October 2, 2008
tales from robert's homeland

if you thought that fidelity bailout plea was tough reading, i've got another one for you.

the news hour has been slumming it in florida this week, and the results are even more distressing than i could have imagined:

I mean, you can go back to Abraham Lincoln. He came from a farm. What's the matter with her being the governor of Alaska?

well, let's see what the online pedier has to say:

In effect he was self-educated, studying every book he could borrow. He mastered the Bible, Shakespeare, English history and American history, and developed a plain style that puzzled audiences more used to orotund oratory. He avoided hunting and fishing because he did not like killing animals even for food and, though unusually tall (6ft 3.75in or 1.925m) and strong, spent so much time reading that some neighbors thought he must be doing it to avoid strenuous manual labor.

i am not quite sure how you get from there to palin without resorting to the word "not."

She's honest, and she just says what she is, doesn't try to say what you want to hear.

while i agree somehwat: she certainly doesn't go out of her way to say what i want to hear, it's sort of refreshing to see that in this day and age, a wink can still hold its own against a nod.

however, what really took the cake was this quote from a clinton supporter:

I feel, if [Obama]'s elected, we will have a socialist, welfare-dominated state, and we don't need that in our country.

her occupation? "retired."

October 1, 2008
so sorry

entertained the idea of resigning today, after a UI deadlock bug surfaced. it was caused by a fix for another bug, put in at the last minute between RC and GA, due to my pleading, and perhaps against my manager's better judgement. of course the other bug was my fault, too.

fortunately, the world of proprietary software is such that you can't even buy this product, let alone download it; this means we'll hopefully get the fix out before anyone external actually runs into the bug.

i better run to the grocery store to get a paper bag to wear over my head at the office tomorrow...

September 30, 2008
who knew

i am going to see stars monday. this is a surprise.

September 30, 2008
hill day number one for san francisco

i thought my heartbreak hill workouts were tough; they are not. but why am i subjecting myself to san francisco hills when my marathon is in florida?

September 26, 2008
what a glorious morning

as long as i manage to stay away from bees, today is already shaping up to be quite epic:

...if GOP nominee McCain does not show for the first presidential debate ... members of the audience [would] submit questions to the moderator ... [who] would then pose the questions to Obama.

awesome awesome awesome.

until... mccain shows up as one of the audience members! man, that guy thinks of everything.

and in case you missed it, this nonsense is still going on:

But someone inadvertently left three of the duct taped hot dogs outside the ballpark, sparking security fears. Stadium employees were evacuated and the bomb squad was called in.

ok. remain calm. focus on the good things.

September 26, 2008
great success

that debate was pretty tolerable. i liked that they occasionally really did get to talk about the issues at hand in some detail, and talk to each other. i guess mostly i liked that moderator. where did he come from, anyway? i only wish someone would put the words "main street" in some sort of lock-box.

great quote from barney frank tonight:

You have the two top economic advisers of President Bush telling us that if we don't do something quickly there's a crisis. But I have to tell you that, even if you think that wasn't true before they said it, it's very likely to be true after they said it.

my only regret is that i only have to pay taxes once a year.

critical mass tonight was awesome! there were tons of people at the beginning, but the highlight came riding up fell and into the park with the fog and everyone's blinking LEDs and the police lights, it was great. i didn't get completely separated until 9 PM (about 2 and a half hours), while my computer claimed i went about 23 miles after getting home. next time, i am eating dinner the night before.

September 25, 2008
i almost pulled a muscle my eyes were rolling so hard

a grown-up said this:

Following September 11th, our national leaders came together at a time of crisis. We must show that kind of patriotism now.

oh my god. the other week, mccain wanted a 9/11-style panel to asses the financial chrisis. this week, we need 9/11-style patriotism. is mccain gearing up to launch a global war on finance? more importantly, who's he going to name to his "axis of excess"?

