2006-11-28

Being a HAXEor

(thanks to d8uv for the title)

I usually describe myself as an "'ex' troglodyte", because I prefer the Unix line editor ex(1) to all other text editors. This makes people look at me like I'm something they found by turning over a rock, but what do I care?

(I know that ed(1) is the standard text editor, but I'm willing to trade off a little minimalism for a little convenience.)

Anyhow, in the tradition of Tim Bray's MARS, I will now say that I make my web site with HAXE, standing for HTML, Apache, and ex (reversed for euphony and cuteness).

Update: Though I don't like cokebottle editors, much of what's said in The Case For Emacs is relevant to me. I don't use ex(1), it is part of me.

2006-11-13

"Irrumabo vos et pedicabo"

In my first year of college, long ago,
I took a class on Ovid and Catullus.
One of the sexual poems I found confusing,
and the book we were using
was quite devoid of commentary on it,
grammatical or otherwise.

So at the next class, I asked my professor
what the poet meant by such-and-such.
He was hesitating, doubtful, maybe-yes-maybe-no.
Yet at the following meeting of the class,
he was entirely changed:
he explained forthrightly just how the poem worked.

I could not understand the sudden change
until I looked about the studentry
and saw the only female student
absent that day.
I was shocked and outraged --
naïve nerd from a feminist family that I was --
to think that a professor! of the liberal arts!
and of Latin of all things! could be so sexist,
so crude, so utterly indifferent to his duties
to all his students.

Many years later, it occurred to me to wonder
if he had sunk so low as to ask her
to be absent that day so that he could answer my questions.
All the worse, I thought.
All the worse.

Looking back today, I think:
perhaps he was, poor man, in a cleft stick,
caught between the fear of being accused of harassment
by the woman for openly discussing sex in class,
and the fear of having his dean (who happened to be my mother)
coming down on him for neglecting the questions
of her precious darling (little did he know
that while she might have disapproved,
she would never have punished him for that --
my mother believed in justice).

It's a hell of a thing
when students can't learn
for fear or for shame
what the poets sing.

2006-11-12

An annoying ambiguity about which nothing can be done now

The phrase "COMBINING DOUBLE" in a Unicode character can mean either of two things. Sometimes the diacritical mark is doubled with respect to some other mark:

  • U+030B COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT  ̋
  • U+030E COMBINING DOUBLE VERTICAL LINE ABOVE  ̎
  • U+030F COMBINING DOUBLE GRAVE ACCENT  ̏
  • U+0333 COMBINING DOUBLE LOW LINE  ̳
  • U+033F COMBINING DOUBLE OVERLINE  ̿
  • U+0348 COMBINING DOUBLE VERTICAL LINE BELOW  ͈
  • U+035A COMBINING DOUBLE RING BELOW  ͚
  • U+20E6 COMBINING DOUBLE VERTICAL STROKE OVERLAY  ⃦

But sometimes it means that the mark extends over two characters, the one it applies to and the following one:

  • U+035D COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE  ͝ 
  • U+035C COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE BELOW  ͜ 
  • U+035E COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON  ͞ 
  • U+035F COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON BELOW  ͟ 
  • U+0360 COMBINING DOUBLE TILDE  ͠ 
  • U+0361 COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE  ͡ 
  • U+0362 COMBINING DOUBLE RIGHTWARDS ARROW BELOW  ͢ 

Of course U+1D18A MUSICAL SYMBOL COMBINING DOUBLE TONGUE  𝆊 is something else again.

Thank you. I feel much better now.

The lackmus test

In a post to one of the innumerable technical mailing lists I belong to, a native speaker of German used the phrase lackmus test, meaning a simple method for detecting differences. In English, the phrase is litmus test; why the difference?

Middle English had both the native English word lykemose and the Scandinavian borrowing litemose; only the latter has survived. The second morpheme in each case is that of English moss, but the first morphemes are different, meaning 'drip' and 'dye, color' respectively.

Litmus is made by drying and powdering certain lichens; it was originally used as a water-soluble dye, but is now generally used as a quick-and-dirty test for acidity, hence the metaphorical use of the term (it turns red in acids, blue in bases).

East is west and west is east

Little Diomede Island (U.S.) in the Bering Strait (not the Aleutians, as I mistakenly wrote earlier) is reckoned to be some tens of thousands of kilometers west of Big Diomede Island (Russia), despite the obvious fact that Little Diomede is about four kilometers east of Big Diomede.

The reason for that is that in the state of nature, Europe is east of North America, which is east of Asia, which is east of Europe. So it makes no sense to ask "Is X east or west of Y?" unless we have instituted a convention of some sort.

One possible convention is: "X is east of Y if and only if the easterly great-circle course between them is shorter than the westerly one." That's the rule we apply in ordinary life, and by that rule, the Russian island is west of the U.S. one.

But the navigator's convention unwraps the globe at the 180 degree meridian, and says that the entire Eastern Hemisphere is east of the entire Western Hemisphere. Using this convention, the Russian island is east of the U.S. one.

And by the same token, Alaska, since it sticks into the Eastern Hemisphere, is the easternmost U.S. state as well as the westernmost and the northernmost. The southernmost state is Hawaii. Of the 48 contiguous states, the westernmost is Washington, the easternmost Maine, the southernmost Florida (thanks to Key West), and the northernmost Minnesota, due to a surveying error.

Say who?

I got four stupid financial spams with interesting From: lines the other day. These are the ones that pick dictionary words for first and last names: what is that supposed to be about, anyhow? Anyhow, here they are:

  • The peculiar Queueing M. Secretively,
  • The paradoxical Tough D. Frailty,
  • The malapropos Foolhardiness T. Phoneticians,
  • And the Marxist (tendance Chico) Spumoni P. Brickbat.

I guess it was the last one that put me over the top.