Page of Moss - bloglet for Wednesday 29 May 2002

I seem to have pretty firmly decided that Wobble is going to generate pages dynamically, rather than publishing to static HTML files. This is mostly just for convenience of programming; generating pages when they're requested is just easier. However, as long as I'm doing it, I should get something out of it. Generating pages when they're viewed means I can also run other code in response to every page view. The first thing I want to do is add something like the exceedingly sweet referer linkbacks on Disenchanted and 0xDECAFBAD. _
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03:28:27 PM, Wednesday 29 May 2002

A Lisp interpreter written in JavaScript. Great hack. _
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07:17:50 PM, Tuesday 28 May 2002

Yesterday afternoon, I specifically told my program to number something from 0 rather than from 1. Because it was the right thing to do, under the circumstances. _
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01:42:59 PM, Tuesday 28 May 2002

Time will destroy you like a Mexican god. _
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03:52:44 AM, Tuesday 28 May 2002

"With these machines, mankind is free to pursue more productive ends, while leaving the playing with marbles to his trusty automated machine servants." _
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05:26:14 PM, Monday 27 May 2002

So sometimes I browse from lynx. But when I do that, I can't read Bridget's blog, 'cause it's syndicated with Javascript. So I wrote a PHP script that grabs the source file and sends it to the browser as normal HTML. It even does the right thing with the comment links. I present: Sad Panda - ultra lo-fi lynxable edition, recorded at the Edison Laboratories. _
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05:10:21 AM, Monday 27 May 2002

There is no emoticon for meaning something lovingly. _
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04:42:21 AM, Saturday 25 May 2002

Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" has to be one of the best love songs ever written. _
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03:10:30 AM, Saturday 25 May 2002

LinuxPrinting.org has a large database of information on how well various printers work with Linux. I'm in the market for a printer right now, and of course I run Linux at home, so something like this is exceedingly useful to me. After some looking around, I think I'm going to get a Samsung ML-1210. It's an inexpensive laser printer that gets good reviews on Epinions and is apparently well supported on Linux (there's even a report of someone using it under Debian Potato--the OS I'm running). Pleasingly, I was even able to use the CompUSA website to verify that it's in stock at the CompUSA in Santa Rosa. The Samsung website is a bit more disappointing. They're using some database-driven session tracking monstrosity that won't let me grab a permanent link to the page on the printer. The content was encouraging, though: Debian was specifically listed as a supported OS. Too often, companies don't acknowledge the existence of anything other than Red Hat. _
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08:31:41 PM, Friday 24 May 2002

Now imagine if someone were to describe this fellow as "a great man, but probably not the son of God". They would be missing the point. He is a lunatic! _
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04:43:36 PM, Friday 24 May 2002

Google Labs passes the Borges test.
[via Hack the Planet] _
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01:56:53 PM, Friday 24 May 2002

I can see that this entry was a bit unclear, mostly because I tried to pack too many different ideas and questions into the first sentence. Let me try again:

Is freedom of speech valuable for its own sake? That is, is there some positive good in being able to speak freely on any topic? If it is not valuable for its own sake, are there other reasons that we would want to guarantee freedom of speech? In America today, I am glad to have the first amendment, because I know that any laws passed limiting speech would be likely to injure me directly. Is this a good general argument for freedom of speech? Can we say that, regardless of whether a just law regulating speech could exist, in practice the state will always pass unjustly limiting laws if it is free to do so? If so, is the potential harm done by bad speech laws enough, in itself, to make us say that the government should never be able to regulate speech?

Even with the first amendment, we have some laws that regulate speech and other forms of expression: libel and slander laws, campaign finance laws, truth in advertising laws, copyright laws, child pornography laws, all sorts of restrictions on the time, place, and manner of speech, especially on television or radio, and doubtless many others that I have not listed. Are some or all of these laws acceptable even in a nation that claims to have freedom of speech? If so, how can we identify acceptable abridgements of freedom of speech? If not, how are we to reconcile this with the real good done by some of these laws, and the real harm prevented by them?

If freedom of speech is good in itself, what is the moral standing of social pressure regarding certain kinds of speech? Some forms of speech--personal insults, obscenities shouted on the street, trolling on the internet--are unwelcome and severely discouraged. With no legal force, does this still create a climate where the freedom of speech is limited? What about the case of a publisher refusing to print something because they disapprove of the content? Certainly they are within their rights to do so; should they nevertheless restrain themselves from it? If freedom of speech is desired, not for its own sake, but as a limitation of state power, then does it even make sense to refer to the concept of free speech outside of the context of state power?

All this seems like a reasonably good starting point, if I want to make a thoroughgoing reexamination of my opinions on freedom of speech. If you have thoughts on any of these questions, please post them. _
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01:31:54 PM, Friday 24 May 2002

Bicycle Repair Man version 0.5, with support for the Extract Method refactoring, has been released, just in time! Bicycle Repair Man is a refactoring tool for Python. What this means, essentially, is that it automates certain common ways of reorganizing your Python code.

For a while now, it's been able to rename a variable, class, or function safely, making sure that all the references to it elsewhere in the code are also changed. This is, in itself, quite handy. As I've been rediscovering at work lately, one of the biggest challenges in writing readable code is the difficulty of renaming something after it's been in use for a while.

Extract Method, though, takes the whole thing to a new level. It allows you to select a section of code, and move it into a separate method (or function, in non-OO terms). This lets you add new levels of organization to the code, in just a few clicks. It can, of course, be done manually without too much trouble; however, an automated tool makes it take just a few seconds, where it might have taken a few minutes before. The kind of casual manipulation of source code that this makes possible is not to be underestimated.

