News You Can Bruise for 2003 April

• Leonard Is Paranoid
• Sumana And The Mail Chute
• One of The Arts of Peace statues
• The Republic Is Under Construction
• Thecodont Eryops in the limelight (may not actually be a thecodont; I always thought it was called a euryops but that's a plant) Update: It's an eryops.
• In Soviet Russia, spacesuits wear you!
• Sumana in colonial Fredericksburg

Wow, I think I got Kris' nightmare by mistake.

The pacing is off on those skits near the beginning, in which the same scene is repeated numerous times. There's also a weird Palestinian-nationalist fantasy sequence near the end which turned me off. The filler, as previously mentioned, is boring.

The trailer is much snappier and has almost everything that's really funny in the movie, except for the license plate skit and the tank skit, and the fact that the balloon skit goes on and on with James Bond music playing the whole time. My recommendation: just watch the trailer. It's great.

• Whacked On The Head By Python
• Python In This World And The Next
• Bowling For Objects
• Lists Suck!

• 1 large tomato
• 1/2 blue styrofoam tray store-bought mushrooms
• 4 green onions
• Some pecorino
• Some pasta
• Olive oil
• Basalmic vinegar

Heat up water for pasta. Chop up onions. Chop up tomato. Chop up--aah! The mushrooms are rotten! They are deformed, twisted into mockeries of their former shapes! What kind of mold preys on a fungus? Shouldn't a fungus be able to hold its own? Uh-oh, the water is boiling! Quick, throw in the pasta! Now, quickly find

• A can of olives

Open the can, drain the olives. Chop up half of the olives. Heat up the olive oil in a saucepan. Stir the pasta! What if you had just mushed up the remaining olives and used that instead of olive oil? Would it work? Would it taste better? If you made olive oil out of canned olives, would it cancel out the cannedness? For that matter, does store-bought olive oil count as "canned" food? Put the tomato, onions and olives into the olive oil and swish them around to cook them. Stir the pasta again. You forgot the garlic! Get

• 2 cloves garlic

Chop them up and put them in the saucepan. Grate the cheese! The pasta is done! Drain it. Add a splash of vinegar to the pasta sauce and cook a little more. Serve the pasta with the sauce and cheese. Halfway through eating it, decide that it needs some basil.

• 1 pinch basil

Add the basil. Enjoy the remaining portion.

• Agar is a C library for writing pseudo-RPG[0] games. Written for the in-progress game Trek To The Cave (motto: "Okay, we'll make the links visible, but that's it.").
• Nethack-el lets you play Nethack from within Emacs. As always, it's not an actual port of Nethack to Emacs, but it does patch Nethack so that it can display the Nethack messages, etc. in different Emacs windows.
• Bankiz is a multiplayer top-level fighting game in which your penguin kills other penguins with sundry weapons. This demonstrates my theory that in the absence of natural predators, penguins will develop ways of killing each other. The life bar on top of your penguin makes it look like the penguin is toting around a girder or something on its head.
• Genuts Cheese Indigestion Puzzle wins the silly name prize for this roundup, and also the triviality prize: the puzzles are all really easy. However, that mouse is indeed going to have some serious indigestion, and kudos to the game for recognizing that fact in the title. What if Pacman was like this? What if Pacman was one of us?
• DIE is "deathmatch with cars". I think this makes obvious the problem with every previous deathmatch game: you are not a car. This could be the first game with a "crush a mountain of Japanese steel" mode (of course, someone would have to write it, but that's never before stopped me proposing ridiculous modes).

[0] "Pseudo-RPG": TwenCen[1] Leonard/Andy term for computer games which have the trappings of traditional tabletop RPGs yet which are not actually RPGs. They're usually just tactical games. Not that there's anything wrong with that! There's no reason you couldn't implement an actual RPG in Agar, except for the inherent difficulty of doing role-playing with a software DM.

[1] Obvious nomenclature for this sort of stupid fake future slang, which I came up with last week while reading David Brin's Earth: "Newslang".

Eryops wasn't a thecodont, but a labyrinthodontid amphibian. Thecodonts, I gather, were reptiles.

Why did I think it was a euryops? Because of Trans-kingdom Speciation Through Typo Codon Insertion.

