News You Can Bruise for 2000 March 9

I had two emails waiting for me when I woke up. One is from Scott. The other is from Fred. Both are 2,108 bytes long.

You: That was an amazing story.

Me: I know.

For years, science has mocked at the venerable notion that the moon is made of green cheese, preferring their ridiculous "rock theory". Now, those hoity-toity eggheads must eat their words, as the latest evidence shows that the poles of Mars resemble different kinds of cheese! Vindication for green cheese selenology! It's time to take our classrooms back from rock theory and its Communist proponents!

Dave says he has to think about my putting his Theobrominator story up on the Memorial. Take your time, Dave. Jeepers.

Yesterday I was setting Mark up with a copy of NOWB, and I decided that the fact that he needed the author of the program to set it up for him was not a good sign. So I need documentation. And the reason I have been holding off on writing documentation is that the notebook program is a mess. It's written in two different languages and it has a lot of legacy stuff from when I tried to generalize it in the wrong direction. So I'm thinking of taking an afternoon and rewriting it all in Python, and then doing proper documentation, and then Mark can set it up himself.

Mark made mention (alliteration!) of some feature (I don't remember what) that many weblog scripts have. I dismissed it by saying "Well, when I wrote this there were no weblogs," but now that I'm rewriting NOWB and there are weblogs now, I might as well listen to feature requests. One thing I'm definitely going to do is put in anchors for each entry, eg "20000302-3" for this one, so that you can point to, chop up, etc. particular entries. One thing I'm definitely not going to do is bring a database into the fray. {Cuba, XML}, maybe. {Castro, Database}, no.

They showed this uncensored on FOX and it had the sun in it.