Aren Cambre's Blog

Do the media or the Democrat leadership “get” tonight’s Massachusetts upset?

This is colossal.

This is the bluest of blue states. This is Dukakis’s state. This is Kerry’s state. This is Taxachusetts. This is blue blood New England. This is the entrenched “Liberal Lion” Kennedy seat. This is the fourth most Democratic state in 2008. It’s a linchpin, the 60th Senate vote for Pelosi’s health care deformation.

So what did Massachusetts do? Voted for a Republican senator. Stopped the Democrat movement in its tracks.

Massachusetts said Obama’s, Pelosi’s, and Reid’s socialist agenda is an abomination.

Thanks you, Massachusetts!

If cops didn’t do traffic stops in safety-challenged places, would we even need “move over” laws?

This University Park, TX cop did a traffic stop in the middle of an intersection!

The Texas Railroad Commission and WFAA channel 8 are scapegoating Atmos Energy, Dallas’s natural gas provider, for house explosions it did not cause.

The state blamed Atmos for a May 2009 Irving home explosion. Tonight, Brett Shipp, a WFAA reporter, all but blamed Atmos for a November 2009 Mesquite home explosion.

The theory is that deteriorating “Normac couplings” in buried gas distribution lines are leaking the fuel, causing these explosions.

It’s a load of crap.

In the Irving case, the state blamed a leaking fitting “under the street.” Yes, as in, under the street, 20+ feet in front of the house.

Um, no.

Natural gas is lighter than air. It goes higher as quickly as it can. That means it’s not going to travel sideways 20-40 feet into someone’s house. Also, it dissipates rapidly like any other gas, like a poofy cloud. So any gas that could reach the outside of a house from a buried line would be faint.

The state’s asinine theory probably breaks several laws of physics. That wisping gas would have to travel laterally from this coupling, in a focused vector, through a yard and through a concrete foundation, and accumulate in a house.

The Mesquite situation is similar. The WFAA cameras clearly showed a gas meter all the way by a fence. And Google Maps Street View shows that the gas lines are in the alley, separated from the house by many feet and a wood fence. (Picture of the next door neighbor’s gas meter in the alley–the exploded house is at 2505 Catalina.) These allegedly faulty couplings would be in lines buried under the alley, at least 20 feet from the house!

Sorry, this house could not have possibly been exploded by Atmos. Something was wrong with something inside the house; that’s the homeowner’s responsibility. It’s irresponsible for WFAA to tar Atmos Energy for this.

Why does this matter? WFAA is campaigning for Atmos to replace tens of thousands of these Normac couplings. Maybe they leak more than statistically ideal, but I have yet to see a convincing case that these couplings routinely cause imminent danger.

Furthermore, the cost of replacement is tens of millions of dollars. Guess who pays that? You and me, gas customers! So basically WFAA is campaigning for our rates to be increased to fix a problem that has not been proven to cause any harm.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Nestle makes a “limited edition” dark chocolate chip and mint chip mixture for Christmas. Here it is, next to a normal bag:

Regular bag on top, mint on bottom

Visual queues say they’re the same except for the mixture of mint chips.

Nope! Compare bag sizes:

• Regular bag: 12 oz
  
• Mint bag: 10 oz
  

Chocolate chip cookie recipes need 12 oz bags. Even Nestle’s own toll house cookies recipe needs 12 oz!

I wish Nestle could have made the size difference more clear. How many recipes get turned upside down when the cook discovers that Nestle shorted him 17%?

CNN promoted the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA on its home page this morning. This is a snap of the page:

Look at the bottom of the bright green sign:

revcom.us is “Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA”. Check out their Wikipedia page; they’re borderline treasonous.

Thanks, CNN!

It’s good conservative policy to oppose pay restrictions, including maximum or minimum wage laws.

But some conservatives also object to TARP salary caps. They are clinging to positions without considering context.

