Page of Moss - Bloglet

Trying to find a library I saw the other day for mapping Python objects to tables in a database, I'm reminded: the relational database is one of the most truly mathematically beautiful things to have come out of computer science. _
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11:39:16 PM, Sunday 19 October 2003

Can somebody tell me something substantial about Dean, or point me to a place where I can read it? _
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10:24:57 PM, Wednesday 15 October 2003

Gallery m14m -- now hosted on hobbes.m14m.net. _
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09:55:26 PM, Wednesday 15 October 2003

As some of you know, I've recently started setting up a virtual server with jvds.com (previously discussed on this blog), in the hope that one day it may host all the various blogmass sites--m14m.net, teasmoke.net, infinity-bound.net, ninjavampire.com, and, if Mr. Eagle is interested, monadology.net. There would be two main advantages to this arrangement: it would be a lot cheaper, and we'd have considerably more control over the configuration of the server. I've asked around, and everyone seems interested.

Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning all this right now is that I've just made one of the most important steps towards getting the new server ready to be used: I now have a website running on the new server, virtually hosted in the format that we'll be using for everything there. It'll still be at least a couple of months before I'm ready to move anything else, but this shows that it will be possible. Ladies and gentlemen, I now present, for your viewing enjoyment... _
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09:54:56 PM, Wednesday 15 October 2003

The Internet Topic Exchange (which I found through a link on crummy.com) looks very interesting. It seems to be a system for doing the sort of self-organizing collection of topics that I've been wanting for Wobble, but distributed across any blogs that choose to participate, rather than limited to a single blog. _
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07:22:23 PM, Tuesday 14 October 2003

("Others like Marx" means William Morris, Wendell Berry, the Luddites, those who fight for human dignity, not Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.) _
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05:57:27 PM, Tuesday 14 October 2003

There has certainly been one element striving to win for the working class the same sort of leisure that the ruling class has always enjoyed. But Marx, and others like him, seems to be saying something more radical: that the idea of leisure is ultimately no better than--indeed, is inseparable from--the idea of work. (This is mostly just a quick note to remind me what I'm thinking later when I have time to flesh it out some.) _
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05:54:53 PM, Tuesday 14 October 2003

On the way to work, I saw a delivery truck from the San Francisco Chronicle. The end of the last word had come off. It was the San Francisco Chronic. _
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01:25:56 PM, Tuesday 14 October 2003

Leonard is implementing TrackBack in NewsBruiser, so I’m posting this to help test it.

_
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08:19:48 PM, Monday 13 October 2003

Of course, it would be foolish to forget that representative democracy has its own risks. A small group can consider issues more carefully than a large group, but they can also work for their own benefit rather than the benefit of the people as a whole. The people are easier to dazzle, but the legislature is easier to buy. _
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02:53:30 PM, Monday 13 October 2003

Well, I meant to fix the blogging bot, but instead I did the thing that fucks up my internet connection for a while. But now the connection's back, so I've fixed the bot. _
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01:45:19 AM, Friday 10 October 2003

Huh. _
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04:56:05 PM, Thursday 9 October 2003

post This is a test to see if I can reproduce Neil's bug. _
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04:55:57 PM, Thursday 9 October 2003

Notice for anyone who uses any of my software: if the software behaves in an unexpected way, it is NOT BECAUSE YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG, it is a PROBLEM WITH THE SOFTWARE. At best, it is because the software had poor user interface design, but it may also be because of a bug. When you get behavior you don't want from one of my programs, you should tell me about it, and tell me how to reproduce it, so that I can figure out how to fix it. (Really, this is probably the best attitude to take towards all software.) _
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04:51:35 PM, Thursday 9 October 2003

Shit, now I'm going to have to read the Cantos. _
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04:40:59 PM, Thursday 9 October 2003

For some reason, I felt compelled to respond to Jason Kottke’s post about the election. My response there pretty well sums up my feelings about the election, so I’m repeating it here:
I’m upset for a couple of reasons.

First of all, as a general rule, I think too much direct democracy is a bad idea. The whole population of a state can’t act as a properly deliberative body, because it’s too large for real discussion to take place, and because most people don’t have time to give these questions the serious consideration they deserve. This election felt rushed. I didn’t have time to get a real sense of what sort of governor Schwarzenegger would be, and I get the sense that other people didn’t either.

Beyond this, based on what I do know of Schwarzenegger, I’m really not convinced that he’ll be a good governor. He has the wrong opinions on some major issues, and, more than this, it’s not clear that he’ll be a competent leader, whatever his positions. So, in addition to my general problems with the process by which he was elected, I think that electing him was a bad decision.

This doesn’t mean I think his election was illegitimate. Schwarzenegger was duly elected according to the laws of the state of California, and it is clearly the will of the majority that he should replace Davis. But I think the majority made the wrong decision. It’s happened many times before, and it will no doubt happen again. Democracy, broadly speaking, is the best form of government we have yet found, but it is hardly infallible, or even particularly reliable.

