| A very disturbing newspaper article |
[Sep. 11th, 2008|10:36 am] |
... but not necessarily for the reason you think.
Go read this article on IOL entitled "Big Bang experiment marred by suicide" and consider what the most obvious worrying thing in it is.
Done? Good. To me, the following quote did it: "Large Hadron Collider (LHV)" (emphasis mine). Sure, the factual errors and minor dissemination of FUD in the article are a problem. The media fixation on a non-existent doomsday threat is a problem, but the girl mentioned almost certainly had far bigger problems that could have been triggered by anything.
The fact that a major news agency cannot be bothered to properly proofread an article that they're placing before millions of eyes makes me question their competence in everything else they do. I wouldn't care so much if this were a once-off, but it seems to be happening a lot recently.
Update: Looks like they fixed it. See my comment below. |
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| Better late than never |
[Sep. 3rd, 2008|09:36 am] |
It has come to my attention that it has been far too long since I last wrote in here. Sorry guys, been far too busy living life to write about it.
I hate those all-in-one-post blog entries that just contain point-form activities, so I'll do mine in paragraphs in random order. (Which is only slightly better.)
The jazz band has started up again (first real rehearsal tonight) for a gig on the 12th at Kirstenbosch. I don't have any further details, but it's going to be a good one. I only realised during last week's trombone section rehearsal how much I missed Wednesday night jazz. The Dukes band is fun, but the music isn't as challenging (some of it is downright boring, actually, but we need to do it) and we usually have big gaps where we're missing instruments.
I have been domesticated. I now own a pot and a pan and am actually cooking myself breakfast most mornings. Usually eggs on toast and such, but today I experimented with fried onion as well. I need to tune the herbs I add (basil and thyme were handy, but not that great) and reduce the quantity (a whole onion is too much) but it's an overall win. One of these days I might be able to actually cook some proper food. (Mom, if you're reading this, this paragraph is a lie. I eat muesli and yoghurt for breakfast and cook marvelous and healthy suppers every night.)
In the last month or so, I have watched most of Doctor Who (the new version) and Torchwood. Definitely near the top of my list of things I really want there to be more of.
I have received two emails about my Erlang stuff. One was a wonderful ego-boosting thank-you and the other seemed to be a question in a language my browser refuses to display except as hex-runes.
On browsers: I finally updated to Firefox 3 on my primary machine. Two things had been delaying this. Two extensions I really struggle without (Chromatabs and Tab Mix Plus) didn't have fx3 versions. They both now have beta versions (although in the case of the former it's actually a new extension). Fx3 really struggles with malformed certificates and won't let you add an exception to visit the site anyway. I think this is still the case, but the one site I relied on with a broken cert has finally fixed it. I quite like the new UI. The biggest win has to be that auth windows and plugin loads no longer lock the whole browser, something that had really irritated me in fx2.
Tomorrow morning shall see me giving my flat a much-overdue clean in preparation for the arrival of a houseguest. I should probably finish putting up my last blind, too. (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) pkeike, if you're reading this, ignore this paragraph. My flat is always spotless and I did nothing special to prepare for your arrival.)
And now, a rant:
Dear Google, please give me a version of Chrome I can actually use. I realise that most of your userbase is quite happy with a Windows-only version, but some of us prefer an OS that isn't actively hostile. At the very least, can we have one that works in wine By alienating a large class of free-software developers you're not buying any favours. Yours, $linux_lad. |
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| Happy hacking |
[Aug. 19th, 2007|06:22 pm] |
I wrote a satisfying amount of Python this weekend. I am currently in the throes of rewriting bits of my website backend, and one of the things I'm replacing is the syntax highlighting code. The present system shells out to vim and munges the HTML it gets back into a useful form. The new plan is to use pygments, a python syntax highlighting library. The problem with pygments is that it doesn't handle all the languages I want to display.
One of these languages is Erlang, which I have a tendency to wax enthusiastic about. Since there are unlikely to be too many other people who want to highlight it in a Python library (although Haskell's there, so maybe not) I decided it would be worth the effort of writing a lexer for it. This was easier said than done, however. The vim and emacs syntax files were both slightly broken (I'll be looking at them next) so I ended up doing a lot of the work by referring to the docs and experimenting with the interpreter.
Along the way, I ran into an issue with the Java lexer. Some badly formatted code tickled a pathological case in one of the regular expressions and took exponential time in the length of an exception class name. Anything longer than about 24 characters (which includes a lot of Java's standard exceptions) and the lexer would never come back. This was resolved with the help of the people on #pocoo (pocoo is pygments' parent project) and ended up in a simplification of and fix to the Java and C# lexers.
Anyways, I've submitted the patch for the Erlang lexer and I'll see if it gets into trunk. It was a fun experience, combining two of my favourite languages. |
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