• Xrmap lets you view and zoom in on a hugely detailed vector map of the world as you cackle maniacally like a B-movie villain. Changelog includes the phrase "Xrmap no longer complains if the CIA_WDB2.jpd vector data are not found." Sunclock, by the same author, gives an interface to various other maps of the world. Both very cool.
• Process Change Detection System watches for new processes on your machine.
• Draco is a web application framework. I think there was some talk of it at PyCon. [Hey, what about PyCon?-ed. I'm working on it.]
• Continuing the "useful thing ported to Python" trend, cracklib has been ported to Python.
• Albumshaper, one of the myriad of photo album software packages. I'm putting it here because I should at least *try* other photo album software packages before deciding that I don't understand them and writing my own.
• DPROG is a German industrial band, and also a language which generates C++ implementations of algorithms using dynamic programming (Dynamic Programming: The Coolest Thing Ever™).
• Autodia turns source code or other text into Dia diagrams. It can't be more aggravating than dragging boxes around in Dia! [0]
• SCons is a build system written in Python.
• CVSTrac is a bug tracker that lives on top of CVS.
• netrick is a colorful text-based Web browser that features partial ECMAScript support. They said it shouldn't be done!

[0] This is not really a problem with Dia. It's a problem with having to drag boxes aroud.

I fully believe that flowers spring from concrete wherever you walk. It totally works!

Huzzah!

Some samples:

• Strata pictures for my mother: 1 2 3 4
• Kevin curses the sun, which vows revenge.
• A nice little valley with an inlet to the ocean.
• Kevin and I spent much of our daytime free time trying make it to the bunker on top of the hill. This is as close as we got (we didn't have a whole lot of free time).
• Caution! Low voltage!
• A splendid sunset. Kind of showy if you ask me.
• I call this island "Sleeping Walrus Island".
• We kept a close eye on San Francisco.
• Remember the site of entrances to hell in and around the UK? Well, let me tell you that we have some pretty fine entrances to hell right here in the States. 1 2
• Kevin was bold enough to brave the entrance to hell.
• Here's Kevin in hell, which turns out to be pretty much as depicted in the old DOS game Doom.
• We also found hell's loading dock. Here I am in my tacky shirt at the loading dock.
• The food was generally pretty good.
• Another sunset picture to keep you on your toes.
• At one point the trail just stopped, due to having been washed away in a mudslide or something. Kevin and I collaborated on this daring depiction of the drop, a picture which makes it look like there is no drop whatsoever. Is it something about my camera? Every time I take a picture of a precarious drop, the resulting picture makes the drop look not that precarious at all.

I believe I saw those strata on a geology class field trip when I took geology at DeAnza. What's scary is there are more of them in the ocean, which only show at low tide. They make a dangerous reef if you were a Spanish galleon.

I have a feeling that the cause is that your camera has a very wide depth of field. If the stuff beyond the drop were out of focus, and the precipice itself in focus, then the precarioutiveness might thus be captured.

We're simple folk 'round these parts. We just point and shoot. Sometimes we zoom.

Some call Jason the patron saint of UML users. I think that rather than being the patron saint of any particular thing, he should be canonized as the PatronSaint design pattern itself.

The reason your precarious picture doesn't look precarious is perhaps a lack of context: you know that the drop is steep, but there is no non-steep stuff in the shot. If you had got the horizon in there it might have looked more precipitous.

Incidentally this is why everyone who stands at the bottom of a building and takes a shot up at it is disappointed with the lack of looming in the final image. You need some context.

Someone get this man a cable talk show!

Members of Congress.
They've got powers.
They fight crime.

I call it "The Supermajority".

All of this is completely irrelevant to the fact that NewsBruiser now has an entry in the prestigious FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory (UNESCO? They just got involved, apparently.)

[0] Actually, I am kidding. Before my initial NewsBruiser submission was approved, I was interrogated by the Freshmeat admins as to what was so great about NewsBruiser that they should put up another pointer to a weblog program. I think this is a good idea, and I think Freshmeat's reputation for being a repository of pointers to useless, unfinished software is mainly because they don't want to go back and deal with all the packages they added in pre-interrogation days. I check the new packages on Freshmeat every couple weeks for Software Roundup, and even the stuff I'm not interested in is pretty original. Compare SourceForge, which doesn't even care.

"Fellas, we've got some new Joes just out of boot camp. I'd like you to give a big G.I. Joe welcome to Blowtorch, who'll be heading up our pyrotechnics efforts.

"Also new to our team is Cross Hair, an expert sniper. He'll be working on disabling the COBRA network of spy satellites.

"And this is Private First Class Jimmy Hightower. He's eleven feet tall, and he speaks Navajo."

