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I saw this headline today:

How Islamic is Islamic State?

And I started gibbering just a little. I admit, I haven't read the full article because, frankly, I don't really care about the answer. It's a stupid question.

But, like those who insist on calling the hijab a cultural artifact when confronted with the grim reality of women who are forced to wear it, many people seem to find the question pertinent.

It disturbs me how much energy is spent debating the issue. Ask yourself: if ISIS really were following the Koran to the letter, would that, in itself, make the murder somehow more acceptable? And if ISIS were not following the Koran to the letter, would that, in itself, make them somehow fairer targets? Much more importantly, why on earth should the contents of the Koran matter in this assessment?

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One time, back when I was actually semi-active on Google+, I came across a rather heated debate. Someone had posted an article telling the story of a child bride who had died on her wedding night. The post was directed accusingly at self-described proponents of "multiculturalism", an ideology which, in the poster's opinion, was in the same category as "cultural relativism", which he considered deeply depraved.

Unsurprisingly, the debate didn't center around the question of whether child marriage was a horrific practice that needed to be roundly condemned in the harshest terms possible - of course it was, and no one needed convincing - but rather around the original poster's insistence on conflating "multiculturalism" and "cultural relativism". People were insulted.

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Niqabs are in the news again. Stephen Harper wants them off during the Canadian citizenship ceremony. The whole thing is surely a tempest in a teapot, as there have been a grand total of two, count 'em, two women since 2011 who have refused to show their faces during the ceremony, but it has started occasionally ugly debates on the limits of what is generally known as "religious accommodation".

First off, I should mention that I really dislike the term "religious accommodation".

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In a previous post I wrote down some notes on the current state of the python packaging ecosystem. I felt that this was useful because most of the information that I found online was out of date or spread out in various places.

One area that still confuses me is the relative merits of requirements.txt versus setup.py files. Ironically, the best article I've read on the subject is aimed at ruby developers. I think python developers should read it - it's surprising (or maybe not so surprising) how similar the ecosystems are in this respect. I've even made a handy Rosetta stone, which is hopefully not completely inaccurate:

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Badges, on github and other code sharing sites, are a way to communicate small snippets of information concerning the status of your repository. They generally appear on your README file, so they are one of the first things you see when you load a repository page.

On my yawt page, for example, you can see several badges for things like my travis build status, and my GPA at code climate.

One thing that I couldn't find, however, was a pylint badge - a simple status that displayed your pylint score. This surprised me; it seemed like it should have been a common thing to want to do. Indeed, I'm still not 100% sure that I haven't simply overlooked something glaringly obvious.

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I use Emacs as a python IDE. The web already offers a significant number of resources on the subject but I've made a couple of specialized tweaks that I feel may be worth sharing. So here we go.

Why am I doing this? Well, the simple answer is that I like using Emacs. I do most of my writing in it. I use it as my task manager and TODO list. I have, in the past, used it as my email client. So it makes sense that I would use it as my python development environment. Your mileage may vary.

I am mainly a Java developer and Eclipse user at work. Eclipse makes Java programming somewhat tolerable. I use the following features heavily:

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Jacques Parizeau died not too long ago. He infamously commented that the 1995 Quebec Referendum was lost due to money and the ethnic vote.

I was in high school, in Toronto, during the referendum. I remember my school following the whole thing very closely. I remember feeling relief when the No side won (by a hair) and I remember the uproar that his statements caused afterwards.

A word about my background before we go on. It's a bit of a mixed bag. I have a British first name (Desmond) and a French last name (Rivet). My mother is Sicilian. My father was French Canadian, though not technically Quebecois by birth (he was born in Sudbury). I myself was born in Montreal, so I am, in fact, a Quebecois by birth, but an Anglophone one, despite my last name. To make things more complicated, I spent a lot of my formative years (high school, University) in Toronto, so people often assume I'm from there.

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Visiting Greece presented some interesting linguistic challenges.

I live in Montreal, which means I have at least some knowledge of the French language. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, fluent in said language. Frankly, I'm not even very good. My French, basically, is terrible.

But while my French may be terrible, it is at least there. I'm generally able to ask for directions, order a meal from a menu, read the road signs, and even to some extent carry on a conversation, if I keep my words short and avoid slang. When someone says a word in French, I'll stand a chance of being able to match it up with a series of letters on paper, even if the word is unfamiliar.

