• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the closest.

My result (while at work): “DeviceRect must compute these values from those supplied.” — Design Patterns, Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides

Sorry for the lack of interesting updates, but a few things have gone down in the past couple months that have kept me from keeping in touch. My company is closing down our office and moving the product elsewhere, so we’ve all been doing two jobs (our normal schedule work and trying to get everything transitioned to the new development team). Add in little things like doctor’s visits, a water heater cracking open, and some travel for work, and you have one busy and tired me.

It looks like things aren’t going to calm down here until Thanksgiving week, so until then: be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

svndiff ()
{
  svn diff $* | colordiff | less -r
}

Pass it anything you’d pass to “svn diff”: e.g., “.” for the current directory, a list of filenames, or options like –no-diff-deleted.

• lime
• lemon
• mango
• cherry
• indigo - not a fruit, but replaced “indulgence”
• oreo - my wife has convinced me that Oreos are definitely a fruit

All machines run Ubuntu server or Kubuntu, and several dual-boot and/or virtualize XP.

1. For an article the widget will provide a “title” attribute that contains the whole content from the article. Since this site implements a tooltip-like hover box for links with a title element, that can get really ugly. The fix is trivial, and involves truncating post content at 500 characters.
2. When given a feed from my Google Reader “shared items” list, the title of the blog is mashed against the end of the article title. I’ll get things like “Cat Stuck Up TreeRoanoke Times”, which is also really ugly. The fix is somewhat more complicated, and involves not including the “source” element in the article title.

Wordpress 2.6 also finally integrated the ability to log in and administer your blog over HTTPS, so that’s one less patch/plugin I need to track.

Happy hacking!

(Click through the last image to see it in a bigger size, in which I think it looks considerably better.)

This was going to be the first year I donated money to a political candidate. The movement of this country’s national politics has become more frightening by the week, and I thought that adding campaign money to my advocacy might be another method for changing that. I was going to contribute to my national Congressional races and to that for the Presidency.

Today’s FISA capitulation, to be frank, knocked me on my tail and made me reconsider. Over the last several months I’ve called, written, and persuaded several friends to do the same. I watched politicians who had stated they would support blocking retroactive immunity for law-breaking companies turn tail and vote for this bill, a bill better for the Executive than the previous FISA bill. I’ve heard some say that voting for the bill was politically wise, a CYA move to show strength against “the terrorists” for the upcoming elections. I do not disagree; I do believe, though, that civil liberties and national security are not at odds with one another, and that true leadership should demonstrate this.

I’ve now spent much of the day reconsidering my upcoming donations. Where is the leadership standing up for constitutional protections? Where is the leadership standing in opposition to torture, kidnapping, and undermining our image worldwide? There were voices leading in the Senate and House, but they had too few friends to prevent this travesty of a bill from passing. So, I’ve decided that I’m still going to donate money, but not to whom I had planned. I’m going to see if I can get Dodd and his like some more friends.

To every Senator and Presidential candidate who failed to support the three amendments today, to every Representative who voted for H.R. 6304: you’ve made yourself an opponent. Here’s what I will do:

• I will not donate any money to your campaigns.
• I will donate money to your opponents in primaries and, if you generally vote in ways I don’t like, general elections.
• I will lobby my friends and associates to do the same; given that they generally have a limited budget, I’m willing to bet that means less money for you, too.
• Provided you’re an otherwise reasonable politician, I will not speak ill of you, but I will refrain from speaking of you. You’ve just lost a persuasive advocate.

Please call your representative right now and implore them to not pass the false-compromise FISA bill, H.R. 6304. The vote comes up this afternoon, so please hurry!

Passing H.R. 6304 would amount to a Congressional seal of approval on illegal surveillance. Even if the President and the telecoms knowingly and brazenly broke the law, the provision in the bill seeks to prevent the courts from holding them accountable. Yet, the suits against the telecoms may be our last hopes for a judicial ruling on whether the President can break the law with impunity.