Rosio Pavoris

Learning C is like learning Latin—while not necessarily of much practical use in itself, and viewed as archaic by most, it does provide a solid basis for understanding the countless languages derived from it, and an enormous help for students of those languages.

That’s not actually a literal quote from anywhere, but it’s still true.
Of course, the C-like-Latin meme has existed for a long time now, and many people actually use it pejoratively (one that comes to mind is “Learning C to learn Objective-C is like learning Latin to speak French—unnecessary and a waste of time”, which is also true, I suppose).
Though people are starting to apply it to C++ as well nowadays, which, in my opinion, is bullshit.

Speaking of C++, The Mansion is progressing nicely.
At this point, the compiled game is 337 KB in size, and it’s already possible to unlock all areas except one, which is three more than I intended for the first release. I’ve also added another area, bringing the total up to 31.
All essential functionality is there, though I’m still working out a bug with saving the game—for some reason, it won’t create a savegame file, though if the player manually creates a blank file, it works fine (and loading works fine too). I can’t imagine that’s not a common problem for nubby programmers, though, so my trusty internets should be able to help me out with that.

At this rate, it’ll be another ten days or so before it’s ready to be playtested. The official release should be in about two weeks. Which is two weeks ahead of schedule.
Wooh.

You may or may not have been aware of the problems with ZiRC, but the short of it is that all server admins took their ball servers and went home started a new network, synIRC, a few weeks ago.
Most channels are moving away from ZiRC, but I wanted to wait until I found out more about why this happened, both to find out if there was a legitimate reason, and to get an idea of how long-lived synIRC (and ZiRC itself) would be.
Now that I got that answer (tl;dr: prince is a self-important drunk and the only person running ZiRC right now), we are, indeed, moving. The only question remains, to which network?

I’d like to avoid networks without services (EFnet) or with retarded ones (QuakeNet), and ones with a large known population of idiots (DALnet, EsperNet), but other than that, I don’t particularly care.

#pharyngula will probably move with it, though that’s open to discussion, since that’s not just “my” channel.

Edit: ‘kay, apparently we’re moving #pharyngula with it.

… about my opinion regarding that scarlet A:

I don’t approve.
Not because I think it’s too in-your-face or because it makes atheism into a religion of its own (both opinions I’ve seen expressed with a straight face, if you can believe it), but because it’s not pretty.

The campaign itself is a good idea, and we desperately need to raise awareness (especially in certain North-American countries), and the gay community has proven branding works (and the scarlet A isn’t an attempt to turn atheism into a religion, or even a centralised movement, any more than the gay rainbow was for homosexuality), but I still very much prefer the asterisk as a symbol.

Having said that, I’ll probably still order a shirt.

After I stopped trying to use (unnecessary, turned out) vectors in the parsers, the game miraculously proved itself willing to compile. What’s more, it even runs.

As such, I present to you a very, very early preview of The Mansion (which might end up being its final name after all).
This preview only covers the prologue, mostly because the prologue uses a much simpler parser than the actual game. It’s 96.5 KB, which should tell you something about the amount of content in it. It doesn’t even have a start-up menu, which the final game will.

(And yes, it’s Windows only, I’m afraid. I haven’t looked into cross-compilers yet. You’re not missing much, though.)

I’m posting this mainly to encourage myself to stay on this project, and because I’m surprised it compiled in the first place. Not even looking for feedback, since there’s nothing to give feedback on, really.
Anyway, have fun with that.

(And run it from the command line, dammit. I’ll find a way around that in the final version, but as it stands, it just exits when it’s done, which means closing the console window if it opened it itself.)

I’ve told people WordPress makes a decent generic CMS for any website, not just blogs, on at least three separate occasions so far, without actually having any experience with using it that way.
Consider that rectified.

I was right, too. The only problem is that most themes assume you’re running a blog, not a regular website, so they require a fair bit of editing. If you know a bit about HTML, PHP, and WordPress’ idiosyncrasies, though, that’s easy enough.

It still needs a proper logo, incidentally. The current one is the theme’s default, and it’s neat, but not Rota Hall. Remind me to poke Terru about that.

