Advogato blog for ncm

16 Jul 2008

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:09:49 GMT

chalst: My experience is that the account deletion threshold is set so (artificially) high that the only way to get a spammer account deleted is to mark them down as spammers unless it's dead clear they're not. Even then lots of fake accounts get through. Mostly the real spammers don't start spamming immediately; they appear to be accumulating fake accounts and holding them in reserve.

Anybody who gets their account deleted can just sign in again and behave less spammerishly next time, so there's no reason to use kid gloves.

14 Jul 2008

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:12:31 GMT

I have altered the "s_t" and "c_t" ligatures in my copy of the Linux Libertine font so the loops are higher. They look really good in Firefox, when it uses them. (I haven't discovered yet how Firefox -- really, libpango -- decides whether to substitute ligatures; sometimes it does, sometimes not, sometimes both in one paragraph, e.g. this one.) Now I need to fix the italic, bold, and bold-italic versions, and get them all accepted upstream. I'd still like to find a better way to get them used by default.

10 Jul 2008

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:34:33 GMT

labaru: What? I'm one of Mauro's biggest admirers. Sincerely: Go, Mauro!

10 Jul 2008

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:42:20 GMT

redi: No kidding! "We do not use C++ exceptions." What a way to dispel the myth of a Google populated by geniuses. Oh, and StudlyCapsTypeNames, too. If it's true that "taste is the feminine of genius", they've shot both. Oh, look, enumerator names that get clobbered by common vendor header macros? Fail. No rule against public virtual functions? Fail. No requirement to qualify member accesses with "this->"? Fail. "Don't use an unsigned type", without a peep about how signed overflow is undefined behavior? Fail.

3 Jul 2008

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 03:18:36 GMT

I just changed my linux-libertine typeface to make Firefox use the looped ligatures for "st" and "ct". I don't know what would be the "right" way to do it; I just added those ligatures to the default set. Unfortunately, they're kind of ugly (not loopy enough), and there's no ligature for "sc". To fix.

3 Jul 2008

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 02:28:42 GMT

Solar

Whenever I read a serious discussion of the prospects of solar power in the U.S., I read that huge expanses of land would be needed, presumed to be in faraway deserts, to cover with solar panels or mirrors. I look out the window, though, and see huge parking lots all around. These lots are mostly uncovered, but not because people don't want to park in covered spaces. Rather, it would cost money to roof them over. Roof them with solar power collectors, everybody benefits: the lot owner gets another income stream, the car owners get covered parking, and the power company avoids transmission costs and losses.

The same argument applies to sports stadiums. Warehouse and mall roofs would last much longer if shaded, and their owners' cooling bills would be lower. Many bridges would look better, and be safer in bad weather, covered; likewise freeways. It seems to me there is plenty of public and semi-public land that would benefit from another use.

1 Jul 2008

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:15:03 GMT

The Debian Iceweasel/Firefox 3 crash (tickled by the linux-libertine 2.8.14 release) is fixed today with libpango1.0-0 1.20.4-1. (Yay Sebastian Dröge!) But why is it "urgency=low"?

26 Jun 2008

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:00:49 GMT

fzort: I would hate for you to think me your a.o nemesis. I enjoy, and learn from, your postings. That one just tickled four peeves at once. Emulating a class hierarchy in C, though, looks like make-work.

26 Jun 2008

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:39:07 GMT

fzort: Your mistake was fourfold. First, using StudlyCaps names rots the brain. Second, even thinking about Singleton rots the brain. Third, the visible presence of keyword "delete" usually indicates bad design. Finally, class hierarchies are an optimization step; first code without. The biggest difference between writing a program well in C++ and in "straight C" is in how expressively powerful are the libraries you have access to.

The place where you code very differently in C++ vs. C is in libraries. Of course any big enough program will have parts that increasingly resemble libraries, but programs don't start out big.

25 Jun 2008

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:02:55 GMT

Sure enough, downgrading linux-libertine from 2.8.14 back to 2.7 appears to have fixed the Debian Iceweasel/Firefox crashiness. UPDATE: Turns out this is known, Debian #488015. UPDATE 2: ...and #487979, both today, but from Germany, where they have a nine-hour jump on me. (Yay Sven Joachim, excellent bug reporting.) It's a good thing there are other browsers.