I have carved out a small slice of the great Intarwebs to share with you my goings on.
It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? Anyway, this post is about C++ and how nothing ever goes wrong with it, ever. I was building a map with a pair of strings as the key and a complex (and confidential) value. For the purposes of this post, I’ll say the value is an int ; the exact value type is irrelevant to this post, anyway. One other caveat: this is performance-sensitive code,…
I recently started replaying the Mass Effect trilogy, having not much else to do while under quarantine. It's been about 7 or 8 years since I'd played through any of the games, since the ending of ME3 really made the rest of the series feel pointless. Now, with some emotional distance and a fresh perspective, I'm going through again and noticing some things that I didn't appreciate before. This…
I got back from an awesome OCON filled with guitar-cello duets , talent-show selfies , an awesome fireworks show , and oh, right, some interesting talks about Objectivism as applied to art, childhood education, and foreign policy. It was my second time going (first was last year), and I had a great, but exhausting time. Obvious disclaimer is obvious: I speak only for myself. My opinions are not…
I just saw some videos of the shameful assault on free speech at CSULA by students, faculty, and the president of the university. A speaker named Ben Shapiro was set to give a talk called "When Diversity Becomes a Problem" and had received permission and a venue to speak. In the week before the event, students demanded that the event be shut down, citing the usual (and usually false) claims of…
So I just found out that, despite promising to end the program this month, the Mountain View city government has decided to extend its stupid food scraps collection pilot "indefinitely." This program cut garbage pickup services in half to once every other week and instead allowed residents to put food scraps in composting bins to be picked up. Upset at this pointless extension of a decrease in…
This was originally going to be a Facebook comment in response to this article , but ended up being much, much longer. Wow, that is a hot pile of nonsense, but in a way that is illuminating. It's interesting in how it approaches some standard topics, and I was actually surprised that it didn't bemoan the higher population and life expectancy of humans as a great sin. I typically expect…
My dad sent me an article about inequality a few days ago. The two points of the article were: that the minimum wage is not well targeted at reducing poverty that a large factor in poverty is family structure The article cited the figure that 72% of black kids today are born to unmarried parents, up from 24% in 1965. Also, the poverty rate for children of single mothers is drastically higher than…
Back in June 2012, I wrote a post about how little actual "austerity" had happened among European governments. Most governments had increased their level of spending between 2008 and 2011, and only three governments had decreased their spending from 2007 to 2011. Now that Eurostat has the numbers from 2012, we can see how things have changed in the past year. As before, all numbers are taken…
Horror story of a DC public school. I had a very brief experience teaching ballroom dance to middle schoolers in an after-school program at a public school, in Woonsocket, RI. Woonsocket is apparently a relatively poor town, but the school buildings were brand new, so it couldn't have been that bad. The author's comments about most of his time going to maintaining order match my experience…
People are always belly-aching about how the polar ice caps are melting. "Oh, the sea level is going to rise and flood coastal cities!" Blah blah blah, as if this is some unsolvable problem. But, as we all know, human ingenuity knows no bounds, and there is a simple, cost-effective solution to the "problem" of arctic ice melting: just re-freeze it. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals…
After much head-wall-banging, I got a Wiimote to pair successfully with my computer and work as a controller in Mupen64plus ! There was a lot of trial and error, so I've created a guide to getting a working setup so future generations don't have to go through what I did. The details are in this git repo , which includes detailed instructions and config files.
Against my better judgment, I am going to take another shot at installing a ROM on my phone. The battery life could use some improvement, and people have claimed that some of the 3rd-party ROMs can help with that. I know I have promised myself not to play with ROMs on my phone again, since the result is usually a big waste of time with nothing to show for it, but this time is different. Brace…
*sigh* I updated to 12.10, and Alt+middle-click to resize windows was broken. After about an hour of circular Googling, I found the correct incantation to sprinkle. For some strange reason, the setting org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences.resize-with-right-button was set to true . Set it back to false and the system returns to its former functioning state.
I came across a page talking about the joys of OOP via this blog post . The original page was a thing of horror. I modified the Elisp code from Irreal, adding a few additional features: In addition to equality matches, it can match using regexps and arbitrary functions. Let's see Java do that in 20 SLOC.
This is copy of an email I sent just now. My concern about the libertarian candidate, besides the fact that he cannot win, That's no reason not to vote for him. A well-functioning democracy requires a choice of more than the people who are "obviously" going to win. Otherwise, it isn't democracy so much as a decree by the political parties who will be the next president. My is that his economic…
Like any virtuous person, I use Emacs for everything, and so tried out using Emacs key bindings for all GTK applications generally. After a year or so of working like this, I have decided to go back. The main problem is that other applications can't handle the awesome power of Emacs. Firefox, for example, uses C-k to jump to the search box, but if you are in the location bar, C-k will run the…
This is an older idea which had been floating around in my head, half-finished for a few years. I was inspired by this Ars Technica article to think about the relationship between network operators — both cellular and landline — and consumers. The key quote from the article is by "one mobile operator" and is: Some people like 3 may be in a position where it could make sense to accept…
I've been hacking in R recently for work, and it is a bizarrely amazing language. I just ran into a situation in which I needed to apply an S3 generic function to a list (actually, a row-wise iterator on a data.frame ) and hit an annoying rough patch For those not as well-versed in R (I've been learning it for about two weeks at this point), "method dispatch" is done in a quirky yet effective way.…
After finding out that the Monospace font doesn't support italics, I set about trying to find a suitable replacement. This EmacsWiki page lists a way to print some example text in all of the fonts on the system, which is very helpful for comparing what's available. The problem with it is that it displays all fonts, not just the monospace fonts, which isn't useful. (For those of you not in the…
I've been tasked with nice-ifying the configuration and setup of the systems at work. They store a huge amount (244 GiB) of protein analysis data in a FileMaker database and have PHP scripts accessing the data through the FileMaker XML HTTP API. The problem is that the PHP scripts are running on Apache (as is an SVN repo), but FileMaker wants to publish its API only through IIS. Having spent more…
I've been skeptical of the rhetoric that there has been "brutal, crushing austerity" in Europe. When these claims are made, I have seldom heard any quantification of how brutal these "brutal" changes have been. So I looked it up . Short version: there's been minimal to negative austerity since pre-meltdown 2008. Longer version: There was a bump up in spending in the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland,…
Yesterday, I spent way too much time trying to get Subversion working under Apache in Windows 7. I really have a new appreciation for GNU/Linux package managers; what would have been sudo aptitude install libapache2-svn under Ubuntu turned into hours of staring at Syntax error on line 270 of C:/Program Files (x86)/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/conf/httpd.conf: Cannot load C:/Program Files…
Based on my decades of experience in the sovereign debt markets, I have come up with a perfect metaphor for what is going on in the Eurozone. It is as if the Grace government promised 200,000 people one boat each, but now that the boats are due, it turns out that she doesn't have 200,000 boats anywhere, there are only 100,000. Grace tries telling half of the people not to try to use their boat; to…
I contacted EA support today to get my reward for participating in last weekend's Mass Effect 3 Bounty Weekend: Operation Shieldwall . I achieved the individual goal, but didn't get the priiiize, so I went to EA for help. Maybe 10 minutes later, it was done. Thank you to "Larry S" for helping me. Here is the log of my chat with him; I want to give credit where credit is due for his professionalism…
Really quick: I wrote a simple bit of elisp to eval a body over each of the files in a directory, recursively. Looking around for a little bit, I found a couple of options, including Findr , which has its own queue implementation (pretty short), and whose main function is a whopping 55 lines! There has to be a quicker way , I thought. I didn't need anything terribly fancy, I just wanted something…