This page about Haskell gives rather a good brief explanation of what functional programming is all about. (Or at least, it finally clicked for me as I was reading it--it probably helped that I've been reading about Lisp and suchlike a lot lately).
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08:30:18 PM,
Tuesday 17 August 2004
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Playing around with AppleScript and Python this afternoon, I wrote a little script that will post to my blog a playlist of the songs I listened to on the way to work in the morning. It's kinda spiffy. For now I'll just say this: the most disturbing thing about "The Curse of Millhaven" is how much fun it is to sing along with.
- "There is a Light", Nick Cave
- "Head On", Pixies
- "Annie Waits", Ben Folds
- "Everybody Knows", Leonard Cohen
- "Away, Thou shalt not love me", Miranda Sex Garden
- "Mexican God", Robyn Hitchcock
- "A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off", The Magnetic Fields
- "Cold Light", Yeah Yeah Yeahs
- "I Don't Believe You", The Magnetic Fields
- "Redemption Song", Bob Marley
- "How Soon Is Now", The Smiths
- "The Curse Of Millhaven", Nick Cave
- "The Things We Did And Didn't Do", The Magnetic Fields
- "Hello City (Live)", Barenaked Ladies
- "Tame", Pixies
- "I Don't Love Anyone", Belle and Sebastian
- "All Along The Watchtower", Jimi Hendrix
- "I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms", Modern Lovers
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07:49:49 PM, Tuesday 17 August 2004
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It really is the worst trailer ever.
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(2)
02:19:11 PM,
Tuesday 17 August 2004
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Peasant's Quest will be amusing to anyone who played the old King's Quest games, or who enjoyed the Trogdor thing, or likes Homestar Runner in general, or is just generally likes things that are funny.
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03:31:39 PM,
Monday 16 August 2004
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I hadn't really looked at Wikipedia's current events coverage before, but I have been just now, and I must say I'm impressed. I like the way that it's integrated with the rest of the encyclopedia, so I can easily find out some background about a story.
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(1)
02:40:34 PM,
Monday 16 August 2004
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Looks like I’m going to have to think about implementing one of those comment spam solutions.
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02:38:39 PM, Saturday 14 August 2004
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The reason people get confused about when to use apostrophes is that the use of an apostrophe in forming a possessive no longer makes any sense. Apostrophe-S is the only English possessive suffix--there isn't a longer form that the apostrophe is representing an abbreviation of--so people won't remember it as a case of the general rule for when to use apostrophes. That being so, they have to remember it as a separate rule with weird exceptions like "its". Most people do understand the rule (it's pretty simple), but it will still never feel really natural, so virtually everyone slips up occasionally.
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(4)
03:36:21 PM,
Friday 13 August 2004
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John Perry Barlow: I’ve gone back and forth with politics. I’ve been a Republican county chairman. I was one of Dick Cheney’s campaign managers when he first ran for Congress. But generally speaking, I felt to engage in the political process was to sully oneself to such a degree that whatever came out wasn’t worth the trouble put in. I thought it was better to focus on changing yourself and people around you, to not question authority so much as bypass it whenever possible.
But by virtue of our abdication, a very authoritarian, assertive form of government has taken over. And oddly enough, it is doing so in the guise of libertarianism to a certain extent. Most of the people in the think tanks behind the Bush administration’s current policies are libertarians, or certainly free marketeers. We’ve got two distinct strains of libertarianism, and the hippie-mystic strain is not engaging in politics, and the Ayn Rand strain is basically dismantling government in a way that is giving complete open field running to multinational corporatism.
If you have any interest at all in Libertarian political thought, the whole interview is well worth reading. Further on, Barlow gives a good succinct explanation of why someone who supports free markets should still want corporations to be regulated in some ways.
One of the few actual hopes I still harbor about politics is that, as libertarians from the capitalist and socialist camps clear away some of the more absurd excesses in their various economic ideologies, we may see the emergence of a mature, serious, and politically viable strain of anarchist political philosophy. People like Barlow make me think that this may be possible. And he’s also written some damned good songs.
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02:43:05 AM, Friday 13 August 2004
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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: Video Lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman.
