Joe Grossberg

2003-01-28T10:27:00.000-05:00

We've moved!

Please point your browsers to http://www.joegrossberg.com.

I will keep this site up for a few weeks; then it'll redirect you automatically.

There will be *no* new updates here at http://josephgrossberg.blogspot.com, so once you see this message, there's no reason to visit this site. All my old posts have been moved.

2003-01-27T19:50:00.000-05:00

For just about the first time ever, I really, really support a Hillary Clinton initiative.

WTC Rescue/Recovery Workers Have Health Woes

By Larry Fine

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than half of the rescue and recovery workers who responded to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York had health problems related to their efforts more than 10 months later, according to early findings of a federal study.

Dr. Robin Herbert, co-director of Mount Sinai Medical Center's World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, said on Monday the results were "alarming."

Of 250 people examined who had worked at Ground Zero or the Staten Island landfill where World Trade Center material was sorted, 57 percent suffered from lung disease, 52 percent had mental health symptoms and 52 percent showed ear, nose or throat problems, hospital officials said.

The sample was randomly taken from the first 500 workers to participate in the program.

More than 3,500 rescue and recovery workers, out of some 40,000 who responded to the hijack attacks on the World Trade Center, have been screened as part of the one-year program, which is scheduled to end in July 2003 and include 9,000 participants.

Dr. Stephen Levin, medical director of the Mount Sinai-J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine and co-director of the screening program, said the examinations were crucial for the long-term health of the workers.

"It's important to find the conditions that they will develop early enough so that treatment makes a difference," said Levin, working in cooperation with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Heath, a division of the Centers for Disease Control.

The $12 million in initial federal funding for the program was championed by Sen. Hillary Clinton, a New York Democrat who on Monday urged that an additional $90 million in federal funds be provided to screen more workers and provide ongoing treatment.

"This is an American priority to take care of these brave men and women," said Clinton.

2003-01-27T17:54:00.000-05:00

My brother Dan has joined the blogosphere.

I hope he posts more than O'dell does.

2003-01-27T17:30:00.000-05:00

Dave Barry (yes, that Dave Barry) has informed us that today is the 50th birthday of Peeps, the chick-shaped marshmallow confection.

Peeps is also the name of one of my cats.

2003-01-27T11:25:00.000-05:00

I was musing the other day about the potential for IM-blogging tie-ins. Looks like some other people have been doing a lot more than musing.

2003-01-24T17:16:00.000-05:00

I didn't like this week's Friday Five, at first. But I'll reconsider:

1. What is one thing you don't like about your body?
I need to lose some damn weight.

2. What are two things you love about your body?
Green eyes are fun. And, like every other male on earth, I love my dick.

3. What are three things you want to change about your home?
Quieter neighbors: car/home stereos, car alarms and car horns.

4. What are four books you want to read this year?
Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java
Kenneth Reek's Pointers on C
Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach

5. What are five promises you have kept to yourself?
I don't feel like thinking of five.

2003-01-24T17:01:00.000-05:00

Random programming tip of the day:

How to compare two dates in any language:

Put them into strings in YYYY-MM-DD format. Compare the two strings. The lesser string is the earlier of the two dates.

Of course, you may want to use a Date object, and converting it to said format may be a pain in the arse.

NOTE: It is important that you keep months and days as two characters. For example, July 4, 2003 should be represented as 2003-07-04, and not as 2003-7-4.

2003-01-24T16:29:00.000-05:00

The Online Journalism Review has a mostly-accurate article (e.g. XML is not a souped-up version of HTML) on news aggregators. I don't use them (yet) for four main reasons:

I like to view stories in the context that the author wanted. That means on the page where they originally appeared, with the proper style, layout, images, comments, etc.

It's really not that hard to view and then scan through a bunch of sites, especially with tabbed browsing. Since not everyone uses RSS, I'll have to do a lot of this anyway.

Lots of sites that do use RSS keep breaking the XML by using incorrect characters, for example.

I use Linux at work and Windows at home. I don't want to bother maintaining two clients' lists of feeds. The ability to export a list and FTP it back and forth is still a pain in the arse. Something stored centrally, like my My Yahoo information, would be more user-friendly.

I may take the middle ground and use a web-based RSS aggregator that someone else has written once I get my site up. I'm hoping for something like Meerkat, but with a better UI and the ability to add feeds that aren't already listed.

2003-01-24T16:05:00.000-05:00

Awesome Photoshop work by Mean Mr. Mustard.

2003-01-23T22:30:00.000-05:00

Well, I learned something from Windows XP in a Nutshell:

In FreeCell, cards are not dealt randomly. Rather, there are 32,000 distinct numbered games, each representing a different predetermined deal of the cards. According to the help, "It is believed (although not proven) that every game is winnable." In fact, it has been proven that game #11982 is indeed not winnable.

Don't know why I bother with the nutshells; I've loathed them all. SQL in a Nutshell was the worst of the lot: $30 for 224 pages. Their other lines are sooo much better, on average.

2003-01-23T18:19:00.000-05:00

Brace yourselves for another internet-spread fad saying ...

"Bubb Rubb" is this year's "All Your Base Are Belong To Us", says Steve Meister.

2003-01-23T14:52:00.000-05:00

Another (Score:5, Insightful) post at Slashdot. This time I wasn't even trying ... just threw out some initial impressions. Boy are the moderators fickle.

2003-01-23T11:32:00.000-05:00

Zeldman is right: onepointzero is a great-looking blog.

