Page of Moss - bloglet for Saturday 6 April 2002

It does not matter whether the death penalty is fair or not; it cannot be fairly administered, therefore it is unsafe to permit it. _
respond? (6)
10:37:40 PM, Saturday 6 April 2002

Some blogs are reporting to blt sometimes even though they haven't been updated. I know why this is happening. Now a challenge: can any of you all guess why it's happening? _
respond? (8)
09:49:30 PM, Saturday 6 April 2002

This is really freaky. The time change is tonight, and for the first time I can remember, I'm actually more excited about the extra daylight in the evenings than I am disturbed about the loss of sleep. Mind you, I'm still none too happy about the loss of sleep. But now I'll be able to watch the sun set on the ocean after work again. _
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08:49:17 PM, Saturday 6 April 2002

Many times, when programming, trying to apply ExtractMethod on a ShieldPattern: I wish there were some variation on return that would bubble upwards through its callers the way that raising an exception does. I can't figure out exactly what the semantics for something like that would be, but it sure would be handy. _
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06:45:52 PM, Saturday 6 April 2002

I'm starting to appreciate how nice a really broad range of Collection types would be. There are clearly more meaningful classes of Collection possible than just Array and Dictionary. I should see what all Python has. _
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06:09:16 PM, Saturday 6 April 2002

If, like me, you use mutt, and sometimes have to deal with people sending html or MS Word documents instead of proper emails, you should check out this page. It describes how to have mutt automatically convert them to text and display them as part of the normal message, rather than opening an external program.

I myself am using lynx -dump instead of w3m -dump, and antiword instead of word2text, but the instructions made it pretty easy to figure out how to do that. Apart from time spent web searching, it was no more than a two minute fix, and it makes my mailreading much happier. _
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12:35:19 PM, Friday 5 April 2002

You know, with autoindent turned on, vi is actually a pretty good outliner. _
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03:52:22 PM, Thursday 4 April 2002

Philosophy is a historical movement, and any particular philosophy is a psychological object.
I'd like some way to state this point more clearly. _
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03:16:05 PM, Thursday 4 April 2002

Dave Winer has been going on about something he calls Instant Outlining lately. This article has finally made me see what it is he's talking about, and I must say, it looks interesting. _
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08:24:09 PM, Wednesday 3 April 2002

Perl module Algorithm::Diff. About what it sounds like. Pretty sweet. _
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06:50:33 PM, Wednesday 3 April 2002

T.I.A.I.L.W.: Juliette Binoche _
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03:12:31 AM, Wednesday 3 April 2002

Blogledyte Dinner
49 West
Friday, April 26th
8pm till whenever we're done
Please RSVP
_
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10:27:33 PM, Tuesday 2 April 2002

Okay: Does anyone in Annapolis have a floor, couch, or bed that I can sleep on for three days when I'm in town for croquet? I'll be arriving the morning of the 25th and leaving the afternoon of the 28th. During some of that time I'll be awake, of course. _
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07:41:14 PM, Tuesday 2 April 2002

Human beings are not machines. However, it would be useful to enunciate just what the class is to which both of them belong. _
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05:19:52 PM, Tuesday 2 April 2002

What Neil Stephenson Book Am I?
I am: The Diamond Age
You are smart and funny, but tend to rush things to a close before they're really finished. Despite your love of technology, you'd clearly much rather be living in the 19th century. You dream of starting a revolution.
[take the What Neil Stephenson Book Am I Quiz] _
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06:57:28 PM, Monday 1 April 2002

Logging out for the night. This evening has convinced me that online chatrooms can actually be good. _
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07:27:50 AM, Sunday 31 March 2002

Love. _
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06:05:27 AM, Sunday 31 March 2002

Knowledge of the material world has no direct bearing on moral questions. However, it is still necessary, because the material world is the only medium through which we experience other moral actors. _
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04:41:10 AM, Saturday 30 March 2002

The logical conclusion of science is a description of the world that, though partial, is entirely correct within its domain. But the only way to follow it towards this conclusion is to continue doing it.

