Wonderful Quote

From Eric Rothschild, the chief counsel for the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial. During cross examination, Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe claimed the immune system was irreducably complex and when pressed admitted he had not read the books and articles on immunological evolution. To which, Mr. Rothschild countered

Thankfully, there are scientists who do search for answers to the question of the origin of the immune system ... It's our defense against debilitating and fatal diseases. The scientists who wrote those books and articles toil in obscurity, without book royalties or speaking engagements. Their efforts help us combat and cure serious medical conditions. By contrast, Professor Behe and the entire intelligent design movement are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don't bother.

As someone who suffers from one of those debilitating diseases of the immune system, I for one whole heartedly thank those scientists toiling in obscurity. Michael Behe and his ID brethren can suck an egg for foisting this nonsense on our school systems.

Tweeting From the Command Line

A little while ago, Twitter removed the ability to tweet using HTTP Basic Authentication. This killed the ability to use a simple call to curl with your Twitter username and password. Interestingly enough, the November issue of the Linux Journal still mentions using the basic auth method to tweet from a script.

This will not work any longer now that Twitter is officially using the OAuth specification. Fellow CLIer's take heart, however, fortunately there is a way to use OAuth from the command line, it only requires a will and a tweepy. Tweepy is a python module written specifically to allow users to authenticate via Twitter's API and fire off tweets programmatically.

I used the method described here to setup my system checks for my home server. Thus far it's working well.