Now we can read my RSS feeds as a group

Blogger in draft (beta Blogger) has a new thing they're testing called Blog List. And I live on the edge, so I added it. It's over there ----->. Approximately. What's handy is instead of manually entering them all, you can import from Google Reader, which is another service I highly recommend, it's the first RSS reader I've ever liked. Anyway, with a laziness-enabling option like that, you know I used it. So I just imported all 29 feeds I have in Google Reader, they show up in the list in order of who's updated most recently.

Perry Band > (!Perry) Band

This isn't related to anything at all, I just happened to stumble across this on my hard drive. It's an audio clip of some halftime commentators at one of the football games my high school band played at, talking about how we're awesome. Because we are. Well, were. I'm not in it anymore, so we suck now :).

EDIT: There used to be embedded audio here, but it was crashing Firefox :'(. Feel free to go here though

PHP doesn't kill people, shitty programmers kill people

I'm reading a thing about security, and I found the canonical PHP example of why register globals is the worst thing ever:

if (authenticated_user())
{
$authorized = true;
}
if ($authorized)
{
include '/highly/sensitive/data.php';
}
?>

I've seen that so many times I have it memorized. Now, I don't program with register globals on, and there's really no reason to have it on, but seriously, show of hands. Who would ever write the above code? It's so obviously specious and yet nobody seems to notice. Assuming authenticated_user returns a boolean, everyone would write this:

$authorized = authenticated_user();

And magically, the problem is gone. Why would you ever have two branches that come back together with different variables released into the global namespace, that's just awful. Almost as bad as storing the user's username in a cookie and trusting it blindly, but obviously nobody would ever do that. I'm very worried about this field.

Targeted ads

This is short, but I keep finding stories about companies and their increasing invasions of our privacy in the name of profit. A lot of the stories tend to be about targeted advertising. Why doesn't everyone want targeted advertising? It seems like a win for everyone involved. Advertisers only pay to advertise to people that actually care about their product, the people that show the ads get paid more, and the people that see ads might actually be interested in the products they're seeing for once. Why don't we want that? Instead, we've got advertisers and ISPs spying on us while we complain about our right to privacy and they laugh and ignore us. Why should they have to spy on us? You'd think we'd be volunteering this information, if it means we get ads for stuff we actually vaguely care about.

House pwns Jeopardy

One of my professors, Dr. Richard House, was on Jeopardy tonight. And he won, because he's better than the other contestants. Plus all your professors. Combined.



EDIT: There used to be an embedded video here, but it was crashing Firefox :'(


So he'll be on again tomorrow. Go watch

EDIT: He won again, so go watch Monday. Thursday he won by $2, Friday he won by $3, which is an impressive increase percentage-wise.

EDIT: He owned the whole time on Monday until he lost in final Jeopardy. He's still better than all of you though.

If God is real he probably doesn't read my blog anyway

I've never read the Bible, or really paid much attention to any religions, I've found them patently stupid for as long as I can remember now, but this is basically my impression of how Christianity works:

God: "Jesus. JESUS! Get over here, I need you to do something"
Jesus: "Damn it Dad, what now?"
God: "HEY! I don't like that talk. Come over here, I'm not going to yell over the whole plane"
Jesus: "Fine. What?"
God: "Look, you know those humans I made? I messed up....er, I mean. I designed them to suck. Yeah, that's it. I designed them to sin. But sinning is against the rules I'm making them follow. But you see, I still want them to get into heaven. And I'm all powerful, I am. But I still can't let them in because they're sinners. Well, I could if I wanted to. But I can't. You following this?"
Jesus: "Uh . . . no. Why would you design them to sin if . . ."
God: "DID I TELL YOU YOU COULD TALK? It doesn't matter, just trust me, I know what I'm talking about, it's a whole "free will" thing. So I need a favor. I need you to go down to Earth"
Jesus: "Aww, no!"
God: "Shut it! You're going down to Earth, and you're going to let my crazy creations nail you to a cross, so then I can say we're even for all the sinning they do"
Jesus: ". . . That could not make less sense if you tried"
God: "Who's the omniscient one here? It makes sense, go do it. You'll just end up right back here anyway. Well, until the whole rising from the dead thing. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, for now just go convince them I'm God. I'm going to stay here. Don't worry, I've got this all timed to match up with their existing holidays, so when we convert them all to the true religion they won't have to change much. And make sure it's a cross, I've got stock in the people that make crosses, the industry is going to explode after this"

So yeah. I'm not a huge fan of religion either, if you couldn't tell by my rampant blasphemy. It's actually on the top of the hate list, even above Macs, which is an impressive accomplishment really, but Mac users don't make a habit of killing people that use other operating systems. Although I think they probably will one day, but even when they do, religion has a pretty big head start on them. I used to believe in the whole "let everyone believe what they will and respect each others beliefs" thing, but I got over that a while ago, now I just think they're all deluded.

