As some readers are probably aware, many computer systems (basically all UNIX or UNIX-like systems, including Mac OSX) keep time internally by counting the number of seconds (excepting leap seconds) elapsed since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. This count is known as Unix time.

This Friday, at exactly 11:31:30 PM UTC (which is not quite the same as GMT), Unix time will reach 1,234,567,890 seconds. Many people celebrated the new millennium back in 2000 (or 2001 for the sticklers), but new millennia come along every thousand years or so. Barring some sort of 2038 disaster, Unix time will never be 1234567890 again. So really, this isn’t just a once-in-a-lifetime event, it’s a once-in-time event.

For those of you in the United States, the important time is 5:31:30 PM Central/6 Eastern (take that, TV!). There’s a nifty little site with a countdown(up) clock here. I imagine that site might get really bogged down once the time gets close, so you could also reprogram your left-over Y2K or Bush Presidency countdown clocks (there’s probably instructions for how to do this on the back).

Happy 1234567890, everyone!

If you’d like to see some nice celebratory fireworks, you can relive the moment here..

Real updates forthcoming.

What the heck’s an intererrobang‽

Contrary to popular opinion, the interrobang (or IB to his friends) is not a curious form of sexual intercourse.

Rather, it’s one of the most glorious punctuation marks (un)known to mankind. Formed by superimposing the humble curve of the question mark (or, depending on your nationality and/or font, the accusatory interrogation point, or even the exotic, snobbish erotreme) with the vertical insistence of the exclamation point (or his well-bred cousin, ecphoneme). The interrobang is at once wondrous and wrathful, skeptical and surprised, quizzical and querulous, inquisitive and indignant, examinatory and exclamatory.

Many of the commenters on blogs that follow developments in the font world have strong, negative opinions about the interrobang. These people are wrong. The interrobang is awesome. Also, they read font blogs.

Like DaVinci’s helicopter, Mendel’s independent assortment, and even its contemporary, the Ford Seattle-ite, the interrobang was simply too far ahead of its time. Invented in 1962 by advertising executive Martin K. Speckter—to date it remains the only actually worthwhile thing ever invented by an advertising executive—the interrobang would have to wait for the rise of the internet to find a medium that truly cried out for its unique mixture of questioning outrage.

Consider: How many times have you written “WTF!?!?”
Wouldn’t you really rather write: “WTF‽‽”

Elegant, efficient, obscure. Using an interrobang online is a mark (pun accidental, but deliberately retained) of distinction and refinement. As a further benefit, the use of the interrobang has the potential to resolve a dispute even more protracted than the battle between the Little- and Big-endians—should it be “WHAT?!” or “WHAT!?”, are you more surprised, or more confused? What if you’re equally both‽

Alright, you’ve sold me! How can I use this magic mark‽

Luckily for you, the overachieving geeks at the Unicode Consortium thought to include the interrobang in their standard. Actually, they sort of had to, because Unicode is the kind of project that computer geeks undertake with a goal so superficially simple, it’s only after you think about it that you realize just how insanely audacious it is. Unicode aims to provide the means for computer representation of every character in every language that exists (and maybe a few that don’t). Easy, right? You just need enough codespace. Unicode contains space for up to 1,114,112 characters.

Interrobang is number 203D, in hex.

On Linux systems running Gnome, you can press:
Ctrl+Shift+U then you’ll get an underlined “u”, type 203D and press space and the underlined code will transform into an interrobang! This works in almost all GTK+ apps.

XFCE is the same deal, but use Ctrl+Shift+X instead. If you’re running KDE, you’ll just have to dig through the character map.

I haven’t tested this, but in Windows, you should be able to generate an interrobang by typing “203d” and then pressing Alt+X.

If you’re running Mac OSX, Apple doesn’t want you thinking that different. Typing an interrobang is a huge hassle, but the instructions are here.

Finally, most browsers will render the (X)HTML character code & #8253 (remove the space) as an interrobang, so you can use that for platform-neutral interrobang placement, in, say, comments on internet blogs.

For the record, I have no idea how the totally worthless tilde (~) rates its own damn key on the QWERTY keyboard, but the noble interrobang is relegated to the nether-reaches of the unicode table. Apparently in the late 1960s, there were actually some typewriters produced that included an interrobang key. If anyone has one they’d like to sell me, you would be awesome.

