Joey Gibson’s Blog

Ann Coulter’s latest column is essentially a review of David Limbaugh’s book Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity but it has a few zingers in it. In discussing a California law mandating a “crash course” in Islam for all seventh-graders, she had this to say

Students are required to adopt Muslim names, plan a trip to Mecca, play a jihad game, pray to “Allah, the Compassionate” and to chant “Praise to Allah! Lord of Creation!” They are encouraged to dress in Muslim garb. Students are discouraged, however, from stoning girls at the school dances, abusing their “Jew” math teachers or blowing up their classmates.

Can you believe that? The government mandates a course on Islam, but a child bringing a Bible to school is reprimanded. I am definitely going to by this book. If you care at all about the all out war against Christianity that government schools are waging, you should too.

Aye, today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day and methinks a celebratory tankard of grog is in order. Yo ho, yo ho, a Pirate’s Life for me! Arr, ye can just call me Cap’n Joey “I’ve Never Owned a Parrot” Gibson fer today, ye can. So raise yer glasses high and be sure to refer to your wife/girlfriend as your “buxom beauty” or, fer the really adventurous, “serving wench!” Aye, that’s more fun than pillaging a small island settlement, it is. Shiver me timbers and prepare to be boarded!

(Note: Yes, this was a pretty poor attempt. I’ve never really tried to talk like a Pirate before.)

For all you worthless punks out there who get off on writing and spreading computer viruses, I’d like to paraphrase Robert DeNiro as Al Capone in The Untouchables. And here’s what I’d like to say:

I want you all DEAD!!! Do you hear me?!? DEAD! I want your families DEAD! I want your houses burned to the ground! I want you violated in more ways that I can count!

OK, so I don’t actually want anyone dead, but I’m sticking with the bit about having them violated… Why am I so mad this morning? Because in the past 24 hours I’ve received over 100 copies of the supposed Microsoft “patch” and various alleged bounce messages because of the W32/Swen@MM worm. People are getting infected with this thing, and it then sets about emailing itself to people that the victim’s computer has emailed before. I’ve gotten close to 10 megabytes of this damned thing just since yesterday! I’m sick of it. Please people, update your antivirus defs and, most importantly, STOP OPENING ATTACHMENTS FROM EMAIL!!!!! And stop using Outlook and Outlook Express.

After reading several threads about the text scrmabler and various implementations, I revised my Ruby version and it’s now 21 lines shorter and much more Ruby-like. It makes far less of an attempt to deal with punctuation, but I think that’s OK. This is just a lark, after all.

  1  class Mixer  2      private  3      def randomize(str)  4          return str if str.length < 4  5  6          str =~ /\B.*\B/  7          first = $`  8          last = $'  9          first + ($&.split(//).sort_by {rand}.join) + last 10      end 11 12      public 13      def mix_file(filename) 14          lines = IO.readlines(filename) 15 16          mix_lines(lines) 17      end 18 19      def mix_string(str) 20          mix_lines(str.split).join(" ") 21      end 22 23      def mix_lines(lines) 24          lines.collect! do |line| 25              words = Array.new 26 27              line.split(/\W/).each do |word| 28                  words << randomize(word) 29              end 30 31              words.join(" ") 32          end 33      end 34  end 

Tonight while riding at Tribble Mill Park, I found the remnants of the old mill wheel. I had been within about 20 feet of it before and never noticed it, but a fellow last week told me where to look. I looked tonight and sure enough, there it was. I’m going to go back with the camera tomorrow and take some pictures which I’ll post here.

It was a strange thing standing there on the stone wall next to the collapsed steel(?) wheel. I was struck with a sense of profound sadness; which was odd since I didn’t know anything about the history of the mill. I have been getting this feeling a lot lately as I look around at all of the construction work going on in this area. Old houses are being torn down or moved in droves in order to build yet another Walgreens or a new strip mall. Houses that have been there for decades or longer; each with histories and lives, happiness and sorrow. Enormous trees that were there before the houses. I’m all for progress and such, but there’s some point where you just feel like saying “Do we really need another drug store?” I don’t know where that point is, but lately I keep sensing that we’ve passed it.

