The only true unbelievers are those who shun the electronic media, and 
seek to speak to one another only through pen and paper.  Yea, for those 
have no conception of the power they refuse.  Let us pray, friends, that 
they all shall one day learn the joy, the wonder, and the comradeship that 
flows through the electronic media.

— Priemacst Morgan Schweers

iTunes 9 just deleted apps I *paid* for from my iPod Touch (1G).

I’m puzzled by the criticism that Twitter has become a place for celebrities. While I’m certainly aware that we have celebrities on our service, I’m not forced to follow them. I think I follow maybe 5, and they’re fairly minor celebrities at that. If you find the communication with a celebrity (or any other user) on Twitter “empty”, simply unfollow them. Just as the mainstream media may be tasteful, nobody is prying your eyes open and forcing you to watch or read or listen; if anything, undesirable content is easier to avoid on Twitter than on most forms of communication.

New media are not a threat to some more innately authenticate, measurably human way of being and interacting. People’s credulity and willingness to be manipulated by other people - whether those people are shouting from a mountaintop, talking into a radio station microphone, or texting into a mobile phone - is a perpetual function of education, circumstance, and opportunity.

— Alex Payne

A receipt, found between pages 214 and 215 in Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters":

                 Sno-Isle
                Mill Creek
          8/11/2005 3:40:42 PM
                              
             - PATRON RECEIPT -
               - CHARGES -

1:  Item Number: 39067035863799
  Title:       The looking glass [illegible]
  Due Date:    9/1/2005

2:  Item Number: 39067029322312
  Title:       Rocket ship galileo
  Due Date:    9/1/2005

3:  Item Number: 39067031568987
  Title:       The puppet masters
  Due Date:    9/1/2005

           Mill Creek 425-337-4822

  ------  Please Keep This Slip  ------
-----------------------------------------

That's here.

The first page of the book says

SNO-ISLE REGIONAL LIBRARY
MAY - - 2002

and has a blue stamp, saying WITHDRAWN. I have no idea how it ended up halfway around the globe.

Next up on the reading list: Friday.

A writer is a professional, and part of what it means to be a professional is that one is assumed to be capable of separating one's personal from one's professional life. A doctor who misdiagnoses you is not allowed to say, in his defense, that he had a fight with his wife that morning; nor can a doctor who has a personal aversion to homosexuality refuse to treat a gay patient. We rely, as patients, on the fact that a doctor can create a reasonably clear boundary between the various domains of his life. I think we can reasonably have the same faith in journalists.

— Malcolm Gladwell

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

An economy that is more entrepreneurial, less managerial, would be less subject to the kind of distortions that occur when corporate managers' compensation is tied to the short-term profit of distant shareholders. For most entrepreneurs, profit is at once a more capacious and a more concrete thing than this. It is a calculation in which the intrinsic satisfactions of work count — not least, the exercise of your own powers of reason.

— The Case for Working With Your Hands

so, i bought this book...

hey, what's this?

er...

Compare SISC's instructions for calling Scheme from Java with ABCL's. Why does SISC make it so painful? The Quick Reference table in the docs is a joke. None of their examples are as simple as ABCL's.

I just want to load up a scheme file, call functions defined in it, and do stuff based on their return values.

Update: Going through the javadocs, I found a snippet of code that helped me figure it out. Using that, I wrote this and pasted the link to the freenode #sisc channel. I hope someone finds it useful.

stuck. in. my. head.

I have a database with a bunch of tables that all have "username" columns (actual varchars, not foreign keys). Two or three times a year, I end up having to change that for a user (usernames are email addresses, and users change their email accounts, or switch jobs or whatever). Previously I'd relied on a bunch of update statements that blindly attempted to change that field in all tables, but I finally decided today to write a script to automate that task.

Finding all the tables with username as a column:

select c.relname from pg_class c
    join pg_attribute a on (c.oid = a.attrelid)
    join pg_roles r2 on (c.relowner = r2.oid)
where a.attname = 'username' and c.relkind = 'r' and r2.rolname = 'pkf';

Time to write the script (with error checking, tests, etc): about an hour. Time I usually spend changing usernames without the script: about 10 minutes a year. So, a net win, or net loss?

