Modern discussions of law are very frequently mired down in discussions of minutiae of what is legal vs. what is moral. Very quickly, the discussion has narrowed further to niggling over minor quirks of American jurisprudence and precedence law.

For example, it seems that the relatively narrow topic of torture has become an almost impossibly unwieldy and unknowable problem for this modern age’s great thinkers, where hours and hours and hours are spent determining at what point a particular... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

A developer on the Microsoft C# compiler team recently made a post asking readers to post their solutions to a programming exercise in Comma Quibbling by Eric Lippert (Fabulous Adventures in Coding). The requirements are as follows:

1. If the sequence is empty then the resulting string is “{}”.
2. If the sequence is a single item “ABC” then the resulting string is “{ABC}”.
3. If the sequence is the two item sequence “ABC”, “DEF” then the resulting string is... [More]

The economy has been topic numero uno for many months now, including the almost three months of the Obama administration. During that time, the administration, Wall Street and the media have tried on explanations like they were trying on hats, changing stories and justifications as soon as it looked like the American people—despite all efforts—might be grasping just how thoroughly they were being screwed by what amounts to nothing more than a self-elected aristocratic elite. The following... [More]

If only this were really the way it was:

Jeff Danziger: On the Elevator to the Executive Suite

That would be awesome, if only the subjugated classes—the other 90% of us—would realize our awesome power and bring those responsible for our current plight to justice. Make them give up every dime and shred of power and settle our accounts. If only we were brave enough to jettison all the criminals instead of putting up with those only willing to work with them. I’m looking at you, pretty much all of the Clinton (Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and co.... [More]

Once you’ve been coding for a while, you’ll probably have quite a pile of code that you’ve written and are regularly using. It’s possible that you’ve got some older code in use that just works and on which you rely every day. At some point, though, you realize that you have to get back in there and fix a few things. That happened recently with the upgrade of the earthli WebCore and attendant applications from PHP4 to PHP5 (which is ongoing). The earthli codebase was born in 1999 and was... [More]

Older versions of the earthli WebCore were more clearly delineated release packages and were hosted at SourceForge and offered for download on this site. Much time has passed and there have always been incremental upgrades made for the maintenance of earthli.com, but no more official releases.

A little while ago, the earthli WebCore’s source was moved from a private, firewalled Perforce server to an externally available Mercurial server. The structure has changed somewhat since the 2.7.0... [More]

Culled from Republicans: The Stupid Party by Brad DeLong (Grasping Reality), written in response to the House Republicans publishing a “19-page pamphlet that does not include a single real budget proposal or estimate”. Instead the pamphlet consists almost exclusively of criticism of the House Democrat proposal, offering no concrete alternatives.

It is not known whether taking the pulse of political opinion via political cartoons is statistically valid, but it is kind of fun—fun in a way that makes your teeth grind in righteous indignation.

Chavez chooses SocialismPut a Fork in it; it's done

At a time when the U.S. and all the nations that followed it down the rabbit hole of pirate/casino capitalism are suffering massive hits on all fronts, it takes real dedication to turn one’s laser-like focus from the U.S. economy to criticize Hugo Chavez for choosing socialism instead. Mort... [More]

Hinwil is a smallish town in the canton of Zürich in Swizerland. It can, by no stretch of the imagination, be characterized as either remotely Hawaiian or Australian. Even more so as an especially long winter retains its iron grip on the region. Why is it then that a local discounter (Aldis) has found it to be economically attractive to carry both ukuleles and didgeridoos, as shown in the photos below?

UkulelesDidgeridoos

Is it really so bad to see the back of an economic system that provides us with lunacy... [More]

In colloquial Swiss-German, the English word “easy” has been incorporated in some of its senses: as a synonym for “simple” and as a synonym for “relax”, as in a shortening of “take it easy” or a replacement for “no problem”.