September 25, 2008
dazed and confused

at about mile six of my eight mile run this morning, some sort of wasp or bee bit or stung me on the back of my leg, right below the knee. apparently, web md recommends that i "Remain as calm and quiet as possible," because "Movement will increase the spread of venom in your bloodstream." unfortunately, i don't have access to webmd on my ironman watch, so i finished running the last two miles, and then biked to work.

martin kady, of politico (he works for rlove?), was sure barking up the wrong tree today trying to convince me that this bailout is a good idea. to wit:

if we don't do this, then your child's college savings will go down dramatically

sure, kick me when i'm down.

Your 401(k) is going to take a huge hit.

it's all in cash reserves. pretty sure that's more or less stable.

...you won't be able to borrow money to open the McDonald's franchise down the street.

where did... i don't... i wasn't trying to give that impression...

...people won't be able to borrow money for their auto loans.

that is what's referred to in this household as "a good thing." and wait. why are they borrowing money for their borrowed money, anyway? this is... isn't that how we got here in the first place?

...it still doesn't have great support ... especially among fiscally conservative Republicans.

you're calling me a WHAT? ok, you know what? martin kady? of politico? you are BANNED! (come back in one year...)

September 24, 2008
what i want to know is

who do i have to give seven hundred billion dollars to in order to have friday's debate go on even if mccain doesn't show up? it would be so maverick just to have the camera on an empty podium for his 90 seconds.

September 23, 2008
talk of the town

as i was walking around, unsuccessfully trying to find a corned beef sandwich for lunch in this god forsaken city, it was amazing to overhear how many people were talking about the bailout. it seems like it's all anyone's talking about.

the news hour had allan meltzer on again, and he was as awesomely crotchity as ever:

It's a terrible idea. It's undemocratic. It's bad economic policy, and it's bad social policy. And it has a very little chance of solving the problem in a meaningful way.

...

I don't want to join a debate about different ways of picking the public's pocket. I think, if they're going to do something ... then what they ought to do is make loans, which the financial institutions have to repay with interest.

...

May I just say one last thing? Very brief. No one, no one has said this will solve the problem. No one has said it will solve the major problem in housing and finance.

where is this guy's emmy?

since the marathon last month i've been feeling slow, but today at the track wasn't that bad. repeat 1600m:

1. 6:35
2. 6:45
3. 6:42
4. 6:38

September 22, 2008
what kind of day has it been

everyone will have posted this, but i may as well get it out of the way: obama meets bartlet, as penned by reverend sorkin. i miss that guy. the bartlet, i mean. not the sorkin.

today was one of those days where you sit down at work in the "morning" to find a new bug filed by your boss. it's... you don't really understand it, can't reproduce it, and it looks scary. oh, and you're supposed to be going GA in a few days.

but eventually, he shows you how he triggers it, and then you can reproduce it. it sure looks like a bug in... something else, who knows what, but if you can reproduce it, you can fix it. so you go and read the matrix a bit, and find something that looks promising.

a few edits and it's fixed, and time to go home.

did i mention i signed up for another marathon? tomorrow is back to the track. break's over, as they say.

September 21, 2008
lame

why can't iTunes select at start up the last artist/album i had selected? i know ace of base is way up there alphabetically, but cruel summer's playcount is only two; why do i have to see it ever time i start iTunes?

September 20, 2008
today

learning last flowers on piano.

September 19, 2008
the most depressing news yet

i don't completely know what to do with this information, but here it is: i have 32 albums that came out in 2007, while only three from 2008. i guess that explains why i haven't been going to many shows.

September 18, 2008
song of the day

for some reason, i've had a certain radiohead b-side in my head the last couple of days:

I want to see you smile again
Like diamonds in the dust
The amazing sound of the killing hordes
The day the banks collapsed

Cease this endless chattering
Like everything is fine
And "sorry" is not good enough
Sit in the back and drive

you can imagine where it goes from there.

September 14, 2008
what i really think about during the day

i have been wondering whether one could run a profitable farm, where they raised pigs that would be left to die of natural causes. they would wear some sort of heart monitor, to enable immediate carcass retrieval. then, the pig would be cured etc. and sold as vegetarian-friendly bacon, for those vegetarians who object to the killing animals thing. i don't think you could pull this off with pork tenderloin, but perhaps... bacon.

anyway this has been on my mind the last week or so, and i thought it was about time it was shared with the world.

