The Lone Star Iconoclast, the newspaper for George Bush’s hometown of Crawford, TX, has strongly endorsed John Kerry for President, citing a long list of troubles with Bush.
Monthly Archives: September 2004
The Evolution of a Programmer
Two takes on programmers:
The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer
I found these on the Haskell Humor page.
Eight Questions For Republicans
If you claim to be such devout Christians, why do you go to war instead of trusting God to resolve problems in Iraq and elsewhere?
If you claim to follow Jesus, why do you ignore his instructions to love one’s enemies and be peaceful rather than violent?
Since you want to spread democracy throughout the world, why do you support dictatorships in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait?
Have you forgotten that the United States armed and supported both Saddam Hussein and Ossama bin Laden at a time with their thugish, brutal nature was already known?
Have you forgotten that Ossama bin Laden originally started his terrorism as an attempt to topple a non-democratic government, and only became opposed to the United States when we supported those dictatorships?
Why then do you believe that arming and supporting other regional dictatorships is in the best long-term security interests of the United States?
Why do you believe that spending billions of dollars we don’t have to kill people that are not a threat to us and turn friendship into hatred is better for our long-term wellbeing than investing in our domestic welfare?
Why do you believe that responding to terrorism by reducing the freedom of Americans is anything other than giving the terrorists exactly what they want?
Zope is GONE
I made some major changes at www.complete.org today. This is the first re-implementation of the site in five years.
The first thing was getting rid of Zope. It is a huge memory hog, each process (and there are usually 5 or more) consuming over 50MB. Upgrades are painful as well. Modifying anything is a headache since I can’t just hack a file on disk.. I rewrote most of the site in PHP and used its command-line interface to generate static HTML files from it. It’ll be possible to have dynamic files in there too if I want later on.
I didn’t choose PHP because I like it. Actually, I think PHP the language is a terrible one. It suffers from all the problems of Perl, if not more. It doesn’t ever complain if you use a variable that’s not been defined; it just assumes its an empty variable. You may never know of a typo until something obscure is broken.
I chose PHP because it has a lot of stuff written for it and because I already have PHP code running on the machine.
I also completely eliminated Apache 1.3, so Apache 2 is the only Web server (aside from PyGopherd) still running on the machine.
A lot of work, with little visible changes, but it’s all faster and nicer now.
Whose Light Bulb Burns Longest?
A light bulb in Texas has been shining continuously for 96 years. But apparently it has a second-place finish to one in California that has been on since 1901. There’s some pride in the light bulb world, I guess.
I Still Hate Phone Companies
I’ve never been a big fan of phone companies. I’ve dealt with a small independent local company, lived in SBC territory in several states, and now live in Sprint Local area. I’ve never had good service, ever. The only thing worse than my phone company service has been cable company service.
Here’s my latest saga.
Sprint finally decided to offer DSL in our area. Great, I thought. We had been using fixed wireless for a couple of years since it was the only thing better than dialup available out in the country. But it has a huge problem: it require line-of-sight to the remote antenna. We have some very big trees here. Despite the company saying that the most powerful antenna should penetrate them, and mounting it on top of our roof — giving it a good 40 feet off the ground — we couldn’t clear the trees. So in summer, our connection would be very unreliable, and slow when it did work.
So we signed up for DSL the very day it became available here. Sprint scheduled someone to come out to install a DSL splitter the next week.
Our DSL modem arrived by UPS the day before the installer showed up. But the first problem: I ordered a static IP but there was nothing telling me what my IP is. Sprint DSL tech support (the one bright light in all of this — almost all of those people have a clue, and are helpful and can actually fix problems!) gave me the info I needed.
The next day, Sprint’s installer showed up at about 3:30, and said she had to leave very soon to get the brakes on her truck worked on. Great.
Continue reading I Still Hate Phone Companies
A Typical American Day
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.
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.