Page of Moss - bloglet for Friday 29 June 2001

Sam, of explodingdog, drew something that perfectly expresses the nature of the Good, at least. _
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12:53:49 AM, Friday 29 June 2001

When we designed the judicial system in the U.S., we didn't promise that corruption would be impossible. All we did was guarantee that there would be as many chances as possible to reverse a bad decision, and that the worst the courts could do would be to fail to act.

(I should probably expand on that a bit. Oh well.) _
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11:56:48 PM, Thursday 28 June 2001

The phrase "politically correct" can be used to express basically three different messages:
1. "I'm about to say something that most people will recognize as obviously wrong, but instead, I want you to think of it as daring, radical, and original."
2. "Somebody objected to my rudeness, and I want you to view that as an attempt to stifle freedom of speech and pollute the clarity of the language."
3. "This person's acting like a humorless asshole, but instead of calling them on it, I'm going to insinuate that they're actually trying to push forward some diabolical political agenda."

It has an additional use academia, namely to insinuate that the horrors hinted at above are all the fault of things like reader response criticism and deconstruction. _
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10:11:52 PM, Thursday 28 June 2001

Evil Bastard Juice: start making a double espresso. Maybe triple. Put big heaping spoonfulls (at least one, possibly two or three, and big) of sugar into a big cup. Put a bunch of cocoa into the cup, too, though not as much as the sugar. The powder, like you'd do if you were going to make hot chocolate. By now, the espresso should be ready, so pour it into the cup. Stir it up so it all sort of mixes together. Then put a bunch of ice into the cup and stir it some more until it's cold. It doesn't taste very good, but all the sweet makes it not be bitter, and the sweetness and coldness of it make it easy to drink fast, and you can prepare it very fast. Evil Bastard Juice has the taste geeks grow to love. _
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05:39:29 PM, Thursday 28 June 2001

What's true of Galeon appears not to be true of Gnome in general. No, for once I'm not talking about bloat. I'm talking about keyboard shortcuts. In Galeon, they are (as far as I can tell) almost entirely nonexistent. In other Gnome appplications I'm looking at, though, they're in abundant supply. I already knew that Sawfish--not strictly a part of Gnome, but its official window manager--is very, very customizable (scriptable (with (lisp))). What's surprising and delighting me tonight is PowerShell, a very, very nice terminal emulator. The main thing it does (besides have good keyboard shortcuts) is let you have multiple terminals in a window, each on its own tab. This reduces a lot of clutter. It's a good thing to have if, like me, one of your main uses of a GUI is to make your command line more efficient. _
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02:28:14 AM, Wednesday 27 June 2001

By "just barely scratches the surface" I of course mean "is all I can think of at the moment". Is that a problem? _
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11:52:45 PM, Monday 25 June 2001

Writing in numbered epigrams doesn't guarantee good philosophy, of course, but think of the examples. Bacon: Good. Pascal: Good. Nietzsche: Good[1]. Wittgenstein: Good. And that just barely scratches the surface. More examples, anyone? (and many thanks to Mr. Findler for having pointed this out to me some time back.)

[1] Yes, good, despite some people's juvenile misinterpretations of him. _
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11:51:57 PM, Monday 25 June 2001

I got linked! By a complete stranger, no less! (Well, okay, she's an SJC alumna, and on the Johnny List (the real one, that's willing to include people Mike and I don't know or like), and thus probably a friend-of-a-friend, but still.) _
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09:35:04 PM, Monday 25 June 2001

And speaking of good ideas: the reason the argument from the existence of evil[1] doesn't work is that the realization of the greatest good is logically inconsistent with the total nonexistence of evil. This not in some ridiculous "good and evil could not exist without each other" way, but in small practical ways, some yet to be determined, along the lines of: not creating free will leaves a lower upper bound on the possible goodness of the world than creating free will does, but creating free will makes more evil possible[2]. And no, the fact that I've seen through yet another argument for atheism doesn't mean I believe in God now, but having more clarity is always nice. Hearing a good argument either for or against the existence of God would be very nice indeed. It doesn't even have to be a purely logical argument, as long as it's not hopelessly falacious.

[1] i.e., "Well if God is omnipotent, and God is good, then how come evil exists, huh?".

[2] Not that I mean to imply that it's the only thing that makes evil possible. _
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03:17:35 PM, Monday 25 June 2001

Bang! Suddenly, a really neat idea for a program, right there in my head. A log analyzer. Powered by an SQL database. Gives you aggregate information--start pages, referrers, most popular, etc.--but also lets you click through that aggregate information to view the records of individual visits. See what paths people followed after being referred. Learn the viewing patterns of individual users. Heck, give it a database of users, and set it up so that it can treat more than one IP as belonging to a single user. This could be exceedingly cool. Implement in PHP and SQL. I think I'll try tonight. _
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02:54:30 PM, Monday 25 June 2001

--pation. _
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02:51:10 PM, Monday 25 June 2001

You'll shiver with antici-- _
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01:27:25 AM, Monday 25 June 2001

But related to this last - sjca blogledytes please email me if you're having problem adding to your bloglets--we think we've got bloglet up and running again, but we're not sure. _
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07:59:33 PM, Sunday 24 June 2001

Update - Kerne's weblog has been restored. You no longer need to check your cache. You are free to visit Kerne's weblog. _
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07:57:36 PM, Sunday 24 June 2001

