Full capitalisation of normal words, underlining, boldface and scare quotes must be limited to one phrase in any two consecutive paragraphs, or two words in any two, three in three, etc. up to a limit where the use of n so emphasised words in m paragraphs, n>m, requires n-m paragraphs either side to be free of such emphasis, and thus requires the document to contain at least n paragraphs, excluding headers.
Any statutory requirement for whole paragraph emphasis must be provided by a margin stripe.
A new version of a document must clearly indicate through appropriate colours where text has been added, changed or deleted, with the old version made visible by hovering over the change indicator.
A timeline slider must be provided to give access to diffs against earlier versions (which the user has accepted).
The user's acceptance on one device must be recognised as acceptance for all devices linked to that account.
The user must be asked to separately indicate acceptance of each significant change.
A button must be provided to allow a user to view or "print" the document in traditional style, i.e. with full capitalisation of parts to be glossed over.
A button must be provided to number the paragraphs with nesting and other supplementation to avoid cascading number changes between versions.
Default full word text is to be no smaller than 11 on 13 and all sub and superscripts no smaller than 8 point, with standard interface options to zoom in or out.
Installers must enforce compliance with these guidelines.

when I'm gone...

What's the matter? You look like you just saw a ghost..

Ever since last week's announcement, Apple's Tech Specs have made it very clear that a USB camera is going to be an option:

The Camera Connection Kit gives you two ways to import photos and videos from a digital camera. The Camera Connector lets you import your photos and videos to iPad using the camera's USB cable. Or you can use the SD Card Reader to import photos and videos directly from the camera's SD card.

which the rumour sites that think they are all over iPhone OS 3.2 support for video calling seem to have missed.

This is a review of the GoDaddy.com ISP. For a brief period of time, I used them for both my SSL certificate provider and my hosting provider. That lasted about a week. This review chronicles my experience with GoDaddy so that others can avoid the same fate.

It's hard to know where to begin when criticizing my experience with GoDaddy. It all started with a GoDaddy SSL certificate that was expiring in mid-August. Things started going wrong when GoDaddy sent me the expiration notice in mid-June. I immediately went to their website to renew. When I got there, I got a message that said I couldn't renew it for three days. I wrote them to complain and their reply basically said, "Yes, you can't renew before a certain date." Three days later, on the day it said I should be able to renew it, it still said I couldn't renew it.

A couple of weeks later, I went back to renew. I submitted a renewal for 9 years and paid for it (almost $270). I thought it was odd that they still hadn't sent out the cert, but I figured it would happen on the billing date for the account.

In the meantime, I decided to try to speed up my website by moving large graphics to shared hosting. Since I had a GoDaddy account already, I added hosting to it. Thankfully, I only paid for two months. While uploading content to the server, I started having weird problems almost immediately, finding that the server would just suddenly block my IP (including pings) for several minutes at a time. I theorized that they were limiting the number of reconnects per minute, so I spread the load out across several IPs and finished my uploading. I did all this over the holiday weekend to minimize impact.

Well, once I had the content on the server, I switched my home server to point to the images on that server. The next night, I tried to view a page full of thumbnail images and it stalled for a very long time. The problem went away after a couple of minutes, so I ignored it. When it happened again the next night, I started becoming concerned. When it happened on the fourth night, I started running a script that requested a tiny 15K image once a minute so that I could characterize the problem.

I contacted GoDaddy at this point, and they blamed my connection. I then reproduced the problem from work (where they have multiple OC-3 connections). I contacted them again. They continued to just say "We can't reproduce this" and actually had the nerve to suggest that I call them when I have the problem. How do you call somebody about a problem that only lasts 2-3 minutes from the start of the hang to the end? That's like telling somebody, "When you see a shooting star, text me so I can look up." Yikes!

Then, it got better. GoDaddy contacted me and said that they couldn't issue my SSL certificate because they now issue them for a maximum of 5 years---this in spite of the fact that their website was perfectly willing to sell me a 9-year certificate. So they started the process of issuing a refund.

A few hours later, they denied the refund. At this point, I wrote them back, chewed them out massively, listing in detail the litany of problems I had experienced with their service, carbon copied the president of GoDaddy, and basically threatened legal action if they didn't fix this mess. They restarted processing of the refund, but continued to refuse to honor the terms of our contract.

Their servers are still performing inadequately, so I plan to drop their service entirely as soon as I figure out where to migrate the files. And my SSL cert no longer comes from GoDaddy. I didn't even wait for my existing cert to expire; I don't want GoDaddy to get the free advertising. It also helps that my new SSL cert provider is free as in beer. I figure it's worth the hassle of renewing the cert annually to save $30 a year.

The bottom line is that I was going to spend about $114/year in hosting and SSL with GoDaddy, but because of their completely inept customer support, I'm now going to spend exactly $0 with them, and I will be spending a fair amount of time over the next few weeks posting detailed, harsh, negative reviews of their hosting service on every site I can find, from FaceBook to Web Hosting Geeks....

