Wow. Ana Gasteyer just sang the word "asswipes" on network television. I'm surprised she could get away with that. Is "asswipe" to "asshole" as "darn" is to "damn"?
Boy, have I been busy at Wikipedia.
For some reason I decided to take pity on the Orphaned Articles, and I felt like I could fix the one for the goddess Diana. I mean, people know about her, right? Her name would come up in any thorough discussion of Roman mythology.
Well, one thing led to another, and eventually I found myself starting an article about Gene C. McKinney, who was Sergeant Major of the Army until he got accused of sexual harassment.
Now seriously, time for bed.
I didn't realize, until I read it in my mailing from the American Family Association, that there has been a bill in the House, now passed, to strip U.S. courts of the right to hear cases regarding the Pledge of Allegiance. I had to dig around the Washington Post quite a bit to find mention of it, after the fact. To its credit, the AFA writeup is fairly complete, mentioning Democrats' objections, as well as (naturally) a more thorough explication of the motivation behind it, and a mention that Democrat Tom Daschle has pushed for a similar law in the past -- not a pro-pledge law, but a law that prevents the Supremes from hearing cases on a certain topic. The AFA article doesn't say what the topic of that legislation was, though.
I think this is pretty scandalous. I myself am not entirely sure whether there is any wrong in having the Pledge contain the words "under God" if reciting it is not compulsory. But this sort of underhanded political posturing and power-grabbing pisses me off. Decisions like this should be made by people who can think for themselves, and who aren't thinking about how their decision will affect their chances at reelection.
Well, I suppose I wouldn't run into bugs like these if I felt like I had the time to fully learn the concepts I have to work with at work, but when I get told, "take a day to learn how to do threads" (for example, not related to this post), well, I spend that day seeing if I can hack something together that seems to do what I want, and praying it'll just compile.
So I had this C++ class, an Event Consumer, which inherited off a POA_RtecEventComm::PushConsumer1. It was working great. I had had to add a few methods to it beyond what was specified by the RTEC Event interface, but I had gotten these all working. So I'm moving forward, and I realize I need to have several different types of Event Consumers, all the same, except for the implementation of the push() method. Time for some inheritance!
So I split my fully-functioning Event Consumer class into a base class (keeping the same name for that) and a derived class, which I called FSEventConsumer, and coded everything up in a way that I thought should allow it all to work as it had before. And, with my gcc 3.2 compiler, the file where I implemented both base and derived classes compiled fine. But at the link stage, I got a series of error messages similar to the following:
.obj/EventConsumers.o: In function `EventConsumer::EventConsumer[in-charge](CORBA::ORB*)':
/home/bob/project/test2.6.6/obj_LINUXPC/corbaClient/EventConsumers.cpp:18: undefined reference to `VTT for EventConsumer'
/home/bob/project/test2.6.6/obj_LINUXPC/corbaClient/EventConsumers.cpp:18: undefined reference to `VTT for EventConsumer'
/home/bob/project/test2.6.6/obj_LINUXPC/corbaClient/EventConsumers.cpp:18: undefined reference to `vtable for EventConsumer'
/home/bob/project/test2.6.6/obj_LINUXPC/corbaClient/EventConsumers.cpp:18: undefined reference to `vtable for EventConsumer'
There were lots more than these, and not all of them had "VTT" or "vtable" in them, but they were all confusing.
I had to go ask for help; turned out the problem was that in my base class, EventConsumer, I had declared the push() method, but not implemented it anywhere. I hadn't been able to figure that out on my own because I was never instantiating the base class anywhere, so precisely how and whether I defined a given method in the base class just didn't seem important as long as it was defined in the derived class. Apparently it is important, at least to this compiler. In this case, the solution was as simple as commenting out the declaration of the push method in the base class's constructor! Yay!
Now, if I could be given a week to just read about inheritance, virtual functions, etc., I could see where I could develop a solid enough understanding of it that it just wouldn't occur to me to declare something I didn't intend to implement. Sigh. Stupid work.
[1] I don't expect everyone to know what that is; the important thing is that it's a virtual class that I have no control over. It's part of CORBA, and I'm using TAO, The Ace Orb, for those who are interested.
While it sucks that Yahoo[u.p.o] no longer lets you compose an HTML e-mail unless you're using a particular web browser on a particular operating system1, they have taken a cue from Gmail and whipped up some (cross-browser) DHTML to give you name expansion for the addresses in your address book. They already had that working for IE, but just didn't bother for {W3C-compliant Web browsers} until just recently.
[1] Used to be that you could hand-code the HTML in there yourself, and click a little check-box saying "send as HTML", but they took that away. Boo!
From the make-fun-of-419ers'-spelling dept.
I just got a 419 similar to this one. Strangely, my Yahoo account didn't detect it as spam.
...AS WE HAVE BEEN RELIABLY
INFORMED OF YOUR DISCRETENESS AND ABILITY.
OK, I am a man of considerable ability, but I wouldn't really describe myself as discrete; I certainly try to make the various aspects of my life flow into each other. I also don't cease to exist for brief periods of time, nor do I jump through space; I'm always pretty close to where I was a moment ago. Then again, I may not be, and I'm just not aware of it. Which would make those around me pretty rude for not telling me that I have a nasty habit of disappearing into thin air in mid-sentence, and reappearing later and finishing the sentence like nothing ever happened. Bastards.
I've been particularly uninspired lately, I guess. I also have a lot of pressing things somehow. I'm trying to get this damned security clearance application finished; isn't that just the most enjoyable thing in life? Cut yourself open and show your guts to the government, and then demand that friends and relatives far and wide do the same.
I'm back in the business of teaching English. Henry's mother-in-law-elect wanted a private tutor, and Henry recommended me, and sort of demanded me to do it. Since he'll be moving out soon, and I want to keep in touch in some way after the wedding and after he's gone, I must have subconsciously figured this would be a good way to keep my social contacts going. Unfortunately, my 60-year-old student's attention span is surprisingly short, and she is not the insanely on-top-of-things person that I would have hoped for in a 60-year old -- indeed, that I would particularly crave, given the limited ability of someone that age to re-learn the rules she's taught herself badly.
Good comments on this The King of Pointland post about Cheney's RNC speech. I like the 6th comment. Which just goes to show you how immature I am.
This ad popped up while I was visiting an article at the Washington Post. I thought it was pretty funny and clever.
It does seem to be easier to laugh at humor that leans toward your own point of view. In my case, I don't particularly blame Bush for the economic slowdown we may or may not be pulling out of now, but I do tend to see such messages as "from one of us".
This brightened my day. There is a town in Quebec called Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!! (Please note: the second of the two adjacent exclamation points is mine, to indicate my astonishment at the name, while the first of the two adjacent ones, as well as the stand-alone one a few letters earlier, are part of the name itself.)