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

— Pablo Picasso

• The Coming Anarchy
• cominganarchy.com

Free irc client for the iPhone/iPod Touch. You can be on multiple servers simultaneously, and on multiple channels.

Problems: can't seem to send private messages or leave joined channels.

Still, it's free.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

“Vegas” is a fun episode. A pity there's only one more before the season (series!) ends.

• ircII
• Gnus
• Phil Zimmermann
• Gmane
• qmail
• ZenIRC

I wish for a cute iPhone app that has beachballs. How can it be an OS X app without random beachballs? Don't they let you do

[NSSchedule atRandomInterval: [[NSBeachBall alloc] init]];?

Lotfi Zadeh has a son.

Of the 900 juvenile detainees in American custody in November, fewer than 10 percent claimed to be fighting a holy war, according to the American military. About one-third of adults said they were.

A worker in the American detention system said that by her estimate, only about a third of the adult detainee population, which is overwhelmingly Sunni, prayed.

— Violence Leaves Young Iraqis Doubting Clerics

Stifled, Egypt's Young Turn to Islamic Fervor

IT is corporate DRM.

— Glen Pritchett

MS-Windows, like fossil-fuelled transportation, is something undesirable, but difficult to avoid without separating from mainstream society.

— Alan Mackenzie

it's hotter than a french kiss from satan.

— laura e burke

Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing — run out and rent it today!

Before I look at the type of the government and the name of the government, I examine how it treats people. The correct treatment of a country’s citizen is conveyed through the upholding of human rights norms. Therefore, from my perspective, any government that seeks to uphold the norms of human rights in terms of its dealing with people meets the criteria of being legal and acceptable. And likewise, if any government, whatever it calls itself, whether secular or religious, seeks to trample human rights, then that regime does not meet the criterion of being legal or acceptable in my eyes. The name of the government is not important for me: the government’s upholding of the standards of human rights is.

— Shirin Ebadi

Thrush is an organization that believes the world should have a two party system: a master, and slaves.

— The Green Opal Affair

Today's options:

• laptop with XP: not really an option soon.
• laptop with Vista: it sucks.
• laptop with Linux: it sucks in different ways, plus you can't get drivers! and it eats your hard drive!
• laptop with OS X: it probably sucks the least, but it's not cheap nor the best hardware. plus, your mom gets to learn what exec 2>&1 is!
• laptop with NetBSD: even fewer drivers than Linux.

<annh> i'm slowly realizing that i'm going to have to hear this bizspeak again
<annh> *shudder*
<annh> once at a meeting someone told me to go make a matrix of what we'd been talking about
<annh> so i asked her what she meant. what would this document look like
<annh> and she mumbled and left
<annh> i'm glad 'matrix' isn't so popular anymore
<self> i hope i never have to deal with biz speak
<annh> it pisses me off
<annh> reminds me of sitting in meetings where they're like, let's name our product
        phoenix or poobah and i said "how about naming it "mail" or "calendar"
<annh> and they'd stare at me
<annh> you know, put that on the icon
<self> let's name it pony express!
<self> because who doesn't want a pony!
<davet> i don't
<annh> you don't want a pony?!
<davet> no
<annh> fine. i'm sending it back
<davet> i want a bag full of gold bars

Trembling, you fire the heavy arquebus. You hear its loud report over the
roaring wind, yet the dark figure still approaches. The gun falls from your
nerveless hands.
   “You won’t kill me,” he says, stepping over the weapon. “Not when I am the
only protection you have from Jean Lafond.”
   Chestnut hair, tousled by the wind, frames the tanned oval of his face. Lips
curving, his eyes rake over your inadequately dressed body, the damp chemise
clinging to your legs and heaving bosom, your gleaming hair. You are intensely
aware of the strength of his hard seaworn body, of the deep sea blue of his
eyes. And then his mouth is on yours, lips parted, demanding, and you arch into
his kiss...
   He presses you against him, head bent. “But who, my dear,” he whispers into
your hair, “will protect you from me?”

[Press RETURN or ENTER to begin.]