King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia Reiterates His Desire To Crush Secularism

( As heard on NPR )

The Periodic Table of Political Interference in Science

( Nifty design, disturbing content )

Minnesota Science Museum will be Closed during Republican National Convention

( Irony! )

Tags: news, shrill
Current Mood: shrill
Current Music: Enigma, Sensing the Spheres

So, for the first time in about a year, I turned to writing some C this week and discovered to my annoyance than Noweb is broken in Emacs 22.0. It doesn't do code transitions or font locking anymore. This is actually very unacceptable; I must have code modes and font locking to switch between C and LaTeX as I work.

I went looking for alternatives, and there are none. Sadly, no new work in Literate Programming has been done in the psat two years. LP is being allowed to die on the vine, unused and unloved.

I really don't understand that. It's a great methodology for single programmers, and there are still a lot of us out there, doing our own little things, not bothering anyone. I'm really pissed off that noweb.el is borked, and I don't know nearly enough elisp to do anything about it.

Tags: geek
Current Mood: annoyed

This afternoon Omaha had to run to Staples, one of our big office supply chains here in the US, and pick up some paperwork she'd had their printing service run off for her. As I wandered through the aisles, I noticed a big table with a new set-up for a line of products called M.

M, it turns out, is Staples' own brand of Moleskine knockoffs. But what was even more baffling was that among the products on the table I saw a small stiff-backed leather holder for 3x5 cards and boxes of 500-each 3x5 cards with grids on one side and portrait-mode lining on the other.

There it was: Staples is not only selling its own Moleskine knockoffs, it's selling Hipster PDAs.

Tags: sighting
Current Mood: boggled
Current Music: Avenue Q OST, The Internet is for Porn

I have long asserted that if you can't handle SQL or Javascript, you shouldn't be programming rails. And I don't mean a little bit; you ought to be able to eat, sleep, and breathe Javascript, HTML, CSS, SQL, and Ruby before you begin to sell yourself as a Rails programmer.

I am not a Rails programmer. Even so, I ought to be able to do simple things. Yet today I was stymied and went for my sledgehammer, the SQL statement.

Here's the layout: Stories exist. Stories belong to serials. Stories may optionally belong to arcs. Arcs theoretically belong to serials, but there is the "no arc" setting which, unfortunately, is global across the Journal Entries and my Other Stories archive, since there are plenty of standalone Journal Entries and most of the Other Stories stories are also standalone rather than complex. (That's a joke. Zoner will get it.)

So I wanted to be able to find all arcs that belong to a series. That's a simple statement in SQL: select distinct arcs.id, arcs.title, arcs.blurb from arcs, stories where stories.serial_id = 1 and arcs.id = stories.arc_id order by stories.pubdate. You see, arcs and serials only have a relationship through stories, not with each other.

There seems to be no clear way to do this in rails. It should be something like Arcs.find(...), but that didn't work at all.

This is on top of my discovering that yes, you can define your own pluralization rules, but you cannot override the ones inside Rails. "Series" will always be unpluralizable. If you try that, it works great until you trip over a call that dives beneath your application to the appserver layer, at which point Rails's internal pluralization rules take over and you're screwed.

Tags: geek
Current Mood: annoyed

I actually have been writing, and pretty steadily the past couple of days. Not fabulous amounts, maybe 500 words a day or so, but at least I'm getting somewhere. At least, I think I am. There are moments where I turn to Muse and say, "Where are we going with this story?" and she puts her hands up and with that "I don't know, I thought you knew" look.

Right now, the story du jour is a Yowlerverse story about a married couple living in Seattle who decide to rent out their mother-in-law basement apartment (hey, it's seriously "write what you know" time!). Their first inquiry is from a woman named "Leema," and the protagonist, Tracy, spends the first few paragraphs trolling through websites trying to figure out what questions would scare off even legal hispanic apartment renters. She's more than a little stunned-- and feeling a metric boatload of liberal guilt-- when a pair of beautiful Bastet show up on her doorstep.

The looks-younger, is-older character, Meer, is an exotic model with her own website. She reveals this to Tracy because she wants to "borrow" Tracy's husband as a chaperone for her first photoshoot in six months. Meer reveals that she's not like most Bastet-- she's not bisexual, and really is madly in love with Leema. She shows off an ugly scar along one shoulder and down one arm where a former fan stabbed her after she admitted to a reporter that she really wouldn't be interested in a male lover, ever. That was eight months ago.