The sadness I felt was in knowing that this mill wheel was once part of a thriving mill. Yet here it was collapsed and broken in the woods. The wall that once diverted the water from the river lay in pieces. I didn’t know any of its history, but all that was left were ruins. I did a quick Google and found this story about the nearby town of Dacula. In it I found this

In the 1920s, he [Newton Giles Pharr] bought Tribble Mill, a water-powered mill where farmers had their corn ground with a mill rock imported from Germany. Situated near the rapids of the Alcovy River toward Walton County, the mill also offered a cool summer outing — people would travel out from town and wade, swim and picnic near the water.

which confirmed some of my thoughts. I don’t know when the mill was destroyed or how. The wheel is now broken and rusted, but it looks like it was once around 12 - 15 feet in diameter. I can imagine it tirelessly turning the shaft which turned the cogs which ultimately turned the meal-grinding stone, hour after hour. I can just imagine folks in their bathing costumes sitting on the sheets of granite by the river having a lunch of chicken and fresh fruit, with the mill behind them grinding out corn meal. I could almost feel the spirits of those who used to frolic there. It was a very sad moment; I don’t know that I can explain it any better than that.

“Popular demand,” yeah… right… That’s the ticket. Anyway, I saw this blog entry by Jamie this morning which caused me to write a Ruby program to mix up the letters of words, leaving the first and last letter as they were. I started out with a simple script, then I added better punctuation support, then I converted it to a class, then I wrote unit tests to run it. Anyway, somebody wanted to see it, so here it is. Is it great code? Probably not. Do I care? Not really.

  1  class Mixer  2      private  3      def randomize(str)  4          if str.length < 4  5              return str  6          end  7  8          letters = str.split(//)  9 10          first = letters[0] 11          mid = letters[1..(letters.length - 2)] 12          last = letters[letters.length - 1] 13 14          new_letters = "" 15 16          while mid && mid.length > 0 17              len = mid.length 18              r = rand(len) 19              new_letters << mid.delete_at(r) 20          end 21 22          first + new_letters + last 23      end 24 25      public 26      def mix_file(filename) 27          lines = IO.readlines(filename) 28 29          mix_lines(lines) 30      end 31 32      def mix_string(str) 33          new_str = "" 34 35          mix_lines(str.split).each do |line| 36              new_str << line 37          end 38 39          new_str 40      end 41 42      def mix_lines(lines) 43          lines.collect! do |line| 44              new_line = "" 45 46              line.split(/\s+|,|\.|\!|\(|\)|\"|\'/).each do |word| 47                  new_line << randomize(word) << " " 48              end 49 50              new_line 51          end 52 53          lines 54      end 55  end 

And the unit tests, which don’t actually test anything.

  1  require 'test/unit'  2  require 'mix'  3  4  class MixTest < Test::Unit::TestCase  5      def setup()  6          @mixer = Mixer.new  7      end  8  9      def test_word() 10          x = @mixer.mix_string("testing") 11          puts x 12          assert_not_equal("testing", x, "String not randomized") 13      end 14 15      def test_string() 16          x = @mixer.mix_string("this is a humongous test, dangit") 17          puts x 18      end 19 20      def test_file() 21          article = @mixer.mix_file("testfile.txt") 22          #puts article 23      end 24  end 

I’m sure someone will find this useful… Again, “yeah, right.” Ah well, it was a mildly amusing diversion…

Today’s scripture at church was James 3:1-12. The entire chapter is about how one’s tongue can’t be tamed and how it can be “full of deadly poison.” The part that his me was this:

¹⁰Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.
¹¹Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?
¹²Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh.