If anyone here plays Desktop TD (which I’ve mentioned before) and can’t seem to finish Hard mode, I’ve written a tutorial thing detailing how I do it.
It’s not the greatest strategy ever (it can’t finish with all twenty lives intact), but it’s almost guaranteed to get to the end and it doesn’t involve juggling, so I thought it was worth posting. It also works for Medium mode, obviously.

Also, regarding the text adventure, I finished four of the thirty zones yesterday (though I didn’t get any work done at all today).
A naive reader might infer from this that I could theoretically finish the entire game within a week, or perhaps two, if you leave time for perfecting the parser and debugging. A naive reader would be wrong.

I’ve restructured the game a bit so that intermediate test compiles are possible (they weren’t before, due to preprocessor trickery), and it turns out that… I… suck at C++.
Not to the point where I have to start over, and definitely not to the point where I’m ready to say “fuck it” and move to another language, but, uh. Don’t hold your breath.
It should still be done by late August, though. There may even be a (closed) beta version before that.

Also, Terru is doing maps, which is winrar.

Random albino weasel. I know weasels are supposed to be Saythings‘ territory, but she doesn’t post enough.

If more of you were on IRC I wouldn’t have to repost this.

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Today is the eighth annual System Administrator Appreciation Day.
I’m not usually one for bandwagons that don’t involve either pictures of cats or breaking the law, but this is important, dammit.

System administrators are generally only noticed when something goes wrong, and the best sysadmins are the ones you never have to talk to or even think about, so as a class, they tend to be incredible underappreciated, especially considering the fact that they make the world not suck.
Many of them aren’t worthless assholes, even.

So, hug a sysadmin today. Or, since the day is almost over, I guess, hug a sysadmin every day.

There’s nothing inherently strange about getting spam. Statistics show that between 99 and 94% of all blog comments are spam. I get between five and several hundred spam comments a day (Akismet has stopped 6,981 of them so far, and I received at least twice that before I bothered to use Akismet).
There isn’t even anything particularly special about spam comments getting past my filters; Akismet stops nearly all of them, but every few days one or two will still get past. Most of those are stopped by my second filter, but even so, some get through with some frequency.

However, I wanted to share with you this particular comment I received earlier today:

I’m 8 years old and I’m doing a summer report on a nautilus. I love our picture of one eating a crab and I’m going to use it in my report, if that’s okay. I love your other pictures too of pandas but I’m not doing a report on pandas.
From, Emily in California

That’s cute, isn’t it? And it is, indeed, a comment on a post that includes a picture of a nautilus eating a crab. And I have indeed posted pictures of pandas on several occasions. And I know for a fact there is at least one Emily in California, so it’s plausible there could be another one, one that is eight years old.
But I don’t think eight-year-olds manage luxury and resort travel websites.

It’s a brave new world of spam out there, kids!
Whether this is a sophisticated new spambot (unlikely) or an actual manual spam comment (likely, since the e-mail address used is the personal address of one of the writers at that website and her husband), I decided it’s worth preserving. I’ve stripped the URL, though, because even I am not that nice.

(Of course, there’s still a small chance this is a legitimate comment and young Emily was forced to use the URL by her parents. Which is actually probably worse.)

(Also, just for the record, AFAIK, all of the animal pictures I post are either in the public domain, or free to use. Of course, since I get many of them from /an/, that can occasionally be hard to verify. Still, for a loli summer report, I’m sure it’d be alright to use them.)

This took a while to finish. In part because I’m reading too many books at once, but also because it’s so depressing I had to put it down a few times.
Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, published in 1962, is single-handedly responsible for revitalising the environmental movement around the world. I wanted to read it just for historical context, but the message is so powerful and important that it’s still a very important book.