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Evelyn and I decided, more or less on a whim, to travel to Greece this year. We went for ten days.

This was the first time we'd ever been overseas without knowing anyone at the other end. The one time we were in Europe together, in Lyon, we stayed at a friend's apartment.

Our itinerary consisted of Athens, followed by Santorini, Rhodes, Delphi and then Athens again. This is quite a bit of moving about and I feel like we saw a lot while simultaneously seeing very little. Greece is the kind of place where you can spit in a random direction and hit an ancient ruin. This is only a slight exaggeration. We are, after all, talking about the cradle of Western civilization. You can't hope to see more than a tiny fraction of all there is to see in only 10 days.

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I started YAWT a while ago, in python, because a) I wanted to learn a dynamically typed programming language and b) python seemed like a relatively easy, fun, popular, not insensible choice. To be fair, it is a fun language to use.

At the time, I gave very little thought actually packaging yawt - i.e. making it easy for someone to actually install and use. Mostly, I simply didn't think I'd ever have to do this - yawt was my baby, and I was the only one using it, so why bother?

My opinion about this has changed somewhat in recent months. I still don't think yawt is likely to be used by anyone but myself, but I find myself wanting to learn at least a little about how the python packaging system works - if only for myself. I mean, it should at least be easy for me to install it, right?

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It's hard to talk about the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo without sounding like you're either a) apologizing for violence or b) spouting tired platitudes about free speech.

I mean, sure, like everyone else, I fully condemn the attacks, given that being offended is not a reason to, you know, shoot people. I feel really weird having to say that. Like they joked on The Daily Show, I sometimes worry if I'm being "denouncy" enough.

But there was something in France's reaction to the attacks (all those myriad "Je suis Charlie" placards) that rubbed me the wrong way, though I was having trouble identifying what it was.

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David Embury classifies cocktails into two distinct groups: sour cocktails and aromatic cocktails. I've written in the past about sour cocktails but have been mostly silent about aromatic ones.

Until NOW, that is! It was an omission that just had to be rectified. Right? RIGHT?!

Aromatic cocktails are flavoured by some kind of aromatic wine, spirit, or bitters. Based on my (limited) experiments, I broadly categorize these drinks into:

But really, there's no real rule here. You basically take a base spirit and you flavour it with some combination of flavouring agent(s). Pretty simple.

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I've posted before about sour cocktails, but I felt that the subject deserved a bit more elabouration. The material here, as before, is quite heavily inspired by (some might say stolen from) David Embury's classic taxonomy from The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.

Embury's basic approach was to define a sour cocktail template. In his mind, a sour cocktail consisted of:

Different combinations of spirits and sweeteners lead, of course, to different cocktails. The exact ratios obviously depend on your personal taste and the actual ingredients you decide to use. My preferred ratio matches Embury's:

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I've been playing around with the Flask web framework for a while now. It's the basis for YAWT, the CMS/blogging system I'm currently developing (mostly as an exercise in familiarizing myself with Python)

With Flask, it's dead simple to get a very basic web application up and running:

Put this in a python file called blah.py, mark it as executable, and run it. You should be able to access the web application on locahost:5000. It does not, admittedly, do anything even remotely interesting, but it's enough to get the basic idea.

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I just finished a book called The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher. It's pretty awesome if you're interested in a) how grammar evolves over time and b) how the very notion of grammar (verb tenses, prepositions, etc.) emerges in the first place.

The author describes, for example, the Latin case system, where nouns can have different endings depending on what role the noun is playing in the sentence. You say "cactus", for example, if it's used as a subject, but you use "cactum" if it's used as an object.

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I once got into a relatively lively email debate with a friend of mine concerning the nature of free will. One of us argued that we had it and the other argued that we didn't. The exchange ended when he sent me an email explaining that he was agitated and losing sleep over the matter.

My life is weird sometimes.

People hear that story and often assume that my friend was the one who believed in free will and that I was one who didn't but in reality the reverse was true. I believed in free will; my friend did not.

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Many years ago I read a book called The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. The backdrop against which the story occurs is a relatively near future society where traditional notions of country and state have been largely supplanted by notions of "phyles" - tribes or groups having similar ethnic or cultural characteristics. One of the main characters, a Mr. John Hackworth, belongs to the Neo-Victorian phyle who, like their namesake, are a somewhat prudish lot who follow a rigid and absolute moral code.

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I'm a long time (15 years) Emacs user. Please don't draw too many conclusions from this fact. I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, an Emacs "wizard". I don't know how to make my Emacs buffer do amazing things with a single key stroke. I'm embarrassed to say, for example, that I've only recently learned the keystroke for deleting an entire line.

I'm not a Lisp hacker, and even less of an Emacs Lisp hacker. While I wouldn't say my knowledge of Lisp is non-existent, I would still firmly categorize it as "novice-level".

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For a long time I've been trying to gauge my personal feelings about this building:

This is the old Canada Malting factory. It's in the heart of Saint Henri, in Montreal, next to the McAuslan brewery on Notre Dame, right on the Lachine canal. I live about a 20 minute walk away. It's huge, intimidating, in extreme disrepair and very well-graffitied. It's been abandoned for decades.

Here's another view:

Ferreting out my reaction is not as easy as one might imagine. Introspection, at the best of times, is a tricky business.

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Evelyn and I found a polish bakery in Point St Charles. One of the things we saw (aside from the actual pastries) were packages of Jaffa cakes for sale. I'd never had one before, but they looked good, so I bought one. Indeed, they're pretty awesome. They consist of a sponge-like base, with orange jelly and chocolate on top.

A friend of mine referred me to a web site that showed how to make them. It claimed that the process was dead easy but that's a lie. Specifically, I had a difficult time making what British people call "jelly".

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I made a batch of tonic water syrup a couple of years ago and, though it was a success, there were a couple of things I found slightly off-putting in the result. Specifically:

So I tried another batch of tonic water this year with no all-spice or lemongrass, and a bit less citric acid. I also simplified the recipe somewhat, using plain sugar instead of agave syrup and omitting the citrus juice (though keeping the zest).

Here's the one I ended up using (the bark is still from Herboristerie Desjardins):

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I'm addicted to a site called tvtropes.org. It's basically a catalogue of various literary and artistic devices used in various forms of media (books, movies, TV). It's fun because the site gives names to practices that you already recognize but haven't bothered to identify in any specific way. Examples include Genre Blindness, which explains the tendency of Bond villains to reveal their entire master plan to the spy rather than just shooting him, and Lampshading, which is an attempt to diffuse an obvious plot hole by having a character draw attention to it.

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How exactly am I supposed to react when I hear about the particularly brutal gang rape and murder of a 23 year old medical student in India?

There is, of course, the obvious stuff. There's horror, sadness, and anger mixed together. There's also a certain amount of incredulity. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and I have a hard time imagining that anyone is capable of this kind of thing.

If I'm honest with myself, there's a kind of smugness too, because you think that sort of thing doesn't really happen here. And, to be fair, it doesn't - at least, not on the scale on which it happens in certain other parts of the world. I think it's fairly non-controversial to say that being a woman in Canada or the U.S. is safer than being a woman in India.

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I've been using Linux since about 1998, when I started my first "real" job at PCI Geomatics. At the time, most of PCI's workstations ran a version of Red Hat Linux. The standard setup revolved around FVWM and Emacs.

I did not find Linux easy. But it was fun.

I installed Linux for the first time in 2000, on a computer I built from scratch (my first one). It was Red Hat 6.2. That installation was not what you'd call "smooth", but I did eventually get it working.

Over the past 12 years, I've used 3 distributions. So that means, on average, I tend to stick with a distribution for about 4 years.

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I don't really consider myself Canadian.

Of course, that's kind of a lie. It does say "Canada" on my passport, so there's that. If you ask me about my nationality, I'll say I'm Canadian. If you mistake me for an American, I'll politely correct you. I mean, everybody's got to be from somewhere, right? And I'm from Canada. So I guess that makes me Canadian.

But I don't feel "Canadian" in the same way that many people feel, say, French or British or Indian (or even, dare I say it, Quebecois). My place of birth doesn't form a big part of my personal identity. The nationality of my parents takes up even less head space - I don't consider myself Italian, for example, despite the fact that my mother was born in Sicily. I've never felt a strong desire to go "back to my roots". It rarely occurs to me to care very much, beyond a fondness for lasagna and rapini.

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