In other words, “do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” I know that when I’m in my office, all by myself, and something is frustrating me, it’s not blessings that are proceeding out of my mouth. I can curse with the best of them, and on occasion I’ve said things that would make a sailor blush. Because of that, this passage resonated with me. I’ve made attempts before to “curb my language,” and did fine when things were going great, but reverted back to the “potty mouth” when things weren’t so great. James is telling me I need to have another go at it.

This chapter can also be taken as admonishing one against gossip. Our minister told a story about a woman who had spread a rumor around town and had hurt the person it was about. She asked her minister what she could do to make amends and he told her to go the market and buy a chicken. She was to bring it back to his house, plucking the feathers out along the way. When she made it to his house with the freshly plucked chicken, the minister told her to go back and gather up every feather she had dropped. A few hours later she returned with just a handful of feathers. She learned just how easy it is to let things drop, such as rumors, but how hard it is to clean up afterwards. We should all remember that.

It’s been two years now since 19 Islamic terrorists killed over 3,000 innocent people. Never forget what happened. Never forget that it was radical Islamic terrorists that did it, and that there are still lots of radical Islamic terrorists out there who want to kill as many Americans as possible. Yes, these practitioners of the vaunted “religion of Peace™” want to destroy us and our way of life. We can’t let that happen. President Bush is taking the fight to them instead of waiting idly by for them to attack us again on our own soil. That’s how it should be. Contrary to what the DemocRATs would have you believe, we are more safe and secure today than we were two years and a day ago. We are winning this war. We will be victorious.

The lovely Ann Coulter just keeps turning out excellent columns. Today’s is no exception. Read it. It’s good. Here are a few snippets from it:

Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has been issuing diatribes against the Bush administration that would surpass even Tariq Aziz with severe menstrual cramps.

and

Apparently it is urgent that we replace the best fighting force in the world with an “international peacekeeping force,” i.e., a task force both feared and respected worldwide for its ability to distribute powdered milk to poor children.

and this

Since we didn’t let the U.N. lose the war for us, the least we can do is let them screw up the peace.

Yeah, she’s good.

If anyone will be in or around Atlanta, GA, October 24 - 26, you should think about attending the Atlanta Java Software Symposium which is part of the No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium series. I’ll be presenting a session entitled “Scripting on the JVM” in which I will present various scripting languages like Python and Ruby running on top of the Java virtual machine and trying to explain why that’s cool. The session abstract is located on the sessions listing page; I’m about 1/3 of the way down the page.

I attended this symposium last year and had an excellent experience. The ratio of useful information to vendor-specific sales-weasel crap was extremely high, which is a good thing. I wrote about it in the February Java Developer’s Journal if you want to read about it. There is also a review of one of the other symposia in the series in the current issue.

I’m really looking forward to presenting at it this year’s symposium.

I’ve just been digging through the J2SE 1.4 regex stuff, and every time I have to do regex work in Java I keep thinking how much easier it is in other languages. Specifically I’m talking about the clunkiness of the various regexen APIs in Java and the requirement to double-backslash regex operators. We need a better way. Ruby and Perl both have native regex support built in to the language, so the backslashes are just fine. Python, which doesn’t have native regex support (it’s in the library), does have “raw” string quoting, which allows you not to double-up the backslashes. So what I have to write like this in Java:

1  Pattern p =
2      Pattern.compile("(\\(\\d+\\))?\\s*(\\d{3}\\s*\\-\\s*(\\d{3})");
3  Matcher m = p.matcher(my_string);
4  if (m.matches())
5  {
6      ...;
7  }

or

1  if (Pattern.matches("(\\(\\d+\\))?\\s*(\\d{3}\\s*\\-\\s*(\\d{3})", my_string))
2  {
3      ...;
4  }

looks like this in Python:

1  if re.match("(\(\d+\))?\s*(\d{3}\s*\-\s*(\d{3})", my_string):
2      ...

and could be even more easily written in Ruby thus:

1  if my_string =~ /(\(\d+\))?\s*(\d{3}\s*\-\s*(\d{3})/
2      ...
3  end

See the difference? The built-in regex support is really nice and the ease of quoting is a beautiful thing. I doubt that we’ll ever see either of these in Java since they would certainly be considered non-trivial to add.

