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 chair, came up with a brilliant idea. He sent everyone who had voted in every election since 2000 a special card saying that they’d earned a certficate for being reliable voters. A few people turned up just to get their certificates. Out of 2400 registered Democrats in our precinct (probably 95% of the registered voters in this precinct), almost 400 had voted in every election. About 800 voted for governor last November. Needless to say, turnout could improve.

Both my wife and I volunteered to be delegates for the county meeting. Our precinct gets one delegate for every 100 voters in the last gubernatorial election, so we got 8 delegates. There were about 12 people at the meeting, so everybody who wanted to be a delegate got to be one. We get to vote for the county chair, and will be choosing between someone who was involved in the Dean for America organization and someone who wasn’t. One of our neighbors who’s very involved supports the Dean guy (who I mentioned last week), and we’ll probably vote for him. Apparently we can look forward to getting calls or emails from both of them.

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 liberal weblogs, and it’s being dissected all over the place. I’m waiting for the brilliant magazine article from Slate or Salon that helpfully points out all the juicy bits.

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 drive over 137 gigabytes, you are asking for a world of problems. I didn’t need such a big hard drive, but given the low low price of storage these days, I figured I’d plan for the future.

I brought the drive home and installed it in my PC. When I went to configure the drive in the BIOS, it only recognized it as a 137 gigabyte drive. Hello, Google. Turns out my BIOS doesn’t support large drives. I then had two choices, buy a separate hard drive controller or try to find a BIOS update for my motherboard. I wanted to go the BIOS update route, but was deterred by the fact that I have no floppy drive (BIOS updates want you to boot from the floppy into DOS), and by the fact that I didn’t want to screw up my PC. Besides, I thought, a new hard drive controller will be faster.

I order a new controller, wait a couple of days, and it arrives at my door. I install the PCI card, hook up everything, and boot up the computer. The controller’s BIOS says no drives are installed, and then hangs. Computer won’t start. I leave the controller in and unplug the drive — computer starts fine. Could my brand new hard drive be broken? Back to Google. I discover that the problem is that I need to disable the MIDI port on my motherboard in the BIOS. Seriously. That’s my problem. Curse a bit, disable the port not believing that it will help anything, plug everything back in, restart.

Lo and behold the controller detects my drive properly. Now all I have to do is use the Drive Manager in Windows to format the drive and I’m all set. I go to the Drive Manager, and it says that the new unformatted hard drive is 128 gigs, the exact problem I was having with the BIOS originally. Well, Windows XP was supposed to start supporting large hard drives with SP1. I have SP2 installed. No dice. Damn, I hate computers.

Update: It’s always a relief to know that I can blame Microsoft for my problems. I booted up the computer using a Knoppix CD, and fdisk -l indicated that the computer knows it has a 200 gig hard drive installed. Windows is the problem.

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 a Firefox extension installed called Adblock. All it does is prevent the browser from downloading resources containing the patterns that I specify. I installed it for one reason, to keep my browser from downloading any content from BlogAds. In my experience, BlogAds’ overburdened servers made pages containing their ads download slowly, and their crappy HTML made those pages display improperly rather frequently. Obviously the sites that run BlogAds would prefer that I download that content since they get paid for it, and maybe my use of Adblock is unethical, since I’m modifying their content as I display it. It’s a tough call.

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

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 to learn Python for years, but those intentions have never amounted to much. I’ve bought a Python book (or maybe I got it for free), installed it on 5 different computers, and started reading Dive Into Python 10 times. Anyway, things seem to be clicking this time. I wrote the monitoring script that I mentioned earlier in Python last night, and today I used it to generate a report. I’m very much impressed by it.

Even though I’m a pretty committed Java developer these days, I can’t resist the siren’s call of all of the dynamic language obsessed developers out there who say that Java is too strict to provide optimum productivity. So I do plan on giving Python a fair shot and turning to Ruby soon so that I can make a real comparison. There are many things I like about the structure of Java, but I’m always interested in figuring out how to accomplish things faster. One thing is for sure, Python beats the crap out of PHP.

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 script to monitor a Web application in Python despite having no real working knowledge of the language.

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 learn, and then do whatever I have to do to get the program to work in that language. I usually end up with 15 browser windows open, at least one book by my side, and a splitting headache, but it’s the best way to jump start my knowledge of the language. I just keep repeating the process with additional problems until I can use the language, then I go back and start reading to see if I can get the philosophy and idioms of the language down pat. I’m not sure I’d recommend this approach to anyone else, but it works for me.

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.

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 the variables.

It also seems very consistent and well thought-out. Language features seem to follow logically from each other and so far I haven’t found anything particularly surprising — no special cases. Of course, I am getting on board at PHP 5, which seems to have worked out all the kinks, and added objects, which seem to be an amalgam of C++ and Java (mostly Java) with ‘->’ instead of ‘.’ for member selection.

I’m surprised to disagree with him so strongly. PHP makes me want to kill myself. Not as much as it did 6 months ago, but still.