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Tofurkey Day
I’m back after a Thanksgiving trip. What do vegetarians like myself eat for Thanksgiving? All sorts of things, actually. That said, for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, we need a big centerpiece food item. Ideally it will both look festive and taste good. I find this combination to be harder for vegetarians. Lasagna or macaroni and…
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Head of a Rock
The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a short piece by Jim Holt on the idea of universal consciousness. The idea is that consciousness can be found everywhere in the universe, even in rocks. This is based on the premise that “physical properties alone cannot account for subjectivity. (How could the ineffable experience of tasting…
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GCC Plugins
There has been recent discussion on the gcc mailing list about plugins. There was a very interesting paper at the last gcc summit about a plugin architecture, with some interesting examples. I think plugins would be a useful addition to gcc. I think this mainly because many researchers and grad students want it. After many…
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The GNU Configure and Build System
The GNU Configure and Build System consists of autoconf, automake, and libtool. I wrote an essay about them a long time ago. Slightly more recently I was a co-author of a book about them. David MacKenzie started writing autoconf way back in 1991. I was an early beta-tester and contributed some early features. autoconf generates…
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Pakistan in the News
When the war in Iraq was under discussion, but before it started, a friend of mine said: if you’re worried about a country which has WMDs and which supports Al Qaeda, looking at Iraq doesn’t make any sense at all. Look at Pakistan. They’ve already got the bomb. They helped create the Taliban in Afghanistan.…