UPDATE: Fixed link, this time hosted on nbc.com. Thanks for the pointer, Chris!
Be sure to watch the leading ad, people. This is what the writers went on strike for!
Like a lot of folks, I use a ‘toread’ tag on del.icio.us to keep track of things I want to read, but just don’t have the time.
The other day I noticed I currently had 270 items to read, the oldest going back to ~2005.
Clearly my eyes were bigger than my stomach. Er, than my eyes. Wait… nevermind.
Anyway.
Oddly the best time to catch is up on Online reading is when I’m offline. Specifically, when I’m on a long plane ride.
Instead of waiting for the airlines to figure out the whole Internet-on-a-plane thing, and since I have some pretty long flights coming up myself, I decided to hack something together using Perl & wget. After all, wget does a lot of the heavy lifting already, so really it should be just a matter of gluing wget together with delicious.
With that, I give you mirror-toread.pl.
You can run it as
./mirror-toread.pl <username> <password>
It’ll take a while to run the first time, as it throttles requests to 1/second.
Afterwards, you should have an index.html & a ‘Toread’ directory containing whatever you’ve tagged with ‘toread’.
I should mention a pretty gnarly hack, done in an hour or so. It ain’t pretty. And it ain’t perfect.
I had wanted to find the “next” link for articles paginated, but I realized it’s be easier to bookmark the “print” version in the future. Video and the like isn’t handled well. And so on.
But hopefully it’s good enough. We’ll find out next week when I head to Europe (where the history comes from).
“In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda. I do not believe we should be too quick to criticize the actions of a belligerent nation. There is always the question whether we, ourselves, would do better under similar circumstances.
…
“It is not only our right, but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively, and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it.
…
“The campaigns of the war show only too clearly how difficult it is to force a landing, or to maintain an Army, on a hostile coast.
…
“When these facts are cited, the interventionists shout that we are defeatists, that we are undermining the principles of democracy…
…
“I say it is the interventionist in America, as it was in England, and in France, who gives comfort to the enemy. I say it is they who are undermining the principles of democracy when they demand that we take a course to which more than 80 percent of our citizens are opposed. I charge them with being the real defeatists, for their policy has led to the defeat of every country that followed their advice since this war began. There is no better way to give comfort to an enemy than to divide the people of a nation over the issue of foreign war. There is no shorter road to defeat than by entering a war with inadequate preparation. Every nation that has adopted the interventionist policy of depending on some one else for its own defense has met with nothing but defeat and failure.
…
“When history is written, the responsibility for the downfall of the democracies of Europe will rest squarely upon the shoulders of the interventionists who led their nations into war uninformed and unprepared. With their shouts of defeatism, and their disdain of reality, they have already sent countless thousands of young men to death… And they have led this country, too, to the verge of war.
…
“War is not inevitable for this country. Such a claim is defeatism on the true sense. No one can make us fight abroad unless we ourselves are willing to do so. No one will attempt to fight us here if we arm ourselves as a great nation should be armed. Over a hundred million people in this nation are opposed to entering the war. If the principles of democracy mean anything at all, that is reason enough for us to stay out. If we are forced into a war against the wishes of an overwhelming majority of our people, we will have proved democracy such a failure at home that there will be little use fighting for it abroad.
…
“The time has come when those of us who believe in an independent American destiny must band together and organize for strength. We have been led toward war by a minority of our people. This minority has power. It has influence. It has a loud voice. But it does not represent the American people.’
– Charles Lindbergh, April 23rd, 1941
The long rumored layoffs at Yahoo seem to be underway. It’s a sad day, even for those of us no longer with Yahoo. It seems once you bleed yellow & purple, it’s with you for life.
Since a lot of former co-workers still tune in to my blog, give me a holler if you know someone looking. We’ve got a lot of diverse, interesting projects afoot at Ticketmaster and we’re looking for a bunch of kick-ass engineers to join us.
