You find yourself driving south down a street with a nice bottle of wine, two destinations in mind: one to the southwest, one to the southeast; both are equidistant from one another. Sooner or later you must decide and commit on a left or a right turn.

To the left, there is a birthday party of an acquaintance—not a good friend—but a few of your good friends are expecting your presence.

To the west is a potluck held by another acquaintance—equally close to you as the other—where one of your other good friends is (though he's a bit of a loner), as is a certain person that you find rather attractive.

You're already running late as it is to both events.

1. Go to the birthday party, gifting the bottle of wine. You meet with your friends there and presumably have a good time. Your other friend at the potluck will likely be alone and awkward, and your future with the attractive person is jettisoned into uncertainty.
2. Go to the potluck, gifting your bottle of wine. You meet with your friend there, keeping him company, and are able to flirt with the attractive person. The friends at the birthday party will miss your presence, and judging by your flaky behavior as of late, may even be upset/frustrated with you.
3. Continue south. Think a while longer about choices 1 and 2. Sooner or later you'll decide, but if you don't choose soon enough, you'll risk being even later than you already are, making both situations worse.
4. Feign sickness and go home.

We make decisions like this every day. Measure damage 1_d against benefits 1_b against benefits 2_b against damage 2_d against... ad nauseum. Either way someone gets hurt, option 3 makes everything gradually worse, and the final option is pitiful in the purest sense of that word. And how do you even quantify those variables?

Map out every option, evaluate the pros and cons, and come to a justifiable conclusion. But grounded on what? Emotion? Value-judgments? Morals? Arbitrary decisions? Telescope inward and you come to the unanswerable question of basis. What is the first movement in any action? What causes that movement? Telescope outward and you have a chaotic system of actions and reactions, all intertwined betwixt reason, fallacy, hope, ideal, destruction, pain, and the will to survive.

Who knows? Maybe it's just entropy and the heisenberg uncertainty principle.

The fact that nothing matters is a dangerous thought.

The great irony is that that very statement is only true if you don't believe the first five words.

I'm currently in a bit of an existential crisis. Since the end of December, (is it really almost May now?) I've gone through by far what I believe to be the most difficult times of my life. December marked the apogee of disrepair: I'd been going down a vicious spiral of ego-fed hedonism combined with an ever growing detachment and fortification of my emotions. My mantra was that of self preservation through the destruction of everything else. I thought that if I could live life without feeling regret, (not without avoiding actions that I would later regret) the logical conclusion would then be that I would not want to change anything in my life. Thus perfection.

Why did I do this to myself? Simply because I believed that's what She wanted. She, of course, being a figment of my imagination manifest in the body of my love, Bonnie. I translated my earnest devotion for her into a contorted piece of fictional star-crossing. I practically worshiped her as a madman covets the voices in his head. Was it a psychotic break? Perhaps, I haven't studied the DSM. There's something (beautiful in retrospect and) frightening about realizing that the one person that you have done everything in your power to help/protect/love (albeit under gross error and false pretenses) turns around, and says to you, "I never thought I would hate you." Enter: Shatter, darkness, broken, cold, shiver, pain, black, cold, hate, empty.

To sum up everything in a sentence: I had never honestly contemplated suicide until this Winter.

I used to be a happy person, I used to be the happiest kid in the world. I used to smile, be content with the little things. I'd blame the change on the loss of my innocence, but that can't be so. The last time I was really me for more than a few snatches of a glimpse was my freshman year. I lived for the little things, for nature, for smiles, for the goodness in others.

Sara has this picture of me: I'm climbing a tree in Aldrich Park and looking over my shoulder at her, the photographer — I recently have been seeing my family, going on bike rides with my dad. It's the strangest thing in the world to see my dad, this guy I once hated with all the bile in my gut, and realize that he is exactly like I was when I was that happy person. He is himself on a trail he's never been down before, sitting under a tree eating pistachios and laughing about some dirty joke he heard at work — Oh, how I wish I could so easily disarm and return to what I was in that picture.

My almost fatal misstep was to think that should is tangible and knowable. Where should I be in life right now? How should I feel right now? What should I want? What should I be doing? What should I know? What should I say? All of these questions are decidedly unanswerable. Nobody knows what they should do. For most people, myself included, this is a very frightening realization. For them, any guidance is welcomed and bestowed upon others as nectar and ambrosia. Religion is finding the answer to should in an old book. Being a damn good liar when I'm trying to convince myself, I decided to write my own.