The book is mainly concerned with indiscriminate pesticides (biocides) such as DDT and various chlorinated hydrocarbons. The book is, of course, famous for inspiring a movement that would very quickly get most of these banned, and it’s very obvious why.
She describes the various projects in the ’50s and ’60s that used these biocides, and how they have a tendency to not just affect the insects or plants targetted, but also, through a process of bioaccumulation in which the pesticides get stored in the bodies of animals in greater and greater doses as they travel up the food chain (that is, a single insect may contain X amount of DDT; a bird that eats twenty of those insects would contain 20X, and because it passes from the system only very slowly, it will remain there while that bird keeps eating insects, or while it is eaten itself), with the result that in the end, applications of these biocides end up killing enormous numbers of larger animals; several projects she described have been successful in wiping out all birds, squirrels, and fish in the (generally very large) treated areas, while not affecting the target insects very much at all, except by removing its natural predators, which, of course, is rather counterproductive.
And of course it’s not just dangerous to birds and the like. She documents a number of cases of human casualties; hardly surprising, given the toxicity of the products involving. Even if death doesn’t occur, permanent brain damage is far more common than it should be, in people handling or just being casually exposed to these supposedly safe products.
And even forgetting the immediate toxicity, there are long-term effects to be considered. Many of the products she talks about (including DDT) are powerful carcinogens. And speaking of long-term effects, insects, with their short generation times, are, of course, going to build up a resistance (and already have), so people will only keep using more and more dangerous pesticides.

She ends the book with alternative approaches to insect control, mostly through introducing natural predators of the insects involved. This has the advantage of being much cheaper and species-specific, and there’s no danger of developing resistance. Or, of course, poisoning your cat.

It’s all very, very depressing to read. If nothing else, it destroyed the myth that “if it’s bad for you, the government wouldn’t allow it!”. Fortunately, Carson’s book made a difference and got all of the products she discusses essentially banned; DDT was banned in the US in 1972, and in most of the rest of the world over the next few decades. Dieldrin, aldrin, endrin, chlordane, heptachlor, and its ilk soon followed.
Regulations on biocides and pest control became stricter and more sane, and most of the projects Carson describes would now be immediately dismissed as retardedly reckless.

Still, it’s alarming how many assholes are out to reverse the DDT ban. The meme that a DDT ban caused thousands/millions/billions of preventable deaths due to malaria is still out there, and for some inexplicable reason gaining support, even though it’s complete nonsense.
It’s important to remember that these people, regardless of their motivation (be it Kool-Aid-flavored ignorance or outright malice (well, greed; same thing)), are very directly working to kill your children.
This is only barely hyperbolic.

(If Rachel Carson and the things she cares about interest you, Deltoid is a very interesting blog that often deals with DDT nutjobs.)

Progress is being made!
I’ve decided on a general structure for the code itself (which was actually quite a big issue), and have worked out the particulars of the plot(s).

The generic parser I wrote at the beginning of this is already too crude to handle some of the commands required, but I’ll probably leave rewriting that for the very end; chances are good I’ll think of more important commands as I write the actual areas, and I don’t want to have to go back and rethink the parser structure every time that happens.
(Not that it isn’t pretty modular as is, I guess. It’s just that it tends to get cluttery, and since this is my first real C++ project, clutter is something I definitely can’t afford.)

It still doesn’t have a name yet, but that’s not that important.
(The working title is The Mansion, though since that’s already a book, a song, and a real building, I’ll almost certainly change it.)

There will be about thirty areas, though a few of them will be inaccessible in the first release, and a few more won’t have anything interesting in them. Still, I can easily finish an area a day (probably more than that, but I’m not hurrying through this), so the tentative release date for version 1.0 is August 28th. Or so.

Though I guess I have exams somewhere in that period as well. We’ll see.

MySpace bars 29,000 sex offenders

The company found more than 29,000 convicted sex offenders in the United States had profiles on MySpace - up from a figure of 7,000 given in May.

MySpace said it was pleased it had identified and removed the profiles of the offenders.

I’ve complained about this before—”sex offender” is far too broad a term, Megan’s Law is a miscarriage of justice, if these people are online they’ve already done their time (though double jeopardy doesn’t apply in this case, obviously), it’s not Myspace’s place to be a parent to your children, &c. &c.

“The exploding epidemic of sex offender profiles on MySpace - 29,000 and counting - screams for action,” said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

In North Carolina, Attorney General Roy Cooper wants a state law that would require children to obtain parental permission before creating profiles on sites such as MySpace, and require the site to check parents’ identity.

Attorneys General Blumenthal and Cooper are fucking idiots, either out to get some easy votes or insane paranoiacs ignorant of their own laws.

That is all.

Edit: Alright, not quite all. There’s also this post by Stephanie Booth, which for the most part articulates my thoughts a bit more coherently. Go read it.

