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.

"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.

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.

Recording your phone calls.

Can you record your own phone calls, ingoing and outgoing? Usually, at least in the United States.

Most states are “one-party-consent law” states. If you live in one of these, you can always record your own in-state calls either openly or surreptitiously, since only one participant’s consent is needed. Likewise, you can get someone else to record them for you.

In interstate calls, it’s important to check this state-by-state summary, because in interstate calls, both states’ laws apply, and you need to apply the most stringent applicable law. For example, if you live in California or are even just speaking to someone in California (an “all-party-consent law” state), you must get the other party's permission to record the call, or risk having to pony up $5000 in statutory damages (or three times the actual damages, whichever is greater). In general, announcing your intent to record and letting the other party hang up if they don’t like it is sufficient in all states: continued participation implies consent.

The all-party-consent law states are: California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington. In Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Missisippi, and probably New Mexico as well, a participant may record but a non-participant may not, even with consent. In Vermont the law is unsettled.

I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice; laws change; errors happen.

Slashdot, eWeek, Microsoft, the OSI, Groklaw, and me

Well, it seems I've made Slashdot, quite unintentionally. The article there references an eWeek article about how I proposed that the Open Source Initiative approve two Microsoft licenses, the Microsoft Permissive License and the Microsoft Community License. Here's a FAQ:

1. Why is this story news in August 2006? Ya got me. Groklaw reported on it back in December 2005, when it was in fact news.
2. Do you speak for Slashdot, eWeek, Microsoft, the OSI, Groklaw, or any of your past or present employers? No, only for myself.
3. Is what the eWeek story says about you true? Yes, except that I no longer volunteer for ccil.org; I did some work for them in the past.
4. Why did you propose the licenses for OSI approval? Because I believe they meet the elements of the Open Source Definition.
5. Are the licenses basically similar to other OSI-approved licenses? Yes.
6. Then why ask OSI to approve them? Because I want to encourage Microsoft to release software under an OSI-approved license, even if they feel it necessary to use their own license
7. Microsoft release anything under an Open Source license? Surely you jest. No, actually. Microsoft released WiX under the Common Public License, an OSI-approved license. And there have been other such releases.
8. Why did you withdraw the request for OSI approval? For a number of reasons, it's awkward for OSI to approve licenses that are not proposed by the author of the license. The OSI wants to keep all approved licenses on its site, and may not have copyright permission to do so. Furthermore, if the OSI wants to request changes, only the author can make them.
9. Does that mean you have changed your mind about the licenses? No, only about the suitability of OSI approving them.
10. Are you a shill/astroturfer for Microsoft? No.
11. What's your view on open-source software? I use a lot of it and have released my own code and other stuff under several different open-source licenses.
12. What do you want to do with your fifteen minutes of fame? Wait for it to pass.
13. Can I leave a comment? Yes. However, as Le Guin says, I can take a little inaccuracy or a little accusation, but the combination is poison. I reserve the right to remove comments I think are poisonous.

The Elements of Style Revised

Get the little book!

I've been working off and on for the last few weeks on updating the original 1918 edition of William Strunk's short book on the basics of elementary composition. No, it isn't "Strunk and White"; White's additions are still in copyright and thus untouchable. Nor is it the book I would have written myself from scratch; that would look a lot more like Mapping the Model, except Rosemary Hake has already written it, so why should I? (Alas, that book is out of print....)

Here's part of the Reviser's Introduction, so you can see if it's for you:

My revisions to the original are founded on the principle that rules of usage and style cannot be drawn out of thin air, nor constructed a priori according to "logic"; they must depend on the actual practice of those who are generally acknowledged to be good writers. For a larger work founded on the same principles and giving much more detailed and up-to-date advice on usage, the reader is urged to consult the current edition of Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage, as I have done with both pleasure and profit while preparing this revision.

I have attempted to remain within the scope of the original. This book, therefore, is intended as a compendium of helpful advice to novice writers in freshman composition classes, not a code of general laws of writing for all works by all writers in all circumstances. Violations of the rules can be found within the book itself — this is neither inconsistent nor hypocritical, as The Elements of Style Revised is not a paper written for a composition class.

In updating Strunk's work from the 19th century to the late early 21st century, I have retained as much of Strunk's spirit and characteristic style as I could. I have removed the obsolete, the erroneous, and the merely idiosyncratic (Strunk's arbitrary dislike of "student body", for example) both from Strunk's own usage and from the rules laid down in his book. Like White, I have also added a few points to Chapters IV and V that seemed to me important enough to justify their presence, as well as removing Strunk's Chapter VI on spelling. I have not hesitated to replace Strunk's opinions with contrary ones, though I was pleasantly surprised to find that many of those I expected to require changing (strictures against split infinitives and final prepositions, as well as the preposterous which/that rule) did not appear in the 1918 edition at all.

