zen.org Communal Weblog

I walked into the Kirkbride Widener CS lab one day as a second semester freshman, nej, maybe first semester sophomore. Brendan was staring at a VT101 with 4 or 5 VAX/VMS manuals, 4 inch binders each, laying open around him.  With a mean, sarcastic voice he looked up and said something like “history majors have nothing on me”.  Before then I had set myself to try to survive college, as my grades where less then great.

It took a few day, maybe a few weeks, but something clicked. College isn’t meant to be survived.  I remember teaching myself Applesoft Basic on the Apple ][+ as a preteen.  On the Apple ][+ Beagle Bros kept me giggling and kept the docs fun to read.  With help of Brendan, el at, I made it fun.  It all started with a stack of VAX assembly language manuals piled around Mr. Kehoe.  It ended with me getting a most improved student award, then watching him leave Widener without his deserved degree.

This morning the Scudder Falls Bridge entrance to I95 was just at the speed that made it too annoying to enter, so I drove over to Washington Crossing Bridge. Hunks of ice where flowing down it, not as large as the painting, but not to shabby. I could not help but draw a parallel to the inauguration, it made me a little faklempt about today.

At 2008-12-31T18:59:59-0500 (2008-12-31T23:59:59+0000) there is going to be a leap second! Anybody have a good cocktail suggestion to celebrate this? If you are in Japan, perhaps something to stave off the hangover from the previous night’s party.

It’s a good thing my systems use ntp.

I was reading that extreme leftist web site, Daily Kos, the other day. I was confused as they kept saying GOTV out of any context. I was thinking that it must be this really cool new television channel I don’t get! Well, while there is a mobile phone content provider called GoTV, it didn’t seem to be worth all the comments. Perhaps I was seeing the fnords!

Alas, no, it means “Get Out The Vote”. Even if you don’t like anybody on the Democratic or Republican ticket, vote Green, or Libertarian, perhaps Nader. Or even (shudder) Constitution Party. Write in Ross Perot!

What’s up with Google News – Most Popular. The US version is usually filled with drivel. I visit today and I see items on Canadian politics, Somali pirates, and ever have to scroll down to see items about the election! Are Americans reading international news? Has the caducity of gossip finally reached its limit? Did Google Change the algorithm?

Well, I didn’t watch much, but I just read what FactCheck.org said about it. According to them, the only outright lie seems to have come from Mr. McCain, McCain was way off the mark when he said that earmarks in federal appropriations bills had tripled in the last five years…In fact, earmarks have actually gone down. I really wanted an outright lie from Mr. Obama too, but there was not any last night.

Then, these bugged me:

…McCain repeated a misleading line we’ve heard before.

Obama was out of date…As we’ve said before…

McCain repeated an exaggerated claim…

McCain repeated the false insinuation…

Each with a link to past articles that that showed the correction. It’s one thing to goof, but to do it again? Ok, perhaps the log is in my eye for there splinter, but I’m a simpleton, they are going to be in the position formally known as the most powerful person in the free world. Mr. McCain forwent correction three times, and Mr. Obama once. So I guess the Dems win this one too. Most of the others corrections, though worthy of FackCheck.org, where trivial.

As I think both Democrats and Republicans politician have been sticking it to fellow Americans for decades, I really wanted the misinformation to be more even.

I got this Apple Mighty Mouse at work. I configured it so when you squeeze it it switches spaces. The only problem is now when I’m at home I squeeze my mouse to switch my KDE desktops, and it doesn’t work. One of these days I’m going to crush the mouse in my hand, and shards of plastic is going to rip into my skin hindering my ability to type for life.

I’m waiting a few hours at the Thompson Toyota, my Prius is getting some minor work done to it to pass state inspection, it still takes a few hours. They have a wireless connection to the Internet, but even though last time I connected without problems this time my PII Debian system was not happy. So I checked out the bank of beat up Gateways with vagabond keyboards in the corner. I wiggle the mouse, and up pops the Ubuntu Heron! Wow! I can tell from the scribbled out tag that these are likely hand me downs from Thompson Lexus, I bet them bastards over there now have Vista. I expect that they just didn’t want to pay for Licenses, but I can do some work!

The neat part is that other people are actually using them. By default there are no icons on the desktop, so some people can’t find Firefox right away, but they find it. The card games seem most popular thought, at least today. I guess Ubuntu really is a user friendly system.

I post it here so I can find it again if needed again. Sometimes I just want to see everything that is going on in a perl object. Sort of what Java’s toString() function does when printing out maps or lists. This is what I ended up with. Now it’s public domain!

our $join = ' ';
sub to_string{ # ug, java
    my $s = shift;
    my $out;
    if (ref $s) {
	if ($s =~ m/ARRAY/) {
	    $out .= '[' . join($join, map {
		to_string($_);
	    } @$_) . ']';
	} elsif ($s =~ m/HASH/) {
	    $out .= '{' . join($join, map {
		"$_=" . to_string($s->{$_});
	    } keys(%$s)) . '}';
	} else {
	    $out .= $s;
	    warn "How do i display '$s'?";
	}
    } else {
	$out .= quotemeta($s);
    }
    return $out;
}