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(1)
07:13:21 PM,
Thursday 12 August 2004
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The California Supreme Court has voided the same sex marriages that happened in San Francisco earlier this year. Some resources on this: case summary; decision in PDF or MS Word format; Google News cluster including an article from a San Francisco paper; MetaFilter thread including an analysis I found particularly good. The thing to remember is that this was expected from the start, as it's pretty much the obviously correct interpretation of the relevant state laws.
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(1)
04:45:30 PM,
Thursday 12 August 2004
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Well well well... you can get House roll call votes in XML.
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10:16:04 PM,
Wednesday 11 August 2004
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Recordings of live Mountain Goats shows for download, for free, with permission.
[via the Creative Commons blog via Scott Rosenberg]
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03:33:42 PM,
Wednesday 11 August 2004
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Alpha: that magical stage in software development where you know there are still bugs in it, but you no longer know what they are.
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05:30:44 PM,
Tuesday 10 August 2004
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Writing metadata is degrading busywork, and nobody should have to do it.
When I’m saying something, what I care about is the content of what I’m saying, not any particular formal description of that content. This is true regardless of the medium I’m working in: whether I’m programming or blogging or writing an essay or taking photographs, I care about what I’m doing, but I don’t want to stop to talk about how I’m doing it.
A lot of programmers have already had this realization about the languages they work in, and are tending to choose dynamic, high-level languages that free them from the need to express inessential details in their code. The main thing I love about Python is that it keeps me from having to deal with things like data types and memory allocation and dereferencing pointers.
What I want now, though, is something that will do that for blogging, and perhaps publishing in general. I want blogging software that will take care of details like HTML code, listing keywords and categories for entries, and possibly even linking to relevant material on the web, and let me focus on what I’m writing about. Most urgently, I want something that will recognize and display topics I tend to blog about (the blogging equivalent of dynamic typing) and something that will clean up the HTML in my posts (the blogging equivalent of garbage collection). The latter is pretty easy to do, and the major weblogging tools all have plugins for it. The former is pretty tricky, but I’d really like to make some progress with it.
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05:27:00 PM, Tuesday 10 August 2004
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Reading a MetaFilter thread about WordNet just now, the realization finally crystallized in my mind that what I’m most interested in, in programming, is the use of computers to deal with language. Or rather, something a bit broader than that, but still centered around language—anything where the abstractions you deal with are better expressed as words than as numbers, what you might call verbal computing.
I’m not sure I really have much to say about this right now, but it was kind of neat to realize. I briefly thought about going to grad school in computational linguistics, but I don’t think that would be right for me, as I’m more interested in practical applications than in abstract research (and my interest is somewhat broader than I think computational linguistics would allow for).
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04:32:39 PM, Tuesday 10 August 2004
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If you’re using RSS to follow news, you might want to check out Leonard Richardson’s Syndication Automat (announced on his blog earlier this month). Of particular interest to me is the feed of proceedings on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, which could serve as a partial replacement for my (currently broken) Congressional Record feed (and which also reminds me, yet again, that Beautiful Soup could be a way to make a more robust version of that feed).
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03:25:21 PM, Tuesday 10 August 2004
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This is kind of a longshot, but does anyone out there know anything about PostgreSQL?
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(2)
01:47:02 PM,
Tuesday 10 August 2004
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The Perl Phrasebook compares code for a number of common tasks in Python and Perl. It’s worth a look if you’re comparing the two languages.
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11:55:13 PM, Sunday 8 August 2004
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We’re watching season seven of Buffy. I’d actually forgotten just how annoying Kennedy really is.
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03:06:50 AM, Sunday 8 August 2004
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Can somebody who follows baseball at all tell me what it is, precisely, that everyone has against the Yankees?
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(7)
01:52:40 AM,
Friday 6 August 2004
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Oh! So pushd is basically like cd with a back button. Cool.
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(4)
08:28:13 PM,
Thursday 5 August 2004
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Heh... after years of Unix, my fingers are reluctant to let me put an 'e' in '/user', even when I intend there to be one.
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07:49:44 PM,
Thursday 5 August 2004
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WEBoggle. Boggle. On the web. A new game every three minutes. Lists how your score compares to the other players that are on.
I could waste a lot of time on this.
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(2)
05:06:48 PM,
Thursday 5 August 2004
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The more I think about it, the more Ralph Fiennes strikes me as an appallingly bad choice for Voldemort. But we shall see.
