Speaker for the Diodes

What's Up With Me, and User Interface Opinon Questions

2009-11-06T21:58:21Z

Uh, did somebody just buy me a gift subscription to Science News? A copy of the current issue just arrived in today's mail ... and I did recently mentioned (and a little less recently) mention having been a reader of it in the past.

If so, thank you. A lot. I've missed it. It's a bit thicker now than I remember.

I could probably get all the same news from the web nowadays, but someties it's just easier -- feels more relaxed and recreational -- to read stuff like that on paper. And by just turning pages instead of scrolling up and down and then deciding which links to click next. (I love the web, but I'm glad we still have dead-trees publications as well.)

I've got a few questions regarding folks' preferences in command-line options for commands. The copy of this entry with the poll in it is at Dreamwidth (or you can jump (I think) directly to just the poll itself)

I'm not sure whether I'll get back to the project that sparked the questions in that poll (see below), but the responses will pertain to some future project too, I'm sure.

Despite the welcome arrival of a copy of Science News, it's been a discouraging week. The Mac won't boot, and it died just as I was fine-tuning the interface for a program that was nearly ready to share, beautifully comment, with a man-page and everything ... that I had not yet copied elsewhere to try compiling on a different OS, or to post yet. There was a lot else not backed up, but most of that will merely annoy and inconvenience me; this bit is the "somebody kicked over my masterpiece sand castle just before I finished it" kick in the gut. (Hmm. Much of what was backed up was backed up to DVD. I'm not sure yet whether any of my other computers can handle that. Experiments to put on my to-do list.)

Couple that with the main Linux workstation -- the bedroom machine -- which I hadn't been using much since I was given the Mac, no longer talking to its monitor, and I've been getting by with an itty-bitty Windows XP machine with a tiny screen and a so-so X server on it for the past few days, and it's been really putting a dent in my enthusiasm. So, in the immortal word of Charlie Brown: AAAUUUUUUGH!

(The bedroom Linux machine shows the POST messages on the monitor -- which is itself having major problems, but I have an even larger monitor to use ifwhen I ever feel capable of getting it up the stairs -- but at some point the screen goes blank and nothing I do to the keyboard or mouse will light it up again. I can SSH to it, and throw X apps to the itty bitty XP screen (a VAIO that only works when plugged into the wall), but I don't get the benefit of the decent-sized screen or the larger keyboard.)

The small screen is fine for web surfing and email; not so good for editing source in one window, editing docs in another, looking stuff up in a third, and viewing output in a fourth, or comparing two PS/PDF pages side by side. Or maybe I'm just spoiled from having a Mac to use for the past several months.

I haven't had the heart to start reconstructing a week of coding from scratch (get a filter working: a couple hours; add enough comments that I won't be embarrassed if anybody else sees it, usefully robust command-line arguments and options, and somewhat reasonable user documentation: a week) -- and I'm still clinging to the faint hope that the files can be recovered -- so I tried to dive back into composing and arranging, and am finding the tiny screen even more annoying for that than for programming. Or maybe I'm just too acutely frustrated and discouraged to cope with even small inconveniences right now. Maybe I'll feel differently about this in a month. But right now, it sucks.

The plan is to head down to Virginia to see whether justgus37, who has more Mac tools, more Mac experience, and OS install media, has any more success ressurecting the Mac than I've had. Wednesday I wasn't feeling well enough to drive that far; last night I got a late start and then ran into some kind of mess that turned I95 and the Beltway into obstacles instead of arteries, and turned back after it became clear I wouldn't get there at any sane hour. So: trying again tonight, if I'm up to it, which at the moment is iffy but I've still got little under and hour to decide. (By the time I got home again last night, it hurt to steer, and I've got power steering. But on the plus side, I got more sleep this morning than the past couple of days, so let's see what my body decides to do with that.)

I want my code back. I want my files back. I want my tools back. This business of knowing I need more backup media and a big disk for a live backup, but not being able to afford either ... well it's starting to wear me down.

QotD

2009-11-06T10:25:03Z

Mark Danner:	I call this in the book the Athenian problem. Which is how do you have--

Bill Moyers:	Athenian meaning Athens of Greece, right?

Mark Danner:	Exactly. How do you have a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world. And the problem is that the things demanded by an empire, which is staying power, ruthlessness, the ability and the willingness to use its power around the world, it's something that democracies tend to be quite skeptical about. And this is a political factor that looms obviously very large in [Obama's] calculations.

