malvasia bianca

A few years ago, when I was starting to get seriously interested in comics, I read Dreamland Japan, by Frederick Schodt. One of its main points was that a huge advantage Japanese comics had over American comics was that Osamu Tezuka was Japanese. And I was willing to believe it – the guy had apparently written huge numbers of comics series, some less serious (Astro Boy, for example), some more serious (Phoenix, Adolf, for example), all excellent in their own way.

So I started reading all the Tezuka in print in English. At the time, that was only a couple of volumes of Black Jack and all five volumes of Adolf. So I read them. The thing is, I didn’t like Black Jack very much. I thought Adolf was pretty good, but for World War II-inspired comics, I’ll take Maus any day.

I was then pleased (and quite surprised) to see a volume of Phoenix appear in English. Finally, I thought, Tezuka’s masterpiece – now I’ll see what I was missing, right? Well, no – better than Black Jack, sure, but there are lots of books out there that I like a lot more. Maybe it will grow on me (and, to be fair, I’ve enjoyed the next couple of volumes more than the first), but either I’m missing something or he’s just not to my taste.

For whatever reason, though, I kept on looking for more Tezuka books. So when Astro Boy started appearing in English, I bought the first few volumes. And they’re great! It’s a series about a robot superhero, it’s a lot of fun to read. It’s wonderfully humane (hmm, is that why I like Zot so much? Or is that really a dominant characteristic of Zot?) and the story lines vary enough that I’ve read 12 volumes so far and have no desire to stop.

Like I said above, I was surprised to see Phoenix out in English. I know (and am very glad) Japanese culture is more and more popular in the US these days, but I still thought Phoenix was bit too fringy to appear in this country, since it didn’t seem to me to be the sort of thing that the youth of America would read. But I was really surprised to see Buddha come out in English: Phoenix had the advantage of being labeled as Tezuka’s masterpiece, and I would have thought that Buddha‘s topic would make it even less likely to appear in this country.

Buddha is amazing. I love the plot. I love the characters. (Many of which are, of course, canonical, but Tezuka added a lot, including, if memory serves me well, the entire first volume.) As with Astro Boy, it’s wonderfully humane. The drawings are great, including some of the most beautiful scenery that I’ve ever seen in a comic book (simultaneously emphasizing its epic scope and its meditative nature), the aspect-to-aspect transitions are used to great effect (lots of the examples in Understanding Comics are taken from Buddha).

Now is an excellent time to be alive.

I bought a new watch earlier this year. I liked my old watch, but it had some scratches on the face and was getting kind of chipped around the edges, so since I’d had it for most of a decade and the battery had died, I figured I might as well buy a new one instead of replacing the battery. I couldn’t find one I really liked, though I’m basically happy with the one I ended up buying. One thing which bugs me about it, though, is that it has a big second hand which normally doesn’t move: the second hand is for the stopwatch, while the non-stopwatch second hand is in a little dial at the bottom. (There are also little dials for the stopwatch minute and hour hands.) Why not use the big hands for the normal time and the little hands for the stopwatch?

That’s a minor quibble, though. What is prompting this post is that the watch broke in a strange way yesterday. It still works, except that the stopwatch second hand, when at rest, is pointing at about 58 seconds instead of straight up. Which just looks bad. Fortunately, there’s a solution to this that solves the problem from the first paragraph as well – now I just leave the stopwatch on all the time. Still, I was expecting the watch to be more solid than this – one reason why I bought it was that a couple of people at work volunteered the fact that they’d had Fossil watches for a while that had lasted well.

I wonder exactly what went wrong, too. I have to think that there’s got to be some simple fix for this if you know what you’re doing, but I’m too nervous / lazy / lacking in tools to open up the watch myself, and I don’t feel like either sending it off to the manufacturer or paying real money to deal with such a minor problem. When I have to replace the battery, though, I’ll see if I can get it fixed then. For that matter, maybe it will fix itself – there wasn’t any trigger that I’m aware of that caused it to go wrong. (More likely it will get worse, I suppose.) I just get a little frustrated when there are things that I feel I could understand that I don’t actually know the answer to.

Side note: the tv antenna is continuing to work well, at least on some channels; right now I’m watching NOVA in HD. Looks nice. Not perhaps as spectacular as I would have thought, given the HD propaganda one hears; part of the reason that I’m not so impressed, probably, is that I went from a 20″ tv to a 27″ tv, and of course SD looks better on a 20″ tv than a 27″ one.

