A recent thread in the TiVo Community Forum brought back this blast from the past... all I can say is, I'm glad I'm not losing my hair (yet!).

Well, it's over for Coach Fran in Tuscaloosa. Apparently the motivation is the Crimson Tide's NCAA problem going from bad to worse; it's hard to imagine any penalty forthcoming from Indianapolis short of the so-called Death Penalty, especially after the infractions committee specifically pointed out that the only reason the Tide avoided it before was for being fully cooperative.

Shutting down the Tide isn't good for either them or the SEC in general. It might be a good thing for college football in the long term, though, as an instructive example. On the other hand, it might push a lot of I-A schools to abandon amateurism completely and withdraw from the NCAA. One thing's for sure: it's going to be a long nine months in Tuscaloosa.

Look at Page 2. Then compare Exhibit B. I'm flattered that a congressman thinks I'm a good photographer, even if the caption is completely wrong (the photo is from El Dorado, nowhere near I-49). ;-)

(Via Bjørn Stærk and the TiVo Community Forum) At least, that's what Karl Rove told Bruce Boxleitner, according to J. Michael Straczynski (jms). Either (a) Karl is lying, (b) George is really thinking of "Blake's 7" or 8 Mile, or (c) George is a lot smarter, or at least a lot more discerning, than most of us thought.

Oh, did I mention that Babylon 5 rules?

I updated the site this evening to the latest PostgreSQL and Apache releases. Hopefully there are no remaining bugs.

The next project will be to convert the blog over to use mod_python; it is currently a standard CGI.

Philippe DeCroy of the Volokh Conspiracy talks a bit about the editorial effects of the Harold Raines regime on the New York Times. Not being a regular NYT reader these days (I did read it for about a year in college, but decided it wasn't worth spending the money on later in life), I can't vouch for Philippe's impression of a decided turn toward the paper's wearing its liberalism on its sleeve; Philippe argues this has caused him(?) to lose confidence in the paper's reporting.

The "problem" of media bias has been widely studied in political science and communications studies. At least in the modern U.S., most media bias has been seen primarily in terms of the framing and agenda-setting powers of the media: deciding how issues are to be presented and what issues should be discussed. Perhaps the most thorough work on this has been John Zaller's The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion and his work on the impacts of the media on public opinion (most notably, "The Myth of Massive Media Impact Revived"). One of Zaller's arguments is that people gain political knowledge due to the information that they are exposed to; this information can be either factual (as we traditionally view "information") or biased in some way. For people to make "good" or well-informed political decisions, they have to be exposed to multiple sources of information, and they have to be able to sort out that information. Other studies have shown that so-called "negative advertising" is a very good source of this information in political campaigns, because unlike most "positive" advertising, it talks about issues and other things that are politically relevant. Despite the ravings of the campaign finance reform crowd, who want strict limits on political advertising, negative TV campaigns tell us much more about candidates than anything else.

Similarly, the media provide information. The best way to learn (i.e. get information) about something is to find lots of reports of the same event from different perspectives; Google News is a near-perfect implementation of this capability, although you'll probably find that most of the reports are based on one "unbiased" AP report, which limits one's ability to integrate: to take the event viewed from various perspectives, process them through the observers' biases, and come up with what actually happened. Somewhere between The New York Times's version of events and that presented in The Washington Times is the truth; if you're open-minded enough to read both, their individual biases don't matter so much as your ability to recognize those biases and include them in how you evaluate what happened.

(Via Instapundit) IMAO writes on U.S. technology companies helping China censor the Internet, arguing that U.S. companies have a moral obligation not to help China.

I'm a bit torn on this issue, because it's largely a question of the exact role companies have in censorship. If they're buying "off-the-shelf" software to do it (and there's plenty out there, including free programs like SquidGuard that are included in Debian, I'm not sure about corporate complicity; after all, there are plenty of responsible uses for the software. For example, we use filtering software to keep students from surfing to random sites during physics labs. On the other hand, if you're giving them a custom-built system that keeps the Chinese away from CNN and the Voice of America, I'd have some problems with that.

Don't expect anything to show up here until sometime on Sunday... I'm too busy celebrating Ole Miss's 6-6 season :-/.

Read it. I've thought for quite some time that people who don't pay a tax ought not to be able to decide how the money is spent; her "negative income tax" would solve the problem without curtailing democracy. So when you vote for smaller government, you get more money in your pocket — regardless of your income.