-- from the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-10-16

QotD

2009-11-05T17:40:29Z

"I do not like this word 'bomb'. It is not a bomb; it is a device which is exploding." -- French ambassador Jacques Le Blanc (sometime in 1995?)

[My ISP where the QotD script runs was installing a new file server last night/this morning ... I'm guessing that has something to do with the script not being executed this morning, since its scheduled run was in the middle of the maintenance window.]

Dream Fragment

2009-11-05T17:33:34Z

From the end of a dream this morning, just before a loud noise outside woke me up -- a cell phone conversation between a lost driver in Upper Marlboro and someone trying to help:

"Have you managed to get onto Rt. 1 South?[*]"

Yes, but now my car is pointing the wrong way."

"What? How did you manage that?"

"Well, I got frustrated, so I decided to change the granularity of the directions."

[*] In the dream it was clearly US 301, a divided highway, but both speakers referred to it as US 1 in one of those bits of random dream inconsistency.

QotD

2009-11-04T10:25:02Z

"I'm waiting for a simple straightforward 'The Only Solution To The Swine Flu Crisis Is To Give Me A Big Pile Of Money' article. I honestly don't know whether to expect it to appear in The Onion or a 'normal' news outlet." -- stevemb, 2009-10-30

QotD

2009-11-03T10:25:01Z

"justice is not about the law. though the law should be about justice." -- stoneself, 2009-10-16

QotD

2009-11-02T10:25:02Z

Bill Moyers:	Is torture the purest expression of evil that you've seen?

Mark Danner:	I think if you're looking for a pure expression of evil, torture is pretty-- is a pretty good candidate.

Bill Moyers:	Why?

Mark Danner:	Well, because you are taking-- I mean, it's also the most illiberal policy, the sort of most diametrically opposed to what we are as a polity. A liberal state has as its heart the notion that government is limited. That there is an area of privacy of our daily lives in which governmental power, state power, cannot intervene. And torture takes over someone's nervous system. Torture takes over what they feel. Torture takes over and penetrates into their mind and into their body. It's not only illegal, it's immoral. And it's against-- it's against the heart of what the American political tradition stands for, which is an enlightenment tradition. And in which the abolition of torture, by the way, in the 18th and 17th century, was extremely important. So it's going back into darkness, I think, in a very dramatic way.

-- from the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-10-16

QotD

2009-11-01T10:25:02Z

"Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?" -- John Dos Passos, 1917

[I don't suppose calendars with intercalary months count, but does getting an extra hour at the start of Samhain due to the end of Daylight Spending Time count as a (very short) gap? Happy New Year, folks, and don't forget to check your clocks (and VCRs and PDAs and ...) if you live in a place that ends DST on the US schedule.]

I may be overcommenting

2009-10-31T16:40:10Z

Is this over-commenting / a sign that I didn't sleep well enough last night? I just wrote, in a C program:

    int     i;                     /* Ye olde generick loope counter (you  */
                                   /* do know that the 'Y' in "ye olde" is */  
                                   /* really supposed to be a _thorn_, so  */
                                   /* it's still pronounced "the old" not  */
                                   /* "yee old" right?  Well you do now.   */
                                   /* Not sure what most C compilers would */
                                   /* do with a non-ASCII character in a   */
                                   /* comment though.  But I digress ...)  */

I do seem to comment more extensively after trying to read almost anybody else's code, where I'm lucky to find comments describing a function's purpose, much less any explanation of its arguments or useful clues as to where I need to poke at it to add a feature. And I've been reading other people's code lately.

Obviously, this is code I'm planning to send to a bunch of other people ... (But while I'm posting -- do other compilers supply the __FILE__ and __DATE__ pre-defined macros, or is that just a gcc thing? I don't know what Windows users will compile this with.)

QotD

2009-10-31T09:25:01Z

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-11-01:

"Ye had need tak care how ye dispute the existence of fairies, brownies and apparitions there; ye may as weel dispute the Gospel o' Sant Matthew." -- James Hogg, in 'The Wool Gatherer'.

http://www.archive.org/stream/talesandsketches01hoggrich]

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)

[The line is spoken by a character named Barnaby.]

Happy Hallow'een and a blessed Samhain Eve, all!

