The Bible Belt celebrates Banned Book Week in style

It seems a couple of parents in Newark, OH, are intent on giving the local children a lesson in irony. As the rest of the country moves ahead with plans to read banned books as part of the ALA’s yearly Banned Book Week, Greg and Tina Angeletti are going to their school board to protest their daughter being assigned Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in high school English class:

They believe the book to be lewd and unsuitable for high school students, and plan to discuss the issue with the board of education.

“As far as I’m concerned this is pornography,” Greg Angeletti said. “How can we raise our kids to be good, quality people, bring them to church every Sunday and then put stuff like that in their hands?” [link]

It takes all kinds, I suppose, but if an 8- year-old boy breast feeding fits your definition of “pornography,” you probably want to take that up with your mental health professional, not your local school board. The district was also very clear that the book was only appropriate for certain advanced classes, and presumably “advanced” means Seniors. If you’re child of or about to be of the age of majority, then 1) it’s not really you business what they read anymore and 2) it’s a little bit late to worry about how they’re going to turn out; they’ve already turned out. I’m encouraged, though, that the parents are going to read the book; a story about a child of an overprotective mother who isn’t allowed to grow up and has to come of age well into his adulthood should be enlightening for them, I hope. Of course, it would have been nice if they’d reserved judgment until after they’d read the book.

[via]

Reminder: Banned Books Week

Just a reminder to everyone that the last week in September is Banned Books Week, when the American Library Association urges all to go out and read at least one book that has been challeneged or banned at some point.

Forcing list context with anonymous arrays

In the learn something new every day department, we have this gem from John W. Krahn on the perl beginners list in response to the following question:

I have a file that I would like to read in then
do the following:

– Read in each line and remove any duplicate text
with tags
- Sort the file so all tag IDs are in sequential
order
- Save the results to a different file name.

Can this be done easily? If so, how? I’m really a
newbie at this stuff. Any help would be greatly
appreciated.

The sample data looked like `Data 1. My own advice to the poster involved a `while ()` loop, a hash, a couple of splits and regexes, and then sorting the result. I didn’t even bother posting it once I saw John’s elegant reply:

my %seen;
print $out map $_->[ 1 ],
sort { $a->[ 0 ] $b->[ 0 ] }
map [ //, $_ ],
grep />([^< ]+)<!– && !$seen{ $1 }++,
;

The real brilliance here is line 4, and I have to admit it had me stumped for a minute. `m//` returns 1 or 0 for success or failure in scalar context, and an array of the parenthesis captures, if any, in list context. When I first read this code, I was convinced that the second `map` should only be passing 1′s to `sort`, because the result of the match was being assigned to an index of an anonymous array, which it seems should be a scalar. You would think that `$x = [ /(.)/ ]` should be pretty much equivalent to `$y = /(.)/; $x = [ $y ]`. You would, however, be wrong. It’s actually functionally equivalent to `@y = /(.)/; $x = [ @y ]`. Expresisons inside `[]` are evaluated in list context. This makes sense, too, because it enables things like `$x = [0..255]`. And, of course, it means that `m//` returns a list of paren matches.

Update: Ok, so I lied about not missing the formatting plugins. I’m not sure what happened here, but all of my angle brackets keep getting turned into comments. Just imagine that it looks like what I say it should. Better yet, just read the thread.

Apology

I want to apologize to anyone who’s commented here lately, particularly to Autrijus and grumpy who commented on my Perl6 rant. For some reason, I don’t seem to be getting emails when people comment. I’m looking into it.

Famous Capricorns

Doing some reading for a post over at The Open Source Weblog. Apparently, Kirk McKusick and I share a birthday. Who knew? And here I though I was the only one who was going to get a nasty birthday present in 2038.

Disappointed with the mainstream blogosphere

If “mainstream blogosphere” isn’t an oxymoron; I don’t think it is anymore. That may be part of the problem, I’m not sure.

Anyway, this isn’t how it’s supposed to work, folks. I feel like the uncool kid in high school who was always three years behind the times for mentioning this almost two weeks after is was big news, but I’ve been really disappointed–not to mention disturbed–by the recent attacks on technorati. Not because i want to defend technorati (they’ve got serious content issues) but because it really shouldn’t matter. The whole idea of blogging is the decentralization of communication and the promotion of open conversation. Technorati (and now IceRocket) has not only never helped in that regard, it’s actively inhibited the growth of meaningful inter-blog conversations and relationships. Organizations like technorati and IceRocket serve as central clearing houses, granting authority and legitimacy to whoever can manipulate their tags to place highest in the search engines…and whoever can get the most links the most quickly to move up in the ranks and get yet more clicks.

Worse, blog search engines preclude meaningful conversation by hiding the conversation behind a web of links and search results. Sure the diligent blogger could click the “linking blogs” link one is now almost required to put at the bottom of every post (most blogging tools do it automatically), but who has the time for that. Most bloggers have a good idea how many people are commenting on what they write, but no idea whatsoever what those people are saying. Bloggers now operate in the feedback-less vacuum previously enjoyed only by the mainstream media, hearing only from the people who take the time to come and comment on their websites.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. And it hasn’t always been that way. As little as a year ago, trackbacks were the norm, or well on their way to being the norm, and that is the way to have a blogging conversation. To have your remarks show up in the comments of the post your commenting on, and to have other people’s responses show up in your comments box. To get an email not only every time someone uses your comments form, but every time someone posts about something you’ve said. In short, to be ripped out of the vacuum and forced into a dialog. a dialog with everyone, not just the (generally like-minded) people who have the time or interest to visit your site, perhaps register, and comment. It would be nice, of course, if we all had time to post to our own sites, and then go to other people’s sites, open up the comment form, and repeat ourselves. But we don’t, and the duplication of effort would be silly anyway.