This dude is supposed to be our next Prime Minister, y’know.
I can kind of understand not knowing why the Nationale Feestdag is when it is (and not just because Verhofstadt didn’t know either), but confusing the Brabançonne with the Marseillaise?

(Via Kosmopolit.)

If you play Desktop TD (which doesn’t suck, despite having been made by a closed-source nub), add your scores to Pharyngula, whydontcha?
And if you don’t, you should probably check it out.

For some unfathomable reason, Hillary Clinton is still leading in the polls, and it’s looking increasingly likely that she’ll be the next president of the US. Whether the Bush → Clinton → Bush → Clinton pattern is neat or profoundly disturbing is open to debate, but what worries me more is that Democratic voters would actually vote for Clinton.

Clinton has the right idea about some issues. She’s right about fiscal policy (she opposes government debt and opposed Bush’s tax cuts). She’s right about energy policy, as far as I can tell. She right about the free market, which is a rare thing indeed in Ameriko (she’s opposed to an unfettered free market, and supports fair trade agreements). She’s right about the importance of the UN, human rights (and it’s sad this has to be explicitly stated), gun control (though obviously she doesn’t go far enough for my tastes), abortion (if you look past the “I’m personally opposed to it” pandering), stem cell research, and net neutrality.

However, she’s wrong on so many more issues, many of which are considerably more important.
She’s wrong about healthcare (she thinks she’s trying to help, but privatisation will destroy it). She’s wrong about immigration (though beyond “border security” (that is, building that goddamn wall, which she supports), her voting record isn’t actually that bad, I’ll grant). She’s profoundly wrong about Israel. She’s wrong (so very, very wrong) about flag burning. She’s wrong about crime (she’s in favor of the three strikes law, and is generally in favor of tougher punishments, which is so wrong-headed it’s not even funny). She’s wrong about the death penalty. She’s wrong about No Child Left Behind.

She’s wrong about violent video games, which I wouldn’t consider that big a deal if not for this incident involving GTA:SA (remember the Hot Coffee bullshit?): she warned Rockstar that if they didn’t change the game’s rating from M (17+) to AO (18+, because apparently that’s not an empty gesture since people go through a magical transformation when they turn 18, making them a whole different person from when they were 17), she would introduce federal legislation to regulate the sexual content of video games.
Rockstar changed it, and five months later, she introduced the legislation anyway.

She’s wrong about Iraq, obviously. She voted in favor of the war, and still refuses to admit that was a mistake. Considering her warmongering hawkishness, I don’t trust her not to piss off Iran.
And naturally, she’s wrong about “homeland security”. She voted for the Patriot Act, but so did everyone else (except Feingold, yes), so I’ll forgive her for that. She supported the filibuster against renewing it in 2005, but apparently only because New York (for which she’s the junior senator) didn’t receive enough funds.
I’m not convinced she understands the importance of not sacrificing civil liberties to gain some illusory sense of security.

And she seems to be a homophobe. She’s opposed to gay marriage (though she supports separate-but-equal “civil unions”, as if that’s not a retarded concept), she supports the (unconstitutional and Orwellianly named) Defense of Marriage Act, and she even refused to say homosexuality isn’t immoral when asked.

Now, you could say her wrongness is just a result of trying to pander to literally everyone at once (and it is; she’s even more blatant than McCain), and doesn’t necessarily reflect anything about how she’ll behave once she’s in office, but are you willing to take that chance?

My main concern, though, is that she’ll pull the Democratic Party even further to the right, thereby destroying any chance the US has of sensible government for decades to come. Bush and the neo-cons did it for the Republican Party (though the religious right, of course, already beat them to it; they just made it even worse), and the anti-Bush backswing isn’t undoing it.
From that perspective, it almost might be better if a Republican won the election, though not really. The most immediate problems are global warming and the threat to global stability posed by the Middle East, and a Republican can only aggravate both.

I seriously think that if Gore doesn’t run (he’s the only one with enough support to beat out Clinton, at this point), we’re all screwed.

1. The LBRS forums.
2. SWBHG
3. Mimetex

Of these, Mimetex bothers me the most, because it’s actually part of my blog and I have no idea how to fix it. It’s a compiled Perl CGI script, and it should be working, but isn’t.

