Solipsism Gradient

I’ve never been more than an occasional user of Apple’s MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop). I thought it was defunct but apparently Apple’s still supporting it for development on older Classic systems.

Anyway, one thing I recall is that the MPW C compiler had some funny error messages, and this post on Ztuff reminded me of that today. Some nice ones:

“…And the lord said, `lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement'”

“a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program”

“This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn’t wide enough to read this whole error message”

“Too many errors on one line (make fewer)”

I promptly looked up the latest official version of MPW on my Apple Developer CDs (August 2001, if you’re interested) and the latest compilers, unfortunately, seem to have been expurged – there are only the usual dry “illegal whatnot found” messages. I’ll have to see if I can find an older edition.

Unfortunately this sort of humor seems to be increasingly rare. The closest thing I could think of in currently shipping software are the ICQ client connection messages:

First we’ll need an ICQ server…

I’m sure I saw a server somewhere…

Attempting to make sure you are who you say you are…

Now, let’s sort out this little issue called ‘logon credentials’…

Doing something complicated…

Waiting in line with millions of other users…

So much data, so little time…

Fulfilling the server’s endless requests…

Initializing all kinds of protocols…

How fussy can you be about one insignificant connection?

Now comes the tricky part…

Seems like the server is a little picky today…

We’re in. Have fun.

While searching for something completely different, I stumbled upon two amazing galleries for a graph-visualization project called Walrus. There’s a visualization and navigation gallery and a abstract art gallery. The first has some animated images, too.

Wow.

I certainly will come back later and find out more about this.

Several people (among them Chris Hanson pointed at The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, written by Carlo M. Cipolla:

The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

…I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. This fact is scientifically expressed by the Second Basic Law which states that

The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

…As the Third Basic Law explicitly clarifies:

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

When confronted for the first time with the Third Basic Law, rational people instinctively react with feelings of skepticism and incredulity. The fact is that reasonable people have difficulty in conceiving and understanding unreasonable behaviour…

There’s much more to it, including lots of stuff on the main True Stupidity site. All, sadly, true.

Some nice folks are linking to my recently released Fax Alert Installer. I purposely didn’t do my usual routine of following the release with a barrage of press releases to major Mac websites, to see what would happen.

Today there was a mention at Mac OS X Hints. Previously, Daniel Steinberg also referred to it, and niknud in turn linked to Daniel’s article. Macintouch also had a brief note, as did MacSurfer.

Meanwhile, even with little publicity, there’ve been around 1400 downloads – and so far, in December, Fax Alert Installer downloads are running neck-and-neck with XRay downloads. Not bad…

Although Max Lyons has been in the news these days for his Gigapixel image of Bryce Canyon, his image gallery is well worth a longer visit.

I was particularly taken by the photographs of the Canadian Rockies, the Southwest Deserts, and the Sierra Nevada… all places where I’ve been. I can attest they really look like that, although my own results were far more modest. Highly recommended!

This seems to be mostly accurate:

Linked to by the J-Walk Blog, as usual… curiously enough, the first version of these pages used nearly exactly this light cyan tint as a background, but I found it slightly tiring.

If you’re a fan of composer Philip Glass, you’ll love the Glass Engine, an IBM research project that allows you to select and listen to any track from over sixty Glass works. I spent over an hour there without really noticing.

The engine has a unique user interface which, unfortunately, runs only on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Java is also required.

The J-Walk Blog, among other goodies, points at a site that turns any website into a screenplay. So guess what I did?

FADE IN.

INT. TRENDY CAFE

WINONA RYDER is lovelorn and sad. She is complaining to her best friend BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT) about the lovelorn and sad state of her life.

WINONA RYDER

Oh, BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT), do you think that I will ever find my true love? I am so lovelorn and sad. Surely, you, as my best friend, have some wisdom to offer

BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT)

Sorry, but to set everything up properly you must first run XRay once from an Administrator account.

WINONA RYDER

Yes, you said that from the very beginning, didn't you? Oh, if only I'd listened to you,BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT).

...

She shoots angrily again. LEONARDO DI CAPRIO comes running up.

LEONARDO DI CAPRIO

I must talk to you, WINONA RYDER. I can explain.

...

BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT)

This mode builds a smaller, faster program without debugging symbols and other encumbrances.

WEDDING GUESTS

Hear, hear.

BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT)

Well, all of this usually takes several hours and is extremely tiring.

Everybody laughs

LEONARDO DI CAPRIO and WINONA RYDER

Hahahahahaha!!!! Oh BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT). You are one of a kind.

THE END

Story of my life…