Archive: October 31, 2003
I think Joan of Arcadia might actually be an excellent show. I'm giving it a tentative but strong recommendation. Amber Tamblyn is surprisingly awesome, and I always like Joe Mantegna. Jason Ritter got a lot from his dad (which is good), and the mom, Mary Steenburgen, was Clara Brown in Back to the Future III  Supporting characters are good, and the major plot device is used surprisingly well.
It's been kicking butt in the ratings, and deservedly so. Check it out next week... Fridays, 8-9pm, CBS.
I want to put the word "smurf" into my common usage. A lot of times you're too lazy to come up with the right word for something, and smurf would work just fine. But sometimes you're too anal and want to find the appropriate word rather than fudging it. Take the plunge... smurf all you want. No kittens will be hurt.
http://www.extremepumpkins.com
This is the extent of my Halloween fun. Well, besides pigging out on our own candy. We live at the very end of a cul-de-sac (on a dead-end street), so our house isn't usually a very high-traffic trick-or-treating house.
You have dialectical tension when your worldview implies two contradictory, or at least competing, ways of thinking about a given topic with no real way to resolve the problem within your worldview. There are many instances of dialectical tension within the history of philosophy, and here are just a few[1]:
- Free will vs. determinism
- Apparent randomness vs. apparent determinism
- Permanence vs. change
- The mind-body problem
- The rights of the individual vs. the rights of the state
- The tension between universals and particulars
- A priori vs. A posteriori knowledge, and synthetic vs. analytic reasoning
What's interesting is that they're really all instances of the one-many problem, which has really never been solved by secular philosophy. In fact, Bertrand Russell, in his The Problems of Philosophy, considered the one and many problem to be one of the central problems of philosophy (I'll have to find a quote to substantiate this, however). I'd argue that Christianity is the only worldview that can provide a solution to the one-many problem.
This all needs to be fleshed out more... I just wanted to get it started. Many times, posts like this will eventually gain a more permanent home on my wiki.
By the way, I need to expand my categories more. I'm putting this in the Christianity/Religion category, but in my mind the full name of that category is Philosophy/Christianity/Religion. Similarly, for my Opinions/Politics category, the full name in my mind is News/Opinions/Politics.
Footnotes:
[1]: I would like to catalogue more here, because I think most of the history of philosophy can really be understood as people taking one side of the issue or another on many issues of dialectical tension. Consider the split after Descartes between British Empiricism and Continental Rationalism
A lot of times we don't pay attention to it, but in many instances, data, to be meaningful, requires more context than we often give it. For instance, character data, to be meaningful, needs to have some character encoding specified. Like, you can give someone a text file, but is it ASCII, Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE, LE, or BOM-distinguished)), SHIFT-JIS, EBCDIC, etc. etc.
Same goes for times (is it UTC, or some other time zone?). I was thinking about this in the context of my data being stored in MySQL. There're no time zones associated with my dates and times, and there's no character encoding information stored with my character data. That makes me uncomfortable. For instance, without being really careful about what date it was when a time was entered, I can't even go back and figure out what time something was really written or entered into my database... was it daylight savings time or not during that time? So, if I were to convert it all to UTC (GMT), I'd have to be careful about whether DST was in effect. And then, for instance, if I were to display a past weblog entry, the time displayed might not actually be the time the post was written.
There are other times data needs context... for instance, a data file format might need a version number for it to be meaningful. Also think of the problem that RSS had, where the <description> field was never well defined. Some people started put HTML in there and applications were built to match, so if you put plain text and had something that looked like HTML in it you'd have a problem.
By the way, this is the criterion by which I usually decide whether something in XML has to be an attribute or a value. If it's "context", and describes the value, then it should be an attribute. If it's the main data you want then it should be a value. Of course, there are times when something could be either, but I see often see cases where the I think the designer made the wrong choice according to this criterion.
What other cases of this are there?
I'm getting the same problems as other people on WinXP Pro. What this guy says at Amazon is right:
I have used UMAX scanners since 1996 (the 1220S and 2100U) and had fairly good luck with them until recently. UMAX customer support has always been pretty much non-existent but their scanners had a good following so one could always find a solution to their screwy driver problems if one looked around on the web. With the advent of Windows XP however, you might as well throw your UMAX gear away. Their parallel port scanners are not supported at all and the SCSI and USB scanners are supported only if you buy the new drivers at a cost of [money amount]. What is worse is that the XP drivers that they sell you don't work at all. Don't get sucked in!! UMAX is trying to rip you off by selling you driver software that won't install and they do not provide any useful support once you paid the money.
So, don't buy UMAX. The [money amount] is $14.50, by the way.
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Friday, October 31, 2003
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I hate PHP
Elliot Anderson,
Dude!! You theman! The reverse replacement forarray_u...
Alex Ndungu: Oct 11, 1:35am