Initial release of WebScraperHelper. Feedback appreciated.
Seems like everyone has been saying "riff" this past week.
Yesterday, I waved at Nader 2004 campaign roadtrippers in Harvard Square. Looks like the meter hasn't yet run out on Nader. A Honda was an impolitic choice, if otherwise sensible.
I actually voted for Nader in 2000, but only because Massachusetts residency meant I could help send a message to the Democratic Party without risking any electoral votes. As some European acquaintances are fond of saying, "America has two political parties: right-wing, and extreme right-wing." Nader needs to endorse Kerry by November; we can ill afford the long-term damage that another four years of Bush would inflict. In return, a Kerry administration should toss Nader a job at the EPA, DoJ, FCC, or similar place Nader might have some positive impact.
Saw "Boys" (1996) the other day. Lousy, except for Winona's genetics.
The initial functionality of WebscraperHelper, which generates SXPath queries from examples, works:
(html body div table (tr 2) (td 2))
(html body (div (@ (equal? (id "ResultsSection"))))
(table (@ (equal? (id "ResultTable")))) (tr 2) (td 2))
(// (table (@ (equal? (id "ResultTable")))) (tr 2) (td 2))
"A Beautiful Mind" was good.
This is CAPPS II:
A key overseer of the Bush administration's unsuccessful efforts to create a more comprehensive screening process for airline passengers resigned in disgrace four years ago from the New Hampshire Supreme Court to avoid prosecution over his conduct on the bench. W. Stephen Thayer III, who left New Hampshire's high court in 2000 under a deal with prosecutors, is now serving as deputy chief of the Transportation Security Administration's Office of National Risk Assessment.
—Michael J. Sniffen and Leslie Miller, "Administration picks disgraced judge for Homeland Security," AP via Boston Globe, 27-Jul-2004
Read this for highlights from Bill Clinton's speech: David Corn, "To Bash, Or Not To Bash Bush," The Nation, 27-Jul-2004
The Senao WiFi card ordered Sunday night arrived already. It's a marked improvement over the Linksys WPC11 1.0, even in the apartment. The dark slate blue antenna clashes with the ThinkPad a little.
Just for practice, shot a Progressive Party protest that marched on Madeleine Albright's supposed hotel in Harvard Square. Have 160 images to sift through. At one point, I quickly panned and shot to try to catch the reaction of a passing Cambridge garbage truck worker to the protesting young college student communists, but my nemesis appeared out of nowhere.
"Ultimate X-Men" #48: pure compensation.
Speaking of extensions, just ordered a Senao NL-2511CD Plus 200mW 802.11b PCMCIA card. Should pay for itself quickly, at least compared to mobile phone plans that would give me Internet when laptopping out of normal access point range (up to 1200m). It's Prism2.5, so works under Linux with HostAP. Reportedly can be hacked to do 250mW.
Whoever dreamt up this latest addition of war zone ambiance to Boston should be shot:
Eight F-16s will patrol the skies over Boston during the Democratic National Convention, military officials said yesterday, as police and military personnel took positions in unprecedented security precautions in the city. [...] F-16 fighter jets will probably continue patrolling Monday and throughout next week's four-day convention, state officials said. The flights will operate 24 hours a day [...]
—Brian MacQuarrie and Bryan Bender, "8 fighter jets added to growing security," 24-Jul-2004
"Girl, Interrrupted" was pretty good, except for the sappy ending.
Got my first print photo credit, in the new issue of The Scientist. (At least I think it's my first, since none of the prior few publications who asked for and got one-time-use permission for any of my photos ever sent the sample issue.) They cropped out the crew team, which was the original subject. Please don't tie up my phone line this week, as National Geographic might be calling.
Released csv.scm 0.3. No important changes; this is just in preparation for a PLaneT package.
Hacked up linuxprocapm.scm and osd.scm. Currently PLT-specific, but eventually portable. Will probably release soon.
