This is brilliant. Microsoft Visual C++ violates the ISO C++ standard (at least as far as my 1998 document is concerned) with regards to this very fundamental and simple scoping behaviour, but they do not admit that this is a violation as such. Instead they claim that one can work around this “problem” by using a special compiler switch that disables “language extensions”. However, depending on your configuration, making use of this switch will break compilation of certain Visual C++ headers (ntheader.h IIRC). You have to love this.

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I’ve finally released post XFree86 4.2.99 merge DRI suspend/resume capable Radeon driver snapshots and the adapted patch. Get them fresh here.

Our somewhat new real-time volume renderer, lovingly called the ShellSplatter, is more or less done. Look at the pretty pictures that it makes:

Semi-transparent rendering of human head arteries, with an aneurism! Rendering of a CT-scan of an engine block, whoooo!

That will be all. Thank you Jeeves.

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Another one of my favourite online radio stations shuts down thanks to CARP. Evil Dildo, RIP.

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I’m back from an incredible holiday in good old ZA. Now I just have to survive my article deadline on Friday and then everything will be just dandy. Fortunately there’s RantRadio to keep my industrial ears happy.

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This is brilliant: “I helped blow up a Bali nightclub — by driving my SUV to work every day!” Thanks for the link, Rudolph.

Read the whole article here. Keep in mind that the USA is responsible for a quarter (25%) of the world’s TOTAL oil usage. This and other interesting tidbits such as the fact that the USA also burns 25% of the world’s TOTAL coal are available here.

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Damn it, when will these idiots learn that patents are evil?! This article (which might be Slashdotted at the moment) reports how a certain genetic test for breast cancer can not be performed by a British Columbia hospital anymore because the morons of Myriad Genetics have patented the two genes that can signal whether a woman may develop hereditary breast cancer and have legally threatened the hospital.

How the F*CK can one patent a gene? Nevermind the very apparent stupidity and lack of reason behind this (the gene was already there, the company merely discovered it – there’s NO creative innovation here!): just practically speaking, this is screwing the populace over. This test now costs three times as much, just because Myriad went to the trouble of taking out the patent at the even more idiotic patent office.

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A DIMM in one of our mail servers decided to break today… to make a long story short, I had to install a new imap on my own machine (as I switched incoming MXes) and with the new installation a new SSL key was created. Evolution (the MUA) of course kept on trying the old server key. DOH.

After quite some minutes of swearing, re-installing and doing various other pointless things, I deleted the very suspicious-looking “cert7.db” and “key3.db” files in ~/evolution. Problem solved. This should be somewhere in the Evolution UI or at the very least help system.

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So, we all agree that Python is The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread(tm), right? To add several levels of pleasure to your interactive Python experience (ribbed or studded), please try IPython. This is so flexible that one could even consider using it as full-time shell, instead of your bash, (t)csh, zsh or whatever. Hmmm….

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As if you didn’t know, Bruce Eckel is responsible for the very popular and electronically freely available and purchasable in paper form Thinking in C++ (and books about lesser languages such as Java too ;). On his FAQ page there are some interesting tidbits, such as his opinion about Ruby compared to Python and especially his opinion about publishing his books on the web (for free) as well as in print.

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If you want to buy me something, get me a laptop with one of these. Thanks, I appreciate it.

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