2003-01-22T16:25:00.000-05:00

Boy am I funny when I'm tired ...

cat cloning humor

2003-01-22T11:51:00.000-05:00

This bears repeating (via IBM's developerWorks):

Don't use floating point numbers for exact values
Some non-integral values, like dollars-and-cents decimals, require exactness. Floating point numbers are not exact, and manipulating them will result in rounding errors. As a result, it is a bad idea to use floating point to try to represent exact quantities like monetary amounts. Using floating point for dollars-and-cents calculations is a recipe for disaster. Floating point numbers are best reserved for values such as measurements, whose values are fundamentally inexact to begin with.

Obvious, you say? I have a CS-degreed coworker who did just that -- tried to use a mysql column of type float, to store payment amounts.

2003-01-22T10:49:00.000-05:00

I'm an atheist, but Thank God!

Obesity Suit Against McDonald's Dismissed

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit against McDonald's Corp. . that alleged the fast food chain was responsible for children's obesity.

U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet threw out the suit in its entirety. The judge held that the plaintiffs did not show that McDonald's products involve a danger unknown to the public.

2003-01-21T12:58:00.000-05:00

After the alcohol treatment, my ear is 90% back to normal. I know you all were terribly concerned. I had a migraine last night. I wonder if it was related.

2003-01-20T09:00:00.000-05:00

My left ear popped when I took a bath last night. It hasn't fully un-popped. Weird. I wonder if this is a cause for concern. No side effects; just slightly harder to hear out of that side, and this (de-?)pressurized feeling, like when you get off a long airplane flight.

UPDATE: Margaret-Ann, a coworker and mother of two, suggested a few drops of rubbing alcohol in the offending ear. We'll see how that goes.

UPDATE: Apparently, my malady has a name: Swimmer's Ear.

2003-01-19T15:27:00.000-05:00

It's amazing the nonsense some people believe. Name has been removed to protect the ignorant.

(15:18:35) ---: pythons isn't so bad, I just didn't realize that there were people doing serious work wit it
(15:18:54) jgrossberg: man there are people doing serious work with everything
(15:19:01) jgrossberg: they're still releasing versions of Tcl
(15:19:07) jgrossberg: and Yahoo Stores is done in Lisp
(15:19:44) ---: Lisp I can understand... even Prolog.... and somewhat Tcl.... but Python is such an outdated language
(15:19:53) jgrossberg: python outdated?!?
(15:19:59) jgrossberg: you sure you're thinking of the right lang?
(15:20:09) ---: Yep....
(15:20:21) jgrossberg: no you're mistaken
(15:20:25) jgrossberg: it's only become popular recently
(15:20:51) ---: Right, but the concepts behind the language are outdated altogether.
(15:21:52) ---: its from the same generation and conceptual model as basic and pascal (actually pascal passes it in some areas)
(15:22:58) ---: the language simply defies the concepts of 4g languages and design patterns

Ugh. Painful. And no, this guy has never used Python before and I do not think he was trolling.

UPDATE: Upon further reflection, I think he was talking about Perl, not Python.

2003-01-19T13:36:00.000-05:00

Some people want to learn about every last capability of emacs. Others just want to edit and then save the damn file. This is for you ...

Emacs for dummies:

To open a file, use the filename as a command-line argument:
emacs foo.txt

To make any changes to that file, just type as if you were in any other editor or word processor.

To save that file, hit CONTROL-X, then CONTROL-S.

To exit emacs and go back to the command line, hit CONTROL-X, then CONTROL-C.

The "panic button" is CONTROL-G. You can hit that combination at any time to escape back to the regular editing mode.

That's all you *need* to know about the very unintuitive, but very powerful editor.

If you want to learn more, you can read many of the websites or books. If you want to learn from the built-in tutorial, then do this:

Launch emacs.

Type ALT-X. This will move your cursor to the bottom of the editor.

Type help-with-tutorial and then press ENTER.

(This mini-guide was inspired by the sight of a coworker hitting ESC CTRL-Q get-me-out-of-here because I set VISUAL=EMACS for a Linux account we both use.

2003-01-18T12:58:00.000-05:00

Hehehe ...

Story at AJC via Fark.

[The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 1/18/03]

Bible college shuns 666 phone number

By ROGER ALFORD
The Associated Press

VANCLEVE, Ky. -- A small Appalachian Bible college is fighting to change its telephone number because the 666 prefix is disturbing to Christians who recognize it as the biblical mark of the beast.

"People say, 'You're a Bible college and you have 666 in your phone number?' " said Carlene Light, an office worker at Kentucky Mountain Bible College. "It's the connotation. No one wants to be part of the mark of the beast."

The conservative, nondenominational Christian college on a hillside in eastern Kentucky has been trying for months to persuade a telephone company to change the number.

Rob Roy MacGregor, the college's vice president for business affairs, said staff and students want the number changed to a second prefix, 693, that recently was added after all the 666 numbers were taken.

In the biblical book of Revelation, 666, the mark of the beast, is stamped into people's foreheads or right hands during the last days. Those who receive the mark, according to Scripture, are damned to eternal punishment.

"The beast represents Satan, and Satan will put the mark on everybody who does secular trade," MacGregor said. "True Christians will not accept the mark of the beast."

MacGregor said he asked Access Point, a North Carolina-based telephone company that serves the college, to change the number about six months ago.

Kaye Davis, general counsel for the company, said Friday that she would make every effort to get the phone number changed.

"I certainly understand, being a Bible college, that the number 666 would cause some questions," Davis said.

MacGregor said the college, which has graduates serving as missionaries in 51 countries, lists only a toll-free number on its Web site so that visitors aren't turned off by the 666 prefix.

"In the secular world, 666 is not a problem," MacGregor said. "It is for us."