Share and enjoy, and of course send me critiques.

Well, wuddaya know

Here's a poem in blank verse:

Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness
And self-respect, innate in every sphere
Of life, and shedding light on every grain
Of dust in God's highway, so smooth below
Your carriage-wheels, so rough beneath the tread
   Of naked feet, bethink yourselves
   In looking on the swift descent
Of men who have lived in their own esteem,
That there are scores of thousands breathing now,
And breathing thick with painful toil, who in
That high respect have never lived at all
Nor had a chance of life! Go ye, who rest
So placidly upon the sacred Bard
Who had been young, and when he strung his harp
Was old...

Go, Teachers of content and honest pride,
   Into the mine, the mill, the forge,
The squalid depths of deepest ignorance,
And uttermost abyss of man's neglect,
And say can any hopeful plant spring up
In air so foul that it extinguishes
The soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!

Who wrote it? Well, Charles Dickens, in Martin Chuzzlewit. What's that? You didn't know Dickens was a poet? Well, the above passage appears, printed as prose, in Chapter 13, with the additional words "and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread" between the two stanzas, quoted from Ps. 37:25. Such things can prose writers fall into when they are trying to be high-flown and not watching themselves carefully.

Kudos to H. W. Fowler for spotting this example.

Futbol en masse

At the summer camp I attended as a yoot in the 60s, there was a game known as Mass Soccer. The chief feature of this game of games was that any number could play on either side. Kids being what they are, this meant that the entire center of the field was occupied by a permanent clot of forwards of all shapes and sizes, with a relative handful of backs whose chief task was to assist the goalies when a ball occasionally escaped from this huge scrum.

To keep things interesting, any number of balls could be in play at once. To keep things fair, each side was entitled to as many goalies as there were balls — when a ball went out of play, one of the goalies would do the usual thing to bring it back in while the game raged on around him. To keep things safe, the footwear rules were strictly enforced: no shoes allowed, socks required.

It was a hell of a lot of fun.

TagSoup 1.0 Final released!

TagSoup is a SAX-compliant parser written in Java that, instead of parsing well-formed or valid XML, parses HTML as it is found in the wild: nasty and brutish, though quite often far from short. TagSoup is designed for people who have to process this stuff using some semblance of a rational application design. By providing a SAX interface, it allows standard XML tools to be applied to even the worst HTML. TagSoup also includes a command-line processor that reads HTML files and can generate either clean HTML or well-formed XML that is a close approximation to XHTML.
TagSoup is free and Open Source software, licensed under the Academic Free License version 3.0, a cleaned-up and patent-safe BSD-style license which allows proprietary re-use. It's also licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.0, since unfortunately the GPL and the AFL are incompatible. You can choose to license TagSoup from me under either the GPL or the AFL.
This release represents the end of my current plans for TagSoup. I will continue to fix bugs, but it now does everything that I foresaw back in 2002 when I started this project, and a great deal more. Thanks to everyone on the tagsoup-friends mailing list for their efforts.

RELAX NG rant

I've added a slide presentation/rant on RELAX NG to my home page.

Plagiarism

This blog is about recycled knowledge. That means there are often facts or ideas in it that I remember, but don't remember the source of. If you read this and recognize your own ideas, please let me know and I'll fix it up.

Sometimes I deliberately don't say where an idea comes from or mention people in a "background" sort of way, because I don't know if they want their names attached to something they wrote in a more private space than the Web five or ten years ago. If you are one of those, and you do want credit, again let me know.

No cross, no crown

Someone used the phrase "No cross, no crown" on a mailing list, and explained it as meaning "Don't discuss religion or politics". I was fairly sympathetic with the intent, but unfamiliar with this use of the phrase: I had always understood it to mean "If you don't take pains you won't achieve anything", and to be a specifically Christian metaphor: "No earthly cross of metaphorical crucifixion, no heavenly crown of sainthood." I decided to look into the question.

I quickly checked the first 500 Google references to the phrase, and all of them except three clearly referred to the sense I already knew, drawn from all over Christianity, mostly Catholic and Quaker, but Episcopal, AMEZ, Orthodox, and even Rosicrucian. The Christian Scientist symbol of a cross surmounted by a crown probably alludes to the saying as well. The saying is of course also found in purely secular contexts, with the same sense.