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(5)
02:31:36 PM,
Thursday 5 August 2004
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07:19:54 PM, Tuesday 3 August 2004
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If you're going to be playing Dungeons and Dragons, but you don't have any of the books on hand, you could always take a look at the System Reference Document online, where they give the whole "open source" part of the rules. For details, see the FAQ.
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(2)
05:21:26 PM,
Tuesday 3 August 2004
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The only thing I remember from my dream this morning is the snail, which was about a foot or two tall and was adorable.
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(1)
06:44:07 PM,
Sunday 1 August 2004
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When editing your Perl or Python code in vim, do you use cindent or smartindent? Does it annoyingly move all your comments back to the beginning of the line, rather than keeping them indented like everything else? Have no fear! The solution for painless vim comment indentation is to reset your cinkeys variable thusly:
set cinkeys=0{,0},!^F,o,O,e
(The problem with the default setting is that it assumes that # indicates a C preprocessor directive, which, in earlier versions of C, had to be at the beginning of a line. To learn more about controlling your indentation, see :help 'cinoptions' and :help 'cinkeys'.
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(1)
02:56:28 PM,
Friday 30 July 2004
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it would be best if the arrest or killing of any high value target were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July
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(2)
08:00:51 PM,
Thursday 29 July 2004
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You may remember that, around the time of the 2003 croquet match at St. John's, the Febbie Nation was engaged in a bitter civil squirty war. Reviewing the declaration of war just now, I noticed the footnotes giving URLs for the websites of two of the factions, and decided to follow them on the off chance that they would still be there--and they were! I present: MWAS and Febbie Justice!
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(2)
02:21:25 AM,
Wednesday 28 July 2004
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Brad DeLong is considering things the Democrats will have problems doing. There are two items on his list that I particularly want to talk about:
We need to upgrade the salaries of teachers--and we need to do this while at the same time upgrading the quality of teachers. The Democratic Party can do the former, but it will have a very hard time doing the latter. The latter means that lots of current teachers get fired, and a Democratic Party that has close links with the National Education Association cannot do that.
This problem is still more maddeningly complicated by the fact that the most popular method of discerning quality of teaching today is standardized testing. Testing is too blunt an instrument to be effective for this purpose, and brings with it a number of social ills. In particular, it leads to classes that focus more on test-taking skills than on real learning, and to curricula being defined by politicians rather than by people who understand education. So any call for "national standards" tends to degrade the quality of education still further, rather than improving it. (The bright side of this is that the area Democrats are more likely to try to deal with--funding--is also the one in which they can do the most good.)
[T]he Democratic Party will have a very hard time figuring out how to deal with [outsourcing] constructively. It's likely to begin thinking that people in India who want jobs processing document-images for U.S. companies are our *enemies*. We can't afford to do that--a world in which Indians and Chinese in fifty years are taught that the U.S. tried to keep them poor will be a very unsafe world. A world in which we try to block expanded world trade will be a world in which we will be much poorer than we need to be.
This is one area where the mainstream of the Democratic Party would do very well to spend some time listening to the radical left. In the center, the debate is essentially one between free trade and protectionism. Democrats try to win the support of labour by tempering free trade policies with protectionist rhetoric, but this is doomed to fail because protectionism is clearly bad policy. Critics of free trade on the left, though, tend to be more concerned with situations where current free trade laws help neither Americans nor workers in developing countries. What they object to is when companies move jobs abroad because they can pay wages that won't support a decent standard of living, or because they won't have to concern themselves with the safety of their factories, or because the local police will help them break up unions. They might have no objection to outsourcing when it takes advantage of legitimate efficiencies of the market, but they strongly oppose it when it is used as a way to get around inconvenient laws. A Democratic Party that used this principle to guide its trade policies would be rightly seen as looking out for the prosperity of American workers--both now and in the future--without making enemies of people in developing countries.
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(1)
07:55:26 PM,
Tuesday 27 July 2004
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Physical Theories as Women, in McSweeney's _
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12:45:29 PM, Monday 26 July 2004
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I've just grossly abused Mr. Gillen's LiveJournal comments to post what has turned out to be a pretty good statement of my thoughts on Nader and the two-party system, so I may as well repeat it here, where it actually belongs (note that I'm responding to someone else who had commented to say, essentially, that he wanted to vote for the candidate that best fit him, not just for someone to beat Bush):
Part of the problem is, under the current system (i.e., whichever candidate gets the most votes wins), a presidential election can't be remotely fair unless there are only two serious candidates. If there are more than two candidates, it's almost inevitable that some groups will unite behind one candidate, while others split between two or more, so that the winner may be someone who could not have beat any of his opponents in a two-way election.
