To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.

—Lazarus Long


Archive for November, 2009

Hiding the Decline: Prologue

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 [...]

Barbecue kings!

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 [...]

The pragmatics of webscraping

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 [...]

Ego is for little people

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 [...]

Maybe if moral cowardice cost money, it would be less common?

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 [...]

Structure Is Not Meaning

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 [...]

Announcing ForgePlucker

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 [...]