Archive for the 'General' Category
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
According to the summaries I’ve seen, the 61 megabytes of email and documents net-jacked from the Climate Research Unit a few days ago do not — quite — reify conservatives’ darkest fantasies about “the team” (as the network of professional anthropogenic-global-warming alarmists communicating through CRU likes to style itself). To do that, they’d have to [...]
Posted in General | 75 Comments »
Monday, November 16th, 2009
John Birmingham writes from Australia:
Even, and this is gonna hurt, the Americans have it all over us when it comes to cooking with fire, iron and tongs. In fact it’s arguable the American barbecue, or rather its plethora of regional variations on barbecue, set the gold standard worldwide for applying heat to meat while out [...]
Posted in General | 132 Comments »
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
Here’s an amplification of my previous post, Structure Is Not Meaning. It’s an except from the ForgePlucker HOWTO on writing code to web-scrape project data out of forge systems.
Your handler class’s job is to extract project data. If you are lucky, your target forge already has an export feature that will dump everything [...]
Posted in General | 39 Comments »
Monday, November 9th, 2009
When I got really famous and started to hang out with people at the top of the game in computer science and other fields, one of the first things I noticed is that the real A-list types almost never have a major territorial/ego thing going on in their behavior. The B-list people, the bright [...]
Posted in General | 134 Comments »
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
Heh. State representative Fred Maslack of Vermont has proposed a bill under which non-gun-owners would have to register and pay a fee. Entertainingly enough, there is actual justification for this in a careful reading of the Vermont state constitution.
The Hon. Rep. Maslack is joking. I think. And I’m against requiring people who [...]
Posted in General | 163 Comments »
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
So, I announce ForgePlucker, and within a day I’ve got some guy from Y Combinator sneering at me for using regular expressions to parse HTML. Says it’s “crappy code”. The poor fool…he has fallen victim to a conceptual trap which I, fortunately, learned to avoid decades ago. I could spout a freshet [...]
Posted in General | 32 Comments »
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
I’ve been strongly hinting in recent blog entries that I planned to do something concrete about the data-jail problems of present open-source hosting sites. Because I believe in underpromising and overperforming, I decided at the outset not to announce a project until I could not only show working code, but code with wide enough [...]
Posted in General | 27 Comments »
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
I’m still not going to talk about my attack on the forge infrastructure problems quite yet; the software is coming along nicely, but I intend to announce only after it handles its fourth forge type (yes, that was a tease). But I will say this: I now think I know what the future of [...]
Posted in General | 10 Comments »
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Hackers have a lot of odd superstitions about software licensing. I was reminded of this recently when a project maintainer asked me whether he needed to get a sign-off from each and every one of his contributors before switching from Apache v1 to Apache v2. Here’s what I told him:
My opinion is [...]
Posted in General | 25 Comments »
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
I am not generally unhappy with my model of how the universe works. Yes, it would be pleasant if there really were a beneficient creator-god and an afterlife; it would be nice if “good government” were actually a sustainable possibility rather than a fond but deluded hope in the minds of statists; it [...]
Posted in General | 210 Comments »
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
Following my post Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves, a great many people took me for task for trying to make a principled distinction between public space and private space, and tangled that up with a lot of confusion about the distinction between “public” and “state-owned” space. Here I’ll attempt to shed some light on [...]
Posted in General | 82 Comments »
Monday, October 19th, 2009
Thomas Paine once wrote: “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Paine’s truth is not idealistic handwaving, it is brutal pragmatism. Justifications for censorship, even the best-intentioned kind, have [...]
Posted in General | 203 Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
In my previous post, Three Systemic Problems With Open-Source Hosting Sites I identified some missing features that create serious brittleness in or project-hosting infrastructure. The question naturally arises, why don’t existing hosting systems already have these facilities? I have looked into this question, actually examining the codebases of Savane and GForge/FusionForge, and the [...]
Posted in General | 46 Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
In my previous post, Why Artists Defend Roman Polanki, I analyzed the flap over the Roman Polanski arrest as a case of artists arguing for a privilege to behave like shitheels without being held to account for it. I advanced this as an explanation because I think it covers the facts better than some [...]
Posted in General | 187 Comments »
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
In 1977, Roman Polanski drugged, raped, and sodomized a 13-year-old girl. When he believed a sort-of-plea-bargain was about to come unstuck, he took it on the lam. He lived the high life in this self-imposed exile for thirty years, until busted in Switzerland recently. Now various of the usual suspects on the [...]
Posted in General | 80 Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2009
In all the foofaraw surrounding the ACORN scandals, there is a huge important consequence of them understood – but not spoken – by everyone who follows politics as a blood sport. This story describing conditions in Michigan and tallying up some recent ACORN convictions for electoral fraud is an indicator. And, on top of Obama’s [...]
Posted in General | 110 Comments »
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
A few moments ago, I read a review of a new book, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, and the following sentences jumped out at me:
This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from [...]
Posted in General | 53 Comments »
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
In California Dreamin’ I wrote:
The U.S. as a whole will almost certainly face [California's structural deficit] problem before the end of Barack Obama’s administration in 2012. Social Security obligations were due to exceed collections in 2013; even before Obama quadrupled the federal deficit this meant a giant blazing meteorite was already hurtling straight at the [...]
Posted in General | 70 Comments »
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
In The Book of Lies, the diabolically brilliant occultist Alesteir Crowley once wrote:
“Explain this happening!”
“It must have a natural cause!”
“It must have a supernatural cause!”
Let these two asses be set to grind corn!
In the original, there is a sort of grouping bracket connecting the second and third lines lines and pointing at the fourth. [...]
Posted in General | 44 Comments »
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
There just isn’t any better marker for the fundamental narcissism of today’s left-wing politics that this:
That’s Che Guevara’s granddaughter, Lydia, We are told that she posed semi-nude to promote vegetarianism and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
There are so many levels of wrongness and unintended irony here that it’s hard to know where to [...]
Posted in General | 110 Comments »