New Year's roundup: resolutions, NYC tourism, and Friday (friend's) cat blogging

(Warning: Navel-gazing ahead. I'm sitting home sick on a Friday night, and so I blog. Pity me, world!)

Resolutions, briefly:

1. Will finish my proofs, defend, and graduate.
2. Will donate a greater fraction of income to charity, keeping a monthly running tally. (Renewed from last year, with greater specificity this time.)
3. Will read at least one non-"genre" novel per month. (I never thought I'd need this sort of resolution, but I recently did my tally for last year and found, to my surprise, that I had read fewer than a dozen novels over the entire year.)
4. Will write one complete work of non-blog prose greater than 50,000 words in length.
5. Will hike eight trails I have never hiked before.

Next, here are some pictures from my holiday trips into NYC, the city where my heart is buried. I played the tourist through and through, because I realized recently that I didn't have any of my own (copyright-unencumbered) images of most NYC sights. Most of these should be readily identifiable...

Lastly, my first-ever Friday cat blogging, wherein I commandeer the cats of my NYC friends PM and JW:

"The surly one"

"The friendly one"

KOrganizer bug alert: Grid layout broken

Attention KOrganizer users: Please be warned that if you set your "hour size" in the view configuration small enough (for me, 8 or fewer pixels, but this varies depending on your screen resolution) then the labels on your hours grid will not display accurately:

As you can see, the appointment's set for 9:30, but from the label it appears to be 10:00. What's the cause of this bug? Well, here's the bottom of the grid, which may give you a hint:

Wow. The programmers never tested what happens when the user sets the grid size small enough so that more than 24 hours fit onto the screen. I like to have a view of all 24 hours of the day in my planner (it helps to track late-night or early-morning flights and submission deadlines), so I've had it configured this way for a long time. Older versions of KOrganizer worked fine --- it would intelligently detect when the grid was too small, and adjust the size so that it just filled the screen --- but code for labeling the grid was tweaked in 3.5, and I guess this got broken.

I actually missed a job interview call because of this bug, and of course I am pissed, mostly at myself for relying on software too much, but also slightly at the programmers. I can't be too pissed, because they wrote a very useful piece of software that's free, and that I use all the time. Nevertheless, it seems like this sort of thing simply should not happen. The very first thing I'd do, after writing code like this, is to test the boundary conditions: what happens when you set the pixel height to a tiny value? A large value? This sort of thing should be almost reflexive.

New Year's Scorecard 2005

I now undertake the painful exercise of revisiting this year's resolutions.

Will complete bulk of thesis research so I can graduate in 2005-2006 academic year.

Verdict: Done. There's some significant (though mostly uninteresting) technical work that remains, but I plan to defend in summer 2006. I'd probably be done with the technical work, and in the midst of writing the actual dissertation document already, if it weren't for the fact that I've been simultaneously looking for a job. Blech.

Will donate larger fraction of income to charitable organizations.

Verdict: Failed. I did not donate a significantly larger fraction of my income to charity this year, and I'm not in a position to remedy this in the next two days.

Will limit blog-reading to two times a day, or fewer.

Verdict: Mixed. Most days I keep to this. Having my XML feed reader hacked into a more usable form helped. Some days I don't read blogs at all, because I'm confident that I can catch up on anything interesting the next day via my feed reader. However, other days I fall off the wagon, particularly if I'm trying to avoid something.

Will strive for more generosity of spirit and less petulance in my blogging.

Verdict: Failed. My most popular post this year, by far, was this rather obnoxious post on Intelligent Design (which, incidentally, is now the #5 hit on Google for "intelligent design debate" [UPDATE 6 Jan: And also one of BlogPulse's top 25 blog posts of 2005. Wow/argh.]). The runner-up for most popular post was this evisceration of Jonah Goldberg. And, although most of my posts are less vitriolic than these, I feel that my tone has been splenetic more generally as well.

Will publish one, preferably two conference papers.

Verdict: Failed. I did, however, get two conference papers rejected, which is something of an achievement I suppose. On the brighter side, my reviews have been decent, and I'm presenting at a workshop in the coming year.

Will learn how to deal with conference deadlines without skipping the gym, spurning my friends, and generally dropping off the face of the Earth.

Verdict: Mixed. The degree to which I drop off the face of the Earth has diminished somewhat, but I do live a pretty lousy life in the month leading up to a deadline. On the other hand, my papers get rejected, so maybe I should learn to drop off the face of the Earth more. Paul Graham has interesting things to say about this.

