News You Can Bruise for 2005 May

New Beautiful Soup, with minor fixes and real Python 2.2 support. Now going to see Hitchhiker's with Sumana and Zack.

I'd been meaning to do this for a while, but the impetus for me actually doing it was that I ended up writing one of those while loops in the screen-scraping script I wrote for the vaporware Productivity Hacks book. With the new stuff in 2.1.0 I could trim a line of code from the manuscript and make it easier to explain.

In fact, Beautiful Soup 2.0 (and the RSS feed builder mentioned earlier, which is going to have a life of its own once I finish the hack) was done for the same reason: so I wouldn't have to explain in print what this complicated code was supposed to do. This is the true power of documentation: it forces you to make things work in a way that's easier to explain. Assuming you care about the people who are reading your documentation, I mean.

Sometimes they get married and everything's fine. Sometimes they get married but then eaten by a fish or a heron or a cat. Sometimes they get eaten in the sixth verse for no real reason. It's like a probability distribution of all the different ways the lives of the frog and mouse could end up. They probably got eaten, but I prefer the versions where they don't. Cause having them get eaten just seems like

I'm tired of singing this song to you, mm-hmm
I'm tired of singing this song to you, mm-hmm
I'm tired of singing this song to you
They all got eaten by a bird, and away it flew
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, the end

Especially when it happens in the sixth verse.

Big problems setting portion expectations. We got salads and they were tiny (and tasty). Then the entrees were enormous (and tasty, though a little salty). We held off on the entrees so we'd have room for dessert, and then the desserts were tiny (and not good).

Oh, I need to review the really good place we went to in Provo. Later.

The conceit is way too complicated, like a movie version of Pee-Wee's Playhouse that spends forty-five minutes building up Pee-Wee Herman as an eccentric cyberneticist who after his wife leaves him decides to build a strange playhouse with sentient talking chairs, etc. There's a theme song that explains the idea, but before that you get a thirty second-intro to the theme song that puts it in context, and by the time it's all over you've lost a good chunk of the air time.

Basically, four slackers are compelled to dub English versions of old Bollywood and kung fu films, but they don't have any translated scripts, so they just make up whatever story seems to fit the action. The show is half dubbed film clips and half skits like the ones before the movie on MST3K. Sumana originally thought the skits were dumb and fast-forwarded through them, but they're actually pretty funny and often clever.

Uncle Morty's Dub Shack is on the poorly-named Imaginasian TV, the new basic-cable answer to local Chinese channels. They run an episode practically every day, and it's not the big watching-a-movie investment of an MST3K episode. You just get the ten minutes of the movie about which the show's creators could make up the funniest story.

I've decided that when I see a word I don't recognize on a restaurant menu, I'll write it down to remember it, and expose its true meaning here on NYCB. First, the only cooking term so far I've learned from menus: coulis is a sauce made in a blender and strained to make it seedless and very smooth. In restaurants it is usually used to garnish a dessert, and is inevitably made from two fruits: raspberries plus something really off-the-wall like passionfruit. Using three fruits in a coulis would clutter up the menu. Using one makes it seem cheap.

Also, jicama, a food I first saw on restaurant menus. Jicama is a South American root vegetable that has the texture of an apple. I can't decide whether or not I like it.

• 1 tablespoon butter
• 2 onions worth of aromatics
• Salt
• 5 cups broth
• 2 lbs potatoes, quartered
• 2 ears corn, removed from cob
• Oregano
• Thyme
• 4 oz blue cheese
• Pepper

Melt butter in soup pan. Add aromatics and salt, and sweat. Add broth, potatoes, corn, and herbs. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, for 25 minutes. Get out the stick blender and blend it. Stir in the blue cheese. Add pepper to taste. Yum.

For the record, the aromatics I used were one onion, part of a leek, and two stalks of baby garlic. Yes, it's Clean Out The Fridge Daze here at Leonard's house.

Still to plant: canteloupe, pumpkin. Already planted: potatoes, rhubarb, garlic.

My mother says there's no way to know what to grow: you just have to plant things and see if they die or not. Nothing grew when I planted last year, but I planted way too late and also the soil in my backyard was all dead. Not even weeds were growing there. I don't have that problem anymore!

I probably never would have come up with the idea for this module if it hadn't been for the need to compress the large feed-scraping problem into a small "Hacks" entry. I've never done so much work for a hundred dollars. (However, I have done a whole lot more work for nothing.) You are the privileged recipients; my feed-scraping has never been easier than with this module. Though sometimes I get the feeling that scraping web pages into RSS feeds is just an obscure hobby of me and a few others.

Update: Actually I have done more work for less than a hundred dollars. When I was about 10, I dug up a huge tree stump in the side yard. It took me most of the summer, on and off. I think I got fifty dollars for it.

tying steps my
pretty fly
human prison side reference anything fly

Check out this thing that finds paths between Wikipedia entries. I love this kind of thing, and this is the most impressive one I've seen. It's as fast as Downhill even though it's probably got an order of magnitude more data to match up.

A website, huh?

On the plus side, strawberries are delicious.

This site is titled Predator at the Chessboard, and is decorated with dinosaurs; yet the dinosaurs pictured are herbivores. Is this not a contradiction of some sort? In fact it isn't; and this, patient reader, for two reasons.

