Congratulations, Python!
Congratulations, Python! It's the year 3000!
My Homepage
My name is Chad Whitacre. I am the Director of Information Technology and Webmaster at the Anglican Communion Network. I write free software, and I am religious. NB: These are my opinions and not necessarily (for example) yours.
I'm leaving the Anglican Communion Network; my last day is December 31st. In January I plan to start as a contract programmer with Art & Logic.
I just found out what the carriage return character, \r, is good for. A friend was asking for help on a command-line program: he wanted to update a progress indicator. This is like you get when downloading something with curl or wget or fetch. So I opened up /usr/src/usr.bin/fetch/fetch.c, expecting to find some low-level TTY hackery. Instead, I found this key line:
fprintf(stderr, "\r%-46.46s", xs->name);
>>> print "foo\rbar"Yay!
bar
I've owned four cars, and they've all been Toyotas. By now it's a brand loyalty. I don't want a Honda or Nissan, let alone a Ford or Chevy. Nope, my car problem is solved. Given that, this is exactly the story I want to be telling myself about my car:
Do you know how many hourly jobs GM has laid off from 2006 to July 2008? Take a guess. How about 34,000? And now, they’re talking about another 5,500 layoffs. And now they’re asking you and your government for a bailout to end their troubled, outdated, low quality, wasteful production system. But, let’s not focus on fixing GM’s problems with an infusion of cash. There’s something even deeper going on here that’s really wrong.The post goes on to say that the employees at the Texas and Indiana plants have either been in training, have been painting the factory and building Habitat for Humanity houses, or have been sent to other factories. This is the sort of story that makes me proud to own a Toyota. It's also the sort of story that makes me think that although size matters, it's not the only thing.
OK, here’s a better question. How many hourly jobs has Toyota’s American production system laid off in the same time frame? Zero. That’s right. ZERO. How? Isn’t Toyota experiencing the same slow down in auto sales as GM is? Yes, it is. And yes, Toyota has halted production at its Texas and Indiana plants for the past 3 months. But the 4,500 people who work at those plants have not been laid off. What!?!?! How? Why?
The answer: Toyota has a special culture, deep-rooted values, and respect for their workforce. Toyota’s tradition is to NOT lay off employees during hard times. This tradition hasn’t really been put to the test until now. And Toyota has stuck to its guns and its values.
Today at work we announced the draft constitution for the new church we are putting together. This has inspired me to draft a constitution for Christian Minimalism.
The Rule of Life is my favorite part. As far as I know, no individual or household has yet ratified the Christian Minimalism constitution. If any do, I'd love to hear about it.
Leah is a Hannah Montana fan but is ashamed because I'm not. Tonight we landed in this conversation:
"It's not that I hate Hannah Montana, I just want to understand it. And I love you whether or not you love Hannah Montana. You're bigger than that."The conversation was richer than that, but it happened quickly and I knew during it that I would wish I remembered it better. I love that crap. I know[, Christy, ] that I'm supposed to not make her feel uncomfortable about Disney's latest money machine, that I'm ruining her. But I'd much rather raise kids that engage culture and actually understand it.
"I'm not bigger than it, it's bigger than me."
"What is? Hannah Montana?"
"Not just Hannah Montana, the whole thing. It's like it jumps out and grabs me and takes over. When I'm 11 it will fade away, like for Molly [her older neighbor friend and main connection to pop culture]."
"Did she tell you that?"
"No, I just thought it. It'll be like I'm out of jail."
Let the record show that after further conversation in the real world, I have agreed with Christy to give Dean Foods a score of 1 on my scale of 1 to 10.
Labels: oscillation