computers

• Turkey reforms a controversial law prohibiting insulting “Turkishness”, but the reforms may not go far enough.
• E911 mistakenly sends help to Toronto rather than Calgary. Someone dies.
• In Israel, an Orthodox backlash against ultra-Orthodox domination of civil and religious institutions.
• Israel provides medical care to sick and injured Palestinians from Gaza. A bit of a bright spot in the middle of swirling chaos.
• A substitute teacher claims that accusations of wizardry cost him his job.
• The New York Times discovers (in the Fashion and Style section, naturally) that transgendered spouses face legal challenges in the United States. Feministe has some interesting and important reactions.
• Gas Tax Spam:
  

  If you accept we will deliver to your a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a “GAS TAX HOLIDAY”. You will then deliver this money to accounts of our friends in Middle East by taking it to your nearby gasoline station where they have information to forward the money. Please supply your bank account, social security number, address and your vote in DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES AND NOVEMBER GENERAL ELECTION.

Real posting resuming soon! Thanks for the holiday, internet.

I use JabRef to compile and maintain BibTeX bibliographies, because while I could be all 1337 and hack them together by hand, this would be extremely painful and not as easy to sort or take in at a glance as using a GUI. However, JabRef, while an excellent program, still shows signs of its origins in the shadowy underbelly of Java applications. It won’t do things like open .bib files from the Finder, or by the open command, or any of those terrific shortcut ways of doing things that Mac users take for granted. So whenever I double-click on a .bib file, it opens in BibDesk. Which is a fine BibTeX editor, and I have lots of friends who use it, but it’s not my preferred program.

But once in a while, it chokes so hard for some unexplained reason that it completely garbage-izes your file and throws up a hilarious error message to let you know that it’s finished trashing every last byte of data in your 200-item bibliography, such as the following:

If BibDesk cannot open files in the “BibTeX” format, what the heck have I been working with all these years?

I’ve been horribly busy the last few days with a research project—it is done for the moment, however, so in the time in between now and when I can calm down enough to write a ‘real’ post, here’s a list of interesting tabs that have been open in my Firefox since a few days ago:

• Sometimes I think my viola-playing belongs in the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Microsoft executives are not surprised to learn how awful Windows Vista really is.
• Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President and current Clinton hench-person, believes that Obama has got this far only because he’s a black man.
• Some amusing British humour about the U.S. presidential election.
• Required reading: Daniel Gordis’s most recent dispatch regarding how Hayyim Nachman Bialik would be mortified by the State of Israel today.
• Iraq really didn’t have WMDs—can you friggin’ believe it?
• Chris Beam’s excellent insight that the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is more likely to harm the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Now I can close all those tabs, and Firefox can stop memory-leaking (ha). Hat-tips all round.

It has recently been rediscovered that Professor Geoff Pullum, late of the University of California at Santa Cruz but now of the University of Edinburgh, as well as of the terrific blog Language Log, has published a proof of the undecidability of the halting problem in the manner of Dr. Seuss. The original poem was published as ‘Scooping the loop snooper: an elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem’ in Mathematics Magazine 73.4, 319–320, and can be found here (JSTOR access required) or reprinted, probably not entirely legally but entirely freely, here.

What driving to the store would be like if computer operating systems ran your car…

[Much like the shooting yourself in the foot list, these jokes are showing its age. If you can come up with clever ways in which it can be improved, expanded, etc., please let me know.]
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The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from each other) sometimes makes it difficult to remember which language you’re using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in such dilemmas.

[Note: as the basic collection has grown steadily older and older, I have tried to update it with some languages (and some OSes, admittedly) with which I am at least passingly familiar. Many people have already contributed; my appreciation for your knowledge and spare time is duly noted. Any further assistance in this matter will be likewise appreciated; please let me know if you have anything to add. Thank you.]
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