Consider: if (hypothetically) most people would prefer both Kerry and Nader to Bush, but those who oppose either Kerry or Nader unite behind Bush, do Kerry and Nader supporters really do themselves a favor by voting for the candidate that suits them best? Because what they end up doing is electing their last choice because they wouldn't settle for anyone but their first.
Now, this is a horrible system (it's insane--an election can go badly because there are too many good candidates!), but it's not horrible because of the two parties. Rather, parties were an attempt to somewhat correct a system that was already broken. Seeing the problem I noted above, people said "look, if a bunch of us form a sort of alliance, and we all agree on one candidate, even if he isn't anyone's first choice, then we'll be easily able to beat our opponents, 'cause we'll be united while they're splintered into factions". Essentially, parties make the ugly part of the election--compromising on one candidate that has a shot at winning--happen before the final vote, so that the final vote can be comparatively fair.
Mind you, this doesn't mean that you Must Always Vote For A Major Party Candidate. Some people really aren't represented enough by either party to have a reasonable preference. These people may want to have a practical influence on the election, but they can't, because there's nobody they can vote for that will do them any good, so they're pretty much completely fucked. Someone in this position may as well vote for a third-party candidate they like, so that they can at least express themselves, even if they won't have any effect on the election. (This is, as I understand it, the position Gillen finds himself in--the issues he cares most about are ones on which the Democrats and Republicans are united against him). Other people might prefer one party to the other, but believe that their party of choice was taking some of its members for granted, and hope that, by supporting a third party for a while, even if it cost them the election, they might force their major party to give more attention to their interests. (This is roughly the situation of the Nader Democrats, including myself, in 1996 and 2000). Still others might hope that, by forming a compelling enough third party, they could win enough votes to displace one of the major parties. This is rare, but has happened a handful of times in our history--the result is another two-party system, but perhaps a healthier one. (This is what Perot tried to do in 1992 and 1996, but, as usual, it failed miserably).
In view of all this, you may still want to vote for a third-party candidate, and I'm certainly in no position to ask you not to. However, you would be a fool to vote for someone just because they 'fit you best', with no concern for the practical aspects of the election. Voting is not a method of self-expression--for that you have a LiveJournal. Voting is a way to affect who becomes president.
Now, you may think, in view of all this, and of what you see the Democrats and Republicans doing, that parties are a completely shit way to compromise on a president. You're not wrong, but that's a problem that won't be changed just by supporting a third party. If you want to do away with the two-party system, you have to change the underlying election method. I personally have come to support a system called approval voting, which could, I think, entirely eliminate the need for parties, and lead to fairer elections. Some groups, such as the Green Party, are currently arguing for a system called Instant Runoff Voting, but there are some grave problems with this system, such that it would, I think, give the appearance of greater choice while leaving the two-party system as entrenched as ever.
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(4)
02:46:24 PM,
Friday 23 July 2004
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Looking through my archives...
19 July 2000: www.transitinfo.org is nice
20 July 2000: I'm not sure if I've mentioned www.transitinfo.org before
...wow.
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07:42:16 PM,
Thursday 22 July 2004
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Me: If you like, I can send you a link to the most horrible musical atrocity you will ever hear.
Julia: er, would I like?
Me: I’ll… link you to a blog entry about it and let you judge for yourself…
Me: http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/7/22/110102.html
Me: speaking from my own experience: my soul bled away and I was left a bitter, broken shell of a man, my empty eyes staring out at a hostile and meaningless world that I could never comprehend. But it was pretty amusing.
Julia: so do I just click the link in the blog entry?
Me: Yeah.
Julia: oh god
Julia: oh my god
Moss: Isn’t it terrible?
Julia: see blog
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07:27:27 PM, Thursday 22 July 2004
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Dennis Kucinich: If there is room for me in the party and the Kerry-Edwards campaign, there is certainly room for Ralph [Nader] and for his supporters.
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(1)
05:59:52 PM,
Thursday 22 July 2004
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