If you are using Emacs 23, and you are mysteriously getting "Error: (args-out-of-range "" 0)" and/or "Lisp nesting exceeds `max-lisp-eval-depth'" messages every time you try to load or save a file... make sure you do not have a directory named .hg at the top level of your home directory. The vc-hg module doesn't deal well with directories named .hg that aren't actually a Mercurial repository for anything.

This PSA brought to you by the I Just Wasted An Hour On That Foundation.

API hall of shame (names redacted to protect the guilty): I have just found a class that must be used as follows:

void foo(Input *in, Output *out)
{
  Processor proc;
  proc->SetOutput(out);
  proc->Process(in, out->ThingOne(), 
                out->ThingTwo(), out->ThingThree());
}

Process() retrieves ThingOne through ThingThree itself, and asserts that its caller passed the same values. I could not make this shit up if I tried.

Something that comes up over and over in arguments about gay marriage and related topics is a notion that the heterosexual, romantic, and child-bearing nuclear family is somehow better than any other family structure. (For instance, this seems to be the core reason Flash Fiction Online turned down an ad for an LGBTQ-themed issue of Crossed Genres.)

To my somewhat-informed knowledge of history and anthropology, though, this notion fails on its presupposition that this nuclear family is the norm and has been since time immemorial. (One could make an argument for that family structure that didn't make that presupposition, but I have yet to see someone attempt it.) It's not. The dominant culture in the USA post-WWII does have a norm in favor of that family structure, but if you go back much further in time, or broaden your horizons much at all, all sorts of other structures turn up to compete with it. Extended families. Multiple wives and multiple husbands (the latter is rare but not at all unheard of). Arranged marriage for property reasons, with neither romance nor childbearing expected. Female-female marriage, again for property reasons. Cross-generational homosexual relations as rites of passage. Moieties, exogamy, hearth-sharing.

I can rattle off a list, but I would like to be able to cite serious research about the prevalence of these various institutions and their variations across time, culture, and class. O my readers: where does one begin?

The microphone input on my desktop computer mysteriously stopped accepting input a couple weeks ago, which is really inconvenient since I rely on VoIP for work-related phone calls. Normally when this happens the problem is ALSA has changed which of its many, many volume control sliders I need to have unmuted. Again. So I spent half an hour playing with them to no effect.

Turns out this time the problem is with GStreamer: of the two choices it gives me for sound input device, "Default" does not work, "STAC92xx Analog" does. This leaves me wondering what the hell is it defaulting to, if not the one and only analog input that exists?

Also frustrating that there appears to be no physical jack on this computer that corresponds to either the "headphones" or "speaker 1" output channels in ALSA, so I still have to crawl behind the computer and change cables for phone calls, but that's a hardware problem and if I really minded I could go buy a cheap A/B switch.

if (constant == variable)
if (pointer != 0)
if (pointer != NULL)
if (boolean == true)

}
else {

fprintf(stdout, ...);

printf("%s", variable);
printf("string with no substitutions");
printf("\n"); // or any other single character

I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to answer my previous question about the best way to draw boxes with dotted lines, when you can’t make them come out perfectly. That discussion ended with a jury split — most of you liked either big dots at the clockwise end or corner gaps to avoid big dots, but there wasn’t any agreement about which of those two was better. I’ve got to pick one, so I’ve drawn much more thorough examples of those two options, and I would like to ask you to consider again which you like better.

Big dots at the clockwise end	Corner gaps to avoid big dots

It is an unfortunate mathematical fact that you cannot draw a dotted line that is one pixel wide, an even number of pixels long, and has dots at either end. This being the case, which of the following possible alternatives to that unachievable ideal looks least bad? Including None of the above; I have a better idea which I will explain, of course.

You might want to magnify the image to see exactly what is going on; however, the aesthetics at this size are what matters.

ETA: I should have explained that both of the boxes in each row are generated by the same algorithm; the difference is that in the left column, the vertical sides are an odd number of pixels long, whereas in the right column, all four sides are an even number of pixels long.

I get junk email from Senator Boxer (D-CA) -- her staff just sent out this open letter:

Making sure America’s families have access to affordable, quality health care is a complex challenge, but one we simply cannot afford to ignore any longer.

The status quo is unsustainable:

46 million Americans have no health insurance.

The U.S. spends more than twice as much on health care per person than most other industrialized nations, yet we rank 29th out of 30 industrialized nations on infant mortality.

Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have more than doubled in the last nine years.

And, a recent study found that, if we do nothing, families in many states, including California, will have to spend 40% or more of their pre-tax income on health insurance through their employer.

The time for action is now.

As I work with my Senate colleagues to craft healthcare reform legislation, I ask you to help me by sharing your stories and experiences—both good and bad—with our healthcare system.

I don't have anything particularly good to send in. But if you do, http://boxer.senate.gov/features/healthcare/submit.cfm is waiting to hear from you.

