GeeCee's Not-Entirely-Original Miscellany

This is a wonderful bit of geekery, and I so want to put one together: Get Twitter alerts from your plants when they need watering.

First, a shameless plug: please go vote for snipeyhead in Animal Planet's "Hero of the Year" contest.

Now, on to a couple of links from today's round of blog-skimming and web-wandering:

Politics:

• aroraborealis writes about Guatemala and the Bush administration's detainee legislation: "Hearing all of this made me realize how delicate the line between a merely corrupt government (ours) and one that's outright evil (Montt's dictatorship) seems to be. Looking at the history of many Latin American countries, I saw the US poised on a cusp that has not led anywhere good for the average person. I had many occasions to be thankful for the rights that we have in the US, things like due process, (relatively) fair trials, and habeas corpus. I may hate the direction that the current administration is taking us in terms of social programs, but at least the basics still stand.
  
  "So, you will probably not be surprised to hear that today is not a good day for me, in terms of feeling okay about a whole lot of anything. I can't decide if I should throw up or just weep in the corner."
  
  In case you've been in Outer Mongolia with no access to US news sources and are scratching your head in puzzlement: "Along the way to approving the Bush administration's detainee legislation today, the Senate has rejected Arlen Specter's amendment that would have preserved the right of noncitizen detainees to file writs of habeas corpus in federal court. The vote was 51-48, with Republicans Lincoln Chafee, Gordon Smith and John Sununu joing Specter in voting for the amendment and Democrat Ben Nelson voting against it. Republican Olympia Snowe did not vote." (http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/09/28/vote/index.html)


• Wil Wheaton: a statement of conscience


• Former Army interrogators weigh in on the torture question (via vvalkyri). pecunium, also an interrogator, has very strong opinions on the matter; hammercock has collected a few links to some of his posts.


• As jmhm says, "And maybe ask yourself if the party which is rushing to enshrine torture and the end of legal protections which go as far back as the Magna Carta in our laws really ought to control any of the branches of the federal government."


• On that note, Pat collects information on voter registration deadlines for all 50 states and DC.


• Electoral-Vote.com's current map based on current polling data predicts an evenly-divided Senate (50/50). Also, the projected new House: 216 Democrats, 219 Republicans.
  

Tech:

• Steve Yegge's Good Agile, Bad Agile (via Dare Obasanjo), which both talks a bit about working at Google and includes this nugget of joy:
  

  So the consultants, now having lost their primary customer, were at a bar one day, and one of them (named L. Ron Hubbard) said: "This nickel-a-line-of-code gig is lame. You know where the real money is at? You start your own religion." And that's how both Extreme Programming and Scientology were born.



• Theme day: The BileBlog has something to say about agile development too. It's seems like an uncharacteristically restrained post, but the comments section is being staffed by plenty of people with very strong opinions either way.


• Today's Daily WTF (Define Failure As Success) made me snarf my Diet Coke, and then made my head hurt. From now on, perhaps I'll try that trick in my code too. Should make testing go much faster.


• Coding Horror on testing. Make sure to check out the Did I Remember To testing checklist.


• Creating Passionate Users on when ease-of-use goes wrong. Kathy's also looking for a web designer/developer to do some work on her Typepad-hosted blog.

Random stuff:

• An old post, but I kept meaning to link to it: chap_eye writes about his experience backpacking in Cuba.


• Stereogum has new Rufus Wainwright and Paul Westerberg tracks. If you liked "All Shook Down", you'll probably like the Westerberg track (from the "Open Season" soundtrack).


• Post-"Talk Like a Pirate Day", a mathematical analysis of the number of "R"s in the canonical pirate interjection "Arrrr"


• NPR's interview with Maurice Sendak and why he puts kid characters in danger. (audio)


• The Chicago Manual of Style is now available online for a relatively small subscription fee.

I think I'm going to have to adopt this one.

