Why do the best literary discoveries always come right before my free time is about to dry up? I'm 20 pages into À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, and I think I'm in love with this passage:

After all, to take what among all her works is considered to be the most exquisite, what among all her creations is deemed to possess the most perfect and original beauty - to wit, woman - has not man for his part, by his own efforts, produced an animate yet artificial creature that is every bit as good from the point of view of plastic beauty? Does there exist, anywhere on this earth a being conceived in the joys of fornication and born in the throes of motherhood who is more dazzlingly, more outstandingly beautiful than the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Railway?

One of these, bearing the name of Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset, and supple catlike movements; a smart golden blonde whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express or a boat-train.

The other, Engerth by name, is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, guttural cries, with a thick-set figure encased in armour-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her dishevelled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together down low, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons.

It is beyond question that, among all the fair, delicate beauties and all the dark, majestic charmers of the human race, no such superb examples of comely grace and terrifying force are to be found; and it can be stated without fear of contradiction that in his chosen province man has done as well as the God in whom he believes.

I'll just have to hurry up and finish it this weekend before I have to start the new job.

From the output of ./configure --help for emacs 23.1:

  --without-sound         don't compile with sound support

The manual confirms this atrocity. I'm beginning to suspect Dana is quite correct to prefer vi...

It turns out my previous effort to make python deal reasonably with not having all libraries in /usr/lib were in vain; I got it to split 32-bit and 64-bit shared objects between /usr/lib/python$version/lib-dynload and /usr/lib64/python$version/lib-dynload, but I forgot about the possibility of third-party modules, which still all went in /usr/lib/python$version/site-packages. I found this patch, which deals with site-packages correctly, but which doesn't look like it keeps just one copy of the platform-independent built-in modules under /usr/lib/python$version like my original patch did. I ended up constructing a hybrid of the two approaches. This new patch keeps the shared objects of third-party modules in /usr/lib/python$version/site-packages and /usr/lib64/python$version/site-packages, and the platform-independent parts in /usr/lib/python$version/site-python.

Here's python-2.6.3-multilib.diff:
( Multilib patch for python 2.6.3 )

And here's python-3.1.1-multilib.diff:
( Multilib patch for python 3.1.1 )

Shub-Niggurath and her performing Cthulhus

Also, while I'm on the subject: The Adventures of Lil' Cthulhu

Less Wrong: An Alien God

But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God - not comfortably "ineffable", but really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes.

I rather like the way my hair turned out this time:

Wow, you know you're really a goth when you contemplate buying crushed velvet thigh-highs by the case.

Apologies for the evil closed format; OpenOffice seems to deal with it tolerably well:

The Totalitarian Threat: Bryan Caplan on the risks of a totalitarian world-state and the possibility that, once established, it would be highly stable.

I'm rather surprised this has been out there for three years and I haven't run across it before. It's not every day one finds one's perennial nightmares analyzed so cogently.

I rather like the way this turned out:

The Microsoft Windows 7 party pack in pictures

*sigh*

On the one hand, maybe the fact that Microsoft's marketing department is clueless enough to think this is a good idea is evidence of their imminent decline. On the other hand, maybe there actually are legions of frothy-mouthed fanboys out there eagerly awaiting the chance to attend a Windows launch party. *shudder*

Anyway, the kit is obviously incomplete. How could anyone throw a Windows launch party without a trebuchet?

Iowa fails justice forever

The latest case comes from Iowa, where the state's supreme court just upheld the 2005 conviction and sentence of Jorge Canal. While he was 18, a 14-year-old female friend asked Canal to send her a picture of his penis. Even the Iowa Supreme Court acknowledges that the photo was at her request, that the two weren't romantically involved, and that the whole exchange was intended to be a joke. Nevertheless, it upheld Canal's conviction and sentence, which comes with the requirement that he register as a sex offender, likely for the rest of his life.

The worst part of this sort of thing is that it probably isn't even particularly controversial with the mundanes. By all means, let's sit back and watch the glorious almighty state stomp some hapless young man's life flat, and most likely leave the supposed 'victim' feeling rather traumatized at having brought the whole thing about in the first place too. Hell, let's applaud it; it keeps our delusion that sexuality magically appears fully developed at age 18 intact.

Ye gods, paying attention to the world is bloody depressing sometimes.

Machine-assisted (almost) telepathy. Cool; so when do I get to upload?

In the opening scene of Babylon 5 season 1, episode 13 (Signs and Portents), the station computer states that the date is "Wednesday, August 3, 2258", but August 3, 2258 is actually a Tuesday. Yes, I know I'm an incredible super-nerd for having checked that by hand.

Also, I have this patch for e2fsprogs 1.41.9, to not put binaries in /usr/lib. *facepalm*

I was building fresh sparc and x86-64 packages of util-linux-ng 2.16.1 today, and discovered it disables building cfdisk on sparc (and apparently also m68k). The rationale for this? It's because cfdisk doesn't know how to deal with Sun disklabels and no one would ever use any other format. I guess these people have never heard of portable USB hard drives. *sigh*

Anyway, de-stupefaction patch follows below:

Something*Positive 2009-09-10 and 2009-09-11: that job actually sounds like a lot of fun, and I heartily approve of Lisa's taste in music and desire her t-shirt.

Looks like it's news of internet fascism day on Slashdot: Emergency Government Control of the Internet? and Crime Expert Backs Call for "License To Compute". Oh, joy. Can I please move to some other planet with fewer control-freak assholes? Time to get my tor exit node up and running again soon.