Inklings: a tumblelog

It’s amazing what a few comments on a randomly stumbed-upon weblog can do!

Pretty cool!

An O/S remake of the old Rainbow Arts game, Logical.

Badman, you’re a hero.

Now, that’s common sense.

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting–or the fact of acting–in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

In philosophical ethics, value-pluralism is the idea that there are several values which may be equally correct and fundamental, and yet in conflict with each other. In addition, value-pluralism postulates that in many cases, such incompatible values may be incommensurable, in the sense that there is no objective ordering of them in terms of importance.

Subsidiarity is the principle which states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest–or, the lowest–competent authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.

Zed Shaw said it best: Indirection Is Not Abstraction, and there’s a whole lot of daft indirection going on here.

Many of these are well worth keeping in mind when working with XML in general.

Not that I’m going anywhere near RSS ever again if I can avoid it, but at least this is clear (as opposed to the spec).

A versatile command line graphing tool and library.

Safe object pickling in Python

Holy crap, this is cool!

Everybody seems to be talking about this, and it is a genuinely informative read.

Ho. Lee. Crap.

You heard the man!

I know this makes me seem like a big girlyman, but if it does something for my RSI and back pain, I don’t care.

Seeing as they refuse to give proper permalinks on their newslog, I’ve no intention of linking to them, but I’ll happily link to Sam Ruby’s post on it. Kids, throw down your RSS shackles and embrace Atom!

On implementing electronic voting systems properly.

An alternative to Magpie RSS.

Ah, at last I’ve found a replacement for my random signature generator that’ll run in Thunderbird.

May come in useful some day, directly or obliquely.

Good reading. You know, this kind of post makes me happy. Why? Because the fact I know nothing about it means that I am blissfully ignorant of the shitslinging being done by politicoprimates in the US. I’ll gladly remain as such until some of said shit escapes the bounds of their pen and lands in our collective laps over here. After all, we’ve plenty of diarrhoea over this side of the pond to worry about. (Note to self: catch up on your bloody writing!)

Jason Kottke: You’re a man by my own heart.

Downloaded!

:-D

Intelligent Design is only one of many ‘alternatives’ to Darwinian evolution.

He’s a hero. Always has been.