Page of Moss - bloglet for Monday 30 April 2001

On the other hand, some of the worst music for the state of my soul is also some of the best music I listen to. So I think for now I'll risk it. _
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01:29:55 PM, Monday 30 April 2001

I'm in Annapolis. Croquet is tommorow. The giddiness is becoming palpable. The quad was covered with alumni. I feel drunk, even though I'm not. Yet. Anyhow, life is beautiful. I'd be tempted to stay here, except that I'd, you know, not have a place to live, or a job, or anything to eat, and such. But the real point of all this is: Kerne implied that he thought I wasn't planning to write a bloglet entry while here. Well. I'll show him. _
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03:07:25 AM, Saturday 28 April 2001

Yay! I'm in Annapolis! _
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04:23:57 PM, Saturday 21 April 2001

Remind me again why freedom of speech should be considered anything more than an unfortunate and unpleasant necessity. _
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07:12:19 PM, Friday 20 April 2001

Mozilla has a "Print to file" option, that prints a page to a PostScript file rather than to a printer. Therefore, it should be possible to use Mozilla as an html to ps converter. Therefore, there should be a program that uses just the necessary components of Mozilla to do that from the command line. _
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07:14:44 PM, Thursday 19 April 2001

Slashdot is too large to be useful. The high population makes moderation impossible. The /. effect is powerful enough to do real damage. When alerted to situations of which they disapprove, the readership acts like a mob. The incoming news items can no longer be filtered adequately by the administrators, but the inadequate filters take so long that new items are no longer posted in a timely fashion. Nonetheless, the ongoing presence of Slashdot makes it impossible for new sites to come along and take its place. It does more harm than good. Therefore, it should be taken down. _
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06:38:38 PM, Thursday 19 April 2001

So I finally looked at the raw server logs, and it really is much more satisfying--though of course, it helps to have the analyzer there, to help me figure out where to look if nothing else. One interesting discovery is that a recent hit from a google search actually found what it was looking for: me. Someone in Maryland was looking for my page, it would appear. (And yes, they were in Maryland--here we see the advantages of looking at the logs directly). Anyway, whoever you are, I'm sure you're someone I'd be thrilled to hear from if you were to email me. And as for people searching for "heel lick", "how to wrap a toga", or "marmoreal month of may"--well, I don't know that I can do much for you, but feel free to email anyway, just in case. _
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03:07:52 AM, Wednesday 18 April 2001

Come to think of it, they hated my enablement essay, too. _
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10:43:34 PM, Tuesday 17 April 2001

The architecture you describe may not be very Unicious, but the functionality sounds like it would actually be quite easy to implement, and in a way that shows no trace of bloat. More generally, making a program more useful is never inherently bloatwary, and to imagine that a good tool ever needs to have a bad architecture is to exhibit the same attitude that sees three star programming as the height of elegance. _
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09:31:49 PM, Tuesday 17 April 2001

Yes, indeed, that wheel has very much been invented before. I'd like to distinguish between two different things that you're looking for. First, a tool that will let you mark up your documents based on content rather than appearance (I assume this is what you mean by LaTeXish), and control the appearance based on a single file containing formatting instructions, so that the appearance can be changed without having to rewrite the individual documents. Second, a tool for applying a general template to individual documents--that is, for making sure that things like your navbox are repeated on every page. The really tricky thing here is that ideally the template program should be smart enough to adjust the navbox based on what page it is being applied to. The first problem has a simple, elegant, standard solution: the Extensible Stylesheet Language, or XSL, and in particular XSL Transformations (XSLT), a "language for transforming XML documents". With XSLT, you can define an XML format for documents in your web page, and then define a standard template according to which that XML is translated into HTML. This should, in fact, be enough to do most of what you need. On the other hand, there is still the harder templating problem, the problem of writing templates that adjust themselves to the individual documents to which they are applied. About this problem, I am less sure. I can, however, say that even this problem will be easier to deal with if your documents are stored in XML, as there are already XML parsers written for most programming languages (and, in particular, for Perl). If you're not up for mucking about with XML right now (I still haven't gotten around to learning XSLT myself, so I can't say how easy it is), but still want a convenient way to at least add standard headers and footers to your documents, and other such stuff, you might take a look at PHP. Note, though, that the server at St. John's tends to process PHP far too slowly. _
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08:58:12 PM, Tuesday 17 April 2001

Essence abuse. _
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07:22:58 PM, Tuesday 17 April 2001

Wow! I've just been reading some posts on an AI group on Usenet, and it looks like Artificial Intelligence researchers really are doing some serious philosophy.