I was searching for a couple of my favorite atheist quotes using the parts of them I could remember, and amazingly found pretty much all of them on the same page, which is handy. The last one is my all-time favorite and the inspiration for that thing above. It comes down to the rather succinct bumper-sticker friendly "God made me an atheist. Who are you to question his wisdom?"

• "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
  --Stephen Roberts


• "When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me."
  --Emo Philips


• "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
  --Epicurus


• "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
  --H. L. Mencken


• "Jesus' last words on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" hardly seem like the words of a man who planned it that way. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure there is something wrong here."
  --Donald Morgan


• Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
  Priest: "No, not if you did not know."
  Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
  --Annie Dillard, 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'


• "We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."
  --Gene Roddenberry

I also find this picture rather amusing:

Do you know what flavor your kid's lollipops are?

As far as I can tell, this story is in fact not an April Fools joke. Georgia has banned the sale of marijuana-flavored candy to minors. Not candy with marijuana in it, which is what I thought it was originally talking about. Candy that tastes like marijuana, with absolutely no actual drug content.

This entry is going to ignore the many, many arguments about the safety of marijuana compared to legal things like alcohol or nicotine, or how it's considered less addictive than caffeine. That doesn't even matter at the moment, we'll pretend marijuana is more deadly than decapitation. I'm also going to ignore the war on drugs altogether, which I think is the stupidest waste of money since . . . well, actually there are lots of stupid wastes of money in this country, I think there are whole websites dedicated to enumerating them. But I'm going to pretend that it is indeed the government's job to tell us what drugs we can and can't do like we're all 5 years old.

There's still two things so very wrong with this. First, why would you want marijuana-flavored candy? What's the point of it if you don't get high, it's like something that's cough syrup flavored but doesn't actually fix coughing (apologies to people that enjoy the taste of cough syrup, that analogy probably made no sense to you). Second, how is marijuana-flavored candy possibly leading to marijuana use? Apparently the theory is if kids eat the candy and don't die, they rationalize that marijuana must be equally safe. Personally, I'm a fan of letting all the kids that find no problem with this line of reasoning go for it, it's probably better for the planet as a whole anyway. I'm going to go get a water pistol and shoot myself in the head, and when nothing bad happens conclude that shooting myself in the head with a real gun must also be safe. They're calling it, and this is the part where I thought for sure I'd been had by an April Fools day prank, a "gateway candy". And the bill, and again I stopped to verify this isn't a joke and ended up looking up the actual bill to be absolutely sure, was introduced by a guy named Doug Stoner. I am not making this stuff up.

This is the biggest problem I have with Democrats and why I would be tempted to be a Republican if they weren't all so completely out of their minds that they've forgotten what being a Republican even means. Democrats love laws, we just cannot get enough of them. I don't believe the government should have laws telling us we can't smoke marijuana, but I can't see how anyone would believe the government should have laws telling us we can't eat candy.

April Fools Day

I considered a post about how Apple had finally won me over with their sexy interfaces and easy-to-access menu location, but I couldn't really make myself write a whole entry about it, even this sentence makes me feel a little ill. People have sent me lots of amusing April Fools Day things though. There's a ridiculously large list on Wikipedia if you want to look at more of them, these are just some I've seen.

• Google's Virgle, the first permanent colony on Mars


• Youtube's featured videos (they all go here)


• Kernel.org's switch to FreeBSD


• XBox's new gear


• WoW's Bard class


• LiveJournal's new advisory board member


• Kongregate's Kongai Launch


• Pirate Bay's move to the desert


• The Daily WTF's logo


• Woot's woot-off, which is the same item over and over


• YTMND's shutdown


• Art Lebedev's Defendius door chain. And people say Russians have no sense of humor


• ThinkGeek's Shrinter


• Opera's 106 Acid 3 score


• PCWorld's Save DOS campaign

What confuses me is the alarming number of rick rolls. It confuses me how 4chan has the power to cause these things, but it happens all the time.

I posted this with Ctrl+P

OK, try this. I think all browsers have a file menu; if your browser doesn't have a file menu, find one that does. Open the file menu. Done? Good job. Now, did you in any way touch the mouse? If you used the mouse to open the menu, you're doing something very wrong.

I was recently forced in class to read a thing about how wonderful the Mac menu system is. Seriously, I had to explain why Mac OS is clearly the superior operating system. For credit. I don't have the lecture material, but suffice to say Mac menus are awesome because the current window's menu is always at the top of the screen, so you can just fling your mouse to the top of the screen and easily click the menu. Now, obviously this ignores the whole still-need-to-position-horizontally problem, which I would think pretty much kills the time gain, but apparently studies say it really is faster. However, this also ignores the you're-using-completely-the-wrong-interface problem. The approximate order of increasing input device speed is:

1. Prayer


2. Mouse


3. Keyboard


4. Mind reading

The mouse has lots of useful applications, but my definition of "lots" is degrees of magnitude smaller than most people's. People used to watch me use computers in middle school and giggle that I never used the mouse, and while "never" is an overstatement it's fairly accurate compared to the rest of them. The mouse is stunningly overused, because people are too lazy to learn the keyboard ways to do stuff. You don't even have to bind your own shortcuts, just the default ways to do things will massively speed up your productivity.

