Not Swept Away

Just an update; it rained all last night (but not as much as forecast; only a bit more than an inch since midnight), and the wind was high, with gusts up to 40 MPH. But though the official flood stage for the Russian River is 19 feet here, and the river peaked at 23 feet, I didn't see any serious flooding in town when I drove through it a couple of hours ago. I rode across the Healdsburg Avenue Bridge, and the river was high. It was probably only about 10 feet below the roadway; it's usually double that, at least. We've been helped a lot by a break in the weather. It stopped raining about 9 AM, and it's been partly cloudy all day. That's allowed a lot of water to run off.

More rain forecast for tonight and tomorrow, but it appears that things here are not nearly as bad as feared. Other places in Sonoma County are being hit hard. People in Guerneville, Petaluma, and Santa Rosa have been flooded out of their homes, and the county wants people in the lower Russian River area to evacuate. Over in Napa County, part of downtown Napa was flooded, causing evacuations.

Swept Away?

You may hear of flooding in our town, Healdsburg, CA, over the next day or so. It's looking pretty bad, with heavy rain forecast through the weekend. The Russian River runs along one edge of town, and it looks like it may be jumping its banks during this storm. Official flood stage is 19 feet, and the forecast is for 24 feet. Luckily for us, we're at the north end of town, and flooding isn't expected here. But the folks at the south end of town may be in for it. The National Weather Service has an tracking and information page on river conditions. Wish us luck!

Attack of the Killer Yappy Dogs

Pack of Chihuahuas attack Fremont cop. It's weird in Fremont, California. The story says that the officer was treated for bites and back to work within two hours. I suspect that he was embarassed enough that he would have gone back to work if he had had a finger chewed off.

And the uploading the screen saver bit at the end of the article? Just weird.

You think you're old?

Joel Spolsky is ranting about The Perils of JavaSchools:

Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers.

His thesis, in a nutshell: in the old days, programmers went to college, learned C, and got a good understanding of what was going on deep down internally. Nowadays, these newfangled programmers are only learning Java, and consequently, they don't know anything about recursion or pointers. Schools should teach Scheme and C, and the students will be the better for it.

Scoble's take:

I've heard the same kind of thing repeated around halls at Microsoft. Almost every team I interview with my camcorder says they can't find enough C or C++ programmers to get their stuff done.

My take: HAH! Seriously, I sound just like the Monty Python routine that Joel includes in his page's sidebar. Back in my day, we didn't even HAVE C or C++! Okay, I'm exaggerating for effect, but not much. I think I bought my first C book (Kernighan and Ritchie, of course!) because of an internship I had during my last year, not because I used it in school. We used Assembler, BASIC, Simula, SNOBOL, Ada, and Pascal. We may have gotten a little bit of pointers and recursion (Joel's two must-haves) when we covered Lisp, but that class (ICS 171) was primarily about teaching AI, not writing code.

Or, as I described it to someone recently, "I graduated with a degree in Computer Science from a highly-thought-of school, at a time when it was possible to graduate without ever having been in the same room as a computer."

File this one under: why I can't ever get another job in programming — I'm older than even the old skool guys. Sheesh. Joel writes about "All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II..." Me? I graduated from high school the same month the Apple II Plus shipped.

And just because I thought of it now, so I'm throwing it in: Sean's CS textbook is Java Au Naturel. The language was chosen because the AP Computer Science test is in Java. The book? It was free, and that's what matters to today's high schools.

Amazon blogs

Amazon has a new feature, "Amazon Connect." Or to be more precise, Amazon author blogs. With an opportunity like that, was there any chance that I wouldn't check it out for myself? Go check out my Amazon.com blog. Sadly, you'll have to come back here if you want to comment on it.

Community MX Open House

All this week, it's an open house at Community MX. Normally many of their articles and tutorials are behind a pay-wall, but for the last week of 2005, it's all open. If you've never looked at the site because you thought that it was all-Dreamweaver all the time, check out their categories page: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Design, Biz Dev, and more.

This is pretty darn cool, because I've occasionally thought about subscribing but haven't because I don't know whether or not what's there is useful. This week, I'll be able to find out.

You disagree, so they want you dead

If you haven't been reading James Wolcott, you should today. In this post, he peels back the veneer, thinner all the time, of civility shown by the posters and commenters of right-wing blogs, and exposes the squirming wormfest underneath. Simply put, these insane people want those of us who disagree with them politically to not only die, but to be brutally murdered by terrorists; presumably, that will teach us a lesson. Wolcott lists examples of Republican shills literally baying for the beheadings of other Americans, then says:

It's no accident that it is the rightwing bloggers and pundits who have been avid about defending the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Nor is it an accident that many of them pooh-poohed Abu Ghraib, sluffing it off as no more harmless than fraternity hazing. But what their decapitation odes reveal is that what they'd really like to do is permit torture closer to home. Domesticate it. Trivialize it. Completely destigmatize it as a tool of the state.

That's exactly right. Since 9/11, these folks have been driven insane with fear and hatred, and there is no authoritarian wet dream that they won't embrace if they think that their Dear Leader wills it, no action they can't rationalize in the name of security. I used to think that there was some line that even these people would not cross, or would not endorse being crossed by the US government. But no, I don't think that anymore. Just look at their record.

Torture? That's OK. Indefinite imprisonment without charges, even against American citizens? Check. Midnight abductions and secret CIA prisons? Right on. The President of the United States admitting in a news conference that he broke the law against domestic spying and violated his oath of office, then expecting congratulations? Sure, that's fine. Committing the country to war under false pretenses? Go for it. Exposing US covert agents for political gain? Make it so.

I was going to post a link to right-wingers who endorsed each of those actions, but I couldn't stomach it, nor do they deserve more linkage. But they're not hard to find, if you want to search them out and dive into the slime.

Imagine how these howling nutbars will react, sitting in their skivvies in front of their computers, spewing Dorito crumbs on their screens and keyboards, when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office and tries to clean up the crap the Republicans have left on the carpet. It'll be Impeachment Every Day, at best, and dark musings about assassination will be a regular feature of right-wing blogs. There was a time when I couldn't imagine that line being crossed. But now, these people have defined deviancy so far down, I fear that's the best we can expect.

Happy Newtonmas

As is traditional around these parts, we'd like to wish everyone a very happy Newtonmas. And if there you hold other beliefs about a sacred time at this point of the year, we wish you the best for those, too.