When do you know that you've got the right answer to a programming conundrum? When the answer means you delete lots of code, and the final product is more efficient, more flexible, and more robust. I love programming.

I don't want this to turn into a political 'blog ("warblog") but I have a few comments to make, focused by an article by ex-President Carter. I'll try to make sure the points are "fresh"... i.e., I haven't seen them made elsewhere. I assume you read the article first.

The war can be waged only as a last resort, with all nonviolent options exhausted. In the case of Iraq, it is obvious that clear alternatives to war exist.

For those who don't track Slashdot, a very interesting review of a book carefully studying the feasibility of a Space Elevator was posted.

For those who don't know what a space elevator is, here's the basics: A satellite is put in geosynchronous orbit around the earth, which is where the satellite always stays above the same point on Earth. A tether from the satellite is extended down to the surface of the Earth, and another is extended away from the Earth a roughly equal distance.

The next generation of News Aggregators should use Bayesian-style filtering to allow a user to indicate what kind of stories they like. Possibly even sorting them out by categories, because you may not be able to capture my preferences in a single filter.

This is not a new idea any more then Bayesian email filtering is, but perhaps the focus it has received in the email filtering role will encourage people to recognize its power in other applications as well.

I've spent most of today moving stuff from the house to the third dumpster. If the stuff in the house was that valuless, in a sense I was living in a dumpster. Most of the stuff I'm throwing away now, on shelves, in the house, had not been touched in years. I got a clue about this when I spent most of the last quarter of 2002 in New York. I did pretty well with a suitcase, knapsack, laptop and cellphone. There really wasn't much more that I needed, or much more that I could even use.... I realize I probably would be happier with a really nice room, a large one, with a deck and a hot tub, bathroom and shower, and access to a kitchen for the rare times I create a meal, and that's about it. Having a car is nice, but I don't need anything on the order of the kinds of possessions that have accumulated in this very nice house-dumpster. [Scripting News]

I was raised middle-class to upper-middle-class (in later years as my father progressed). I always wondered how I'd do being much less well off when I lived on my own while I was going to college and getting my grad degree. And the answer has pleasently surprised me; I'm quite happy the way things are, with a two-bedroom apartment and a quite modest amount of stuff.

My laptop just self-immolated. Other then the fact that the warrentee repairs will take "up to three weeks", am I saddened? Nope. I finally got a decent backup scheme going, and I only lost perhaps a sum total of an hour of work.

It is likely that the repair technicians will not have to wipe the hard drive (unless the sight of Linux freaks them out when they fix it), but even so, I'm not afraid of data loss, because I've got it all right here.

Continuing the spammer's march to make sure that e-mail is 100% useless soon, I recently received a spam with this title: "Please return immediately, or we will be forced to take legal notice". Can you afford to ignore that, in light of the fact that electronic notice is sometimes sufficient, IIRC? (Though the last word should be "action".) It's a porn spam.

It is getting harder every month to visually scan my spam and reliably seperate them by title.

256 days since I quit smoking. Yeah, I'm a programmer. Sue me. [Scripting News]

For non-programmers, 256 happens to be two raised to the power of eight, which is the number of distinct bytes that exist (a byte is eight bits, which is either a one or a zero).

Incoming computer science students no longer know their powers of two. Even most of my contemporary grad students don't know their powers of two. Those of us who instantly know 32,768 is 2¹⁵ are a dying breed. Heck, most grad students don't even seem to know the 2¹⁰ =~ 10³ (where =~ means "approximentally equal)... I see something like 2⁵⁵ and I know quite quickly that is approximentally 32 quadrillion, close enough for government work.

What bothers me more is that Jeremy Bowers, who is usually so insistent that we should be clear and precise when we speak, is now using such obfuscating and emotionally-loaded language.... "Wage Life" is, to my mind, a content-free phrase which can only confuse the issue. - words (is that the right name?)

OK, guilty as charged. I was going to post this as a comment on that site but I suppose it could use more general dissemination.

I saw a "Wage Peace" sign today, obviously homemade, and for some reason it set me off thinking.

It occurs to me that the whole War/Peace dichotomy is a fraud. There is no War, there is no Peace, there is only Life and Death. A War can save Lives. A Peace can Kill. There is no contradiction, because they are not opposite.

I am on the side of Life, whatever that takes. If there is a War that will save Lives, I am in favor of it. If there is a Peace that is Killing, then the peace should be broken.