Older blog entries for ncm (starting at number 388)

For a couple of weeks, totem 2.28.5 on Debian has been crashing with SIGSEGV at startup with a message "Invalid column number 6 added to iter (remember to end your list of columns with a -1)". Traceback says this comes from a bad call to strlen, from somewhere under totem_action_set_mrl_with_warning. To fix it, I manually updated totem-common from 2.28.1-1 to 2.28.5-1.

redi, IlyaM: Ilya, your reaction to the C++ code you saw may (pace Jon) be right. There are heaps, mountains, planets of bad C++ code out there. Most of it probably comes from former (and current) Windows coders and Java coders. It's no harder to write good C++ code than good C code, but they seem disinclined to do it, or don't know how. C presents fewer temptations to bad coding than C++, but fewer tools to write powerful code. When you find a C++ library packed with virtual interfaces, "get" and "set" members, redundant constructors, and operator overloads, what you're seeing is probably just the product of procrastination.

A month ago I quit drinking (green) tea. Now my ADD is gone. I started twelve years ago because I was persuaded that it was "good for me". If you don't have ADD, dropping caffeine might not do you much good. If you do have ADD, have you tried that?

From an exchange on LWN:

... transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ ... PHP->Scheme or PHP->Lisp ... would be seen as ... impossible to use in "real life" ... would be seen as very, very funny -- particularly by Lisp fans ... Roadsend PHP Compiler [is] doing (php -> scheme (bigloo) -> c)

Lisp comedy -- it writes itself.

My laptop is running linux 2.6.32.7 now, and the $2 Clique HUE cameras that failed with 2.6.29.4 and barely worked with 2.6.31.4 now seem to work fine, even producing credible (fake) 1280x1024 video at low frame rates. Thank you to Brian Johnson, I think.

I finally saw Avatar. My advice is -- particularly if you're seeing it with kids -- leave the theater at the point right after the first big explosion. At that point you have seen everything original and inspiring, and you can walk out feeling invigorated and inspired by the visuals, and forget all about the toy plot. Every detail after that point rings false. It just keeps getting dumber and dumber until it's just a parody of every other Hollywood explosions movie.

Seriously, there are two movies here. The first is beautiful. The second is ugly and stupid. There are much better things to do with that final half hour than getting dragged through Hollywood's gutter.

Epiphany itself has a nice new version, 2.29.6. It now gets stuck in an infinite loop while rendering (some?) meetup.com pages, failing to render any other pages and keeping CPU usage pinned at 100%, or even crashing outright. It's not entirely certain 2.29.5 didn't also fail on these pages with Webkit 1.1.19, or even Webkit 1.1.18, but with Webkit 1.1.17 it didn't.

Webkit released a version 1.1.19, so I decided to try out Epiphany on it. The bug from 1.1.18 that made Epiphany unusable is fixed, but none of the Debian changelogs nor the Webkit or Epiphany changelogs hints at anything germane. Maybe it was some random library incompatibility, fixed by my upgrading libgtk or something in the meantime. So, I am left to thank the anonymous person who fixed it. Thank you, anonymous person.

Sadly, it still ignores my Gnome edit-key bindings setting.

The American Experiment lasted 233 years, 6 months, and 18 days. It was an interesting experiment, but it's over now. I wonder what historians will call the new form of government instituted by the Supreme Court on January 21. (They might reasonably date it to the 2000 Gore decision, instead.) It strongly resembles Fascism, but without the millennial ideology it carried last time around. It's hard to believe Europe will be able to, um, save us the way we (and Russia) did them, then.

Following up on what katzj said, when somebody says "cloud" to you, immediately say "I don't know what a 'cloud' is. Please mention something that exists."

I have finally been forced to abandon Epiphany, as of webkit 1.1.18. Now, when it recovers after a crash and can't reload the page, it shows "blank page" in the address bar, and logs that, instead of the address that wouldn't load, in its session_crashed.xml file. Epi with webkit 1.1.17 didn't do this.