Older blog entries for haruspex (starting at number 127)

REP - someone who wants to improve their own lot (at expense of the world), or maintain their comfortable, unsustainable status quo;

DEM - someone who wants to improve the world.

Seems to apply equally to FOSS workers vs capitalistas (M$, SCO).

Sick of stupid, bloodthirsty, self-interested, warmongering fools.

Tired of seeing comments such as "liberals are Utopians", "liberals are living in the past". Liberal is a word now as meaningless as "terrorist"; both are used to mean shades of "someone who disagrees with [my conservative views]".

I am not afraid to inhabit the world and history both. The REPs can have their cesspit Post History, New World. They created the ugliness. They can live in it, or let the humanists fix it (as always).

And this is disgusting (State Dept roundly and hypocritically insults Castro and all Cubans). From what I hear of the two countries, for the non-rich, life in Cuba is often more comfortable than life in the US. But the US govt would never let the facts get in the way of a good opportunity for some astonishingly brazen propaganda, even by their standards. I suppose the imbeciles in public office think ignorance will always be the controlling force in America; I hope, for humanity's sake, they are not correct. Please vote.

nymia, love your reflection on History! LOL.

nutella, scary. I knew the world was going to pay for Beavis & Butthead eventually.

raph, I too was underwhelmed by the results of the paper. I don't share the authors' confidence in their approach but I see how seductive it might be to a non-type-designer... the same intellectual trap that mars METAFONT results, as you say: the conceit that letters can be dissected into mathematical objects at a high level. The research seems to show that this is not the case. I did think the paper had some interesting aspects but these were tangential (haha) to its main premise.

Re: UI frameworks, yes, it's a tragedy that we have to wrestle with several mutually incompatible UI models. Sigh. Guess each player doesn't really want cross platform software (excepting the open source toolkits of course).

raph: Nick Summers sent me a link to this paper, Parameterizable Fonts Based on Shape Components - have you seen it?

Also these results.

raph, "native X server"? What about a Quartz version? (and/or libart/X11)

Gah. Does anyone else here hate D-Link? I have a D-Link DWL-122 USB compact wireless thing in an iMac that gives grief to two other devices on my Ad-Hoc wireless net:

1. a P4 running WinXP with a D-Link DWL-G520B PCI card can't access Samba shares on the iMac or surf reliably (the iMac is gateway); can't ftp either.

2. a P3 laptop running Linux can't do certain transfers (http, nfs) with the iMac over wireless. Funnily enough, ssh and ping work perfectly.

Hmm...wonder if it's MTU/MRU related.

Gah. I think the next thing is to swap the D-Link USB for a Linksys USB.

(update) Ankh, NAT is not involved. MTU changes do not help... I think I am dealing with a faulty D-Link USB wireless adapter. Will probably buy a Linksys wireless router tomorrow (only $60 approx!) and solve it that way...

(I wish Advogato wouldn't keep spawning <p>'s every time I edit a post)

Found among M$ blogs.

1) Andy Rich says, "I love when customers find bugs!"

He must be a happy man then. Maybe one day he'll realise it's even better when customers find and fix bugs.

2) Brian Johnson's blog is titled BufferOverrun. Bad omen, or what? Sure enough, the top post is a Security Bulletin - the GDI+ vulnerability.

National tragedy in Australia

Australian election is a disaster. That's it. I'm leaving the country. I can't believe they re-elected that pathetic drooling liar for another term.

miconof, just mmap the file once.

AlanHorkan, in "RTFM", the profanity is entirely in the eye of the beholder. You can choose to read it in that way, or not, it's entirely up to you. It's not inherent.

Re: the case in point, most of your arguments are moot, since wget is not only completely and accessibly documented in its man page - if shlomif can't use man then answering his question would have done him little good - but also has its internal documentation which is impossible not to stumble over.

Shlomif needs to be helped to help himself. RTFM is by far the most polite way of doing so (see previous entry).

(additional) Actually I mean nothing against shlomif personally. He's a pretty OK guy. And I really like his solution to Perl Regular Quiz 023.

shlomif,

I recently had to figure out how to do something with wget: get everything below a directory on the web-server, without following links to outside it. So I logged in to FreeNode's #debian channel, where there are many knowledgable people to ask it. The first answer I got was "RTFM". ...

No matter how much you bleat, the answer has always been in man wget AND wget --help. (The latter is impossible to miss, as any incomplete or incorrect invocation suggests you use it.) If you need IRC to babysit you through a command that has comprehensive built-in help, well, you deserve what you get. Make an acronym of this: Try Harder Next Time.

(update) nymia:

So, what is shlomif's chance of getting the answer: 25%.

100% if he uses man wget or simply wget itself.

IRC was the wrong avenue, as he may or may not learn. The fault is not IRC per se. "RTFM" is a valid response because what is required here is not the answer asked for, but the knowledge of where in general to find such answers. "Give a man a fish" versus "Teach a man to fish". The former does not scale. The latter does (and is the premise of education in general).

To your cases I would add:

5. Whether the respondent knows the answer is irrelevant; "RTFM" is appropriate when it is clear from context that answering the question of the instant will do no lasting good.