Laptopping from outdoor cafe in Harvard Square was pleasant overall, but with a few drawbacks: 1. neither AC nor WiFi, 2. high-yield bombardier pigeons overhead, 3. smoking tourists and Europeans, 4. well-to-do teenagers drowning out live flamenco music street performer with a boombox playing rap, 5. teenagers impervious to looks that should kill.
"Chocolat" was OK, but the best line was "Don't look so damn pleased with yourself." Binoche should be forbidden from speaking English unless she agrees to thicken up the French accent.
Until now lawmakers from the tobacco belt have opposed allowing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco. But they signed off on the new oversight in exchange for a $12 billion, 10-year program to aid tobacco growers struggling for survival in light of lower prices resulting from less smoking and increased imports. [...] The buyout has been criticized as a boon for the rich since a recent analysis of the House plan by the Environmental Working Group found that more than 400 large quota holders would receive $1 million or more and that 10 percent of those eligible would receive 67 percent of the money.
—Carl Hulse, "Senate Approves Tobacco Buyout and New Curbs," New York Times, 16-Jul-2004
Heads should roll at IBM for putting important documentation in the effectively proprieary Shockwave Flash format:
Make sure you have the latest Macromedia Flash Player installed. Click the Get Macromedia Flash Player icon above to obtain player updates. NOTE: After updating the Flash Player, you must close all open browser windows before the update will take effect. If you are unable to play the movie after updating the Flash Player, reboot your computer. Playback of video files can be unpredictable in different browsers on different systems.
Fortunately, after more searching, I found a less-offensive format, which I will link here, in case I ever need it again: "Hardware Maintenance Manual (March 2002) - ThinkPad X20, X21, X22, X23, X24"
Quack 0.26 released.
Too predictable: David Cole, "My First (and Last) Time With Bill O'Reilly," The Nation, 13-Jul-2004
A new Chicken htmlprag.egg is available for HtmlPrag. I'll be building these from now on.
I've replaced the quack-announce and
htmlprag-announce email lists with a single
scheme-announce email list, where I will announce new releases of
all my Scheme-related software. Let me know if you'd like to be added.
NUU is the worst, and their lacrosse team sucks!
While I was resigned to fighting plagiarists in my classroom, I had not expected to have to fight one for credit for my own dissertation. A doctoral student at Northeast Urban University — I'll call him Mr. X — presented my dissertation as his own. He received a Ph.D. and took an excellent research job at Prominent African University.
—Kim Lanegran, "Fending Off a Plagiarist," Chronicle of Higher Education, 2-Jul-2004
The disturbing thing about Bush tossing around terms like "weapons of mass murder" is the thought that significant numbers of voters might actually not recognize the clear hypocrisy (if not outright imbecility):
President Bush yesterday countered mounting criticism of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by declaring that even without stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein possessed "the capability of producing weapons of mass murder" [...]
—Anne E. Kornblut, "President defends Iraq war rationale," Boston Globe, 13-Jul-2004
Just sold almudena, my beloved ThinkPad 560e.
Thomas Friedman, Shrub and Lay
Provisionally cutting sugar from my coffee. Down to decaf with rice/soy milk.
boston.indymedia.org, besides sometimes being
over-the-top in its content, is permitting PayPal to do cross-site tracking of
visitors to this politically sensitive site by embedding the following image
(and HTTPS, so filtering HTTP proxies can't touch it):
https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but21.gif
Conspiracy? Highly unlikely. Another sign that some people should spend more time learning and less time smoking pot? I wouldn't dispute that.
HtmlPrag 0.12 released.
Should he be asked, [Ron] Reagan said he would not attend the planned tribute to his father at the Republican convention, Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 in New York. "I don't think, in good conscience, I could take the chance that somebody could read that as an endorsement of this administration," he said. "I'll support any viable candidate who can defeat Bush."
—Gail Shister, "Ron Reagan to address Democrats at convention," Knight Ridder via Boston Globe, 12-Jul-2004
"Go Fish" (1994). Most of the acting was poor. Some was so atrocious that I imagine workers at the DVD-pressing plant walking off the job in protest. Better sound engineering could've propped up the worst actors. There was little story, the relationships weren't developed, and no reason was given for Max's attraction to Ely other than sheer desperation. I also felt pistol-whipped by film-student devices. Recommend this film to your cutest lesbian friends if you want to turn them straight.
