Been in Sunriver all week with brothers, parents, nieces, nephews, sisters-in-law, spouse, daughters, aupair.  It’s been snowing a little pretty much every day, so we’ve stayed in with lots of games.  I did find a few geocaches though before the snow set in, and sneaked out a few times into the icy air for a few photos.  See them here.

I’m on my way home from France, having attended a very successful WSDL 2.0 Interop Event, in which we made dramatic progress in completing the test suite infrastructure, running tests of various sorts, fixing bugs in implementations, and even debating some ambiguities in the spec.  Everyone worked incredibly hard (often into the wee hours - 4AM was my best[worst]), and the accomplishments are impressive.  Merci boucoup to all who attended and worked so hard!  Final victory is within sight…

But besides the nearly round-the-clock hack-a-thon, we did take a bit of time out to enjoy the local attractions - a nighttime tour of Mont Saint Michel, crepes and a walk around the old town of Saint Malo, an over-abundance of excellent meals, and even a few rounds of Werewolf.  Pictures are available here.

Last week I accompanied my daughter on a field trip to the Mission San Juan Batista and Mission Carmel (they’re studying California history), and to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Finally finished arranging, tagging and geotaggingthe photosets.  You can find the photoset for Missions here, and that for the aquarium here.

With a recent update to IE (not sure if it was IE7 or earlier), browsing to an XML file without a stylesheet on a local drive now gives a security warning.  The cause of this is the little bit of script generated by the default stylesheet to make the + and - collapsing behavior work.  Of course, for IE to warn it’s users against script that it ships itself seems rather kookoo, let’s hope they fix this oversight soon.

You can "Click here for options…" including allowing the script to run, but honestly that’s just too much work when you just want a quick view of the XML.  At the WSDL 2.0 Interop Event, others were complaining about this behavior too, and wondered how to turn it off globally.  So I got around to looking for a method.

What I found is in the Advanced tab of Internet Options - the "Allow active content to run in files on My Computer" option.  By selecting this option, clicking OK, and then closing all your browser windows, you can open local XML files without the annoying warning.

Of course, this is a pretty lame workaround, because not only allowing IE access to it’s own internal organs, so to speak, this option also has the potential to allow real security violations - such as attacks that might run by tricking the user to download a web page to their local drive and then open it from there - the useful warnings against Active content might be quite valuable.

Let’s hope IE get’s a little smarter about detecting what’s harmful and what’s not.

A rather obscure news story came to my attention recently, and triggered some musing.

On October 12, France passed a law extending the same penalties (a year in prison, 45K euro fine) for denying the Holocaust to the so-called Armenian Genocide, a horrific massacre back around 1915.  I accept that killing people in the 6 and 7 figure numbers may be considered genocide by all rational people.  But I also agree with this editorial from the Christian Science Monitor that penalizing free speech, even when that speech is a damaging lie, can have a high cost.

That reminds me (for reasons you will have to bear with me on) of some cool programming my brother did a few years ago.  He had a genetic algorithm that would grow digital plants.  Each plant had DNA of 100 instructions, and the instructions told the plant which direction to grow in.  He would generate some random DNA, put them in a garden, and see which covered the most ground.  The losers were all killed off (natural selection), and the winner would be randomly mutated into several new varieties, placed back in the garden, and allowed to compete for space again.  After a tens or hundreds of thousands of generations, some pretty sophisticated strategies would emerge, filling the screen with colorful whorls in an amazing variety of shapes.  Very cool that essentially random numbers could be coerced into creating complex and beautiful forms! (These aren’t images from the program, they are simply fractal images generated using Apophysis; I needed some illustrations!)

My brother started looking at the digital "DNA" to see how the plants’ algorithm actually worked, and to his surprise found that on average only about 5 of the 100 instructions were actually engaged - the other 95 were "dead code."  So he reduced the size to about 5 instructions - and the result was completely uninspiring.  Countless generations of mutating those 5 instructions simply never resulted in the variety and beauty possible with 100 instructions.  Those 95 unused instructions were vital, not to the "life" of the plant, but to the future evolution of the plant.  Despite having no present purpose whatsoever, they provided fertile ground for evolution to blossom in.

Geneticists find the same thing in real DNA - lots of sequences that appear not to serve any functional purpose, or may even have harmful effects, yet are there as a result of the evolutionary journey.  If we were able to remove all those dead or harmful sequences most organisms would probably be able to live just fine, perhaps even better in some circumstances.  But the potential for evolution would be flattened.

Tying this back to the Armenian Genocide, denying well-documented facts about history seems deluded and hurtful to a civilization.  It seems to have no beneficial purpose whatsoever.  However, over the course of history there have been many seemingly non-sensical and dangerous theories, a few of which have revolutionized human development and allowed our civilization to evolve in unimagineable ways.

We may not need to believe that well-documented genocides are hoaxes (I certainly hope not!) but a civilization that limits freedom of expression, a crude attempt to limit freedom of thought, is limiting it’s primary potential for evolving to ever higher levels of splendor.  That seems like a far graver threat in the long run.

Got my Tahoe Rim Trail patch in the mail today from the Tahoe Rim Trail Association, confirming my application that I’d done the whole trail.

I’m number #565 to register my completion of the trail.  I’m sure I’ll be posted on the official list soon.

I think I’ll sew it onto my backpack ;-).

I’ve come across a number of interesting variations on panoramas on Flickr lately, some of my favorites illustrated below.

Anyone intrigued by The Little Prince would naturally gravitate towards polar panoramas - in which a 360 degree panorama (or at least a nominally joinable one) is transformed into polar coordinates, resulting in your own tiny world to explore.  Makes the world seem much more manageable, don’t you think?

I often like leaving the edges of a panorama raw - the shapes can be quite interesting.  In this vein check out Mareen Fischinger’s panographic compositions - well over a hundred photos collaged to transform their rather mundane, colorless subjects into brilliantly rhythmic pieces.

And then there’s the physically created panoramas, like this polaroid emulsion lift panorama from Cℓea tecℓea.

Or this moody, slightly spooky panorama stitched (in a darkroom I think) from sequential but otherwise unrelated photos on a film roll. View it large.

I find this kind of thing rather amusing.  Makes me sound far more important than I am…

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