Older blog entries for berend (starting at number 156)

Released new software last Saturday: alpha 1.9.3 of eposix and version 0.5.2 of emc, my Bayesian antispam package for people who use an IMAP server and don't want to be tied to a particular email client.

Mark Steyn, brilliant as always:

To date, two US soldiers are believed to have succumbed to the heat in Iraq, whereas over 10,000 people have succumbed to it in France.

And what does Chiraq?

Jacques Chirac, en vacances just up the road from me in North Hatley, Quebec, took time out of his three-week holiday to issue a statement on events in Baghdad, where 20 people died on Tuesday. But he didn't bother to interrupt his vacation to issue a statement on events in France, where so many people have died, the funeral homes are standing room only and they're having to store bodies in the freezers at the fruit and veg markets.

And a big cause of this:

But Big Government inevitably diminishes its citizens' capacity to take responsibility, to the point where even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the state should do something about.

This is so true. If you find this hard to believe, just work in a home for elderly people for a while:

"Some, he said, informed of the death of relatives, postponed funerals, not to interrupt the August 15 holiday weekend, and left the bodies in the refrigerated hall." Au bord de la mer? Ou au bord de ma mère? Hmm. Tough call.

Ben, I did not say that New Zealand is communist. In the past, the 80s and 90s, New Zealand did really well. Currently we're number 21 or so at the OECD list. And dropping. The ruling party, The Party we might say, is debating to take away property rights. They attempt to abolish the court of last appeal, the Privy Council. Soliciting is now legal. Crime has never been so high. You see, they're hard at work at solving this countries most pressing problems.

And about communism? Don't get me started at people who say we haven't seen real communism or socialism or whatever crap yet and that the USSR was not the true example of that. Yes, let us see real communism. What will that be? 1 billion dead people instead of the 100 million attributed now to this philosphy?

The issue is if the state knows better to spend your money than you or me. Heck, without guns, socialism wouldn't work. Only with the threat of force they can conduct this experiment. Look at the heavy handed way the Auckland Regional Council responds: we will sell your house if you don't pay. I assume it's still better than a labour camp. But if they had that option, they would mention that as well I'm sure.

What about a system where you pay for the services you get? If you want a car, you buy it. If you don't want a car, you don't buy it. If you use the road, you pay for it. If you don't use the road, you don't pay. If you want to go to a concert, you pay for it. You don't go? You don't pay. Easy. Fair. Weeds out a lot of stuff nobody wants.

What kind of government is prepared to take away the last money of its elderly? To force them to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars more every year for services they don't use and pet projects they never will profit from? This absolutely baffles me. But one calls it fair.

To the defence of the socialists, I must say that even they are opposed to the new rates system. Probably because the people who give us jobs, pay less in the new system.

Tried to improve the HTML interface for my legacy integration engine the last two weeks. Javascript compatibility between the three major browsers, Mozilla, Opera, and IE is still low, very low. Gave up on Opera 6 and bought Opera 7. A lot better. What was interesting is that it is possible to do some nice tricks in HTML now. Refreshing comboboxes for example without resubmitting a form.

Expect to see a lot more Javascript the next weeks. Have to write some tree mapper window or field to field mapping code with it.

Joab Jackson has written a good article about Eiffel. When he approached me, I admit I was a bit sceptical what kind of article it would become, but it's good and complete. Job well done.

Gone live with a FAQ about the protest against the ARC rates increase. The ARC has hit the poor and elderly especially hard. If you are on a pension and you suddenly have to pay hundreds of dollars, or even more, every year, imagine that! No way to increase your income, or perhaps you can work at McDonalds or so. And the rates will go up the next 7 years. Anyway, that's the idea. This council will be voted away in the biggest turnout next year. But the protest wants to have the rates reset this year. I'm quite confident that goal will be reached. There's just too much socialism and communism in New Zealand at the moment. Why can't the government leave people alone to live there own lifes and catch some criminals for a change?

Had a bit of a trouble driving home yesterday. Went to the Tae-Kwondo grading, but that was far out in Papakura. The light of the city isn't so stark there, so when I returned, the stars were overwhelming. Couldn't keep my eyes from the milky way, while they should be at the road. Won't see them real close any time soon I'm afraid.

My Linux crashed again. Happens too often lately. It seems 2.4.21 is less robust than the already not so robust earlier versions. After a resume, it's very prone to hang after a few keystrokes. And the problem I had since the earliest versions is still there as wel: loosing my mouse. I quickly had learned to use gpm, so I could restart it and get my mouse back. But what could I expect? Both Linux and Microsoft developers use the same tools, the same language. Only the developers themselves could make a difference. Microsoft can hire the best developers, so I really don't see how Linux could be a difference here. They're hiring 5000 new people it seems! And do more eyes look at the Linux source? How many thousands of Microsoft developers look at their source? This is not gonna work I'm afraid. And now I stop, reboot is completed. Let's see if IBM's supposedly log based file system hasn't screwed up my system. Another piece of code that never worked for me.

Time is up for my Gobo Eiffel parser tests. Expat is the fastest parser as we already knew. And interesting differences between Eiffel compilers. Huge differences. Hadn't expected that. And SmartEiffel is really the fastest. Something other experiments I've done already had hinted at.

Mark Steyn is at it again: you'll enjoy this.

Last week I released the final beta, so I thought, of xplain2qsl. But today I did a lot of work on certain constructs with Boolean that didn't work with Microsoft SQL Server. The problem is that Microsoft SQL Server doesn't have a Boolean data type. And assigning the result of a Boolean expression to a value didn't work. Took me more time than I expected to fix it. So perhaps I should do another release candidate. But as I don't get much feedback, I might as well skip it. Anyway, have to run all the tests again, as I had to touch a lot ofcode.

And problems with my XRTDS tool. Get a segment violation on a realloc. Somehow memory is being overwritten. A pure Eiffel world would be preferrable, but interfacing with CLI and your OS is a necessity unfortunately. Perhaps built-in checks in my STDC_BUFFER to see when memory is overwritten? I suspect it happens in ecli, but let's not point fingers before I've figured it out. And I have to give a demo tomorrow, so that means figuring it out before then, oops.