My piano needs maintenance. It’s been a while since it’s gotten tuned, but it actually doesn’t sound too bad. But there’s one note that clicks when you play it, and sometimes the keys don’t always come all the way back up when you play them. That’s actually been happening for a while when the pedal is down, which is interfering with my grand plan to actually learn how to play some music written since 1750, but I could deal with it since mostly I play music written before then. But now it’s started to occasionally happen without the pedal down, which is really no good at all.

Unfortunately, I don’t know any good piano techs. I don’t want to go with the person who did the free tuning a month after I bought it, since he’s had two chances to fix the clicking note and hasn’t succeeded either time. And none of my local friends play the piano. So I guess I’ll have to pick somebody more or less at random, and cross my fingers.

I’m hoping that the issue of keys not coming all the way back up is something I can learn how to fix myself. (And I’m also hoping that the piano grows out of it – it’s actually a very nice piano, but that really is not good behavior.) I suspect it is – I took off the front of the piano (it’s an upright), and looked at what was happening, and I think that I probably just have to turn the right screw somewhere. Still, it would be nice to have somebody to watch while they’re fixing it, so I can learn what to do.

A recent post on the Samuel R. Delany mailing list mentioned that he has a piece in issue 11 of Chain, a magazine published out of Temple (judging from their address). The same issue also apparently has an article by a friend of mine from college, Stephen Burt, as well as one by Rachel Pollack, the author of the excellent Unquenchable Fire. So I guess I’ll have to give it a look! Anybody know anything about the magazine? The Delany is called Eden, Eden, Eden: Genesis ii, 4, to ii, 22; no idea if it’s fiction or not.

Another post on the list says that copies of Delany’s short film Orchid still exists; I can’t say I have high hopes for it, but being a Delany completist, I can’t wait to get a look…

Nintendo is introducing a new handheld in November, the Nintendo DS. It has two screens, the bottom one is touch-sensitive (a stylus is included, or you can use your finger), built-in wireless connectivity and a microphone, and probably other stuff that I’ve forgotten.

I will, of course, buy one when it comes out. I really wonder about it, though; it looks like Nintendo is throwing all sorts of random ideas at the machine, and looking to see what sticks. I mean, two screens? Nintendo says things like “you can use the second screen for a map!”, but if that were such a great idea, we’d see lots of games out there using half of their screen real-estate on a map. Or a microphone – as far as games goes, its main use would be for voice recognition, which is just a gimmick. (Maybe some games will use it plus the wireless for communication in multi-player games, which I suppose is a good idea, if long-distance connectivity works well.) Wireless support is sensible enough; the Game Boy family has gotten a lot of mileage out of interconnectivity (I certainly wish I had more friends with Game Boys), and it might as well happen without wires.

The touch screen will presumably make or break it. It’s not at all clear to me how games will be dramatically improved by that, but there were some interesting-sounding demos at E3 this year using that feature. And some stupid ones – you can move by touching the screen with your finger, and fire by tapping! Yeah, or you could just move with the D-pad and fire with the A button… Nintendo sometimes has very good, unexpected game ideas; maybe they really do have a series of interesting games in the works that will use the touch screen.

Or maybe not; maybe they’re just flailing around.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day saying “Kerry/Edwards: A Stronger America.” Which would seem to be their slogan. And which makes me unhappy.

Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of ways that one could mean that phrase that I would approve of. He could mean that we’re strong enough to share our riches with others. He could mean that we’re strong in friends. He could mean that we’re full of energy, that we’re self-confident enough to convince others when we’re right, to be convinced by others when we’re wrong, and to sometimes amicably disagree.

But that’s not the feeling that I get from the bumper sticker. It reads to me like he’s saying that, under John Kerry, we’ll keep on beefing up our military, and that we’ll beat people up whenever we want to. Which I don’t want – I want our military weaker, not stronger, and I certainly don’t appear of bullying. And it also looks like more of the “I’m just like George Bush, except better” theme, which strikes me as a stupid way to run a campaign.

Sigh. I thought Al Gore was a lousy candidate, but John Kerry isn’t looking too good, either.

I was just reading Borgel, by Daniel Pinkwater, when I ran into the phrase “Hot cha”. Which is also the title of a song on They Might Be Giants’ album Flood. Is this a common phrase in some circles? Not that I would be shocked if They Might Be Giants were big Pinkwater fans, but there’s not much internal evidence for that within the song in question.