• Freshmeat is the one that everyone knows about, and the main source of my entries for Software Roundup. I have filters set up to show me new applications, and I clear out the list every couple of weeks. I'm not sure why other people don't do this; it's interesting and easy material for your weblog.
• The Linux Game Tome provides supplemental material for Game Roundup.
• The aforementioned FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory is practically useless for Software Roundup purposes, but since AFAIK a third party has to deem a package "useful" to get it included, the average package is of higher quality than elsewhere.
• Sweetcode updates very rarely, and if you check Freshmeat you can usually find the programs before they get to Sweetcode, but because every Sweetcode program is unique or innovative in some way, it's a great place to browse.
• O'Reilly's Open Source Directory is the runner-up. It is aggravating (but not particularly difficult) to navigate for Software Roundup purposes, and it has few applications listed.

Any that I missed? (I'm deliberately excluding Windows software sites like download.com.com because 1) I am a snob, and 2) I prefer linking to Linux software because that's what I use.)

[Addendum: I update this weblog entry as I remeber or discover more application directories. Do not let this disturb you. Just think of it as a Wiki that only I can edit.]

• Scapy is a Python tool for packet manipulation.
• drumpiler is a drum machine program with a little mini-language that includes functions. Sure beats writing a Perl script to generate Csound, like I did for Annoying Techno Music.
• emo2html is a script that turns a file generated in Emacs outline mode into HTML. Actually, here's otl2html, which is in Python, which trumps Perl.
• Wheel 'O Yum [sic] is an elaborate scheme to make it easier to decide at which nearby restaurant to eat, yet it merely solves the problem of negotiating between persons; individual people are still supposed to vote for their preference, and what if they can't decide? Argh!
• Brainfucker, a compiler for brainfuck. Transforms to assembler, C++, or an executable, all in <3k.
• Simple Blog System is written in PHP. It has a cool theme which I might ask to copy.
• darcs is one of those experimental version control systems (written in Haskell!).
• monotone is another experimental version control system which is probably the closest I'll ever get to "Napster As A Version Control System"; rather than keep the code in a central repository, everyone keeps their own copy of the code and decides from whom they'll accept patches.
• Kodos, which was recently reviewed in LWN, is an interactive tool for defining regular expressions. Because Python uses basically the same regular expression syntax as everything else, it's not Python-specific, but unless you're into Python it's unlikely you'll put up with installing all the software on which Kodos depends.
• TinyTools is a bunch of handy add-ons for Emacs.
• Capon is another Python build system. Okay, Python is the best for build systems! It's the best for everything! You win! Torment me no more, spirit!
• simplisite is one of those programs for generating a static HTML website with a consistent look and feel. I should start using something like this instead of the horrible Noodle-esque thing I currently use.

• Zinc is an IF interpreter front-end (it does both TADS and Z-code) with network support, so that people can connect across the network to collaborate on a game.
• There's a new Celestia, which now comes with a user's guide.
• Langband is an Angband clone written in Lisp, which aims to contain existing and new Angband variants as plugins (what has happened to the good old technique of just cramming every single feature into the same game?). The Langband logo also demonstrates the debilitating effect on Roman discipline of imported Greek culture.

1. He now has a weblog.

   Still, Mike Godwin is not someone who exaggerates the seriousness of a situation. Slashdot does, though!

2. He sent me and Kevin a link to reviews of a hot sauce written by people who have not yet recovered from the hot sauce.

   I WANT TO SEE THE PEOPLE IN PERSON WHO SAY THIS IS NOT HOT I WANT TO SEE THEM BURST INTO FLAMES AS THEY LIE ABOUT THIS VOLCANO EXTRACT IN A BOTTLE.

   I envision Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf saying that about some wimpy Tabasco.

(Cf. the elephant.)

May I help you with your cell phone axjtsizpfb uygt

The candidates will need to be CORGI registered...

PS: PAP is the second game I know of in which feature creep is a bogeyman.

The food here is okay; the decor, kitschy. I can't say how the apricot pie is, because it turns out I don't like apricot pie.

Back on the road.

I have not looked into whether or not this actually exists, because the longer I put it off, the longer I can pretend it exists in some dusty section of the HTML spec. I assume it doesn't exist because I can already feel the people who are in charge of adding things to the HTML spec breathing down my neck, telling me to use one user-visible control per hyperlink destination. Don't make me use Javascript!

Also gave a bunch of old stuff I don't need to the Salvation Army. It's Get Rid Of Stuff Daze here at Leonard's house, because I might be moving soon. More as the situation develops.