If you need to run a program, Super+R opens the run dialog in Windows, Meta+F2 in GNOME. I can't remember the last time I manually opened a run dialog, and I almost never use a shortcut or a start menu item to launch a program, it takes forever. Super+D/Ctrl+Meta+D shows the desktop, although hopefully if you're doing this you're not going to need desktop shortcuts anymore so this won't come in handy very often. Here's one nobody seems to know: Super+Pause opens the System properties dialog. Never right click My Computer again. Want to open the start menu? There's a dedicated key on the keyboard for it. Stop clicking the start menu and hit the key with the pretty windows symbol on it. Then hit the first letter of the menu you want to jump to, P for programs, S for search (although Super+F will get you there faster anyway), etc. Just learning basic navigation keys for documents makes life so much easier. You don't need to be a vim ninja, just knowing that Ctrl+End will get you to the end of the document in most programs is helpful. Highlighting by holding Shift and an arrow? Hold down Control too and each arrow press will jump one word instead of one character.

Now, if you're feeling super crazy, you can set up your own hotkeys to do stuff. I don't know the canonical way to do this in Windows, but most programs come with their own way to deal with hotkeys. Under Linux I use XBindKeys, which lets you map keys to commands really easily. Here's one of my entries:

mpc toggle
Alt+Mod4 + space

When I hit Meta+Super+Space, it runs "mpc toggle", which pauses or unpauses my music. I have a bunch for MPD, a bunch of others for MPlayer (for videos), and a handful for miscellaneous other programs. For maximum fun, you can get peripherals. I have a Saitek Command Pad and a Griffin Powermate, and I use Gizmod to control both of them, which lets you write Python scripts to deal with input devices. In short: bonus hotkeys. Global hotkeying is much easier in Linux because everything is doable from the command-line, but I imagine a lot of this can be accomplished in Windows as well.

Side note: Coincidentally (I started writing this like a week ago when I had the evil lecture of mac-loving), there's an article on Coding Horror about how using the keyboard tends to take longer than using the mouse when learning a program. This is probably true, although with hints like letters underlined in menus I would think the keyboard would be able to keep up just about from the beginning. Nonetheless, once you know how to use the keyboard, it's always going to be faster, so if it's a program you use regularly it's definitely worth the effort. Google understands this, and all of their web applications have hotkeys built in, which is something incredibly lacking in web UIs for some reason. I hit Ctrl+S to save my draft of this entry, and Ctrl+P to publish it. In Google Reader (which i highly recommend), J and P jump to the next/previous entry in the list, and V opens the current selection in a new tab. There are other hotkeys, I don't remember them because I don't use them often, but just remembering two or three saves time.

All the cool kids hate Apple

There's an article on ITworld about how even Apple will be hated one day. When that day comes, I want to have this blog post on hand so I can point at it and say "See! I TOLD you they sucked. I hated Apple before it was cool to hate Apple"

Start?

This is going to be short, but this particular thing drives me crazy. At some point some anti-Microsoft person noticed that to shut down your machine, you click the Start button. They apparently thought this was quite comical, and suddenly everyone on the internet is making fun of Microsoft for being so silly as to put the shutdown option in the Start menu. Now, it's possible the whole Internet is just stupid, or maybe people really do get it and then just keep making fun of Microsoft anyway because it makes them feel good, but just in case it's the former I'm going to clear it up right here. The "Start" on the Start button means start doing something. So, for example, if you want to start to shut down your computer, you would click Start -> Shut Down. You don't click the Start button to start up your computer either, but nobody seems to care about that one. No, it's not a perfect analogy, but when they added the start bar in Windows 95 it was a really big deal UI-wise (No more alt-tab switching!, wink), and it took a decade for somebody to finally complain that apparently they're too slow to figure out how to shutdown their machines.

Microsoft is a dirty thief, let's iCry about it

I found yet another video of Apple bitching that Microsoft steals all its stuff:

Normally when I talk about operating systems on here I focus on my love of Linux, so it may not be clear that my love for Linux is equal to my hate for Mac OS. I hate the look and feel, I hate the interface, I hate the software, I iHate their iNaming scheme, and I hate its users pretty much on sight. Mac users focus on three truths they latch onto like a religion (speaking of things I hate):

1. Mac is the best


2. Windows steals everything from Mac


3. Windows sucks

At some point they're going to realize that there's an issue in there somewhere. Windows steals everything so flawlessly from their precious Mac OS that they call it "photocopying", but Windows still sucks huge. Stop bitching that Windows steals all your shit as though they're going to stop or something; you can't maintain that you're amazing and yet still complain that people are imitating you and you want them to stop

It's just like a real table!

