Advogato blog for ztf

25 Nov 2003

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 12:11:23 GMT

Blog

Eclectic Amateur is not entirely fallow, but posting is infrequent (weekly, when I'm lucky), and less Eclectic than I'd hoped -- it's been too much on the current SNAFUs of the Episcopal Church and less on everything else.

Life

... is good. Work is busy, which in the current economy is A Good Thing™.

Politics

MichaelCrawford, while I do think there are some very troubling problems in the USA that the "War on Terror" has exacerbated, here are some points to consider:

Suppose George Bush loses the upcoming election. Do you think he will cede power?

Oh boy. Not to rehash 2000 in great detail, but (1) the local officials on the ground in Florida, plus most of the Florida Supreme Court were Democrats, and (2) the SCOTUS ruling was not "for" Geo. W., it was against the Florida SC making up election rules not addressed by the legislature ex post facto. This was not a defeat for the rule of law.

So yes, if George Bush loses the 2004 election, I fully anticipate that we will see a new President. You may not believe he won, but I think he does. And we are not so far gone in this country that a President can simply refuse to step down.

I am very fortunate to have married a citizen of another country so that I can be sponsored as an immigrant in a safe haven. I've been in what I hope to be my new permanent home of Canada for a couple of months now ... Even though I have fled to another country where the rule of law still applies...

No offense (and I know that you have some very good personal reasons to emmigrate to Canada, so I don't begrudge you that), but have you considered that Canada may not be a "safe haven"? And not because of the big bad neighbor to the south, either. From my observations, Canada is further along to a soft totalitarianism which abandons the rule of law than the USA is. Don't let your anger at GWB blind you to the possibility that you're moving from the frying pan into the fire.

25 Jun 2003

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 14:54:55 GMT

Life:

A year and a half with no Advogato entries? How pathetic. In the meantime, I've experimented with running my own blog, Eclectic Amateur, although that's gone mostly fallow. Amazing how Real Life™ just keeps getting in the way. (Also amazing: the search strings that bring people to a blog with "amateur" in it's title.)

I had the pleasure of meeting MichaelCrawford in person while he was in the area for MacHack. It was a more than fair trade; I grilled steak for Mike and got to pick his brain about all things hacking and consulting-related. And he was most gracious about the entropy zone that is our house with four small children.

Job changes continue. I am now out of data-mangling for websites and am back into embedded systems. This time, they're automotive and aerospace instead of telecom.

Hacking:

I've done squat with GtkGlArea; happily I've abdicated that responsibility.

Spent some time learning (and trying to write about) gcov and gprof. Good tools, but severely lacking in the fit-and-polish department compared to what I'm used to from proprietary equivalents. My theory is that the folks who understand gcov/gprof enough to improve them have so thoroughly imprinted on their existing use/limitation that there's no "itch" to make them better.

On the positive side, I found a bug in the glib test execution via coverage analysis and even got a minor credit on the latest glib release!

I've also become a local (behind the firewall) GForge administrator. I like GForge, but I'm finding there's a bit of a learning curve on using it effectively and customizing it for local use. But I'm still happy with its potential for good use.

Thoughts:

Do not hate hard work nor despise farming, for the Most High has established them.
-- Sirach 7:15

25 Jan 2002

Fri, 25 Jan 2002 03:58:04 GMT

Hacking:

It figures. I'm starting to grow my hair pointy enough at work that I don't get to do much code anymore. But hey, there's always free software, right?

So I (foolishly) let jlof know that I'll take over maintainership of GtkGlArea for him, figuring that this will get me to dig into OpenGL and Gtk2 code getting it ported to the new Gtk+.

In reality, I end up doing administrative work while someone else goes ahead and does the port anyway. :^/

I guess I'm doomed for management. jfleck is right, once you start taking leadership roles it's hard to actually do the work yourself anymore.

Life:

Is busy.

3 Jan 2002

Thu, 3 Jan 2002 05:30:15 GMT

Life:

It continues. It's busy. :)

Hacking:

It begins again. :) I have gotten the Linux box running again, so there's some hope. OpenCASCADE 4.0 is out, and I finally bought a book on OpenGL and tried my first demos. Wahoo!

Not that AutoDesk has anything to be worried about yet ...

But at least I'm trying to not let all programming skills atrophy.

24 Aug 2001

Fri, 24 Aug 2001 12:25:13 GMT

Hacking:

Reducing my Win32 GTK+ work to the status of "useless, redundant, and irrellevant," someone has created a whiz-bang, no-brainer compile script whilst I was banging my head against a wall trying to figure out the steps. Some days, it just doesn't pay. At least I got the learning experience out of it (and a working MinGW).

Life:

School must start, soon! :)

17 Aug 2001

Fri, 17 Aug 2001 15:15:48 GMT

More Hacking:

Wahoo! I figured that as soon as I wrote my gripes about GTK+ Win32 compilation down, I'd get it solved.