"Zatôichi monogatari" (1962) was OK. I prefer Kurosawa's films of the genre.
Time to print up "Osama For Bush 2004" bumper stickers:
Another senior administration official said on Thursday that the intelligence reports — apparently drawn partly from interviews with captured Qaeda members and partly from other intelligence — referred to efforts "to inflict catastrophic effects" before the election.
—David Johnston, David Stout, "Bin Laden Is Said to Be Organizing for a U.S. Attack," New York Times, 9-Jul-2004
Urgent need of smoothies necessitated acquisition of Signature Gourmet unit from Walgreens. Functional: blades dented by ice cubes. Aesthetic: robot beehive. Status: probationary.
Linux soon to revitalize tater-burner.
Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon. [...] The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.
—Ralph Blumenthal, "Pentagon Says Bush Records of Service Were Destroyed," New York Times, 9-Jul-2004
Quack 0.25 released.
Asked at an afternoon news briefing about the timing of the announcement — which interrupted coverage of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry's selection of John Edwards as his running mate — White House spokesman Scott McClellan denied a political motive.
—Charlie Savage, "Al Qaeda planning attack, Ridge says," Boston Globe, 9-Jul-2004
"Nation's Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue," The Onion, 7-July-2004
Ashbel S. Green, "Portland Archdiocese will file for bankruptcy," Oregonian, 6-Jul-2004
The US military are experts at war, but not necessarily at foreign policy as distinct from war:
It's essential to purge our minds of the clichéd images the term "war of attrition" evokes. Certainly, we do not and will not seek wars in which vast casualties are equally distributed between our own forces and the enemy's. But a one-sided war of attrition, enabled by our broad range of superior capabilities, is a strong model for a 21st-century American way of war. [...] Of course, we shall hear no end of fatuous arguments to the effect that we can't kill our way out of the problem. Well, until a better methodology is discovered, killing every terrorist we can find is a good interim solution. The truth is that even if you can't kill yourself out of the problem, you can make the problem a great deal smaller by effective targeting.
—Ralph Peters, "In Praise of Attrition," Parameters, US Army War College Quarterly, Summer 2004
Apparently cocaine destroys one's sense for irony:
Asked to compare the one-term senator to Vice President Cheney, President Bush snapped: "Dick Cheney can be president."
—David Stout, "In North Carolina, Bush Takes a Swipe at Edwards," New York Times, 7-Jul-2004
Saw "Punch Drunk Love." Didn't much like it, except for the sisters' abuse and Emily Watson.
The new Scheme URI library is being documented, and will be released along with a new Httper shortly. UriFrame is being deprecated, which is really too bad, since it's a better general way to do things, if you have a portable object system.
Scheme implementors are strongly encouraged to support SRFI-0 and SRFI-7, and to define at least one SRFI-0 feature that identifies the implementation's language variant and/or the implementation itself. I'm close to making all my libraries require the SRFIs.
Now spam is casting aspersions on my MUA. I actually keep the HTML viewer uninstalled, because little good has ever come from HTML mail, and lots of bad has. Reminds me of a cyberpunk short in which they used a modded ancient Nintendo (or similar) as a deck, to protect against black ice feedback to meatspace.
Everyone wish Robby a happy birthday.
Saw "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999). I found the characters unlikeable, and didn't find Matt Damon's acting very convincing. Granted, it's difficult role.
"Underworld" (2003) was OK.
Those poor Iraqis have John Negroponte for a US ambassador now. One hopes Negroponte will not be overseeing death squads in Iraq, as he did in Honduras (when Negroponte was installed by Reagan to replace someone who didn't know how to play ball). Perhaps a new Iraqi public, caught up in a wave of democratic euphoria, will soon extradite Negroponte for his long-overdue human rights tribunal.
John Negroponte is not to be confused with his brother, Nicholas Negroponte.
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