Page of Moss - Bloglet

Okay, I’ve finished what I was working on. All m14m.net blogs can now receive TrackBack pings. What this basically means is that, if another blogger posts something elsewhere on the web that refers to one of your blog entries, they can send a notification back to that entry, so that you can see who’s linking to you. Chances are it won’t affect most of you, but it is a nifty thing, and it was pretty easy to do, so I thought I might as well do it.

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10:25:05 PM, Tuesday 22 July 2003

I think it’s working now…

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09:29:55 PM, Tuesday 22 July 2003

Oh, hey, guess it’s time to add Three Years Ago to the sidebar.

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08:59:36 PM, Tuesday 22 July 2003

LiveJournals are now pinging weblogs.com. Interesting.

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02:05:56 PM, Tuesday 22 July 2003

Proposition: tea parties are punk as fuck.

Please offer proofs.

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03:51:37 AM, Saturday 19 July 2003

I think I may have another interesting feature almost implemented in bloglet. (Not telling what it is yet, but if you're clever, you may be able to figure it out.) _
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08:21:10 PM, Friday 18 July 2003

“Okay, I get that Alan Rickman plays him in the movie, but otherwise… huh? The character is a jerk”

I find Naomi Chana’s remarks about Snape refreshing, to say the least.

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02:03:22 PM, Friday 18 July 2003

Commenting on m14m.net has been changed somewhat: comments now show up with full dates and permlinks, like on ninjavampire. Line breaks now also work like they do on ninjavampire—the only sane way. I’ve also made some internal changes that should make it possible for me to do a couple of other things I’ve been planning; watch this space!

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10:58:11 PM, Thursday 17 July 2003

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09:08:52 PM, Wednesday 16 July 2003

O.o.C.Q.o.A.F.D.A.: “Can somebody blindfold my mother?”

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07:42:53 PM, Wednesday 16 July 2003

Inner Truth. Pigs and fishes.
Good fortune.
It furthers one to cross the great water.
Perseverance furthers.

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05:47:58 PM, Wednesday 16 July 2003

I got a birthday present from Mirabai. I am filled with glee. Glee!

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05:25:56 PM, Wednesday 16 July 2003

1,288 miles later…

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02:33:39 AM, Tuesday 15 July 2003

So there is a way to do titles in Textile? Neat. I wonder if it works right in PyTextile.

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06:37:15 PM, Friday 11 July 2003

SILENCE! (via jwz )

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02:33:59 PM, Friday 11 July 2003

Everything Aristotle Has Said is Wrong was one of my favorite St. John’s lectures.

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08:27:30 PM, Wednesday 9 July 2003

They’ve gone wild.

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06:26:51 PM, Wednesday 9 July 2003

I just contributed some code and documentation to an open source project. I’m rather pleased.

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02:52:22 PM, Wednesday 2 July 2003

The Man is a woman!

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04:49:38 AM, Wednesday 2 July 2003

NOW LISTEN! I WANT YOU TO TEAR DOWN THE WALLS OF YOUR HOMES AND OFFICES SMASH YOUR MACHINES TEAR UP YOUR STREETS FLEE YOUR CITIES BURN YOUR CROPS IN THEIR FIELDS! THE END OF CIVILIZATION IS AT HAND! RUN THROUGH THE CROWDS SHOUTING IT SO THAT EVERYONE MAY KNOW! THE END OF CIVILIZATION IS AT HAND! _
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03:28:59 PM, Friday 27 June 2003

Why Antonin Scalia is my favorite conservative Supreme Court justice, even if I don’t agree with him on anything:

The Court’s claim that Planned Parenthood v. Casey, supra, “casts some doubt” upon the holding in Bowers (or any other case, for that matter) does not withstand analysis. Ante, at 10. As far as its holding is concerned, Casey provided a less expansive right to abortion than did Roe, which was already on the books when Bowers was decided. And if the Court is referring not to the holding of Casey, but to the dictum of its famed sweet-mystery-of-life passage, ante, at 13 (“‘At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life‘“): That “casts some doubt” upon either the totality of our jurisprudence or else (presumably the right answer) nothing at all. I have never heard of a law that attempted to restrict one’s “right to define” certain concepts; and if the passage calls into question the government’s power to regulate actions based on one’s self-defined “concept of existence, etc.,” it is the passage that ate the rule of law.