Two of the three exceptions are basically accidental: a song "Ojo por Ojo", which says "And in that place there is no cross / no crown, no sacred ground / all is done and left unsaid"; and a page denying that the Mormon Temple is a Christian edifice, enumerating the Christian symbols that it does not have (at least on the outside): "There is no cross, no crown, no alpha or omega, no icthys, no lion, no lamb, nor any other recognizable historical Christian symbol."

The final exception appears in a speech on Voltaire by Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century agnostic, who is clearly using the expression in the mode of parody; he associates it with King James I's maxim "No bishop, no King", by which the King meant that if Presbyterianism came to dominate England as well as Scotland, he would swiftly find himself either out of a job or a tolerated figurehead.

The Quaker references clearly allude to a book of that name by William Penn, in which he says, "No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown." The modern phrases "No pain, no gain" and "No guts, no glory" are clearly reminiscences of this. I also found "No pruning, no grapes; no grinding mill, no flour; no battle, no victory; no Cross, no Crown!" and "No laming, no naming, no struggle, no Promised Land; no cross, no crown" in the works of others.

Changing names

The names of Unicode characters, once published, can't ever be changed again, not even when they are obviously wrong. In this case, stability is considered to trump correctness.

A participant in the Unicode development process once complained: "If biologists had insisted that names once assigned could not be changed because of advances in knowledge, or even to correct errors, then surely the system would have broken down centuries ago."

But in fact, the international Linnaean names of plants and animals are not changed for either of those reasons, nor for any other reason whatsoever: though we now know that Basilosaurus is a proto-whale and not any sort of reptile, Basilosaurus it will remain forever.

The only thing that can happen in Linnaean nomenclature is the recognition that two names are synonymous. In that case, there is a question which shall be the preferred name, and normally it is the first name to be published, but exceptions sometimes occur. Thus when the dinosaurs Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were found to be the same, Apatosaurus was chosen as the preferred name because it was published first; however, this is not properly to be described as "changing the name of Brontosaurus to Apatosaurus". Brontosaurus is a perfectly good name and may still be used even though it is dispreferred.

When are later names preferred to earlier ones? Usually when the earlier name has long been forgotten, and the later name is widely used in the scientific literature.

And per se and

The name of the & character, ampersand, is short for and per se and, meaning and by itself and. People used to recite it at the end of the alphabet. About that much there's no doubt.

But of the two ands in that phrase, which one designates the ampersand? Is it and per se & or & per se and? It seemed clear to me that the former is the correct reading, so I did a little desultory research.

Most sources say the derivation is & per se and, but the story of reciting the alphabet is firmly established and I don't see how and, the conjunction, could possibly appear at the end. The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins takes my point of view.

An alternative adopted by the American Heritage and Merriam-Webster dictionaries is that the words and per se and are to be construed as & by itself [means] 'and', but that seems far more strained to me than the natural x, y, z, and per se &.

So I suppose you can say what you like.

Zanzibar!

It was a dark and stormy night. I stalked my enemy through the tall grass. I saw the flash of his muzzle as his shot went whistling over my head. I fired! I killed him!

I walked to the nearest town. Casually smoking a cigarette, I entered the nearest bar.

"I have killed a man!", said I.

"His name?" demanded a tall, dark, and handsome stranger at the other end of the bar.

"His name? His name was Zanzibar!"

"Zanzibar! He was my brother! We must meet."

It was a dark and stormy night....

Pity

"But this is terrible!" cried Frodo. "Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!"

"Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need."

     --J.R.R. Tolkien

The War (after Simonides)

This is a villanelle, a very special verse form that I have taken some liberties with. I had always wanted to write one, but I never could come up with a couplet strong enough to support all the required repetitions. It finally dawned on me that the couplet didn't have to be original with me, if I was clever enough about it.

Even if you don't click on all the links, be sure to mouse over them: they provide a first-level commentary on the poem.

"Go and tell the Spartans, passerby,"
   The man of Keos sings in lines that soar,
"That here, obedient to their laws, we lie."

The king of Lakedaimon will not fly,
   Though "Kill them all!" the hordes of Persia roar:
Go and tell the Spartans, passerby.

The news is carried of their terse goodbye
   From Hot Gates to far Atlantic shore
That there, obedient to their laws, they lie.

The law of nations ready to defy,
   Atlantis rising plots aggressive war --
Go and tell the Persians, passerby.

The Archon smiles, and smiles: real men don't cry.
   His friends sell not reality but lore
As here, obedient to his will, they lie.

Boxed in flags, the dead all verse deny.
   They cannot serve their country any more.
"Go and tell our people, passerby,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie."