Lifestream

Headline on Slashdot: "People Feel Weird About Touching Robot Butts, Researchers Find"

There's an Irish joke that runs as follows:

A journalist, researching for an article on the complex political situation in Northern Ireland, was in a pub in a war-torn area of Belfast. One of his potential informants leaned over his pint of Guinness and suspiciously cross-examined the journalist: "Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?" the Irishman asked.

"Neither," replied the journalist; "I'm an atheist."

The Irishman, not content with this answer, put a further question: "Ah, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?

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Gyros pita plate for lunch. Stomach hurts. I REGRET NOTHING!

Easiest way to modernize 1950's science fiction: replace all instances of the word "atomic" with the word "nuclear".

Hey....psssst.... How does Moses make his tea? ... ... Hebrews it. You're welcome.

I just used Google to search for "non-Google search engines". Awkward!

I was a fan of Bowie's music, but I'm actually a bit more sad that there will now never be a proper sequel to Labyrinth.

So I saw Spectre.

So it's funny when the characters in the reboot are recognizable, not from the originals, but rather from their Austin Powers counterparts.

I never really watched most of the original Cold War Bond movies.

If you're in the tech industry, or you're just generally interested in technology, chances are you've heard of the Turing test. It's usually billed as a litmus test for intelligence in machines. The idea, in its most basic form, is simple. A judge converses with two subjects, one of which is human and one of which is a machine, via some sort of mechanism that hides the physical characteristics of the subjects. If the judge cannot tell the human from the machine, we say that the machine is intelligent. Simple as that.

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The first two episodes of "The Man in the High Castle" are, indeed, appropriately grim

Switzerland banned minarets in 2009? I had no idea...

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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Javascript people: React or Angular?

Every time Justin Trudeau smiles I always think I see the sunlight glinting off his teeth.

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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Line from Asimov's 'The Stars, Like Dust': 'Gillbret fingered and stroked the knobs gently'.  Oh 1951, you were a simpler time.

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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Repeating the Facebook experiment. Sending out a tweet from a python app.  Can you see me? :)

Chocolate eclair at 10am. Mistake. Delicious mistake, but still a mistake.

Calvados Crusta. Possibly my new favourite drink.

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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