Well, the worthless DemocRATs in the Senate have derailed the judicial nomination of Miguel Estrada. How’d they do it, and why am I sick of gutless Republicans? I’m glad you asked. The RATs employed the threat of a filibuster to block a vote on Estrada’s nomination. The Constitution says that a simple majority (that’s 51 votes for you liberals) is all that is required to accept a judicial nomination. There were around 55 known ‘yea’ votes to accept Estrada. But the RATs threatened a filibuster, which requires 60 votes to stop. So by threatening a filibuster, they essentially hosed the Constitution and made 60 votes necessary where only 51 were really needed.

That’s what the RATs did. Now why am I mad at the Republicans? The RATs only threatened a filibuster. The Republicans did not force them to actually filibuster. In other words, they didn’t force them to start speaking from the rostrum 24/7 like a true filibuster. Had they done that, all business of the Senate would have come to a halt until the RATs gave up and went home. Why the Republican leadership is so absolutely gutless is beyond me. Just like in 1994 after a brilliant start, they pretty quickly thereafter screwed up because Republicans, apparently, just don’t know how to act when they are in control! Because the Republicans refused to call the RATs’ bluff, Estrada has now officially withdrawn his name from consideration. (After a 28 month fight.) Was he qualified? I have no idea. From what I hear, he was. But that’s not the point. The point is that the RATs used a measure that has never before been used in the Senate to change the requirement for a vote which has been set forth in the Constitution. They have harmed our Constitution as well as the reputation and life of an ostensibly good man. But who’s going to hold them to account, eh? The Republicans? Not likely. The media? Nope. The voters? Sorry, wrong again. The bulk of the voters are just worried about which candidate is going to give them the most stuff, and the RATs excel at that. No, these RATs will be allowed to continue this sort of crap until they all retire. Or die, I suppose.

I finally got a chance to see And Now… Ladies and Gentlemen Saturday night. I’ve been waiting over a year for this movie to make it to the States and it finally has. It stars Jeremy Irons who is wonderful as master jewel thief Valentin. The scenery is beautiful; it was filmed in France and Morocco, and the story is also quite good. But the main reason I wanted to see it was the debut performance of my favorite French chanteuse, Patricia Kaas. She played a lounge singer (surprise!) who ends up in Morroco and meets Valentin. She sings through a great deal of the film, which was wonderful, but quite a bit of it was in English. While she sounds lovely in any language, I much prefer it when she sings in French. The deal is that they are both suffering from blackouts and Valentin has the added bonus of migraine headaches. They are pulled together by the careless tongue of the Morroccan doctor who mentions to Valentin that the singer at the local hotel has the same problems as he. Valentin heads to the hotel to see her, and witnesses her having one of her blackouts. She walks out of the hotel and ends up in a dark alleyway. Two thugs attempt to mug her, but Valentin is there to save the day. She ends up returning the favor the following day when Valentin is accused of a robbery in the hotel. This is the beginning of their relationship that will continue through the rest of the film as they head for Lalla Chalia’s grave; supposedly Lalla can heal people from “the other side.” I won’t give away what happens…

Anyway, I really enjoyed the film. There are sad moments and funny moments (Jeremy Irons dons several disguises during his various robberies) and then there’s all the lovely singing. I highly recommend this film, if it’s anywhere near you. It probably won’t be, but you can always watch for it on DVD. I had to drive 40 miles in to “the Big City” (Atlanta) at 9:40 PM Sunday night to see it at the Landmark Midtown Cinema. I generally don’t like going into the city, but I occasionally head to the Red Light Cafe to see Glenn Phillips, which is about a block away, so it wasn’t that bad.