I've seen dozens of videos now on Microsoft Surface. First, I think Surface could be very cool, I love multitouch interfaces. Second, I think right now Surface looks useless. As far as I can tell, a personal Surface table can do exactly four things:

1. Show really big maps. This is pretty neat; personally, I would get tired of manually dragging a map around instead of just entering an address and going there, but I can see the use for it


2. Transfer files (well, really just pictures and music in the clips I've seen) between devices. This is useless for me, but cool for other people, so this one is good


3. Take the nice, organized photos stored on a device and explode them into a mass of disorganized thumbnails that you can spin and resize for no reason


4. Make little bubbles shoot out from a glass when you set one on the table

Now, the one that really annoys me is apparently Surface's big feature: allowing you to, and I quote from more than one video, "organize your photos". For some reason, Surface's definition of "organize your photos" is to take all the photos on your device, ignore any organization they may have like folders named "Vacation" and "Work", and spread thumbnails of them all over the table haphazardly. Sure enough, I check the Wikipedia article and there it is:

Apparently this is somehow a good thing. If I wanted my photos to be like this, I would take print photographs and spread them all over my much cheaper analog table. Why would you want this?

Terrible:


Sexy:


I made up those picture folders on the spot because I don't take pictures, but still. I really don't understand why you would want to use the method of organizing photos that computers replaced forever ago, that's exactly the wrong way to be going about this. We should be designing new interfaces that are even easier to use than the ones we have now, not ones that very accurately simulate stuff we've already gotten rid of. Somebody should write a Surface app that lets you play music by dragging an LP over to a record player and then dragging the needle onto the record. Not that people ever actually do anything with the photos but spin them around and resize them over and over again; it's actually very much like people who enable the desktop cube in compiz for the first time:

Jon Stewart: 1, Crossfire: 0

My roommate is watching this clip for the first time, and it's come to my attention that not everyone in the world has seen Jon Stewart destroy Crossfire. And you should see it before you die, because he is both unbelievably funny and extremely intelligent, unlike the sadly unimpressive Crossfire hosts:

And the transcript:

(show transcript)

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, he's been called the most trusted name in fake news. Next, we're joined by Jon Stewart for his one-of-a-kind take on politics, the press and America.

PAUL BEGALA: Welcome back to CROSSFIRE.

STEWART: Thank you very much. That was very kind of you to say. Can I say something very quickly? Why do we have to fight?

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: The two of you? Can't we just -- say something nice about John Kerry right now.

"It's not so much that it's bad, as it's hurting America ... Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America." --Jon Stewart, to "Crossfire" hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala

CARLSON: I like John. I care about John Kerry.

STEWART: And something about President Bush.

BEGALA: He'll be unemployed soon?

(LAUGHTER)

BEGALA: I failed the test. I'm sorry.

CARLSON: See, I made the effort anyway.

BEGALA: No, actually, I knew Bush in Texas a little bit. And the truth is, he's actually a great guy. He's not a very good president. But he's actually a very good person. I don't think you should have to hate to oppose somebody, but it makes it easier.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: Why do you argue, the two of you?

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: I hate to see it.

CARLSON: We enjoy it.

STEWART: Let me ask you a question.

CARLSON: Well, let me ask you a question first.

STEWART: All right.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: Is John Kerry -- is John Kerry really the best? I mean, John Kerry has...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: Is he the best? I thought Lincoln was good.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: Is he the best the Democrats can do?

STEWART: Is he the best the Democrats can do?

CARLSON: Yes, this year of the whole field.

STEWART: I had always thought, in a democracy -- and, again, I don't know -- I've only lived in this country -- that there's a process. They call them primaries.

CARLSON: Right.

STEWART: And they don't always go with the best, but they go with whoever won. So is he the best? According to the process.

CARLSON: Right. But of the nine guys running, who do you think was best. Do you think he was the best, the most impressive?

STEWART: The most impressive?

CARLSON: Yes.

STEWART: I thought Al Sharpton was very impressive.

STEWART: I enjoyed his way of speaking. I think, oftentimes, the person that knows they can't win is allowed
to speak the most freely, because, otherwise, shows with titles, such as CROSSFIRE.

BEGALA: CROSSFIRE.

STEWART: Or "HARDBALL" or "I'm Going to Kick Your Ass" or...

STEWART: Will jump on it. In many ways, it's funny. And I made a special effort to come on the show today, because I have privately, amongst my friends and also in occasional newspapers and television shows, mentioned this show as being bad.

BEGALA: We have noticed.

STEWART: And I wanted to -- I felt that that wasn't fair and I should come here and tell you that I don't -- it's not so much that it's bad, as it's hurting America. But I wanted to come here today and say...

STEWART: Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.

BEGALA: OK. Now

(CROSSTALK)
"You know what's interesting, though? You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show." --Jon Stewart, to Tucker Carlson

STEWART: And come work for us, because we, as the people...

CARLSON: How do you pay?

STEWART: The people -- not well.

BEGALA: Better than CNN, I'm sure.

STEWART: But you can sleep at night.

STEWART: See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you're helping the politicians and the corporations. And we're left out there to mow our lawns.

BEGALA: By beating up on them? You just said we're too rough on them when they make mistakes.

STEWART: No, no, no, you're not too rough on them. You're part of their strategies. You are partisan, what do you call it, hacks.

CARLSON: Wait, Jon, let me tell you something valuable that I think we do that I'd like to see you...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: Something valuable?

CARLSON: Yes.

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: I would like to hear it.

CARLSON: And I'll tell you.

When politicians come on...

STEWART: Yes.

CARLSON: It's nice to get them to try and answer the question. And in order to do that, we try and ask them pointed questions. I want to contrast our questions with some questions you asked John Kerry recently.

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: ... up on the screen.

STEWART: If you want to compare your show to a comedy show, you're more than welcome to.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: No, no, no, here's the point.

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: If that's your goal.

CARLSON: It's not.

STEWART: I wouldn't aim for us. I'd aim for "Seinfeld." That's a very good show.

CARLSON: Kerry won't come on this show. He will come on your show.

STEWART: Right.

CARLSON: Let me suggest why he wants to come on your show.

STEWART: Well, we have civilized discourse.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: Well, here's an example of the civilized discourse.

Here are three of the questions you asked John Kerry.
"No. No. I'm not going to be your monkey." --Jon Stewart, to Tucker Carlson

STEWART: Yes.

CARLSON: You have a chance to interview the Democratic nominee. You asked him questions such as -- quote -- "How are you holding up? Is it hard not to take the attacks personally?"

STEWART: Yes.

CARLSON: "Have you ever flip-flopped?" et cetera, et cetera.

STEWART: Yes.

CARLSON: Didn't you feel like -- you got the chance to interview the guy. Why not ask him a real question, instead of just suck up to him?

STEWART: Yes. "How are you holding up?" is a real suck-up. And I actually giving him a hot stone massage as we were doing it.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: It sounded that way. It did.

STEWART: You know, it's interesting to hear you talk about my responsibility.

CARLSON: I felt the sparks between you.

STEWART: I didn't realize that -- and maybe this explains quite a bit.

CARLSON: No, the opportunity to...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: ... is that the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: So what I would suggest is, when you talk about you're holding politicians' feet to fire, I think that's disingenuous. I think you're...

CARLSON: "How are you holding up?" I mean, come on.

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: No, no, no. But my role isn't, I don't think...

CARLSON: But you can ask him a real question, don't you think, instead of saying...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: I don't think I have to. By the way, I also asked him, "Were you in Cambodia?" But I didn't really care.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: Because I don't care, because I think it's stupid.

CARLSON: I can tell.

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: But my point is this. If your idea of confronting me is that I don't ask hard-hitting enough news questions, we're in bad shape, fellows. (LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: We're here to love you, not confront you.

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: We're here to be nice.

STEWART: No, no, no, but what I'm saying is this. I'm not. I'm here to confront you, because we need help
from the media and they're hurting us. And it's -- the idea is...

(APPLAUSE)

(CROSSTALK)

BEGALA: Let me get this straight. If the indictment is -- if the indictment is -- and I have seen you say this -- that...

STEWART: Yes.
"What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably." --Jon Stewart

BEGALA: And that CROSSFIRE reduces everything, as I said in the intro, to left, right, black, white.

STEWART: Yes.

BEGALA: Well, it's because, see, we're a debate show.

STEWART: No, no, no, no, that would be great.

BEGALA: It's like saying The Weather Channel reduces everything to a storm front.

STEWART: I would love to see a debate show.

BEGALA: We're 30 minutes in a 24-hour day where we have each side on, as best we can get them, and have them fight it out.

STEWART: No, no, no, no, that would be great. To do a debate would be great. But that's like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: Jon, Jon, Jon, I'm sorry. I think you're a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring.

STEWART: Yes.

CARLSON: Let me ask you a question on the news.

STEWART: How old are you?

CARLSON: Thirty-five.

STEWART: And you wear a bow tie.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

CARLSON: Yes, I do. I do.

STEWART: So this is...

CARLSON: I know. I know. I know. You're a...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: So this is theater.

CARLSON: Now, let me just...

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: Now, come on.

STEWART: Now, listen, I'm not suggesting that you're not a smart guy, because those are not easy to tie.

CARLSON: They're difficult.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: But the thing is that this -- you're doing theater, when you should be doing debate, which would be great.

BEGALA: We do, do...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: It's not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. And I will tell you why I know it.

CARLSON: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you're accusing us of partisan hackery?

STEWART: Absolutely.

CARLSON: You've got to be kidding me. He comes on and you...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: What is wrong with you?

CARLSON: Well, I'm just saying, there's no reason for you -- when you have this marvelous opportunity not to be the guy's butt boy, to go ahead and be his butt boy. Come on. It's embarrassing.

STEWART: I was absolutely his butt boy. I was so far -- you would not believe what he ate two weeks ago.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: You know, the interesting thing I have is, you have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.

CARLSON: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think.

STEWART: You need to go to one. The thing that I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk...

CARLSON: Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.

STEWART: No. No. I'm not going to be your monkey.

(LAUGHTER)
STEWART: How old are you?
CARLSON: Thirty-five.
STEWART: And you wear a bow tie.

