etc. etc.

I blame Comcast, and lack of decent, uh, something (mumble).

FWIW, I really do miss all of you when I go caving, but that doesn't prevent my spelunking. :D

"I cannot fiddle but I can make a great state of a small city."

Al Gore's global warming movie "An Inconvenient Truth" opens this weekend at Tara. Anyone want to pick a time and go?

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inconvenient_truth

Willie Nelson
The Tabernacle, Atlanta, GA
Fri, Feb 24, 2006 08:00 PM

Dammit, I keep saying I should go to more shows--I gotta start somewhere. :D

Tickets go on sell this Saturday; anyone interested in going?

Submit your own plea to Cthulhu!

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us.

--Samuel Coleridge

The turth on troop morale

If you don't want to read the above Op-Ed, the gist is: during Vietnam, the White House said the same shit about dissidents demoralizing the troops, giving aide to the enemy, yadda yadda yadda, so an intrepid journalist did the right thing: he went to Vietnam and actually talked to the troops in combat. What they said was far different than what the Chicken Hawks in Washington were saying.

I've ignored LJ for a while, so here's a nice Op-Ed from The Times that gives a "historical" view of Bush's dodge tactics on the WMD question. :)

"Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/opinion/15tue1.html

Bush's latest tactic is actually one of my favorite spins, though I can't remember the "official" name for it. It works like this: wait long enough for people to forget the particulars and minutae surrounding each claim that has been made and later demonstrated to be false, make other claims while slowly bending the surrounding history on your past claims, and then once you've bent it enough and enough time has passed, accuse others of playing fast and loose with history.

Mother of God, that is Genius! I (EvilSpinJohn) make claim after claim. As fast as you disprove each one, I shift to another one (and there is never a "correction" or "process" or "meta" story about what I am up to). After this goes on long enough, all but the anal have forgotten the first few claims that I have made, so I switch back to making them while at the same time calling the history into doubt (by accusing you of doing what I am doing...namely, bending the truth and playing loose with past facts). To everyone on the sidelines, it suddenly looks like something is going; that maybe both of us are futzing with the facts. You get A vs B bias (aka, if both sides are arguing, they are probably both somewhat reasonable...see evolution vs intelligent design). So they think "ah, why bother, they are all full of shit" and I get away with it and you lose. :p

Ahhhh...Tom DeLay's mugshot. My day just got better.

(crossposted from: my wiki.)

Here’s a nice principle from The Pragmatic Programmers (you can find a PDF of the article here.)

One of our favorite OO principles is “Tell, Don’t Ask” (see IEEE Software, Jan./Feb. 2003, p. 10). To recap briefly: as an industry, we’ve come to think of software in terms of function calls. Even in OO systems, we view an object’s behavioral interface as a set of function calls. That’s really not a helpful metaphor. Instead of calling software a function, view it as sending a message.

“Sending a message” to an object conveys an air of apathy. I’ve just sent you an order (or a request), and I don’t really care who or what you are or (especially) how you do it. Just get it done. This service-oriented, operation-centric viewpoint is critical to good code. Apathy toward the details, in this case, is just the right approach. You tell an object what to do; you don’t ask it for data (too many details) and attempt to do the work yourself.

By “telling the other guy” in this way, you ensure an imperative coding style that keeps your code from becoming too nosy and from getting involved in details that it shouldn’t care about. Such involvement would make your code much more vulnerable to change. To make this work in a system, you’ll need to preserve the commonsense semantics of commands (that is, every object that has a print
method should behave similarly when called).