Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

A lot was made this past week of Karen Hughes speech to Saudi women. I think everyone can agree that a closed society isn't going to be putting a representative sample of its population to hear and question the visiting dignitary. Slate even says that some of Ms. Hughes' tactics were wrong and I would agree with some of that. With that said, it always helpful to remember what The Religious Policeman has to say about her visit. In particular, I like his analysis of the wisdom of listening to people who have full time chauffeurs claim that they don't want to drive.

For some reason, GMail for me this morning will not switch out of their "Basic HTML View". It keeps offering me a link to switch to the Standard view, but alas it keeps re-appearing. Not sure what the dealio is since I am using the same browser as I was last night (Firefox 1.0.7) and everything was OK). Prehaps a code change on their part broke something. In any case, this helpful hint from the Opera people, show how to always get the Standard GMail view.

Don't you love it when you come across someone express an opionion that you share that you either a.) haven't taken the time to articulate or b.) presents it in a very clear and concise manner? With that said, Charles Miller clearly states what's wrong with OPML.

If you doing any web development, then you really owe it to yourself to check out the Live HTTP Headers Extension. It allows you to see the headers sent and received with each web transaction. It was particularly useful for me tonight as I can now go to bed in peace knowing that my problem was solved.

So why should use this versus a local proxy server. It is certainly faster and easier to setup than running a local proxy server (and you don't have to worry about any local proxy's dodgy implementation). There is no browser configuration needed to use the live http headers. Its just Tools | Live HTTP Headers... and off you go. The other big advantage that Live HTTP Headers has over a local proxy is that it can report HTTPS streams which a local proxy cannot due to the encryption.

If you ever used Python's interactive command shell, you've undoubtable made this mistake when trying to quit:

>>>exit
'Use Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit.'

the same thing happens if you try to type the command quit. Neither of these things are used when you write Python scripts so I never really gave it much thought until the other day when I was wondering what is exit and quit are and why does it work this way in the interactive shell? It turns out:

>>>exit.__class__
<type 'str'>

that exit and quit are just string objects that have been put into the local variable scope. You can even change their value if you want:

>>>exit = "don't do that"
>>>exit
"don't do that"

I can see why the interactive shell developer added this. It had to be dead simple to implement and very useful to the end user.

A co-worker sent an e-mail the other day that had a latin phrase in the signature line. I was curious and looked up the phrase. That is when I came across this page of Latin quotes. It makes for some good reading.

Hibernate is one of those things that I have always intended on learning but have never taken the time. Today I was trying to help someone at work diagnosis a problem they were having with it (What good help am I when I have never used the software before!). Actually, I able to find this article on enabling Hibernate's SQL logging. It looks pretty simple and getting my co-worker down the path of trying to solve the problem.

Its amazing how stubborn we can be with our partners. Case in point, we have a little mat/towel that we put down in front of the tub while we are showing. My wife prefers to have it on the floor as minimally as possible and I personally don't have a problem with it being there. Eventhough I've known my wife for a long, long time, I've just realized that if I give in and do something extra (i.e. spend the two seconds to pick up the mat) I can make my wife extremely, out of this world happy. Its amazing that I never picked up on this before. It took her awhile to get adjusted to the new behavior (she accused me of not taking a shower a few days because the mat hadn't moved) but now she is very happy.

Its the little things that we all can do to make our loved ones feel more apreciated and loved. Why didn't I think of this before?