Will buy and read:

• Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code, by Fred Rieke, David Warland, Rob de Ruyter van Steveninck, and William Bialek.
• The Pentagon's New Map, by Thomas P. M. Barnett.
• Rational Herds: Economic Models of Social Learning, by Christophe P. Chamley.
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond.
• All the books I bought over the holidays.

Verdict: Mixed. Of the above, I only read Collapse, and about half the books I bought over the holidays. I did read some other interesting books (though I didn't finish as many as I'd have liked), of which I'll recommend a couple:

• Iron Council by China Miéville. The folks at Crooked Timber have said volumes about this, and I don't have anything new to add for now, but it's a lovely book. I also read Perdido Street Station on a plane; it's less good, but managed to keep me up on the red-eye from Seattle to Newark. I'm going to be flying around a lot in the next couple of months, and I'll most likely be reading more of Miéville --- at least The Scar, to complete the New Crobuzon novels.
• Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, by Albert O. Hirschman: I'm still in the middle of this, but if you're even vaguely interested in politics, economics, or game theory, then you really owe it to yourself to read this sometime. It's a slim little volume, easy to carry around, and easy to read, though digesting the ideas fully will probably take me a lot of mulling (which, of course, I don't really have time to do these days, but whatever, I'll probably do it anyway).

Well, all in all, it was a pretty mixed year. I suppose I'll be making new resolutions (or renewing the old ones) soon. Have a Happy New Year all, unless I'll be seeing you in the next couple of days, in which case I'll wish you Happy New Year in person I suppose.

Manual blogspamming via Technorati: Grrrr.

I'm writing today to note a mildly noxious form of spam that's cropped up a couple of times on this blog, and that popped up again tonight. My last post about the Massachusetts Little Red Book/DHS hoax got a comment that was only marginally on-topic, and frankly struck me as a total non sequitur. It was evident that the post's satirical content, for example, completely sailed over the commenter's head. Or, more likely, the commenter simply hadn't read my post at all, since the comment consisted solely of two links to his own blog posts about the Little Red Book hoax. Hence, the comment seemed like some kind of self-promoting spam. So I deleted the comment, of course, but I also got annoyed enough to fire up Sitemeter and go a-hunting. The comment was posted at about 8:40 p.m. PST, and bingo, here we go:

The IP address is located in Wisconsin, and the blog in question states prominently that the author's located at Marquette University, so this is probably our man. Note that this guy spent a grand total of 15 seconds reading my post before composing his perfunctory, self-promoting comment. Gee, either he's a speed reader, or... hey, let's look at that referer --- it's cut off in the picture, but he came from the Technorati search for "student mao massachusetts". I wonder if this person's spammed his comment onto other blogs on this search?

Hey, that comment looks kind of familiar... (I'd go on, but I think I've proven my point.)

Therefore, "John McAdams", I christen thee spammer, sad sack of dittohead wingnuttery that thou art, so desperate for traffic that thou goest commenting onto random Technorati blogs for attention.

And let that be a warning to other would-be Technorati spammers out there: this blog's not a platform for you to misdirect traffic towards your own site. If you're not here to have a conversation, then crawl off and spread your ant droppings somewhere else. Or better yet, use comments as they were meant to be used, and don't try to promote yourself that way at all.

On newspapers and trust

On December 17, a regional Massachusetts paper called The Standard-Times reported that agents from the Department of Homeland Security visited a student's house after he checked a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's Little Red Book out of a library. Today, we learn in the Boston Globe that this story was actually false. Now, clearly, this is an example of the incredible dangers inherent in the technology of newspapers, which permit reporters to publish things that are false! It's true that the error was eventually corrected, but the story was out there for a whole week, and it's far from clear that people who read the original article will see the follow-up reporting.

And look --- the Standard-Times posted a corrected article, but the old article's still available in the newspaper archives, where any schoolchild could come across it! Why don't these irresponsible editors send the archived article down the memory hole, for the children?

Emboldened by the unencumbered freedom of the printing press, reporters are out there spreading scandalous untruths about our national security apparatus. It's clear that the system of reporters and editors digging up facts and reporting them, without the oversight of a national Ministry of Information, cannot be allowed to continue. Or rather, I am personally all in favor of newspapers, but unless newspapers voluntarily submit themselves to scrutiny by a private-sector Ministry of Information, which consults with the government to ensure accuracy and fairness, then in the next election, who knows, maybe some reporter will report something inaccurate about a politician, and the political pressure to regulate newspapers will become overwhelming. And people like John Seigenthaler will have to step in to defend them.