Ed does have a way with words, but what did you expect? In this posting, he points out another example of the fact that this stupid war is all about economics. Once again, did we ever think otherwise?
This article (thanks to Paul for the URL) documents yet another list of examples showing how the US is able to use its dollars to garner support for its war plans.
It’s a very silly kind of democracy.
In other news, I was able to put time in on Friday and do some
PyColourChooser hacking. Michael Gilfix (the author) has integrated my patches. You know it’s a good patch when it removes far more code than it adds, yet increases the functionality. :)
I’m still wondering why wxWindows doesn’t wrap the GTK colour wheel though. The wxWindows generic colour selector (used on GTK setups) isn’t worth the photons it was coded with. PyColourChooser alleviates this deficiency in wxPython to some extent, but that durn colour wheel would have been nice too!
This weekend I gave Knoppix 3.1 a spin on my workstation. Knoppix is a complete Debian-based Linux distribution that runs directly from the CD. It’s a simple question of downloading the ISO, burning it and booting from it: a minute or so later you’re staring at a KDE 3.0 desktop and everything Just Works(tm).
Knoppix is an impressive feat. There is an amazing selection of ready-to-run software on the CD, including Open Office 1.0.1, as much of KDE 3.0 as you can handle (including KDevelop) and much more. This is definitely my new rescue CD: hardcore system repare in GUI style.
By making use of the outline minor mode of Emacs, one can do Python code folding. However, it seems MOST of the available .emacs examples illustrating this are broken, as you’ll find if you try to use them on any Python code longer than three lines.
Here is a correct example, thanks to me and goof.
Paul links to this CNN article from his weblog. I thought it was so ridiculous that I would link to it too.
In short: a man dares to wear “Give Peace a Chance” T-shirt in an American mall, is told by two security guards to remove the shirt or leave the mall, refuses to do so and is consequently arrested.
Don’t forgot to read some of the comments on my previous posting. It turns out our friends from the US officially believe that they should rule the world.
Here is a very interesting excerpt from a speech by Major General Smedley Butler (USMC). You can read the whole thing (the excerpt is quite short), but this paragraph just about sums it up for me:
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
This link has some very interesting tidbits that could help you to speed up your Python code.
In other news, I’ve updated the binary Radeon DRI suspend/resume-capable drivers on my dri_resume page.
As I was slaving away at my trusty Linux workstation today, the 30G IBM DTLA 307030 IDE hard drive started making extremely upsetting noises. These are not the kind of noises one expects from a smoothly operating hard-drive, but rather from some mechanical device in the throes of a messy death. Yes, this is one of those IBM hard drives and Paul confirmed that it was exactly this noise that his IBM hard drive made shortly before it went to heaven…
This is probably the most elegant euphemism I’ve heard in a very long time:
“Wat de geachte afgevaardigde daar zegt staat op gespannen voet met de werkelijkheid.” which is short for “Hij LIEGT!”.
Vive l’Hollandais!
>>> def someFunc(someParam, someDict={}):
... someDict[someParam] = someParam
... print someDict
...
>>> someFunc('hello1')
{'hello1': 'hello1'}
>>> someFunc('hello2')
{'hello2': 'hello2', 'hello1': 'hello1'}
>>> someFunc('hello3')
{'hello2': 'hello2', 'hello3': 'hello3', 'hello1': 'hello1'}
>>>
The moral of this story is: be careful when using default parameters for dictionaries, lists and such like. One could be forgiven for thinking that the default parameter gets initialised with every invocation, but that is clearly not the case.