Ole Miss is 5-6, yet can still pull out a bowl invitation in today's Egg Bowl game against Mississippi State due to (a) the collective futility of the remainder of the league and (b) Albert Means, the kid at the center of the Crimson Tide's recruiting scandal that earned them a 2-year post-season ban, with the death penalty still an option due to additional infractions the Tide forgot to report (including the involvement of a coach in addition to the boosters).

Of course, the Ole Miss late-season collapse is becoming a recurring theme, ever since Tommy "Judas Iscariat" Tuberville was too busy negotiating with Auburn at the end of the 1998 season to get his current team to do anything on the field. David "Coach to the Manning Family" Cutcliffe hasn't done much better, with the annual November skid becoming a recurring bad joke; though this year he started early.

In fairness, Ole Miss isn't the only team that's had a skid that looked worse in the box score than on the field; Kentucky's season has been about as heart-rending, complete with a final-play loss to LSU. (Ole Miss, by contrast, folded like a cheap kite on drives against Auburn and LSU, forgot to actually go to Tuscaloosa, fumbled the game away against Arkansas, and got pulverized by a ten-minute game-ending drive by Georgia.)

I guess the big question in Oxford is whether Eli Manning sticks around for his senior season. His receiving corps is only getting better and the running game seems to have finally gotten on track. His draft chances are probably better in 2004, with Byron Leftwich and probably Rex Grossman in the 2003 NFL draft. With backup QB David Morris graduating this year, the starter next year on an Eli-less squad would be Michael Spurlock, who apparently is pretty talented but whose total college quarterbacking experience is a few downs against Arkansas State. My gut feeling is that Eli will stay, if only because (a) Peyton did and (b) I think Eli wants to win the SEC title.

Mel Kiper thinks Eli needs another season to maximize his draft value. That's another reason for him to stay...

Colby Cosh writes on the outdated, industrialized model of education in the Western world. My high school history teacher made some similar points about a decade ago; our public schools are designed (from the ground up) more for indoctrination than for education, two subtly different things.

I'm not sure what the answer is, and I'm certainly not sold on the idea that home schooling is the right approach for everyone, but surely sticking kids in a vaguely prison-like facility for 6-8 hours a day where the rules assume they are going to be making trouble isn't entirely healthy.

Get it here; it seems to be relatively stable. Hopefully it leaks memory less than 20021119 did...

Various pages under the roads hierarchy have been updated with new photos, including the MS 302, MS 304 and U.S. 78 pages.

Here it is. You'll need at least foomatic-bin, python-gnome2 and python-glade2 for it to work (as well as their dependencies). No .deb yet.

Some of the input validation isn't there yet. It does do autodetection of parallel and USB printers; if a printer is known to foomatic's database, it will fill in the add druid for you; all you'll need to do is just hit "Forward" a few times to make the queue.

I've added proper GPLv2 boilerplate to each of the source files and fixed a few minor buglets. Also, you probably need python2.2-gnome2 1.99.13-2 for this to work properly.

Here it is: the world's first look at foomatic-gui. It can do everything except add/modify a printer at the moment (i.e. it does next to nothing, but it sure does look pretty).

I've been spending most of this evening working on a printer config tool for Debian, tentatively called foomatic-gui. As the name suggests, it's designed to use foomatic; basically, it's just a cute frontend to foomatic-configure. I think some autodetection should be possible; however, discover doesn't detect printers, so I may have to do it manually.

I also tried to hack together a new Phoenix+Xft build, but the 20021125 build fails to start due to a missing libc6 symbol; weird.

Momchil Velikov's glibc port to NetBSD is apparently working well now; Debian GNU/NetBSD will benefit greatly from this work. Note that the FreeBSD port is using FreeBSD's libc instead of GNU libc, just to make things more interesting; even so, a lot of cross-pollination between the two ports is happening.

Quoth Colby Cosh:

...how exactly is the U.S. going to adopt a single-payer national health care system "like Canada's"? The United States is missing an essential component of the Canadian system--namely, a large neighbour to the south with a working economy and a market-based health system.

The funny thing about all of this is that if health care was actually overpriced in America, as some politicians allege, it would get cheaper due to market forces because people would defer surgery, leading to doctors geting hit in the pocketbook and lowering their prices. (The presence of an insurance oligopoly doesn't affect this basic equation; doctors don't get paid if people don't use them.)

