20 Feb 2009 redi   » (Master)

In a reply to one of his recent articles, lkcl said:

here's the secret, that you and everyone else who reads what i write, don't seem to be in on...

I take objection to "everyone else," lkcl was one of the first certs I gave on this site, and the only reason I removed the Master cert I'd given him was because of his certification of mentifex, not because I don't value his work. My feeble trust-juice will have no influence on either of their ratings, but that's not the point.

There's been some more brouhaha about KDE4 recently (well, recently when I first saved this draft diary entry) including Linus Torvalds announcing he's switched to gnome. Some commenters have said that people who aren't happy on the bleeding edge should not be using distros such as Fedora. I agree, but my problems with KDE4 are not that there are unstable, unreliable parts, which I expect from new releases. It's that basic functionality was removed, resulting in stupid regressions that still aren't fixed in KDE 4.2, despite claims that it is "a compelling offering for the majority of end users." The problems for Fedora users are exacerbated by the response to any KDE-related bug reported to Fedora bugzilla: "not our problem, report it upstream." (update: and in some cases claiming it's fixed without even bothering to check.)

Despite its flaws, I really do like my eee pc. Being able to hack on code while walking down the street is brillant.

Recently I did some hacking on std::thread for libstdc++, as I needed to make a small fix before I could finish std::bind and I got carried away making improvements to std::thread.

I also suggested a few patches for Boost to fix some problems in the (fscking excellent) new thread library. Unfortunately whether I report bugs to the boost list or to trac, they seem to fall between the cracks. The list has far too much traffic for me to follow, so I don't bother chasing them up.

I've realised that one of the things I like about smart pointers in C++ is what they tell you about the programmer. Smart programmers use smart pointers. The other group use raw, unsafe pointers.

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