_________________________________________
( The countdown had stalled at ‘T’ minus )
( 69 seconds when Desiree, the first )
( female ape to go up in space, winked at )
( me slyly and pouted her thick, rubbery )
( lips unmistakably — the first of many )
( such advances during what would prove )
( to be the longest, and most memorable, )
( space voyage of my career. )
( )
( — Winning sentence, 1985 Bulwer-Lytton )
( bad fiction contest. )
—————————————–

o  ,__,
o  (oo)____
   (__)    )\
      ||--|| *

via @mint

<lvh> I’d split, if only because it does French spacing correctly.

<raz> oh, split is magic in that way?

<Wild_Cat> “French spacing”?

<Wild_Cat> what is French spacing?

<lvh> If you know your input won’t do that, fine :)

<ProgVal> a word is something which match with that :
#[^a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9]+[^a-zA-Z0-9]#

<lvh> Wild_Cat: It’s what the English call something stupid to mock the
French.

<lvh> Wild_Cat: Two spaces after a period. [09:51]
*** toabctl (~tom@ubuntu/member/toabctl) has joined channel #python

<Wild_Cat> but nobody uses that!
*** nzmm (~matthew_j@121.98.145.205) has joined channel #python
*** regebro (~lregebro@121.16.97-84.rev.gaoland.net) has joined channel
#python
*** nzmm (~matthew_j@121.98.145.205) has left channel #python: #python

<Wild_Cat> (I’d have expected “French spacing” to mean something like putting
a space between words and ? or !)

<lvh> Wild_Cat: loads of software has broken because of things that “nobody
does”, because nobody does that, until somebody does [09:52]

<raz> well, he has a point. whitespace counting only makes sense after
squeezing whitespace, e.g. with a regex
* evanton wonders what’s the problem to google for “python word count”

<ProgVal> <lvh> Wild_Cat: Two spaces after a period. => Why do you call that
French spacing ?

<Wild_Cat> lvh: no, I mean, nobody does that in France. Why the heck is that
called French spacing?

<ProgVal> I’m french, but never write two spaces…

<lvh> ew no, let’s not use things that solve NP-complete problems
*** lamefun (~dingbing@92.246.161.75) has quit: Remote host closed the
connection

<lvh> ProgVal, Wild_Cat: <lvh> Wild_Cat: It’s what the English call something
stupid to mock the French. [09:53]

<Wild_Cat> (I suspect it’s like French fries: it’s actually Belgian spacing
but it’d sound silly :p)

<evanton> space length contest

<evanton> enlarge your space!

<lvh> You have been successfully trolled by long-dead English typographers.

REAL MAGIC STAYS

SPECTACULARLY STILL

Photo by

Auro

“Zappa was important to me because I realised I didn’t have to make music like he did. I might have made a lot of music like he did if he had not done it first and made me realise that I did not want to go there. I did not like his music but I am grateful that he did it. Sometimes you learn as much from the things you don’t like as from the things you do like. The rejection side is as important as the endorsement part.

On hindsight

“Instead of shooting arrows at someone else’s target, which I’ve never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.”

Slightly expanded version of the Paul Morley interview that appeared in yesterday’s Observer Review

Basically, the political class is waiting for the civil population to come back to the church of the free market and get over the fact that its cardinals walk in public with no clothes on.

You’re starting to see weird forms of acting-out, neurotic displacement activities. Fetishes, even. Sarah Palin, for instance. I could go on about that woman every day. And so can everybody else, which is why they do.

Genocide has much more proven shelf-appeal than any of these hokum Rube Goldberg geo-schemes. It’s by no means easy to kill off half of everybody, but we’ve already invented a wide variety of ingenious ways to attempt that, and almost all of ‘em are much simpler, more rugged and more plausible than putting the North Pole under a tinfoil hat.

Bruce Sterling’s State of the World 2010

File under: Too long for twitter, too fun to edit

(Nobody will say that an orangeis an instrument, or a means to an end; but we often look upon oranges as means to ends, for example, if we wish to eat them, or, perhaps, to make our living by selling them.)

- The Open Society And It’s Enemies

Google Apps for your domain bring you all the functionality of Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar and talk to your own domain. Which, for those of us who like Gmail et al, is a very nice thing to have.

What Google Apps doesn’t give you however, is the integrated google account that gives you access to all their other services like Google Reader and Analytics.

So after a while switching between my shiny new apps account & my plain old google account, I decided to write a little greasemonkey script to add them to Google Apps.

Basically it inserts links to Google Reader and Analytics into the top left navigation of Gmail, Google Docs & Calendar, and redirects the navigation in Google Reader to point to your Apps account rather than the ‘Google Account’ you’re using for Reader & analytics.

You can generate the script for your site by typing the domain in here and then following the link:

e.g. deadpansincerity.com

Alternatively you can take a look at the Source on github, or clone the repo with

git clone git://github.com/davidmiller/apps.expanded.user.git

Hope you find it useful somehow.

Love regards etc

LIKE IT WAS HIS TO

GIVE AWAY

Photo by

O’mages

Which is great the first time you set up an experiment, but really starts to grate after a few dozen.

Thankfully, as long as you are logged in to the right account you can just bookmark your way straight to the create a new experiment page by bookmarking something along the lines of this:

https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/exptsetup?experiment=&account=YOUR_ACCOUNT-NUMBER_HERE

Saving you Three Precious Clicks & Two Pageloads !!!

Love Regards etc

If you know that things are bound to happen whatever you do, then you may feel free to give up the fight against them. You may, more especially, give up the attempt to control those things which most people agree to be social evils, such as war; or to mention a smaller but nevertheless important thing, the tyranny of the petty official.

Popper – The Open Society and Its Enemies