QotD

2009-10-30T09:25:01Z

"We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future." -- Randall Munroe, xkcd, 2009-10-21 (image title attribute on that day's strip -- hover over the image (or use "view source") to see it), comparing Terminator to today

QotD

2009-10-29T09:25:01Z

From the PBS television program, Charlie Rose (formerly The Charlie Rose Show according to IMDB), 2009-05-11 (video and transcript):

</td></tr>

Elizabeth Warren:	We destabilized an entire American system and worldwide economic system one family at a time. We started it right down at the basic level. So when we're going to talk about regulatory reform -- in the 1930s, we started it by making it safe to put money in banks. We need to start regulatory reform in 2009 right down at the family level, to just get a market for credit that works for families. You don't have to pretend ...
</p>
Charlie Rose:	But I love the objective. How do we do that?
</p>
Elizabeth Warren:	We know how to do this. How did we make water safe? How did we make the paper not have arsenic in it? And your suit have, you know, be properly labeled for what it had? This is what government actually does. It supports markets by creating agencies that say, hey, you just have to be -- you have to disclose, right, you've got to have some minimum safety standards. We've done this over and over. We've done it with food labeling. We've made sure that little babies' carseats don't collapse on impact, that we don't have lead in children's toys. We ultimately have a baseline safety for every product you taste, touch, smell, feel, but we don't have it for credit products.
</p>
Charlie Rose:	OK. If you were going to put together a committee to recommend to the president of the United States, chairman of the Fed, what the regulations for the future which will shape the next 50 years are going to be, who should do this? It ought to be in the full light of air.
</p>
Elizabeth Warren:	Right. So I would say, let's ask Congress to give us a new agency. Right? We're going to have one more thing in government. We've taken care of the safety, we've taken care of our environment, we've taken care of food and drugs, we've taken care of basic consumer products that you buy and sell, meat, agricultural products. Let's do one for credit products, basic safety so that the markets can work. Ultimately, I'm real free-market girl. I mean, I truly believe markets bring us enormous riches. They let us do lots of things, including they let us be stupid. And... [...] And we should hold people responsible for being stupid. What we shouldn't do are have markets that are designed around tricking people. We have to come back to the notion that government really has a function in America. It has the function of creating kind of these basic safety -- think about how the world -- how well markets have worked. [...]

QotD

2009-10-28T09:25:02Z

"One way to introduce a course like this would be to promise you that by reading these books and by debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen. You will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgment, you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. This would be a partial and misleading promise.

"Political philosophy for the most part hasn't worked that way. You have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one. Or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And that's because philosophy is a distancing (even debilitating) activity.

"And you see this going back to Socrates [...]

"[...] philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions, and from settled beliefs. And those are the risks, personal and political.

[...]

"... the very fact [these questions] have recurred and persisted may suggest that though they are impossible in one sense, they're unavoidable in another. And the reason they're unavoidable, the reason they're inescapable, is that we live some answer to these questions every day... just throwing up your hands and giving up on moral reflection is no solution."

-- professor Michael Sandel [copied from longer passage quoted at The Obligate Scientist; also in a clip shown on the PBS television program Charlie Rose, 2009-10-12]

QotD

2009-10-27T09:25:02Z

From Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler ( howardtayler), 2009-09-13:

Reverend Lieutenant Theo Fobius:	Do you want my discourse on the relative merits of moral absolutism and moral relativism, or --

Commander Kevyn Andreyasn:	Evil or not. That's what I want.

Reverend Lieutenant Theo Fobius:	Do you have a measuring stick with "evil" clearly labelled on it? I have several, but they're all of different lengths. And some measure along axes perpendicular to observable reality.

QotD

2009-10-26T09:25:01Z

"To today's Republican, attempting to understand what one's opponent is saying is a sign of weakness. a TRUE Klingon tries to prevent his opponent from saying it in the first place." -- admnaismith, 2009-09-10

QotD

2009-10-25T09:25:02Z

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-04:

"Sleeping, I dream about my cyborg half, that it's a monster that has half-devoured me, its teeth sunk in the right half of my body. Or it's a forest I've wandered into, and I'm lost amid its mazy pathways, deep pools, strange trees whose long fronds brush my shoulders. In the center, there's an enchanted well I can never quite reach. Night falls and the sky shows strange new constellations. Waking at night, the world glows in wireframe.

