Sarah Palin
The Palin speech really is poetry. Read below. It makes me want to go to Alaska.
And getting up here I say:
It is the best road trip in America.
Soaring through nature’s finest show.
Denali, the great one,
Soaring under the midnight sun.
And then the extremes.
Programming
I recently heard about a Car Talk puzzler. I don’t listen to Car Talk as much as I used to. Anyway, you can read about the puzzler and the fellow who solved it here. This is an excerpt.
During Christmas week on the popular National Public Radio show Car Talk, the weekly puzzler required listeners to find the longest English word that remains a valid English word as you remove its letters one at a time, but without rearranging any of the letters. For example: sprite, spit, pit, it, I. There are many such words, but, as Barr discovered, only one with 11 letters.
So, only one word with eleven letters: complecting. Maybe. I’m not convinced, but finding out is easy. Continue reading »
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Sure, we all want to be successful, but we can’t all be, since success must be measured against the failures of your peers. Preferably spectacular failures, with a well-timed “I told them so.” But you aren’t like other people: you read my blog, so you’re gonna get some inside information to make you $ucce$$ful!
Apple
For the record, here’s how I set the MAC address on my MacBook Pro. As I write this it is running Leopard 10.5.6 and this has been working successfully with every version of Leopard. In fact, it has worked so well I’d forgotten how I did it, so I’m basically writing this post so, if it ever stops working, I will know how to fix it. Continue reading »
If it helps you, all the better. If it hurts you… well… don’t blame me.
Programming
I need to generate multipart/form-data (see here) messages from Python. Never mind why. I dug around in the documentation for httplib, urllib, and urllib2, but it seems this is not currently supported (it’s Issue 3244). I didn’t like the code I found on the web to do it, because I needed to set additional headers on each piece. So… I wrote something. Here it is. If it’s useful to you, great! If you find bugs in it, please let me know. I think this is pretty easy to use. Continue reading »
In “Embracing Change with Extreme Programming” (IEEE Computer, 1999), Kent Beck writes:
Some methodologies, like Cleanroom, prohibit programmers testing or in some cases even compiling their own programs.
As evidence of this he cites the text Cleanroom Software Engineering: Technology and Process, by, among others, yours truly. I for one have never said that people should not run unit tests, nor does the above text say that. I emailed Mr. Beck about it, and he confirmed that he did not get this from the cited text. Whew!
Just to be clear, here is my position. I would never tell anyone not to run a test they felt was necessary. I may personally believe there are efficient and inefficient ways to test, but I’m not an expert in every domain. The people who create a product are responsible for the consequences of release of that product, and should act accordingly.
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Apple
The hard drive in my Mac has failed. Again. For those of you keeping track, this is the third time.
It’s a hassle, but it is usually okay, since:
- TimeMachine is always there, making backups and keeping them up to date.
- Apple support is wonderful. We can’t send back the hard drive, but they let me open the case and remove the drive without voiding the warranty.
Sadly it is also a pain because:
- The MacBook Pro is some of the most poorly designed hardware I have ever encountered for maintenance.
Well… I’ve been using jsMath on my Wiki, and now I’m keen to use it on my blog. There does not seem to be a WordPress plugin explicitly for jsMath (if anyone knows of one, please let me know), but you don’t need one. Using jsMath from WordPress is actually easy via a different plugin.
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Grrr. I really wish Java had either:
- Reified generics or
- Closures
In the interim, I offer the following Java code to the world. Does it help? Use at your own risk.
I’ve been doing some nasty database work with Python and MySQL. Specifically, I’ve got long programs that run eight to ten hours, and sometimes I need to kill them and restart them later.
So… I wanted a way to trap CTRL+C and clean up. That is, I wanted to have transactions without actually having to use transactions. I’m funny that way. (In other news, I’m probably moving to PostgreSQL at some point.)
Anyway, here’s what I came up with. You might find it useful, too.
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