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As you know, I'm no fan of the Intelligent Design idiocies and the associated anti-evolutionary thinking. Every child in every classroom infested with those memes is one child fewer that might go on to be a scientist and produce the next great breakthrough in medicine agriculture. To date, not a single meaningful technological advance has been made using intelligent design as the premise. It has been as useful to us as Aristotelian physics. So I wasn't surprised when Olbermann chose Arizona State Senator Silvia Allen's little comment, while defending a local uranium mine's lax environmental post-processing policies, "The Earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anyone had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn't been done away with." But I was disgusted when Olbermann proceeded to make fun of the fact that Allen's comment about the age of the Earth came in the context of a discussion about uranium mining. Olbermann asserted, "The way we can know the Earth is billions of years old is because of the decay of uranium. Carbon dating!" Sigh. Someone tell Keith that uranium is only a mediocre dating choice because of its uniformity. It's hard to tell how much uranium a sample started with, therefore it's hard to date. Much better choices are rubidium, potassium, and strontium, all of which have multiple decay products that can be measured in ratio to one another to produce accurate results. As for "carbon dating," carbon is an entirely different element from uranium, and is used for the dating of recently dead things, as it is only accurate out to about 50,000 years, and is only good for dating organics. (Living things have a regular flow of carbon in and out as they eat and breath; it's only after fossilization that carbon transference stops and we can reliably date the organism's age from the decay of carbon left.). So Keith is an idiot. He should consult with a geek before he goes off, again, with an idiotic rant of that flavor. Apparently, an MSNBC peer, Ed Schultz, made a similar mistake, claiming that the Earth is only a billion years old. It's about 4.5 billion. Tags: shrill
Current Mood:  annoyed
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As it turns out, there is a Linux zombie network. It's called Psyb0t. It infects cable modems and home routers, which you never turn off, and gives whatever nefarious person running the network the capability to hack into your home network, monitor all traffic going through it, and exploit any passwords you send. Nefarious, stealthy, and evil. There's a reason I run a small, home-based, home-made router with my own monitoring software. A layer of security through defensive obsolescence. Almost all home-based routers from Linksys and Netgear are based on an old distro of Linux with a weak password that makes it easy to hack. Sad, but true. Updates are available on Netgear and Linksys's websites, and the latest versions have patched the hole. Here's what annoys me: every report I could find on Psyb0t mentions that it's a "Linux zombie network". Yet nobody calls MyDoom, the five year old virus that makes up the current denial-of-service attack, a "Windows zombie network". Why not? Tags: geek
Current Mood: annoyed
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I’m prepping for an interview this afternoon at what is primarily a Perl shop, and so I’m mainlining the O’Reilly Perl in a Nutshell book as a way of reminding myself about the little details of the language. I can write Perl just fine– I just made some major hacks to dailystrips for example, and I write various renaming and text processing scripts all the time in Perl, because it is the language for that kind of thing.
But it’s little corners like, exactly what does bless do, that I’m reminding myself of. I know it’s the OO instance creation operator, and I remember the instantiation procedure but what exactly does it do?
So I go read the source code for Perl, in C, because that’s where the magic is kept, and I discover to my not-so-surprise that bless is a complete and utter hack. It puts a flag in the dereferencer to point to a different function, one that seems added after-the-fact, that instead of handling a procedure one way, instead just handles it another way with the recently dereferenced scalar as the first argument. That’s all it does. OO is so “bolted onto the side” of Perl that it’s amazing how important it seems to have become to the language.
But there’s so much missing from Perl; the whole metaprogramming capabilities of modern languages like Python, Ruby, and Javascript is just gone– done instead with code generation and eval, good grief– and yet the capacity for obfuscation is so terribly great. In many ways, Perl feels more like Bash scripting with a much bigger library of niceties and bolt-ons, which may explain why I use it that way.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.comTags: programming, python
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At the beginning of this year, I made a New Year's resolution to drink more alcohol and less soda pop. I've cut down on the soda pop, but in an effort to balance things out I've also worked on increasing my appreciation for alcohol. In the past five years, I've learned to like wine, and this past year I've developed a taste for beer, and this summer I put some money into buying some agave tequila and Cointreau and making margaritas, which is the official drink of Floridians and Floridian expats everywhere. As I've gotten older I've developed a tolerance for alcohol: Omaha will tell you that when we were younger, one glass of wine would put me out. Nowadays, I barely notice one glass of wine, or one bottle of beer, or one two-ounce cocktail. At all. And I find that I'm not willing to do any more than that. I read a blog, I can't recall where, in which the writer said he spent an entire month without drinking at all to see what it was like, and he discovered that it was like being in a room with himself all the time, and he learned that, while he generally had high self-esteem, even he couldn't stand himself that much. Well, even though the job search has been rough on me, I guess I don't get that solace. I get my one glass of whatever a day-- it raises my "good" cholesterol, and has other benefits-- but I still have to live with myself day in and day out. I'd apparently make a poor alcoholic. My drugs of choice these days are coffee and information. Still, extra thanks to Rachel Maddow for teaching us all how to mix a drink, as well as being very clear as to what, exactly, constitutes a lime: "If your lime juice comes in plastic, it's not real." Tags: life
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: The Buggles, Johnny On the Monorail, unreleased studio mix
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