I think the one thing undergirding the decline and fall of newspapering is that, by and large, newspapers lost touch with their audience and communities long ago.
-Revolution 21's Blog for the People: Extra! Extra! You won't read all about it!

Amen. Read the whole thing.

Crazy right-winger Michele Bachmann from Minnesota, in her floor speech, issued a litany of talking points against the public option, and said that the public option would be far cheaper than private insurance. -Michele Bachmann Opposes Public Option Because It’s “Cheaper”

Well, it's certainly an interesting 'problem' that the government can apparently provide health insurance for 30-40% less than the health insurance industry.

Affirmative action is needs to just go away. I respect the goal behind idea, but it just never worked correctly. Affirmative action is the sort of gibberish policy you get when you let progressives loose at liberal issues.

Continue reading "Affirmative Action" »

I suggest more poverty-base grants for the very poor B student to at least manage a community college associate degree, so they can make $20 an hour job fixing cars or wiring houses instead of $7 an hour as cashier, which is the difference between two 30-hour a week jobs where you can't pay the rent, and a 45-hour a week job where you can and even save a little.

Continue reading "Poverty and Education" »

There are always conspiracy theories. Here's what I think.

Anyone who thinks that the rich and powerful secretly control large sections of the world isn't paying attention. That's sorta like claiming the chairman and board of IBM secretly control IBM. Of course rich and powerful people control the world, they just do it out in the open informally, not in secret back room meetings where they laugh maniacally.

Continue reading "Conspiracy Theories" »

I am apparently the coolest person evar. Or, at least, everyone agrees with me.

Continue reading "My adoring fans" »

Firefox, as it comes be default, has several inane UI choices, so I'm going to list some extensions here that make it a good deal saner:

Continue reading "Firefox: Trivial User Interface Extensions" »

muss is a concept for the sharing of common code between mu* servers.

Specifically, it will follow the musix standard. Only code following the standard will be put in there.

Whether or not it will be a true library, or simply a source file, is unknown.

If a source file, all functions in it will be able to be disabled so that servers can continue to use their own if they wish.

muss stands for MU* Shared Source, if it's not obvious.

musix is a proposal for a standard set of functions that exist on all MU* servers. There are many identical functions that already exist, and more importantly there are plenty of nearly identical functions that could be made identical with very little tweaking.

An example would be the htab interface. It predates the forking, and has remained basically unchanged. A few features have been added to different implementations, but those can either trivially be added to others or left out of the musix standard.

It's important to note that musix doesn't require any sharing of source, each function could be implemented separately on different servers. Source sharing is in muss

No existing function names will be used. They will obviously be considered, but will be prefixed with a msx_

Over time, especially with muss, it's hoped that server code will be charged to call these standard functions instead of their own. (Even if the standard function is just a macro to their own) in the hopes of writing code that can be shared much more easily between servers.

The name 'musix' comes from 'posix' and stands for MU* System Interface.

If you know what this is, you know what it is. If you do not, you do not.

Continue reading "Compatible string functions on PennMUSH and TinyMUX" »

For the first in this series, I'll talk about Keyword Search. This is actually a built-in feature of firefox, made more useful by an extension called 'Smart Search'.

The feature is explained on the keyword searches. That page explains in in a rather odd way, so I will try to do it better.

Continue reading "Firefox: Keyword Search" »

Here's I'm going to tell you about all the Firefox extensions I use. I've repackaged them all and have them locally, so you can install them from here, and I've also included links to their page so you can go over there. Sometimes I'll write articles about more than one extension, and I'll additionally have all of them packaged into one file so you can download them at one time.

I'll also talk about some of the overlooked and useful features built in.

If anyone has suggestions as to extensions or features, feel free to add them in the comments.

As I said in my introduction, I consider myself somewhat a Progressive.

There are people out there that think that's just another way to say 'Liberal', but in reality progressive political thought and liberal political thought are often at loggerheads, which I will probably write about at some point in the future. The 'New Left' is, at this point in time in this country, comprised of both traditions. I also hold a few liberal views, including some that the left doesn't!

Continue reading "About Politics" »

The Notepad that comes with Windows is a prime example of how Microsoft doesn't understand what sort of software is supposed to come with operating system. A useful text editor is right up there at the time, but Notepad is broken and defective by design in so many different ways that this would turn into a rant if I listed them all.

So, instead, I shall list Notepad++. Download it, install it, use it, and stop worrying.

Continue reading "Software I Use: Notepad++" »

This series is going to be talking about stuff I use on my computer to get my work done. Sometimes they're not the most popular, and I'm sure others will take issue with them, but I'm not issuing awards or anything, I'm simply saying that I, personally, use them right now. My computer is running Windows XP, so you can assume all the software here will work on it, although I'll try to note if there's some other OSes supported.

A lot of this software will be free software, either as in beer and/or as in speech. Some of it won't.