BEGALA: Go ahead. Go ahead.

STEWART: I watch your show every day. And it kills me.

CARLSON: I can tell you love it.

STEWART: It's so -- oh, it's so painful to watch.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: You know, because we need what you do. This is such a great opportunity you have here to a actually get politicians off of their marketing and strategy.

CARLSON: Is this really Jon Stewart? What is this, anyway?

STEWART: Yes, it's someone who watches your show and cannot take it anymore.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: I just can't.

CARLSON: What's it like to have dinner with you? It must be excruciating. Do you like lecture people like this or
do you come over to their house and sit and lecture them; they're not doing the right thing, that they're missing their opportunities, evading their responsibilities?

STEWART: If I think they are.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: I wouldn't want to eat with you, man. That's horrible.

STEWART: I know. And you won't. But the thing I want to get to...

BEGALA: We did promise naked pictures of the Supreme Court justices.

CARLSON: Yes, we did. Let's get to those.

(CROSSTALK)

BEGALA: They're in this book, which is a very funny book.

STEWART: Why can't we just talk -- please, I beg of you guys, please.

CARLSON: I think you watch too much CROSSFIRE.

We're going to take a quick break.

STEWART: No, no, no, please.

CARLSON: No, no, hold on. We've got commercials.

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: Please. Please stop.

CARLSON: Next, Jon Stewart in the "Rapid Fire."

STEWART: Please stop.

CARLSON: Hopefully, he'll be here, we hope, we think.

(APPLAUSE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)


CARLSON: Welcome back to CROSSFIRE.

We're talking to Jon Stewart, who was just lecturing us on our moral inferiority.

Jon, you're bumming us out. Tell us, what do you think about the Bill O'Reilly vibrator story?

STEWART: I'm sorry. I don't.

CARLSON: Oh, OK.

STEWART: What do you think?

BEGALA: Let me change the subject.

STEWART: Where's your moral outrage on this?

CARLSON: I don't have any.

STEWART: I know.

BEGALA: Which candidate do you suppose would provide you better material?

STEWART: I'm sorry?

BEGALA: Which candidate do you suppose would provide you better material if he won?

STEWART: Mr. T. I think he'd be the funniest. I don't...

(LAUGHTER)

BEGALA: Don't you have a stake in it that way, as not just a citizen, but as a professional comic?

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: Right, which I hold to be much more important than as a citizen.

BEGALA: Well, there you go.

(LAUGHTER)

BEGALA: But who would you provide you better material, do you suppose?

STEWART: I don't really know. That's kind of not how we look at it. We look at, the absurdity of the system provides us the most material. And that is best served by sort of the theater of it all, you know, which, by the way, thank you both, because it's been helpful.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: But, if Kerry gets elected, is it going to -- you have said you're voting for him. You obviously support him. It's clear.
Will it be harder for you to mock his administration if he becomes president?

STEWART: No. Why would it be harder?

CARLSON: Because you support...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: The only way it would be harder is if his administration is less absurd than this one. So, in that case, if it's less absurd, then, yes, I think it would be harder. But, I mean, it would be hard to top this group, quite frankly.

(LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

STEWART: In terms of absurdity and their world matching up to the one that -- you know, it was interesting.
President Bush was saying, John Kerry's rhetoric doesn't match his record.

But I've heard President Bush describe his record. His record doesn't match his record.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: So I don't worry about it in that respect.

But let me ask you guys, again, a question, because we talked a little bit about, you're actually doing honest debate and all that. But, after the debates, where do you guys head to right afterwards?

CARLSON: The men's room.

STEWART: Right after that?

BEGALA: Home.

STEWART: Spin alley.

BEGALA: Home.

STEWART: No, spin alley.

BEGALA: What are you talking about? You mean at these debates?

STEWART: Yes. You go to spin alley, the place called spin alley. Now, don't you think that, for people watching at home, that's kind of a drag, that you're literally walking to a place called deception lane?

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: Like, it's spin alley. It's -- don't you see, that's the issue I'm trying to talk to you guys...

BEGALA: No, I actually believe -- I have a lot of friends who work for President Bush. I went to college with some of them.

CARLSON: Neither of us was ever in the spin room, actually.

(BELL RINGING)

BEGALA: No, I did -- I went to do the Larry King show.

They actually believe what they're saying. They want to persuade you. That's what they're trying to do by spinning. But I don't doubt for a minute these people who work for President Bush, who I disagree with on everything, they believe that stuff, Jon. This is not a lie or a deception at all. They believe in him, just like I believe in my guy.

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: I think they believe President Bush would do a better job. And I believe the Kerry guys believe President Kerry would do a better job. But what I believe is, they're not making honest arguments. So what they're doing is, in their mind, the ends justify the means.

(CROSSTALK)

BEGALA: I don't think so at all.

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: I do think you're more fun on your show. Just my opinion.

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: OK, up next, Jon Stewart goes one on one with his fans...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: You know what's interesting, though? You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: Now, you're getting into it. I like that.

STEWART: Yes.