(From his dissent in this decision, where I suspect I agree with the majority.) _
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01:48:32 PM, Thursday 26 June 2003

Holy shit! It says here that being allowed to hit children could be used as a cover for abuse! Who knew?

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03:38:30 PM, Tuesday 24 June 2003

In more concrete Supreme Court news, I’m disappointed but not horrified by this decision about internet filtering in libraries. I really want to read what Breyer wrote about it—he’s always struck me as being a particularly clear thinker.

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03:18:00 PM, Tuesday 24 June 2003

Fascinating article about (as I understand it) mathematically modelling how independently the nine Supreme Court justices come to their decisions. I’m interested in the ways that we can use mathematical abstractions to inform our social and political life. Math can’t capture the true essence of something in the real world, but there is a usefully testable precision to mathematical statements. This is essentially why physicists use so much math: not that it can express everything about a theory, but what it does express it expresses in a way that’s relatively free from personal qualitative judgment. Now that I think about it, if I were writing a longer essay on this, I might compare the role of mathematics in science to the role of the Supreme Court in our government.

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03:07:53 PM, Tuesday 24 June 2003

This is from Jeff Makes A Movie. I believe Martin Marks says it. I’d been trying to remember since it first came up on One Year Ago.

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10:02:17 PM, Monday 23 June 2003

Having never quite understood Python’s functional programming type features, it rather surprised me just now to find myself in a situations where it was both natural and useful to use lambda, map, closures, and recursion.

Specifically, I wrote a function to convert a MetaKit view into an array of dictionaries:

def dictify(view):
    properties = []
    for property in view.structure():
        properties.append(property)
    dictifyRow = lambda row: row2dict(row, properties)
    return map(dictifyRow, view)
 
def row2dict(row, properties):
    dict = {}
    for property in properties:
        value = getattr(row, property.name)
        if property.type == 'V':
            value = dictify(value)
        dict[property.name] = value
    return dict

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09:44:40 PM, Monday 23 June 2003

Results of browsing through SJC student pages [1, 2]:

"Menin aeide, thea, Peleiadeo Achilleos..."
Little Kerne!
"I would say that St. John's isn't so much gay-friendly as gay apathetic"
"Reality 2003 presents: Orange Drink! For your listening pleasure, our two new hit singles"
Croquet pictures including Mr Paul Spradley
"But I pray every day to the kind loving and merciful God who allows necromancy."
"Rumour has it that in the interest of accuracy, Santa Fe students have shed the name febbie, preferring instead 'January Freshman.' Their condemnation is deserved."
"How to use filesharing without killing the network."
Mr Hunt's impressive (and CSS-based!) web design on the Environmental Club page.
Movable Type running on an sjca.edu server.
Many of Katherine's wonderful stories, including The Heroes and its sequels.

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05:26:18 AM, Sunday 22 June 2003

Wow… destroying the Brooklyn Bridge is just such an utterly classic supervillain plot, is it not?

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05:50:59 PM, Friday 20 June 2003

Joel McClung desperately needs a good strong application of a clue-by-four to the side of his head.

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03:34:52 PM, Friday 20 June 2003

Roundup looks like a good bug tracker.

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10:05:08 PM, Thursday 19 June 2003

I’ve fixed the typo that was keeping my site statistics from being updated.

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07:36:05 PM, Thursday 19 June 2003

Let’s celebrate our heroic American soldiers.

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06:11:21 PM, Thursday 19 June 2003

...then The Baron should be pinging BLT. I don't know quite what I expect to come of this--I don't really think the game's likely to get started again, given that it collapsed so roundly before (and it did have its own tracking system, at least). But I thought I'd give it a try, just to see what happens, like. At the very least, this'll make it easier to notice Spur Of The Head Sonnetry _
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04:36:24 PM, Thursday 19 June 2003

And if this is in fact working…

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03:58:02 PM, Thursday 19 June 2003

Information Radiator is a lovely phrase.

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02:59:40 PM, Thursday 19 June 2003

Okay, so the breakage was unrelated to my MOST recent change.

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10:49:48 PM, Wednesday 18 June 2003

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