infundibulum

Inkscape is an awesome free illustration program which is available for OSX, Windows, and Linux. It’s kind of like Adobe Illustrator, from what I understand.

Anyway, and now a stupid Inkscape trick:

1. We want to put an outline around this text.
2. You can choose Object → Fill and Stroke → Stroke Paint and add a border in the color of your choosing.
3. You can adjust the thickness of the border with Object → Fill and Stroke → Stroke style, but if you set the width to a high value it turns ugly.
4. The solution is simply to make a copy of the orignal and remove the border. Then make sure the borderless copy is above the bordered copy by selecting the borderless copy and doing a Object → Raise to top. Then select them both, and do Object → Align and distribute, and align their centers vertically and horizontally.
5. Voilà. Tweak the fonts and border size, impress your friends.

Manila Bans, India Clears ‘Da Vinci Code’ - Yahoo! News

…in the Philippines — with Asia’s biggest Christian population — the Manila City Council passed a resolution banning [The DaVinci Code], effective Friday.

The movie “is undoubtedly offensive and contrary to established religious beliefs which cannot take precedence over the right of the persons involved in the film to freedom of expression,” the resolution said.

Except it does, so they’re banning it?

Confusion ensues.

If you’re gonna try to be a mindcontrolling uberstate, at least say what you mean.

No wait, on second thought…

Sean figured it out: ‘they missed out “nonetheless, this film sucks so: banned”‘

Well, I agree with that that assessment is probably accurate! Nonetheless, I feel compulsion to see the damn thing.

Something I’ve never understood about “beginner” tutorials in programming:

LiveWires 2005 : Python for the Inexperienced

This is a really nice tutorial, with interesting examples. But check out this bit:

Ranges

As you can see, Python’s loops are a bit different from BASIC’s and C’s. (And from those in most other languages, too. Lisp has something similar.) Instead of giving a range of values (as in BASIC), or a recipe for getting from each value to the next one (as in C), you give a list of values. Obviously this is more flexible; but what if you want to get the same effect as BASIC’s FOR loops?

Well, no, actually, a beginner never has heard of BASIC. Or (!) C. Or Lisp.

The Python documentation on Python.org is filled with stuff like this. Consider the first sentence in the “tutorial” “introduction” to Classes:

9. Classes

Python’s class mechanism adds classes to the language with a minimum of new syntax and semantics. It is a mixture of the class mechanisms found in C++ and Modula-3.

I mean, whatever, I guess there are plenty of people out there who are already programmers who will appreciate info like that.

About Modula-3.

In an introduction to Python.

But there an awful lot more people who are not, and who won’t.

Python seems to me to be the best choice for teaching programming, but outside of an O’Reilly book or something, I don’t think there’s much well-and-truly “for beginners” tutorial stuff around at all.

Not that I’m saying such stuff is easy to write — on the contrary, it’s mindbogglingly difficult. And I’ve tried.

Which is why I’m happy to discover an awesome wiki started by Frederik Lundh:

((An Unofficial) Python Tutorial Wiki)

Here’s the intro to Classes, not a Modula in sight:

Classes (introduction) ((An Unofficial) Python Tutorial Wiki)

Rad.