"Tonight, I have a whole long dream about a list of assembler instructions and their possible uses and then about the team that wrote them, a bunch of engineers in the 1980s. It turns out to be obsolete documentation that got left on an install disc for a chip series three generations before mine, made by a Protheon-owned company out in New Mexico. Just before waking, I catch a glimpse of red earth and a storefront office window in an Albuquerque strip mall, the smell of air conditioning and bad office coffee, the glass door swinging shut, as if whoever made me has only just left the building."

-- Austin Grossman, from his novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible. The novel tells the story of Fatale, a cyborg who joins a group of superheroes known as the Champions.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

QotD

2009-10-24T09:25:01Z

"In the middle of the concert I require to, as Wayne Shorter would say, take a backwards flip into the unknown. I need 20 minutes to half an hour where nobody knows, including myself, what we're going to do. Not the light man or the sound man. So you can dip into what's not written, beyond the mechanics, the intangibles." -- Carlos Santana (b. 1947-07-20), interviewed by Tavis Smiley on the PBS television program Tavis Smiley, 2009-04-02

QotD

2009-10-23T09:25:01Z

"privilege isn't about [who] has it the worst.
it is about who has some aspect of expectation and who doesn't." -- dyssonance, 2009-09-06

To See The World In A Gr^H^H Single Pixel

2009-10-23T06:48:15Z

From last night's L&O:SVU[*]:

That's it? No porn? You're sure?

Just three cheesy pictures, totally innoccuous.

That doesn't make sense. Why would O'Donnell give Banks these pictures?

I didn't get it either, so I dug a little deeper, and found computer code hidden in a pixel. [zooms in one a tiny portion of the image, so each pixel appears as a square, then teensy text appears, line by line, within one square] I cracked it, I found a secret file, and found all these pictures.

Ripped me right out of the story, it did. Took my head away from the plot, and I spent the last 18 minutes of the episode stuck in can't-decide-whether-to-mock-or-gripe mode. Some writer -- no, make that every writer, the director, whover did the graphics for that scene, and anybody else who had a chance to look at that line -- apparently has heard of steganography but lacks not only any trace of a clue about how it works, but also a reasonable understanding of how raster image files work in general.

I'm pretty sure that if the cheesy picture had been stored with a colour depth of 640 bits per pixel[**] (instead of a more typical 24 bits), the police tech would have immediately noticed that a) the file was suspiciously large for that size picture, and b) ordinary image-handling software was confused by it. Is it just a super-geek thing, or were reasonably computer-literate non-geeks scratching their heads and thinking, "Wait, pixels don't work like that, right?" C'mon, there has to be at least one graphic artist working on that show who knows what a pixel is, whom they could've asked ...

Then again, in a genre (police procedurals / crime drama) where until recently it seemed that low-budget CCTV cameras all had infinite resolution as long as a detective kept asking a tech to zoom in a little farther[***], I guess the idea that any one pixel could hold arbitrary amounts of "computer code" is just more of the same kind of error...

Steganographic images are real, of course. Steganography[****] is not just used for sexy spy stuff and sleazy sex-crimes stuff like on the telly; it's also the technique underlying invisible digital watermarks (the kind where you don't see a distracting logo layered on the image, but where the person who stuck the watermark in can prove that you stole her photo even after you've cropped off the copyright notice and such). It doesn't hide a lot of info in one pixel. In a 24-bits-per-pixel image, human viewers are usually not going to notice tiny changes to low-order bits of the pixels, so you spread the hidden data out across several pixels, making the change to each pixel too small to attract attention.

Now if they'd just gotten that bit even almost right, they wouldn't have wrecked the last third of the episode for computer-literate people. There'd still be the problem of, say, a 4 GB flash drive large enough for thousands of photos and PDF files appearing to contain only three small images and almost no free space left, without that being a tip-off right there (or the writers could've made that the inspiration for the tech to check for hidden files and/or steganography!), but that's more of a 'fridge logic' problem than a point-and-laugh error.

Or am I asking too much?

[*] Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, "Hardwired"

[**] Rough idea based on how many dots representing the revealed computer code appeared in that one-pixel square, without bothering to rewind and watch more closely.

[***] Lately it seems the more common approach is to have the tech say, "I'll clean that up for you," and apply some math to the image to interpolate the desired data -- often a few steps better than what I suspect works in real life, but still blurry enough to not smack the casual viewer upside the head with the absurdity of it -- with the occasional infinite-resolution camera and a few cases of techs saying, "Well you know real cameras don't work like the ones on tee vee; this is as good as it gets," once in a while.

