Xenophobia has deep roots in the U.S. For all of its “global melting pot” rhetoric, the reality has been much more complex. It begins with the maltreatment of the native peoples of America with its attendant extinction of their language and culture. But even as recently as 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that persons from India were not eligible for U.S. citizenship because only “free white persons” were permitted. This case was one of the most egregious in the history of the United States and is a poignant example of how the Supreme Court reflects, rather than transcends, prevailing cultural values. In the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that an Indian Sikh man could not be granted citizenship because he was not white. Even today, the suspicion with which many English-speaking Americans view Spanish speakers undoubtedly contributes to their xenophobic calls to build a wall along the border with Mexico.

As I’ve written before, I use Anki for Russian language learning. One of the skills to master in learning a foreign language is to quickly speak and recognize numbers. With a little help from macOS, I’ve developed a way of rapidly creating audible content of spoken numbers for my Anki cards.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that as of right now, you’ll have to have Xcode and build the app yourself. Someday, I’ll deal with all the official certificate stuff again (I’ve not developed apps seriously for iOS or macOS for several years now.)

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” - Socrates

This year I decided to take a different approach to making New Year’s resolutions. Although many people make resolutions, less than 10% regard themselves as successful at achieving them.

I decided to overhaul the idea of New Year’s resolutions. Rather than committing to an entire year of change, I set up a schedule of 12 mini-resolutions in the form of experiments. My first experiment for the month of January was to work out daily. My February experiment was to determine whether avoiding the news and time-boxing my social media interactions would make me happier.

Indigo currently shipping version 7 is a leading Mac home automation software package. One of it’s mostly widely-used features is its ability to execute user-provided Python scripts of AppleScripts. In my previous introduction to scripting Indigo with Python I showed how to use the Indigo plugin host to execute Python scripts. In this post, I’ll describe how I use a third-party charting package rrdtool to graph data from Indigo by taking advantage of Indigo’s ability to execute arbitrary Python scripts. This tutorial is focused on using Python as a bridge between Indigo 7 and rrdtool. If you are interested in a solution that takes advantage of AppleScript and bash scripts to do the samee thing, see this thread on the Indigo forums.

An interesting perspective on resisting Trump by focusing on policy and not personality:

“The Italian experience provides a blueprint for how to defeat Mr. Trump. Only two men in Italy have won an electoral competition against Mr. Berlusconi: Romano Prodi and the current prime minister, Matteo Renzi (albeit only in a 2014 European election). Both of them treated Mr. Berlusconi as an ordinary opponent. They focused on the issues, not on his character. In different ways, both of them are seen as outsiders, not as members of what in Italy is defined as the political caste.”

Since the election in the U.S., my wife and I have supported the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. So should you.

In internet speak, “to feed the troll” means to try to engage people online who are just trying to stir up discord for no other reason than to provoke people. Trolls are almost always insecure, psychologically-damaged people, if not full-blown psychopaths who lack the usual social barriers that most of us possess. Thus, a common piece of advice tossed about on the Internet is: “don’t feed the troll.” This is sound advice.

Among the many reasons I use iTerm2 in lieu of the macOS Terminal is its AppleScript support.

I recently had the need to automate some tasks on my Amazon Web Services EC2 server in a way that takes advantage of iTerm2 AppleScript functionality.

Use case

I’ve found recently, that my screen sessions were disappearing. Although I haven’t completely excluded other causes, some have suggested that infrequently-reconnected sessions can be cleaned up. Since I’m not a Unix sysadmin, I’m not sure about this. However, I decided to test the hypothesis by writing an AppleScript that logs into my EC2 server, attaches to each screen session, detaches and closes the connection.

“The Trump Administration will be a law and order administration.”

- whitehouse.gov January 25, 2017