What can I do to promote this wonderful typographic innovation‽

Well, for starters, use it! But if you want to showcase your love of the interrobang in a more visible, real-world way, Arts & Letters Daily has Interrobang T-shirts and merchandise available for purchase.

Wearing one of these will allow you to easily segregate the population of the world into three groups.
1) The people who approach you and say, “Why do you have a question mark and an exclamation point on your shirt?”
2) The much better class of people who approach and say, “You’re wearing an interrobang shirt. You are awesome.”
3) Font-blog readers.

Enough about interrobangs, where are you‽ What have you been doing‽

I am in Paris, France. I have been doing some cool things, and also agonizing and procrastinating over my 2nd Quarter Watson report, which is the main reason I haven’t been writing here. I will try to write more frequently, and possibly go back to cover some of the stuff I missed.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is a Microsoft logo on the side of a JET ENGINE. The jokes practically write themselves:
“Microsoft Flight: Giving new meaning to the term ‘Blue Screen of Death‘”
“The reliability of Microsoft software, now available in jet engines.”
“Well, you can take off fine, but without Genuine Advantage Validation, I’m afraid we can’t let you land.”

I’m not sure what game Microsoft is playing at, advertising on airplane engines, but it doesn’t strike me as a smart move for them. It reminded me of one of those usenet-era computer jokes:

What if Operating Systems Were Airlines?

DOS Airlines
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again, then they push again jump on again, and so on.

Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Mac Airlines
All the stewards, stewardesses, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look the same, act the same, and talk the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are told you don’t need to know, don’t want to know, and would you please return to your seat and watch the movie.

Unix Airlines
Each passenger brings a piece of the airplane and a box of tools to the airport. They gather on the tarmac, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they want to build and how to put it together. Eventually, they build several different aircraft, but give them all the same name. Some passengers actually reach their destinations. All passengers believe they got there.

Linux Airlines
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

In any case, Buenos Aires seems like a nice city. It reminds me a bit of Mexico, or maybe downtown Los Angeles. I may have fried the European power cable for my laptop by trying to use it in a South American power outlet that was an almost-but-not-quite fit. Pegs, holes, and so forth. So my mission for today is to find a new cable or an adaptor.

Breaking standards-compliance

One guy told me that it’s against the law to sell adapters because they want to force people to buy Argentinian electrical products, rather than bringing in foreign ones. It’s true that high-end electronics are generally cheaper in North America than here, and I’ve talked to Argentinians who make a point of buying digital cameras and computers on their visits to the States. Still, I really doubt there are enough of these people to warrant a law banning the sale of power converters. Plus, wouldn’t those people just buy adapters abroad too?

Another explanation was similar, but with the justification that because Argentina is in the process of changing from an European Type C plug standard, to an Australian/Chinese Type I plug (oh, but they wire them the opposite way!), and they don’t want you using converters to cling to the old standard. Why Argentina feels the need to change their national plug standard, I’m not sure. Today, it’s common to see both types of sockets, as well as weird hybrid sockets that accept either plug. I’m not sure this explanation for scarcity of adapters makes much sense either. Newer buildings and appliances are all Type I, so people would gradually make the shift with or without adapters.

My own theory, for which I have no evidence, is that the adapters simply aren’t worth the trouble for a retail shop. They’re small, dirt-cheap pieces of plastic and metal. The ones I bought cost $5 ARS which is about $1.35 USD. Because they cost almost nothing, but come in a zillion subtly different varieties, the profit margins may be so thin that it’s not worth it to a regular retail shop to organize and stock them.

In any case, I can certainly relate to the frustration of young Skywalker, denied his power converters:

Those of us who pay attention to such things frequently gripe about the failure of standards-compliance in web browsers, especially a certain popular browser that until recently kind of pretended standards didn’t exist. However, it’s worth noting that almost everything in the computer world is fantastically standardized compared to, say, electrical wiring.

According to this site, there are at least 14 different electrical plug “standards” in common use around the world. Adding to the confusion, not all of them are strictly incompatible, either. It’s possible to shove a Type C plug into a Type E or Type F socket. However, just because a plug looks like it should fit, doesn’t mean that it actually will. As noted, “This plug is technically known as the CEE 7/16 (Europlug 2.5 A/250 V unearthed). A plug with an identical appearance with slightly larger pins is technically known as the CEE 7/17 (German/French 16 A/250 V unearthed). This type of plug is very common in most “universal” adaptor sets.”

