Amazingly, there’s an open source RSS reader for the Mac which can compete with Ranchero’s NetNewsWire, at least if you’re not interested in all the most advanced bells and whistles thereof. It’s Vienna, and it’s simple and beautiful and does just what you need it to do.
Month: November 2005
Ohio Electronic Voting Machines Still Churning Out Wildly Statistically Improbable Results
In the wake of the Ohio-decided election of 2004, it’s interesting to see that Ohio’s voting machines are still producing results which are completely at odds with well conducted poll results.
It’s almost as if, as the General Accounting Office has stated, they are easily manipulated, or something.
That said, I’m not sure I wish Kerry had won. I mean, I wish that Bush weren’t in power, but if Kerry had won, with a massively Republican Congress, he’d be unable to do much useful, and he’d be saddled with all the consequences of the actions of the Bush administration’s first term, and everyone would blame him for the Iraq war going south, and imagine that if Bush had won a second term everything would be hunky dory.
So in the long run I think it’d be a bad deal to have a Democrat in the White House as a scapegoat, and I am not convinced that Kerry would have had the stones to do the right thing and just cut the war off. He certainly didn’t have the stones to campaign on an anti-war platform.
So I’m not as bitter about the results of this election as the 2000 election.
But it is still interesting to look at what’s going on in Ohio and wonder just who’s pulling what strings.
McCain on Torture and the Green Bay Packers
Obviously, to defeat our enemies we need intelligence, but intelligence that is reliable. We should not torture or treat inhumanely terrorists we have captured. The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps, our war effort. In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear—whether it is true or false—if he believes it will relieve his suffering. I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. But I did not refuse, or repeat my insistence that I was required under the Geneva Conventions to provide my captors only with my name, rank and serial number. Instead, I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse. It seems probable to me that the terrorists we interrogate under less than humane standards of treatment are also likely to resort to deceptive answers that are perhaps less provably false than that which I once offered.
— John McCain via Reddit.
The Problem with Being or Having a Boss
ChangeThis :: Why Your Boss is Programmed to be a Dictator
Did you vote your boss into the corner office? If not, perhaps your boss is a dictator. Chetan Dhruve explains why bosses become dictators.
Reminded me a lot of Paul Graham:
Because few of us know any alternative, we have no idea how much better we could do than the traditional employer-employee relationship. Such customs evolve with glacial slowness. Our employer-employee relationship still retains a big chunk of master-servant DNA.
I dislike being on either end of it. I’ll work my ass off for a customer, but I resent being told what to do by a boss. And being a boss is also horribly frustrating; half the time it’s easier just to do stuff yourself than to get someone else to do it for you. I’d rather do almost anything than give or receive a performance review.
Io 1.0 impending
The target date for a 1.0 beta is Jan 1, 2006 and the goal for this release is to clean up Io and make its implementation solid and ready for production use. This work involves a reorganization of the source tree, moving much of the implementation from C into Io, and extending the coverage of the unit test. Coroutines will be exposed within the language and actors, exceptions and the asynchronous networking control will be implemented in Io.
That’s cool to read. Especially the “moving implementation from C into Io.” I bet that really puts a language through its paces — insisting on pure language libraries instead of just wrappers of C libraries. (Of course I’m sure there will still be tons of C wrapper libraries — that’s something Io is very good at, and that’s a feature, not a bug.)
I haven’t done much with Io since I’ve been programming full time. Back when I was a sysadmin, a couple years ago, I was fascinated with different computer languages and kept learning new and interesting ones whenever possible. (That’s why I was writing Ruby scripts before everybody wanted to do Ruby because of Rails…) Now that I hack Perl full time, I don’t have the choice to say “hmm, I need a script, I could write it in bash or perl, but why not Python or Ruby?”
It’s nice to have gotten to know Perl much, much better than I had known it a couple years ago. I’ve learned some wonderfully cool things about Perl. But I miss those dillettante days. Maybe I eventually would have gotten to understand those wacky Haskell monads.
Now I find myself wanting to go back to Io and see what’s happened while I was away.
Ironically I’m doing something with Perl now (cooperative multitasking, using POE) which Io has always had built in support for.