group hygiene

Rumor concerning Yahoogroups:

Attention: Owners & Moderators please read Important!!!
If you are on other groups, or are a moderator or owner of other groups, please crosspost this notice . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Someonehas been joining communities with the nickname YAHOO COMMUNITYMONITOR, and then posting the following:

Yahoo Group Managers have been receiving a few complaints about your group. I am required to join your site and monitor it for about one month. will not do anything to damage or ruin your site,I am only required to monitor it. The only thing required of you is to accept my application and make me a Manager of your group for the time I am there. If you cannot meet these requirements,Yahoo will have to shut your group down.

DO NOT!! make this person a manager! SHE/HE is a fake, and has been deleting groups once made a manager. BAN the member immediately. Please let other groups know about this problem.

Now, I’ve no idea if this is really going on, but it’s obvious that such a message would not come from someone genuinely sent by Yahoo.

Tangentially: I wish there were a convenient commercial alternative to Yahoogroups – something that would allow me to create a list with all the old Majordomo-style conveniences, for a small yearly fee, rather than being driven by advertising.

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wanted: abstract plumber

Joel [Spolsky] on Software – The Law of Leaky Abstractions

means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.” Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning.

And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.

Posted in neep-neep | Leave a comment

the virtue of crudity

In Praise of Evolvable Systems: Why something as poorly designed as the Web became The Next Big Thing, and what that means for the future. (Thanks to Joel Levin for the link)

Posted in neep-neep | 1 Comment

Hortensii present and past

A few months ago in alt.fan.miss-manners someone confessed ignorance that Hortense is feminine. That sent me to the books to learn its etymology. From E.G.Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, I learn that the Hortensii were a Roman gens (~clan). From the Oxford Classical Dictionary I learn of a dictator and a senator both named Quintus Hortensius.

Posted in language | 1 Comment

rhinosauric

As I listen to Rhino’s Super Hits of the Seventies: Have a Nice Day vol.9, divers questions come to mind.

  • When Gary Glitter recorded “Rock and Roll Part 2” did it cross the mind of anyone concerned that I might be air-drumming to it thirty years later?
  • Is Rick Springfield’s “Speak to the Sky” the only pop hit with a prominent tuba part?
  • Why haven’t I heard “Popcorn” used in advertising?
Posted in music+verse | Leave a comment

time for fun

Partly as a protest against the dirigisme presupposed in the institution of “Daylight Saving Time”, I’ve been tempted to set my computer’s clock to mean local solar time; I’m at 122 degrees West longitude, so my mail would be marked “–0808”. But nothing in my books will tell me how to change time-zone on Linux (let alone choose an irregular one), though I now know how to do it on Solaris.

One could go further Continue reading

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tantalizing

Jean-François Colonna makes elaborate and striking mathematical images. I only wish they had more annotation.

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment