Quick hit: the origin of ScrappleFace

A rare piece of non-satire from ScrappleFace.

Jessica Rachel McMaster (née MacMenamin), the woman who coined the term ‘ScrappleFace’ as a nickname for a family dog, passed away late last night or early this morning.

Mrs. McMaster is the grandmother of ScrappleFace.com editor Scott Ott, and served as a mother to him and three brothers since the late 1960s.

Jessica McMaster gave up her career, surrendered much of her pension, and walked away from a comfortable lifestyle in a handsome apartment to move to an old house in the country and take care of four boys. Without her sacrifice, and that of her husband James McMaster, 84, these boys were candidates for foster care or an orphanage. Thanks to their love, these boys are now… an airline pilot, a university professor, a construction worker and a Christian children’s camp director (who happens to write satire).

James McMaster has devoted more than a decade to caring for his wife in their home as she moved through the stages of dementia. He kept his promise.

Both of them serve as inspiring role models to their boys, and to many others

It's always nice to see true, heartfelt tributes instead of the phoney, hyped-up things you see so often on national holidays. For example, the speeches I heard about on Martin Luther King Day seemed to be excuses for ranting about a favorite political platform, sometimes even missing MLK's mission entirely.

[via ScrappleFace]

LA Times columnist says "I don't support our troops"

If there are reasonable people in Los Angeles, they don't seem to be writing for the papers.

Joel Stein writes in yesterday's editorial about the war in Iraq and says we shouldn't have parades for our returning troops.

I'm not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War, but we shouldn't be celebrating people for doing something we don't think was a good idea. All I'm asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return. But, please, no parades.

Stein perpetuates some common falsehoods advanced by the MSM. In fact, I would have to put him right square in the middle of the MSM category.

After we've decided that we made a mistake, we don't want to blame the soldiers who were ordered to fight. Or even our representatives, who were deceived by false intelligence. And certainly not ourselves, who failed to object to a war we barely understood.

But blaming the president is a little too easy. The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying. An army of people ignoring their morality, by the way, is also Jack Abramoff's pet name for the House of Representatives.

Excuse me? Did I read that correctly? I think he's actually implying that the troops should disobey orders while in harms way! Is he an anarchist, or is he really that much of a fool?

He does seem to have one part correct:

But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.

I have to agree - this foot-shuffling position is a very tenuous one. The leaders who take this position need to hear from their constituents that their little dance isn't fooling anyone.

I think even Patrick Henry would have trouble defending this guy's right to free speech.

[via Drudge Report]

Technolust: MoGoMouse

As mice for my laptop go, I've become very happy with my touchpad, using the touchpoint (eraser-looking thingy in the middle of the keyboard) for certain tasks. For any long-term or high-precision work (Photoshop, Visio, gaming), an external mouse is the way to go. Since I do 90% of my work at home or the office where I have mice waiting, or on the train where I can't use a mouse anyway, I usually take my chances and travel without, to minimize weight, space and the tangle factor. This sometimes makes for an awkward moment when I have to borrow one from a client.

Thanks to Newton Peripherals, the MoGoMouse should make the decision much easier. The MoGo is a wireless mouse that folds flat and fits in a PC card slot (the most common expansion option on laptops). It uses Bluetooth to talk to the laptop instead of wires, and it recharges in the slot when you're not using it.

[via VanDamme Associates developers blog]

QOTD

Quote of the day (heard at Liberty Bible Church this week).

"I Try" counts for more than IQ.

The evils of optimization

Donald Knuth once said "premature optimization is the root of all evil". Actually some guy named Tony Hoare said it first, and Knuth was just quoting him, but I don't know who Hoare is, so I'm quoting Knuth. In any case, it refers to a tendency of programmers to try to fine tune a program before determining where the real problems are. The end result is a lot of programmer thinking time is spent improving things that don't really matter. This isn't the same thing as "rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic", more like trying to make an M1 Abrams tank faster by changing the aerodynamics.

I discovered an essay on the subject by Joseph M. Newcomer. I also don't know who Newcomer is, but I like his essay so I'm quoting him here too. The essay, Optimization: Your Worst Enemy, is a very experience-based story about why premature optimization is so evil. If you can make it through the tech-speak (sample quote: "Even I can figure out how to get CWnd::OnAnything to inline-expand to a call on DefWindowProc."), the tales he tells underscore that it is not merely a distraction, but actually harmful, to optimize uninformed.