Can you see the difference?

The prongs on the left plug (a Type G->Type C adapter I have) are just slightly too large to fit in sockets designed for the plug on the right. There’s a nice map here, showing the ridiculous proliferation of different plug types around the world. There was one proposed international standard, but so far Brazil is the only country using it. In this context, IE6’s CSS support looks like a marvel of interoperability.

I really do feel bad for the makers of electrical appliances having to contend with so many different designs. I’m sure it drives up the price of manufacturing to some degree, and it also makes it harder for people to easily move from country to country. Some companies have gotten quite clever at making sockets that accept a variety of different plug types. Now, if the entire world would just switch to sockets that look like this:

(Semi-)Universal Power Strip

P.S. I haven’t even touched on the different voltages/frequencies in use worldwide, and that’s an entirely separate issue.

Sadly, the reason this post is necessary is that Twitter is fast approaching a tipping point in public consciousness. Oprah has a Twitter account now, as do dozens of members of Congress; the New York Times has published an article instructing their readers on the finer points of “tweeting”. Next, one of two things will happen. Either Twitter will be abandoned en masse by the members of the trendwhoring geek intelligentsia that made it popular in the first place (who will then tell you how they always hated it as much as Friendster and Pets.com), or, alternatively, it will become a permanent fixture of the culture. We’ve seen this pattern before: in 1985, having an email address meant you were either a scientist or a truly hardcore geek, in 1995, having an email address meant you were a cutting-edge first-adopter type; by 2005, having an email address just meant you were a person in a first-world nation. There should probably be some sort of official rule of pop-culture: once Oprah does something, it is no longer cool.

In many ways, Twitter is like a horrifying chimera bred from the worst aspects of a variety of new(ish) communication technologies. Take the mangled language and limited expression that comes with SMS texts, combine that with the time-sucking, life-draining aspect of an email inbox always filled with new messages, cross that with the desperate self-promotion and attention whoring of social networking sites, and finish it off with a heaping helping of the echo-chamber circle-jerking commentary-without-content that is the hallmark of the so-called blogosphere. Oh, and just for fun, you can top it with a pinch of good, old-fashioned celebrity worship.

If you’re looking to understand what’s wrong with Twitter, this godawful blog post (don’t even click it, I’ll “re-tweet” it so I won’t be responsible for giving him any more hits) by part-time Digg founder and full-time toolbox, Kevin Rose is a pretty good place to start.

‘”RT” or “retweeting” is simply taking a twitter post from someone else and forwarding (rebroadcasting) it to your followers. Here are a few common ways to retweet a message (all do the same thing):

RT @originalsender: original message
retweet @originalsender: original message
retweeting @originalsender: original message

Retweeting can be a great way to add followers, as it pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, which in turn results in clicks back to your profile. Make sure to track your retweets using retweetist.

To retweet this post, type:
RT @kevinrose: Retweeting (RT) explained: http://tinyurl.com/whatisrt

If you enjoyed this post, add me at twitter.com/kevinrose – thanks!’

For those of you not fluent in douchebag, allow me to summarize: an acceptable (even encouraged) activity on Twitter is to copy-paste somebody else’s one-sentence post, add nothing of value, and repost it. You will want to do this so that more people will pay attention to you and your heretofore worthless life will have value. It’s the web 2.0 version of buying the same lunchbox as the popular kid at school.

One thing I find particularly baffling about Twitter is the way people who are otherwise staunch advocates of free software, open standards and non-proprietary protocols are nevertheless huge fans of Twitter, which pretty much epitomizes centralized and proprietary. If Twitter decides to start censoring messages, banning accounts for Terms of Service Violations, or (more likely) just go bankrupt and shut down, you’re pretty much screwed. If these people really are relying on Twitter for meaningful communication, as they claim, then they should think this through. As it stands, Twitter seems to be skating by under what I like to call the “Apple exception” where proprietary issues that would normally be deal-breakers are ignored when the company in question is hip and trendy.

