A quick poem about Lisards.

So someone on IRC by the name of "lisard" was having difficulty with their internet connection, and their IRC client was using "lisard2" and "lisard3" as alternate names when the IRC server hadn't yet decided that the original lisard was no longer connected.

And this burst out of my head and onto the channel...

Three little lisards sitting in a channel
All in a row, and none wearing flannel.
One in the morning
Two to-day
Three in the evening
Four on the way

Finally got around to using sshfs

So I finally got around to using sshfs.

It's a heck of a lot nicer to use than sftp.

For giggles, mount a system's log directory, and run tail -f on syslog or some such.

Tell me the Why and Why Not

I often have questions, and they're often very detailed.



I don't just want the answer to the question.

I don't just want the answer to the question you think I should be asking.



I want the answer to the question, the answer to the question you think I should be asking, why you think I should be looking for your answer, and why you think I shouldn't be looking for the answer to the question I asked.



You see, I realize I don't know everything, and I know I will never know the best way to do things. However, I am perfectly willing to read any and every piece of reference material I can get my hands on if it will lead me to understand the why and the why not of the choices that I need to make. With the understanding of the underlying reasons, I can apply that understanding inductively to other problems with superficially similar structure. I can learn more not just about how the thing it self is alike and different from something else, but I can learn more about how its structure and basis for existence is alike and different from that of something else.



Understanding where things stand is one thing, understanding why things stand is another, but taking those and getting things closer to where they can be is everything.

Sentinel States and Irritable Iteration

I'm getting real annoyed with return value contracts like "returns a typed value if possible, or a T object" and "returns an array of U objects, or FALSE on failure." That's not what dynamic typing is for! I'll check for a failure code in the object. Just give me a return value I can iterate through!

My 4th

I did catch a few shots of the 4th of July...

A quickie about Bernard Madoff

There are three sides to punitive (as opposed to reformative) justice:

1. Protection of society from the convicted -- Appropriate to a point; Nothing stops him from running another illegal scam so long as he has communication with people with the power to do such things. However, that's only true if his communications are monitored, or if he's put in solitary. It's also only true up until he dies; 100 year plus sentence for a guy already near that old?

2. Dissuasion of others to enact similar crimes. (I don't think punishment has much, if any, dissuasive impact on people who would be likely to commit the crime. Even primarily fear-controlled societies still have an underground where people risk their lives to do things that would seem trivial in other places. People who think that legal punishment has significant dissuasive impact are living in their own little world...)

3. Revenge...And I think that's mostly what this is about. Whenever you hear someone saying that so-and-so deserves such-and-such a punishment, it's about revenge.

Top ten photos on my Flickr account

Curiously, they all seem to be from AWA14.