News You Can Bruise

I'm sure there's something you're supposed to do ahead of time to prevent Python from choking on those characters, and that I'll hear all about it soon, but this is still useful because you can use it to get rid of the Microsoft smart quotes. Everyone hates Microsoft smart quotes, right?

That made me curious as to what other programming language names you could give a kid. Despite (or perhaps because of) my own better judgement I am limiting the list to reasonable names and avoiding names like "Bullfrog" that I like, and individual people might like, but that a couple would never agree on.

Girls' names: Ada, Alice, Alma, April, Aura, Bliss, Charity, Claire, Eleya, Ember, Emerald, Envy, Euphoria, Ewe, Friend (if you're a Puritan), Glee, Godiva, Hope, Io, Ivy, Jade, Joy, Juliet, Lakota, Leta, Libra, Lua, Maple, Mary, Maude, Mila, Miranda, Muriel, Onyx, Pandora, Pe[a]rl, Ruby, Sally, Theta.

Boys' names: Ace, Al, Alan, Alf, Alvyn, Bob, Cecil, Chuck, Crow, Darwin, Dino, Dylan, Euclid, Heron, Hugo, Igor, Kermit (not really a programing language, but it's got an embedded scripting language), Kid, Mercury, Oberon, Occam, Pascal, Peter, Pike, Rene, Rex[x], Slate, Saul, Tom, Yorick, Zeno.

Exhibit A. In the US, when you order an "x salad sandwich" (eg. "chicken salad sandwich"), you get a sandwich made of x salad, which is x mashed up with mayonnaise and celery and other unsavory things. I'd never order any kind of "x salad sandwich" here.

But in the UK "x salad sandwich" means "do you want a sad little slice of tomato and piece of lettuce on your sandwich, or do you just want the bread and cheese and meat and whatever?" And clearly you want the x salad sandwich in preference to the x sandwich, because you need that tomato and vegetable to lubricate the sandwich which is otherwise pretty dry or slathered with some obscure Qwghlmnian sauce.

Exhibit B. I ran into some confusion between "chocolate" meaning a candy bar and meaning an individual, unwrapped piece of chocolate candy and meaning a piece of candy in general. I never did figure this out, and in the end I just went chocolate-less rather than navigate what seemed to be another country's "Want a Coke?" "Sure, I'll have a Sprite" issue. Now that I think about it it's kind of weird that it was easier for me to buy chocolate in French in Belgium than in English in England. Anyway, can anyone clear up this point? It's possible I was merely faced with a surly or inexpert cashier.

Silver Lining Department: the SCOWL Word List seems to have a very high percentage of real words, as opposed to strings found in trusted pieces of text. Maybe I'll grab it for the Eater.

Sour Grapes Department: Who cares what words yield other words when ROT13ed? The real question is, what words are composed of a string concatenated to its ROT13 equivalent? There are five common words that fit this vital criteria, not counting proper nouns:

• an
• boob
• earn
• near
• vain

Also the abbreviations "Re", "PC", and "SF", and the editor "vi".

There must be little cartoons where the lines of ideograms frolic and interact in vocabulary-building ways.

The new theory is that the hippie Muppet is trying to communicate with the Snowths, but the only thing he can get across in their language is the phrase "Manahmanah", a context-free friendly expression that translates roughly to "Hey hey!" So the lyrics of the song, translated, go something like this:

Hey hey! (It's good to see you)
Hey hey! (I said it's good)
Hey hey! (It's good to see you, to see you, to see you, it really is a good thing that you came)

Then the hippie Muppet whips out his Advanced Snowth and starts talking about how lovely the Snowth country is, and asking where are the most beautiful landscapes, and they can't understand a word he's saying.

Perl farm woman. I'll cast you to array. Perl farm woman. Cast you to scalar too. Perl farm woman. Don't you know I'll cast to hash... hash!

PS: some people write a transliteration of their name in Chinese characters and think they're cool. I think I'm cool because Steve wrote a made-up translation of my website's name into Chinese.

