Swhack Weblog

Morbus: Tis a good site. Save a dejected project today!

Morbus: Simply cos I know AaronSw loves big snakes.

Morbus: "Welcome to the Rx Cookbook! This is a new collaborative website, built by ActiveState, which will host your techniques for building, finding, verifying, and doing pretty much anything else with patterns of text. We invite you to contribute regular expressions, snippets of code, comments, and ratings for recipes from the entire Perl community. This living collection will allow programmers to be more productive with one of the most difficult areas of

Morbus: In order to maximize the amount of publicity your software gets, you're going to have to put some effort into getting it out into the world. This can be quite time consuming, but it's definitely worth the effort since you can earn more fame and possibly increase the amount of income you receive if you're distributing shareware. The following listing of software archives, directories and news sites will hopefully help you accomplish this task.

Morbus: Philosophical writing is different from the writing you'll be asked to do in other courses. Most of the strategies described below will also serve you well when writing for other courses, but don't automatically assume that they all will. Nor should you assume that every writing guideline you've been given by other teachers is important when you're writing a philosophy paper. Some of those guidelines are routinely violated in good philosophical pros
Morbus: Philosophers sometimes do say outrageous things, but if the view you're attributing to a philosopher seems to be obviously crazy, then you should think hard about whether he really does say what you think he says. Use your imagination. Try to figure out what reasonable position the philosopher could have had in mind, and direct your arguments against that.
Morbus: Don't be afraid of mentioning objections to your own thesis. It is better to bring up an objection yourself than to hope your reader won't think of it. Explain how you think these objections can be countered or overcome. Of course, there's often no way to deal with all the objections someone might raise; so concentrate on the ones that seem strongest or most pressing.
Morbus: I agree with this point primarily. Flavoring is important to me: "Make sure every sentence in your draft does useful work. Get rid of any which don't. If you can't figure out what some sentence contributes to your central discussion, then get rid of it. Even if it sounds nice. You should never introduce any points in your paper unless they're important to your main argument, and you have the room to really explain them."
Morbus: Oop, I mean disagree. The... the uh... stupid bot screwed up. Stupid bot.
Morbus: Make sure your sentences say exactly what you want them to say. For example, suppose you write "Abortion is the same thing as murder." Is that what you really mean? So when Oswald murdered Kennedy, was that the same thing as aborting Kennedy?
Morbus: Yes, as a matter of fact it does. To abort is to stop a current action - you're aborting the life of someone. Abortion being specific to child death is as innocuous as faggot is for gay people.
Morbus: Or nigger is to black people.
Morbus: Heh: "Also, don't begin with a sentence like "Webster's Dictionary defines a soul as..." Dictionaries aren't good philosophical authorities."
Morbus: We do not judge your paper by whether we agree with its conclusion. In fact, we may not agree amongst ourselves about what the correct conclusion is. But we will have no trouble agreeing about whether you do a good job arguing for your conclusion.