(original at http://xkcd.com/c156.html)

nminusone may appreciate this, judging from the twitching that ensued when I forced him to look at some perl code. From the Tour de Babel, found via a link from Coding Horror:

There are "better" languages than Perl — hell, there are lots of them, if you define "better" as "not being insane". Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, gosh, I could probably name 20 or 30 languages that are "better" than Perl, inasmuch as they don't look like that Sperm Whale that exploded in the streets of Taiwan over the summer. Whale guts everywhere, covering cars, motorcycles, pedestrians. That's Perl. It's charming, really.

But Perl has many, many things going for it that, until recently, no other language had, and they compensated for its exo-intestinal qualities. You can make all sorts of useful things out of exploded whale, including perfume. It's quite useful. And so is Perl.

The author seems to like Ruby, which I suppose I might as well look at one of these days in the interests of keeping my brain from rusting. Someone on That List[tm] has been singing its praises for years, but it's not been high up on my priority list to spend any time on it.

Ever wonder what would happen if you got Warren Ellis and Joss Whedon involved in the same comment thread? Well, now you know.

28. Joss Whedon Says:
February 16th, 2006 at 7:29 pm

Wow, we both went right to the cross-dressing humor! This is just like the Algonquin round table, except there’s only two of us, and no table, and no particular surfeit of wit, and no great certainty about how spell ‘Algonquin’. Huzzah!

(link via elynne)

Lord help me. I've just installed the IE 7 beta. And I don't entirely hate it yet.

Good:
Tabbed browsing. Smaller toolbar. Integrated search in the toolbar. (Sounding a lot like Firefox so far.) Integrated RSS reader. So far I haven't run into any Javascript or CSS that is blatantly broken; some of it seems even marginally less broken than in IE 6.

Bad:
The menu bar layout is odd: "back" and "forward" are round buttons to the left of the address bar, "refresh" and "stop" are in a completely different style and to the right of the address bar. The "open new tab" icon is not obvious until you happen to mouse over what looks like the stub of an empty tab, which makes the icon appear; not terribly intuitive I think.

I'm not going to give up Firefox no matter what, I loves me my extensions too much. As much as I hate to admit it though, IE 7 might turn out to be reasonably okay. Tabbed browsing makes me overlook some more minor faults, I think. [Edit: Except for the part where after running it for an hour with other applications open, my system is screaming at me to shut it down for $deity's sake and reboot please.]

LibraryThing.

Enter a couple hundred of your titles for free, or shell out $10 for a lifetime membership and enter all of them. If you've got everything entered into Readerware or a similar program already, apparently you can import that info into LibraryThing. Nifty.

I grabbed the contents of the closest two shelves and started entering stuff; if you're curious, my LibraryThing bookshelf is here.

Today is Setting Orange, day 49 in the season of Confusion, 3271.

Seen on a license plate last night:

prontab

I'm guessing that they weren't really referring to a way to schedule automated downloads of naughty pictures, but I could be wrong on that. [Edit: And given that the DMV says that "pr0ntab" is already taken, I probably am wrong. ;) ]

Well, concurrent coffee amusement at any rate.

From comments on the (old) Good vs Evil post on The BileBlog, with a bit of trimming and formatting of the attribution lines to make the separation between comments clearer. (They're picking, by the way, on JSF - JavaServer Faces. Among many, many other things.)

Why are you guys picking on the Joint Strike Fighter? Its an amazing machine!

Also, what does any of this have to do with car struts, your boss Jay, the Apache indians, solar eclipses, ideas, ants, tom-cats or coffee?!?

Or am I way off base?

Posted by Dat Guy

Ohhhh I get it now!!

I had no idea it mattered which way my Java Server Faces!!

South would be down, the devil is said to be down below, so south sounds bad to me. The devil is evil, right? West and East both face the sun at some point and I wouldn't want my Java Servers Face in the sun.

I guess that only leaves North or perhaps standing on end facing up??

What do you guys recommend? I am very concerned.

Posted by Dat Guy

I find that if you put the server upside down, it runs better, because all the electricity runs to the CPU.

Posted by Cameron

BileBlog also has the "ultimate summary" of every discussion thread ever at TheServerSide. A bit rude, but funny. (That pretty much sums up BileBlog most of the time, I think.)

I will not spend all day playing with the new Mac. Won't. I have actual work to do, and I will do it. Uh huh, sure.