Page of Moss - bloglet for Friday 22 March 2002

There's a little thing I'm thinking of doing. Just a quick hack. But it's something that Perl is the ideal language for. That makes me happy. It's been too long since I did much Perl hacking. _
respond?
07:51:54 PM, Friday 22 March 2002

Not knowing things is SO MUCH FUN! _
respond? (1)
01:56:11 PM, Friday 22 March 2002

I'm not going to build that heavy duty multiple file plain text persistence system I was planning. It's not useful enough to justify the time it would take to make it, and it doesn't appear to be necessary. I'm going to do something nice and easy with db files.

::sigh of relief::

And hopefully I'll actually have some free time soon when I'm not all programmed out from work. _
respond? (1)
03:22:25 AM, Friday 22 March 2002

"My pockets are full of tools- and you are held together with bolts! Rah!"

I think Diesel Sweeties is growing on me. That or it's gotten better lately. _
respond? (1)
12:03:10 AM, Friday 22 March 2002

At work, I've started learning just a little bit about CVS and what it does. Basically, it keeps track of all the changes you make to the source code for a program you're working on--all the changes everyone makes, if there's more than one person working on it--and lets you roll back to earlier states, take a snapshot of one particular working state, and other nifty things that I can't easily explain to a non-technical audience. Anyway, it fucking rocks. _
respond? (2)
11:40:18 PM, Thursday 21 March 2002

Bridgie has just pointed out that 'irrational exuberance' would make a great band name. This must be done. _
respond? (53)
11:16:04 PM, Thursday 21 March 2002

The Kingsbury Manx opened for Clinic last night. I hadn't heard of them before. I really liked their music. Quiet, intense, very pretty. _
respond?
10:33:26 PM, Thursday 21 March 2002

The archives of my bloglet contain approximately 145,000 words. Some of that's html code and such, of course, but even so... shit. That's scary. _
respond? (4)
09:52:44 PM, Thursday 21 March 2002

Just saw Clinic in concert at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. They rocked. Seriously. Surgical outfits and all. _
respond? (1)
04:45:05 AM, Thursday 21 March 2002

In brief: I believe in a world that does what I see it do. _
respond? (9)
01:13:46 AM, Wednesday 20 March 2002

Hear, hear! _
respond?
05:41:58 PM, Tuesday 19 March 2002

The Interface Hall of Shame is a collection of exceptionally bad user interface design. A good thing to learn from. _
respond?
03:27:45 PM, Tuesday 19 March 2002

Here's how much to avoid redundancy: your program should never use two tokens together for the same reason in two different places. _
respond?
02:46:39 PM, Tuesday 19 March 2002

"Hickory Dickory Dock,
The mice ran up the clock,
The clock struck one,
The others escaped with minor injuries." _
respond? (6)
11:59:36 AM, Tuesday 19 March 2002

When I begin to suspect that someone I know has the same sort of sense of humor I do, I often show them Carl Steadman's Placing. As kind of a test, you see. Of course, so far, only about two people have passed. _
respond? (5)
03:18:46 AM, Tuesday 19 March 2002

Aha! The line quoted two entries back comes to us, it seems, from Boswell's Life of Johnson. See paragraph 32 of the linked excerpt.

"And what increased the ridicule was, that one of the company, who slyly overlooked the reader, perceived that the word had been originally mice, and had been altered to rats, as more dignified."

In the end, the poet apparently dropped the whole line as too ridiculous. A pity. _
respond?
02:45:22 AM, Tuesday 19 March 2002

At a party the other day with some friends from the Renaissance Faire, one of them gave me the URL for this folk music website, which has, among other things, a fairly substantial number of Child ballads, often with MIDIs of the tunes (and while MIDI is an entirely unacceptable format for listening, it's handy for learning from). This is a very good thing indeed. What I really want, though, is for someone to enter all of Child into a database, with good searching and crossreferencing tools and a nice web interface. 'twould be yummy.

Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, in case you do not know, was the first really substantial collection of folk ballads. It has the words to some 305 songs, along with detailed notes and numerous alternate versions. It is a deeply wonderful reference book, in the public domain, and hard to find a copy of for a remotely reasonable price (I have mine by pure luck--found it at a U.C. Berkeley library sale). Thus, it is just the sort of thing that ought to be put online. _
respond? (14)
02:34:48 AM, Tuesday 19 March 2002

fortune says:
Come, muse, let us sing of rats!
-- From a poem by James Grainger, 1721-1767

I do not know anything about this, but I shall find out. Oh yes, I shall. _
respond?
01:39:55 AM, Tuesday 19 March 2002

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are contemporaries of Hamlet just as Tycho and Digges were contemporaries. Digges' model killed geocentricism just as Hamlet is responsible for the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and then of Claudius," Usher says.

Quite possibly the stupidest interpretation of Hamlet ever--and that's saying something.

(via Rebecca's Pocket) _
respond? (2)
08:02:51 PM, Monday 18 March 2002

Dave's released the Radio Community Server 1.0. I'ven't tried it out yet (it's that whole doesn't-run-on-Linux issue), but it looks to be pretty interesting. Weblogs for group collaboration. _
respond?
06:56:43 PM, Monday 18 March 2002

Sort 'em all out and let God kill them. _
respond?
05:25:08 PM, Monday 18 March 2002

The reason to redistribute money to poor people is that, if they have less than a certain amount of money, the system won't know how much food to make for them. _
respond?
04:14:57 PM, Monday 18 March 2002

MegaWiki is a hack for the Palm that lets you do WikiLinks. It's pretty sweet. _
respond?
04:28:57 AM, Monday 18 March 2002

"Aquavit is also considered useful for medicinal purposes, an essential ingredient in what I was once told is the Norwegian cure for the common cold. You get a bottle, a poster bed, and the brightest colored stocking cap you can find. You put the cap on the post at the foot of the bed, then get into bed and drink aquavit until you can't see the cap. I've never tried this, but it sounds as though it should work."
-- Peter Nelson _
respond?
11:06:15 PM, Sunday 17 March 2002

A very happy birthday to Mirabai Knight! _
respond? (8)
03:50:37 AM, Sunday 17 March 2002

You will address me as "Sensei" or "Mister Bill", or occasionally "Bob The Avenger", but not as "Hermann" or "His 'Eminence'". _
respond? (30)
09:55:17 PM, Friday 15 March 2002

I get tired of rushing to meet deadlines. I get tired of trying to work out bugs caused by brain-damaged systems. But I do not, it seems, get tired of programming. _
respond?
09:39:01 PM, Friday 15 March 2002

Most of the time, when guilty people go free, it is a sign that the system is working properly. _
respond? (3)
02:33:32 AM, Friday 15 March 2002

Well. That was interesting. _
respond?
01:21:09 AM, Friday 15 March 2002

It's a song about opium. In the liner notes, they advise you to read more on the subject at your local library. _
respond? (6)
11:13:29 PM, Thursday 14 March 2002

Why does anybody use a Macintosh? Especially to browse the web! _
respond? (4)
08:59:54 PM, Thursday 14 March 2002

I hate the world. _
respond? (4)
04:40:10 PM, Thursday 14 March 2002

"this [HTML] is what's behind all the web pages you see."
"Yes, but there are bones inside all the people I see, but I'm not used to seeing that either."
Me and Tori, discussing the source code to a bloglet. _
respond? (2)
11:55:56 PM, Wednesday 13 March 2002

::Moss's brain finally gives out altogether:: _
respond?
03:27:36 PM, Wednesday 13 March 2002

Golly... I rolled over an archive page. _
respond?
03:27:07 PM, Wednesday 13 March 2002

"Jane, desired by the people at the school and work
Jane is tired, 'cause every man becomes a lovesick jerk" _
respond? (9)
03:26:02 PM, Wednesday 13 March 2002

older entries