The John McCain Short List
Posted 8:46 PM

Some talking points you may want to have in mind in case your Republican friend starts to argue with you:

• McCain said, "I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned."
  
• He voted against the children's health care bill last year, then defended Bush's veto of the bill.
  
• The pastor McCain calls his "spiritual guide," Rod Parsley, believes America's founding mission is to destroy Islam.
  
• John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
  
• While claiming he is opposed to torture during his campaigh, McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.
  
• He's one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires.
  
• McCain, the owner of 8 homes, said the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a "second job"
  
• Senator Thad Cochran, a Republican said of McCain: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine."
  
• McCain's campaign manager and top advisers are professional lobbyists, he has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign.

Labels: politics

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Phoenix and Venus
Posted 8:11 PM

This image of ice on Mars may become an icon of our future relationship with that red planet.

( Of course, just as Mars shows it's stuff, I've started thinking Venus is the best place to go ... based on the excess of easily harnessed energy, which could be redirected to support comfortable, productive, protected airborne-bubble habitations. I mean ... it's just so cold on Mars.)

Labels: science

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Clinton's Veiled Assasination Threat
Posted 9:56 PM

When America saw Bill Clinton get red in the face and talk about how he tried to kill Osama Bin Laden, we were watching a man comfortable with issuing death threats in general. You may not remember, it but I do.

Hillary Clinton's mention of the RFK assassination, in connection with Obama, left him and his supporters "visibly rattled".

This country is getting creepier and creepier. You don't toss around thinly veiled assassination threats on prime time. It's uncouth.

Labels: politics

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Image Cannot Be Displayed
Posted 3:43 AM

Ever get "This image cannot be displayed because it contains errors." when viewing an image? The reason is, 99% of the time, that the image uses CMYK as its encoding. Here's a fixcmyk perl program, that resolves this issue for all the files in a given directory.

Labels: programming

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Bookmark this Electoral Poll Site
Posted 6:17 AM

Since it's been slipping in Google's ratings, and I had to wade through a couple pages of crappy results, I'm writing myself a blog post to remind myself that electoral-vote.com is the best site as far as accuracy, coverage and depth of information on the presidential election in the U.S. It's like the "Craig's List" of voting.... clean, simple, and without pop-ups, videos or runaway opinion getting in the way of simple facts.

Labels: politics

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Perl Round Function
Posted 4:16 PM

Yes, you can't find this easily on the web. What you get is people telling you to import posix, or do some wacky one-off thing that works half the time. This is the only solution you'll ever need... it should be a builtin.

# round to any decimal place
sub round {
        my ($n,$d) = @_;
        return int($n/(10**$d) + .5 * ($n <=> 0)) * (10**$d);
}

Labels: perl, programming

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Useful Line for Quoting Shell Arguments
Posted 10:25 AM

Safely pass "@*" to ssh without having to worry about the remote shell re-expanding variables.

qa=`perl -e 'for (@ARGV) {s/(["\\$])/\\\\$1/g; $_="\"$_\"";} print join(" ", @ARGV)' "$@"`
ssh remote-server "cd /some/where; do something; $qa"

Single quote version is safer, but is harder for me to read.

qa=`perl -e "for (@ARGV) {s/'/'\\\\\''/g; \\\$_=\"'\\\$_'\";} print join(' ', @ARGV);" "$@"`

Labels: perl, programming

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Latest Barack Obama News, In My Opinion
Posted 6:50 AM

In North Carolina, Republicans paid good money for an Obama attack ad, only 1 week before the primary. This meddling in the opposing party's election is an encouraging sign that can *only* mean that Republicans have decided that Hillary will be easier to beat. Meddling in another party's primary may or may not be seen as "ethical" or "fair game". But, IMO, NC voters should be smart enough not to be swayed.

Sure, the media is having a field-day with Obama's charismatic former pastor, and it's obvious that his radical sermons make great prime-time viewing. I have relatives in my family who would make Wright seem *boring*, and I'm sure Hillary's cocaine dealing brother in law, Roger Clinton won't turn up in the press, but it seems like white American's are "fixin' for a lynchin'" this year and just aren't ready for a President who grew up with controversial figures that they don't understand.

If Obama's pastor was a white conspiracy theorist, who talked about the 911 attacks being coordinated by the Bush-Bin Laden cartel (did you know there's Bin Laden airfield in Texas), we would have understood. Maybe some of us would have even been sympathetic. But, instead, he was a black conspiracy theorist. Ouch! When my white brother mails me a conspiracy video about depleted uranium exposure in the Iraq war, I can choose to think "harmless hobby" or "maybe there's something to it". But when I see Jeramiah Wright claiming that HIV could have been bioengineered as an assault of blacks and gays (yes, there's a gene that whites have gives them resistance and immunity to AIDS), I'm supposed to think "my god I can't vote for someone who hung out with this guy".

Sure, Hillary's mentor was Saul Alinsky, who was analogous to a secular, white Jeramiah Wright, a rabble rouser and conspiracy theorist from Chicago. But that actually gives her credibility among liberals... any news about that and Democratic voters would cheer.

The downturn in polls for Barack reflects white liberal America's misunderstanding of what Wright represents. He's a charismatic kook, but really, a lovable one... and among those who are struggling to get by in Bush's economy, he is one that is more to Obama's credit (in a political-street-cred sort of way) than to his disfavor.

Labels: politics

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