September 9, 2008
uncrippling itunes 8

$ defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

(source)

September 5, 2008
my first SF earthquake

the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me.

this is directly due to the local news people talking about how glad they are they don't have to deal with hurricanes. idiots.

September 4, 2008
the final countdown

it's been a tough two weeks, but now there's just one more night left, and then we can all vote tomorrow and not have to worry about another election for the next eight years. woo!

putting that motorized vehicle death number into some perspective, it's about one 9/11-level event, every month, every year. instead of this global war for automobiles, we really should be having hundreds of local wars against them.

and speaking of paying for wars, why is losing a child to a war patriotic, but paying taxes is the burden?

i better get started with the tv so i can get to bed before midnight.

September 4, 2008
ok, wow

i am not sure this is exactly how it works, but kudos to bill frist for going there:

HIV/AIDS continues to hollow out entire generations of people at the prime of their lives. It's easy for people to lose hope.

And when they do, the vacuum is filled with desperation, instability, and - yes, the seeds of terrorism.

up until that line, i thought this was a repeat from last week's convention.

September 4, 2008
tonight's sign

simply reads:

THE MAVRICK

September 3, 2008
fun for the whole family

PAUL SOLMAN: Every economist I know says that's exactly the wrong way to dampen energy use and, if it's ever even conceivable, make us energy independent.

NANCY PFOTENHAUER: But you now know an economist who advocates a gas tax holiday, because that would be me.

---

PAUL SOLMAN: The first thing we learn in economics is the supply-and-demand curves. And that is that, if the price is high, there's less demand and, if the price is low, there's more quantity demand.

NANCY PFOTENHAUER: So are you in favor of higher gas prices?

let me field this one, paul.

YES.

September 3, 2008
country farce

in between U-S-A chants, they showed a shot tonight of some people with "THE FENCE BUILDER" signs. at least romney got in some nice racist fearmongering in tonight.

September 3, 2008

They are in a state of denial about the biggest threat that faces this country.

total deaths in america from terrorst attacks in 2007: 0.

Total deaths in motor vehicle crashes in 2007 declined to 41,059.

half an hour to go. i will perservere.

September 2, 2008
i was sort of thinking

while i was not-watching the non-convention last night, i couldn't help but notice all of the "country first" things all over the place. this morning, while i was running, i wondered... if that's what the republicans think, what's the democrats' message?

maybe it's people first.

people first, whether you're from this country or not.

people first, whether you're republican or democrat.

people first, whether you're here legally or not.

people first, whether you're poor or merely just middle class.

people first, whether you're religious or intelligent.

anyway, i'm not particularly looking forward to it, but i am going to make it through all three gut-stabbing hours tonight, mark my words. and that's a promise.

September 2, 2008
and another thing

the other difference between the conventions is that everyone attending the republican one can remember the last time we had an election without a bush or clinton on the ballot.

September 2, 2008
one more

i can barely keep my eyes open as liberman winds up (i hope!) his speech, but there are some pretty awesome buttons on some of the delegates here tonight. two i've spotted:

Drill ANWR Now

Liberals pick on someone your own age

these were both worn by women; i don't really know what the last one means.

also there have been so many U-S-A chants i feel like i'm back at student night at the vault. i don't know if i can make it another night.

the skyscrapers in downtown SF make me sad. they are just huge monstrosities with the 2nd or 3rd floor repeated ad nauseum until the builders ran out of money. the older, shorter - often 10 floors or more - builds are almost all more beautiful, with interesting detail, and have revolutionary features like windows that actually open.

September 2, 2008
the end, really

the rnc speeches are full of the same self-congratulatory we-know-bestisms that the chrome comic is so rife with. if that equates mozilla with the democrats, i don't want to think where opera (whose browser i use almost every other day on my phone) fits in that metaphor.

i wonder if i'm going to regret this post in the morning.

