For some reason November is now Mustache November. Now we’ve got two months out of the year where we have to grow mustaches? I don’t get it. This is supposed to be some statement about masculinity or something? Whatever. You don’t have to grow a mustache, ride a motorcycle, or drink whiskey, to be a man (although admittedly all those things are awesome).
Men should know how to stop a toilet that’s overflowing, and we should know how to change a tire. The dudes over at Art of Manliness have compiled a bunch of things every guy should know. The link is to a list of 31 things every man should know before heading out on his own. Here’s something else:
Google Scholar just added a citations feature which, among other things, lets you get a BibTeX formatted citation. This is so handy, and I’ve wondered for a while why they didn’t have that feature in there. Often you can go to the IEEE page or whatever to get the citation, but some journals make you login (IEEE, why do you do that?) and anyway this makes one less click.
To copy a formatted citation, click on the “Cite” link below a search result and select from the available citation styles (currently MLA, APA, or Chicago) […] You can also use one of the import links to import the citation into BibTeX or another bibliography manager. We hope that simplifying the chore of citation formatting will let you focus on what you really want to work on: writing a great paper!
I’ve been writing a lot of Python lately, and there are some things I love about it, some things I’m uncomfortable with, but nothing I hate. The super() builtin function makes life a lot easier when you’re using Python for object oriented code and have some inheritance going on. This blog post describes the best way I’ve seen it used so far.
First of all, in Python3 you no longer need to write “super(CurrentClass, self).foo”, “super().foo” does the right thing generally. This is great, because it’s easier to change class names, or copy a line of code, without breaking everything.
So, you can spend all kinds of time looking through IMDB trying to get the order of the bond movies correct, or you can just look at this great infographic, thanks to these guys.
So helpful, right? They put the years right there on the left side (it’d be easy not to notice that).
I think X11 is the most complex piece of software I’ve ever tried to work with. It has been a long time since I’ve had to open up xorg.conf (and before that I think it was x11.conf) to fix something that’s broken, and that’s a testament to the quality of modern versions of Ubuntu and Debian. But there was a day when I had to open that massive config file up quite often to get the video card, or mouse, or keyboard or whatever working properly.
I end up using GNU “screen” a lot. It lets me SSH into my laptop, run something, then close the SSH connection with the task still running in the background. Later I can SSH in and regain control of the task. It’s helpful for Counter-Strike server admin, compiling stuff, or building a test corpus…
Anyway, screen interferes with the regular terminal’s ability to scroll back and view previous program output. Today I found a description of how to fix that problem. To set the scrollback buffer size:
When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives.
They chronicle some of the apocalyptic predictions of the past 50 years or so, including acid rain, CFCs, famine, and oil shortage. I think the folks who make these predictions often want to focus humanity’s attention on some important issue. The method works for a short while, but mistrust brews when apocalypse fails to materialize. I think this is what has happened with environmental concerns. We’ve heard apocalyptic predictions regarding nature for so long that a substantial group of people are now convinced that anybody who even mentions “climate change” cannot be correct. We’ve got to stop turning climate change into an imminent apocalypse.
I just finished reading Animal Farm and found a great quote attributed to Orwell by Wikipedia.
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. … Things are kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervenes but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.
He was speaking sometime around World War II. Someone on Slashdot the other day said that only governments censor, because only they may do so by force. They suggested that other people simply make choices about what they wish to publish. Apparently the author of 1984 thought about it a little differently.
So, maybe a year ago I changed my “religion” on Facebook, because I wanted to make sure I had something in there that really defined me. I settled on “Coed Naked Motorcycle Hiking”, because I like motorcycles and I like hiking and “coed naked” seems to go pretty well in front of anything. Facebook didn’t think this religion existed, so I created a page complete with a photo from Waking Ned Devine. You know, that scene where the wrinkly old dude is riding a motorcycle naked. It seemed appropriate, and I guess I had old shriveled dudes on my mind for some reason.
Star Trek had it right. They were a bunch of peace loving (except for Worf) scientists roaming the universe in a war ship. They always kept their cool when someone faced them down, but if they needed to Jean Luc had no problem blasting the enemy out of the sky.
I’ve been reading Animal Farm recently, and it has impressed upon me the need to maintain arms and a force capable of using them no matter how peaceful society gets. And today may be the most peaceful time in history, so it’s important to think about these things.