Angie Combs, city clerk in nearby Jackson, said the telephone prefix shocks everyone who calls from outside the county.

"They say "Oh, no, how did you get that number?' " Combs said. "It's like a black cloud over us."

2003-01-17T18:33:00.000-05:00

Nah, Chavez isn't another Fidel Castro:

"We are distributing this product to the population because collective rights come above individual rights," said National Guard Gen. Luis Felipe Acosta Carles said.

Reuters story here.

2003-01-16T11:33:00.000-05:00

Whew. I seem to have rediscovered my archives by changing some settings, saving, reverting the settings and saving again.

2003-01-16T10:29:00.000-05:00

Wonderful. I tried to go to the Blogger Forums to see if anyone else has had this problem, and here's what I get:


Error!!!



XML Error loading ''



A string literal was expected, but no opening quote character was found.

at line 27, character 26 <font face="Arial" size=2> 

                                                 ^

2003-01-15T22:33:00.000-05:00

Blogger has discarded my archives. Fortunately I have a MT installation on my home computer. Hopefully, this is temporary, and they'll have it fixed soon. First noticed it today; don't know how long it's been broken.

2003-01-15T16:21:00.000-05:00

Thought for the day:

If we legalized marijuana, pot smokers would support farmers instead of terrorists.

2003-01-15T16:02:00.000-05:00

I love to spoil my cats. But there are two problems. Cat toys and furniture are really, really expensive. Cats are extremely finicky. What to do?

I bought my cats a spa that looked like cat paradise. They ignored it, even when I sprinkled it with catnip.

So now I'm trading it for a coworker's cat furniture that her three cats don't use. Considering that Miju is obsessed with dental floss and bottlecaps, while Peeps adores foam balls -- and they're oblivious to each others' toys -- it may be a worth a try.

The only toys they both enjoy are sissal and corrogated cardboard scratching posts.

2003-01-15T15:06:00.000-05:00

Here's another MySQL cookbook gem:


mysql> SELECT 'a' = 'A';

+-----------+

| 'a' = 'A' |

+-----------+

|         1 |

+-----------+

As they say, "This technique of displaying comparison results is particularly useful for writing queries that check how a test works without using a table ... This query result tells you that string comparisons are not by default case sensitive, which is a useful thing to know."

2003-01-15T14:58:00.000-05:00

Another MySQL tip from the cookbook: you can have NULL values display as something else.


mysql> SELECT name, IF(id IS NULL,'Unknown', id) AS 'id' FROM taxpayer;

+---------+---------+

| name    | id      |

+---------+---------+

| bernina | 198-48  |

| bertha  | Unknown |

| ben     | Unknown |

| bill    | 475-83  |

+---------+---------+

And I'm sure that the three-parameter IF() clause can be used for other formatting purposes (perhaps displaying any too-long values as ""). Example:


mysql> SELECT IF( LENGTH(state) > 2,'', state) AS 'state' FROM address;

2003-01-14T14:58:00.000-05:00

Must get better at Warcraft III. The computer is whipping my ass. My friend Ryan confirmed that it's not me -- the game really is increasingly hard as you go along. Time to replay some levels I've already beaten.

2003-01-13T19:01:00.000-05:00

Random MySQL tip of the day:

Until recently (version 4.01), MySQL had no subqueries. This made simple things annoying, because you had to cut-and-paste stuff all the time. Or at least I thought so. It turns out, MySQL offers an oft-overlooked, but nice feature -- variables.

To select, and then store information, you can do this:


mysql> SELECT @children := MAX(sons + daughters) FROM families;



# And who are the most prolific families?

mysql> SELECT name, @children AS 'kids' FROM families WHERE (sons + daughters) = @children;

Thank you, MySQL Cookbook, for pointing out that this can also be used as a handy way to number rows:


mysql> SET @n := 0;

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)



mysql> SELECT @n := @n+1 AS rownum, thing, arms, legs FROM limbs;

+--------+--------------+------+------+

| rownum | thing        | arms | legs |

+--------+--------------+------+------+

|      1 | human        |    2 |    2 |

|      2 | insect       |    0 |    6 |

|      3 | squid        |   10 |    0 |

|      4 | octopus      |    8 |    0 |

|      5 | fish         |    0 |    0 |

|      6 | centipede    |    0 |  100 |

|      7 | table        |    0 |    4 |

|      8 | armchair     |    2 |    4 |

|      9 | phonograph   |    1 |    0 |

|     10 | tripod       |    0 |    3 |

|     11 | Peg Leg Pete |    2 |    1 |

|     12 | space alien  | NULL | NULL |

+--------+--------------+------+------+

12 rows in set (0.00 sec)

2003-01-13T16:27:00.000-05:00

Via Elegant Hack: Robert Spears' The Seven Deadly Sins of Free Content. FWIW, I pay for two sites online: The Wall Street Journal, and Salon Premium. In the past, I've paid for online dating sites. And, when the teasers have been good enough, I've paid for porn.

2003-01-12T12:30:00.000-05:00

Sooo fucking werrd! Wooden keyboards, mice and other peripherals. Stranger still, look at that top picture. The "Y" key is where the "Z" should be.

Link via jwz.

2003-01-10T14:42:00.000-05:00

Here is The Advertising Artwork of Dr. Seuss. His style is so distinctive ... I wonder if he had a following before he wrote childrens' books. It's hard for me to view the advertising illustrations in their own context, instead of as the work of a soon-to-break, trippy children's cartoonist.

2003-01-10T11:53:00.000-05:00

Surprising no one, my brilliant girlfriend now has a job as an attorney at the SEC's Division of Enforcement. She'll be going after the bad guys next year. Yay for Pam!

