Voting third party and government job "creation"

This is copy of an email I sent just now.

My concern about the libertarian candidate, besides the fact that he cannot win,

That's no reason not to vote for him. A well-functioning democracy requires a choice of more than the people who are "obviously" going to win. Otherwise, it isn't democracy so much as a decree by the political parties who will be the next president.

Change GTK keybindings from Emacs back to default

Like any virtuous person, I use Emacs for everything, and so tried out using Emacs key bindings for all GTK applications generally. After a year or so of working like this, I have decided to go back. The main problem is that other applications can't handle the awesome power of Emacs. Firefox, for example, uses C-k to jump to the search box, but if you are in the location bar, C-k will run the equivalent of kill-line which means that in order to get to the search bar, you have to remove focus from the location bar. Not convenient.

Those Dumb Pipes

This is an older idea which had been floating around in my head, half-finished for a few years.

I was inspired by this Ars Technica article to think about the relationship between network operators — both cellular and landline — and consumers. The key quote from the article is by "one mobile operator" and is:

Correctly Dispatching on Generic Methods in `*apply()` in R

I've been hacking in R recently for work, and it is a bizarrely amazing
language. I just ran into a situation in which I needed to apply an S3 generic
function to a list (actually, a row-wise iterator on a data.frame)
and hit an annoying rough patch

For those not as well-versed in R (I've been learning it for about two weeks at
this point), "method dispatch" is done in a quirky yet effective way. You define
a generic function, say foo like this:

Listing available monospace fonts in Emacs

After finding out that the Monospace font doesn't support italics, I set about trying to find a suitable replacement. This EmacsWiki page lists a way to print some example text in all of the fonts on the system, which is very helpful for comparing what's available. The problem with it is that it displays all fonts, not just the monospace fonts, which isn't useful. (For those of you not in the know, all programming is done with monospace or uniform-width fonts, meaning that l and m are the same size).

Use FileMaker Web Publishing in Apache

I've been tasked with nice-ifying the configuration and setup of the systems at work. They store a huge amount (244 GiB) of protein analysis data in a FileMaker database and have PHP scripts accessing the data through the FileMaker XML HTTP API. The problem is that the PHP scripts are running on Apache (as is an SVN repo), but FileMaker wants to publish its API only through IIS. Having spent more than a minute wrestling with configuring IIS, I want it out of my life ASAP. But that can't be done unless scripts have a way of talking XML to FileMaker on port 80. All hope seemed lost.

When European "Austerity" Isn't

I've been skeptical of the rhetoric that there has been "brutal, crushing austerity" in Europe. When these claims are made, I have seldom heard any quantification of how brutal these "brutal" changes have been. So I looked it up.

Short version: there's been minimal to negative austerity since pre-meltdown 2008.

Longer version: