This is the personal weblog of Moss Collum, a programmer living in Boston, MA. I used to have a description here of what I tend to blog about, but whenever I try to nail down a few main topics, I end up getting interested in something else. If you want to know what to expect, browsing the recent archives should give you some idea.
If you've found this page through Google, I hope it helps. The search tool may help find the exact post you're looking for. If you want to see what I've posted lately, you can go to the front page of the blog.
If you're someone I know, you probably already know about this blog and come here regularly, but if not, please leave me a note: chances are I'd be delighted to hear from you.
If you want to contact me, you can email me at gmail (where my address is my first name dot my last name), or just leave a comment here.
Note that the "Bloglet" of my page title is the Perl script I use for my blogging, not the other, better known Bloglet.
Also, I'm delighted by this video of someone using an old modem from 1964 to connect to the internet. Quite apart from the nostalgia factor (modems remind me of BBSes!), I just can't get over how gorgeous the thing is. I just wish anyone was making electronics this beautiful today.
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12:41:25 AM,
Tuesday 9 February 2010
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Memo to self: come back to the AskMe cilantro thread and cook everything in it.
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12:29:03 AM,
Tuesday 9 February 2010
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This political ad is... kind of amazing. I'm not really sure what else to say about it.
via MetaFilter
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07:13:07 PM,
Friday 5 February 2010
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Snow!
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08:38:36 AM,
Thursday 4 February 2010
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Flying Over Ireland, Yesterday
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06:00:01 PM,
Sunday 31 January 2010
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Here's Hoping These Don't Fill Up
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06:06:08 PM,
Friday 22 January 2010
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Your government is basically made up of people who are richer than you--often much richer than you. With this greater wealth comes a drastically different perspective on life: different fears, different desires, and different assumptions about how the world works. I think it would be good to talk about this more, even if people find the topic embarrassing.
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12:37:25 AM,
Tuesday 19 January 2010
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This reflects what she and her husband Vincent refer to as "polycentricity," a normative approach to governance which stresses the degree to which higher levels of government should not crowd out self-organization at lower levels. Her work implies that both pure marketization and top-down government control can have badly adverse consequences for resource management, because they rob individuals of the capacity to govern themselves, and because they both lead to the depletion of important forms of local collective knowledge.
Clearly I should read more.
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02:46:57 PM,
Monday 18 January 2010
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This is pretty cool: a sample OS X application with complete unit tests.
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02:03:49 PM,
Monday 18 January 2010
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The 2D fight back starts here!
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01:24:44 PM,
Sunday 17 January 2010
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I think the best thing about this query is that the result describes why I did it in the first place. Off by 8.13% really isn't too bad when I remember to think of it as science instead of math.
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4
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11:03:21 PM,
Wednesday 13 January 2010
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11:09:25 AM,
Sunday 10 January 2010
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Mysterious Device in Park St
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08:52:59 PM,
Thursday 7 January 2010
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This collection of pictures of fantastic subway architecture has been open in Firefox for so long that I don't even remember where it came from, but it seems like it deserves blogging.
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11:11:46 PM,
Tuesday 5 January 2010
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The opposite of sudo.
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10:26:10 PM,
Tuesday 5 January 2010
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This interview from the Economist podcast, talking with Barbara Ehrenreich about the virtues of pessimism, made me happy. It's a great antidote to all the positive thinking bullshit out there, and kind of makes me want to read her book. (Or any of her books, really, since I haven't yet. I know she bugs some people, but I've certainly enjoyed everything I've heard her say in short forms like this.)
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10:55:08 PM,
Sunday 27 December 2009
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The Funnest Calculator Ever
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09:20:39 PM,
Friday 18 December 2009
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The Blinds Left an X-ray of a Spine on the Wall
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08:32:35 AM,
Friday 11 December 2009
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Wall of Beer
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09:21:13 PM,
Monday 7 December 2009
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Not a Sustainable Position
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01:17:38 AM,
Sunday 6 December 2009
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Autumn Polyhedron
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04:28:40 PM,
Wednesday 18 November 2009
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Tree at Spy Pond
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04:19:33 PM,
Wednesday 18 November 2009
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Hate crime legislation is a unique issue in that, every time I've seen an argument about it on the internet, some of those who started out opposed to it have changed their minds by the end of the discussion.
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10:22:38 PM,
Thursday 29 October 2009
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Equanimity is lots of fun.
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11:09:07 PM,
Friday 23 October 2009
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Java developers! Improve your tooling!
IntelliJ IDEA has gone open source, at least for a basic version. I'd urge anybody doing Java development to check it out. Individual tastes vary, but I find it worlds better than any of the other Java IDEs out there.
Also, Cucumber, a fantastic Ruby tool which lets you write automatic acceptance tests that can also act as human-readable documentation, is now available for virtually all the JVM languages.
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04:38:27 PM,
Thursday 15 October 2009
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Awesome Steampunk Cakes. Fuck yeah.
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10:03:24 PM,
Wednesday 14 October 2009
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