2003-01-09T14:47:00.000-05:00

I've been spelling a friend's name wrong this whole time. It's O'dell, not O'Dell. Here's his blog.

2003-01-09T11:23:00.000-05:00

LazyWeb is a wonderful idea, but what about archives? Especially now that they are so popular that one day's lazies fill up their front page.

And how about categories? Programming vs. design vs. research needed.

2003-01-08T16:58:00.000-05:00

Lew Rockwell's response to my letter:

Sir, I appreciate your comments. Thank you.

And that's it. Maybe he'll address it in a later column, but I was hoping for a more substantial response.

2003-01-08T16:34:00.000-05:00

People from work are now reading this blog, so I have to be more careful about writing everything I think. Like: it's possible to be overworked and bored at the same time.

2003-01-08T13:41:00.000-05:00

The American Journalism Review covers a great consequence of the ease of publishing to the web: sources ... publish transcripts of their interviews.

2003-01-08T11:56:00.000-05:00

More Google whoring:

Why did Apple choose KHTML over Gecko? Why choose Konqueror over Mozilla? Why Safari and not Chimera?

Looks like code bloat was a problem, if not *the* problem.

2003-01-08T10:47:00.000-05:00

Here is a bizarre Capitalist argument against war with Iraq, and here is my genteel response:

Sir:

You have written a 1500 word essay on US-Iraq relations, but mention neither Kuwait nor the Gulf War.

I can understand the purely consumerist argument that it does not matter from whom we purchase our oil, only the price, quantity and quality of it.

However, do you not think that the US and the world have it in their interest to remove a man who has previously demonstrated a willingness to disregard others' property rights, by seizing the land and oil reserves of Kuwait and threatening those of Saudi Arabia?

Regards,
Joe Grossberg

2003-01-07T20:14:00.000-05:00

I've been neglecting the Friday Five, one of my favorite memes. (Note to self: That's the first time I've used that term. It's all downhill from here.)

1. Do you wear any jewelry? What kind?
Just a wristwatch (if that counts). I had noserings -- one hoop in each nostril, for a few months in college.

2. How often do you wear it?
Watch -- daily.

3. Do you have any piercings? If so, where?
No. See #1 above. Never had any other piercings.

4. Do you have any tattoos? If so, where?
None yet.

5. What are your plans for the weekend?
Go to the birthday party of Michelle Weltman, my girlfriend's friend. Hopefully get some time to visit my friend Matt Gibson out in Reston, and to work on some computer stuff I've been neglecting.

2003-01-07T16:33:00.000-05:00

This is Newt, the coolest dog in the world, playing in the snow:

2003-01-07T09:11:00.000-05:00

I know who the Joe Millionaire winner is. In other words, I can tell you who won Joe Millionaire. Even though it's a secret. Ah, reality TV shows and their huge audiences.

Thanks for the idea, John. I wonder how many hits this will generate.

Oh, and the winner? Fox wins. Duh.

OK fine, that's a cop-out. But maybe I'll get some good hate mail to post.

2003-01-07T08:35:00.000-05:00

This is a pretty cute page, called The Evolution of a Programmer, as seen by the "Hello, World" programs they write.

For the uninitiated, traditionally, the first program you write with a new language is one that prints "Hello, World" to the screen. Then, you get into the task at hand. It's the programmatic equivalent of a mic check.

2003-01-06T17:49:00.000-05:00

Yay! I got (Score:5, Insightful) ... I'm the greatest commenter ever. Or, rather, I've hit my goal on Slashdot. Now, if only they had a numeric score for Karma, instead of just "excellent".

2003-01-06T13:40:00.000-05:00

The Telegraph, a newspaper in the U.K., has a great opinion piece on how gun control has failed horribly in their nation. In a nutshell, it's the old refrain: guns are outlawed, and only outlaws have guns.

2003-01-05T21:29:00.000-05:00

This is the worst thing in the history of Slashdot. Clerks is brilliant, the best film in the history of New Jersey, an unpretentious gem of wit and sarcasm. Dogma is pretentious, star-studded bullshit.

2003-01-05T15:56:00.000-05:00

Since I've already been working on my weight and general health, I've decided to adopt a real resolution in its place: to stop procrastinating so much. My girlfriend nearly cried tears of joy when I told her this, and she knows me well, so it's gotta be a good one.

2003-01-04T15:44:00.000-05:00

I have eaten lunch from this carry-out joint over 500 times. If you don't count school cafeterias, The Perfect Pita is easily my most-frequented restaurant ever. They're across the street from my job, and the ingredients taste fresh. The menu has a Mediterranean/American vibe.

2003-01-04T12:38:00.000-05:00

I've gotten rid of the "Friends' Websites" links, and merged it with Link Exchange. In other words, if you don't link back to me, you're not really my friend. ;)

2003-01-03T16:34:00.000-05:00

Am I the only one who suspects these Halloween Memos might not be actual leaks from Microsoft, and are forgeries instead? After all, about have of them so far have been parodies. Why couldn't an MS critic slip a bogus one in there?

2003-01-03T16:17:00.000-05:00

This imbecile was my boss at Vir2l. I've bookmarked that image to look at any time I get pissed at my current employer.

Putting it up on Fark.com Photoshop as soon as possible.

2003-01-03T15:02:00.000-05:00

Reasons I'm psyched about moving to MovableType:

A real, integrated search

A reliable, integrated commenting system

Static URLs for each archived post

Archive calendar

Titles for posts

Categories for posts

Better tools for managing posts

Titles for posts

An easy-to-remember domain name

My own host

A good excuse to do a minor rehaul of the design

2003-01-02T18:06:00.000-05:00

Howard Stern mentioned Joyce Hyser, star of Just One of the Guys, a brilliant, underrated 80's teen comedy. That made me happy.

