Page of Moss - bloglet for Thursday 30 August 2001

On the other hand, people in MetaTalk do actually seem to be thinking about the problem in some good ways. And Matt still rules. So I think there's hope. _
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06:05:19 PM, Thursday 30 August 2001

I'm worried about MetaFilter. If things keep up the way they've been going for the past few days, then it's bound to end up going the way of Slashdot sooner or later. This would be sad. _
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05:51:27 PM, Thursday 30 August 2001

Shonen Knife Planet! Let's go to the knife planet! _
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03:15:53 PM, Thursday 30 August 2001

Public Enemy, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back

(but also Clannad - Clannad In Concert (fear not, it's before they started doing lame new age crap))

(and for that matter, also Dropkick Murphys - Sing Loud, Sing Proud. My playlist is coming from all over the place this morning.) _
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12:41:19 PM, Thursday 30 August 2001

I'm baffled at how it could have happened, but since it has, congratulations. The two of you might actually have a good fighting chance at making Reality really cool. _
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12:25:17 PM, Thursday 30 August 2001

emacs sucks. And vi rules. (and yes, I am mostly saying this just to feed the $EDITORs Sucks-Rules-O-Meter) _
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12:14:34 PM, Thursday 30 August 2001

"My mind is going, Dave--I can feel it." _
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04:31:52 AM, Thursday 30 August 2001

Arrest Henry Kissinger for crimes against humanity. _
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07:41:05 PM, Monday 27 August 2001

The Power to Revolutionize the World _
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11:48:16 PM, Friday 24 August 2001

sugar cane and abel? _
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11:27:57 PM, Friday 24 August 2001

"I felt like destroying something beautiful." _
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11:27:12 PM, Friday 24 August 2001

Fuck them if they can't take a joke. _
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02:56:14 PM, Wednesday 22 August 2001

Perhaps a news/mail filter that could automatically delete any message containing more than two exclamation points in a row? _
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02:18:55 PM, Wednesday 22 August 2001

(Why have a spot in every blog entry for what you're listening to right now when you could just blog whenever you happen to be listening to something good?) _
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06:09:29 PM, Tuesday 21 August 2001

The Pretenders, "Lovers of Today" (from Isle of View) _
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06:06:54 PM, Tuesday 21 August 2001

Did I mention I cut my hair? Short. The shortest it's ever been, I think. A little over a week ago. _
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10:19:11 PM, Sunday 19 August 2001

Jefferson was not the only founding father. _
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05:51:38 PM, Thursday 16 August 2001

The Baron has started up again. Many thanks to Mr. Treuer for instigating this. You may now all go and continue your stories. _
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12:39:32 PM, Thursday 16 August 2001

It's getting bad--just now, where I normally would have said "I hate computers!", I instead went with the more sweeping "Civilization was a bad idea from the start." _
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02:10:38 PM, Tuesday 14 August 2001

Hey Remi, is this the sort of thing you were thinking of? I spent the last hour or so (okay, maybe two hours) throwing it together, because it seemed like the perfect sample script to test out my Python hacking abilities with.

For those of you who aren't Remi, and thus aren't aware of our conversation last night: what this is is basically a script for a multiuser weblog. Anyone can add an entry, but you can only delete an entry if you log in first with the secret administrator login and password. This means that anyone can add to the page, but administrators can review content for appropriateness. For the purposes of this demo, the administrator login and password are 'test' and 'test'. Also for the purposes of this demo, I made no effort whatsoever to make it look pretty. All the cosmetic stuff is easily changeable.

As it stands, it's not really ready to be used anywhere--it could use a few more niceties, and maybe something to keep people from passing in bad html. Also, the code is a bit of a mess (though nothing that couldn't be cleaned up). I may try to finish it up tommorow, though I've got some other things I need to be doing, too. Python made the whole thing fantastically simple to write, and it's small enough that it'll be easy to edit even with its messiness. I may start using this in my own site--perhaps to replace the comment script I'm now using, and thus make it so that I've written every part of my weblog myself. _
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03:12:39 AM, Tuesday 14 August 2001

I'm going to try my first Python hack tonight. Wish me luck. _
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05:37:50 PM, Monday 13 August 2001

while (you.base.hasNext()) {
    Base eachBase = you.base.getNextBase();
    eachBase.belong(us);
}

