The good news: the pseudo-judicial process at Gitmo isn’t absolutely rigged to find everyone guilty of terrorism. The bad news: innocence isn’t enough to get you out of the hole. (Cited by Gary Farber.)
J R Stockton collects a lot of useful tidbits about orbital mechanics and the like.
Netflix’s list of new releases this week has five Israëli titles, ten Chinese and 55 Indian – not counting 23 collections of songs from Indian film.
Pillow spends much of a typical day on my bed; when I find him there, I tussle with him. Now I have clear evidence that he enjoys these little skirmishes: whenever I go to that room (except at bedtime), he eagerly follows me in and jumps onto the bed.
Yet he never approaches me when I’m not on my feet.
Fluffie, alas, is less friendly to me since Pillow joined us. She still visits me in bed but never jumps on my lap anymore.
A dreadful blunder in Granada Television’s version (1985) of “The Greek Interpreter”: in a non-canonical scene, Mycroft Holmes refers to a derringer as a “revolver”. Tsk!
My bookmarks file has 4539 entries, most of which I intend to look at “someday”. So I’ve written a little utility (two lines of code, plus scaffolding) that other Unix users may find useful, provided that your favorite browser keeps bookmarks in a textfile (as the Mozilla family does). Once an hour it picks a bookmark at random and opens it in my default browser. My crontab contains this entry:
01 * * * * sh ~anton/bin/bookcron
meaning: at :01 of every hour, run the following shell script:
cd ~anton
cat Library/App*/Firefox/Profiles/*/bookmarks.html | grep -o “http[^\”]*” | python bcp
which extracts any links from any bookmarks files and feeds them to this Python program:
import os
import sys
import random
os.system(“open %s” % random.choice(sys.stdin.readlines()).replace(‘&’,’\\&’) )
The function random.choice picks a random entry from the list. The command open does the right thing on MacOS X, but for other Unices you’ll probably need to replace it with the browser name. The replace() prevents silly things that would otherwise happen when a shell command contains an ampersand.