So now I'm in a bit of a limbo. Winter is over, things are getting better. I'm realizing that being human is nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone needs to be loved, and that's alright. Maybe I'm just scared now because I'm finally realizing my atheism. Time moves slowly and there is lots of it. It maybe took me a half hour to write this entry; 48 in a day, 336 in a week, 17,520 in a year, an easy million in a life time; Not too bad for getting some well needed shit off my chest.

There's too much time and too many people in the world to think that hiding something you feel is a viable option. I guess that will explain the frankness and openness that I am trying to embrace. Maybe if I can just explain myself, I won't have to worry about people judging me.

I've always been a huge fan of the separation between header files and code in C. Separating the interface and the implementation just feels right. But what I hadn't really thought of is gratuitous use of C's extern identifier and abusing the linker. I was building a qmail RPM for work, and in doing so having to go read (and decode) a bit of DJB's code. In particular, I needed to understand exactly how his building and installation program works (as he does not use the "standard" (and probably broken) ./configure && make && make install). In a nutshell, he generates an install program from the sources install.c and hier.c and a instcheck program based off of instcheck.c and hier.c. Let's first examine this install program.

Unexpectedly, the install.c has absolutely no reference to the files that are to be installed. It just defines a few functions that create directories and move files around keeping in mind owner, group, and permissions. The file hier.c contains function calls to the defined functions in install.c which lists the files and directories that need to be installed. Simple enough, build these two files together and you have a competent, customized, and fast installer program. Nothing too special.

The real interesting part is when you look at the files necessary to generate the instcheck program. instcheck.c defines functions to check and see if directories and files have the proper permissions, owners, and groups. These functions are named the exact same as the the ones defined in install.c. Aha! That means the hier.c file list/function caller performs essentially two completely different tasks in two separate, yet related contexts with the exact same code.

After realizing how spiffy that was, I made a mental note of such an interesting technique, but thought it was a little too limiting to apply to many different areas.

Earlier this evening, I was writing some libraries for my own personal work, dealing with linked lists, trees, and other linked structures. I was thinking about how annoying it is to have to go through the process of writing a linked or tree-based data structure from the disk. In the past, whenever I had to do something like that, I would have to modify the code for the linked structures, working within a fixed array, or do some post-op trickery converting pointers to indexes, etc. As everyone knows, the reason you can't do this simply by writing everything to memory is because you simply can't know where your memory allocator is getting data from. And then it hit me. Why not write a custom malloc() to function within a fixed array? You then could write the fixed array hunk out to disk and be done with it. Writing linked structures to disk would be trivial. No code would need to be modified at all. You could write the base pointer out to disk so that on read you could dump it to memory, calculate the "proper" memory positions, do a traversal of all of the nodes, and inject the data back into something that uses either the standard malloc() or your custom one for later writing.

I'm sure there are plenty of other uses of this technique of overriding existing function calls and abusing the linker in order to get different, yet related tasks complete. The best part about this method is that there is no modification of code. If the original works, then the injected will, insofar as the replacement code is bug free.

Come to think of it, this is a lot like Aspect Oriented Programming... but for some reason, the blatant hinting toward COME FROM that AOP prides itself upon just feels wrong.

Dear friend,

They say that no man is an island, and it seems that I've been trying to spend my life proving that wrong. I fear, now, that each day brings me closer to that dystopian ideal. Everything that I have ever loved, I have, through some maddening ingenuity, sent reeling from me in fear, disgust, or hatred. Perhaps I thought everyone in the world was as useful as a steaming heap of flesh and bone. Perhaps I saw myself as so great that nothing else but active solitude would bring me happiness. Regardless of either, I feel like Mersault in the beginning of his journey away from Algeria: sick, confused, and shrouded in the yellow haze of solitude.

I've many times said that I despise people in general. Though there is much truth in that statement, I never realized how necessary they are. But why is this so? Am I so misguided that I need to see myself in the reflection of others? Am I so desperate that I need to know a strand of thought and memory exists outside of my mind? I regretfully must say yes to these questions. I don't know what I want anymore. The disillusion of our absurd society's covetous nature, that overwhelming need to portray one's self as the image of success, beauty, and power — that lecherous desire to own by deceit and misdeed — that has led me to lose what it was that I once had: self-hope, or, a future.

It's strange, the progression of my emotions throughout this day. Last night I was happy, bent on waking up the next morning to the glorious feeling of being able to do what I want — being able to start on the netflix project, to start on the dictionary library for that operating system that has been kicking around for so long, to start on the rest of that song without a name... Though this morning, all I wanted to do was sleep. I managed to get out of bed and make some breakfast, but that soon lost its splendor along with my appetite. But then this overwhelming sadness came over me, I needed, desperately, a familiar face, one who would listen to what I had to say. But going through the list led me to come up empty-handed. All of my friends, even acquaintances, I had systematically destroyed for foolish and naive reasons. The few that remained, specifically Rikin and Erin, were those who have an infinite capacity for forgiveness and patience. so I was left alone, even from myself. My mind, like the sky, was clouded with solitude. Not even the sun was a companion today.