_
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03:25:53 AM, Thursday 9 October 2003

I'm really not sure the popular vote should play as big a part as it does in electing the president. _
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02:41:23 AM, Thursday 9 October 2003

So, I gather there's some sort of big sporting event coming up. _
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09:19:33 PM, Wednesday 8 October 2003

Neil points out that Bill O'Reilly walked out on an interview on Fresh Air. Other great Fresh Air train wrecks: Monica Lewinsky, Gene Simmons. Permanent (I think) link to the O'Reilly interview. Bonus: the sheer ridiculous glory that is an NPR critic giving a glowing review of School of Rock. _
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08:33:05 PM, Wednesday 8 October 2003

Ah, the joys of debugging. Though in this case, it turns out that I was just debugging myself. _
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07:06:27 PM, Wednesday 8 October 2003

The Sandström family from Espoo, just outside Helsinki, were enjoying a quiet september evening at home watching the main TV newscast. The news anchor had just started an item about the President of Finland when the screen unexpectedly went blank. _
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07:04:26 PM, Wednesday 8 October 2003

I'm surprised and pleased about just how popular the blogbot has proved to be. For such a simple hack (155 lines of code, most of which are very trivial, many of which I threw together ages ago), it's very effective. _
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04:25:32 PM, Wednesday 8 October 2003

If anyone wants an even more streamlined version of the blogbot, where just sending a message causes it to be posted, without you even having to say post, just ask and I'll hook you right up. _
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03:58:16 PM, Wednesday 8 October 2003

Progress. _
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03:55:41 PM, Wednesday 8 October 2003

Refactoring is one of the good things to do with a program. _
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03:46:48 PM, Wednesday 8 October 2003

The good news of the election is that both the propositions were defeated. In the long run, I suspect defeating prop 54 was more important than defeating the recall. Still, I'm disappointed. _
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02:56:44 PM, Wednesday 8 October 2003

San Francisco Chronicle: There are people on this planet who cannot lose. They may not deserve to win. They may not be qualified to win, but they win.

Gray Davis came up against such a person in Tuesday's election, and now Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor-elect of California. _
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01:28:35 AM, Wednesday 8 October 2003

Californians: if you haven't voted yet, what are you waiting for? _
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08:57:42 PM, Tuesday 7 October 2003

One Brandon Long has written a Python library for stripping unsafe tags from HTML. This is useful if, for example, you are writing a comment script for a weblog, and you want to allow HTML in comments without letting people post malicious scripts to crash other readers' systems. I also used it in the BlogBot, essentially as an equivalent to PHP's strip_tags function. That use is slight overkill, but I had a devil of a time finding anything in Python to let me selectively strip some but not all HTML tags from a block of text. This does the trick quite nicely. (And I'm blogging it partly in the hope that it will become a bit easier to find in Google.) _
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08:38:17 PM, Tuesday 7 October 2003

I should note, the blogbot's still in beta--I've mostly got it working, but I'm still polishing, so it will occasionally drop out of existence for the next few days. _
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08:28:10 PM, Tuesday 7 October 2003

An improvement to the blogbot--it should now recognize bold, italics, underline, and even links in your IMs, and carry them over to your blog. _
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08:20:35 PM, Tuesday 7 October 2003

That was reasonably clever. I wonder if it worked. _
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07:46:13 PM, Tuesday 7 October 2003

This makes it exceedingly easy to post to my blog. And that has me thinking about ways to make an even more streamlined version. What if you didn't have to say "post" to post an entry, and it just posted every IM you sent it? What if you could just send it a URL and it would grab the title of the page and post a link to it? What if I made it support Textile? What if I made it accept formatting from AIM, so if you sent it a link or a bit of text in bold or italic, it would recognize that? All sorts of possibilities. If I find that I actually want something more streamlined than this, though, I'll probably hook it up separately, under a different screen name, 'cause I think I'd want both options. Or... I could make it configurable by user. That would actually be pretty simple. _
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04:44:06 PM, Tuesday 7 October 2003

So I've got the BlogBot into beta stage. The interface is pretty simple: basically, you IM it with the entry you want to post, and then tell it to post it, and it posts it. You can IM it with the word "help" to get a brief usage message. Your entry can be spread across multiple IMs--each new IM will start a new line of the entry. The screen name for the robot is m14m Blogging Bot. It should recognize any m14m.net users whose screen names I know. If you try talking to it and it doesn't recognize you, get in touch with me (PlatonismElbow on AIM or blogbot@m14m.net) and I'll tell it about you.

If you have a weblog elsewhere that supports the Blogger API--this includes anyone on ninjavampire.com or teasmoke.net--I can also make the bot recognize you. If you're interested in running your own copy of the bot, let me know. I'm planning to package it up and GPL it sooner or later, as I suspect it could be useful to all sorts of people, but I'll be more inclined to hurry if people are actually interested. _
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04:38:36 PM, Tuesday 7 October 2003

Coming soon: blogging by IM on m14m.net.
_
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10:05:11 PM, Friday 3 October 2003

This is a test. If this works, then I'll have something pretty cool working.
_
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10:01:47 PM, Friday 3 October 2003

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