(Both book and album are recommended, by the way.)

Here’s a question that’s come up at work over the last week or two. A couple of us are trying to rehabilitate some unmaintainable code that’s currently in our product: trying to bring it “From Mud to Structure”, as POSA1 puts it. The obvious pattern to start with is is Layers: we’d like to separate the pieces of software into a core that provides the core functionality that we need and that uses the same classes and patterns as the rest of our system, with an outer layer on top of it that satisfies customer-specific needs (e.g. using CORBA instead of our own RPC system and threading model) and that could be easily changed for different customers.

So: how do adjacent layers communicate? You could have adjacent layers invoke each other via function calls, but that would couple them too tightly. One standard trick to use here is to use the Observer pattern: in one direction, you’re allowed to do function calls, but in the other direction you’re only allowed to publish state change events. (And, of course, information can also be passed in the other direction via return values of function calls.)

But who gets to do function calls, and who is restricted to being observed? You could do it either way (replace a function call foo() by publishing the event that your desiredAction attribute has been set to foo), but presumably one way is more natural than the other. In the situation, it’s pretty obvious: the outer, customer-specific layer frequently wants to invoke customer-neutral functionality in the inner layer, get the results back in a customer-neutral format, and translate them to a customer-specific format. There are also some situations where the inner layer wants to trigger actions in the outer layer: for example, the outer layer may request that the inner layer start a long-running action, and want to know when the action is finished. Which is a classic situation where Observer works well. So, here, it looks like the best solution is for the outer layer to make function calls on the inner layer, and for it also to be an observer of the inner layer.

Is this a general rule, then? If you have a layered architecture, do you want your function calls to always go inward? At work, there’s somebody who sometimes gets annoyed if it looks like we’re doing things that he disagrees with, so I looked to see if he’d written anything on the subject. He gives an example at the other end of a layer architecture – a machine-independent part (of a kernel?) on the outside, and a hardware abstraction layer on the inside. And there, he wants the hal to call and be an observer of the mi layer.

So, some questions:

• Does this make sense, or should it be reversed? Honestly, here I’m hampered by my lack of experience – it sounds fishy to me, but I’ve never written such software, and the devil is in the details. (It is the case that the person in question thinks about observers fairly differently from me.) One thought experiment is: what if we go down still further, so the outer layer is the hal and the inner layer is the hardware itself? If my understanding of hardware is correct (which it probably isn’t!), we have two communication mechanisms: the hal can read/write memory (and some memory locations may trigger special actions, e.g. disk writes), and the hardware can raise interrupts. If that’s the case, then I’d say that reading and writing memory is more like performing a function call (consider, e.g., replacing a public member variable by a pair of accessors), while an interrupt is more like publishing an event to on observer (“something happened!”).
• If we do agree with his point of view, is it really inconsistent with the example I’ve given above? In my example, the customer-specific layer was a caller and observer of the customer-independent layer; in his example, the hardware-specific layer was a caller and observer of the hardware-independent layer. Maybe if I thought about it more, I’d decide that we were both right, and come up with a generalization along the lines of X-independent vs. X-specific.
• Is there really only one correct answer here? POSA1 says no: it’s more common for outer layers to call and observe inner layers, but that the other direction is also possible. (As well as other solutions, e.g. observers everywhere to reduce coupling still further.)

Miranda’s taking dance lessons (tap and ballet for 5-6 year olds). The second one was today. At the first one, I got to see what a girl-dominated world might look like: all 10 kids were girls, 8 of the ten were wearing light pink, one was a mixture of pink and black, and one was all-black. One other parent was male, the rest were female. Much more balanced today, though – more black, a few kids were wearing lavender, and one was dressed in white. And I think there were four fathers there.

On the drive there, while passing some fire trucks: Miranda: “Fire trucks can go through red lights because they’re red!”. Me thinking: Hmm… Miranda: “And taxis can go through yellow lights because they’re yellow!”. Me thinking: That would explain some things, wouldn’t it?