For example (and I’m taking liberties with the Swiss-German spelling here because there are, at best, unwritten rules for that), you can say:

“Das isch doch easy! (But that’s easy!)”

and you can also say:

“Kasch es nid mache? Easy, ich mach es.(You can’t do it? No... [More]”

• Asgard: Windows workgroup; no longer actively used. (home of the gods)
• Valhalla: Wireless network. (where warriors go when they die)
• Loki: First Alienware computer; deceased. (trickster god)
• Thor: Second Alienware computer. (god of thunder)
• Idun: “scoop of rice” iMac. (wife of Odin, god of gods)
• Nott: Kath’s iPod Shuffle. (goddess of night)
• Sif: Marco’s iPod Shuffle. (corn goddess; wife of Thor)
• Freya: Kath’s Sony-Ericsson K550i phone. (goddess of love, fertility and sexual desire)
• Goll:... [More]

When someone posts a link to your web site on Facebook, it retrieves a preview and presents that as the default text, along with a selection of pictures it found in the page. Clearly, Facebook has some sort of scraper that extracts what it thinks is the best preview text from a given URL. Sometimes it works well, sometimes not. Luckily, you can tune your pages for Facebook requests, emphasizing the parts you think are important and belong in the preview.

It’s anybody’s guess how the scraper... [More]

PHP is a programming language like any other; like any other, it’s possible to construct a bug complex enough that it can only reasonably be solved with a debugger. Granted, most PHP code is quite simple and limited to single pages with single include files and a limited library or framework. However, the advent of PHP5 has ushered in more than one team with the courage to build a full-fledged web framework. You would think that the state of PHP development had concordantly improved to the... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

In August of 2008, Microsoft released the first service pack (SP1) for Visual Studio 2008. It included the first version (1.0) of Microsoft’s generalized ORM, the Entity Framework. We at Encodo were quite interested as we’ve had a lot of experience with ORMs, having worked on several of them over the years. The first was a framework written in Delphi Pascal that included a sophisticated ORM with support... [More]

Once you’ve worked with computers for a while, you end up with a lot of them around. They don’t seem to outgrow their usefulness as quickly as they used to and they manage to limp onward more reliably as well. That doesn’t, however, mean that all is rainbows and ponies when using them with newer technologies.

Exhibit A: wireless networking.

As it stands, I’m in charge of IT support for four wireless devices: a 6½-year–old iMac (scoop-of-white-rice edition) with OS X Tiger (Idun), a... [More]

Conservatives recently gathered at a large conference to deliver a yearly report to one another on the state of the nation. Though the president was invited—and lauded—last year, they didn’t see fit to invite the still decidedly conservative[1] current president this year. It is more than mildly appalling to watch, however, as one commentator after another blithely acts as if conservatism had had nothing to with the ruling of the country for the last three decades or so. Though fiscal policy... [More]

The Finder in OS X is a notoriously old, cantankerous piece of software. With every major operating system release from Apple, we wait with bated breath for the announcement of a long-awaited replacement. There are two primary reasons for this: support for external drives, like CD- or DVD-players and support for networked volumes. In both cases, OS X, ostensibly a multi-tasking powerhouse, capitulates completely to the whim of the external resource, slowing to a crawl that is often nearly... [More]

A meme is an idea that takes root and spreads from person to person. A quick-fix meme[1] is such an idea, usually a solution, that sounds good but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Often the meme preys on people’s basic ignorance of the subject matter and their desire to believe that their gut instinct won’t steer them wrong.

One example of such a meme is that countries should pay people to scrap their cars, commonly called “scrappage payment” plans. Germany has something like this in place and... [More]

We are ill-equipped to deal with huge numbers. Many of couldn’t tell the difference between 100,000 people and 1 million people. We are notoriously bad at estimating, conceiving of and comprehending large numbers. This makes it that much easier to pull the wool over our eyes when it comes to budgets and finance. Take, for instance, the $1 trillion figure being bandied about these days. What does one TRILLION dollars look like? (PageTutor) provides a handy visual mnemonic, starting with a single $100 bill... [More]

If you spend any amount of time reading online, you know how difficult it sometimes is to get the text into a format that makes for comfortable reading. All the more so for those doing their reading on portable devices. Web sites have several tools at their disposal to ease both online reading and printing:

• Offer a printable stylesheet that is used when the browser prints the document, so that advertising, comments, and other garbage are left out, leaving only the text of the article.
• Offer a... [More]

Stop wiping your ass with them.