Adam Cohen, by way of The Volokh Conspiracy and Radley Balko, has a bone to pick with Ken Starr:

Mr. Starr was particularly exercised about liberals' being result-oriented, abandoning their principles to reach the outcomes they favor. But he would have made a more compelling case if he had not proceeded to abandon his — and the Federalist Society's — own oft-repeated commitment to judicial restraint to praise the Supreme Court for striking down the Gun-Free School Zones Act and the Violence Against Women Act in a burst of conservative activism.

I think Cohen is confusing "judicial restraint" with something very different: an interest in taking the constitution at its word. Both of these decisions dealt with the ever-increasing scope of Congress' powers the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 3) that basically gave the federal government a blank check to do anything it wanted, so long as some (often tangential) connection with "interstate commerce" could be made.

The original purpose of this line of reasoning was to justify laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1963 that extended non-discrimination requirements into public accomodations to stamp-out segregation. However laudible the goal, the court's reasoning in upholding these statutes opened the door for virtually any federal law to be justifiable.

In retrospect, the courts could have more narrowly tailored the rulings under the 14th Amendment's "privileges or immunities" and equal protection clauses, along with existing common law, to avoid this outcome; however, the Warren Court often seemed more worried about the policies it could set from the bench than the precedents its decisions would set elsewhere in the law. The end result: the Gun-Free School Zones Act and the Violence Against Women Act, neither of which did anything but federalize crimes that are already illegal in every state of the union.

Libertarians (big-L and small-L) are often accused of wanting a "weaker" federal government. Certainly we support a reduced role for the federal government, and in particular a Congress that stays within its enumerated powers. A limited federal government would allow more freedom for citizens and, at the same time, be able to concentrate on problems that the states cannot solve on their own. The rush to federalize every conceivable crime, from smoking pot to murder, accomplishes neither of those goals.

I've added an RSS feed to the site; it's probably compatible with most 0.9x tools, although it's actually built on RSS 2.0.

FWIW, RSS 1.0 seems a bit overboard on the "XML as a solution to all problems" dimension, but I'll implement it if anyone cares.

Tim Blair lets us all know that British authorities have fined a pub's owners because some of its patrons were caught dancing.

I haven't the faintest clue what this means, but there's a Footloose joke in here somewhere just begging to be told.

If you're in the market for a wireless base station, check out this deal from Amazon.com: a Netgear MR814 for $99 with $50 in mail-in rebates.

Want to iterate over a file? Try this on for size:

for line in open('/etc/passwd'):  # You could also use file('/etc/passwd')
    logname, x, uid = line.split(':')[:2]
    print 'user %s has uid %s' % (logname, uid)

You'd probably want to use the pwd module instead if you need to access the passwd database portably; this was meant as a simple example. :-)

Explanation: In Python 2.2 and later, file objects have a built-in iterator, which allows the lines in a file to be iterated over in a "for" loop. This is more memory efficient than the lines=f.readlines() semantic and easier to read than using the relatively new xreadlines() method.

You can also iterate over dictionaries now, as well as any class that defines a __next__ method. This is particularly useful when combined with generators, which are basically functions that preserve state between calls. xrange() and xreadlines() are now implemented this way. Of course, sequences (lists, tuples, strings) have their own built-in iterators too for backwards-compatibility :-)

Python 2.2 also has additional cool dictionary features; you can use "in" and "not in" instead of using dict.has_key(). "in" can also be implemented in classes using the __contains__ method. (Also, 2.3 extends "in" to allow multicharacter strings, so you can use the much cleaner if 'hell' in 'hello' instead of if 'hello'.find('hell') != -1.)

Another productivity tip for 2.2 and later: use help(object) at the interpreter prompt to get documentation for that object; it works best with modules and classes.

Radley Balko passes on word that Jim Jeffords, who defected to the Democrats (er, became an "Independent") last year, wants back in with the GOP.

It's certainly nice to see principles are alive and well in the Senate.

I've hacked together a Xft-enabled Phoenix build from a nightly Mozilla build and a nightly Phoenix build; you can download it here. It seems to run well under Debian unstable; it should also run OK in Red Hat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.

If you want to roll your own, see the unofficial Phoenix FAQ for details. That site also has extensions and themes that work with Phoenix; I'm enjoying the Qute theme, myself.