Older blog entries for redi (starting at number 210)

lkcl, if I lived a few miles in the right direction I would vote for you, stick it to 'em

The C++ FCD (final committee draft) has been published for review by national bodies and member organisations. Once ballot comments have been received and dealt with there will be an FDIS (final draft international standard) and then a new standard. We're getting there, slowly.

GCC 4.5 has been released, and though certainly not a complete implementation, GCC 4.5 is pretty close to the FCD. As with GCC 4.4 last year, the new release happened while I was at the ACCU conference, where my Abusive C++ talk went very well. As I enjoyed it so much I'm keen to speak again next year, if I can think of a good topic.

I recently noticed that /usr/share/dict/words on Fedora is chock-full of gibberish, making it useless for most of the useless things I used to use it for (e.g. finding palindromes and words with 5 consecutive consonsants.) Even on RHEL it's got crap like 'dubitative'

apenwarr makes some very good points:

Java and Flash are the opposite of awesomeness. Thus, Apple rejects them outright.

As Homer wisely said, it's funny because it's true.

Microsoft won on the desktop by being developer-friendly and Apple won in mobile by being developer-hostile. Developers never had anything to do with it.

Also true. I think MS only told devs that devs were important, noone else cared. I don't see those unbearable Windows 7 adverts ("I told them to make it blow fewer donkeys, now it blows fewer donkeys") mentioning developers.

lkcl, yes, yes, and yes.

I'd take two, maybe more.

[Edit: just to be clear, the extras would be for family, not just to have several!]

When you have a survey site up please say so here on advogato.

Until then, what I want is:

• GNU/Linux, obviously.
• Portable. I have an eee 701, which is inferior in nearly every way to the later eee models, except its form factor. The size is more important to me than the later models' faster CPU (I've already upgraded the RAM it came with)
• Good battery life. It sounds like this wouldn't be a problem with an ARM-based system. It is a problem with my eee 701

That's it for must-have requirements. I wish the screen on my 701 was larger, there's plenty of room for a bigger screen, but I assume the small screen was used on the first model to save costs and I can live with it. The 701 keyboard and touchpad are shite, but I can live with them because it's very portable and runs Fedora without problems.

I don't care about onboard wifi, I rarely use it on my 701, I use a USB broadband dongle and ethernet far more often

What louie describes sounds a bit like how the diary rating system affects advogato's recentlog. I would like to see it on mailing lists though.

I thought I'd already mentioned this here, but apparently not. I'll be going to the ACCU conference in April, as I do every year, but this year I'll be speaking for the first time. Richard Harris and I will be presenting Abusive C++ in the last session on Saturday:

Time and time again we programmers have discovered that the clever tricks of yesterday are the maintenance nightmares of tomorrow, and yet still we are drawn, moth-like, to the leet.

In this session we shall describe a selection of our own clever C++ tricks, some of which we have learned to avoid, some of which have yet to burn us and some of which we have yet to use...

ncm, yes, I probably should have looked at the code to see if the longer version does actually offer any advantage to the users.

IlyaM, why should you care how long the library code is? What matters is whether the client code is more concise, or more readable, or allows users to be more expressive and efficient.

I have no idea which API is better in that regard, I'm only commenting on your rather misguided measure of how good an API is based on its implementation details. If the two provide exactly equivalent features with neither having any advantage for the user, then it makes sense to question the benefit of the additional complexity in the implementation.

welcome back, hjclub

badvogato, disjoint sets in the trust graph are interesting, but what cert level would the new seeds have? If they do not lose their certification then the spammer can still post their crappy SEO links with advogato's google-juice.

I prefer to say goodbye with the gesture "here's the source code, run your own mod_virgule but don't spam this one"

badvogato, are you suggesting we should convince the spammers to stop their pathetic attempts at SEO and to become Free Software developers instead?

That would certainly be consistent with the goals of advogato, but I'm not sure it's practical :)

I didn't say the system was ideal, only that it worked. I consider it unfortunate that hjclub's account was deleted. I did try to convince hjclub that certifying the spammer was a bad idea. I don't know if hjclub read that and I don't know whether the spammer's cert was dropped by hjclub, or as a result of hjclub's cert being dropped.