Obvious nexus: Sopranos and 60s Garage Rock

http://www.littlestevensundergroundgarage.com

Great listening while programming.

Potripper: Playing Perfect Poker

Poker is a game of missing information. Some people idly wonder what it would be like if a player had access to more information. The release of a corrupt account at Absolute Poker shows how a player named POTRIPPER was playing as if he knew his opponents' holdings. So far the events have turned out to be online poker's watergate story. Its Bernstein and Woodward are publishing their findings at twoplustwo.com. Its Deep Throat is apparently a whistleblower with inside access to Absolute's records. And the equivalent of the eighteen-minute tape was a suggestion in the records that a founder of the company played a part in the alleged fraud. The interesting wrinkle is the company straddles multiple legal jurisdictions, including Costa Rica, England, and a Mohawk-administered semi-autonomous region south of Montreal.

The summary at http://wizardofodds.com/software/absolutepoker.html doesn't show the other players' cards, but it contains some damning patterns. Note the lack of "Call" actions on the river. Some of the twoplustwo posters were talking about "infinite aggression", which I guess means the number of times you raise or fold on the river divided by the number of times you call (and presumably lose). The biggest question is how or why anyone with access to that info would make their cheating so obvious.

Now we need a Sam Ervin and John Sirica to bring everything forward. Except I don't think anyone jurisdiction is going to do anything. Internet companies grow on their reputation, and die on it.

Facebook Misconstrued?

Facebook purports to be a place for human connectivity, but it’s made us more wary of real human confrontation....

Among other gems. In "The Fakebook Generation" by Alice Mathias, http://tinyurl.com/3djx5p
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/opinion/06mathias.html?_r=1&oref=slogin for those who like the actual link).

Consistency in Software: Case #3841-22

chrome $ unzip --help
UnZip 5.52 of 28 February 2005, by Info-ZIP.  Maintained by C. Spieler.  Send
bug reports using http://www.info-zip.org/zip-bug.html; see README for details.

Usage: unzip [-Z] [-opts[modifiers]] file[.zip] [list] [-x xlist] [-d exdir]
# 2 dozen lines of helpful info omitted

chrome $ zip --help

zip error: Invalid command arguments (no such option: -)
chrome $ 

There's a very logical explanation for this, similar to why certain words in English are spelled in apparently arbitrary, inconsistent ways. For example, while it might seem maddening to remember which adjectives end in "able" and which end in "ible", all you have to remember is whether the Latin word the adjective is derived from ends in "abilis" or "ibilis". Another very useful cue, which I currently can't come up with a concrete example for, is knowing in whch rough century a word entered the English language. Knowledge of the fashion at the time could help remembering, for example, whether the spelling of a trade would end in "er" or "or".

It's similar in software. Sometime around the turn of the century the GNU Coding Standard calling for "--help" for command-line help options was adopted nearly universally. Before that common ways of accessing help were "-h", "-?", or programs often left the help to the man page[2].

The link program I run has a 2005 copyright on it, while the zip program was last compiled in 1999.

So obviously to be a fluent user of a system you need to know when the various tools you use were last compiled. Chances are, if you knew that, you wouldn't need the online help -- there's enough in your head already.

Any utility that supports "--help" and doesn't have a "-h" option, and is unlikely to ever need one, might as well map "-h" to "--help". And if there is a logical meaning for a "-h" option, if it doesn't make sense when it's the only argument, treat it like "--help". Doing otherwise leaves the impression of the inflexable software writer mocking the incapible user.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLine-Interfaces.html#Command_002dLine-Interfaces
was dropped

[2] http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch10s05.html

[3] Typos in the last sentence are metonymical.

Does Eric S. Raymond know about this list?

Following a nugget from Philip Greenspun's coffee table book, on
the funniest acknowledgment ever in a tech book, an ancient
treatise on a precolombian version of Java

http://www.steveheller.com/whosj/acknowl.htm

> Of course, I'm deeply indebted to Eric Raymond for his wonderful
> foreword; I can only hope that you and my other readers like this book
> as well as he does!

> Besides those who have directly helped me with this book, I'd like to
> acknowledge two of the greatest benefactors of mankind in general and
> myself in particular. The first of these is the greatest writer I
> know, Ayn Rand. She had the ability to explain complex philosophical
> concepts in language so simple that anyone could understand them; if I
> can explain programming half as clearly, I will consider myself a
> great success. Even more important, she laid the foundation for
> solving what is possibly the greatest conundrum of philosophy: how to
> connect what is with what ought to be.

> Finally, I want to thank L. Ron Hubbard for his discoveries and
> inventions in the field of the mind and spirit. Even a small fraction
> of his myriad contributions to knowledge would qualify him for the
> first rank of friends of mankind; in total, they elevate him without
> question to the top of the list.

Quite the list ... Java, Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard. I wonder if ESR even
knew he was going to appear in that context.