A modest proposal for further presedential debates

Each candidate to be locked in a soundproof box, and their microphones to be live only during their alloted speaking periods.

Nothing new under the iron sun

I just had this great "new" idea that could be used for the basis of a time travel story. Yahoo!.

Except that, on reflection, I believe that Charels Stross not only had it first, but followed the consequences through more completely that I'd gotten around to. ::sigh::

The good news is that he pushed the idea in one direction and I could take it in another. We'll see what comes of it.

Don't speak so loudly sir, or everyone will want one!

Is that a bug in my BeautifulSoup?

It seems that the maintainers consider prettify() to be a debugging tool and are not concerned that it often adds unmeant white-space to the output.

Uhm. Really?

I mean, I can see the utility of a tool which exposes the tag structure as clearly as possible, but I also like to have my machine generated code look good (i.e. be fairly readable) while it remains correct. Perhaps a interface like prettify(preserve_output=False) would be in order?¹

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¹ Here I have selected the default sense to not break existing code, starting ab inito I would have made True the default.)

I'll have the BeautifulSoup

We've delived version 1.0 of my project at work; or perhaps we're in the process of delievering it.

We've handed over a complete copy of the repository and deployable binary bundles for three targets and VM based development environments for two.

We still have some time to complete and hand over the documentation. Better still, by policy I set very early on all the documentation is in the repository, so they already have it. And I tried to keep us writing and updaing documentation often enough that it didn't get too far out of synch with the code, so the documentation they have is pretty good. But we're taking this time to make it better: more complete, easier to understand, and reflecting the code we handed over even better.

There is a twist: even though the project is entirely in-house, it's paid for by a contract to which we are a subcontractor. This means that the prime contractor has the responsibility to report on the work (and the authority to make demands about that). This particular prime contractor has a tradition of including the user manuals for software projects as appendicies to the report.

But my main user documentation takes the form of a pile of individual html files that are displayed in a on-line help system. There is no linear structure imposed and no single document containing it all.

So I needed to flatten it.

There are only 20 files right now, so I could have done it by hand. But that would have taken a few hours or more to get right (all the internal links!) and I have reason to believe the project will be funded for further development meaning I'll have to do it all again in a year or two. That's excuse enough to automate the task.

The tool I settled on was a python library called BeautifulSoup which I had heard of but never used before. I loaded a html/css scaffold file, looped over a hand-tooled list/tuple structure placing my files into a few categories. In the loop I created a table of contents entry for the file; grabbed the file body, re-wrote the header levels, munged the anchors and links, base64 encoded the images, and wrapped the result in a section for nice formatting; and then appended the new section to the body of the scaffold. When the loop ended prettify and write. It just works. I'm hooked.

On styling text in a QTextBrowser

My project at work is complicated enough to need fairly extensive on-line documentation, which we write as html and diplay to the user in a QTextBrowser. Now, this thing is not a full web browser¹ and only a supports a limited subset of html/css.

Suffice it to say that if you're just had a clever CSS idea it's not supported by QTextBrowser.

At first this didn't bother me too much because I had never done css before. But as I've become more familiar with the tool (and at once awed and appalled by it), I've become aware of just what I'm missing out on. I wrote the quoted sentence as part of our guidelines for writing and formatting the help files.

I'm sticking with QTextBrowser for now because our needs are simple and we can't really expect an incoming junior dev to be able to support a sophisticated pile of css anyway.²

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¹ That's available as QWebEngine, but it brings in a large module so I didn't want to use it.

² Because of the nature of our work, our target demographic for new hires is "scientists and engineers who can program" more than it is people with a strong development background. Having web skills would be a bonus, but it's not part of the expectation.

Duty and painting oneself into a rhetorical corner

Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect

Robert Heinlein

"Duty" in the sense of an obligation is a politically contentious idea. I am personaly a fan of Heinlein's definition, but it suffers for some people's purposes from not being something that you can dictate as in "Doing [this thing I'm interested in] is your duty". The best you can do is explain to them why you think their self-respect should depend on doing it.

As a legal reality a few "duties" are required and you can be punished if you don't comply. If you are summoned for jury duty and neither provide an excuse the court finds acceptable nor show up you can be held in contempt and subjected to fines or jail time. If you are a young but adult male in the US and don't register with the selective service you can get in trouble. In the same vein, many people were punsihed during the Veitnam war era for draft dodging, which brings us to the culture wars.¹

The political right in the country largely partakes of a long standing view that military service is and should be required of men "in times of war" (which really means at the discretion of the political leadership). Some who don't go quite that far feel that there simply shouldn't be a way for a "real man" to not want to join the fight which is a slightly different take. In either case the point is that the community needs defense at times, and the costs should be widely borne.

The political left, on the other hand, mostly feels that it is the right of every citizen to question the motives behind and necessity of military action and to demur from participating if they find them unsavory or unecessary. Some go so far as to consider it an obligation to make such judgements. Some have even held unwilling particpants in military misadventures responsible for the failing of the political and military leadership under which they served.

That is a stark divide, and has been the cause of much dislike and mistrust between people on opposing political teams for the whole of my lifetime.

Then comes Covid19 and the issues of wearing masks in public, social distancing, enforced closures of some kinds of business and so on...

Suddenly there talk from the left of a duty to protect others by respecting these rules and talk from the right about their right to judge the urgency of the threat, the effectiveness of the suggested measures, and the motives of the leaders.

Laugh or cry.

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¹ There is, of course, some tension between this notion and that of religious liberty. Quackers, various Menomnites and other conciencious objectors have been a bone of contension on this matter since the beginning of the nation.