I could go on at (even greater?) length about everything that’s wrong with Twitter, but it pretty much all boils down to this: Twitter is a stupid idea. It solves a problem that doesn’t exist, and it does so in an irritating fashion. Restricting people to 140 characters based on an obsolete technical limitation virtually guarantees that nothing worthwhile will ever get said on Twitter. And it’s not like the internet was short on rapid-fire gibberish in the pre-Twitter era, anyway.

Nobody at Twitter has figured out how to make money yet, and they’re not going to. If Facebook can’t figure out how to make money despite perceiving our thoughts from afar, discerning our going out and our lying down, and being familiar with all our ways, then there’s no way Twitter stands a chance. You can’t spin gold out of a billion irrelevant tweets. The sooner Twitter goes the way of Second Life, the better.

Oh, if you enjoyed this post…TELL NO ONE AND DO NOT FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine, and he said something like, “Wow, only 25? It kind of feels like Tetris should have been around forever.” I can see where he’s coming from. There’s something about the platonic purity of Tetris that makes it seem timeless. Other computer games from the 1980s, may still be fun, but invariably feel dated, handicapped by the primitive graphics and sound hardware of the era. Not so with Tetris. Playing Tetris, one gets the feeling that it looks and sounds the way it does because that’s what Tetris is.

The history behind the creation, licensing and promotion of Tetris is incredibly convoluted. It is a tale rich with Cold War politics and transnational intrigue. It’s also too long to recount here, and covered in sufficient detail elsewhere.

Of course, Tetris’ most famous characteristic is its addictive gameplay. In fact, it may be the only game so addictive that it nearly prevented its own completion. When Alexey Pajitnov first wrote Tetris, he found himself so distracted by playing the half-finished version—with no scoring, acceleration, or levels—that he almost didn’t get around to writing those features.

Over the years, a similar addiction has consumed the lives and livelihoods of many. World-record Tetris players have been known to play for more than 12 hours at a time. In my own life, back in junior high, I used to play Tetris DX on the Gameboy Color for an hour or two at a stretch, maxing out the acceleration.

I can testify that Tetris does weird things to your brain. At first, as the pieces fall faster and faster, the game becomes more hectic and stressful. However, I found that if I survived, and kept playing long enough, eventually I would move past that to a Zen-like state of total focus. The feeling is as though all available cognitive resources were redirected to the unitary goal of sorting blocks. Once I reached that state, it didn’t seem to matter how fast the pieces dropped, I was relaxed. I found that I could even get up and wander around my house, in a kind of trance, without breaking concentration. If somebody spoke to me, it seemed to come slowly and from far away. Unfortunately, replying would take me up out of the zone, and the quality of my play would decline rapidly. More than one game was lost as the result of my parents trying to talk to me.

I have occasionally had a similar feeling when writing, or during an exam, but never as overwhelmingly as when playing Tetris. This is analogous to the mental state reached by skilled hackers when coding. The Jargon file defines “hack mode” as:

“a Zen-like state of total focus on The Problem that may be achieved when one is hacking (this is why every good hacker is part mystic). Ability to enter such concentration at will correlates strongly with wizardliness; it is one of the most important skills learned during larval stage. Sometimes amplified as deep hack mode.”

The entry goes on to discuss the jarring experience of being jolted back to reality when deep in hack mode. In Tetris, that moment occurs when you lose. I would have a brief moment of disorientation, and “Wait, I’m not playing anymore?”, followed, of course, by the pervasive belief that everything in the world is made out of tetrominos, and if I could only fit them together properly, my life would be much, much better.

This post-Tetris hangover, the “Tetris Effect,” is actually a documented neurological phenomenon. Following intense Tetris sessions, players may visualize the real word in terms of interlocking geometric forms, they may see falling colored (or hideous green monochrome!) blocks when they close their eyes. Oh, and, yes, you will play Tetris in your dreams.

The mathematical aspects of Tetris are nearly as fascinating as its neurological ones. Like other classics, such as Chess or Go, Tetris is a game that is striking in its outward simplicity, but conceals enormous complexity. The number of possible board configurations in Tetris is on the order of 10^59 (for comparison, chess includes between 10^43 and 10^50 legal board positions, and there are probably about 10^75 atoms in the universe).