Edit: Fixed it. chmod desu~

The LBRS forums should be fairly trivial to fix, I just can’t be bothered to right now because nobody uses them anyway.

SWBHG could take a while, primarily because apparently Mercury wrote it on the assumption register_globals would be enabled. That’s painfully stupid, though fortunately for him, so was our last webhost.
I’m hoping it’s just in the log-in/registration script, and not in the entire application, because otherwise I’m just not going to fix it.

Edit: Oh, goddammit. Mercury, your code has made me physically ill. I don’t want this piece of shit on my server. No more SWBHG.

This is a baby pygmy hippopotamus.

Happy Belgia Day, kids.
176 years ago today, Leopold I was crowned King of Belgians.

This is the way nationalism should be done: with openness, hospitality, and acknowledgments of the people around us. No fireworks or self-satisfied flaggotry, just tours of parliament and samplings of European culture.
You know it’s a good day when even people in delightfully xenophobic Brussels start saying hospitality is key to the greatness of Belgium.

Military parades can’t be avoided, I guess, even though our army is tiny (good thing, too, since the King just got a new hip and can’t actually remain standing for a long parade), but when that army carries the flag of Europe around and makes a point of reminding people that international peace missions are its priority, it strikes me as less frightening and more hopeful.
They even played the European anthem before the Brabançonne.

Incidentally, Prince Laurent is still a childish fuckwit. Protocol demands the men of the royal family show up in military uniform, and the King and Prince Philipe both did, but Laurent just wore a suit instead of his navy uniform. If he’d done that out of anti-militaristic protest, I’d applaud it, but the only reason he did it is because he refuses to take responsibility for his involvement in that fraud case involving navy funds, and to annoy his father. It’s petty and pathetic.
Or maybe he’s just gotten too fat to still fit into it. If that’s the case, I apologise. Fatty.

(It’s also my dad’s 51st birthday today, but nobody celebrates that.)

’bout time. Some set-up hiccups, but apparently we’re finally on the new server.
Our new hosting plan allows for 35 GB of webspace (compared to 500 MB on the old one) and three terabytes of bandwidth per month (compared to 20 GB before), for roughly the same price as the old one, and it auto-renews, so no more fucking around with downtime in August.
Best of all, it’s not run by a 17-year-old and his two imaginary employees.

Anyway, all blogs should be up (though some things are apparently broken; I’m working on fixing that now), and all databases should be reasonably up to date. The blogs are from backups taken a few hours ago, but if you posted something interesting (or someone interesting commented) in the meantime, let me know and I’ll retrieve if from the old databases while I still have access to them.
Incidentally, the essentially unlimited webspace means you can use StatTraq again, if you like, though I don’t guarantee those tables won’t crash eventually.

I know SWBHG is broken, and I know Muffins is missing entirely. I didn’t move Muffins because syncing the databases while the game was up would’ve been a nightmare. I’ll get to that in a bit.

I also know all FTP accounts are gone. This is because I don’t have access to the passwords, and without that, there’s no way to move them seemlessly anyway. If you had an FTP account and need it back, tell me so I can make you a new one.
You can still use your old FTP info to get to the old server, if you connect to ftp.ysgonzo.be instead of ftp.rotahall.org.

Everything else (well, such as it is) should be working. Let me know if there are any problems.

Edit: Muffins is back up and seem to be working properly. I know the LBRS forums are still broken (though they were before the move as well), and I’m working on those now. SWBHG, the Selectively Antisocial subdomain, and Terru’s blog seem to be having DNS problems (I think), which I hope will resolve itself in a bit. Otherwise, I’ll look at those next.
Meanwhile, here are the last of the bandwidth statistics on our old server:
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• Some gas stations have problems with people not paying.
• Relatively few unemployed people in Belgium are younger than 25.
• An Italian company bought part of a Belgian company, and a handful of people may or may not lose their jobs.
• There is nothing new to report regarding the formation of our new government.
• A mayor somewhere made an unrealistic demand nobody will remember a week from now.
• Hygiene at some Walloon camping sites is not that great.
• A bank lost a lawsuit.
• Some Swedish guy was kicked off some cycling team.