TARP is welfare for terribly-run firms. (I still maintain that chapter 7-style liquidations would have been better in the long run.) These firms got to the precipice of disaster because of incompetent leadership.

What will bad leaders do with cheap taxpayer cash? Line their pockets! What should bad leaders really get? Drastic pay cuts.

So what’s wrong with this salary cap? Nothing. If you got TARP funds, you have to live by reasonable restrictions. If you don’t like these restrictions, then raise capital and pay back the funds.

I am a conservative. I don’t like TARP, but I support its salary caps.

David Nalle, Chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus, wrote this in 2008:

The content of the Texas Republican Platform is a telling reflection of how divided the party is and how potentially destructive the most extreme factions are. Yet consideration of political realities renders much of what’s in the platform essentially irrelevant. Most of these extreme positions absolutely cannot make it to the national platform, and local politicians who want to get elected are going to have to ignore many of these resolutions, no matter what provisions are in the platform to try to force them to comply with it. For most Republicans with any political involvement at all, this platform is going to get stuffed in a drawer while they pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s ridiculously indulgent of counterproductive extremism and an embarrassment to a party which wants to have any kind of meaningful political future.

He’s right. Review Better Platform for specific examples of the flawed platform.

With this blog entry, I am publicly unveiling BetterPlatform.org, a movement to reform the Texas Republican Platform.

The 2008 platform is a farce. After removing problem planks, the platform shrinks 70%. That’s a lot of cruft!

Some of the worst planks:

1. Theories of Origin, which calls for replacing science with religious theory.
2. Support of Our Armed Forces, an unfocused grab bag of miscellaneous requests.
3. Emergency War Powers, which alleges the United States is in some overarching state of emergency.
4. Elimination of Executive Orders, which have been used since George Washington to conduct business.
5. Illegal Immigration, which starts with gibberish and prescribes little than punishment and deportation.

I don’t yet know where this movement will go, but it’s started!

The Texas GOP recently rolled out a new web site at http://www.texasgop.org/.

If you surf it, you’ll see asp file extensions. For example: http://www.texasgop.org/inner.asp?z=6

That means the Texas GOP’s runs its brand new site on a kludge CMS!

“Woah, Aren, isn’t that severe?”

No.

ASP’s most recent version is from 1999.

Microsoft replaced it with ASP.Net 1.0 in January 2002. ASP.Net is now on 3.5, and 4.0 is around the corner.

Vendors still delivering classic ASP code in November 2009 have colossally failed to invest or innovate and may be incompetent.

When I review products, those still on ASP start out such a disadvantage that they’ll probably never make the selection.

What is up with the Texas GOP? How did it get hoodwinked into a kludge CMS?

The PEAR Text_Diff system’s inline parser has a silly word splitting algorithm: it only defines word boundaries as spaces or newlines (\n).

This causes problems with punctuation. Suppose you are diffing the following two sentences:

The quick cat jumped over the lazy fox.
The quick cat jumped over the lazy dog.

The final rendered output will look like this:

The quick cat jumped over the lazy fox.dog.

Notice how the period is included in the word boundary? That makes messy markup. This comparison is worse:

The quick cat jumped over the lazy fox, who was totally lazy and should be shot.
The quick cat jumped over the lazy fox.

Here’s how PEAR Text_Diff does the diff:

The quick cat jumped over the lazy fox, who was totally lazy and should be shot.fox.

This final diff is difficult to read. You are not deleting and reinserting fox, you are in fact just changing the punctuation on its right. But because the inline diff renderer only considers space and newline as word boundaries, it doesn’t catch this basic punctuation issue.

The fix took me 1.5 hours of PHP code review to figure out the system, but it’s painfully easy to do it. Edit PEAR/Text/Diff/Renderer/inline.php. At lines 158 and 159 (per the online source code), you’ll see " \n" at the end. That is a collection of word boundaries, passed as a mask to the PHP strspn function. Simply add your word boundaries between the quotes, and the diff engine works correctly.

I’ve reported this as PHP PEAR bug 16774.