h3h.net

I’m going to keep this short and sweet. 9rules, the community I was admitted to based on the quality of my site content, has recently made a change in policy. This quote sums it up:
…participation in either the new member area or my.9rules is required for all members…

Tyme White
Essentially, in the interest of “fairness”, only [...]

The separation of Church and State shall be inviolable.

Article 2, Section 6 of The Constitution of The Republic of The Philippines
I suppose it would be wishful thinking to hope for the US to follow a sensible Filipino lead in this respect. Though it would also be good if Filipinos actually followed their constitution.

Bank of America requires that your password be only alphanumeric.

Wait. Let me get this straight. You want me to supply a password that consists of only letters and numbers, thereby increasing the likelihood of simple dictionary attacks? And this is “to make sure [my] passcode is sufficiently secure”? Apparently there are “invalid symbols” that I [...]

I never got around to writing a print stylesheet for posts when I redesigned this site the last time, so I went ahead and did so tonight. It’s very minimalist and uses a serif font for printed readability (Georgia to be exact).
I’ve tested the output in Safari and Firefox on some of my more complicated [...]

For some reason I find it highly improbable that I’m the only one to ever experience this breakage with the Bazaar VCS:
$ bzr
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/opt/local/bin/bzr”, line 76, in ?
import bzrlib.breakin
ImportError: No module named breakin
I installed it from MacPorts a long time ago and ran into this [...]

If Python 3.0 ships before Perl 6, I’m going to cry.

John Gruber, Daring Fireball
Of course it will. And I’m going to laugh. Heartily.

How would you get the current user’s name in your programming language of choice? Furthermore, how does this exercise reflect on the design of that language?
C#
string user = Environment.UserName;
Perl
my $user = getpwuid($<);
PHP
$user = $_ENV['user'];
Python
import os
user = os.environ['USER']
Ruby
user = ENV['USER']
Now that I’ve iterated through a few of these I’m wondering if the methods are equivalent. In [...]

Sometimes when I write an article I know that there is a low potential value for comments directly on the article. In these cases, I close comments and encourage linking to the article from other sites, hoping to encourage more thoughtful replies and a richer discourse. Well that’s great, but it’s not much of a [...]

Does anyone else find it strangely unsettling that Guido van Rossum’s blog runs on Java? Presumably, at least: the URL has .jsp in it.
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=212259
It’s not the end of the world or anything, but I think eyebrows go up when the CEO of Ford drives a Toyota or the BDFL of Python publishes his blog on [...]

Recently I used Fog Creek’s Copilot software to attempt to help a family member import some favorites into Firefox. I followed the original Project Aardvark team two summers ago and knew what Copilot was in broad strokes.
So I ran the two minute trial and things seemed to work as expected. I bought a day pass [...]