CARLSON: OK. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BEGALA: Welcome back to CROSSFIRE. We are joined by Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, host of "The Daily Show"
and author of No. 1 bestseller, "America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction."

CARLSON: And a ton of fun, I like that too.

BEGALA: Some questions from our audience. Yes sir, what's your name, what's your name?

QUESTION: Hi, my name's David. I'm from Boston.

STEWART: Hi, David.

QUESTION: My question is, what do you think the hump on G.W.'s back during the debate was?

STEWART: Say it again?

QUESTION: What do you think the hump on George's back during the debate was?

STEWART: The hump on his back?

BEGALA: Oh, you're familiar? This is (INAUDIBLE) conspiracy theory. Can I take this one?

STEWART: Yes, please.

BEGALA: It was nothing, his suit was puckering. A lot of people believe he had one of these in his ear. If he was being fed lines by Karl Rove, he would not have been so inarticulate, guys. It's a myth.

(LAUGHTER)

BEGALA: It's not true. There's this huge myth out on the left.

(CROSSTALK)

BEGALA: Yes, ma'am.

QUESTION: Renee from Texas. Why do you think it's hard or difficult or impossible for politicians to answer a straight, simple question?

STEWART: I don't think it's hard. I just think that nobody holds their feet to the fire to do it. So they don't have to. They get to come on shows that don't...

BEGALA: They're too easy on them.

CARLSON: Yes. Ask them how you hold...

STEWART: Not easy on them...

(CROSSTALK)

BEGALA: ... saying we were too hard on people and too (INAUDIBLE).

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: I think you're - yes.

CARLSON: All right. Jon Stewart, come back soon.

BEGALA: Jon Stewart, good of you to join us. Thank you very much. The book is "America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction."

From the left I am Paul Begala, that's it for CROSSFIRE.

CARLSON: And from the right I'm Tucker Carlson, have a great weekend. See you Monday.

Prefix notation considered harmful?

I found an article on making readable S-expressions. The premise is that, as Paul Graham is quoted as saying in the article:

I've used Lisp my whole programming life and I still don't find prefix math expressions natural

I understand that prefix notation isn't what everyone learned in school, so it seems weird at first, but I find prefix and postfix notation both more logical than infix; come to think of it, I'm actually not sure why we even use infix in the classroom instead of prefix. It's an ambiguous grammar, so (ironically, considering all the whining about parenthesis in S-expressions) you need parentheses to clear up what the meaning is, or some sort of accepted precidence rules.

Postfix makes sense if you think of things like a stack, which granted most people probably don't. It's easy to understand in that sense though. If you see an operator like +, you're going to add the last two numbers you had, so 2 3 + means add 2 and 3, and you end up with 5 on the stack. Want to do (2 + 3) * 5? To hell with parentheses: 2 3 + 5 *. This is easiest for computers, but I agree it doesn't make much sense to think about math this way.

Prefix makes total sense to me, however. In prefix notation the first thing you get is what you're going to be doing. You shouldn't have to wait for the middle of an expression like 2 + 3 to find out you're doing addition; when you have + 2 3 you know from the beginning you're adding two numbers, all you need to do is get the actual numbers now. Prefix notation tends to be much more logical to read: + 2 3 is obviously "add 2 and 3". Infix notation requires a passive voice like "2 added to 3", which seems silly. Programmers take it for granted that you would call add(2,3) to use the add function to add two numbers, but balk when they see (+ 2 3) as being obviously wrong -- all Lisp has done is normalize everything instead of having an annoying mix of prefix and infix functionality.

When I first learned Lisp (technically, Scheme) I thought it was the greatest thing ever, and I loved writing things in it. I think a lot of programmers have the same experience, and yet there seems to be a growing movement to destroy the S-expression, which seems to defeat the whole point.

Holy hell, all is not lost

If you haven't heard Obama's speech from yesterday, go listen to it. Now. It's fine, my blog will still be here when you get back. Or watch it here:

How great was that? Seriously, it gave me chills, I can't remember the last time I heard a speech I could even stand to listen to, let alone liked. Rumor has it Obama wrote that speech single-handedly. If he did, we might not end up destroying the world after all like I figured was pretty much inevitable at this point. Even if he didn't write it alone, still, it was great. Now, I understand that our southern voters might worry about electing someone who "knows stuff". (Yes, I went there. Be happy I left the racism out of it for the moment). But please. Please. Don't keep electing crazy morons, we can't afford another four years of insanity. Presidential candidates seriously worry about "looking too smart", because "people don't want to elect someone smarter than them". WHY NOT? Here is pretty much my formula:

(elect (apply max candidates))

Why would you not want the smartest person possible? Are you jealous? You should be, they're President and you're not. Sorry I went all second-person on you, but I'm imagining getting my hands on all the people that, to put it bluntly, vote wrong. Don't vote for somebody because they make you feel smart by comparison, vote for somebody that can actually fix everything.

This post is a trade secret

How hard is it to write voting machine software? Seriously, ignore all the problems we've had with them, and (if you're a CS, or just bored) picture it. How long would it take you to write something that asks the user who they vote for, and records it?

