Sambal

Nobody’s using Unicode, as far as my life is concerned. Which is a bonus for me, because it means I haven’t had to learn how to do Unicode.

What we do, by preference, is reverse-engineer file formats. This statement tends to generate two distinct responses. Most people’s eyes glaze over; the few who understand it tend to sneer openly. At length, what we do is figure out how your X program (CAD, word processing, drawing, whatever) decides what the contents of a file mean, and then write a parser — a program or module which converts the contents of the file into a useful form.

We rarely reverse-engineer code, for several reasons. First, it’s rarely useful. Second, it’s risky: simply decompiling object code appears to be a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), and even if that weren’t the case, most software licenses explicitly prohibit decompilation. Finally, we don’t have any skill or interest in reverse-engineering code, so we’d probably do a lousy job and not enjoy it.

Reverse-engineeing files is legal. We’re always under the “for reasons of compatibility” banner, which is explicitly written into the law. But even without that, we’re generally safe. The files belong to the client; unlike the code, which is merely licensed to the client by the vendor. The client has the right to dispose of its property as it wishes, including sending it to us to be reverse-engineered. Often the client’s aim is to get away from the vendor, but that doesn’t affect us.

Of course, the DMCA may make it more difficult for us to reverse-engineer certain files. I believe that DMCA holds that circumventing any deliberate countermeasure against reverse-engineering is tortious. Any one — no matter how trivial — such as shifting each alphabetic letter thirteen places over. Some vendors, such as Adobe, have started to do precisely this. Luckily, DMCA seems to be a dead letter, thanks to jury nullification. But it was scary for a while.

Anyway, I was going to ramble about Unicode, instead of what I do to earn my living. But now my niece wants to use her computer, so I’ll get off.

I forget about the homeless problem when I’m in Edmonton. Especially in winter, streetcorner panhandling is.. mmm, uncommon. That doesn’t mean they’re not there, of course. Just not visible. Here in L.A. they’re visible.

The word “homeless” is a quite unfortunate euphemism. Homelessness is not the problem: in fact my father and his wife, enjoying their retirement, spent several months traveling, “homeless”. Anyone can become homeless, as homeless advocates are fond of pointing out, and it’s easier than you might think to become so.

The problem is beggary. Becoming homeless should be an unpleasant but transitory experience. Staying homeless means having embraced the lifestyle of a beggar; an urban scavenger.

When I take an ecologist’s view, it’s clear that the only way people could survive begging and scavenging is if there’s unexploited value in the garbage. Food and valuables, a place to sleep: there is an ecological niche occupied by those unwilling or unable to do other work.

This niche can’t exist without the surrounding city. After all, one can’t be homeless alone in the wilderness. That’s not homelessness, it’s hermitage. Nor is it easy: the whole point of begging is to make the least possible productive effort by sponging off the work of others. It doesn’t work when there are no others.

The size and wealth of this niche is directly related to the size and wealth of the surrounding human society. (Modified, certainly, by the weather.) Without our wealth, we couldn’t support such a large homeless population. If everyone were strapped for cash and careful not to discard food or anything with use left in it, the niche would disappear. Beggars can exist because of the wealth accumulated in a city.

And here’s a nasty closing thought: suppose there were no human beggars, somehow. A rich empty niche is created. What sort of animal would you prefer to fill it?

We arrived in LA just before noon yesterday. God, I miss LA. I miss the sight of smog and the rectangular street layouts. I miss needing to use the driving skills — especially the team driving skills — that we’ve developed.

I don’t actually miss smog. It makes me choke. But I feel sentimental while I’m choking.

Budget was out of cars — at least, in the economy/mid-size/full-size matrix. Rather than bumping us into an SUV or a minivan or (my hope) a Mustang convertible, they drove us over to Hertz and promised to re-imburse us. Whatever. So we have a tiny red Kia Rio.

We played with the kids for a long time: roughhousing, playing board games, arranging the dollhouse. We haven’t seen them since last Christmas exactly, while we were returning from Africa. A year ago, the baby was, well, a baby of 8 months. Now he’s 20 months old: he walks, he talks sometimes. He generalizes. We gave him a Kinder Egg (the Canadian kind with tiny chokable toys inside) and he pretended to crack it on the edge of a bowl.

After we opened the presents (I got a copy of Comstock’s Conversations on Chemistry from 1828!), we settled down to the real business of the evening: Vanguard. My sister and I set up the old Atari 2600 and had a 20-year Vanguard rematch. I’m in the lead so far, which is better than I used to be able to do at 8 or 9. I even get to quote Darth Vader at her: “Your powers are weak, old woman…. Now the circle is complete. Now I am the master.”

So, Christmas is done. In about six hours we’re flying down to California to see my family and our friends down there, so I’ll make this quick.

We hosted dinner: 12 adults, two children, one 25-pound turkey. Now I have to find our passports and finish packing our bags.

It’s easy for me to give in to depression at this time of year. It’s dark, the holidays are over, and Christmas spawns a great deal of humbuggery in me. And here I am, having wasted the last hour reading blogs instead of finishing packing and going to bed. No wonder I’m cranky.

Charles Johnson quoted my favorite seasonally-appropriate Eliot poem. I would not yet be glad of another death. There exists a temptation; that of looking away from this world, condemning it for its unreality (or ‘mere reality’). I do not usually feel it. Usually I have the opposite problem, living too much in the real world. Perhaps that’s what I feel now.

Certainly I had hoped to have something more pleasant to say!