• vainglorious
• mouthfeel

Update: You could make the Enterprise theme song a lot more bearable by replacing key lyrics with old episode titles from these lists:

'Cause I got dark side of heart
Goin' gorgeous transfiguration
I got Earth martial law
I can Rom's mutiny
I got terrible people-weapon
No one's gonna stolen Spock's brain
I can nature regression
I got dark (I got dark)
I got daaaaark...
Dark side of heart

Also check out HQ9+, from the same author.

Leonard: 凹! 凹!
Chinese Person #1: What is he saying?
Chinese Person #2: It appears he is saying "Concave! Concave!"
Chinese Person #1: Look, he is writing it down!
Chinese Person #2: What brushwork!
Leonard: 美国使馆在哪里是?

Fitz and I [kfogel] were just speculating about what various programming languages sound like when you drop them.

Fortran       crunch
Perl          *thud* +bounce+ ~quiver~ (fading into silence)
C++           loud and messy, like if you took everything in a
              junkyard, connected it all together with cable, and
              dropped the whole mess from a cliff.
Lisp/Scheme   same sound as dropping a slinky
Java          no sound, already been dropped

The Inevitable Update: From Brendan.

PHP            sproing sproing ("stupid blasted") sproing ("off my 
               lawn") sproing
Python         Just like anything else, if air was Jell-O
Smalltalk      "Ouch!"
Pascal         *Crash.*  Now, did you notice how that sounded?  If you 
               were actually dropping something, it would have sounded 
               a lot like that.  Let's try again.
COBOL          (THUD)
Visual Basic  "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you drop me."

I talked with Moshe Zadka a bit after my talk. I talked to some other people as well but I bring up Moshe because there were several talks he was going to give yesterday but he didn't get here in time. These include his "text steganography" talk and his "Writing web clients in Python" talk. I've asked him for copies of the notes for each, and they'll be part of the inevitable EuroPython roundup, coming sometime next week to this space. I was able briefly to recharge my battery, but it's only at 50% and I want to write another rambling, incomprehensible entry tomorrow, so I'll sign off now.

Best talk so far: a talk about PyPy, a Python interpreter written in Python, which is currently up to 20,000 times slower than the one written in C. Armin Rigo, author of PyPy, also wrote his own presentation softwareusing PyGame, which presented his presentation as a brainstorm diagram that he navigated as he gave his talk. It's only a matter of time until Steve Jobs steals that idea.

I went to Amsterdam. I've been hanging out a lot with Jarno and his girlfriend PrustiTaina, because their travel plans have overlapped with mine to an unbelievable extent (eg. they planned to go to Amsterdam the same day I planned to, they chose the same hotels that I did, etc.) I also ate a waffle. My French is only good for reading and not for hearing what people are saying, nor for talking because when I try to talk to someone in French they just respond in English.

Finally, the vowels in my phrasebook have all sorts of weird lines on top of them, like sprigs of linguistic parsley. So Kevin and I are starting our own phrasebook, dealing with situations likely to occur specifically in Belgium, and with no funny accents on the characters to confuse things. The English phrases are Kevin's; the French, my half-assed translations.

"Give me the large waffle with herring."
"Je voudrais du grand gaufre des harengs."

"Please place the kippers under my shoe in the morning."
"S'il vous plait, mettez les kippers sous mes chausseures le matin."

"You heard me; you know where the damn kippers go."
"Tu m'entende; tu sait ou vont les kippers!"

"Get out of my way; I'm heading to France."
"Allez! Allez! Je vais au France!"

More similar word lists at wordlist.sourceforge.net, including a list with part-of-speech data which made me waste time this evening writing an eater that replaces a word with another word of the same part of speech. It's not up yet because I'm not yet sure how good it is.

Of course, time has once again left unicode.org in the dust, as there are now websites that show you Unicode characters in your web browser. Take heart, though: I don't yet have a font for Byzantine Musical Symbols, so for that it's gotta be the PDF.

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.