Photo gallery from CCCG 2012
Friday 10 August 2012, 21:00Here's a photo gallery (salvaged from my old gallery software in July 2020) of my trip to the Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry in Charlottetown, PEI.
LCD monitor adventures
Monday 23 July 2012, 16:16I haven't had very good luck with computer hardware, nor operating systems, in the last few months. I lost a hard drive in my main desktop computer at home, and had to replace that (no data loss because it waS RAIDed); the latest Arch Linux "upgrade" made my computer unbootable because the maintainers decided they had to move everything from /lib into /usr/lib and the documented procedure for doing the upgrade safely didn't cover oddball configuration cases like having GCC installed (because who would have that?); and now my LCD monitor is dying.
Photo gallery from SWAT 2012
Friday 6 July 2012, 21:00Here's a photo gallery (salvaged from my old gallery software in July 2020) of my trip to the Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry in Helsinki.
Open letter to Joyce Bateman
Saturday 21 April 2012, 12:24The latest evidence regarding the Conservative Party's fraudulent activities in the last Canadian federal election hits close to home for me because I live, and voted, in Winnipeg South Centre, one of the ridings subject to a court challenge by the Council of Canadians. The affidavit of Annette Desgagne is quite damning; people are calling it a smoking gun. One small ray of hope is that it's pretty clear this was all coordinated centrally, and probably by a small conspiracy. Much as I dislike the Conservative Party as an entity, I think there are some decent people within it, and it's likely a whole lot of them didn't know about the fraud and are as shocked by it as the rest of us. Most of the checks and balances of Canadian democracy have been emasculated under Harper, but it still remains that we can try appealing to the decent people within the Conservative Party to weed their own garden. Below is what I'm mailing to Joyce Bateman, CPC Member of Parliament for Winnipeg South Centre.
Arch installation thoughts
Tuesday 3 April 2012, 20:19I had a request for some comments on Arch Linux, now that I've been using it a few days, and in particular the question of whether it is easy to install.
Switching to Arch and XFCE
Tuesday 27 March 2012, 12:32I am, as the title implies, switching my home desktop system from Slackware Linux and KDE to Arch Linux and XFCE. You may see some minor disruptions here (in particular, the astrological chart generator may be down or unreliable) for the next few days. The switch is a pretty big production; I've been using Slackware for most of the last 20 years, and KDE for most of the time I've been using Slackware, and because I've been doing continuous incremental upgrades instead of full reinstalls, some parts of my system actually are that old.
There was no one big annoyance or disaster to make me want to switch, but my dissatisfaction with KDE has been gradually increasing for the last few years, and I decided it would be better to switch in a controlled way when I'm not fighting a fire, rather than wait until some kind of disaster forces me to switch under pressure. I'm still basically satisfied with Slackware, and I could have continued to use it, but I tried doing a similar KDE to XFCE switch on my laptop first to debug the process, and found that doing a complete reinstall of the underlying Linux distribution really makes the desktop change a lot pleasanter. Given that I'm doing a reinstall of the core Linux system, it seems like a good opportunity to also do the switch to Arch, which has some advantages over Slackware.
公安相のことは
Friday 17 February 2012, 14:48昨日は、カナダにツイッターに面白い日でした。しかし日本語の新聞は、それくらい記事を書きないと思います。これで私は教えています。あまりよい日本語ありませんごめんなさい。
今ある政党は、カナダの国会の上に君臨します。保守党が絶対安定多数です。でもたくさんの人は、その政党が好きありません。
最近与党は、新しい法案の提案しました。警察権を上げてインタネットの盗聴を作って法案んです。対決法案ですね。ヴぃっク・テーヴスさん（Vic Toews）と言う政治家は、その法案のスポンサーをします。公安相です。月曜日に、国会に、テーヴスさんは「[critics] can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.」と言いました。もじ公安相たちを支持しなければ、児童ポルノを支持しているということになりますよ！（@_w_deeさんの翻訳の介助ありがとう）英語のことわざは、「That's when the shit hit the fan.」です。たくさんの人は怒気になりました。
Testing with Autotools, Valgrind, and Gcov
Saturday 4 February 2012, 09:27I only have limited faith in software testing, partly because of my lack of faith in software engineering in general. Most professionally-written code is crap, and the more people use "methodologies," the worse their code seems to be. I'm inclined to think that the best way to remove bugs from code is to not put them in in the first place. Nonetheless, writing tests is fun. It's an interesting way to avoid doing real work, and some of you might enjoy reading about some test-related things I tried on a couple of my recent projects.
SOPA/PIPA protest disappointments
Wednesday 18 January 2012, 13:40As you probably know by now if you live under a rock and get all your news through the Net, several popular sites are protesting current US proposed Net censorship laws. I'm glad to see that happen, and I'm glad that a lot of people are paying attention, and I don't want to understate how glad I am of those things. But I'm also disappointed by a lot of what I'm seeing, too.
Distributed version control is not my favourite technology
Wednesday 11 January 2012, 11:41Not too long ago a free software project I'm peripherally involved in decided it was time to replace its old and not broken version control system with something new and broken, and the lead maintainer conducted a straw poll of what the new system should be. My suggestion of "anything, as long as it's not distributed" was shouted down by the chorus of "anything, as long as it's distributed." Having lost the argument in that forum, I'm going to post my thoughts on why distributed version control sucks here in my own space where it's harder for me to be shouted down.