[****] Note also that steganography is not limited to images. Codes of the "take the first letter of every seventh word" count as steganography too. But on television, when steganography shows up it's usually in a photo or video.

QotD

2009-10-22T09:25:02Z

"[...] There can be no redemption - not after corpses floated in the streets, not after the dying begged for help and none came. We talk about the message discipline of the noise machine, but we - by which I mean anyone and everyone else - can do it too.

"Thug: ....healthcare is socialism scaaaaaaary -
You: Dude, Hurricane Katrina.
Thug: ...national security bugaboo -
You: Sorry, Hurricane Katrina.
Thug: ...gift certificate Black president -
You: Wanker, you lost me at Hurricane Katrina.
Thug: ...forgetting 9/11 -
You: You forgot Hurricane Katrina. So forget you."

-- Tata, Poor Impulse Control, 2009-08-28 [thanks to realinterrobang for quoting it earlier]

QotD

2009-10-21T09:25:03Z

"On the subject of the 'weird and entertaining' vs. 'who we are' debate, I long ago decided that we would all be better off coming to terms with the fact that when it comes to all things erotic, who we are is pretty much weird and entertaining. Pretending you are normal is a huge piece of baggage that you really don't need to carry, and is a huge burden to live with just for the small consolation of not being mocked.

[...]

"So my theory, as flawed as it may be, is that a large number of sexual relationships consist of a pair of people each trying to hide from the other what a perv they are, out of a (possibly justified) fear of judgment. A tragedy on a massive scale, I weep for the non-pervs."

-- idiopath, 2009-09-06

QotD

2009-10-20T09:25:02Z

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking." -- John Maynard Keynes (b. 1883-06-05, d. 1946-04-21), 1933-07-15

A Disconcerting Sound, A Concert, and Tools

2009-10-19T21:39:08Z

It turns out that the unmistakable sound of a dying bearing in a computer power-supply fan ... is mistakable after all. I heard it as I was getting ready to leave the house yesterday afternoon, and had that paralyzing moment of wondering which machine was about to die. Then I realized it was actually the sound of a circular saw being used in the house across the street (with the sound being funneled through an open basement door).

Whew.

Yesterday was a day when things kept going wrong but the day somehow worked out after all. Getting ready to go out, it was one of those everything-takes-longer-than-it-should days; I took a wrong turn and somehow ended up in Odenton instead of Laurel and had to backtrack; my ears were acting up enough to make me nervous about going to a concert (but fortunately not badly enough to make it obviously a bad idea); and somebody at Montpelier Arts Center seriously underestimated how popular a free Sunday afternoon concert by The Montpelier Jazz All-Stars would be.

But after a while of listening to the concert from a corridor outside the gallery the music was in, someone wheeled in another stack of chairs and more of the folks leaning against the walls outside got in (then the person who brought more chairs pointed out that there were a couple of open seats in the front row, so Sheepie and I spent the first half of the concert listening from the corridor and the second half with our knees brushing the drape on the front edge of the stage).

I hadn't known what kind of jazz to expect, and I'm not really sure how to classify what they played, but fortunately it wasn't the "difficult listening" all-theory-but-is-there-a-melody type of jazz, nor was it ~~lukewarm~~ ah, "cool" jazz[*]; it was accessible jazz with some fire in it, a little bit done Dixieland style, a little straight-up blues, all of it enjoyable. Piano, vibes, upright bass, two tenor saxophones (one saxophonist also played flute), and for a few tunes, a singer (where we were sitting, I had a great view of her nifty shoes; had to lean back a bit to see her face). The bassist was making sure we didn't feel the lack of a drummer -- he was pretty much filling two roles at once, and his right hand was really, really busy the whole show. (I was taking notes. I think I understand part of what I saw that I need to practice to see whether I can copy it, but there were a couple of right-hand moves that went by so quickly I couldn't figure out what he'd done.)

The volume was probably about right for the room, and good for normal-hearing folks present, but I would have been more comfortable toward the back. (As it was, with how my ears were doing at the time it wasn't really bad, just a little too loud; the way my ears are acting today -- and late last night -- it would've been downright painful.)

Pastries and punch afterward in another gallery, cool art to look at, then off to a kabob place for curry, while my ears got more sensitive and the echoes in the kabob joint started to hurt, then I went home. OT1H, today I feel like I'm recovering from my weekend; OTOH, yay for live music and actually getting out to do something social!

