Posts from — October 2006

So I was watching the news today, and they were talking about negative ads, and they played one ended with (paraphrased): “Candidate X wants to have a party for homosexual illegal immigrants who are burning American flags in the streets”.

That ought to heighten the level of American discourse.

In other news, John McCain seems less appealing the closer we get to 2008, but there’s plenty of time to worry about that.

For those of you who develop web pages, this might be of interest:
Optimizing Page Load Time

I can’t stop listening to this song! Definitely Peyton’s fault.

I’m considering switching my desktop OS from Debian (which I’ve been running since late freshman year) to Ubuntu. I need to investigate more and think about a partition scheme first, though. I might dual-boot my laptop, too, depending on how the disk space looks.

The Perry Bible Fellowship is the only online comic I’ve really liked… Tim sent me the link when I told him about how terrible I thought most online comics were (they’re mostly bad, but this is an exception). I had forgotten about PBF, but it was recently mentioned on BoingBoing and by another friend this weekend, so it reminded me of my favorite PBF comic. There’s a lot of other good stuff in their archives. I’ve subscribed to their RSS feed, so I’ll be able to keep up with new comics as they come out.

This quote from a recent White House Press Gaggle is really good. A press gaggle is an “on-the-record briefing without video recording”… Mr. Fratto is the white house representative, I’m not sure who the questioner is. Excerpt with my added emphasis is below:

Q You said that it’s the only way to proceed, to prepare for a Republican-controlled Congress. With such a close election, and with both parties recognizing how close it’s going to be, why not at least consider both alternatives?

MR. FRATTO: We’re still in the game, and — if you’re in the game, you’re in it to win.

Q But you don’t know the outcome of the game any more than I do, and –

MR. FRATTO: We feel confident about the outcome, and that’s the way we’re going to proceed.

Q Continuing the analogy, but government isn’t a game, and you are governing, and so your responsibility is to prepare for how to govern regardless of how it turns out. So it may be a game in the political sense, but it’s really not a game to Americans who want their government to be ready to do what needs to be done.

MR. FRATTO: He’ll be ready.

Q That means you’re preparing for the other outcome?

MR. FRATTO: We are ready. We are ready for — we’re ready for a — we’re ready to work with a Republican Congress. Nice try, Jennifer.

Q That would suggest not ready for a Democratic Congress.

MR. FRATTO: Questions? Anything else? Thank you.

Tonight Pete and I put the final touches on the newest version of Runstoppable: version 1.4. It has a lot of incremental improvements, new features, and redesigns, and is definitely a big step forward. Pete posted a good (and amusing) summary on the blog.

Also, Firefox 2.0 was released today. You can download it here. I’ve only been using it for about 30 minutes, but already I’m a big fan. I had used alpha builds of firefox 2 over the summer to build some demos for my project, but it has come a long way since then. Some of the biggest deals for me:
- The speed. I noticed it right away… it’s definitely faster.
- Tabs work differently now- if you accidentally close a tab, go to History -> Recently Closed Tabs and you can get back to where you were!
- RSS Feeds are handled better- I can easily make it subscribe to them in Google Reader, for example, and it shows me a prettied-up version of the feed before I subscribe. IE has a few more features here, but nothing really compelling for me.
- You can now manage your search engines list that shows up in the upper right. I’ve wanted this for a while- there used to be no easy way to remove an engine from the list.
- Inline spellcheck in web forms (you know, the red underline)

These are just the biggest things that have stood out to me so far, there are more features discussed here and here.

It kinda bothers me how terrible I am with matlab. It’s really frustrating, though I guess I’ve never been all that great with matrices. Hopefully I won’t have to deal with it too much more this semester.

Here are some things that I actually want to learn:
Lisp (don’t worry, it’s a programming language)
Ruby on Rails
Google Web Toolkit (compile Java code into AJAX web sites)

Vague interests:
Flash
ASP.NET

I’m not pursuing the vague interests too much since they don’t have really good development platforms for Linux, as far as I know.

Alumni weekend is awesome. Alumni band day and the bash were a lot of fun.. it’s a bit strange to be considered one of the young ones again, but I can’t complain.

(tangent) This song reminds me of driving in to San Francisco to spend time with friends, it’s a good association and a good song.

I wish I had more time to write here, but I have a lot of work that I should be doing these days, hopefully I’ll be able to get into it later.

For Jen Forbes: “Pigs in a blanket”.

I wish I had more time to write about yesterday’s signing of the Military Commissions Act, but I’ll just leave this quote for now, from Jonathan Turley, a GW constitutional law professor:

It‘s a huge sea change for our democracy. The framers created a system where we did not have to rely on the good graces or good mood of the president. In fact, Madison said that he created a system essentially to be run by devils, where they could not do harm, because we didn‘t rely on their good motivations.

Now we must. And people have no idea how significant this is. What, really, a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the president signed today essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values.

It couldn‘t be more significant. And the strange thing is, we‘ve become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. I mean, the Congress just gave the president despotic powers, and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to, you know, “Dancing with the Stars.” I mean, it‘s otherworldly.

If you don’t know what this is about, you can listen to the whole interview with Keith Olbermann here. The more I read about this the more angry I get, maybe I should try to focus on my homework more.