Beverage Review/Health Status Update

It turns out that "Very Berry" Airborne mixed with orange-flavored Metamucil is actually quite tasty when served cold.


#   | |   Last changed: Sat Jan 30 13:33:37 2010



Ten Best New (to me) Songs of 2009

Last week while driving to Canada, Debbie and I did the year's-best thing and talked about what we thought were the best songs of the year. But being brilliant, Debbie extended the list to include songs that were new to her--that is stuff she hadn't discovered 'til this year. Which made for a great conversation topic throughout the week.

Anyway, Debbie's list is here. This is mine.

Songs are listed in no particular order, and I added the rule that no two songs on the list may come from the same album. This is because some of this years' discoveries are entire albums and I wanted to represent them here.

And so:

And that's it. I slapped this list together pretty quickly so I've probably forgotten a song or two but it's close enough.

2010 promises to be more interesting. We've been moving Debbie's CDs to the apartment.


#   | |   Last changed: Wed Dec 30 19:27:54 2009



Testing: software update

I've made some significant changes to Infernal Icecube and am now switching to the new version. Any changes you see here are due to that.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Update: seems to be working. I've gotten ii to use git instead of rcs so I can distribute my blogging across computers. I'll publish my changes once I've convinced myself that there aren't any obvious bugs.


#   | |   Last changed: Wed Sep 16 23:27:41 2009



Another Project Announcement: nest

nest is a Git front-end designed to organize a collection of unrelated (mostly textual) projects. It maintains a central project collection and creates working copies of individual projects as needed, possibly on other computers via ssh. Projects and working copies are all Git repositories and so can be cloned, pushed and merged between computers. nest will also (optionally) create a local backup/cache of the whole collection on any computer you use it from, so if your server catches fire, you can restore your work from the cache on your laptop.

I've been using it for about three months now and it hasn't eaten anything yet, so I'm calling it done and releasing it.

The project page is here.

To use it, you'll need git (and to know how to use it), perl, ssh with ssh-agent and a sufficiently Unixy OS. (Cygwin and MacOSX ought to be sufficient but I haven't tried it so YMMV.)


#   | |   Last changed: Wed Jun 10 22:44:59 2009



Random Python musing

It occurs to me that from an advocacy point of view, Python's significant whitespace is kind of brilliant.

It's a defensible design decision, in that the designer has traded a certain amount of source-code fragility for improved readability. If you want the readability enough that you're willing to be a bit paranoid about what happens to the whitespace, it's a worthwhile trade. If not, then it's not.

In other words, it's a matter of personal preference.

But that makes it controversial. Invariably, when someone starts complaining about the language, the first thing they start with is the most obvious--the indentation--and the discussion immediately degenerates to something with the calibre of emacs versus vi. Five hundred posts later with nothing resolved beyond "I like it" and "I don't like it", everyone gets sick of the whole thing and Python's real shortcomings are never discussed.

Brilliant!


#   | |   Last changed: Thu May 14 22:50:33 2009