To my American friends
Vote tomorrow! If you do not, and McCain wins, and I know you, you
will be subject to my constant mockery over the next 4 or (fuck!) 8
years.
If you do vote, but you vote for McCain, please don't tell me unless
you have a deep hatred for me and wish to see my blood boil before
your eyes.
That is all.
US Election
The good: Obama. In January, America will have a a more liberal leader
than Canada. Wow, whodathunkit?
The bad: bans of gay marriage in 3 states, including California, where
it was briefly legal and where the marriages of more than 17,000 couples
are now in limbo.
The ugly: ban of gay adoption in Arkansas. There are too few foster
homes in the state already and removing willing homes from that list
hurts the kids who need them. In fact before the election gay couples
were being recruited by the state to adopt.
The best: after 2 fucking years, it's finally over.
While I am deeply inspired and relieved by Obama's victory, the social
conservative successes with ballot measures go to show that there is
still a long way to go.
Constructor thread safety
Says pphaneuf:
I reminds me of people who ask me about the thread safety of my
constructors. Dude, if you manage to call the constructor for the
same object on two different threads, you've got your own issues to
deal with!
Actually, that's not the problem. Obviously it's not possible to call
the constructor of the same object from 2 different threads. However,
it is possible to pass 'this' from your constructor into some
other object, which might be used by another thread. Granted, that's
a bad idea, but it is possible and if you do it, you do need to think
about thread-safety in your constructor, which is indeed yucky.
Unfortunately, I have much more experience with this exact situation
than I would like.
Starbucks Clover
My worst fears were justified. The Starbucks on University Ave. in
Palo Alto just got their Clover machine. I tried a cup on Saturday,
and it was deeply disappointing. Starbucks' beans are very stale, you
see, and the Clover machine is excellent at extracting the precise
flavours from the beans. When you combine the two, you get a coffee
tasting strongly of, well, cardboard. Completely disgusting.
They were also pimping the Clover coffee something fierce. The guy
who took my order told me several times how awesome it was and then
asked me if I had tried it before. The cashier told me it was just
sooooo great and that I should make sure to smell the coffee before
drinking it — even if the barista puts a lid on it, she says,
make sure to take it off and take a whiff.
Anyway, it was about what I expected from Starbucks, but still
very disappointing since Starbucks is the only company getting new
Clover machines now.
ion: still rocking
On a completely different note, I recently switched my laptop to
ion from gnome. I had been suffering with gnome for a while because
I had simply been too lazy to figure out how to make WPA and 802.1X
networks work without NetworkManager (call me a sissy if you like,
but honestly I have better things to do with my time these days than
fuck with wpa_supplicant).
Anyway, through some hacks I managed to make gnome-panel run in
an ion dock, so I can still use NetworkManager and the gnome power
management stuff along with ion. In fact, this unholy combination
has been working surprisingly well.
It also starts up way faster than normal gnome, since all I run is
gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-power-manager, gnome-panel and nm-applet.
I'm not sure what a full gnome-session runs, but whatever it is it
takes about a minute to start. But the real surprise is that suspend
to ram is also way faster with this setup, and I'm not really sure
why. I can see why suspend to disk takes time proportional to the
amount of memory you're using, but suspent to ram? Oh well, not going
to complain abut fast suspend.
Now if only my stinkpad battery would last longer than 90 minutes,
I'd be set :)