2003-01-02T11:40:00.000-05:00

Slashdot picks up a story that's already been discussed on Joel on Software and Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Guess which site has the most comments and the lowest value per comment? Thank God for Slashdot's comment filtering; I don't read anything under Score: 3, a total lifesaver.

2003-01-02T08:22:00.000-05:00

HHOS, to use another great hackerism. Hershey's Ordered To Pay Obese Americans $135 Billion, jokes The Onion. I don't see a joke; I see an inevitability.

2003-01-01T21:56:00.000-05:00

Dammit, my Slashdot posts have gotten 4/Informative thrice now. I want a 5!

2002-12-31T13:08:00.000-05:00

My friend O'Dell is one of the authors for an upcoming book on graphics programming.

Since I have a background in writing/editing, and also programming skills, I've contemplated writing an article or two for a publication like ColdFusion Developer's Journal, but never bothered to actually do it.

2002-12-31T10:30:00.000-05:00

The Smoking Gun presents a gallery of their favorite non-celebrity mugshots this year. The chick in #6 looks like she's trying to fellate her way out of a night in jail.

2002-12-30T21:28:00.000-05:00

Jeebus ... is an iPod all that?

2002-12-30T11:07:00.000-05:00

Now, this is the kind of thing that Flash should be used for: 3-d and detailed views of a camera at Amazon. Link via Ordinary Life.

2002-12-27T20:17:00.000-05:00

Three new links have been added to the lists at left:

Snopes is a site dedicated to debunking urban legends, which have proliferated as communication has gotten easier. Next time you get some email claiming a kid has cancer and will be cured if you spam 500 of your closest friends, read it. In fact, read it now and realize that you shouldn't believe everything you read.

Harvey the mouse must die is a page about one man's fight against the mice determined to ruin his peace of mind. It is the funniest, most witty writing I've ever read on the web. Brilliant, if morbid.

Jeff "Mad Dog" Mach is an awesome guy I met at Teaneck High School. I don't know of a single person on Earth who's more willing to be original and express himself. He performed "Ice, Ice Baby" in a white, sequined jumpsuit at our school's Black Student Organization's annual Lip Synch Contest, and got a standing ovation.

2002-12-27T15:47:00.000-05:00

Friend, fellow JHU alum, entrepreneur and Steelers fan Neil Mandava has gotten engaged to Angela Lu, his girlfriend of a million years. Congrats, guys!

2002-12-27T11:50:00.000-05:00

Anil Dash is having some trouble with his math. My response:

"Hindus make up about 3% of the U.S. population"? That sounds a bit high!

According to this: sidebar, they're 1 million out of almost 300 million Americans.

That's 0.3% and, according to another statistic they quote, it's only 2% in New York City.

(The US Census, AFAIK, does not tally religious affiliation.)

Here are some other estimates: 1.5 million, 1 to 1.3 million -- both a far cry from the 8 or 9 million you claim.

Groups all have an incentive to exaggerate their numbers, but even Hindu sources don't claim they're 3% of the US!

2002-12-26T23:49:00.000-05:00

I've successfully imported all my blogger entries into my MovableType installation at home. Next step is converting the templates.

2002-12-26T23:48:00.000-05:00

1. What was your biggest accomplishment this year?
My relationship with my girlfriend.

2. What was your biggest disappointment?
That my girlfriend isn't happier.

3. Will you be making any New Year's resolutions?
Yes, step it up re: losing weight and getting my ass into shape -- i.e. less slacking on the eating and way, way more exercise. I've lost like 20 lbs. already but it's going sloooow.

4. Where will you be at midnight? Do you wish you could be somewhere else?
Spending it with my s.o., for the first time.

5. Aside from (possibly) staying up late, do you have any other New Year's traditions?
Nope. they've run the gamut -- from partying until daylight to a quiet evening at home with family.

2002-12-26T18:44:00.000-05:00

John has been kind enough to link to my blog. I read it daily. It's style is somewhat similar to mine -- a train of thought about work, blogging and life, along with original contributions such as this gem: How to make your own beef jerky from scratch. Unfortunately, I can't try it for myself, because ... cats + meat hanging from hooks = trouble.

Thanks for the link, bro. You're getting linked back tonight (I have my template saved on my home computer).

Stephen and Rachel haven't reciprocated yet, but he's on vacation and she's procrastinating re: updating her blogroll. :)

2002-12-26T17:02:00.000-05:00

Random UNIX tip of the day:

Aliases (i.e. .bashrc aliases) don't take arguments. Use a function instead.

Initially, I had:


alias sp='echo $1 | ispell -a'

but that didn't work. (It turns out this was because $1 had never been initialized and set to the value I expected.) Instead, I had to do:


sp () {

    echo $1 | ispell -a

}

at Barry Margolin's suggestion, and it worked like a charm. And now I can do stuff like this:


$ sp "recieve"

@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell .33.7.1 alpha)

& recieve 16 0: receive, receiver, Recife, relieve, received, 

receives, revive, reeve, reserve, deceive, reliever, recede, 

receivers, recipe, recite, relive

UPDATE: Joe Halpin gave me even better advice, going so far as to write the small function above (though I'd already taken that step on my own ... damn Google Groups lag).

2002-12-26T13:04:00.000-05:00

Ssshhh ... another secret geek book: O'Reilly's Mac OS X Hacks, release date unspecified.

2002-12-26T12:48:00.000-05:00

A classic example of media sensationalism, sound-byte journalism, corporate control of the media, and the dangers of letting others think for you: The McDonald's Coffee Lawsuit.