August 30, 2008
more of the same

palin can't pronounce "nuclear" either. can't wait for the debates.

August 30, 2008
late night anthems for the waiting on laundry kids

here are some things i've found recently on the internet.

george orwell has a blog. well, he had a diary, seventy years ago, and someone is typing it in every day or something. this is severely awesome in theory, but i haven't been reading it yet, so it might be boring.

a pelican trying to eat a pigeon. if this is what the dinosaurs turned into, i'm starting to feel a little cheated that i wasn't taught a little more about creationism in school.

and finally, people choosing horses over humans. because relationships with animals that are treated as property are much more rewarding than ones with free will. i mean, if you just replace the word "horse" in that page with "slave," the views become quite enlightened:

i guarentee if any girl told me to pick between my slave and her the slave is like family and family comes before and girl so id say bye bye

My aunt has been divorced twice that way- she always picks the slaves.

I know plenty of women who say they would take a slave over a boyfriend if they weren't married. I would take a slave over a guy even if I was married, slaves don't argue with you or demand things.

I tried to include him-even talked about him loaning a slave so it was something we could do together but eventually for a variety of reasons marriage ended in nasty divorce. So in my case husband gone...slave still here!!!!

stick with the slave it will be less trouble

although i suppose doing that with almost any page is pretty offensive, too.

August 28, 2008
why i love developing on linux

so, where to start. i want to put an animation in a dialog. GtkImage can show a GdkPixbufAnimation. sounds good so far.

gdk_pixbuf_animation_new_from_file()? well, i'm embedding the pixbuf data in my binary; not loading from a file.

gdk_pixbuf_simple_anim_new() would be great, but we're targetting gtk 2.4, so it's out.

so, in a sane library, i'd be able to implement my own animation object that i load myself, but thanks to gdk-pixbuf's opaqueness, i simply cant. but thank god the manual has an extensive section on the differences between imlib and gdk-pixbuf. it's really comforting right now.

ok, so i have to handle the loading and timing myself. this is more than just <img src=, but at least it's in C, so it's fast, right?

so, i probably don't need to run my timer when the dialog's not visible; do i connect to show, realize, map, or map-event?

i guess i'm just a little extra cranky this morning because, when i type my password wrong, SLED takes thirty earth seconds before i'm allowed to try again. it's almost faster to just reboot. i mean, it should be, if that weren't so slow.

August 26, 2008

Think about it: after September 11th, if there was a call from the president to get us off foreign oil to stop funding the very terrorists who had just attacked us, every American would have said, "how can I do my part?" This administration failed to believe in what we can achieve as a nation, when all of us work together.

i guess one thing that has disappointed me about this year's radiohead tours is that for how much they played stuff off the first in rainbows disc, they've really neglected the second. down is the new up, last flowers, up on the ladder, 4 minute warning... when the acoustic guitar comes in in go slowly, and it feels like some pink floyd song, these would have been great on the road. oh well.

they did play bangers + mash, but i don't really like that one.

It's too much; too bright, too powerful: too much.

August 25, 2008
and truckdrivers!

as i turn the corner into hour three of PBS's convention coverage (this is already after a full news hour), it occured to me that a couple of weeks ago, i spent this long... running.

August 24, 2008
my favorite band is a witch

three (or four) awesome bands, a few yards from the stage, and all i had to do was stand for seven hours. i think BSS peaked with 13 people on stage during ibi? it's been a while since i've seen them with their full setup of five guitars + horns.

1. Pacific Theme
2. KC Accidental
3. 7/4 (Shoreline)
4. Farewell to the Pressure Kids
5. Fire Eyed Boy
6. Churches Under the Stairs
7. Love is New
8. Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl
9. Ibi Dreams of Pavement

i'm pretty sure i'd be able to find myself in some of the wide shots, if it wasn't youtube-quality.

