A new study has a lot of interesting tidbits about the habits of Americans — who does more work around the house, who works more, and what we do in our free time. Some of the statistics are a little scary — half of Americans’ leisure time is spent primarily watching TV, for instance.
All posts by John Goerzen
Cooking for Engineers
Cooking For Engineers is a fun and interesting site. They have various recipes and information. A fun read.
Paul Graham\’s Age of the Essay
This interesting essay starts out like this:
Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure.
Oy. So I’m going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.
Into the Cuckoo\’s Nest
The Guardian ran a funny yet sobering story about the state of psychoanalysis today. It’s a very entertaining read, and well worth it.
Nice Review Site
I was searching for a new electric shaver the other day and came across ConsumerSearch.Com. It’s a neat site — they consolidate reviews from other sites about devices, offer opinions about the other site’s review qualities, and give you background on devices. I was looking for two items: a shaver and a DVD player. Based in part on the info there, I’m getting a Norelco Synchro and a Panasonic DVD-S47S. I’ll post here when the items arrive and I’ve had a change to try them out.
Battle of the VMs
There are a lot of virtual machine interpreters out there. Java was the first well-known one, but VMs are also used for .NET, OCaml, Python, and the new Parrotcode VM will likely be used for Perl 6.
I started a discussion on the OCaml mailing list about some other bytecodes OCaml could target, with very interesting results. OCaml interpreters or compilers already exist for both Java and .NET.
There’s more to this than meets the eye, though. There are many different languages supported by .NET even though the .NET CLR does not lend itself to many of them very well. There are also a number of languages supported by the Java JVM, and Parrot is looking to support a good number, too. So it appears that no VM is going to promise the mythical language convergence .NET was talking about. Rather, we’re going to have too many choices. I wish we could standardize on a single VM and go with that.
Foundations of Python Network Programming
Update 9/23/2004: There is now a page for this book on my homepage, Complete.Org.
My latest book, Foundations of Python Network Programming, is now available for purchase (Amazon, bn, AllDirect, buy.com). This book is designed to show you everything from fundamentals of networking and low-level protocol design to work with higher-level protocols such as IMAP, HTTP, and FTP. For more information, please see the letter to the reader from the book’s back cover.
This is not a basic reference like Python comes with. Rather, it’s a hands-on guide. There are over 6600 lines of example code and the text strives to show you the big picture. For instance, there are several different ways of getting directory information from an FTP server, and some are not documented for use this way. The chapter on FTP explains them and provides example code to illustrate. There’s also an Apress page with details.
Below is the book’s Table of Contents along with a partial list of the examples you’ll find in each chapter:
Continue reading Foundations of Python Network Programming
Alan Alda to join West Wing
One of my favorite actors, Alan Alda of M*A*S*H, will be joining West Wing as a Republican senator. He seems to do a good job at whatever he does, so I’m looking forward to it.
The Olympics: Be Searched for Unauthorized Flags
There are two interesting stories about the Olympics over at Slashdot. First is a chilling story about the restrictions placed on athletes. They are not allowed to blog about the Olympics while it’s going on. They’re permanently prohibited from ever publishing photos taken at the games, even if those photos are of themselves or their teammates.
Then there’s the story about “advertising terrorism”. Apparently, if you have a soda, flag, unbrella, purse, shirt, whatever from a competitor to official Olympics sponsors, you can have that item confiscated. The comments in that story are interesting too. One poster wrote about the political control exerted there as well. Taiwanese flags were confiscated.
It seems that the Olympics is now less about the athletes than the advertising show. Serios reform is needed at the IOC for sure.
John Gilmore on inflight activism, spam and sarongs
As always, John Gilmore is funny, witty, and thought-provoking. Check out his latest interview at GrepLaw: John Gilmore on inflight activism, spam and sarongs.