Our neigh­bor­hood was built in spurts. The brick Tudors, like ours, were built in the 1930s. The houses adjoining mine were built in the years after World War II.

There’s a house for sale a few doors down that’s very like ours. We snooped around on Sunday during the open house.

Our house was built in 1931; the other, the year before. Ours is slightly deeper, but the floor plans are very similar. Theirs has no eye­catch­ing yellow brick trim. Our kitchen was remodeled in the sixties, taking over part of the next room. Theirs never was and it’s tiny. Our basement is half finished and it had a bathroom added in the …continue.

The Cozi Tech Blog needed some love, so I wrote a post on augmenting Python’s strftime.

England, 1958: an alternate universe where famous fictional characters really lived and the regime of Big Brother has just come to an end. Sixty years ago, the British Crown gathered together the Murray Group, ex­tra­or­di­nary ad­ven­tur­ers charged with sensitive missions. The remnants of the group fled England in World War II. Now they’ve come back to steal their dossier from MI-5, a dossier that could lead the Government back to them, a dossier that details the exploits of earlier …continue.

Betty Bacal is an only child, abandoned by her father, raised by her Rumanian Jewish mother in New York. Stagestruck from an early age, she takes acting classes for years but gets little stage work. Modeling work is a fallback. A cover shot for Harper’s Bazaar leads Howard Hawks to bring her out to Hollywood. Within months, Hawks’ protogée, now Lauren Bacall, is the lead in “To Have or Have Not” and falling in love with her costar, Humphrey Bogart. Bogie is 45 to her 20, but it doesn’t …continue.

I’ve been to a few Toast­mas­ters com­pe­ti­tions in the past. Tonight was the first time that I helped out at one, as one of the timers. It was the combined Area 35 and 36 com­pe­ti­tion.

A typical Toast­mas­ters com­pe­ti­tion has two parts, a speech com­pe­ti­tion and an evaluation com­pe­ti­tion. In the speech com­pe­ti­tion, the com­peti­tors give a prepared speech on a topic of their own choosing. Some speech com­pe­ti­tions are humorous; tonight’s wasn’t. In the evaluation com­pe­ti­tion, the invited speaker gives a speech heard by all the com­peti­tors. They are taken out of the room, then one at a time, they come back in and evaluate that speech.

The speech com­pe­ti­tion is always fun. You get …continue.

For various reasons, I hadn’t cycled to work in about three weeks, just before the clock went forward.

It was very pleasant to cycle home in broad daylight for a change. Very pleasant.

When we bought our house in 2000, our interest rate was about 8.5% on a 30-year loan. A couple of years later, we refinanced it down to 6.875%, which reduced our monthly payments by several hundred dollars.

Today, we signed the paperwork to refinance it again, down to 4.75% over 20 years. That drops our monthly payment by another $300, which is most welcome, as Emma’s unemployed.

All of these are fixed-rate mortgages. We’re really not fans of adjustable-rate mortgages: too many horror stories about people starting out a low rate and not being able to cope when the rates go up.

We went through the same guy each time, Sanjay Pitroda of MetLife Home Loans …continue.

On a Stack­Over­flow question about favorite Vim plugins, I learned about Ack, a re­place­ment for grep that’s smarter about searching source trees.

Ack is written in Perl. The built-in :vimgrep is rather slow. It seems to have some Vim-specific overhead, such as creating swap files and executing BufRead autocmds. Ack is noticeably faster, though somewhat slower than GNU grep.

Which would you rather type to search a tree, ignoring the .svn and .git subtrees?

$ ack -i -l foobar
$ grep --exclude='*.svn*' --exclude='*.git*' -i -l -r foobar .

The ack takes 6 seconds to search 4500 files, while the grep completes in 2. This does not count the time that I spent trying to figure …continue.

Exuberant Ctags is an essential complement to Vim: it generates an index of symbol names (tags) for a set of source files. In Vim, just place the cursor on a function name and type C-] to go to its definition.

Ctags works well for most of the languages that I deal with, but falls down badly on modern JavaScript. Its built-in parser simply doesn’t handle de­c­la­ra­tions like these:

Sizzle.selectors.filters.animated = function(elem) { // ...
ajaxSetup: function( settings ) {

I came across Unbad‘s workaround earlier tonight. His code didn’t work for me, so I hacked on it until it did:

--langdef=js
--langmap=js:.js
--regex-js=/([A-Za-z0-9._$]+)[ \t]*[:=][ \t]*\{/\1/,object/
--regex-js=/([A-Za-z0-9._$()]+)[ \t]*[:=][ \t]*function[ \t]*\(/\1/,function/
--regex-js=/function[ \t]+([A-Za-z0-9._$]+)[ \t]*\(([^)])\)/\1/,function/
--regex-js=/([A-Za-z0-9._$]+)[ \t]*[:=][ \t]*\[/\1/,array/
--regex-js=/([^= ]+)[ \t]*=[ \t]*[^"]'[^']*/\1/,string/
--regex-js=/([^= ]+)[ 

Rural Texas, 1980. Llewelyn Moss, out hunting in the middle of nowhere, finds the remains of a drug buy that went wrong: dead bodies, shot-up cars, black tar heroin. And a satchel with two million dollars in cash. Moss takes the money and runs. He knows it’s stupid, he knows that people will come after him, and he does it anyway.

Anton Chigurh is the worst of the killers on his trail. Relentless, re­morse­less, untroubled by conscience, and offended by the wrongness of Moss’s act. He and Moss will be locked …continue.