_
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04:41:15 PM, Monday 13 August 2001

UPDATE TABLE base SET belong=us WHERE belong=you;

for (i=0; i < base.length; i++) {
    if (base[i].belong == you)
        base[i].belong = us;
}

for all in base:
    if all.belong == you: all.belong = us

_
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03:36:24 PM, Monday 13 August 2001

I'm back. _
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12:09:51 PM, Monday 13 August 2001

The www.sjca.edu domain name doesn't seem to be resolving properly, from either home or work. I assume others are having this problem. Have no fear; whorfin is still up, and reachable by its IP address (199.89.180.20). Thus: Katherine
Andrew
Tracy
Cassie

And for those of you who'd like to be able to log in, check your email, and add to your bloglets: telnet to 199.89.180.2. (Note, that's 2, not 20. Different IP address for loginhost.) _
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12:07:48 PM, Monday 13 August 2001

I'm blogging from the airport. Teehee! I'm blogging from the airport...

No, it's better than that: I'm blogging from the airport for free! _
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06:33:53 AM, Thursday 9 August 2001

Worse is Better. _
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04:04:37 PM, Wednesday 8 August 2001

I'm going away for a few days, so, from tommorow through sunday, if you don't see me on AIM, and if I don't post anything, I've got an excuse. So there. _
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01:23:39 AM, Wednesday 8 August 2001

"George Lucas should have his balls frozen in carbonite. That's all I have to say." --Dan, my coworker, describing what he thought of The Phantom Menace _
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11:57:39 AM, Tuesday 7 August 2001

Say what you like about whether Bush was legitimately elected President, but Gore sure as hell wasn't. _
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03:26:06 PM, Friday 3 August 2001

I don't think MetaFilter should have to put up with having an Objectivist posting to it. _
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12:52:18 PM, Friday 3 August 2001

Ursus horribilus _
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01:52:57 AM, Friday 3 August 2001

On the other hand, nobody would think me the least bit shortsighted if I expressed my doubt that we'll ever make an intelligent hammer. _
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07:41:12 PM, Thursday 2 August 2001

Think about laws. In particular, the kind that we most naturally think of as laws--prohibitions against certain types of behavior (murder, theft, etc.), rather than expressions of administrative procedure and suchlike. These sorts of laws are only justified, it seems to me, because they represent the consensus of nearly everyone in society--apart from a few sociopaths, even those who break the laws recognize that they are doing wrong. They would not be justified if they were merely the expression of how a few people would prefer for everyone else to act. Wherever there is any large, organized opposition to a law, we must assume that it is something about which reasonable people can disagree. But when one group enforces their beliefs on another, beliefs about which there is rational disagreement, this is not law, but mere force, whatever its origins or justifications.

Therefore,
I suggest that a simple majority is not nearly enough to justify passing a law, for this allows any group that gains a temporary advantage of numbers to force everyone to obey their will. Rather, the requirement for a law should be something near consensus--eighty or ninety percent, at least--and the law should last only as long as such a consensus holds.

(Yes, I'm aware we live in a republic. This changes things. I'm not sure of the details of how.) _
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02:30:24 PM, Thursday 2 August 2001

'There's a big difference between just making a living wage and making the kind of money programmers, at least in the US make nowadays. They always say: "How will I eat?", but the problem is not really how "Will he eat?", but "How will he eat sushi?"'

--Richard Stallman, in the Lecture at KTH (which I strongly recommend reading) _
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05:08:51 PM, Wednesday 1 August 2001

As far as I can tell: some form of LISP (probably Scheme), C, some form of assembler (MMIXAL, perhaps?), a Smalltalk (probably Squeak, once the Refactoring Browser gets ported to it), and possibly Perl. The question being, what programming languages should someone with a good general education be expected to know? The above list (as far as I can determine, not yet knowing all the languages on it) gives a good introduction to both the theoretical and the practical aspects of programming, using established, well-loved languages that are widely considered to be the best at what they do, and that represent a variety of approaches to programming.

I'm even less sure about what some good code readings would be. Certainly the Unix source, for C, and the EMACS source, for LISP, would be good things to look at. For MMIXAL, of course, there will be the examples in Knuth, when the new version comes out (and for now, there's MIXAL). What about Smalltalk and Perl readings? _
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08:01:09 PM, Tuesday 31 July 2001

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