It has to be assumed that even the most bloodthirsty Americans were shocked at themselves—if only for a giddy second or two—for having voiced their most atavistic opinions in public at two of the recent Republican debates. At the most recent one, there was applause and hooted calls to “Let him die!” during the discussion of a hypothetical young and uninsured coma patient. At another, Rick Perry’s record of over 200 state executions was cheered to the rafters as a badge of honor.

It’s... [More]

Support Occupy Wall Street: considering the recent announcement that over 15% of Americans live at poverty level or below, defined as $22,350 for a family of four (according to Wikipedia), it’s a disgrace that Obama’s spending his time fundraising from people who can afford to pay almost twice that for one dinner (prices start at $500 and go up to $38,500 according to Gloria Steinem To Headline Obama Fundraiser In New York City (Huffington Post)).

Juan Cole’s blog has, for years, been a useful source of information about world affairs, in particular those concerning the Middle East. Since The NATO intervention in Libya, though, the blog has become more militaristic and cheerleading, with near-constant reports of how the rebels are winning the war on Qaddafi.

The problem I have with Cole’s coverage is not that he’s clearly siding with the rebels but that he rarely, if ever, considers the problems that may come. As long as Qaddafi is... [More]

The blog post, Be a Hero, Barry by Robert X. Cringely, proposes an elegant solution to one of the main drags on the economy today: the millions of people (over 80% of mortgage-holders) who continue to make exorbitant payments on their now-nearly-equityless homes. They are moral heroes for continuing to pour money into what amounts to a black hole, an investment that will never pan out. They are also paying a huge amount of interest—especially compared to today’s rates—because they’re trapped and unable to... [More]

1. Changeling (2008) — 8/10
2. Black Dog (1998) — 4/10
3. Felon (2008) — 8/10
4. Jaws (1975) — 8/10
5. Unstoppable (2010) — 6/10
6. Star Trek (2009) — 9/10
7. Bridesmaids (2011) — 6/10
8. Magnolia (1999) — 8/10
9. Achtung Fertig Charlie (2004) — 7/10
10. The Switch (2010) — 6/10
11. Knowing (2009) — 3/10
12. Love and Other Drugs (2011) — 6/10
13. Rango (2010) — 8/10
14. Knight and Day (2010) — 5/10
15. Shrek Forever After (2010) — 5/10
16. Rio (2011) — 2/10
17. The Other Guys (2010) — 8/10
18. Little Fockers (2010) — 1/10... [More]

1. You should check that you’re not relying on any applications that will no longer run on Lion. See the article How to Check if Applications are Incompatible with Mac OS X Lion (OS X Daily). Basically, the Rosetta Stone application is not compatible with Lion, so PowerPC-only applications no longer run. If you can’t find an update (or there is none announced) for an essential application, then you may have to stick with Snow Leopard for now. If you open the System Profiler and look at Applications, you can... [More]

When you buy something from the iTunes Store, you will often be asked to confirm new terms and conditions. In Switzerland, there are four official languages—French, German, Italian and Romansh—and English is used quite often as well (though it’s not yet an official language). Apple, seemingly unable to decide which language to use, simply chose almost all of them at once.

No that’s some well-executed localization!

What could happen to Greece and why is it Greece that’s in such big trouble? The short article, When Austerity Fails by Paul Krugman (NY Times) sums it up quite well.

Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland are in trouble, but Greece is hit the hardest because it was the government that “borrow[ed] at rates only slightly higher than those facing Germany [and] took on far too much debt.” In Ireland and Spain, the government didn’t borrow too much, but both those countries’ banks did and, at least in Ireland’s case, the... [More]

Michelle Bachmann is a member of the U.S. Congress. She has said:

“Literally, if we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.”