August 23, 2008
don't lose your nerve

there was that moment, complete silence with the trees around, the trees and thom's reverby voice, and light guitar, and for those brief minutes, that was it, this is amazing, and the rest of the show, the rest of the year, will not be as amazing, but right now it's amazing, just when you thought it couldn't be, it's possible.

the crowd was very behaved, except for the two women i actually shushed during exit music (hey, that's what they do in europe), and i even enjoyed talking to the couple next to me (between songs, of course). they'd seen them the other day in seattle, where they played talk show host, and vancouver, and APW which i should have gone to, because they played kid a, which i didn't hear this summer. but it wouldn't be the same, it will never be the same, something has been lost. anyway, i "mentioned" i saw them in dublin - the rainbow show?, yeah! - and then i made my dutiful pitch for broken social scene but they already knew.

and even though wikipedia doesn't list it in its this-day-in page, have a safe, healthy, and, most importantly, a very happy windows 95 day!

August 20, 2008
tired

not getting enough sleep lately, oh well. i got a new bike lock friday, but the rack by work is too thick, and i couldn't lock my front whell with it, so that followed me upstairs to the office. during the day i noticed some tire damage, i assume from the move, so on my way home i stopped by the local bike shop for some replacements.

i asked the guy why all the people who ride fixies have aurospokes and stuff. he said it's just cause they look cool.

here are the only two pictures i guess i took during my two weeks in europe:

i had an awesome burrito today: prawns are definitely the new fish.

August 17, 2008
welcome to san francisco

August 17, 2008
i wonder how many js_Invoke()s i can get on the stack...

#8 0x1808ac0a in nsJSContext::EvaluateString ... #20 0x001c5a63 in js_Invoke ... #45 0x001c5a63 in js_Invoke ... #55 0x001c59ee in js_Invoke

i should really go to bed.

August 16, 2008
G_GNUC_CONST considered harmful

some sort of epic plague has set upon gtk, and it's time someone said something about it: why are _get_type() functions declared G_GNUC_CONST?

to wit: GType gtk_entry_get_type (void) G_GNUC_CONST;

glib's own documentation has this to say on the matter:

Likewise, a function that calls a non-const function usually must not be const.

"usually must not" is a little passive-aggressive for api docs, but anyway these _get_type() functions almost all call g_type_register_static_simple, which is not const.

anyway, the problem is if you have code like this:

GTK_TYPE_ENTRY; g_print ("%s\n", g_type_name (g_type_from_name ("GtkEntry")));

it may or may not work, depending on your optimization level. if you ignore the return value of a G_GNUC_CONST function, gcc -O2 will happily optimize it out, as i discovered long ago.

the fix workaround is to pass the return value from the const call into a function that is not declared const; g_type_qname() fits this bill rather nicely.

well, i'm sure they have a good reason.

August 16, 2008
another eight weeks

it's taken two months, but my name is finally on the outside of my office. it's not painted on the door, or etched into anyway; just a simple printout. but now maybe people will stop calling me amy.

it's still sort of weird working for a proprietary company. just about nothing i worked on at novell ever got released, or looked at by anyone other than myself, so i didn't think it would be a big change. but at an employee meeting the other day they were recognizing people who'd registered software patents. the juxtaposition between the cheering there and the reaction most of my normal friends have to software patents is quite striking.

August 16, 2008
square one

after my previous failure with XPCOM, a helpful person on #content pointed me at XTF. don't let the sparse documentation and lack of examples frighten; in my experience those are signs that you are on the road to glory.

basically, it lets me register an object that gets called when elements with a specific namespace are encountered in a document, and i can create an object that is effective aggregated with that element. since i use namespaces, this is exactly what i have been looking for this whole time. and it looks like it'd be pretty easy to add support for other libraries, if you are interested in some incredibly erotic widgets.

unfortunately, though, this means throwing out just about every line of code i've written since october, and more or less starting anew. the cost of progress, i guess. and anyway, did i really want to maintain my own dom implementation?

anyway, in a night or two i got it creating widgets, and setting their properties (including container child properties) working correctly. i even have an nsIDOMNavigator implementation written in javascript. pretty awesome! anyway, i think the difficult legwork in getting scripts working is done, but there's a little more work there that will have to wait for tomorrow.

i am not quite yet ready to svn rm my old implementation; but that day is fast approaching...

