The 2005 Mark Twain Prize celebrating Steve Martin

The Kennedy Center Presents: The 2005 Mark Twain Prize celebrating Steve Martin . Home | PBS

In a similar vein, Steve Martin is still funnier than you.
Get used to it.

Worst Job Ever - ad nauseum

Yes yes yes...

Sweet lord that is some good comedy.

Makes you wonder why there is so much drivel on television (i.e. mad tv, snl) when you see something like this. At least Chapelle is coming back.

Remembering those we lost

We lost many artists this year, and I see the press about the biggest names like Richard Pryor, Pat Morita, and Carson. But look, here is one that touched a nerve for me: Jerry Juhl.

The guy created Super Grover, wrote Gonzo out of thin air, and then made up the Fraggles - where would you be without them?

I only wish Avenue Q would spark a new puppetry rennaisance, it's about time.

Thanks Jerry.

2005: Lost lives that touched our own: "Jerry Juhl, 67, who was head writer for 'The Muppet Show' before he co-created 'Fraggle Rock.' Juhl worked as a puppeteer on Jim Henson's first television show, 'Sam and Friends,' and later spent six years writing for 'Sesame Street' after its 1969 premiere. Juhl was head writer for 'The Muppet Show' from 1977-81, receiving two Emmys for his work."

End-of-Year Reflections from Ted Kooser

I am a Ted Kooser fan. Why aren't you reading his work every day?

I read Delights and Shadows last month, and am ready to buy more of this retired insurance salesman/poet laureate's work. Please don't let me try and do justice to describing his work, but I will say it reminds me of Charles Wright - I heard him speak once in NYC, I think he read from Black Zodiac.

Differently, I also enjoyed his Poetry Home Repair Manual, which I am almost done reading, and only started digesting.

And even if you could care less, he has excellent citations/examples, so you are also getting poems that have stuck with Kooser, like this oft-mentioned one from Joseph Hutchinson:

Artichoke
O heart weighed down by so many wings.

To paraphrase Kooser, after you read that, can you ever see, or think about an artichoke the same way?

If all else fails to convince, I like that he writes for those of us without advanced degrees in Ulysses, and most of you will like that too.

Today, while it has a 'rural elitist' slant (i.e. urbanites are spoiled, real life is in the country, the nobility of a rugged individual accomplishing of small things, etc.), he provides a bit on the end of the year. It's a breath of cold air to sweep the year into the dust bin.

NPR : End-of-Year Reflections from Ted Kooser:

december 31
Cold and snowing.

The opening pages forgotten,
then the sadness of my mother's death
in the cold, wet chapters of spring.

For me, featureless text of summer
burning with illness, a long convalescence,
then a conclusion in which
the first hard frosts are lovingly described.

A bibliography of falling leaves,
an index of bare trees,
and finally, a crow flying like a signature
over the soft white endpapers of the year.

poetry

If for some reason you are still reading poetry even though you are no longer in school, nor work at a university humanities department, then this site is for you. Get your daily dose, for bitter or verse.

video ipod at last

After much thought (nano vs. video) I finally bought my own xmas present (with the encouragement of my lovely bride). I got the 60gig vid ipod - I am such a little consumer.

A few problems: my laptop does not have sufficiently powered USB port (though they are usb2 hi-speed) to charge it. So I need to get a cradle...perhaps one like this. Seriously, the cottage industry of ipod accessories must be a larger than farming in the US.

Also made a trip to Waaa-wa-chusett (excuse me, I have allergies), but with many other options in the area, all I need is for the weather to cooperate. Mainly, since I have friends who are much better riders than I am, the Wa was mostly a remember-what-I-am-doing kinda thing.

I miss my monkeypatch.

If you have done a decent amount of python code, you've probably run into monkey patching - if you haven't, you're missing out. But in java, where I use an ever increasing number of open source libraries, I missed this lovely feature I was able to use to good effect in Plone. But no more, now there is AspectJ to the rescue.

First off, the problem I had was to extend the code generation capabilities in Axis 1.3 to generate java code from a WSDL (which is better than the other way around). But WSDL2Java extension is limited, and I don't feel like downloading all the Axis source and changing it and recompiling it myself. All I wanted to do was to make the java code that was created include a unique ID to make the objects easier to persist in hibernate (and just to be a show-off, yes I am using Spring too, but not for code generation - it's not good for everything :).

So how to do it? Easy enough, use the cuckoo's egg design pattern to replace Axis's current java class generator with an instance of my own when the constructor is called:

import java.util.Vector;
import org.apache.axis.wsdl.symbolTable.TypeEntry;
import org.apache.axis.wsdl.toJava.Emitter;
import org.apache.axis.wsdl.toJava.JavaBeanWriter;
import org.apache.axis.wsdl.toJava.JavaWriter;
import org.kookster.PersistentJavaBeanWriter;

/**
* Use this to change the behaviour of the WSDL2Java axis code gen
*
* @author kookster
*/
public aspect ReplaceJavaBeanWriterAspect {

//here's a pointcut to get the public constructor of Axis JavaBeanWriter
public pointcut javaBeanWriterConstructor( Emitter emitter,
                                         TypeEntry type,
                                         Vector elements,
                                         TypeEntry extendType,
                                         Vector attributes,
                                         JavaWriter helper ):
  call( JavaBeanWriter.new( Emitter,TypeEntry,Vector,TypeEntry,Vector,JavaWriter )) &&
  args( emitter,type,elements,extendType,attributes,helper );

//here is the advice which calls the constructor for my object instead
JavaBeanWriter around( Emitter emitter,
                      TypeEntry type,
                      Vector elements,
                      TypeEntry extendType,
                      Vector attributes,
                      JavaWriter helper) :
javaBeanWriterConstructor( emitter,type,elements,extendType,attributes,helper )
{
  return new PersistentJavaBeanWriter(emitter,type,elements,extendType,attributes,helper);
}

}

well, finally.

I spent the last few days trying to revive an old pII/350mhz PC.
Having excorsized redhat9, an ill-timed installation as this particular curse damned itself in favor of fedora days after I installed, I had to pick a sexy new distro to play with...so what else, but go with little-miss-popular, i.e. ubuntu?

After downloading the ISO twice, burning four CDs at various speeds and orientations to the crab nebula and burning bushes, I got one that installed on my eighth attempt. My kung-fu is the best. So far so good, I am typing on it now, and looking for other fun to put it through its paces. Actually pretty usable for all that it is ancient - gee, maybe you don't need to gigs of memory to be happy after all.

I also need some better way to get it networked, as I have no wifi card for it, and it is across the house from my hub. Like everyone else I am sure, I have a 50' ethernet cable around I am using at present, but as I don't wish to make yet another electrical hazard in my home, this is not a permanent solution...

So my brother, an aspiring evil scientist, plotting to take over a flat of his own, has relocated to the land of golf, sheep, and men in skirts. He too has caught the blogger-flu, and now reports from Mighty Reason.

The real question is how much to extort from him in order to prevent me telling mom his new URL. Of course, there is the efficacy of mutually assured destruction . Hmm. I'll have to find another means to extort the secrets of his evil plans from him.