Yay jazz.

I'm having a lot of trouble concentrating today, which is especially annoying since I'm trying to wrap my head around somebody else's code (or wrap the code around my head, I'm not sure -- it's a library: "abcp"). This is my third attempt to avoid finishing writing my own ABC parser from scratch[**], and since it's a library explicitly intended to save other programmers from that task (as opposed to my trying to rip a not-general parser out of somebody else's standalone app), it's the most promising. But alas, even though the author wrote a lot of words about it -- about the general theory of the design, and the names of the token types returned (and for some of them the information fields included ... but not for all), it's still not quite library-documented, if that phrasing makes any sense ...

That is, yay for useful comments in the code, and the diagram of the state machine the library implements, and an overview of the structure, but ideally I shouldn't still need to go tease apart the C code to figure out how to use the library if it's intended as a library for random other programmers to use. I don't want to complain too loudly, because I do want to applaud the documentation that is there (way more than I usually find), but it's kind of like if, say, printf() were described in terms of how the implementation of it figures out what to do next, instead of the 'man' page actually explaining the syntax of a format string and how to zero-fill a %d field. If I had to go read through the source code for the library printf() is contained in to figure out what "%*s" means in a format string, or how to specify the number of decimal places to use on a float (e.g. "%.2f" for two decimal places) instead of just reading the documentation, printf() would be a lot less useful than it is. Yeah, there are always a few questions for which the answer is RTFS, but I'd like RTFM to be enough most of the time.

I know this is asking folks who do an open-source library project to do a second whole project that is the proper documentation, but it spells the difference between a library that is excellent code but never used by anyone else, and a library that becomes a new standard tool. (Open-source developers: become really good friend with tech writers who can be bribed with pizza and beer and/or are huge fans of OSS themselves, okay?) Make the learning curve a speed bump instead of a detour through mountains; make somebody else's decision to try using your library a matter of looking up the function calls, not yet another exercise in yak-shaving.

That said, I'm currently compiling wee test programs to suss out the quirks and answer questions about the library's behaviour not spelled out in the docs. Replacing the main switch() statement in one of the sample programs that came with the library has been a good start (and yay for sample code like that!). It seems to do a few things differently than what would be most convenient for me, but it looks like it'll save me a lot of time if I don't have to squint at its .h and .c files so closely for much longer. (I did have to #ifdef out a chunk of inline assembly in the utility library that this library calls, and fix a dozen makefiles that needed a space inserted between two macros on a bunch of lines, but I have gotten it all to compile, so that part of the yak is shaved, at least.)

So: yay for documentation, but seriously, more of the right kinds of documentation, please?

Unlikely to make it to 3LF tonight (big surprise, I know, considering how long it's been since I did manage to show up), since I'm still feeling the effects of going out yesterday. Possible, but not likely.

[*] "Cool jazz": jazz for people who don't like jazz but are ashamed to admit it. I'm so glad that's not what this concert was. (There are cool real-jazz tunes, but that's not the same as what radio calls "cool jazz".)

[**] I've got a handful of small projects in the works that do various things to ABC files to generate intermediate files to pass to end-product tools like abcm2ps, abctab2ps, and abc2midi. A couple of these need to "understand" enough of the ABC syntax in order to do the right things, that I needed a parser.

QotD

2009-10-19T09:25:02Z

"It should be pointed out that when many, many people actively promote the assassination of a person, as was the case with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and then one person does it, that is not considered a conspiracy. Just a lone gunman.

"We don't have conspiracies in the US. Just those, crazy, crazy conspiracy theorists.

"And an abundance of lone gunmen."

-- Rain Monkey, commenter at The Stranger, 2009-09-29

QotD

2009-10-18T09:25:02Z

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-05-05:

"Recipes, like birds, ignore political boundaries. Just as the British empire still has a culinary pulse, beating in a curry in Scotland or in the mug of builder's tea with sugar and milk you are handed in some roadhouse on the Karakorum Highway; just as the Ottoman empire breathes phantom breaths in little cups of muddy coffee from Thessaloniki to Basra; so the faint outline of the Tsarist-Soviet imperium still glimmers in the collective steam off bowls of beetroot and cabbage in meat stock, and the soft sound of dollops of sour cream slipping into soup, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and, in emigration, from Brooklyn to Berlin." -- James Meek, The story of borshch, The Guardian 15th March 2008.

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2264726,00.html]

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)