Yes, now it is the plants who are the prey.

Video rental time! We got The Great Dictator and the original Ladykillers. The Great Dictator was alternatively hilarious and bizarrely sentimental. You don't see movies with names like The Great Dictator anymore. I miss that.

Oh, one weird thing about this movie. At the very very beginning there's a scene during World War I and Charlie Chaplin is playing a German soldier. So you think he's playing fake-Hitler, because of course real-Hitler was a soldier in World War I and used this to his political advantage later. But apparently this was not common knowledge in 1940, because in the first scene Charlie Chaplin is playing the other guy in the movie, the everyman barber who just looks like fake-Hitler, and it's incredibly disorienting. You're expecting in the first scene the kind of vicious anti-Hitler humor you end up getting later on in the movie, because c'mon this guy is Baby Fake-Hitler, but he's played as a garden-variety buffoon, the Tramp, not fake-Hitler at all.

We just finished The Ladykillers and it too was great. Truly this is the weekend we struck comedy gold. About halfway through I realized that Alec Guinness' mannerisms in that movie are just the same as Danny O'Brien's mannerisms. I expect the movie would be even funnier if you watched the whole thing imagining it's Danny O'Brien planning the heist.

I inherited a corduroy jacket from my grandfather, which I wear sometimes when I go out. It's great because it makes me classy. Without the jacket I haven't shaved and I'm wearing ratty jeans and a T-shirt I got for 25 cents at a yard sale. With the jacket I get let into restaurants.

Back to working on article.

The book is a pretty good introduction to the problems of mind and identity; I had not previously heard of the closest-container schema for numerical identity, and it's interesting but it doesn't make me feel any better about going through the transporter. Plus this book introduces a great term which I think deserves wider use: "recruited matter".

So it's a lot better book than I thought it would be, and not so aggressively "that is impossible" as The Physics of Star Trek, which I must have also somehow gotten for free because I wouldn't have bought it. These books apparently just fall off the backs of trucks into my lap. I believe Sumana is involved.

For instance, The Day of Days we get this little denoument:

"What I want to say is—will you be my guest at the theatre tonight?"

"You are the one woman in a thousand who knows enough to look before she shoots!"

Facing her, he lifted his scarlet visor.

He was Red November.

And in Little Eve Edgarton this madcap comic gem:

"Music! Flowers! Palms! Catering! Everything!"

"I am riding," she murmured almost inaudibly

"I would therefore respectfully suggest as a special topic of conversation the consummate cheek of—yours truly, Paul Reymouth Edgarton!"

"Your paper-doll book?" stammered Barton

"Don't delay me!" she said, "I've got to make four hundred muffins!"

Suddenly full comprehension broke upon him and he fairly blurted out his astonishing information

"You're nice," he said. "I like you!"

"Any time that you people want me," suggested Edgarton's icy voice, "I am standing here—in about the middle of the floor!"

Man, four hundred muffins. Almost makes me want to read the book. Actually I just skimmed it and that one's not too bad.

Why is this such a common feature of mortgage spam? Are they trying to trick the people who are trying to get a mortgage but haven't heard back from the bank? A sort of phishing applied to customer poaching?

I have from the beginning felt that my paper is a much better contribution to the field of computer science than the Ultra Gleeper itself. The Gleeper, like all flesh, is frail and has shortcomings, but the paper exists in the realm of ideas, and solves all the damn problems and crowns me king of the world already.

Regrettably I have used this fact as an excuse to not work on making the Ultra Gleeper easier to install and use. I am a mess, I have writing assignments and even despite that I'm lazy and don't do work (this is also the reason I have not responded to your email). Also I beat myself up about the absolute amount of time I waste, even though by relative standards I'm a pretty productive guy.

Oh yeah, as long as I'm touting accomplishments that just highlight my lack of follow-through. blogs.gnome.org has started using NewsBruiser for their user weblogs, and they say nice things about me that I don't think are deserved. Also Benjamin Kahn ported one of those standard weblog themes (ie. one of the ones you see everywhere on weblogs of all shapes and sizes) to NewsBruiser. It looks nice!

Second, Josh has started a reading group for The Art of Computer Programming. His aim: use group dynamics and the fear of failure to make the members of his pact keep reading the thing and working the exercises. I always knew peer pressure was a technology capable of substantial non-infringing use.

Oh, the reason we wanted to go in the first place was my mother heard that there's this guy who does topiary dinosaurs, and we wanted to see that. He was not there. There are topiary dinosaurs online, though.

Here's a rendition of my two upper front teeth with the gumline:

 _-___
 |_|_|

As you can see from my state-of-the-art diagram, the gumline above the mutant tooth is higher than the rest of my gumline. That pesky tooth is weird enough to guarantee I'll never be in a cereal commercial, but it's not a big deal. This is where the upsell came in. The reason it was weird was that I'd think cosmetic surgery might be used to restore my gumline to the population average, making it look like this:

 _____
 |_|_|

But it seemed like my dentist was proposing raising the other tooth's gumline, bringing me further from the population average for the sake of local symmetry:

 _---_
 |_|_|

And making me look like a rabbit. No thanks. Of course, we've already established that I know nothing about teeth or how they're supposed to go into the mouth of Homo sapiens, so maybe that gumline isn't as weird as it looks.