Perhaps the best example of pure programmer stupidity in "optimizing" code occurred when I was porting a large library we used for our research project.
...
The port mostly worked, but we had a really strange problem that showed up only under some rare conditions, but which crashed the program using the library. I started looking. The heap was damaged. When I found how the heap was being damaged, it was being damaged via a bad pointer which allowed a store into a random place in the heap. OK, how did that pointer get bad? Four levels of storage damage down, and after 12 solid hours of debugging, I found the real culprit.
...
When I confronted the programmer, he justified it by explaining that he was now able to zero out two pointers with only a single doubleword store instruction (it wasn't an x86 computer, but a mainframe), and wasn't that a clever optimization? Of course, when the pointers became 32-bit pointers, this optimization only zeroed one of the two pointers, leaving the other either NULL (most of the time), or, occasionally, pointing into the heap in an eventually destructive manner. I pointed out that this optimization happened once, at object creation time; the average application that used our library created perhaps six of these objects, and that according to the CPU data of the day before I'd spent not only 17 hours of my time but 6 hours of CPU time, and that if we fixed the bug and ran the formerly-failing program continuously, starting it up instantly after it finished, for fourteen years, the time saved by his clever hack would just about break even with the CPU time required to find and fix this piece of gratuitous nonsense. Several years later he was still doing tricks like this; some people never learn.

[via flounder.com]

The lessons of McCarthyism

Arthur Herman has a great piece in the New York Post today (free login required).

He recounts the story of Senator McCarthy (after whom McCarthyism is named) – a story I haven't heard before – and proceeds to compare it to the recent treatment by Democrats of Judge Alito in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Republicans, and the conservative movement, learned a powerful lesson. They would now pay a high price for their rhetorical excess or hysteria, which the media would instantly denounce as "McCarthyism."

GOP attacks on the Truman presidency during the Korean War had been reckless and bitter, much like what today's Democrats hurl at George W. Bush. As American soldiers were dying, McCarthy and his colleagues speculated publicly if top administration officials might be in the pocket of the Kremlin. They dismissed Truman as a stupid, weak stooge addicted to "midnight sessions of bourbon and Benedictine." They smeared Secretary of State Dean Acheson as pro-Soviet, nicknaming him the Red Dean; on the floor of the Senate, Sen. William Jenner even called Gen. George Marshall "a living lie."

THE fall of McCarthy forced conservatives to change their political style. Smearing opponents as "commies" or "pinkos" only backfired. Appealing to racial or anti-Semitic stereotypes told the public more about the accuser than the accused.

The right began policing its own. Conservatives who didn't or couldn't make the adjustment were relegated to the swamps of the John Birch Society - or later, like white supremacist David Duke or evangelist Pat Robertson, instantly denounced. The new attitude was embodied in a new magazine that appeared soon after McCarthy's fall, William F. Buckley's National Review, which taught conservatives that they could gain more through reasoned debate than through conspiracy theories, name-calling, and sleazy innuendo.

Conservatives learned their lesson: The Reagan Revolution would be the result.

But liberals have not learned this lesson. McCarthy's defeat seemed to vindicate their own excesses. Liberals began to label conservatives as closet fascists, embodiments of a primitive and pathological "paranoid style" of politics, while the media applauded.

Over the next decades, while conservatives were reining in the rhetoric, liberals were settling into the habit of attacking every Republican as a crypto-Nazi, a racist, a sexist and a religious bigot — and those who supported them as an ignorant redneck lynch mob.

I find the comparisons striking, and I really hope that the backlash against the Dems is as strong and long-lasting as the term McCarthyism has been. Of course, every silver lining has its cloud – in this case, learning their lesson might result in a more influential and representative version of the DNC. Still, there are things the DNC stands for which are true and right, and which can serve as a good and necessary balance against the goals of the Republican party. Those things have been lost behind the rhetoric and slander of the current liberal left. Having the "real" Democrats back wouldn't be so bad – losing to an honorable opponent is far more palatable than losing to a cheater.

Side note: what does it mean about education in the USA that I had never heard the story of McCarthyism? For years, I thought McCarthyism was a variation of Chicken Little. According to this, it sounds like he was more guilty of wrongly accusing people, and going over-the-top in how he accused them.

[via Powerline]

Web gadget: DAIRY

Found this neat web toy. Wait for it to load (it takes quite a while) then type something for an example of manual typesetting. I especially like the K. The site appears to have lots of these interactive interfaces, not the least of which is the main site (another long load).

[via TheGreyDragon]

Net serendipity: Grumpy Gamer

I started out tonight looking for confirmation about the demise of Cyan, the makers of the Myst series, including Myst V: End of Ages (which – hint,hint – was noticeably lacking in my Christmas presents). I was able to confirm that Cyan was a non-entity for a period of some weeks (see here, here and here).

Along the way, I found links to The Grumpy Gamer, a poorly-drawn animated cartoon about the real life of computer gamers. I especially laughed at episode #6 (there are only 9). Perhaps a bit too much of an inside joke for those who haven't been gamers, but I can tell the author speaks from personal experience.