"You'll like our crust!"

i was very, very well read in my youth, before i forgot everything. all of that reading did not prevent me from trading 10 or so ratty paperback editions for one fine hardbound, sewn-in-signatures, best translation/commentary extant version of a personal favorite, over and over again. i was ruthless and systematic.

the result is that i have a personal library reflecting well below 10% of the harder books i've read, mostly in immaculate editions that quite naturally show no sign of use. the ones i chose to get the immortal versions of tended to be the ones that spoke most to me at the time. i wish i had the scribbled-up profusion around to remind me of important things from time to time, now that i'm older.

I'm noticing the same sort of thing, except that I buy good copies of things, new or used, at random intervals, and the rest of my library is distilled at intervals from a large number of cheap paperbacks to a smaller number of different but equally cheap paperbacks. Most of the stuff I want to keep is well-known and public domain, hence already on the web, and I'm not sentimental about paper, so it can go. Exceptions for particular authors I'm collecting, like Chesterton, and my awesome hardcover copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which is available Gutenberg-style but which I hang on to with the slim justification that there are woodcuts not reproduced in the ASCII edition.

Second, Todd on links with multiple targets:

there is a specification called xlink that matches your description for links across xml-based documents, including xhtml (1.1 and later) potentially: http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/ . like most xml fabulousness, the existence of some how-to documentation, schema etc., does not imply the existence, much less wide deployment of software designed to support said fabulousness. mozilla does support some xlinkish stuff - not sure whether the bits you describe: http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/xml/#linking . in the meantime, there's javascript. <shudder/>

I've barely played with Mozilla's XLink support, preferring to waste this evening writing a syndication feed file writer for NewsBruiser, but the functionality covered by Mozilla's single test case didn't fill me with confidence. Here's an article on XLink which I find only slightly opaque. Perhaps there's hope for me yet; it took me years to comprehend XML, but once I finally figured out the left angle bracket, the right angle bracket was easy.

[From time to time, "Software Roundup" will appear in a bonus edition, evaluating according to obscure criteria the members of an overly bifurcated software category. Only Crummy Premium subscribers ($24.95/year) will be spared this exclusive content.]

By my side-of-the-envelope calculation, there are more Python templating systems than there are Rocks 'n' Diamonds levels. I've skimmed some web pages and tried to get a few of them to work, so I am now an expert on Python templating systems, at least as regards whether or not I can use them in NewsBruiser.

Here are my showstoppers for any module I might want to incorporate into NewsBruiser. The first two are born of my design goal of making NewsBruiser work for anyone whose hosting service has Python available and who can unzip a tarball. The last one is due to the unfortunate reality of software licensing. I've looked at the template systems with these showstoppers in mind, which means that often I'll simply dismiss a possibly deserving module without really looking at it; this is not a reflection on the module.

• Not-obviously-fixable incompatibility with Python 1.5
• Requires separate installation step
• BSD-incompatible license

First, the ones I can't or won't use:

• Cheetah: Beautiful Velocity-like syntax. Seems written for Python 2.2 from beginning to end, unfortunately, and it's a lot of code. Otherwise I would definitely use this.

• Zebra: XML-based. Somewhat language-independent, which is a cool idea. GPLed, so I can't use it.

• PSP I couldn't get to work.

• empy is GPLed.

• htmltmpl is Python 2-specific.

• XIST looks like a good idea but is Python 2.

[STOP PRESS! Crummy Premium subscription now only $24.91/year! Such a deal!]

• Yet Another Python Templating Utility works, but I really don't like its template format. XYAPTU is much better-looking, but contains a 2.2ism which I can't get rid of. If I could make it 1.5-compatible, XYAPTU would be a contender; stay tuned.

• PyMeld has some of the control flow logic in Python, but not as much as template (see below). It's 2.2-only, though.

• Wasp is a whole web framework, and the syntax is acceptable, but again: Python 2.

Now, the actual contenders:

• template has all the control flow logic in Python rather than in the template, which I don't like, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't do the job.

• AHTS has a slightly awkward API, and the examples don't work as is, but otherwise seems to work. It looks like it only accepts variable substitution by name, though.

• tinpy took just a little work to get working in 1.5. It has a ?SP-like syntax, which is okay, but you can't access members or make method calls from within templates; it has to be variable references, dictionary lookups, etc. Otherwise, I think this is the best one for me.

So, unless I find something else that's better (do you know of any?), or I can get XYAPTU to work, I'm probably going to hack up AHTS or tinpy to fit my needs.

I wouldn't mind so much, except that I have photographic evidence that Amazon is showing this same page to everyone, and trying to pawn it off as my work. For shame!