(Note: before deciding how to interpret that last remark, you might consider some of the other things I've said about philosophy in the past.) _
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02:01:27 AM, Saturday 14 April 2001

Ah-ha! If your program is well-factored, and every function does one thing and one thing only, then you can present those functions in the order in which they are best understood. Thus, you can have much of the benefit of Literate Programming without having to use a tool like WEB. I like this, because it seems to me that if you want to write really literate programs, then not only should they be readable by humans, they should be readable by humans with a minimum of extra documentation. _
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07:45:30 PM, Friday 13 April 2001

Certain systems that are designed to host large communities of participants (I'm thinking in particular of BBSes, MUDs, and (the example that brought this pattern to mind) Wikis) seem to have the incidental effect of making everyone who sees them want to start one of their own. Come to think of it, these examples also tend to make programmers who see them want to code their own versions. This is especially interesting since duplicating such systems would often seem to be exactly the wrong way to make them thrive--a new BBS needs more users, for example, so starting a new one, and thus breaking up the user base somewhat, will only make it more difficult for conversation to flourish. Furthermore, anyone starting a new instance of such a system will necessarily find it much harder to gain any of the potential benefits of the system, for they will initially have no users, while the original which they are duplicating will already have at least a somewhat developed user base. And of course, duplicating the software work to create such a system would seem to be even more ridiculous--the new software will inevitably have a somewhat different interface, making it harder for participants in the original system to join the new one, and making it hard to connect the new system to the old (in the situations where this applies--echoed BBS subs, for example). And yet, this reaction seems perfectly natural--I feel it myself. I'm not sure what to make of it, but it's odd, and, I think, interesting. Anyone care to offer other examples? _
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06:22:20 PM, Friday 13 April 2001

It's official--I prefer my eight minute walking commute to work to the alternative 4 minute driving commute to work. Just had to bring my car back from lunch with me, and it almost seemed like more trouble than it was worth. _
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06:14:00 PM, Friday 13 April 2001

Quod Erat Demonstrandum _
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11:08:47 AM, Friday 13 April 2001

For me, it would have to be:

1. Sloth
2. Pride
3. Gluttony
4. Avarice
5. Wrath
6. Lust
7. Envy _
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10:15:29 PM, Thursday 12 April 2001

Oh Katherine, I'm so sorry... and I didn't realize Tracy even liked beer. _
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12:08:19 PM, Thursday 12 April 2001

There. Fixed that. _
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11:39:24 AM, Thursday 12 April 2001

Items was intended to be a sort of variation on a diary that would destroy, ignore, or subvert the distinction between personal and impersonal. I haven't updated it in a long, long time, because the software I wrote for it is trapped on my laptop. Now I see that it doesn't work properly in Mozilla... I wonder what other browsers it fails in? In some ways, it failed as a site, too... I don't think the problem was exactly that it conflated the personal with the impersonal, but it's someting close to that. I still do need to keep the distinction, if I'm going to maintain a page like that properly; I just need to remember that the personal does include thinking. Looking back at what I thought about this before, I think I was right to plan on splitting Items into two separate projects. I'm certainly not going to try to do it tonight, but I am going to try it sometime. This web page needs a bit more life. _
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01:22:38 AM, Thursday 12 April 2001

And as for the whole question of personal vs. impersonal, I think it's fascinating to watch how weblogs have changed over the past couple of years. When the whole weblogging trend started out, a lot of the online diarists were afraid that the weblog meant the end of everything personal on the web, but in fact, not only have many of the old diaries turned into weblogs, but many new people who've started weblogs have treated them like diaries. That said, I really miss some of the old diaries... this weblogging format just doesn't allow one to go on long enough to tell a proper story. _
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01:16:52 AM, Thursday 12 April 2001

I had wondered, though only momentarily. I must say, I'm very encouraged at the fact that the part that most made me think of Kerne was the bass guitar reference. And speaking of Kerne, it appears the head-scarf theorem is finally going to be properly tested. If anyone can wear a head-scarf and still not look like Katherine, it's Kerne, all dressed in black. _
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01:11:40 AM, Thursday 12 April 2001

