We've enjoyed vists from two young men in the last week, each with with
well-rehearsed pitches about some National Communications Award and dog-eared
lists of magazine titles with no prices. Their appeals were emotional, and they
turned up the pressure when I said, No, thanks.
According to the FTC and other sources these come-ons are a scam, and you end up paying many times the cover price of the magazine and will probably never receive an issue.
The officer I spoke to with LPD last night suggested that, when such people knock on the door, we should ask to their peddler's permit. If they cannot produce one, the officer asked me to call LPD (441-6000) and report it.
The police are very interested in this, and I gather there may be abusive labor practices involved along with the fraud.
FTC page on magazine sales scams: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/telemarketing/tel03.shtm
I looked around for some python bindings for Festival, but neither pyfestival nor pyfest seem to be maintained. I was too tired to use swig or similar to wrap the C++ library. Instead, I wrote a thin shim between python and the Scheme-based command interpreter. (You must have festival installed.)
import os
BIN="/usr/bin/festival"
class Festival(object):
def __init__(self):
self.p = os.popen("%s --pipe" % BIN, "w")
def eval(self, scm):
self.p.write(scm + "\n")
self.p.flush()
def say(self, text):
text = text.replace('"', '')
self.eval('(SayText "%s")' % str(text))
Import the module, instantiate a Festival object, and call its "say" method to create utterances.
>>> import festival
>>> tts = festival.Festival()
>>> tts.say("Hello, world.")
It's quick. It's dirty. It works.
I want to use cURLpp for a project I've been working on, but there's no package for Ubuntu.
I downloaded the tarball, but discovered that example 18 would not compile. It would fail with the following error:
example18.cpp: In function ‘int main(int, char**)’: example18.cpp:85: error: ‘BoostWriteFunction’ is not a member of ‘cURLpp::Options’ example18.cpp:85: error: ‘test’ was not declared in this scope example18.cpp:85: error: expected type-specifier example18.cpp:85: error: expected `;' make[1]: *** [example18.o] Error 1
I discovered that usage of the Boost
libraries was an option, and wasn't being tested for in example
18. boost::bind is one of the tools I frequently use in
C++, the Boost support seems less optional to me, so I cleaned and ran
configure --with-boost. Still, I got the error.
It became clear that the configure-generated config.h was not being included. This patch fixed that, and fixed the compile:
--- ../../curlpp-0.7.2-orig/curlpp/global.h 2007-09-22 09:31:10.000000000 -0500
+++ global.h 2009-04-05 10:57:58.000000000 -0500
@@ -26,6 +26,8 @@
#ifndef HAVE_CONFIG_H
#include "config.win32.h"
+#else
+#include "config.h"
#endif
#endif
Five political links to start the weekend:
To help celebrate my 42nd birthday, we thought we'd have a few people over for drinks and pizza. Because of the significance of the number of years I've been alive, we thought Pangalactic Gargle Blasters would be a nicely appropriate refreshment.
We were immediately stymied by the complete unavailability not only Ol' Janx Spirit, for which there is no distributor that serves Nebraska, but found Arcturan Mega Gin to be also difficult to obtain, frozen or not. There also seems to be an embargo against importation of Fallian marsh gas and seawater from Santraginus V. (Oh, those Santraginus beaches. Oh, those Santraginean fish.) And given the utter absence of Algolian Suntiger tooth outlets, actually harvesting one seems likely to be beyond the resources of major world governments, not to mention I'd want to have them by later this afternoon.
Undeterred, we undertook to reverse engineer the drink, given a working knowledge of its general effect as well as the experience of drinking it, namely that it's similar to having one's brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick, and starting with materials we know to be readily available on an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.
A brief survey of foregoing attempts was unsatisfying, each recipe failing to capture the mood and spirit of the original creation. One seems much too concerned with the slice of lemon, while another is likely to be overly gold-bricky. Some versions seem to assert that all you need to make a Pangalactic Gargle Blaster are some colorful-but-tacky liquors with none-the-less exotic names, like Blue Curacao or Mike's Hard Lemonade, and a shaker. We think, though, the recipe must be more subtle.
Pangalactic Gargle Blasters, we know, have the following characteristics:
Given this, here is the recipe we came up with. To make one Pangalactic Gargle Blaster:
Rub the rim of a pint glass with lemon, and dip it in the salt (like you were making a margarita). Place several ice cubes in the glass.
Pour in the tequila, gin, and creme de menthe. Don't bother floating it; it won't work with the ice in the glass...
Top off with ginger beer. Drop in the sugar cube. Squeeze in the juice from the wedge of lemon.
Add an olive.
Drink...but...very carefully...