I say this only to distinguish it from what might otherwise be taken as the 'logical conclusion of science': namely, whatever the current scientific theory is, extrapolated to its extreme. Science is specifically carried forward, not by developing an idea, but by continuing to modify one's ideas in response to reality. _
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04:39:09 AM, Saturday 30 March 2002

If you have a Yahoo account, they have just reset your marketing preferences. Unless you fancy receiving a lot more spam--and junk mail--and calls from telemarketers--you will want to log into Yahoo, go to your account info, and change them back. I am fucking furious. _
respond? (6)
08:22:26 PM, Friday 29 March 2002

Now that I understand how copying and pasting works in X, I'm actually really getting to like it. It's still not supported consistently enough between some applications, but in principle it could be very nice, and its behaviour no longer confuses me. _
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02:08:05 AM, Thursday 28 March 2002

I had a mango tonight, and it made me happy.
That is all. _
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01:28:26 AM, Thursday 28 March 2002

"I just did a search, and I wasn't happy with the results. Who should feel my wrath?" _
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12:52:16 AM, Wednesday 27 March 2002

But if representative democracy really can't be made to work, then we're altogether fucked, because everything else is ultimately nothing more than force.

I suspect it could be made to work, but not in the context of capitalism.

(Hmm... I've scarcely even thought about direct democracy, but... I wonder.) _
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10:53:20 PM, Tuesday 26 March 2002

The Sims has overtaken Myst to become the best selling computer game ever. I find this interesting in all kinds of ways. _
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05:42:48 PM, Tuesday 26 March 2002

Someone wrote a book about e-prime, called To Be or Not. _
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06:53:51 PM, Monday 25 March 2002

"...And He Shall Signal This Event by Seeking the Poor and Distributing to Them Precious MAO BUTTONS..." _
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02:59:40 AM, Monday 25 March 2002

Darth Brooks? _
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07:18:34 PM, Sunday 24 March 2002

I've uploaded the current version of the wobble source code. I'm actually gonna be changing some things about it, but you can take a look at what I have so far. Higglety takes requests from the web and passes them on to wobble to tell it what to render, and Wobble does the actual webloggy things. _
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05:14:01 PM, Sunday 24 March 2002

detail & pattern is a weblog of sorts. It has no words. It is mysterious and beautiful. (It is also a blog of note at blogger.com this week, which is how I found it.) _
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03:23:04 AM, Sunday 24 March 2002

A very happy birthday to Cassie Sherman! _
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11:59:52 PM, Saturday 23 March 2002

Made a few changes to blt that should improve performance and decrease lossage. I packed the database, and set up a cron job to do so nightly. This brought the size of the database file from 40 megs down to about 800k. The database system I'm using saves old versions of every object in the database--packing the database clears these out. I've also made blt itself open the database in read only mode. Before, it couldn't add an entry to the database when someone was in the process of loading blt. Now, that won't be a problem.

I still plan to move blt over to teasmoke.net, and get it using the nice filesystem-based database that Kerne's set up, but it's no longer so urgent. _
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09:23:16 PM, Saturday 23 March 2002

test _
respond? (4)
08:42:59 PM, Saturday 23 March 2002

Okay, this article has been linked to before elsewhere in the blogmass, but it wasn't till just now that I noticed the truly great thing about it. Right under the photograph. Best. Caption. Ever. _
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04:14:38 AM, Saturday 23 March 2002

BLT is suffering under its weight, and dropping some entries. Those of you who browse through it may want to also look at people's blogs directly. Looking into finding a fix. _
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11:50:03 PM, Friday 22 March 2002

Hack idea: a perl script to let me conveniently swap different .muttrc files, so I can use a different folder read order at home and at work. _
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10:10:44 PM, Friday 22 March 2002

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