These days, however, many of the big names in blogging, Jason Calacanis, The Social Software Weblog, Dvorak, don’t even allow trackbacks. And those that do, like Atrios, Phil Torrone, and Dan Gillmor, don’t get many.

C’mon people. Get with the program.

NYCBSDCon 2005

In the mail yesterday; pretty much speaks for itself. :

> (REMINDER: There is no monthly September meeting at the Apple Store this month due to NYCBSDCon.)
>
>Speakers and topics are now set for NYCBSDCon 2005 to be held at Columbia University in Manhattan on September 17th 2005.
>
> The speaker list is impressive. Scheduled speakers and topics includes:
>
> Jason Dixon will speak on “Failover Firewalls with OpenBSD and CARP”
>
> Jeffrey Hsu of DragonFlyBSD will cover the “History, Goals, Objectives, and Structure of DragonFlyBSD”
>
> Dru Lavigne will provide an update on BSD Certification.org
>
> Michael Lucas will speak on “Network Management Tools to Make your Boss your Willing Slave”
>
> Marshall Kirk McKusick will address “Enhancements to the Fast Filesystem to Support Multi-Terabyte Storage Systems”
>
> Bruce Momjian will enchant attendees with “PostgreSQL in BSD Land”
>
> Phillip Moore will cover “Practical Enterprise Scalability: Case Studies of Infrastructure Software Deployed in Production”
>
> Already registered attendees include dozens of developers, systems administrators and end-users of the BSD operating systems. Besides the well-known speakers at the event, NYCBSDCon 2005 will also be an excellent opporunity for networking with others in the BSD community.
>
> NYCBSDCon registration is open online until September 10th at www.nycbsdcon.org.
>
> Registration by September 10th is only $20, payable during the morning of the conference. Onsite registration is $40. As the conference fee is quite low, only cash will be accepted.
>
> A light continental breakfast will be provided throughout the morning, while snacks and beverages will be available during the afternoon.
>
> After the conference concludes at around 5:30 pm, attendees will meet at >the West End bar, in a back room reserved for the conference, just across Broadway from Columbia University. The after-party is sponsored by OrgCom, the entity that held last year’s New York Technical Community Holiday Party.
>
> Sponsors, besides the hosting technical user group NYC*BUG, include USENIX and New York Internet.

If only Michael Lucas were going to open things out a bit more…

“…and what was over there…”

“…is over here.” From [Reporters Sans Frontièrs](http://www.rsf.org/):

Reporter Tim Harper and photographer Lucas Oleniuk of the Canadian Toronto Star daily were the victims of police violence while covering a clash between police and looters. The police threatened them several times at gunpoint and, when they realised Oleniuk had photographed them hitting looters, they hurled him to the ground, grabbed his two cameras and removed memory cards containing around 350 pictures. His press card was also torn from him. When he asked for his pictures back, the police insulted him and threatened to hit him.

Harper said in a report about the police violence in the Toronto Star that, given the situation in New Orleans, there was not doubt that the police saw journalists as an obstacle to their efforts to regain control of the city.

A second incident involved Gordon Russell of the New Orleans-based Times-Picayune daily as he was covering a shoot-out between police and local residents near the convention centre where hurricane victims were awaiting evacuation. The police detained Russell and smashed all of his equipment on the ground. Russell was forced to flee to avoid further violence and reportedly left the city the same day. [link]

Let’s hear it for freedom of the press. Just exactly how, one wonders, does a journalist become an obstacle regaining control of a city? Perhaps by documenting things the police shouldn’t be doing regardless of the circumstances? i mean, we wouldn’t want stories like these making their way into the press, now would we:

On an Uptown porch Sunday, the body of a man lay wrapped in plastic with a wilted bouquet at his feet. Someone had written his driver’s license number and name — Alcede Johnson — on a torn piece of cardboard and placed it on his chest.

And yet life goes on here for a small group of locals that will not, or cannot, leave. Some are holed up in their houses, protecting them from looting that seems to have largely subsided. Some have gathered at traditional hubs of social life — a Bourbon Street bar, a fancy Uptown restaurant — for camaraderie, medical help and military food drops. And a hardy few wander the streets, locals turned tourists in the new ghostscape that the city has become.

“We’re just riding around checking things out,” Art DePodesta said. The 30-year-old restaurant owner had pulled up to a Whole Foods market on Magazine Street on his bicycle Saturday, a .45-caliber handgun on his hip. As the police looked on approvingly, he and a friend joined a handful of locals who wandered through the glass-strewn store, rummaging for food. DePodesta chose a couple of gourmet salamis.

He surveyed Magazine Street, usually busy with cross-town traffic and antique shoppers. It was silent, but DePodesta was optimistic.

“This neighborhood’s going to be up and running in no time,” he said.

[...]

Some black residents of Uptown New Orleans had different gripes[...] Though none of the neighbors of Alcede Johnson — the dead man on the porch — could say definitively what happened to him, they were upset that his body had not been picked up.

Homemaker Alma MacBrowder, 43, was angry that police had hauled away all of the water in her neighborhood store for their own use.

Michael Chachere, a retired longshoreman who lives around the corner, said that he had tried to ask some National Guardsmen the best way out of town Saturday night. Instead of giving directions, he said, they drew their weapons on him. They later explained that a number of “refugees” had been wandering into the neighborhood.

“I’m not a refugee,” Chachere said angrily. “I’m not from another country. I’m a Vietnam Vet.” [link]

Glad we have the police there to keep the “looters” from getting between those starving white people and their gourmet salami.