I have no idea how this managed to happen…. I’m very rarely ranked high on Google for semi-common stuff like that. I suppose it’s because a site that talks about Haskell doesn’t get a lot of inbound links :-)
I noticed this because of a sudden spike in Drupal’s referrer report. (Which is slick, BTW).
If you’re not careful, you may find MythTV interferes with your thought patterns…
Here’s what I’ve been reading today:
Hackers, Slackers, and Shackels by Matt Barton, a fascinating article about trends in game development. The author calls Martin Luther “the Richard Stallman of his time.” That’s one analogy I hadn’t heard of before. (seen on Slashdot) Also a bit of insight into the history of Unix I hadn’t heard of before, either.
Personal Chemistry and the Healthy Body by Gerald Weinberg, (via Slashdot). Seems like sound enough conclusions, with some rather mushy in-between stuff.
Review of Author Unknown by Foster. Foster attempts to identify the authors of various bits of text. Seen on a comment from Jon on an earlier story here.
Back in October, Jon Stewart (host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show) appeared on CNN’s Crossfire, and called for the show’s cancelation. To quote a comment on Slashdot:
I did watch the show yesterday thought and it was awe inspiring, especially because it was live and they kept coming back from the commercial breaks for another beating. I especially liked it when they were in Rapidfire and Stewart ignored the gong until they gave up on it.
So anyway, Stewart’s main point was that merely repeating talking points and analyzing how things “play” — rather than statements themselves — is actually a disservice to the public. I would add that obsessive coverage of the trail du jour — OJ, Peterson, whatever — is just as silly.
It seems that the new head of CNN US listened. Phil Rosenthal has this little quote in the Chicago Sun-Times:
On Wednesday, CNN’s Klein told the AP, “I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp” and would prefer a more substantive discussion of current events and controversies.
“I doubt that when the president sits down with his advisers they scream at him to bring him up to date on all of the issues,” Klein said. “I don’t know why we don’t treat the audience with the same respect.”
You really don’t think the president’s Cabinet meetings come with an audience ready to cheer, boo, applaud or hoot when prodded?
Apparently Klein wants to re-brand CNN as the hard-news, in-depth alternative to Fox and MSNBC.
I hope he does, because America really needs one of those. It’s sad to have to resort to BBC for in-depth coverage.
I had been using WordPress for this blog since I switched from Drupal last June.
However, I’ve been growing dissatisfied with several things about it:
Since June, Drupal has released version 4.5.0, which has made a lot of progress towards being useful for a blog site. It has better support for trackbacks, including spam prevention for them, and can be configured to act pretty much like one would expect a blog to act, complete with anonymous comments. It also supports file attachments to nodes, one feature I’d been missing.
So, I’m back to Drupal, and am running the nice Pushbutton theme. It even looks nice in lynx.
My one gripe is that the archive module stinks, but the tracker is reasonable at least. I’d rather let people see a whole month of history at once. Perhaps that will come yet.
Here’s an interesting read from Joel on Software: Advice for Computer Science College Students
Our power finally came back on yesterday morning at about 2AM (judging by the time shown on our clocks.)
Now, we have to:
Over 43,000 households are still without power.
There are some wacky warnings out there.
These are all real.
Local radio station KZSN told people to go to their website to get a list of Red Cross shelters available for people without power, but did not read the list on the air. They then repeated that message several times. Also, to get the list, you have to ignore the giant football on the page, click on school cancelations, scroll to the bottom, then click on shelters.
Burning your house down in an attempt to get some light. This happened to several people.
Going 55MPH on roads that are covered with ice, snow, or both.
Running a gas-powered generator indoors.
Here’s an interesting page on the Python wiki: PythonVsHaskell. It seems a lot of Haskellers come from a Python background. It’s a remarkably fair piece, although both the Python and Haskell example code are poor examples of language features.