According to this article, Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests by Leslie Kaufman (NY Times), “[a]lthough toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel.”

Regrettably, America manages to stand pretty much alone in demanding super-soft toilet paper for home use, although even in European countries, recycled paper makes up only 20% of paper intended for home use. That’s still ten times... [More]

Conservatives are fond of invoking the Constitution and the “founding fathers” in order to end all discussion when a proposed change to existing law would evolve in a direction that they don’t like. This is not always wrong, but often seems quite cherry-picked. For example, when the Supreme Court granted corporations full rights as citizens in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (Wikipedia), there was no hue and cry about activist judges. That single decision has arguably had a tremendous... [More]

Here’s a story originally published back in the Seventies and carefully passed from hand to hand to newsgroup to newsgroup and now from blog to blog: How to Build an H-Bomb. There’s a lot of pseudo-realistic–sounding scientific babble about various chemical compounds and elements, but the home-liquefaction process guide takes the cake:

“First transform the gas into a liquid by subjecting it to pressure. You can use a bicycle pump for this. Then make a simple home centrifuge. Fill a... [More]”

Obama joins the mainstream media as well as his compatriots across the aisle in a call to forgive and forget. As a constitutional lawyer, it’s not that he doesn’t see that crimes against the Constitution were committed, it’s that he sees more important tasks at hand. It’s an interesting logic that he is likely only willing to apply to the greatest criminals this nation has seen since, well, ever. It is unlikely that he will find a similar softness in his heart for more everyday criminals who... [More]

With an unwavering adherence to the party line, several political cartoonists giddily convey far-right talking points word-for-word, promulgating a severely twisted—and context-free—view of history and the world. Let’s take a look at a sampling from the last couple of months.

The Failing economy proves that Social Security doesn’t work

With Bernie Madoff’s admission that he’d been running a Ponzi scheme for decades, astute commentators asked whether there was a difference between Madoff’s... [More]

The article, I Twitter for you! by Mark Morford (SF Chronicle), is about a great new service called Geekamania. This site takes mechanical turking to a whole new level by providing a service unique to the new millenium: integrating you into the online world in a “cool” way.[1]

Here’s the sales pitch:

“We design, set up and maintain as many hip social networking pages as you want, spinning off the information you provided but also totally rearranging it and making it up at will, all to make you sound exactly as... [More]”

Man Up! Hedge-Fund Man’s Advice for Wall Street by Michael Lewis (Bloomberg) is a (somewhat) amusing look at the world through the eyes of “typical” trader on Wall Street. This trader is wondering why Wall Street is wasting its time worrying about what the rest of the non-Wall Street-world thinks. Instead, he feels his fellow traders should stick to the plan and stick it to a government that gave them so much money without bothering to force any conditions first.

“Think about this. Some fool comes along and gives you $15... [More]”

After nearly a decade of using Perforce for my private source control, I’d decided to switch to Mercurial. Mercurial is a distributed version control system and open-source and all kinds of awesome and I won’t go into why I made the switch here. Suffice it to say it makes it much easier to release code and work with others.

Mercurial itself is an easy installation and I had it running both on my OS X 10.4 and Windows XP in a flash. I even installed the newly released HgTortoise plugin, which... [More]

The article, Why I am a Green, not a Democrat by Mitchel Cohen (Informed Comment), wasn’t exactly about finance, but it did involve this interesting question that the author wanted to ask of the exceedingly smarmy Senator Chuck Schumer. It’s about a slated fare increase on NYC transit from the current $2.00 to $3.00 per ride. The fare increase is “to raise $1.2 billion claimed by the MTA as its deficit”. Naturally, the MTA is not allowed to run a deficit, so it has to make up the difference. Since bailing out a transportation... [More]

The blog entry, Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned Watch (“Bipartisan” Edition) by Brad DeLong (Grasping Reality), lists the actual votes for the spending bill recently passed by the Congress and the Senate.

“The Obama bipartisan proposal receives 0 Republican votes in the House, and 0 Republican votes in the Senate. An extremely small group of posturing senators makes the plan materially worse – reducing its likely efficacy as an employment boost by roughly 600,000 or so – and it looks as though the final passage bill will... [More]”