I find it hard to argue with Avery in his rant against C++, besides minor quibbles. (In fact, you can append to a std::string without re-allocating. You can choose whether a std::map should quietly allocate a new cell for a previously unused key.) Still, much of what he writes is true. Yes, C++ code is often unavoidably unpleasant to look at. Yes, std::string is nobody's baby. Parts of the language are best forgotten (I'm looking at you, RTTI, and exception declarations, and export templates). We could say that's the price of power, but Java is just as ugly and not powerful at all. Haskell is pretty enough, and seems powerful until you try to use it for anything. The Gloriously Incompatible Successor to C++ could be even more powerful, and beautiful, but it's nowhere on the horizon. Until somebody makes one, well... there's more to life than pretty code. Powerful code, for example.

I upgraded my laptop kernel to Linux 2.6.34.1 to get the qcaux driver so it would talk to my Sanyo Katana LX phone, to offload pictures. When I plug it in, it shows up in dmesg, but nothing seems to know how to talk to it. I wonder what to try next. [Update: Dan Williams's blog has everything known. Yay Dan Williams. No picture downloads, but ModemManager can PPP through it, which is good for something, I guess.]