote a column more than ten years ago in which I made fun of a tabloid pyschic predicting the election returns for Arnold Schwarzenegger's presidential campaign. Granted, they missed by about a decade (they thought he was going to run that year) and a level of government. But still, now I'm nervously trying to remember what else I made fun of around then.

The LA Times complained in their election day editorial that Schwarzenegger was basically campaigning using lines from his movies (other than, of course, the rushes from the documentary in which he allegedly spoke well of Hitler, the footage of which, of course, he purchased to use to heat his home). But let's face it. It's hard to find a speechwriter who can string together monosyllables with as much panache as did Cameron's Terminator crew. Mostly because the White House has already hired all of them, but I digress.

Anyway, I feel it's important that every continent should have a place like California. And that it be on the opposite end of that continent from me.

A propos of nothing, an absurd email to the Gang of Four

(... from my sent mail file... the thread of conversation actually involved a bicycle outing and a pride parade... none of which really leads to any of this, which, I suppose, means all of this is no one's fault but mine...)

I want to see a John Waters/John Woo coproduction. We could call it 'Divine Ninjas'. I see transvestite ninjas with massive bouffant hairsprayed coiffures battling each other in the streets of Balti... [fzzzzt]

So sorry. Blew out my absurd juxtaposition module... A moment please while I execute repairs...

[sound of air wrench loosening bolts, followed by hacksaw, chainsaw, then a ukelele]

All done.

Moving on, in the movie I'm always writing in my head, there are no ninjas. But there *is* a gang made up of great, scary, sinister organized crime types from former Eastern-bloc countries. There are many internal tensions within the gang, and eventually they get into this massive firefight with each other in a postage sorting plant they're ransacking for bearer bonds. In a climactic battle, the master of one of the rival factions, one Viktor Havel, is vanquished by his foe, and falls from a catwalk in time-honoured action film slo-mo into a massive pile of envelopes.

"Vhere is Viktor?" demands his frustrated arch-nemesis, who comes in a moment too late, missing his chance at revenge. "Vhere is the Butcher of Plzen!?"

"The Czech," replies a henchman, "is in the mail."

Aliens ate my blog

In all the gin joints, in all the servers, in all the net, you hadda come into mine.

Today in my life, one of the firms on which I depend for my poor struggling consultancy's livelihood is late with the cheque from the last invoice. They have a term for this. They call it 'managing our cash flow'. This, of course, is accountantese--it translates roughly as 'paying you late'. Also rather descriptive is the term 'screwing *your* cash flow'.

Grumble grumble grumble...

It could be worse. I could unemployed. As opposed to employed and not being paid.

Waitaminnit... which one of those did I say was worse again?

Well ain't this just a brilliant @#$% idea

So I'm thinking to myself, okay, I'm clearly overcommitted. Too much to do, too little time to do it in. Any decent physician would probably say look, kiddo, you've got a bit much on your plate, you're getting a bit freaked about it, and that ain't healthy. Stop it. Drop a few things. Some of it, it's not like it's gonna stop the world or anything.

So, obviously, the smart thing to do is start something *else*.

Like a blog.

Yeah. Brilliant. Let's do this thing.

No, there will be nothing blazingly insightful in this post. Can't say you can count on that happening in any of the posts, really, but then you probably knew that. It's a blog. I'm just gonna drool random bits of text into it now and then. Some of it will probably be so obscure and self-referential that it will make TS Eliot look positively accessible. I hope that's okay with all my nonexistent readers.

Awaaay we go then.