I will try to blog from on the road, but posts should be sparse until after Jan. 9. Sparser even than usual!

… or, chains of consequences.

Start with a trivial observation: The Czechs, being landlocked, have no maritime tradition. Therefore there was never a Czech navy. Therefore the Czechs had no overseas colonies or dominions. Therefore, Czech Christmas baking contains no brown sugar, molasses nor rum.

Of course it helps that the Czechs groaned, suffering inexpressibly under the yoke of the savage oppressors. (And there’s more groaning to be had.)

Still I wonder if the oppressor actually gets the better of it. My wife’s Christmas baking is basically Canadian, which is to say English: rum balls, butter tarts, lemon tarts, plum pudding. Czech baking is vanilkov

I’m bizarrely multicultural, if I must say so myself. At least for someone so monoculturally Czech, anyway. Here is the latest import to our Christmas tradition: Finnish christmas tarts (joulutorttuja). Star-shaped pastry dough with a plum filling. Made ‘em myself.

Eat your heart out.

I just finished reading an interesting article about SUV’s (from someone’s blog via my wife).

It’s a good read, especially the debunking of claims that SUV’s are safer than normal cars.

While reading this article, I had an insight about generational rivalry. The reason to hate baby boomers isn’t that most of them have sold out — that’s irrelevant. What’s wrong with baby boomers is what’s always been wrong with them. They’re self-centered pricks who violate the social compact. It doesn’t matter if it’s by buying cars which are likelier to kill, or by not vaccinating their children: these are people who maximize their immediate advantage, even though that incurs an expected long-term loss. They’re defectors in life’s prisoner’s dilemma.

(Unfortunately for this generalization, the only baby boomers I know are my wife’s parents, who don’t fit this sterotype. They are pleasant, gentle, giving church people. My own parents/stepparents are not in the baby boom demographic; nor do they behave badly.)

But this Washington Monthly article is not without its howlers, notably:

Sport utility vehicles have become like guns

Oh? I must have missed the part where the author explains how SUV’s can be used by the people to defend themselves against state tyranny.

Oh, you mean that nice leftists find them unpleasant! Well, then I do see how SUV’s are like guns. Idiot.

It takes less than four hours to run a sizeable distillation. It is not reasonably possible to prohibit such an activity, which can be carried on indoors, with no outwardly visible signs (energy or water expenditure, for example), using legally-available materials.

Nevertheless, the state still outlaws private distillation, even for personal use only. Even though hard liquor is legal.

Why keep pot illegal? I’ve argued in this space before that one good reason is that pot is an enivronmental intoxicant. Legalization and public consumption of marijuana will inevitably expose innocent people to the smoke, as innocent people are currently exposed to tobacco smoke. Worse than tobacco, secondhand marijuana smoke can have intoxicating effects. You would have to be extremely sensitve to THC to show intoxication from passive inhalation. Here’s a summary of a study that claims that passive inhalation in a social setting (i.e., not hotboxing) should not cause a positive test result.

I’ve also argued that valid conservative reasons — avoiding disruption to settled social customs — exist for keeping marijuana illegal. What is the mainstream etiquette for smoking weed socially? There isn’t any. We’d have to develop it. What an annoyance. Libertarians may find this a weak reason, but it’s a serious claim. Conservatives stand against change, unless it’s trumped by social justice. There were, after all, valid conservative reasons to oppose desegregation. They just don’t hold water against, you know, equal rights under the law. (Bye-bye, Trent.)

But I don’t think that marijuana should be illegal pour encourager les autres.

Year-end is coming up, so our scheduled two weekly hours of charity work (I open the library while my wife does the books) stretched to six. Receiving the advertising revenue for the last magazine issue of the year; paying for things, including internet access; writing charitable donation receipts and making sure they get into this fiscal year. We choose to work together whenever possible, and there turned out to be lots of work for me, even though I’m not the accounting specialist. (Therefore, in my heart, I can still think accounting is kind of cool.)

I ran a couple of errands, so I listened to the car radio (unusually). Apparently some pedophile is now living in an Edmonton community. The question of a cover-up was raised. The RCMP should not be trusted with the investigation, opined an M.P. from Edmonton. Apparently Dudley Do-Right’s reputation is no more.

Later, there was a call-in show. The topic was: how to structure your holidays, for the divorced set. Mostly women phoning in to complain about their kids’ dads. I don’t know: maybe my parents worked it out better than most — I certainly didn’t think so at the time. But I felt a strange compulsion to call in, or better, to grab these women by the lapels and say: “He’ll be your child’s father forEVER! Your child will remember your nasty comments for the rest of his life! Can’t you swallow your pride for a mere ten years?”

My wife and I were talking about the Prisoner’s Dilemma the other day because we were in one — the details can be skipped.

The interesting thing about the Prisoner’s Dilemma — which I never appreciated deeply before — is that it’s a non-zero-sum game. In fact, the sum value of the game depends on the player’s behavior.

Our position at the time we were discussing this was that the other side had defected while we cooperated, thus giving us 0 and them 5. The best strategy I know for iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma games is Tit For Tat (TFT). TFT indicates that we should defect on the next turn.

The sad thing is, though, that we saw clearly that it would be possible for everyone to get 3 — for a total of 6 — of only both sides cooperated. We could do better than net five, if only the other side cooperated. Alas, they hadn’t. So we defected next turn.

But there it is again — the dream! Real growth! But only in certain circumstances can you realize it.

39.75 hrs last week + 0.25 after midnight today. But you could tell that by the dazed ramblings above, eh?