Martin Fowler, who wrote the standard reference book on refactoring, has referred to Extract Method as refactoring's Rubicon, not just because it is so useful in itself, but because in order to support it, a tool must have reached the level of sophistication that will be required for most of the more complex refactorings. When a language has a refactoring tool with Extract Method, it is clear that automated refactoring will continue to be a serious possibility in that language.

The lack of a tool like this was the only thing that had kept Python from being my OO language of choice. I am a happy programmer. _
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12:50:48 PM, Friday 24 May 2002

Is freedom of speech valuable in itself, or only as a protection against the necessarily unjust application of laws regulating speech? What sorts of laws regulating speech are acceptable, if any? What is the moral standing of social pressure regarding certain kinds of speech? _
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04:01:16 AM, Friday 24 May 2002

typos = annoying. _
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08:36:56 PM, Thursday 23 May 2002

data -> structured data -> searchable data _
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08:35:49 PM, Thursday 23 May 2002

Has anyone from the blogmass cd swap not yet downloaded Tania's mix? Is it okay if I delete it now? _
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08:25:19 PM, Thursday 23 May 2002

If I do not have Wobble running a weblog by the end of this weekend, I will give up on developing it. _
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04:34:07 PM, Thursday 23 May 2002

T.I.A.I.L.W.: CRC cards. _
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01:25:30 PM, Thursday 23 May 2002

ZOE is an email client. Rather than using traditional folders, it lets you do a variety of complex searches on your email. I am interested. _
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05:21:17 PM, Wednesday 22 May 2002

There's a Herodotus quote in Blood Money! _
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03:24:31 PM, Tuesday 21 May 2002

Interesting article about just why Lisp is so special. I'm now even more sure that I want to learn it. _
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12:38:41 PM, Tuesday 21 May 2002

Well, just on the off chance that there are other Python programmers reading this... I'm looking for a way to keep two ZODB databases on separate machines synchronized with each other. Anybody know of a tool that can do this?

More specifically: I'm keeping a weblog in a ZODB database. I'd like the user to be able to add entries to their weblog on their home computer, and then publish them to the server. I'd also like the database on the home computer to keep up to date with any comments that have been posted on the server. _
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03:36:27 PM, Monday 20 May 2002

Anything worth doing is worth absolutizing into a general moral imperative. _
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02:09:53 AM, Monday 20 May 2002

Most general sites for listing movie showtimes are kind of unreliable, so if I want to know what movies are showing around here and when, I pretty much have to go to the websites of the individual theaters. The Raven is the one in Healdsburg. It's about a ten minute walk from here. It often doesn't have the newest or the best movies, but sometimes it has some good things, and it's nice and close. The Airport Cinemas are the next closest--about a fifteen minute drive. After that is the Roxy. It's like a twenty or twenty-five minute drive, but it has comfy seats and good sound and nice big screens, so it's probably the nicest place to watch movies around here. It's right in downtown Santa Rosa, so there's usually other stuff to be done when going there, too--don't have to drive all that way for only a movie. Finally, about half an hour's drive from here, there's the Rialto Cinemas. They mostly show art films that won't show up anywhere else around here, so if you want to see such a thing, it's worth the drive. Also, they have a pleasingly surly FAQ list, which makes me happy. _
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12:48:13 AM, Monday 20 May 2002

Happy birthday, Mike! _
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12:03:57 AM, Sunday 19 May 2002

I'm not sure the republic is really doing its job. _
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04:25:58 PM, Saturday 18 May 2002

I know it's cheap to blog this much fortune output in so short a span of time, but it's yet another quote too good to pass up:
"Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised) are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software."
-- Levitating Trains and Kamikaze Genes: Technological Literacy for the 1990's. _
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02:40:21 PM, Saturday 18 May 2002

I would like to know why Xine has stopped working for me. I have another DVD playing program, Videolan, and it works. But Videolan doesn't do menus. I want Xine to work again.
</whine> _
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01:56:59 AM, Saturday 18 May 2002

I just used the words "motherfucker" and "viz." in the same sentence. _
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01:10:20 AM, Saturday 18 May 2002

Remember Star Wars? You know, the first one they made, Episode IV, A New Hope? Okay, this is important: it wasn't a very good movie. I mean, it was entertaining and all. I enjoyed it. If I found it on TV and had nothing better to do, I'd probably stick around and watch it for a while, unless I'd seen it recently. But basically, it was pretty forgettable. It could be a good movie to watch in a group and heckle, in that Evil Dead kinda way--though it's not as good for that as the Evil Dead movies are--but I wouldn't willingly sit through it in a movie theater more than once. I wouldn't pay to see it, unless I was getting pizza or something too.

And of course, the same goes for its sequels.

Which, you know, isn't really a big deal or anything. Just it kinda freaks me out that a basically crap movie should have such a big place in our culture.

I'm probably going to go see Attack of the Clones tonight. Wish me luck. _
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08:14:24 PM, Thursday 16 May 2002

Cross-platform compatibility is nice, but there are more important things. Java seems to find the wrong balance. _
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02:36:40 PM, Thursday 16 May 2002

Rondellus is an Estonian early music group. Their new album Sabbatum is a collection of Black Sabbath covers, performed in a medieval style, in Latin.
[found posted to the J-List by Luis Salas] _
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01:57:12 PM, Thursday 16 May 2002

This is a good idea. _
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05:20:01 PM, Wednesday 15 May 2002

So. I have a new car. (Well, a new used car). It is a 1983 BMW 320i. I like my new car. It does what I tell it to. Its name is Leibniz. _
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01:18:31 AM, Wednesday 15 May 2002

nothing _
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01:20:23 AM, Tuesday 14 May 2002

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