OK. Remember a few months ago, the Sundays were briefed about one of Tony’s eye-catching initiatives – to launch a magnetic levitation high-speed rail link from London up to Scotland? Well, if it ever had any substance, it’s now a dead parrot. And so are all maglev projects, which should bring a hearty cheer from…
Read More Maglev is DeadIn a wonderfully-titled article, (“Former Miss Bolivia on Drugs Charges, Second Beauty Queen in Trouble”), the Associated Press reports that Sonia Falcone, cosmetics enterpreneur, Bush-Cheney’00 donor, and wife of Elf-Aquitaine/Arms to Africa fugitive Pierre Falcone, copped a plea to charges of illegally employing some immigrants (they were legal immigrants, but not allowed to work, so…
Read More Update on Falcone, ChichakliIt’s quite well-known that I don’t think very much of Niall Ferguson’s intellectual credibility. But this is special, in the sense of “I’m not different…I’m special.” I’m not going to take issue with his bizarre contention that saying sorry for the slave trade is why the Iranians grabbed the boarding party from Cornwall. I am,…
Read More Here Comes the Equestrian StatueOK, so we solved the last problem. But now I’ve got another. We’ve just created a window with a Tkinter frame within, and announced that a listbox will be there. Then, we have the following statement: self.selector = Listbox(frame)..Listbox.pack(side=TOP)…for item in [“lots”,”of”,”data”,”in”,”here”,”that”,”takes”,”up”,”four”,”lines”]:….Listbox.insert(Tk.END,item) Dots inserted to get the indenting right. Tk.END causes the interpreter to fart…
Read More Bonus Pathetic Python SundayHow many times do I have to tell you? A US aircraft carrier will leave port for the Gulf every six months, about six months after the last one. BTW, the assorted speculation on some of the US blogs about the RN’s carriers is risible. The current RN presence in the Gulf consists of two…
Read More Yes, there is STILL not going to be a war with IranOK, the Enetation comments are getting too bad to use. There’s no spam protection, and no central moderation page, so it’s not practical to remove comments spam from each of 1,473 threads one by one. By clicking on the permalink at the bottom of each post, you can use the Blogger comments thread, which is…
Read More Admin Notice: Withdrawal of Enetation commentsRemember this post, again? This Reuters DeathWatch story confirms every last bit of it. Zalmay Khalilzad did indeed talk to insurgent spokesmen during 2006. And the Baker-Hamilton commission? Who knows.
Read More The lost opportunityWhat on earth is causing this class definition to throw a syntax error? The error occurs at the colon (yup, the one that has to be there according to docs.python.org) in the second line. class gui: def_init_(self, mainwindow): self.frame1 = Frame.mainwindow self.frame1.pack() Update: Thanks. Yes, the code is correctly indented elsewhere. Now, I’m getting a…
Read More Pathetic Python SundaySome time ago, I got involved in a debate about the cost of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs. I argued that the idea that they would supplant piloted aircraft was overambitious, and that, crucially, the high accident rate they experienced would make them rather more expensive than anyone thought. After all, if their biggest advantage was…
Read More The cost of UAVsWell, the decisions are in on the plan to break up the Home Office into the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry for Counter-Terrorism, National Security, Border Control, and Unauthorised Ball Games. And the snark in that link remains applicable. The only interesting news is that it’s even worse than I thought. Not only does…
Read More Political GOTO considered harmful