Older blog entries for berend (starting at number 253)

The quote of the week goes to Ann:

Muslims are the only people who make feminists seem laid-back.

The little darlings brandish placards with typical Religion of Peace slogans, such as: "Behead Those Who Insult Islam," "Europe, you will pay, extermination is on the way" and "Butcher those who mock Islam." They warn Europe of their own impending 9/11 with signs that say: "Europe: Your 9/11 will come" -- which is ironic, because they almost had me convinced the Jews were behind the 9/11 attack.

Anyway, I'm safe in New Zealand. Or am I? Some newspapers and television stations here printed the cartoons as well. So far we haven't had calls for violence here, just protests by the local muslim community. To which they have a right. Wish they would be as upset when someone in their name kills a movie producer.

Quote of the month:

Simple though it may seem, this one line of code fixed the issue in almost all browsers, except Internet Explorer. I hate IE just as most web developers and designers do, but I could not ignore the fact that 70% of my visitors were still using this cursed web browser. So I had to continue looking for another solution.

Why does a company with so many billions create such inferior stuff? I just made an AJAX demo for my company showing them how one of their applications could become multi-user and deliverable over the Internet and use just 150MB instead of 3GB, but I had to spend 2 full days fighting IE and still its output is inferior to FireFox for example.

Hit by another Internet Explorer bug. What a piece of BLEEP is this piece of software. Every other browser is a joy to use, this is just one big pain.

Mother Sheehan, just saw one of our apps taking 2.5GB of memory!! This is on a Windows 2003 or XP machine with the 3+1 setup (3GB apps, 1GB OS). And a special patch to allow the app to use 3GB of memory. Better get my Ajax demo ready that shows off the functionality of this app, in a browser, and uses just 100MB of memory.

Matthew points to an interesting weblog entry about Lisp. Because I'm using Emacs, I've been doing Lisp (Emacs-Lisp, ok) as well for a long time, and indeed, Lisp is interesting. But so is Forth for example. And in the end my thoughts on this are that not everything is a stack, and not everything is an untyped list of things.

Modifying Lisp code is hard. Trying to understand how things are passed along is hard because the passed lists are not annotated. Adding new material to pass along to another routine is hard. For example you cannot just append things to the list. You might need to wrap the original list in another list and append the new data you want to pass along. But that will break an unknown number of other routines which use the output of the routine that generates the list in the first place.

Modifying software is much easier in the Algol families, and especially in Eiffel. Changes made here are truly local.

Yesterday I realised how blessed we are in our day and age. I usually read/browse a lot on Sundays, and I went through an amazing list (no particular order):

1. John Gill's commentary on the Bible, Internet version indeed.
2. Johan's Huizinga's Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, in a most beautiful printed edition (couldn't find link to this edition), which I purchased many years ago.
3. Those Terrible Middle Ages by Regine Pernoud.
4. Maarten Toonder's Als je begrijpt wat ik bedoel ("if you get what I mean"). I'm a fan of the Olivier B. Bommel cartoons since I was a teenager and was lucky to purchase a second-hand ones when I visited The Netherlands.
5. My hard copy of the 1991 edition, bought as a poor student in 1991, of the Encyclopedia Britannica to read an article about Thomas Aquinas.
6. Two issues of the magazine from my church, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
7. Karl H. Dannenfeldt's biography on Leonard Rauwolf sixteenth-century physician, botanist, and traveller, which I bought from a second-hand book seller on Amazon.
8. Greatness : Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders, a very interesting book by Steven F. Hayward.

All these things made and delivered to me by the market. An extra-ordinary place, an extra-ordinary invention. And then to know that so many want to destroy the market, hate free markets, want to control what I do with my money. Don't trust people to make the correct decisions with their money. Control freaks, who, when push comes to shove, want to control every piece of your life. A typical example is Hillary Clinton:

Hillary Clinton: "We're Going to Take Things Away From You on Behalf of the Common Good"

Yep, and Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of my country is precisely the same. All socialist all over the world are.

For my part, I love markets. Unless government, they actually work.

Just back from a concert in the Auckland Town Hall by the New Zealand National Youth Orchestra. Never been there. Accoustically speaking I wasn't impressed, but that could have been due to my seats at the back, row W. But the technical abilities of this orchestra is just amazing.

The kids were asked at school if they wanted tickets for this. They liked to go, so I agreed. Didn't expect that much and hadn't seen the programme, heard they had the Russian and Ludmilla Overture by Glinka and something from Tchaikovsky.

But I'm really glad I went. They performed a New Zealand work as well the Tu-mata-uenga (God of War, Sprit of Man) by Robin Toan. If you ever get the chance to hear that live, go! A truly magnificient piece.

And then we got Prokofiev's third piano concerto as well! Lucky day. Part one and two were performed brilliantly, both by the orchestra and the pianist John Chen. That man has a honey sweet touch! And par coeur the whole concerto!! Performed as well as I've ever heard. Part three was less interesting. Not sure why, just had the feeling the tempi weren't right, and I also had a hard time distinguishing the piano from the orchestra. No, the accoustics didn't win me over.

We finished with Tchaikovsky. After Prokofiev, I could have gone home, that was enough. But they performed it with gusto.

Great evening. And watch John Chen.

Just had it with Opera today. It crashed ten times. I wasn't using Mozilla because it doesn't save my session, so every time you restart it, you have to reload all your windows and tabs.

But I was so sick of Opera that I went to Google searching for a Mozilla session saver. Voila!! Found The SessionSaver extension!!! And it works. I've switched. Let's see how this goes.

There are a lot of extensions there. All the stuff that Opera has, is available. Reload pages every couple of minutes. There's even an image zoom facility. I'm now compiling Mozilla 1.7.11 so I can install an extension that can move tabs around. When that works as well, there's no reason to use Opera anymore.

Doing an LDAP parser in Eiffel for for my eposix library. It seems however that the RFC 2849 has some bugs. Examples that are incorrect (not folded correctly, wrong data) and I believe the ldap-oid specification is also incorrect. As I read the spec only 1 or 1.1 are ldap-oid's, as in fact there can be an infinite number of numbers separated by dots.

Why aren't RFC's published in a format where people can leave comments??</a>

Well, that switch to pure erc wasn't as easy as it sounded like. It seems Emacs has a problem when you switch between networks, as I do with my laptop. I finally tracked the problem down to the use of getaddrinfo(). It seems this function implicitly calls res_init() which caches /etc/resolv.conf. When /etc/resolv.conf changes, it doesn't notice. So Emacs tries to contact a non-existing name server.

I've patched Emacs to call res_init() when getaddrinfo() fails and that seems to work. This also explained why I couldn't get to access my NNTP servers if I loaded GNUS while at work. At work I can't access the NNTP servers of my provider at home, but if I loaded GNUS at work, it tries to access them. But when I resume my laptop when home, I never could get access to my NNTP servers again, unless restarting Emacs. But that issue is now also fixed.

Two more things to do: create the patch and write a nice description for it. And secondly, get RMS to accept the thing.

On other stuff: at work I try to implement Single Sign On for our application in a Windows environment. If one could just copy and paste code that did do that. Lots and lots of articles with all the acronyms one might desire. But code? Nowhere. Only talk.