Blast! I hate it when I press enter by mistake. Stupid enter key. Why haven't I switched to version 2.2 yet? Stupid Moss. _
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01:10:28 AM, Thursday 12 April 2001

Okay, so I've recently set out on an interesting project: I'm trying to turn myself into a morning person. I'm gradually retraining myself until my sleep habits are less "stay up as long as possible and then sleep as long as possible" and more "get up at a constant time each morning (say, 6:00) and get to bed early enough to get as much sleep as possible". In practice, this doesn't actually mean I get any less sleep than I did before, just that I sleep earlier--and I also have more time to myself in the mornings, which is very nice. But my body seems to be in a full scale rebellion against this whole idea. I've only been at it for about a week (and not a terribly consistent week, at that), but I'm finding myself absolutely exhausted in the afternoon, moreso than the (relatively mild) sleep deprivation could possibly warrant. I mean, I know I should expect some difficulty in trying to change a habit that's at least 6 years old, but should it really be that hard? _
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07:51:49 PM, Wednesday 11 April 2001

What, am I not last? I thought so to be; but Huckle nor Muckle before me do I see! _
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11:30:01 AM, Wednesday 11 April 2001

Ah ha! Preformatted text should be 10 point in my stylesheet. _
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09:17:39 PM, Tuesday 10 April 2001

So I'd been trying to figure out this bug I had for the past half hour of work. I'd given up and left. And then, when I was nearly home, it finally hit me: since I'm calling Iterator.next(), not ClientList.next(), It's returning an Object, not a Client. I've overriden Client.equals(Client), but I hadn't overridden Client.equals(Object), because I didn't think it was a case that I'd have to deal with. But now I realize that there's always a possibility that a Client will be compared to another object which was a Client, but has been cast to another, more general, type. I believe the assertion I need to add to get this to show up in the unit test is:

assert( sampleFoo.equals( (Object)sampleFooDuplicate ) );

_
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09:11:45 PM, Tuesday 10 April 2001

I believe I have a discovered a problem with Slashdot's moderation system. It is missing a rating:
-1: Wrong. _
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07:21:23 PM, Tuesday 10 April 2001

Some bloglet entries just require lots of responses. _
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07:16:43 PM, Tuesday 10 April 2001

J:\My Music\ : 480 Folders. That's not 480 tracks, mind you, that's 480 different artists. I'm not sure how many tracks we have, but it all adds up to 46.5 gigabytes. _
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03:40:45 PM, Tuesday 10 April 2001

Furthermore, when I opened up the bloglet script to add the feature I was planning, I found that I'd already added it when I added the other ones. I'm going to start using the new version, 2.1, for a bit, just to iron out the bugs, but in a few days, when I'm sure it works at least reasonably well, I'll send it on down to St. John's. _
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10:55:00 AM, Monday 9 April 2001

I woke up a little before seven o'clock this morning, which means I can actually get ready for work at a reasonable pace, and even take some time to read my email and suchlike. I woke up, took a shower, headed into the kitchen to assemble a scone (yum) and then a mocha (a further yum), which I quietly savored while contemplating various weblogs and listening to good music (Pink Floyd, The Wall). From the looks of things, the weather's clearing up; I haven't been outside yet, so it may still be cold out, but it's clear, not rainy like yesterday. For the first time in far too long, I actually feel like my life's starting to come together into some sort of order. I'm happy. Kerne's right. It's a perfect day. _
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10:43:40 AM, Monday 9 April 2001

Beaches come in a can,
they were put there by a man
in a factory down town... _
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10:41:51 AM, Monday 9 April 2001

Okay, I did it! I'm here to claim my 90 points now. _
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09:52:19 AM, Monday 9 April 2001

Oh, by the way, if you haven't read my bloglet in the past few hours, there are a bunch of new entries on the last page that you've probably missed. _
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09:54:22 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

Okay, I object to this turn the weather's taken lately. A week ago, it was bright and sunny and springtimish and wonderful. Then for the past week, it's been sort of chilly and cloudy and not-that-nice (except one morning when the mist made everything really lovely--but I digress). Then about half an hour ago, it started raining, and five minutes later, HAIL! I've decided to blame Oregon. _
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09:49:21 PM, Sunday 8 April 2001

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