August 13, 2008
the end of an erra

one of the earliest memories i have of my move to boston is having breakfast at the greenhouse cafe after opening a checking account at the bank boston branch in harvard square. i got checks w/o an address or phone number on them (since i had neither at the time), which i tried to use to buy my first laptop, that trusty n505ve. of course, compusa didn't take checks so loper paid for it and i wrote him a check.

of course, that was two mergers ago, and compusa isn't even around anymore.

anyway, i just closed my bank of america checking account. hooray!

August 13, 2008
those ivory tower eggheads have done it again

kudos to the fine folks at suse, who have evidently reimplemented distcc + mdns, poorly. as a refresher, to enable this on a modern unix requires no invocations of sed, or learning whatever the current package manager du Tag happens to be:

what's even more ridiculous is that distcc is already open-source. what the hell, guys? multicast dns-enabled (x)inetd probably is, too. good going.

their faq is full of awful english, and even worse jokes; i will not dignify it with a link, but two elements of FUD do merit addressing:

you're changing compiler versions often and still want to speed up your compilation (see the ICECC_VERSION support)

i... i don't know why you are changing compilers often. i am not going to ask; i really don't want to know. anyway, if your company hasn't figured out how to distribute a toolchain to its developers, dag has awesome distcc compiler packages for red hat and fedora. i used to use these when i had a mini cluster in brookline, and it was the best. cross compilers were no problem, either; i also distributed x86 builds to my ppc macs.

most important: you're sitting in a office with several co-workers that do not like if you overload their workstations when they play doom (distcc doesn't have a scheduler)

it's 2008, guys. if your workstation can't handle DooM on one of its cores while the other three are compiling compilers, well, i don't even know. maybe if you had a stable kernel abi that didn't require recompilation of drivers for SMP and UP machines, you wouldn't have to spend so much time compiling? just throwing that out there.

also, it cannot go without saying that today was the first boston radiohead show of the millennium that i missed. and they played kid a and a wolf at the door! i can take some solace in the fact that i wouldn't be going to the smelly old tweeter center anyway, even if i wasn't in california.

i will also take this opportunity to mention that tickets for radiohead's show IN TOKYO ON MY BIRTHDAY (WHICH IS ALSO THOM'S BIRTHDAY) go on sale august 23. you know, if you happen to be shopping on the internet that day.

August 12, 2008
a little disappointed

i had been doing a few small improvements since my initial xpcom parsing success on friday, but a Document.importNode()-based solution is not a... solution. today, i wrote a SAX-based parser in js, that just called my DOMImplementation's functions (why there isn't something in mozilla that can do that already had confounded me, but as you'll see, i'm no longer so naive).

that was all well and good, until i got it working, and tried to use XMLSerializer to print out my dom tree. that did not work. you see, there is a pesky little function call nsContentUtils::CanCallerAccess(), which contains this:

nsCOMPtr<nsINode> node = do_QueryInterface(aNode); NS_ENSURE_TRUE(node, PR_FALSE);

unfortunately, while my objects support nsIDOMNode, they do not support nsINode; its header is not in the public sdk directory, and besides:

class nsINode : public nsPIDOMEventTarget {

that P doesn't lead me to believe i should be implementing it.

ok, that's fine. i can create a dummy document with DOMParser, and import my document into it, and then dump that.

of course, nsDocument::ImportNode() has this:

nsCOMPtr<nsINode> imported = do_QueryInterface(aImportedNode); NS_ENSURE_TRUE(imported, NS_ERROR_FAILURE);

i'm sure i'll think of something in my sleep.

August 10, 2008
it's almost as if it's trying to tell me something...

i just let roomba clean my apartment for the first time, and it has apparently resorted to autovorism. i found an arm from its spinny brush in its dust bin :(

maybe it's also regenerative?