Phil Baugh: Country Guitar

I was doing time on the connector when what wafted through the aether on WRFG? Phil Baugh's Country Guitar. I don't know why, but it really struck my fancy

New Acronym: WTFW?

Do you ever wonder from whence something came? I do. I love thesarui, e. g.

WTFW?

Where TF Whence?

QOTD

Software can't solve the dumb-ass problem. -- Dr Aybabtu

Duff's Template

template <class T>
void
duff(T* to, T* from, T count) {
  T n = (count+7)/8;
  switch (count % 8) {
    do {
    case 0: *to = *from++;
    case 7: *to = *from++;
    case 6: *to = *from++;
    case 5: *to = *from++;
    case 4: *to = *from++;
    case 3: *to = *from++;
    case 2: *to = *from++;
    case 1: *to = *from++;
    } while (--n > 0);
  }
}

How to Make a Grown Hacker Cry

From Yaml for Ruby:

Man 1: What's Yaml?
Man 2: It's for writing data structures in plain text.
Man 1: And?
Man 2: And what? That's not good enough for you?

Top Tech RD

Note to self: Top Tech RD spenders. Got some Adobe verbiage in there...

Cool Timeline Web API

MIT Simile.

Key to World Domination

Note to self: read this. Key to PSan's Big Idea...

Google Talk

Note to self: investigate Google Talk

Oh! It is very wonderful!

How indenting with a tab key! What's all this now? Emacs Enviroment to Eclipse, or EE2E. Here is some cut-and-paste right off of the main project page:


How to use EE2E

Push a TAB key!
Then, it will indent!!
This is the most important function of EE2E.

Click the tab (ok, here) to understand how very wonderful indenting with a tab key!

Or something like that.

Ruby Rant

I haven't gotten a really good rant on for a while, but I can still recognize a good one when I see one:

ie_hack: Internet Explorer is the worst piece of crap to have ever been written, with the possible exception of Windows itself. Since IE is unable to parse proper XML, we have to provide a hack to generate XML that IE’s limited abilities can handle. This hack inserts a space before the /> on empty tags. Defaults to false.

Chortle.

Oh, The Beemanity!

I like bees. Still, I can't help but laugh at man v. bee. I wonder if any alcohol was involved...

Google Busts a Move

Google just busts a move.

Limited Edition Vista, Anyone?

W... T... F...

Hillary Throws Her Hat In The Ring

Yow!. The right-wing talk-radio newspeakers have all but destroyed any chance of meaningful consideration of Senator Clinton by a huge segment of our population. I'm not sold on the Honorable Senator from the (truly) Great State of New York, but she deserves a fair look.

Rosemary's Perl

*nix like environments are a funny thing. There are different tools (really, languages) for doing different things, and which one you reach for differs by context. One of the things that I never seem to learn is that just about anything I write is going to grow, eventually, and I should just start with SCSH and be done with it. But, no, BASH it is. Anyway, tucked away at the top of a growing file deployment script is

function die () {
    echo $@
    exit 1
}

and, later

test -d $ns || die "Directory $ns does not exist."

I have just birthed a little Perl demon baby...

Does bracket alignment matter?

I'm in the throes of trying to get some code out and it looks to be an anti-Massonian proposition. Along with other design and coding duties, I'm promulgating formal coding standards, project architecture, et cetera ad infinitum. One of the things that there seems to be near uniform consensus among our programming group is that brackets should align, in all contexts, thus:

if (! brackets_aligned_p)
{
  go_apeshit_ballistic();
}

For a while, I was fairly ambivalent about this, but GNU did give me the heebie jeebies:

if (brackets_gnu_aligned_p)
    {
        all_hail_emacs();
    }

C++ has put me over the edge in the other direction with namespaces. I simply cannot abide:

namespace foo
{
  namespace bar
  {

    // your nested namespace code here

    class CodeBastard : public CynicalBastard
    {

    };

  } // end namespace bar
// end namespace foo

Unanimous vote minus one for this. I cannot put my finger on the source of my loathing, and why I find:

namespace foo {
  namespace bar {

    // your nested namespace code here

    class CodeBastard : public CynicalBastard
    {

    };

  } // end namespace bar
// end namespace foo

soooooo much less offensive, and

namespace foo {
  namespace bar {

    // your nested namespace code here

    class CodeBastard : public CynicalBastard {

    };

  } // end namespace bar
// end namespace foo

now strangely compelling when at one time I didn't give a rat's ass. I never noticed it before, because I always did namespace brackets on the same line, regardless of the other ways we were doing functions and control structures. Even the GNU stuff was shudder and get on with it. Now I care, and I don't know why. Back at it.

Ghostscript with X11 Device on Cygwin

Note to self: (setq ps-run-x '("/usr/X11R6/bin/gs" <args>)). Something like that. Get all of my emacs stuff back into subversion.

Student of Strategy

Lately, I've been on a student of strategy kick. It's a recurring theme, wherein I dust off The Book of Five Rings and The Art of War and see if they're applicable to anything I have to deal with.

Turns out, they are, and I'll distill it into a bon mot: Tactics without strategy is tomfoolery.