She seems to be all for a race to the bottom, selling out every American in an ideological adherence to what she would no doubt call free-market principles. Turning her opinions into policy would be suicidal for the nation and would... [More]

1. Fireflies in the Garden (2008) — 8/10
2. Inglourious Basterds (2008) — 9/10
3. After.Life (2009) — 4/10
4. Management (2008) — 5/10
5. Despicable Me (2010) — 7/10
6. Megamind (2010) — 8/10
7. My Best Friend’s Girl (2008) — 7/10
8. Double Jeopardy (1999) — 6/10
9. Cry-Baby (1990) — 6/10
10. Paycheck (2003) — 6/10
11. Coco Avant Chanel (2009) — 4/10
12. Eagle Eye (2008) — 2/10
13. Les rivières pourpres (2000) — 5/10
14. Vanilla Sky — 6/10
15. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World — 6/10
16. Max... [More]

The man is a steadfast news-reading and -debunking machine. You can read his reviews of articles from the mass media at Beat the Press by Dean Baker (CEPR). He is a national treasure and that he’s not as household a name as Anderson Cooper is a sign of the average American’s decline and inability to pay attention to that which could make his or her life so much better.

In response to the recent article, The Budget Debate, Revealed by Richard W. Stevenson (NY Times), Baker wrote The Battle Is About Giving More Money to Rich People, Not About the... [More]

It’s so hard to separate all of the threads in the warp and weft of history. A Saudi prince is reared in the lap of luxury. At first, he is fiercely nationalistic but also proud of his people and his religion and his culture. This pride is easily manipulated to draw him into battle in a foreign country to battle the communist foe in the employ of the capitalist one.

Years later, he will take up arms against his former employer for the crime of building bases in his homeland. He was purported... [More]

The Fukushima I Nuclear Accidents (Wikipedia) page is quite good and the “Reactor status summary” somewhere in the middle of the page is updated often.

Wikipedia Reactor Status Summary

In addition to the reactor status information, there is a crowdsourced map of microsievert values from 215 Geiger counters across Japan. These are (ostensibly) real-life readings, but it’s hard to know whether to believe it or not. They certainly look legitimate, but it’s the Internet, so take it with a grain of salt.

Status as of March 27th, 2011

Rounding out the images is a the... [More]

The oft though-provoking XKCD published a flow chart recently, called Good Code (XKCD), which outlines the two branches: doing it fast or doing it right. The chart is linked below.

Despite the panacea of Agile Development, you still can’t have both fast and right. While it is possible to write good code, the odds are good that that code will accomplish a task that no longer requires completion (indicated by the “requirements have changed” block).

Even if it’s decent code, it’s further quite likely... [More]

The photo below is from the first week of the revolution in Tunisia by Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images (Big Picture Blog) and shows a protester taking aim at the police with a baguette[1].

I just couldn’t help thinking that the cops were surprisingly nonchalant considering the guy pretending his bread is a gun is part of a revolution. Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to what would have happened to this guy had he tried something like this in a real hot zone, like New York City? Amadou Diallo’s family, perhaps?

The comedy/cabaret troupe Fascinating Aida riffed on cheap flights—specifically those that you can get in Ireland (I’m looking at you, Ryanair). The video below is pretty funny (and includes subtitles for the Irish-accent–impaired).

Cheap Flights with subtitles by bolikoki (YouTube)

SPOILER ALERT:The best line was right at the end (but it’s really much better in song): “And as we heard his announcement, our hearts gave a terrible thump…if you haven’t prepaid to use the steps, you’ll have to feckin’ jump!”

How did I not know that John Oliver had his own show on Comedy Central? It’s apparently a show where he does stand-up comedy of his own—at which he is flat-out brilliant—and includes bits from some other very talented people. He had a special last year as well, called Terrifying Times (Comedy Central) (the link takes you to clips from that show).

Below is a video in which he tells the story of a man who rushes to catch a subway train. Oliver is a natural-born storyteller; it’s definitely worth the four... [More]

The video below[1] explains the difference between the various political and geographical entities that are still or have historically been associated with England. Below the video is a summary with links and a screenshot of the final graphic, which is a nice Venn diagram of all of the various entities.

