Page of Moss - bloglet for Wednesday 13 March 2002

I need... a top hat. Yeah. _
respond? (2)
03:19:57 PM, Wednesday 13 March 2002

Humour is the art of judging what someone is tired enough to laugh at. _
respond?
03:44:33 AM, Wednesday 13 March 2002

Face down, nine edge first. _
respond?
03:43:00 AM, Wednesday 13 March 2002

"I am a golden god!
And you can tell Rolling Stone
that my last words
were...
I'm on drugs!" _
respond? (3)
03:27:19 AM, Wednesday 13 March 2002

It's getting late... I just had to explain an a priori synthetic concept. _
respond?
01:34:26 AM, Wednesday 13 March 2002

On the other hand, if the best way to do something happens to be more general than what you specifically need, that's okay. Don't undergeneralize. _
respond?
12:51:45 AM, Wednesday 13 March 2002

"I have created things that will change the world for the better. For example, here is a monkey with four asses." _
respond? (1)
06:42:35 PM, Tuesday 12 March 2002

I am tired
I am weary
I could sleep
For a thousand years
A thousand dreams
That would awake me
Different colors
Made of tears
--The Velvet Underground, "Venus In Furs" _
respond?
04:35:28 PM, Tuesday 12 March 2002

How much of my willingness to delete things comes from spending time on Wiki, where deletion is an entirely democratic process? _
respond? (14)
02:58:54 PM, Tuesday 12 March 2002

I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record. _
respond? (5)
04:53:27 PM, Monday 11 March 2002

Is Windows XP more stable than Windows 2000? Well, that's a tough question. On the one hand, it doesn't always boot up on the first try, which is a definite strike against it. On the other hand, it always shuts down completely when I tell it to, and it hasn't yet crashed on being told to run Internet Explorer first thing in the morning. _
respond? (1)
11:47:19 AM, Monday 11 March 2002

The maintainers of the Debian fortune package seem to have developed a habit of adding "cute" excerpts from their IRC logs to the fortune file. I do not approve. I do not approve one bit. _
respond? (11)
11:27:50 PM, Sunday 10 March 2002

How many movies is it reasonable to watch in a weekend? _
respond? (12)
09:30:36 PM, Sunday 10 March 2002

In Wobble, you will be able to retroactively change the posting time of an entry. This isn't actually specifically a useful feature, in itself--it's just that it'll happen as a result of a couple of other things. Heh. _
respond? (1)
06:27:58 AM, Sunday 10 March 2002

"all she really wanted to do was blog, anyway." _
respond? (12)
04:38:29 AM, Sunday 10 March 2002

Okay, new little feature. If you follow the "turn off css" link, in the right sidebar, it will turn off the style sheet for this page. This is handy if you're reading it on a broken browser that sometimes renders it unreadable. I'll install this on the other m14m.net bloglets some time tommorow afternoon, when I'm less likely to break them. If you don't want it added to your bloglet, say so. _
respond? (3)
04:19:04 AM, Sunday 10 March 2002

Oops... got that backwards. Retest. _
respond? (1)
03:57:50 AM, Sunday 10 March 2002

Test... _
respond?
03:57:19 AM, Sunday 10 March 2002

Must... not... overgeneralize! _
respond? (3)
12:30:54 AM, Sunday 10 March 2002

Computer time keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, while programmer time does not. This being the case, I suppose it's inevitable that very high level scripting languages will become more and more common. In my opinion, this is largely a good thing--it lets us think about problems at a higher level, and makes it easier to figure out how to do fairly complex and useful things. There's a risk, though, that programmers will become less and less aware of what's actually going on at the level of the machine. It's very useful not to have to think about things like memory management when building a program, but if you don't understand them at all, you'll never know what your program is doing. _
respond? (5)
12:47:52 AM, Thursday 7 March 2002

Score! _
respond? (1)
12:44:42 AM, Thursday 7 March 2002

This is a test. _
respond? (9)
06:01:55 PM, Wednesday 6 March 2002

I am now uninstalling 154 MB of Stuff I Wasn't Using Anymore. _
respond? (9)
02:38:59 PM, Wednesday 6 March 2002

Photographica is a community photoblog. It's pretty cool, and some of the photographs on it are well worth looking at. _
respond? (1)
11:10:32 PM, Monday 4 March 2002

Dude! April 7th! I'm there! _
respond? (2)
11:00:23 PM, Monday 4 March 2002

Neither capitalists nor socialists have any grasp on reality. Because they see their positions as arising from more fundamental moral principles, they are unable to recognize the practical problems with their own models, and unwilling to acknowledge the practical successes of other models.