1. The shiny new smart phone I just got, which has more CPU grunt and nonvolatile memory all to itself than I had to share with 1000 other undergraduates in 1995, does not function as a telephone outside the continental USA.
2. It can talk to satellites in space and find out where I am standing, but cannot deduce from this that I am standing at a bus stop, nor find out when the next bus will arrive.
3. AT&T (thankfully, as of day before yesterday, my former telephone carrier) has just billed me nearly four dollars a minute for a phone call to New Zealand.

You can now buy it, courtesy of Zazzle. (Slightly redesigned, font now URW Bookman. Still CC-BY.)

The CA Supreme Court ruled today that Proposition 8 stands, which means gay couples cannot be legally married in California, except for the 18,000 such couples that married last year, in between the earlier ruling that allowed it and the passage of the proposition in November. Here’s the full text of the decision; I confess I have not read all 185 pages of it.

Subtext and hair-splitting. I read appellate court decisions for fun. It’s a hobby of mine. As you might expect, appellate judges are masters of hair-splitting — they have to be — what you might not expect is that they’re also very, very good at subtext. One of the subtexts that you see fairly often boils down to We looked under every stone for an excuse to rule otherwise and could not find one. This decision is dripping with it. I concur with aphrael’s comment here: the court was in a bind, it could not rule Prop. 8 invalid without also invalidating a whole bunch of earlier initiatives that no one wants to disturb right now (although, looking at the list, some of them deserve to be thrown out). They go so far as to point out that that in a sense, petitioners’ and the Attorney General’s complaint is that it is just too easy to amend the California Constitution through the initiative process. They wouldn’t even mention that if they didn’t agree with it.

So since they can’t overturn the initiative, what they do instead is an artwork of hair-splitting: they declare that the proposition carves out a narrow exception applicable only to access to the designation of the term marriage, but not to any other of the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage...  (emphasis in original). In other words, the state remains obligated to provide some legal framework to gay couples that is identical in all but name to marriage. I guarantee you this is not what the backers of Prop 8 had in mind.

Words matter. Identical in all but name is still not equal, and not just for symbolic reasons. There are hundreds if not thousands of little ways in which someone you are married to is special cased: in law, in contract, in custom. (My personal favorite example: your spouse is automatically allowed to drive any car you rent, no questions asked, no extra fee, even if you’re over 25 and they’re not.) Now, the state legislature can easily pass a law saying that all those special cases also apply to anyone you are civilly united to, but imagine you’re out there on the sharp end of the stick, arguing with a bigot over whether you have to pay extra for your same-sex lover to drive the car you rented. The State of California says we’re married, so fuck off has ever so much more force than The State of California says we’re civilly united and the word spouse on your form legally includes that (so fuck off).

Sixty miles to the nineteenth century. California is not as liberal as one might like to think. We’re a community property state. We’re a right to be fired for no reason state. We’re a 2/3 majority to pass the state budget state. I live in the district of U.S. Representative Brian Bilbray (R), whose push poll about taxes sits on my desk even now waiting for me to have enough acid to dip my cursor in for a suitable reply. And he’s popular. Some friends of mine, out in east county, put up a No on 8 sign last fall and it was vandalized within 24 hours. Point being, there really is a majority against gay marriage in this state. This is why the U.S. Constitution and sane state constitutions take repeated supermajorities to amend. No law abridging the freedom of speech would, at the least, have a flag-burning exception by now if it were as easy to change that as this. (Although, we shouldn’t forget that the ERA fell just short of the 3/4 state legislature bar.)

Is this well-formed (assume nothing else in the translation unit)?

  template <class T> class R {
    int f();
  };
  template class R<int>;

Now, how about this?

  template <class T> class S {
    int f();
  };
  template <> int S<float>::f() { return 10; }
  template class S<int>;

The crux here being that, in both cases, a definition of S is in scope at the point of the explicit instantiation, but a definition of S::f isn’t (only a specialization, in the second case). Section 14.7 of the C++ standard is so confusing that the authors included a joke about it in the text. GCC doesn’t complain at all, but I don't trust it to get templates exactly pedantically correct.

I saw this and cracked up:

Spotted on joeydevilla.com. Extra special "screw you" to Flickr for making me extract the image URL from their page with Firebug.

I dreamed this bumper sticker.

No, I don't know what it means, but if you have a use for it, please feel free (let's say CC-BY licensing, just to be clear).

Font is New Century Schoolbook.

I'm reading The Children of Húrin and I keep thinking: gosh, they could have avoided all this if Eru had been willing to share the power of True Creation with Melkor in the first place. I realize that within the mythology, that's a logical impossibility, but from the external perspective, why the heck not?

This in turn leads to a badfic idea in which a being from outside Eru's creation (I want to give it a completely ordinary name, like "Karen") shows up in Arda at some point during the First Age and offers to teach Melkor this, the power he's always truly wanted, if he'll just pack up and leave...