This is so awesome: http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Drama/plays/victory/avant.mov (no audio, Quicktime)

When I was in college, I became obsessed with Russian art history thanks to an incredible professor. One of the difficult things to imagine during that class was what Vladmir Malevich’s costume designs for Victory Over the Sun looked like. Can you imagine seeing this in the Russian theater in 1913? Amazing.

I’m so impressed that a group reproduced this, and even more glad that someone posted it to the net.

While i’m on perl.com, here’s an interesting article that probably relates to my recent MySQL (>4.1) projects:

Stéphane Faroult’s article, “How to Misuse SQL’s FROM Clause”. The problem queries involve using the FROM clause to list tables from which no data is returned. These examples can be spotted by the use of DISTINCT to un-join the result set.

While MySQL just recently started supporting sub-select syntax, this detailed description of correlated vs. uncorrelated sub-selects is good material for troublesome SQL queries.

Sam Tregar of Primedia (who wrote the Bricolage SOAP interface years ago) writes an article on perl.com describing the Krang Data Set, an alternative to SOAP he developed after discovering the many pitfalls of relying on SOAP for large amounts of network traffic.

I’ve personally administered, debugged, and generally become pissed off at SOAP-based information transports, for a number of the reasons he’s mentioned. Trying to send useful XML documents en masse over SOAP is like trying to send christmas gifts via USPS. It takes forever to wait in line (that is, if you’re lucky enough to be delivering to a decent messaging server), has stringent packing requirements, is often late, and also sometimes never even reaches the destination intact.

If a KDS sneakernet (or scp-net) is faster and more reliable alternative to SOAP with large XML documents, i’m interested.

For some feeds (or categories of feeds), i’d rather have it NOT notify me when there’s new content. Such as humor or gadget news. It’s not urgent, and I don’t want to be bothered. However, other feed categories, such as hot deals, need to be acted on immediately, and should notify me and perhaps be tuned to a more frequent RSS check. If there are server bandwidth concerns, maybe these can operate like stock ticker services, where an extremely high refresh rate or instant access can be for paid users, whereas free users get a 15 minute delay. The feed-level alert and timing issues are present in sharpreader, as i’ve just discovered.

It would be great if this could reflect in the interface more nicely. I’ll do some more thinking about what i’d want to see and write more.

Then, for feed groupings that mostly don’t have original content, it should perform meme-tracking and aggregation among those light blogs or link blogs. Memes tend to go crazy if you’re tracking multiple link blogs.

http://homepage.mac.com/njenson/movies/timryanlow.html

http://www.edmunds.com/advice/buying/articles/42962/article.html?tid=edmunds.a.landing.feature..3.*

Simply one of the most interesting undercover investigations that could have possibly been done. Edmunds.com hires a ghostwriter of automobile buying guides to go undercover and report back on the other side of the car salesman industry. What you end up with is a humanizing and engrossing look at the lives of people that we love to hate.

As it was also comissioned by Edmunds, it’s also very practical to know if you’re into walking up to car dealers.

So, in response to a RFC (Request for Chinese) food that I just received, here are a list of a couple of my favorite restaurants as well as things to order when you arrive. I’m assuming family-style dining, where you can order at least 4 dishes and share. An order of steamed rice is assumed.

Sichuan (or Szechuan, if you prefer):

Oriental Pearl $ 621 W. Main St. (Atlantic Blvd.) Alhambra, CA 91801 626-281-1898

• I originally heard of this restaurant during an interview on NPR, so go figure. Having been to Beijing and eaten “ma-la” dishes, where your tongue goes simultaneously numb and hot, I was disappointed to return to the states and not be able to find authentic Sichuan cooking. This restaurant seems small, but packs a punch and is probably the closest to authentic that you can get. Not super cheap, but great, great value.

Order recommendations: Water Boiled Beef or Fish (or ask for combination) - try to get this one as spicy as possible, and ask for ma-la flavor if you can. Mapo Tofu - Probably the best mapo tofu around. A very common dish done right, extremely spicy as well. Spicy Crispy Chicken (sp?) I’m not sure what this is called on the menu. It should be little crispy chunks of chicken in a bed of red peppers. Pretty good. Kung Pao Chicken - very different from American style KP chicken. Chinese cabbage or broccoli - good to balance out the spicyness with veggies. To drink: the watermelon blended drink is pure, not-to-sweet watermelon, that really helps to cool you off during the dinner. It’s big.

Shanghai

Green City $$ (not sure if this address is accurate) 140 W. Valley Blvd #207 San Gabriel, CA 91776′

My friend and I drag our companions to this place often for the incredible specialty dishes that are available. It’s a little harder to recommend what to order, since i’m not sure of the english names of the dishes, but you can always ask the wait staff to help since they’re fluent in English. Prices are a little higher than your typical Chinese restaurant, but it’s absolutely worth it, with incredible taste and nice ambience. This is in Focus Plaza, on the second floor above Sam Woo.

Order Recommendations:

1 - Salted fried fish - in a tempura-like batter, this is one of their specialties. It comes out like incredibly delicate fish sticks with some salt for rubbing or dashing. My favorite dish there.

Braised (Hong-Shao style) tofu - this tofu is braised in a sweet red sauce, and is delicious. Crab meat dumplings - kinda foggy on this one. Just order one of the Shanghai-style steamed dumplings, and don’t forget to dip them in a spoon of vinegar first. Wu-ti ribs - I think it actually says “Wu-Ti” on the menu. These are some great rib chunks. Any veggie - it’s good to eat vegetables!

Mei Long Village $$ 301 W. Valley Blvd., No. 112, San Gabriel

Great ambience and food, but definitely upscale and pricier than your average Chinese restaurant. If you’re really feeling like beef though, this is your spot. Great shanghai-style dumplings, and make sure to get the pork pump and dip sweet rolls in it. Mmm. It’s in the back left corner of a plaza on the north side of Valley.

Order recommendations: Pork Pump - a huge thigh of pork just falling off the bone, with plenty of delicious pork fat. Sweet rolls - these come out hot and fresh from the oven, and are perfect for dipping with the pork pump. Shanghai-style dumplings - again, get the soft, steamed dumplings. Any veggie - balance out the pork pump with some vegetables.

There are a few of my favorites. Leave a comment if you visit a restaurant and try any of my recommendations!

So someone asked me for my gaming resume tonight, but since my old quake clan’s website is now out of commission, it was really tough to find this old interview that Jody did with me years ago: http://www.caligirl.net/interviews/q3w/gloucester.html

It has the most complete tournament listing i’ve seen around. One of these days i’ll put up a little gaming history page with some of my old (old fart, that is) stories, pictures, and scans. Hopefully one day i’ll find a free weekend, find my old q2, and record some of my old demos in divx.

Prevayler - a completely in-memory data store, which operates extremely fast because it avoids object instantiation within J2EE. I had run across this last year at some point, but chalked it up as nonsense. Now that I hear Jot is running with it, it looks like i’ll have to take another look.

Laszlo, an XML-based schema et. al, for developing browser-based rich clients, has been open sourced under the GPL. Interesting stuff.

I released a new version of the DropCash COM object today. I realized that 1.1 didn’t do anything special or provide a particular interface when an campaign’s goal is met. To that end, I added campaignMetGoal(), a function that returns true or false based on the completion of the campaign. Application providers that use this method can add bonus / full registration capabilities, hide the object, or remove a nag screen, whenever this function returns true.