Under capitalism, some people would starve. This is non-optimal. But because the philosophical capitalist takes capitalism as a moral imperative, he must find a way to justify this failure, rather than finding a way to correct it.

Under socialism, people are shielded from the economic consequences of their actions, leading to inefficiency or even total collapse. But because the philosophical socialist takes socialism as a moral imperative, he turns a blind eye to this failure and hopes that it will go away.

The organizational structures of the economy--things like money, property laws, and labor laws--are nothing more than tools. They are tools to improve the production, distribution, and use of economic resources: land, capital, labor. They have no inherent moral significance whatever, and moral principles do not determine them with any precision.

The only reasonable question, when considering how these structures shall be arranged, is how they can be made as effective as possible. And this question will be answered, not by discovering some one ideal arrangement, but by indentifying particular improvements to the current situation. _
respond?
04:37:15 PM, Monday 4 March 2002

Rebecca Blood has probably the best short history of weblogs. _
respond?
02:34:27 PM, Monday 4 March 2002

Downloaded two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation tonight, and did some cleaning. And now Kerne's here! Happy! _
respond? (3)
01:35:20 AM, Monday 4 March 2002

This question of how to do the persistence layer for Wobble is going to drive me insane. It's actually the main reason I haven't gotten much done on Wobble in the past few weeks (well, that and I've actually been doing something other than just sitting around at home). Persistence is a big issue, and it's not really related to the interesting part of the problem. Thus, it's exactly the sort of thing high level languages are supposed to keep you from having to deal with. And ZODB almost takes care of it just fine, except it doesn't quite do what I need. So now, whenever I start to do something to the current, ZODB-using, version, I hold back, 'cause I'm worried that it'll have to be different when I build the new system.

But maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong. Maybe I should do what the Extreme Programming people say, and instead of trying to plan it out ahead, let the persistence system evolve to meet the needs of the program as it is. _
respond?
05:13:34 AM, Sunday 3 March 2002

Elegant and athletic are two qualities that describe Bella. She enjoys a variety of activities from golf to miniature golf. _
respond? (7)
12:43:57 AM, Sunday 3 March 2002

Deborah, you have a blog. Email me to let me know what your password should be, and to tell me any changes I should make to the layout. _
respond?
10:47:26 PM, Friday 1 March 2002

Dude! Why do I have to quit using ZODB? Why not just define a new type of DataStorage? I bet that could work! _
respond?
10:29:04 PM, Friday 1 March 2002

Why I Should Be The Blogmass's Shadow Government Representative When the US Government Falls:

Insanely brilliant, and modest too.
Hates and fears the light: perfect for long assignments in caves.
Extremely durable: has lasted 24 years despite paying no particular attention to staying healthy.
Enjoys organizing things, especially when they cannot be implemented.
Computer experience.
Comfortable in a role of absolute and unquestioned authority.
Has a DVD player to keep the shadow government workers entertained during the long (nuclear) winter nights.

_
respond? (13)
10:25:16 PM, Friday 1 March 2002

Okay, I added a side link to blt. Didn't do everything that needs doing, but it's something, at least. Am busy at work. _
respond?
04:07:07 PM, Friday 1 March 2002

The PYX format is a line-oriented representation of XML. This allows for much simpler processing in line-based text processing tools.

If the first implementation of my XML persistence layer turns out to be too slow, this could lead to a good optimization. I'd still store the objects in XML, but I'd compile them to PYX whenever they were updated. This would slow down write operations (posting, editing, commenting), but would speed up read operations, because it would make random access to individual parts of an object somewhat more plausible.

I'm not sure I'll actually need to do anything like that, but it's comforting to know that it's a possibility. And again, it would still be easy to access from other languages. Good. _
respond?
04:03:38 PM, Friday 1 March 2002

This is why computer problems are so uniquely maddening: the computer works just well enough that it's still somewhat better to use it than not to, but it's got enough problems that, when you use it, things will go wrong, again and again. So you have to deal with the frustration of something going wrong, and also with the frustration of knowing that it's going to continue to go wrong and that you're just going to continue to put up with it. _
respond?
12:15:28 PM, Wednesday 27 February 2002

older entries