2016 — 27 August: Saturday
A duller start1 brings with it the virtue of blessedly cooler air, so no Bank Holiday weekend weather complaints from me. At least, not until the promised monsoon arrives. The motorway is currently noisy, and was already filling up yesterday the second time I drove over it. Lemmings are clearly influential somewhere in our genes.
The guru who...
... drew my attention to Python's built-in SimpleHTTPServer function remarked: "Got to be the easiest to configure web server ever!" He's not wrong. It takes about 10 seconds to start it serving with no installation or configuration providing (of course) you already have Python installed on your system. Now that all my 'molehole' external web pages are all simple HTML flat files held in one, simple, file directory tree, serving them locally with this function consists of leaving everything at its default values, opening a terminal at the top of the file directory tree, and typing:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
This kicks off the server, and reports back the IP address (0.0.0.0) and port (8000) on which it is now listening for requests from a browser to tell it what to serve. It puts a trivial load on the system for a single user serving pages from a local SSD! I currently run the lighttppd webserver on BlackBeast to serve my internal "view" of 'molehole', but am now very tempted to switch to this Python function for sheer delight at its elegance.
Breakfast beckons.
What goes around...
... eventually comes back, I notice. 'Twas on this date in 2007 that I was trying (when not nursing poor Christa, that is) to pre-empt web problems by putting in place .html variants on 'molehole' as I had then just switched over to using Server Side Includes on the first of the Texan servers Junior arranged for us.
Speaking of things going round (like the Earth around the sun) I finally got the round tuit I needed to watch "Agora" last night. Its acute parallels (in 400 A.D. or so) with the current mess in the Middle East are even more resonant now than when it was made in 2009. It made me very angry while I was watching it, and rather sad afterwards when contemplating the story. But I highly recommend it. Rachel Weisz did an excellent job. And Roger Ebert's review is as good a summary as any.
Attention on deck!
There's a huge Red Admiral on my buddleja.
Patterns
I don't recall ever seeing a complete episode from "The Twilight Zone" though I've known of it, and Rod Serling, for decades. I was therefore delighted to read his insightful essay "About writing for television" which appeared as an introduction to his 1957 book of four "teleplays" with his critical assessments of his own work. The route to this essay was a strange meander, starting from a broken link that hadn't been broken when I found this snippet by physicist Paul Davies on it six years ago!
Religion is the one area in which an immediate impact would be felt. All the world's major religions were founded in a pre-scientific era. The sacred texts and the various creation myths were formulated long before humans had a good understanding of the natural world or the nature of life. More importantly, they are directed specifically at human beings and human society. Knowledge that we share the universe with myriad other sentient beings would inevitably diminish the sense of human specialness that most religions foster... No religion focused on one species and one planet could retain credibility.
I'm still not convinced Davies is right, by the way. There are all too many people all too deeply attached to their various religions. Serling's essay includes a description of a "fat-faced, sanctimonious slob" who was then appearing on an afternoon ladies' show sermonising about the need to pray for "the boys in Korea". (More here.)
My bank has just...
... sent me their latest Ts&Cs, with this new Clause 63:
We can transfer all of our rights in relation to your account to someone else.
Is there something they're not (yet) telling me?
Just had to excavate...
... CD #1545 from the dining room floor's CaseLogic folder "system" to re-rip and then replace one of its tracks. (Ibrahim Ferrer, "Murmullo", on the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack CD). Now all I have to do is fold the repaired track into every occurrence of this album in every digital nook and cranny I can find. Such good fun. I know from bitter experience that if I don't make such a repair in a timely fashion, I will end up cursing my indolence next time I hear the same glitches.
My primitive reasoning suggested that, unless the flaw was an invisible one actually on the CD, the chances of it manifesting again when ripped by different software, running on a different PC, using a different optical drive, under a different OS, ten years later... were pretty miniscule. And so it seems to have proved. I even had a backup Plan B: grab the same track (or its nearest equivalent) from the soundtrack of the DVD of the excellent film by Wim Wenders of basically the same set of musicians. Not saying it was a good backup Plan B, as the end-to-end process would have been considerably more convoluted.
Nurse! More meds, please!
Why?
Well, if you must know, because the process of finding the CD's location involved opening the "MusicCDsIntoMP3s.txt" file that constitutes the nearest thing I currently have to a DB of the things.
So?
Well, if you must know, I couldn't help noticing it's several months since I last updated it.
<Sigh> I'll double your dose.
I got two...
... good chortles out of a piece about Auden's prolific non-poetry. Source and snippet showing one of them:
In a review of a book on Tennyson, Auden relates how the great poet was dining one night with Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, and after reciting one of his new poems, Jowett said to him: "I shouldn't publish that poem if I were you, Tennyson." To which the poet replied: "Well, if it comes to that, Master, the sherry you served us before dinner was filthy."