A ray of hope from desolation came once I picked up this pen, once I started writing to you. I anthropomorphized this piece of paper; it became a psychologist, asking me the cookie cutter questions: "What brings you here?", "Why do you think that is?", "How does that make you feel?" In a twist of fate, the clouds began to part, the shadow of that pine tree shown through onto the table and the carpet before me. The mechanics of my mind begun turning, my entire being was focused onto the ink with which I write this. Things were going so well...

But then a reminder of my loneliness vibrated within my pocket. Erin returned the call I made in desperation earlier. I was amazed that I kept my voice steady for so many words. My brain stopped, my hand stopped, the clouds returned, and I began to rain.

Seeing as how that did not help, I quickly ended the conversation and began writing again. So that is what brings me here, and we both know why that is. Now that just leaves me with the question of how all this makes me feel. Relieved that I am feeling, I suppose. I spent so long — so many years — trying to destroy feeling, to cut off my amygdala and become the Terminal Man. But I was attacking the wrong part of my brain, I was killing the wrong part of me. Half of me knew it, I would always and will always proclaim life to be great. The highs, the lows, the pain, the bliss — they all should never be shut up and shut out. But I was doing that and I think now I know why. I thought that if I was unable to feel, I would be unable to feel the shame that I felt for existing, for being me.

I was always a shy child. Afraid even to willfully affect the physical world around me. I did not want to inconvenience anyone. So began my excessive apologizing, my incessant doubt, and my necessary hesitation. By killing my reception of emotions, I was able to function, to work with others and, essentially, for others since my fear of altering the world was still there. This continued throughout my life, until that night we physically fought and ultimately the night I broke that board with my arm. The raw, unadulterated power that I felt sent me on a mission of destruction. My first target was myself, of course. I thought that I was invincible. The rush, however, of destruction soon wore off and I was left disillusioned and unhappy. Instead of destroying myself, I thought, I would destroy my past. So I literally vacuumed my history, my past. Anything that was not firmly stuck in the ground was removed. My old journals were torn up, photographs I didn't want were trashed. I removed everything I could from the internet that reflected upon my past. I wanted to be born again.

In a way, I was. My first entry in my new journal stated:

When I found my journals, I stopped to read them, laughed, then promptly tore them up. My memories have always been like that. I don't doubt that these words will also be torn to shreds at my own hand, yet I feel no futility in writing them. Perhaps it is a voyeuristic desire for me to lose this book and have it fall into the hands of some unassuming person.

I continued thereafter to only take not of all occurrences where I, by sheer will alone, outwitted someone or controlled them in some way. I was a different person: heartless, mechanical, and proud. Even my handwriting was drastically altered. I was hellbent on destroying my past and destroying my emotion. I now realize the error of my logic. I wanted to destroy all feeling, leaving me to live life for myself. The problem is, living and feeling emotion are inseparable.

So now I know that my entire life up to now has been spent attaining a paradoxical ideal. This letter was not just simply an exercise to bring that fact out and leave me in shambles, but in finding the flaw, I now know how to fix it. I wanted, originally, to kill my emotions to not feel the shame that I felt for being myself. The source of that shame should have been my target! I need now to embrace emotion, embrace my friends, embrace life because it is so amazing in its unraveling. I need to destroy my inhibition, my feeling of constantly being afraid of being judged, I need to return to the time where I did what I wanted to out of curiosity, not fear. I need to take care of myself, to justify every action, to find each seed from which each action has sprouted.

This is my apology to you, whom I have hurt through self deceit and intentional ass-covering. The irrationality will stop here.

Sufian Rhazi
11/11/06

So the other day, we finally got a fridge at my new apartment. Bonnie had a set of magnetic poetry, so I installed it, so to speak.

Wanting to be all cool and learn the latest buzzwords, I decided to give AJAX a whirl.

The result? Multiplayer Magnetic Poetry.

Tell me if you find bugs, write some amazing poem, or if it works in IE and/or Opera.

Tested slightly and probably working in Safari, Camino, and Firefox.

It's been a month or so. I haven't even noticed.

I seriously think that the world has gone mad.

In other news...