However, unlike these other games, Tetris is fundamentally digital. With due respect to the creators of some truly inspired electromechanical adaptations, Tetris really must be played on a computer of some sort. Intriguingly, Tetris is not a game that can be played by computers perfectly. Although for any given board configuration there is theoretically an ideal move, calculating this move in real time, for all possible situations, is beyond current computer hardware.

The best Tetris-playing AIs can complete hundreds of millions of lines before they lose, but they will eventually make a mistake and lose. There’s an outstanding (but long and technical) paper here where Colin Fahey explains his design of a Tetris AI (and anything else you’d want to know about the theory behind Tetris). If you’d just like to play around with a Tetris AI demonstration, you can download a good one here.

However, even if it were possible to construct an AI that played Tetris perfectly, it would still lose. There exist possible sequences of blocks which are impossible to clear fully, even by an inhumanly perfect player, and these necessarily result in a loss. Assuming that the sequence of pieces were truly random (computer random number generators only produce pseudo-random numbers, for reasons that are themselves complicated and interesting) the system would eventually (as t->∞) deal one of these sequences. One example of an absolutely fatal sequence is 70,000 or so Z- or S-pieces. The reasoning behind this futility is explained by a UIC math professor here; on his site, you can also play a modified version of Tetris that deals only S’s and Z’s. Experience failure yourself!

The fact that it’s mathematically impossible to win at Tetris; indeed, impossible even to achieve the sustained stalemate of perpetual play probably has as much to do with our enduring fascination for the game as anything else. Some see in Tetris’ futility a reflection of the grim, resigned outlook of its Russian creator, others a metaphor for the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union, or communism writ large; still others find Tetris a metaphor for life itself. Hint: at the end, you always die.

For myself, I suppose the fact that I can never “beat” Tetris means that it will always represent a challenge. Tetris is the unclimbable mountain of video games. There’s a quote from an author whose name I can’t recall (and that I, shockingly, can’t find in google!) that goes very nearly:

“It is only possible to really succeed at second-rate pursuits like politics, sport, or war. Truly worthwhile human endeavors—art, science, philosophy—necessarily evoke a sense of failure”

This, more than anything else, is the reason that Tetris is perhaps the only video game about which we can accurately predict, “They’ll Keep Playing It Long After All of Us Are Dead.”

Ok, so this is kind of a stupid little phishing scam that one of my friends pointed out to me, but I found it pretty amusing. Basically, you can put anything you want in the URL after the “?k=”, and it will generate a page pretending to have a magical solution to your problem (one which just happens to involve downloading and running their obviously malware-ridden software). Some of the more amusing suggestions I’ve seen or come up with include:
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=My-Marriage
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=Human-Nature
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=Cancer
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=The-Tragedy-of-the-Commons
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=Time-travel-paradoxes
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=The-Nameless-Horror
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=The-yawning-void-within-my-soul
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=Radioactive-Robot-Holocaust-of-2029

Phishing scams like this one are interesting because they remind me just how little effort goes into most malicious computer attacks. Social engineering can be a form of hacking in some cases, but this page doesn’t even come close to the level of actual hacking.

I guess I can give them a few points for good web design. They have a lot of (stolen) logos on the right-hand side (Look, they’re hacker-proof!). The photo of “Andrew the PC Nerd” is a nice touch, too. You’d trust that guy with your computer, right? Look, he’s a youngish, slightly overweight white guy with glasses! He must know how to fix computers. And if that’s not enough proof for you, he’s standing in front of a Windows logo! Sidenote: It should be a tipoff that a site is a scam when every single image on the page links to the same download URL.

Shamelessly hotlinked without permission

Their comments section also deserve props for being convincingly banal (“errr…I hate Microdude sometimes, why couldn’t they make vista as good as xp?”). Although the 4th comment down takes its “username” from the search query, which can lead to some incongruous results. It’s also smart of them to have the comments supposed posting times listed in terms of days from the present, rather than fixed dates. It saves them the trouble of having to update their scam site. If you actually try to leave a comment, it redirects to a generic “windows errors” page, with your new comment on the bottom. Well done, although I have to penalize for crappy grammar (“Error Your Getting?”).

All in all, I’ll give the errornerds a 2/5, with points for presentation and comedy, if not for actual technique or skill.