Page of Moss - Bloglet

Journal

Direct

_
respond?
12:10:55 PM, Monday 29 October 2007

Bromance 4 Ever

_
respond?
12:08:17 PM, Monday 29 October 2007

Sun

_
respond?
11:56:54 AM, Monday 29 October 2007

Ub Bus

_
respond? (1)
09:15:43 PM, Sunday 28 October 2007

Grid

_
respond?
04:25:39 PM, Sunday 28 October 2007

Industry

_
respond?
04:03:51 PM, Sunday 28 October 2007

Past Building

_
respond?
09:25:56 PM, Saturday 27 October 2007

Future Building

_
respond?
09:24:57 PM, Saturday 27 October 2007

Fish Grotto

_
respond? (2)
09:19:55 PM, Saturday 27 October 2007

Art

_
respond?
08:37:55 PM, Saturday 27 October 2007

Big Hugs

_
respond?
07:10:21 PM, Saturday 27 October 2007

Why?

_
respond?
02:09:40 PM, Saturday 27 October 2007

There Was A Shark In The Elevator

_
respond?
12:27:53 PM, Saturday 27 October 2007

A Party?

_
respond?
12:17:51 PM, Saturday 27 October 2007

An Important Decision

_
respond?
12:12:42 PM, Saturday 27 October 2007

Pumpkin

_
respond?
11:07:06 AM, Saturday 27 October 2007

Google Documents has gotten good enough in the past year or so that (for the handful of tasks I would use them for) I no longer feel the need to have a word processor or spreadsheet installed on my desktop. That's pretty neat. _
respond?
11:14:08 PM, Wednesday 17 October 2007

An Acrobatic Robot!

_
respond?
01:00:32 PM, Tuesday 16 October 2007

We haz a robot!

_
respond? (2)
12:57:26 PM, Tuesday 16 October 2007

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

Paul Graham is frequently maddening, but his description of what went wrong with philosophy is pretty much spot on. (By "spot on", I of course mean that it flatters me by arguing for opinions that I myself share.) _
respond? (4)
10:44:49 PM, Friday 12 October 2007

"And when I move, I slice like a fuckin' hammer!" _
respond? (1)
04:40:26 PM, Saturday 6 October 2007

What is it about seasons six of TV shows that one likes, and the way that they're either miserably depressing or badly written, if not both. _
respond? (15)
10:33:17 PM, Friday 5 October 2007

Back in Healdsburg, my habits when crossing the street were pretty straightforward: when the street light said Don't Walk, I would wait, and when it said Walk, I would walk. Besides showing proper respect for the law, this rule had the advantage of making me that much less likely to be run down by tourists, unfamiliar with town, half drunk from wine tasting, and in no condition to notice pedestrians.

Still, I understand that, like religious texts, traffic laws can only be properly understood in the light of a common tradition of interpretation. So, when I started my stay in New York, I watched the behavior of those around me, and soon learned the local standard: when crossing the street, first check that there's no traffic, and then cross, regardless of what the light says. I took to this method quite comfortably, especially as I realized that my old Healdsburg rule would have made walking in New York next to impossible.

In Boston, though, I've had a rather harder time figuring out just how people decide when to cross the street. I could tell they weren't following quite the same rule that New Yorkers did, but I couldn't tell quite what they were doing. Recently, though, I think I've cracked it. The rule for crossing the street in Boston is this:

First, check for oncoming cars. Then, if you will have time to walk out into the street before they arrive, forcing them to stop, cross. _
respond? (4)
06:53:20 PM, Thursday 4 October 2007

Veal?

_
respond? (1)
08:48:43 AM, Tuesday 2 October 2007

A Lot Of People Care A Lot More About Sports More Than I Do

_
respond? (2)
05:38:46 PM, Monday 1 October 2007

Performance Area

_
respond? (1)
10:49:32 PM, Thursday 20 September 2007

Sorry for the two day, and ongoing, partial outage. There've been some upgrades on my server, which made newer, better tools available, but also got rid of some old, outdated tools that I was foolishly still using. I'm starting to try to straighten things up now, but it may be a few weeks till everything's entirely back to normal. At the very least, pinging seems to work now. _
respond?
09:27:04 PM, Thursday 20 September 2007

This is a test. Are things pinging again?

UPDATE: Evidently they are. Please use this post as a place to report any remaining problems. _
respond? (18)
09:14:50 PM, Thursday 20 September 2007

Googling around today about something only slightly related, I found some really excellent observations about the tradeoffs involved in designing a language whose syntax includes significant whitespace:

Moral: Haskell and Python happen to succeed with significant indents but their rules are hard to adapt to other languages. Significant indentation constrains the syntax - if you like these constraints, fine, but it would hurt if a language were incompatible with these constraints. _
respond? (1)
10:24:12 PM, Monday 17 September 2007