If I did my job as well as their customer service reps did their jobs, I would have lost my job after the first day. How, precisely, do these clowns stay in business? And how have they not had their credit card merchant account revoked?

David

P.S. Does anyone know of a web hosting provider that allows SSH, is reasonably reliable, and doesn't claim the rights to produce derivative works based on anything you upload?

Look-ahead generation is now completely automated. That is, it is precompiled on the first run, but can still be re-generated dynamically if confronted with some language that adapts how certain segments are to be parsed, for example after a function or variable declaration..

HiLexed can now compile semantic actions at any time (I could even allow these to change between invokations) and invoke as needed. Currently, only java is supported for these actions, but I am keeping my options open by making the decision on compilation strategy in a configuration file. Individual user projects should be able to override the default, but initially I will just create a working system.

Recursion is probably the final big problem to solve for this version. That is, I have parts of the problem solved, but the many different forms do not fit well together. The plan is to emulate the results of LR-parsing by annotating recursive segments with information on its form of recursion and by keeping track of recursive insertion points into the resulting list. Yes, results will be serialized since different languages have different priority for the same operators. I believe Smalltalk and NewSpeak are strictly left-to-right, whilst the wast majority of languages use standard arithmetic priority.

Upon entering a recursive segment selection, some segments are allowed and some disallowed. Upon exiting a recursive segment there is a certain set of allowed follow segments and for some even an exit segment. What is allowed differ depending on the annotations made earlier. Some segments are multi-recursive, directly or indirectly so the different rules have to be combined. Very complex but I believe solvable for deterministic grammars.

In trying to solve the world's energy problems on the back of a napkin (see blog), I think I figured this global warming thing out. Mind you, I don't believe in human-caused global warming; but this one's a little more generalized. Basically, the sun and the earth are the same; the earth's a lot dimmer, but it radiates thermal energy out into the universe, and has struck an equilibrium with input (from the sun) versus output. Plants store thermal energy; bacteria and animals eat plants and release thermal energy. Well, every machine running on electricity also releases thermal energy. Whether we burn biofuels or throw up solar panels, we're absorbing energy from the sun that's normally reflected wholesale back to space and/or releasing it faster into the ambient environment than useful (i.e. burning plants in 30 seconds, rather than letting them decay in 3 months). With all the extra absorbed and wholesale-released heat, the equilibrium point shifts upwards, and the earth maintains a higher temperature-- it gets hotter! It gets hotter with every man, animal, and machine that walks the surface of this damn planet!

My heart will always be yours for eternity
I knew some time we'd have to say sayonara
So promise that...
Uhh, Colonel, fair is fair. If I nail Hotlips and punch Hawkeye, can I go home?
I'll remember our romance until the day that I die
I'll see your face in the moon and stars in the sky...

Heh. Really. Just like conservatism...

Hiii.

If one studies the history of sexual suppression one finds that it does not exist in the early stages of culture formation. Therefore, it cannot be the prerequisite of culture. Rather, it appears at a relatively late stage of culture, at the time of the development of authoritarian patriarchy and of class distinctions. At that stage, the sexual interests of all begin to serve the profit interests of a minority. This process has assumed a solid organizational form in the institutions of patriarchal marriage and patriarchal family. With the suppression of sexuality the emotions undergo a change: a sex-negating religion begins to develop which gradually builds up its own sex-political organization, the church in all its forms, which has no other goal than that of eradicating sexual pleasure. This has its sociological reason in the exploitation of human work which sets in at this stage.
    In order to understand this, we must study that social institution in which the economic and the sex-economic situation of patriarchal society are interlaced. Without a study of this institution, a comprehension of the sexual economy and of the ideology of patriarchy is impossible. Character-analytic investigation of people of any age, nationality or social stratum, shows that the interlacing of the socio economic with the sexual structure, as well as the structural reproduction of society, takes place in the first four or five years of life, and in the authoritarian family. The church only continues this function later on. In this way the authoritarian state develops its enormous interest in the authoritarian family: the family is the factory of its structure and ideology.
    We have found the institutions in which the economic and the sexual interests of the authoritarian system meet. We have to ask ourselves how this comes about. This question is also answered by character-analysis, provided one does not exclude such questions from character-analytic investigation. Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, "good" and "adjusted" in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first, the child has to adjust to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety.

The Mass Psychology of Fascism(pdf) p.25

George W. Bush Presidential Librarium

I could stand close to Caesar and rule the world. Actually, he would stand close to me, or stand down if he wants to live. It's the pirates who are the real rulers of the planet. These are men with no need for nations who roam freely throughout the world, and create and destroy them on a whim. This is how your world works today. It has always been that way.

But just in case...

Family Values

Would you please open up your songbook to Hymn 43?