The sed utility is a useful, if slightly obscure, tool. (Fortunately, there are excellent guides available to its use.) Today, however, I ran across an annoying incompatibility in one of its features, which I want to briefly discuss.
Transparency is generally considered a good thing. In particular, it’s often touted as a beneficial thing in the context of political activities: “Let the people see from whom a politician has raised his money”, goes the notion, “and they’ll know to whom he is beholden”. I’d always been more or less on board with this notion, but I saw something today that gave me pause. (Fair warning: This is pretty specific to US politics.)
Remember this fascinating article? (It’s about those www.CITYNAMEsingles.com signs that were nearly ubiquitous 6-9 months ago.) If you don’t remember, or haven’t seen it, it’s worth a read. I have only an anecdotal note to add.
This is a quick addenda to yesterday’s notes on backing up self-hosted WordPress blogs. I noticed that I neglected to make the scripts I described available as downloads, and that I didn’t illustrate the final piece of the puzzle: a one-line script which obviates the need to specify any of the backup script’s 6(!) arguments. I’d like to correct those oversights today.
If you run a self-hosted WordPress Blog, it’s probably a good idea to back it up now and again. Here I present some code that I use to back up my blog to Amazon’s S3 service, which might help you to do the same.
Today, a brief contest between two theories explaining why you’ve been hearing so much about Twitter recently. Our contestants are Mickey Kaus, who has reasonable instincts for when he’s being had, and Seth Godin, who knows a lot about how to persuade people.
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the construction of a solver for KenKen puzzles. Most people, of course, prefer to play these puzzles. To that end, I present a collection of roughly 1000 KenKen-style puzzles, available here.
Seth Godin knows a lot about marketing, but his grasp of economics is, regrettably, a little shaky. Normally, I don’t like to criticize on this blog, but he has, I am sorry to say, been peddling some very destructive nonsense.
A reader asks if the KenKen solver we recently developed can handle puzzles with multiple solutions. It turns out to be pretty simple to modify the search-and-propagation algorithm to return all the solutions to a puzzle, instead of just one.
Joe Calzaghe retired from boxing last month. Calzaghe was generally regarded as the top fighter active in the 168 and 175 pound divisions. Debate about his career tends to center on whether he was merely a good fighter in a weak era, a great fighter, or an all-time great. I think he was a great fighter, who could have held his own with any boxer in his weight class, from any era; he was perhaps the most skilled boxer active when he retired, handicapped only by rather fragile hands.