Interesting article over on Reason.com: Does Climate Change Skepticism Merit Jail?
David Suzuki, environmental and a former leader of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, wants to put people in jail for denying global warming.
“Think like me or you go to jail.”
You know, some days I’m glad I’m conservative and other days, I’m really glad.
You know I feel bad for? The software developers that work for the IRS.
It hadn’t occured to me until I saw this:
IRS has targeted Feb. 11, as the potential starting date for taxpayers to begin submitting the five-related returns affected by the legislation. The February date allows the IRS enough time to update and test its systems to accommodate the changes without major disruptions to other operations related to the tax season.
Think how screwy the tax code. Nutty exception & clauses left & right.
You requirements are established by a horrible committee — the U.S. Congress. You get no say in requirements (you’re a programmer, not a Senator!).
You work for the government and are paid government wages. Hell, you work for the IRS. So even your friends don’t like you.
You & all your coworkers live in constant fear of a “flat tax.”
Why do they do it? Why not quit & go work on Turbotax?
At least there, you’d get stock options.
UPDATE: In case it wasn’t clear, I have NOTHING but the highest regard for the these dedicated, determined, intelligent, hard-working individuals. Please please please, for the love of God, don’t audit me.
I recently stumbled on Project Euler, a series of various mathematical/programming challenges. A lot of them can be solved quite easily in Perl, such a problem 5:
What is the smallest number divisible by each of the numbers 1 to 20?
I’m sure there’s a more elegant solution, but I figured, heck that’d be easy to brute force. So I whipped up a few lines of Perl. Here’s my first pass:
#!/usr/bin/perl -wuse strict;
my $value = 0;
my @divsors = reverse(2 .. 20);EULER: while (1) {
$value += 20;
print “$value…\n” unless ($value % 1000000);for my $i (@divsors) {
next EULER if ($value % $i);
}last;
}
Anything like while(1) always makes me worry about an infinite loop, so I threw in the status line & watched it.
Happily, there was no infinite loop & it terminated.
0.0001 seconds later I realized what an idiot I was.
The programs goes through all the hard work of figuring out the value and then… well, nothing.
I forgot to add a line to print it out the final value.
So, in a nutshell, my first attempt worked — all the heavy lifting bits were correct — but it was worth naught as I overlooked a trivial bit.
Sadly, this is apt microcosm of my life.
A thought experiment on various November matchups…
Most Happy with Either: McCain vs. Obama
Least Happy with Either: Huckabee vs. Clinton
Most Lopsided Democratic Victory: Paul vs. Obama
Most Lopsided Republican Victory: McCain vs. Clinton
Your picks?
I’ll give you a moment to figure out why this is annoying & why my life sucks.
UPDATE: Wow, I have to give the hat tip to Erika for this and Barb for this. The crazy thing is I literally searched for hours. Thanks guys!
Today, I saw a homeless man, ragged shirt, jeans not just torn, but missing left leg fabric from the thigh down, crossing the street in front of my car, listening to an iPod.
When I completed my journey to Subway, a group of metalheads, clad in dark, demon-laden, metal shirts, sat at the table next to me debating & proposing new potential categories for Wheel of Fortune.
In other news, my car was broken into (again) this morning.
I was awoken by the landlord informing of the situation & asking me to check my car. As I drive a Jeep Wrangler, it looks more like it was a “unzipping” than a break-in. Luckily, as part of leaving for China, I stripped my car of various gadgets — notably my GPS — and had yet to put them back.
All-in-all, it looks like they rummaged through my backseat, stole some burned CDs & some loose change. Perhaps happy with their loot, they ignored my radio. Honestly, the biggest pain of it all was re-attaching the side & back window.
With similar rationale, I’m going to hit a CD store. I’ll stock up on a dozen or so $.99 CDs and leave them in the car. Hopefully, future thieves will be happy with a score they estimate at $100+, decide that’s enough & leave, leaving everything else alone.
