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Tonight, my wife and I attended the Democratic party precinct meeting, my first ever. The goals were to nominate precinct officers and pick delegates for the county meeting, who will elect a county chair and other county officers, and in turn name delegates for the district meeting for our Congressional district. My neighbor, the new [...]

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Frank Luntz is a Republican consultant who has mastered the art of framing. When you hear conservatives on TV spouting the talking points as if they were robots, there’s a good chance those talking points emanated from the “playbook” that Luntz provides. Anyway, a copy of the playbook has made its way out to the [...]

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You’d think buying an additional hard drive for a computer running Window swould be easy, right? You buy it, stick it in the computer, and turn it on, then use Windows to format it. If only. I bought a 200 gig hard drive the other day, not knowing that if you buy a hard [...]

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For an idea how polarized the debate over whether Google’s new Auto Links function is, check out the comments on this entry from Rogers Cadenhead. The debate is interesting because there’s no clear line here, it’s a judgement call and everyone’s judgement differs. I have an example that plays into this somewhere. I have [...]

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Looks like spam is ruining Technorati. I’m not a violent person, but when I think of spammers, I think violent thoughts.

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I was all set for the next programming language I learned to be Ruby. Then I read some disparagement of the language and had a few quick tasks to take care of, so I turned back to Python, the language that’s always the bridesmaid and never the bride as far as I’m concerned. I’ve intended [...]

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Kellan suggests that the last line of my post on brute force education should read, “I hate to advocate this approach to anyone else, but it’s always worked for me.” Maybe the methodology should be called Gonzo Programming as well. (Another reader suggested “Banzai programming.”) The technique served me well last night as I wrote a [...]

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Recently I talked about how I find that I don’t learn best from books. When it comes to programming languages, I do my best learning using what I’d call the brute force approach. If I have a problem to solve, I demand of myself that I solve it in the language that I want to [...]

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Newsweek has the goods on extraordinary rendition. The article even mentions Maher Arar, the Syrian national who we eagerly turned over to current maximum enemy Syria so that he could be tortured on our behalf.

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Bruce Eckel, the guy who wrote my favorite Java book, writes a paean to PHP:

I had somehow gotten the impression that PHP was a kind of Perl derivative, probably from the ‘$’ before the variables. As I learn about it, however, it seems more like C than anything else. C with ‘$’s in front of [...]

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