ABCDEFGH -------- |r q rk |8 |pbpn pp|7 | p pp |6 | p |5 | PPn |4 |P BBPN |3 | P QPPP|2 | R RK |1 --------
NTK has some hilarious coverage of Yahoo keyword filters, which lead, NTK notes, to "medieval" appearing as "medireview".
I observed that the same substitution ("review" for "eval") leads to reviewuate, reviewuation, retrireview, prreviewent, and even primreview. ("Medieval" and "primeval" both incorporate the Latin aevus, which means "age" or "time"; "primeval" is pertaining to the first age and "medieval" pertains to the middle age.)
Yahoo also replaced "expression" by "statement", leading to oddities like Statementism (the artistic movement, doncha know) and the political virtue of freedom of statement.
(This subsequently appeared on slashdot.)
I misspoke back in November when I said that the author of the Pledge of Allegiance and the author of Looking Backward were the same person. They were different Bellamies; they were cousins.
I re-read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I liked it even better than the first time. I was looking for the passage about King Coyote:
Castles, gardens, gold and jewels
Contentment signify, for fools
Like Princess Nell; but those
Who cultivate their wit
Like King Coyote and his crows
Compile their power bit by bit
And hide it places no one knows.(The Diamond Age, p. 437)
After I found that passage, I found it hard to put the book down, and I read from p. 437 to the end, and then from the beginning up to p. 437, and then from p. 437 to the end again. It's very good.
(Princess Nell certainly turns out to be no fool.)
You can do a lot with one line of Perl. For example, I wanted to change the default root device of a kernel image -- the way rdev(8) does -- to block device major 240 minor 0 (which is /dev/cloop if you use the cloop driver). So I found how to do this with dd, instead of rdev, and then it turned out that it could all be done this way:
perl -e 'open V,"+<bzImage";seek V,508,0;print V "\0\360"'
Now that's concise.
My dad and my stepmother are visiting, and I've managed to clean up again.
We had some various pieces of good news today in EFF-land, including a subtle and hard-to-explain triumph.
If you're going to be around D.C. on Wednesday, don't miss the DOC workshop on DRM. (Richard Stallman will be there, will you?)
Contact: Seth David Schoen