Here's what worked:

Install Mingw.
Install Cygwin (REQUIRED, even though we'll be using the Mingw compiler). There is a bash script that is required to create the .DLL.
Make sure that Cygwin is after Mingw in PATH.
Make sure the current build directory is in PATH (required so that the generated glib-1.3.dll can be found for later build steps).
make -f makefile.mingw
Copy the results to a more useful place when done.

Now, hopefully I can repeat these steps ...

17 Aug 2001

Fri, 17 Aug 2001 12:49:11 GMT

Hacking:

Sheesh. I thought that compiling the latest and greatest GTK+ on Windows was a solved problem, accomplishable with little pain and suffering.

Apparantly, this is simple for Hans Breuer and tml, but they are using VC++. I was hoping to do this with MinGW, but either it's not quite baked or I'm still doing something brain-dead with my setup, even after reading all the README's I can find.

So here's what I've got so far:

Compiling glib-1.3.6 with MinGW didn't work.
Cross-compiling glib-1.3.6 under Cygwin didn't work.
Compiling glib-1.3.6 as a native Cygwin module didn't work
Getting latest from CVS and trying to build under Cygwin doesn't work, because autogen.sh wants a newer automake and because Cygwin doesn't ship with libtool.
At least the latest automake build cleanly for Cygwin.
However, libtool-1.4 fails all build checks, and some searching on the Cygwin lists yields the observation that libtool is Just Broken(tm) right now on Windows. But maybe in a couple of months it will be OK. :(
Some days, it just doesn't pay to not go to bed. :)

Oh well. Time to go back to the plain MinGW compile and try again ...

Life:

My Dances With Wolves name should be "Needs More Sleep."

Thoughts:

Well, at least the House passed the good cloning bill, even though my congrescritter seems to have not been persuaded by my letter. :^/

31 Jul 2001

Tue, 31 Jul 2001 03:45:41 GMT

Keeping And Arming Bears

bcully, I think the argument for The Right To Keep and Bear Arms(TRTKBA) is a bit more subtle than "we might need to overthrow the government again" (not that the founders shied away from that, having been successful revolutionaries themselves).

As I understand it, the reason that TRTKBA is enshrined in the Constitution is that it offends the dignity of a free people to be kept disarmed. In other words, it's a matter of liberty. Free men and women should be free to publish, worship, and be armed as they will. If people can't be trusted with force themselves, how in the world will they be able to elect those to government who can use force wisely?

As for nukes, a good explaination that I've seen is that the intent behind the "keep and bear" shows a practical limit. Citizens have a right to personal arms, something that an individual person in their private live might reasonably expect to wield and maintain. Handguns, rifles, and katanas obviously pass this test. M1A1 Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets, and tactical or stragetic nukes obviously fail this test. And of course we can find gray areas somewhere in between...

So cheer up. There's absolutely no way that the Constitution protects large evil corporations from becoming nuclear powers.</a>

More Thoughts

Why am I bothering arguing about TRTKBA when we have more urgent issues? I finally stopped procrastinating and wrote a dead trees letter to my congresscritter about the current crop of human cloning bills about to hit the floor of the House. Bottom line: I do not wish to live in a Brave New World. It is even more of an affront to human dignity and freedom to make persons into an industrial byproduct than to deny them TRTKBA. I'm urging Rep. Rivers to vote for the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001 (H.R. 2505, the Weldon bill) and to defeat the Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001 (H.R. 2608, the Greenwood bill). H.R. 2505 actually prohibits human cloning. H.R. 2608 allows the creation of cloned human embryos, but forbids allowing them to develop to term. In other words, "it's OK to clone people as long as you kill the clones before they get cute." It even goes to the trouble of forbidding states to pass alternative legislation, so that it would also mandate that all 50 states permit human embryo cloning. This is monstrous, and I hope that you all contact your congresscritters as well. This week. Even if you don't agree about banning human cloning entirely, at least urge them to defeat the Greenwood "clone-and-kill" bill.

30 Jul 2001

Mon, 30 Jul 2001 21:03:27 GMT

Thoughts

Telsa, there's something you need to understand about the American experiment: the founders intended to trust common people with dangerous things. This includes presses, property, and yes, deadly weapons. While this is (ahem) not entirely problem-free, I don't really see that trusting the gov't. to have a monopoly on the use of deadly force is problem-free either.

While it's not as common as it used to be, I remember growing up in a rural area where it was assumed that every household had at least one gun. Surprise: we didn't run around shooting each other.

But I expect that's hard to understand if you haven't seen it close up (which you wouldn't have on your side of the Pond).

If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns.
-- Edward Abbey

23 May 2001

Wed, 23 May 2001 14:12:44 GMT

Life:

Andrew James Frey is here! (And there was much rejoicing ...)

Work:

Perl is fun. :^)

Hacking:

Still nonexistant, although hopefuly this will pick up now that I get my cable ISP hookup today and now that Andrew is here.

The death of Eazel is very sad.