Archive: January 15, 2003
Now I only have to look in one place to see who's on Conan, Leno, Letterman, and a whole bunch of other shows. Check out The Late Night TV Page.
Thank God. I've been watching the channel 11 news tonight just because on one of the commercials before the news they advertised that "Bush weighed in on affirmative action", and I really wanted to hear what he had to say. Thank God he weighed in against the Universitiy of Michigan's racist admissions policies.
Here's a transcript of his speech today.
.... quota systems that use race to include or exclude people from higher education and the opportunities it offers are divisive, unfair and impossible to square with the Constitution.
In the program under review by the Supreme Court, the University of Michigan has established an admissions process based on race. At the undergraduate level, African-American students and some Hispanic students and Native American students receive 20 points out of a maximum of 150, not because of any academic achievement or life experience, but solely because they are African-American, Hispanic or Native American.
To put this in perspective, a perfect SAT score is worth only 12 points in the Michigan system. Students who accumulate 100 points are generally admitted, so those 20 points that are awarded solely based on race are often the decisive factor.
Wow.
At the Law School some minority students are admitted to meet percentage targets, while other applicants with higher grades and better scores are passed over. This means that students are being selected or rejected based primarily on the color of their skin.
The motivation for such an admissions policy may be very good, but its result is discrimination and that discrimination is wrong.
Yeah Bush. I continue to be glad I voted for him 
Via LGF, the Duke University Chronicle, Defining a Religion.
Over centuries, Christians broke the Church's stranglehold over politics and ended religious persecution with moral and physical force, teachings and wars. The founding moral flaw of the United States, slavery, was confronted intellectually and ended in four years of titanic war. Yet Islamic fundamentalist imperialism has usurped the face of Islam with little resistance from moderate Muslims. Today when some Americans oppose conflict with Iraq, they protest "Not in my name" or "No blood for oil"; where are moderate Muslims protesting the actions of Islamic fundamentalists with "Not in our name" banners or "No blood for Qur'an"?
How is it possible that PHP's call_user_func() doesn't support passing references to the callback (when the references are specified in the parameter list of the callback)? You can do it by passing a reference explicitly, but doesn't this break "call_time_pass_reference" something or other that's deprecated? Grrr!
I keep hearing things like "It costs more money to have capital punishment than to not have it" -- that's a quote I just heard on The O'Reilly Factor by some guy defending the Illinois Governor's decision to release all inmates on death row to life in prison.
I don't buy it.
How can it be possible that keeping someone alive for 50+ years in the prison system (costing food, clothing, shelter, security personnel, and on and on), is less expensive than "flipping a switch" once, even if you count whatever extra legal fees may be involved in executing someone rather than just throwing him in the prison system?
The way my CMS is currently structured is that it has a "model", which is basically an API to certain business objects in the system. My weblog, for instance, has a model that allows me to add/edit a weblog entry, and retrieve weblog entries by date, category, search string, etc. The point is that this model knows nothing about the web or my CMS and should be able to be ripped right out of the CMS and be used for something else easily.
Then you have a "module", which is sort of a web interface to the model which mediates between the model and the "view" in my system. So the module has functions for "printWeblogEntries", etc., which access the model API and call certain view components to get the job done. There's more, but that's the gist of it.
I originally started this post to "think out loud" about a question I had, but now I forgot what that was...
Oh yeah. The point is that the underlying database tables of my weblog can have different column names than the module expects to be given by the weblog API. My Weblog API is actually an abstraction over the "node" model that my CMS provides. Whereas Node is generic, Weblog is more specific. So rather than "Node_Title", I want to present the module with a field called "entry_title", or even just "title". So I'd really love a way to change the name of a key in a PHP associative array, but there's no way to do that. So the only way I see is to copy a reference to $struct['Node_Title'] into $struct['title']. Hopefully that won't be that slow of an operation.
Hmm, or maybe I can have the field names be changed in the database itself. You know, "SELECT real_field_name AS whatever FROM..."
I wish PHP had iterators (hey, very cool, check out patterndigest.com). In my CMS, I'm going to have to design an iterator structure, and I may use a similar approach to the one the Whitebeam System uses. Also see that page for a justification of using iterators in a CMS instead of caching an entire dataset in RAM.
You may also be interested in this JavaWorld article: The trick to "Iterator Observers".
Via Matt, The Year in Scripting Languages. It's a review of all the progress made in various scripting language communities in 2002. It's been Slashdotted, but there's a mirror set up for you to read.
This is a joint review of 2002 for the programming languages Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl.
It was a cooperative effort by people from the five communities.
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Wednesday, January 15, 2003
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The Elegant Universe
Well I have finally found the crazyguy that preaches useless nonsencein A...
Joseph Baxter: Jan 7, 11:07pm