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.
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 "racism" and "hate speech." The president canceled the event, but Young Americans for Freedom and Shapiro decided to hold the event anyway. A professor, Robert Weide, threatened to assault students sponsoring the event. Shortly before the talk started, the president un-cancelled the event, but hundreds of students barricaded the doors to prevent Shapiro and the audience from getting in the room. Here are some videos I found of the event.
This was originally going to be a Facebook comment in response to this article, but ended up being much, much longer.
My dad sent me an article about inequality a few days ago. The two points of the article were:
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 unmodified from Eurostat.
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.
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.
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 yourselves for a follow-up in which I immediately regret this decision.
*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:
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.
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 equivalent of kill-line which means
that in order to get to the search bar, you have to remove focus from the
location bar. Not convenient.
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:
data.frame)foo like this: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 know, all programming is done with monospace or uniform-width fonts, meaning that l and m are the same size).