Who do you vote for?

 

DONE. Slap a database connection on that thing and it's already more successful than the voting machine software in use today. What is wrong with these companies? Furthermore, what could possibly make them think this is ok:

Union County has backed off a plan to let a Princeton University computer scientist examine voting machines where errors occurred in the presidential primary tallies, after the manufacturer of the machines threatened to sue, officials said today.

A Sequoia executive, Edwin Smith, put Union County Clerk Joanne Rajoppi on notice that an independent analysis would violate the licensing agreement between his firm and the county. In a terse two-page letter Smith also argued the voting machine software is a Sequoia trade secret and cannot be handed over to any third party.

Excuse me? How can we possibly still allow security through obscurity designs? Haven't the *epic failures* of these designs in the past proven that we should maybe not do them anymore?

If you missed what actually happened that prompted this investigation, there's coverage elsewhere, I'm not going to go though it all. In short, dozens of voting machines in New Jersey were disagreeing with themselves: the number of votes for each candidate didn't add up to the total number of votes the machine said were cast. The article I just linked to had a fantastic example of how bad this is:

This is a single voting machine, disagreeing with itself about how many Republicans voted on it. Imagine your pocket calculator couldn’t make up its mind whether 1+13+40+3+4 was 60 or 61. You’d be pretty alarmed, and you wouldn’t trust your calculator until you were very sure it was fixed. Or you’d get a new calculator.

We (as in, the country) should refuse to so much as consider a voting machine that isn't completely open. And I know this is the OSS inside of me talking, but in this case I would think everyone would agree that a voting machine that can be examined by everyone is better than "It works and doesn't cheat at all, pinky swear. Love, Sequoia". Anyone that wants to can view the source code for this page and look at how my voting buttons above work, so they can clearly see that clicking Hillary's button seems to very suspiciously cast a vote for Obama anyway.

Finally, this is somewhat unconnected to the general "closed-box voting machines are bullshit" argument above, but I noticed this in the article too:

Sequoia maintains the errors, which were documented in at least five counties, occurred due to mistakes by poll workers. The firm, which is based in Colorado, examined machines in Middlesex Count, and concluded that poll workers had pushed the wrong buttons on the control panels, resulting in errors in the numbers of ballots cast.

Why in the world do poll workers have buttons that change the number of votes that have been cast? Why do poll workers have buttons that do anything at all? Let's take a poll on what poll workers should be able to change:

Add votes
Subtract votes
Nothing at all
It doesn't matter, I'm just going to change your votes anyway

Good news, you all voted for "nothing at all", because I changed your votes. Perhaps I shouldn't have this power, and neither should the fairly technology-illiterate poll workers who just have to see what the blue button does.

Weapons of Mass Piracy

The MPAA today weighed in on net neutrality. Think about everything the MPAA has done in the last five years, and then guess how they came out on it. If you guessed "the way nobody likes", good call. From Glickman himself:

Government regulation of the Internet would impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways, and it would impair the ability of broadband providers to address the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks today.

Ah, there's the magic word. It would not be below the MPAA to blame global warming on the "rampant piracy problems" facing the world. They're almost as bad as Bush with terrorists, which is a depressing analogy really. Terrorists are to Bush as piracy is to the MPAA: Bullshit they use to get away with whatever they want.

This is my second negative blog post today; I need to find more positive sources of news.

Microsoft: Standards are for lesser companies

The W3C has been working on a draft for supporting safe XSS requests. It's currently a working draft, so they're encouraging comments and criticism on the design; that's the whole idea behind publishing the working draft. Firefox 3 implements the draft as it currently exists. While I think implementing drafts is a somewhat bad idea, Firefox 3 is in beta, and Firefox's automatic update mechanism means they can make any changes that come up in the draft.

Did Microsoft implement the draft? Or, even better, did they just wait? Or, God forbid, did they take their ideas and contribute them to the W3C draft? Hell no they didn't, waiting and contributing to the community is for "the other guys". They implemented their own mechanism. How very precedented, Microsoft. They just couldn't fucking help themselves, they had to do it. So once the W3C draft is finalized, everyone else will implement it, IE will have its own way, and web developers will have to write functions that use both methods. Soon fun libraries will come out that handle all the browser differences for us so we don't need to bother. Libraries that needn't have ever existed at all. Pledge to conform to web standards indeed.

This question occurred to me once, and I still don't have the answer, so if somebody does comment or something. Why does Microsoft still make Internet Explorer? They don't make money from it, they were forced to start distributing it for free ages ago. They get in trouble for antitrust stuff because of it all the time. Every web developer alive hates them because of IE. They'll probably never get it right. What's the point? Why not just distribute Firefox or some other browser instead, and stop making a custom browser?

random.choice(['Clever','Not so much'])

Apparently there are rules to having a clever blog title. Fortunately, I have avoided public reprimand by

1. Not attempting to be clever with my blog title


2. Having no readers

Take that interweb