Brought to my attention by the rare anonymous-but-intelligent poster on this Slashdot thread.

2002-12-26T11:02:00.000-05:00

Latest evidence that Jews control the media -- The Onion published on Christmas this year.

Especially festive are the letters to Savage Love: Horrifying Holiday Sex (xxx).

2002-12-25T21:59:00.000-05:00

I now have installed Apache, MySQL, PHP and MovableType on my home machine (Windows XP) by myself and all are working. Amazing. Soon as I get comfortable with MT, I'm switching over. (My box at home isn't accessible from outside; it's just for my own practice.)

2002-12-24T15:14:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my boy Jerry for letting me know this page looks like shit in IE. I guess I'll have to use different stylesheets, depending on what browser someone is using.

UPDATE: problem solved. This site looks best in Mozilla, but IE users are people too.

2002-12-24T11:58:00.000-05:00

Cool! Amazon now has restaurant listings for various cities (and their neighborhoods), inluding Washington, D.C. They've scanned in menus and people can leave feedback too.

Here's Generous George's, an Alexandria tradition.

2002-12-23T18:08:00.000-05:00

Awesome thinking. hungry_donner is a Morrowind fan who wanted to look into the rumors that they have a second expansion, called Blood Moon, coming out.

BethSoft is evasive, but he had the bright idea to search who filed for any trademarks on that name. Voila -- on October 18, 2002, ZeniMax Media, Inc. (BethSoft's parent company) filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

2002-12-23T16:36:00.000-05:00

Random Python tip of the day. Try out "list comprehensions". They're sometimes the most concise way to express something. Python borrows the concept from Haskell, I believe.


# give me the numbers from 1-10, in a list

>>> [ x for x in range(1,11) ]

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]

that's not terribly useful; you could just have said ...


>>> range(1,11)

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]

But, as stuff gets more complicated, the list comprehension shows its flexibility.


# give me the squares of the numbers from 1-10, in a list. 

>>> [ x*x for x in range(1,11) ]

[1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100]



# give me the squares of the even numbers from 1-10, in a list. 

>>> [ x*x for x in range(1,11) if x%2 == 0]

[4, 16, 36, 64, 100]

It's inline and concise, though not as Pythonic as:


aList = []

for x in range(1,11):

    if x%2 == 0:

        aList.append(x*x)

return aList

For more on functional programming in Python, check out the IBM developerWorks article.

2002-12-23T11:54:00.000-05:00

That rare quiz that is good: Which Supreme Court Justice are you?

I got Antonin Scalia. Yikes. I don't *feel* that conservative.

Link via Alas, a blog.

2002-12-23T11:07:00.000-05:00

But he swears he has no weapons of mass destruction ...

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had a secret plan to use biological weapons against Israel in the first stage of the 1991 Gulf War, but was unable to carry the plan out, according to a secret CIA document released for publication, Israel Radio reported Monday.

The 1992 CIA dispatch was made public over the weekend by the National Security Archive, a research organization.

The document says that Iraq sent three MiG-21 planes to bomb Israeli targets with regular bombs to check whether they were able to penetrate the Israeli air defense system.

At the second stage, three more MiGs armed with conventional weaponry were to be sent to Israel as a diversion, together with a Sukhoi airplane armed with biological weapons. But the operation failed during the first stage, when the three MiGs were downed over the Persian Gulf a short time after takeoff.

From Ha'aretz.

2002-12-22T23:27:00.000-05:00

PyCon 2003 is coming to DC. Under $200 this time ... I wonder if I can get my company to pay for it, considering how I do 90% of my coding in Python these days.

I might also see if I can get involved somehow.

2002-12-22T13:26:00.000-05:00

Here's my initial response to Time's Person of the Year choice -- The Whistle-Blowers: Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Coleen Rowley of the FBI, and Sherron Watkins, of Enron. Or, rather, my reaction to others' reactions.

1) As far as it being an obscure choice, what about David Ho, from 1996? David Who? Exactly.

2) As far as Con. vs. Lib. vs. Neither, here are the tallies since 1990:

1990 - C - George Bush
1991 - L - Ted Turner
1992 - L - Bill Clinton
1993 - L - Rabin, Mandela, De Klerk, Arafat
1994 - C - Pope
1995 - C - Newt Gingrich
1996 - N - Dr. David Ho
1997 - N - Andrew Grove
1998 - N - Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton
1999 - N - Jeff Bezos
2000 - C - George W. Bush
2001 - C - Rudy Guiliani
2002 - L - Whistleblowers
Total: 5 Conservative covers, 4 Liberal, 4 Neither

Even though you can dispute the categorization of a few, I don't see any obvious biases along the political spectrum

3) As far as this year's nominees go ... my question is, why didn't they blow their whistles earlier, before September 11 happened and billions dollars were lost to unethical business practices?

2002-12-20T17:45:00.000-05:00

Boy, Jennifer Connelly is hot. The link goes to two galleries of photos of this hottie. Some are topless (xxx), most are safe for work.

While I'm at it, here's some Google bait: Jenifer Connelly. Jenniffer Connelly. Jennifer Connoley. Jennifer Connolley. Jennifer Connelley. Jeniffer Connelly. ;) Here is the list of Britney Spears misspellings that inspired me.

2002-12-20T16:16:00.000-05:00

My favorite sports title was Bulls vs. Lakers and the NBA playoffs, for the Sega Genesis:

A huge improvement on its predecessor (Lakers/Celtics) this was the first basketball game where I got to use the real players from the NBA. Each team had one player with a special move. The best were Tom Chambers' ball-fake-then-levitation dunk and Alvin Robertson's off-the-backboard-self-alley-oop.