I was going to make a compiler. However, compilers require a parser/scanner. So I was going to make a parser/scanner. However, parser/scanners require regular expression matching. So I was going to make a regex library. However, somewhere in the process I wanted to store something in a sorted, quickly accessible way. So I decided to make a general data structure library.

Yes, I know there are many examples of these libraries and their respective parts, but these libraries are lacking in two areas. Firstly, they're not mine. And secondly, they aren't made the way that I feel libraries should be made.

So without shedding any more light upon that last statement, I'll just retire to making a library for the handling of data structures such as lists (queue, stack, dequeue), binary trees (avl, red-black, splay), and probably some other stuff.

So since I got a mac, I've been trying to find a piece of software which plays music as well as I was able to using the mpg123 and ogg123 command line utilities that I used in linux. (Seriously, they worked like a charm)

Itunes is nice, but relies far too much on the tags of music. Plus, playing ogg files is a pain in the ass, and playing flac files is much moreso.

VLC was able to play the ogg and flac files, but randomly would skip to the end of the song while playing flac files due to some nonexistent error. (flac -t said it was fine!)

And then I found cog. A (overly) simplistic interface to a backbone which can play literally anything. And the best part is that there is an extremely small gap between songs — hardly discernible unless you're listening for it.

But the interface is too simplistic for my tastes. A single playlist. It's hard to navigate around to listen to a specific song that you're looking for. I want music to be as accessible as it was back when I used linux 24/7 — I organized my music by artist/album/song within subdirectories and stripped all tags. Subdirectories of artists would have Unsorted and All directories which contained the songs that were unknown to a specific album or, for the latter, symlinks to every song in each album. I want to be able to browse through that with as much ease as I had before.

As a result, I've recently been tinkering around in XCode and Objective-C, writing little programs for OS X. Started with a little tutorial which helped a lot with learning the ins and outs of the interface builder and how to integrate that properly with controllers and such. This last weekend, I decided to begin to create the ideal interface to the ideal music player. The problem is, the documentation for Cocoa and all of the NS* classes is depressing. Not because it's hard to read, but because it's such a let down. So many promises of amazing, easy to use documentation, and when I try and make a simple NSBrowser object, I get fed a bunch of tripe like this:

NSBrowser requires a delegate to provide it with data to display. The delegate is responsible for providing the data and for setting each item as a branch or leaf node, enabled or disabled. It can also receive notification of events like scrolling and requests for validation of columns that may have changed.

You can implement one of two delegate types: Active or passive. An active delegate creates a column’s rows (that is, the NSBrowserCells) itself, while a passive one leaves that job to the NSBrowser. Normally, passive delegates are preferable, because they’re easier to implement. An active delegate must implement browser:createRowsForColumn: to create the rows of the specified column. A passive delegate, on the other hand, must implement browser:numberOfRowsInColumn: to let the NSBrowser know how many rows to create. These two methods are mutually exclusive; you can implement one or the other, but not both. (The NSBrowser ascertains what type of delegate it has by which method the delegate responds to.)

Both types of delegate implement browser:willDisplayCell:atRow:column: to set up state (such as the cell’s string value and whether the cell is a leaf or a branch) before an individual cell is displayed. (This delegate method doesn’t need to invoke NSBrowserCell’s setLoaded: method, because the NSBrowser can determine that state by itself.) An active delegate can instead set all the cells’ state at the time the cells are created, in which case it doesn’t need to implement browser:willDisplayCell:atRow:column:. However, a passive delegate must always implement this method.

What are the parameters to browser:createRowsForColumn:? What do they mean? What the hell does browser:willDisplayCell:atRow:column: get passed with? The thing about the documentation was, after I read the "Introduction to Browsers" tutorial/manual/whatever, I still had no idea how to actually use one.

Despite this apparent frustration, I have had a lot of fun playing around with Objective-C and the OSX Cocoa API. It's been a long while since I've actually 'tinkered' with anything, and it's been a breath of fresh air, albeit a bit too plasticy. Once I finish the interface, I intend on forking/improving cog and using it for my music listening needs.

In a purging catharsis, I think I'm now where I should be.

I was reminded that Edsger W. Dijkstra is my favorite person, it's a shame he is no longer alive.
The Threats to Computing Science (EWD898)

That paper among many of his others gives me hope in mankind.

Yesterday, I set out to write a paper on minimalism in programming languages. I realized, as I ended up writing about CISC and RISC, that I was taking the wrong approach entirely. Computer science has nothing to do with computers, programming has little to do with computers.

I'm in the process of making a compiler for a new language — not because yet another programming language would solve anything, but as an experiment in a new method of design.