Saw two excellent Hitchcock pictures this week: Strangers on a Train (1951) and Dial M for Murder (1954) — each of which concerns a tennis champion with an inconvenient wife.
In the latter, Grace Kelly’s accent is sometimes plummier than her character; I wonder whether she modelled it in part on Joan Greenwood (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, The Importance of Being Earnest).

The Daily WTF showcases badly written code. (Cited by Ned Batchelder, who found it from Bob Congdon.)

Looking up the Constitution of the State of California for a discussion on secession, I noticed this doubly odd provision (article 3 section 2):

The boundaries of the State are those stated in the Constitution of 1849 as modified pursuant to statute. Sacramento is the capital of California.

Why incorporate a superseded law by reference rather than explicitly? And why put in the constitution something that is subject to alteration by ordinary statute?

I’ve just written my first cron job, to sort my Mozilla bookmarks by last access (since Moz won’t do it properly). Seems to work. Woohoo!

I learned just enough from the Llama Book to do it crudely, but not enough to do it quite the way I’d like to.
(Later: rewrote it more to my liking in Python.)

In other news, summer is suddenly over: after a series of heatwaves, this morning it’s intermittent heavy rain.

AlterNet: DrugReporter: Dressing Up Failure

In Angel episode 4:8 “Habeas Corpses”, there’s a long scene where Our Heroes have to fight off a horde of zombies with nothing but their fists. It’s twice as tricky as it might be, because one hand is busy holding a sword or axe.

I guess it’s expensive to film multiple decapitations.

Ah, hell. Suddenly my Yahoo password doesn’t work, and I can’t recover it — because I never told Yahoo my true birthdate, and of course I’ve long forgotten whatever bogus birthdate I filled in way back when.

I much prefer sites that let you choose your security question, e.g. “your first pet’s name” or “the street where you lived at age 7” — oh, wait, that’s how to get your stripper/dragqueen name. (Mine is Smokey Florecita: not bad eh?)

Later: networking works for me, for once: my mole inside Yahoo promises to look into it.