Attention all bloglet readers! If you read Kerne's web log, DO NOT go to it right now. Rather, check in your browsers cache to see if you have a copy of it. If you do, then please save that copy. His page has gone missing, and he's not got a backup of the most recent entries. Repeat, DO NOT visit the page now--that would clear out your current cached copy. _
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03:02:41 AM, Sunday 24 June 2001

So I asked, and it seems you're allowed. _
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12:40:43 AM, Sunday 24 June 2001

I'll second Mike's recommendation of launch.com: it's collaborative filtering done right. That is to say, it predicts what music you'll like by comparing your ratings of various songs and artists to other people's ratings, and then extrapolating to predict how you'll rate things you haven't heard yet. Now, normally, this is as far as such things go, but at launch.com, rather than just giving you a list of ratings you don't know if you can trust, they use their predictions to run a streaming radio station for you. It's spiffy. _
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04:12:18 PM, Saturday 23 June 2001

Good debunkation of the Eskimo Snow Words myth here. _
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02:25:25 PM, Friday 22 June 2001

Oh golly... I have to see this. _
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12:48:33 AM, Thursday 21 June 2001

ladies and gentlemen

mind-bending chemicals _
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02:28:23 PM, Wednesday 20 June 2001

I fixed my computer! As I may have mentioned the other day, it had stopped turning on. So, I took out the power supply, went down to the computer store, got a new power supply, put in the new one, and sure enough, it works. It was all very exciting, actually replacing the right chunk of hardware to get the computer working again.

One thing about power supplies, though--I rather suspect that opening it up to get its balls would be a very bad idea. _
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11:22:30 PM, Monday 18 June 2001

If the pessimist says the glass is completely empty, what does the optimist say? _
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08:24:03 PM, Monday 18 June 2001

It's the editor's note that really makes this one great. _
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06:26:10 PM, Monday 18 June 2001

"They have not known a single day of peace since the monkey invasion in March"

(link borrowed from MetaFilter) _
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03:49:51 PM, Monday 18 June 2001

They make movies of things by Henry James, but never of things by William James. _
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04:02:24 PM, Sunday 17 June 2001

If anyone wants to send me email (or has tried to send me email since about Thursday afternoon), be warned that I'll probably only get it if you send it to one of my m14m.net addresses. My desktop isn't working (it won't turn on!), so I'm using my laptop, and telnetting (well, ssh'ing) in to m14m.net to check my email. I can't do this to get my mail @hamparts or @home. This sucks. I want my computer to work again. _
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03:39:44 PM, Saturday 16 June 2001

Someone on Wiki just mentioned the following wonderful quote from E. W. Dijkstra: "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." _
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01:05:23 PM, Friday 15 June 2001

And now Andrew's having that problem, too. It's an old problem, and one with a simple fix, so I suppose I should explain it just so everyone knows.

If you're logged into whorfin (you know, the computer at St. John's where you check your email. Or if you don't know, you don't need to worry about this anyway), and when you try to use pine it gives some sort of complaint about a bad terminal type, what you want to do is type this command at the shell prompt:

set term=vt100

This will tell it that you're on a vt100-compatible terminal, which is approximately true, and which it knows how to deal with. Sometimes Windows Telnet gives its terminal type as ANSI, which is also approximately true, but which some of the things on whorfin often don't understand. But don't worry about any of that, just remember the magic incantation:

set term=vt100

_
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06:35:17 PM, Thursday 14 June 2001

Okay, so it's internet-only, and it's audio-only, but still: this is extremely cool news. _
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08:17:28 PM, Tuesday 12 June 2001

It's Ice Cream Day. And we hope you have a happy one! _
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01:48:31 PM, Tuesday 12 June 2001

Note that a decision to use the GPL rather than some non-copyleft free software license doesn't necessarily indicate a preference for the Free Software movement over the Open Source movement. I've got no particularly strong moral objection to non-free software[1]; however, I do have an objection to working for free. If I use, say, a BSD license[2], I'm essentially saying, "go ahead, take my work and resell it without giving me anything in exchange, that's what it's there for". On the other hand, if I use the GPL, I'm saying, "here's something I made. I don't think I'll benefit by keeping it secret and trying to sell it, so you can use it too if you think it will help you. If you do make something interesting with it, though, you have to share it too, so that it will still be useful to me, or else you have to contact me directly to work out new licensing terms: I'm not altruistic enough to give other people the profit from my work". I'm not saying that everyone should use the GPL, but I certainly plan to use it myself for any free software I do. Software companies aren't nice enough to give free help to--they can pay for their own damned programmers.

[1] I don't actually use much of it, at home at least, because there's rarely any point. When it is good, though, (Photoshop) I'm all for it.

[2] Without the obnoxious advertising clause, of course. _
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01:12:22 PM, Tuesday 12 June 2001

This is fun. _
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09:54:33 PM, Friday 8 June 2001

On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe trying to work for change within a corrupt and unjust political system only legitimizes that system, and direct action really is the only way to work for real change. _
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04:45:33 PM, Friday 8 June 2001

Unfortunately, it takes three Penguin mints to equal the caffeine in one cola. Also, it takes only one Penguin mint to taste like utter crap. (What really surprises me is that anyone would actually take the time to do this, but I think that line made it all worthwhile.) _
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11:47:25 AM, Friday 8 June 2001

Ever play Baron Munchausen? Ever wonder if a similar sort of storytelling game could be attempted online? So did I, so I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I set one up. So, go check it out. _
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03:33:13 AM, Friday 8 June 2001

I'm not a real doctor, but I am a real worm. I AM AN ACTUAL WORM! _
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03:31:47 PM, Thursday 7 June 2001

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