We bought an hdtv last week; I mostly actually wanted to use it as a monitor for 480p inputs and sd cable, but this model did a nice job of upconverting 480p inputs to make them look like 720p, so spending the money for an hdtv monitor was worth it to me. (Not all hdtv monitors did as well, though, so be warned: go to a store and get the sales clerk to plug in a dvd player via the component inputs.) And it actually has a built-in tuner, so I went out and bought an antenna for it. Which I’ve had mixed experiences with so far: it’s amplified, but signals still go in and out sometimes. So, with less amplification, it would go between 0 and 2 bars, while with more amplification it jumps from 0 to 5 bars, but the frequency of 0 bars doesn’t get reduced as much as I’d like.

Right now, though, I’m watching baseball on Fox, and I’ve actually managed to fiddle with the antenna to get a consistent signal. It’s being transmitted as hd, according to the tv, but it sure looks to me like sd. So I’m pretty sure that it’s being recorded with sd cameras. And, ironically, the result is in some ways worse than what I get if I switch the antenna over to cable: the tv recognizes that the cable signal is sd, so it uses its clever machinery to improve the quality of the signal, while it leaves the hd signal as it is. In particular, on the hd signal, the interlacing is pretty obvious, while the tv has circuitry to convert the sd 480i signal to 480p. So there are tradeoffs. (Probably better hdtv receivers have less of an issue with this; for that matter, there’s no technical reason why a tv with a built-in hdtv receiver couldn’t display the signal as 1080p instead of 1080i, I think.) (Edit: actually, MPEG can encode interlacing, so there really is a difference between a 1080i signal and a 1080p signal.)

Still, I’m glad to see that I’m getting a consistent signal here, because presumably the playoffs and world series really will be broadcast in hd.

Jordan’s comment reminded me that I forgot about his other website. Which, at least currently, links to a page advertising his book, The Grasshopper King. Which I like a lot, so go buy it! I remember enjoying reading the manuscript when we were in grad school together, but in the mists of time I couldn’t remember whether I liked it because he wrote it or because it’s actually good. Fortunately, the latter proved to be the case. My only quibble is that I always feel guilty about enjoying novels set in academia. But I suppose that you should write about what you know; anyways, now that I’ve been out in the real world for a whole year now, I guess I can start getting over that.

Side note to Jordan: at first I assumed the web page was the publisher’s page for the book, but a closer examination showed that not to be the case. What’s your connection with this Zeek magazine that’s hosting it? Who did the web site design?

Anyways, the real reason why I’m typing now instead of reading a book is my happiness at the Red Sox’s victory over the Yankees (at the expense of Mariano Rivera, no less), and at the awesome catch that Manny Ramirez made to take a home run out of the stands. Manny has a bad defensive rep, but he’s actually always been more or less decent defensively. Still, that was probably the best play I’ve seen him make. Good Red Sox crowd, too; it took me a little while to realize that, in fact, the game was in New York. We went to an A’s-Red Sox game a few weeks ago where the crowd as a whole was, I think, slightly tilted towards the Red Sox, and the fans around us were heavily leaning that way. Miranda was highly amused by the simultaneous “Let’s go Red Sox” and “Let’s go Oakland” chants, but her favorite chant of the night was one all the fans could agree on, “Yankees Suck”. She is a fabulous daughter!

I was listening to the Gustav Leonhardt recording of The Art of the Fugue in the car for the last few days, and I kept on waiting for the unfinished fugue to show up. But it never did! Reading through the liner notes (what is the accepted term for CD booklets?), Leonhardt is of the opinion that the unfinished fugue wasn’t intended to become as part of the work. I hadn’t realized that there was any serious debate on this issue (though it is, I suspose, a bit suspicious that the main theme of the work doesn’t appear in the portion of that fugue that we have); at any rate, I miss it.

Not my favorite recording of The Art of the Fugue; it seems a bit flat to me. (Flat in the sense of “insufficiently textured”, not in the musical sense, of course.) The other recordings on the CD are better, though (Clavierubung II and Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro BWV 998). I’m looking for more recordings of The Art of the Fugue; the other ones I have are the ones by Davitt Moroney (which I quite like) and the partial recording by Glenn Gould, largely on organ, which is dreadful. (At least the organ parts.) Anybody with any favorites?

Welcome to my blog. It’s implemented using WordPress, which seems pleasantly nice to use. (And is GPL‘d.) Many thanks to the good folks at Red Bean for their assistance, especially Ayse Sercan and Karl Fogel. (While I’m mentioning people, I’ll say hi to Jordan Ellenberg, since he promised to read the thing.)

Great things await. Or not. We’ll see.