October, 2015 archive
Descent into Fear 0
Dan Casey stifles his qualms and explores some “gun-free zones.” Here’s a bit:
I started at the DMV in northern Roanoke County and found Tanya Howell of Roanoke standing calmly outside.
“I think [the gun ban] is a good idea,” she said. “I feel safer knowing someone’s not going to walk in and shoot up the building. I’m just glad somebody’s doing something about it.” Score one for McAuliffe.
The Climates They Are a-Changing 0
MarketWatch’s Paul B. Farrell unloads on Big Oil. A snippet:
Listen: “Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuel’s Role in Global Warming Decades Ago,” screams an InsideClimateNews.org headline. Environmental activist Bill McKibben’s op-ed in the Guardian news was brutal, calling Exxon Mobil’s secret decades-long campaign as a turncoat climate-science denier an “unparalleled evil.”
And the Department of Justice attorney who successfully sued Big Tobacco says America should sue Big Oil on racketeering charges, a fraud against investors as well as the public, covering up their own research and hiring goons to undermine other legitimate research, such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Demonstrate politeness at the children’s sporting event.
Police say the shooter was not attending the game where the child was shot, and believe it might be an accident.
Have Cake, Eat It Too, Paul Ryan, Special Snowflake Dept. 0
Emily Mills points out his hypocrisy.
Sticking to his tradition may well mean Ryan ends up forgoing some of the duties traditionally associated with the job, like traveling the country to raise money for his party. Honestly, Ryan’s demands are entirely reasonable and could do much to bring more visibility to the challenge faced by many parents across the country — that of juggling jobs and family.
Thing is, in so demanding deference to his work-life balance, Ryan also is revealing himself to be a hypocrite of the first degree. The congressman has authored several policy and budget proposals that would directly and negatively impact working parents, especially those in lower income brackets.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Be polite to your neighbor:
It is not yet clear what they were arguing about.
Regular Expressions Make My Brain Hurt 0
If they also make your brain hurt, here’s a good tutorial.
If you are not sure what Regular Expressions (often called “regex”) are, they are a versatile tool for searching text for specific strings. You can search for strings with various permutations and qualifications.
Here’s an example, illustrating a search of the file /usr/doc/HTML/en/common/gpl-license for the any occurrence of a string including two characters followed by the characters “cept” (the -i means “ignore case”). The working directory was /usr/doc/HTML/en/common/, which is where the GNU Public License resides in Slackware –Current.
The text is choppy because the output of the command displays individual lines from the text file, rather than sentences:
$ grep -i "..cept" gpl-license
License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
special exception, the source code distributed need not include except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not
prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by
Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and
make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals
FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN
Here’s some more searches I did during the tutorial:
grep "^[A-Z].*\.$" gpl-license <--Searches for all lines starting with capital letters or ending with periods.
egrep "(public license)" gpl-license <--Searches for all lines including the string "public license."
grep "^[A-Z]" gpl-license <--searches for all lines starting with capital letters.
These are very simple regex searches.
Here’s a complex regular expression string that I grabbed from a website. Note that it is just the search string, not prefaced by a search command:
\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,}\b
When I understand that, I will consider that I have achieved geekdom.
Yes, this is my idea of fun.
“The Smart One” 0
Turn off the oven. He’s done.
Afterthought:
Even a facade of sanity is now anathema in Republican World.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Be polite during family activities.
The gun discharged, hitting the son in the face.
. . . and another gun that fires itself.
In a Nutshell 0
Dick Polman sums up the Republicans’ Benghazi farce:
Follow the link for the play-by-play.
Decoding de Code 0
One more time: A complaint about “political correctness” means “I want license to be nasty without penalty.”
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
It’s the big lie of the secesh, the big lie they tell themselves even more than they tell it to others: the big lie that the Civil War was not about slavery.