I'm not sure where the story goes from here. I'm not even sure who the protagonist is. It might just die on the vine, but after 4,000 words or so, I hope not.

But it occurred to me, as I was writing the story, that I needed a lot more backstory. I needed it to go somewhere permanent and stop residing within my brain.

As an exercise, I decided to write the Bastet Wikipedia page. It's not anywhere remotely done, but it's a fun exercise. With headers like "Definitions," "Distinctions from H. Sapiens", "Origins," "Culture," "Sexuality," "Health and Life Span," "Issues Facing Bastet Today," "American Bastet," "European Bastet," "Bastet in Asia," "Bastet and Muslim Societies," "Population," and "Prominent Bastet," there's a lot to fill in.

So, if your characters live in an Alternative Earth, what do their Wikipedia pages look like?

Tags: writing
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Philip Glass, Warszawa

It was a gorgeous Autumnal day this morning. Cool, crisp, and with that special clarity that only happens in here as Fall comes around and the winds start blowing toward the southwest. Too bad it's mid-July, but we Seattlites don't really miss summer. We don't even understand summer ("Seattle Summer" from Almost Live, featuring Bill Nye as a "drunken beach loon", 1:40), right?

Anyway, today's list of newsie things:

HHS moves to redefine hormonal contraception as abortion

( The bounds of reason. )

California Conservatives Turn On Each Other Over Gay Rights

( The harder you squeeze, Lord Vader... )

AFA: If we lose California, we lose everything

( The End of the Culture War? )

Christianists Wringing Hands Over McCain's Gay Adoption Stance

( He just blew his chances with Evangelicals... )

PZ Meyers bags one

( Don't send death threats over the Intertubes, children... )

WND: How Dare Atheists Publish In Christian America!

( Who is responsible for this outrage? )

The perfect chocolate chip cookie?

( Mmmm... )

Understanding Closures in Modern Programming Languages

( Only half the story here... )

Tags: news, shrill
Current Mood: shrill
Current Music: Keiko Matsui, Bay of Destiny

Breakfast was granola, and I boiled some eggs to prepare for lunch. Kouryou-chan tried to wear the same clothes she had worn the day before. She insisted that the pants were clean, so Omaha had me roll through the photographs to prove to Kouryou-chan that, yes indeed, she had worn those pants already. Darn photographic evidence. After the eggs had cooled in the river Omaha and the girls set up an assembly line to make the sandwiches while I washed the dishes.

We've got neighbors suddenly. Family of four, parents that have that muscled biker look to them. Rough trade.

Yamaraashi-chan insisted on wearing a tied-die bellyshirt that covered little more than a bikini top so Omaha made sure she was carrying a spare t-shirt in case it turned cool.

We drove up a narrow service forest road, the kind that really ought to be attempted only by jeeps and heavy trucks. We stopped at a vaguely wider spot in a heavily wooded area at an unmarked trail Omaha insisted was the one we wanted. I was dubious, but she insisted, and we headed off.

The hike was gorgeous. We saw all manners of flowers and madrona trees along the path. There were also these peculiar aluminum markers on trees all along the path with notes like "17+00" and "6+47". We couldn't figure out what they meant, but when they got to zero we were at an old bridge across the Elk River that had been smashed in last year's flooding and was now uncrossable. We walked on to Elk Lake, where we found two guys drinking beer fishing quietly. After we reached the west end of Elk Lake we concluded that there was no way down to the lake itself for swimming or anything like that, so we had lunch and then turned back around for home. The hike back was easy, mostly downhill, and the girls were strong troopers about it. Kouryou-chan's ankle was no longer bothering her.

We got back to the campsite and shared watermelon, then Omaha went for a nap. I sat back and finished Trial of Flowers, which was a lot slower reading than the popcorn of Hammer of Daemons. The girls ran around. Our neighbors... drank. And drank and drank and drank. The adults finished one case and started in on another. They had brought all the scrap wood from their workshop and were destroying it in a massive fire in the fire ring. It reached seven, eight feet high, which would have steamed a ranger if he'd seen it.

We made tacos for dinner, but Kouryou-chan wouldn't eat them and instead made a hot-dog. Afterward, we roasted marshmallows. Yamaraashi-chan did not set herself on fire this time. We played cards until it was too dark to tell the difference between blue and green. The neighbors played country music, but they at least turned it off promptly at ten.

Tags: camping, family
Current Mood: happy