The game was well-suited to the Genesis' three-button controllers. On offense, it was dunk-pass-shoot; on defense you could block-change player-steal. It was my goal to score 100 points in a 5-minute (per quarter) game with Michael Jordan. I got 96 twice.

2002-12-20T16:03:00.000-05:00

My favorite coin-op (i.e. arcade) game of all time is an easy one. Hands down, it's ...

Gauntlet

Outstanding quality for its time. Great graphics and design. Awesome sound effects, voices and music for its time. In that venerable fantasy genre. And, best of all, four players at once, each of whom had different strengths and weaknesses. I went with the Valkyrie -- she had the most armor and wasn't as slow or dumb as the Warrior. Of course, the blue controller was also directly in front of the screen, so that made the choice easy.

2002-12-20T15:41:00.000-05:00

1. What holiday or holidays do you celebrate this time of year?
I nominally celebrate Channukah and try to ignore Channukah. For New Year's Eve, I'll typically go to a friend's party.

2. What was the best gift you have ever received?
Peeps, my little cat. I briefly called her "Channukah" in honor of when I adopted her. She's back to her original name.

3. What was the worst gift you've ever given?
On occasion, in the end-of-semester/start-of-vacation rush, I've forgotten holiday gift-giving entirely.

4. Where will you be celebrating the holidays? Are you hosting? Going away?
I'll probably be spending a quiet evening at home with my girlfriend, watching movies.

5. If you could spend the holidays with someone who isn't around, who would it be with? Why?
Petunia, the beagle I grew up with. :)

2002-12-20T15:33:00.000-05:00

When I switch from Blogger to MovableType, I'll be able to title and categorize my posts. Here are the initial categories I'm thinking of:

blogging
computers
fun
life
news
politics
sex

Any suggestions?

2002-12-20T11:46:00.000-05:00

My cousin Gabi is getting married. Interesting site. She's from an Orthodox family of seven kids. Oy veh.

2002-12-19T22:22:00.000-05:00

The first real computer we had was a Commodore-128. To play a game, you powered up, put in the floppy disk and typed load "*",8,1. I was about 9 or 10, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to me. (Geez, the spoiled kids these days and their silly icons and menus ...) No time to second-guess the experts, I had games to play.

Games like Mail Order Monster:

The premise was this: you select a monster out of options ranging from a Brontosaurus to a Human to a Blob. You enter it in various tournaments and competitions, which usually involved fighting other monsters. With the money you won, you increase your monster's power, get special abilities like having tentacles or buy cool weapons like a Needler or Anti-Grav Gun. Then, you go beat the shit out of your opponents some more.

Eventually, I figured out that the most efficient way of ranking up kills was to play two-player and then just leave the other joystick sitting on the desk. And was it fun to shoot the crap out of an opponent" who just sat there? Hell yes! A dinosaur with laser guns -- what else could a kid want?

2002-12-19T21:27:00.000-05:00

Baseline Magazine covers Hershey's recovery from an ERP disaster. Hershey, Pennsylvania native Anil Dash, who brought the article to my attention, says:

it seems like the simplest cause of the failures was that the software wasn't set up to accommodate the fact that "inventory" wasn't always tightly controlled palettes stacked neatly in a warehouse. In the real world, the pre-holiday rush left workers stashing boxes wherever they could find room, including rented warehouses and empty rooms in the facility.

As I get more experienced with end-user software development, there is a key point that keeps getting hammered home: when you're dealing with people, you have to be flexible. The books don't talk about it, the usability essays gloss over it, and few UML "sequence diagrams" have arrows that go right-to-left.

The fact is, building an application that works in reasonable circumstances is only halfway there. Users reload pages, close their browsers, hit the wrong button, bookmark pages, and do ridiculous things that you -- a developer who knows the site like the back of your hand -- wouldn't. You have to build one robust and agile enough to deal with the real world, where shit happens.

2002-12-19T21:11:00.000-05:00

Most news stories on it are sparse on the photos/drawings, so here are the seven proposed New World Trade Center Site Design Concepts ... i.e. the World Trade Center replacements and twin tower tributes. The imagemap doesn't render properly in Mozilla 1.2, but the pages for each presentation are fine. Each one has an introduction, team, slideshow (i.e. PowerPoint) and elements (the part you're probably looking for).

2002-12-19T15:42:00.000-05:00

Michael Levin offers us a new take on the antagonist of Christmas, with In Defense of Scrooge:

It is necessary first to distinguish Scrooge's outlook on life from his disagreeable persona. [...]

So let's look without preconceptions at Scrooge's allegedly underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit. The fact is, if Cratchit's skills were worth more to anyone than the fifteen shillings Scrooge pays him weekly, there would be someone glad to offer it to him. Since no one has, and since Cratchit's profit-maximizing boss is hardly a man to pay for nothing, Cratchit must be worth exactly his present wages.

No doubt Cratchit needsâ€”i.e., wantsâ€”more, to support his family and care for Tiny Tim. But Scrooge did not force Cratchit to father children he is having difficulty supporting. If Cratchit had children while suspecting he would be unable to afford them, he, not Scrooge, is responsible for their plight. And if Cratchit didn't know how expensive they would be, why must Scrooge assume the burden of Cratchit's misjudgment?

As for that one lump of coal Scrooge allows him, it bears emphasis that Cratchit has not been chained to his chilly desk. If he stays there, he shows by his behavior that he prefers his present wages-plus-comfort package to any other he has found, or supposes himself likely to find. Actions speak louder than grumbling, and the reader can hardly complain about what Cratchit evidently finds satisfactory.