The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained by CGPGrey (YouTube)

• The United Kingdom is a political entity that comprises England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
• Great Britain is a geographical entity and is the largest of the British Isles and is a... [More]

I would amend this to:

“Never trust a programmer’s opinion about a programming language if he or she cannot give you at least one reason why that language sucks.”

TuneSync is a Windows application that transfers ratings, play counts and last-played times—as well as other song data—between iTunes libraries. Use TuneSync to keep all personal information about songs synchronized between two or more copies of iTunes. TuneSync should be run every so often between the same libraries to make sure that they all have the most up-to-date information, regardless of where you’ve made the changes.

TuneSync loads two iTunes library files, compares them using... [More]

A few years ago, I developed a utility for syncing ratings, play counts and last-played times between the same set of songs on two different iTunes installations. I haven’t worked on it in years, but it’s quite well-written and full-featured and has rich documentation with a tutorial. You can download the Windows-only software for free.

I originally wrote this software because I was listening to a lot of music at work and rating it. When I got home, I didn’t have these ratings anymore because... [More]

Lewis Black delivered what can only be considered a triumph of dark comedy in the following clip, in which he stumps for Donald Trump in 2012. You have to hang on through the whole video for his justification, which is transcribed below.

Back In Black – Trump 2012 by Lewis Black (The Daily Show)

“That’s what he’s best at: putting a bow on a turd, marking up the price and selling it so hard, you want it, even though you know it’s just a turd with a bow on it! America…is that turd. It’s time to let Donald Trump come in, put some gold leaf on the... [More]”

Imagine, if you will, that you would like to take a trip from Zürich (to pick an arbitrary starting point) to Copenhagen (to pick an equally random destination).

Imagine further, if you will further indulge, that you would like to take the train in order to see Germany along the way instead of flying over everything. Imagine that you have a vague notion of nobility in doing so because of the ghastly wastefulness of flying, as far as carbon footprint goes.

You will be surprised—and not just... [More]

I’m currently revising the Encodo C# Handbook to update it for the last year’s worth of programming experience at Encodo, which includes a lot more experience with C# 4.0 features like optional parameters, dynamic types and more. The following is an expanded section on working with Linq. A final draft should be available by the middle of April or so.

7.30 – Loose vs. Tight Coupling

Whether to use loose or tight coupling for components depends on several factors. If a component on a... [More]

I’m currently revising the Encodo C# Handbook to update it for the last year’s worth of programming experience at Encodo, which includes a lot more experience with C# 4.0 features like optional parameters, dynamic types and more. The following is an expanded section on working with Linq. A final draft should be available by the middle of April or so.

7.17 – Using System.Linq

When using Linq expressions, be careful not to sacrifice legibility or performance simply in order to use Linq instead... [More]

PHPDoc is a popular tool for generating documentation for PHP projects. I made a whole lot of improvements to it for PHP5 and created a new skin with clean separation between structure and styling as well as a lot of generation options.

The new style is cleaner, has far fewer borders, better margins and alignments and nicer icons (for all elements, with access visibility for all element types) as well as much more legible placement and more information, including direct links to source for all... [More]

PHPDoc is a popular tool for generating documentation for PHP projects. I made a whole lot of improvements to it for PHP5 and updated all the skins to look less boxy, have nicer and more informative icons and be easier to use, and then created an earthli fork. This article includes a full feature list and screenshots.

The earthli WebCore (the software that runs this web site) is open-source. It is also relatively well-documented. The documentation is generated using PHPDoc, but a better... [More]

I’ve been keeping track of the movies I watched for a couple of years now, but have only recently been adding mini-reviews[1] to each so I can remember (A) what it was about and (B) whether I liked it.

Since I’m no longer maintaining the old text file in which I kept this list, I’m dumping the list here.

2008 (or so)

1. Monster (2003) — 8/10
2. The Good Shepherd (2006) — 7/10
3. Breach (2007) — 7/10
4. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) — 7/10
5. Eastern Promises (2007) — 9/10... [More]