Disclaimer: I haven't seen or read "A Christmas Carol" or any of its derivative works, but I do enjoy the intellectual exercise of reconsidering our cultural (and even pop cultural) dogmas from a 180-degree perspective. This is the best one since Jonathan V. Last's half-flamebait essay, A Case for the Empire, which questions who the good guys are in the Star Wars films.

2002-12-19T12:09:00.000-05:00

Mark Pilgrim gives us a summary of RSS and accidentally(?) tips us off to another future O'Reilly release: Content Syndication with RSS, due to be published around April 2003.

2002-12-19T11:35:00.000-05:00

Last night, we went to see comedian Jim Gaffigan at the DC Improv. That is one funny motherfucker. I knew him by his "You can call me the manatee" skit on Comedy Central's dearly-missed cartoon "Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist".

I woke up this morning and my alarm clock said: nothing. The power had gone off in my neighborhood. Wonderful. I got into work at 11:15.

2002-12-18T16:31:00.000-05:00

O'Reilly has a new book coming out in February, called Google Hacks. Strangely, it's on Amazon, but not their own list of new and upcoming titles. I suspect it'll be chock full o' things like surrounding phrases with quotes if you only want results where they appear consecutively.

Apparently we're also getting The .NET CD Bookshelf, V. 1.0 in April 2003, and then Java Enterprise CD Bookshelf V.2.0 in May 2003.

2002-12-18T15:59:00.000-05:00

Two articles on Digital Web Magazine discuss the subtleties of website navigation:

Self-described "Information Architect" Jesse James Garrett has a piece on "The Psychology of Navigation". His main thrust is that the various aspects of a link combine to create an impression in a user's mind, and then (s)he decides whether or not to click on it. Bad navigation can essentially be viewed as a breakdown in this communication: the link goes somewhere the user didn't expect; the user expects a link that isn't there (or at least where they thought it would be); the link is unclear about what it points to; etc.

Information architects can better understand how to communicate navigational choices by examining how users make choices. A typical user, faced with a typical, freshly loaded Web page--her eyes bouncing around the page--takes in all the options available. Maybe she scrubs the pointer over a few navigation elements. Then, finally, she's poised to click. In that moment, as her pointer hovers over the link and finger hovers over the mouse button, she has a picture in her mind of what is on the other end of that link. Where does that picture come from? What informs the details of the userâ€™s imaginary result?

Jeff Lash focuses on ways for getting users to click where you want.

Many sites offer a free email newsletter, with the goal of increasing their number of newsletter subscribers. This is usually done with a simple "Sign up for our free email newsletter" link. This standard call to action does little to entice the users. Why should the user sign up for the newsletter, just because it's free? There are plenty of free newsletters available. What does this newsletter offer that others don't?

The "Signup for our free email newsletter" call to action link could be replaced with more persuasive navigation like:

* Get exclusive content if you sign up...
* Receive extra discounts if you...
* Sign up today and receive...
* Save time by signing up for...

The persuade to action doesn't need to actually contain a full description of what the specific persuasion is; it just needs to entice the user to click.

2002-12-18T11:24:00.000-05:00

IBM's developerWorks has posted an article on introspection in Python.

2002-12-17T17:47:00.000-05:00

This essay on gun rights/control, sent to Rachel Lucas' blog, is awesome.

2002-12-17T13:39:00.000-05:00

Regarding this old post, it has come to my attention that "raised" toilet seats don't mean toilet seats where the seat has been lifted so a guy can pee. It refers to elevated seats, for kids who are potty training, old people with bad hips, etc.

2002-12-17T12:56:00.000-05:00

OK so, as promised, here is a recap of my crazy eventful weekend ...

On Thursday night, I went to the company holiday party. We did it at Capitol City Brewery in Arlington. Free (good) beer, free food. You can't go wrong with that, and I highly recommend breweries as venues for holiday parties.

Friday morning, I went into work with my gf, and she was sworn in by the judge for whom she works. She's now officially a lawyer.

I took the Acela "Regional" to NYC. Same regional price ($89), but Acela speed (3 hours from DC to NYC).

I was supposed to meet up with my friend Joe Hewitt. We used to work together at ZeniMax Media, back in 1999-2000, and haven't hung out in two years, though we still IM. Unfortunately, I don't use my cell phone much, and don't even know the number by heart. Instead, I have it written down in my wallet, sans area code. So, when I gave it to Joe, I prepended "202-" (DC, incl. my girlfriend) instead of "703-". What an idiot I am. He came into New York to look for me and got drenched by the rain this weekend. I felt awful and got him the new Beck CD off his Amazon Wish List, as a consolation prize. Moral of the story: if you're meeting up with someone, exchange cell numbers; don't just give them yours.

I met up with my college friends Nick and Cathy. Cathy prepared for the party while Nick and I played an obscene amout of NBA2k3 on his X-Box.

I'm getting tired of writing this entry, so I'll finish it up. I missed my Teaneck friends Matt Guiney and Dan Goldman. I spent $18.53 at the bodega for two 2-liter bottles of Coke and a six-pack of Amstel. The party was good and Cathy's teacher friends were all way hotter than I remember my teachers being. I had a few bites of Cathy's cinnamon French toast at brunch. That shit rocked. On the train back, I sat across from the same people as the first train ride. I missed my manager's Lord of the Rings party and my CEO's dessert party. When I was leaving the Metro, a man tried to sell me toothbrushes (still in their packaging). When I got to work on Monday, my parents' Channukah gift was waiting -- a digital camera. Expect pics on this site soon.

Whew.