The Cliffs of Inanity

Quantum of Solace

I don’t care what the critics say.  This was a solid action film that dispensed with most of the stuff I hate about Bond — the dumb lines, the invisible cars, the 50s concept of suave.  The plot was a bit undeveloped, but I managed to turn that into a plus by telling myself that confusion is probably the order of the day in real life intelligence work.  Also, so are exploding hotels.

I liked this better than the immediately previous Bond, too, primarily because nobody drowned on screen.  Stabbings, shootings, blunt trauma, explosions — all ok, as long as there is no drowning.

Gnome Tip

As usual, my upgrade to F9 brought with it some behind-the-scenes changes.  Sometimes these lurk for quite a while before I discover them.

Tonight I clicked on a “mailto:” URL.  A while back I had configured firefox to open a new message buffer in Emacs when I did this; but to my surprise instead it launched evolution.

I wasted a lot of time trying to see what I did wrong in my firefox config (which is amazingly obscure, by the way, for something that seems like a basic configuration tweak).  The answer: nothing was wrong.  Instead, now I must also configure Gnome to know how to do this.

This meant a short side trip to install gconf-editor… as with seahorse, I was surprised to find out that a generally useful tool like this was not already installed for me.

After successfully editing the proper key, it turns out that “mailto:” is actually handled by the “Mail Reader” in “Preferred Applications” — something I would not have guessed, given that I am trying to send mail.  I guess I read that a bit too literally.  (The tip from the title: just edit this and save yourself a lot of time.)

I’m not even sure where all these little changes get made.  Was it a Gnome change?  A firefox change?  And integration patch from Fedora?  I couldn’t say.  Over time, these little annoyances do add up and leave a bad impression.

Off the top of my head, I don’t have a good idea for how Gnome, or whoever, should solve this kind of problem.  I just felt like venting a bit.

How to how-to?

Clearly, we need to publicize the gdb/python integration a bit more.  It is easy to get, and reasonably functional.

I’ve been thinking a bit about how to get the word out better.  What is most effective?  Here are some ideas:

  • A series of “how-to” blog entries (what do you want to do?)
  • A “how-to” article in a magazine (what do you read?)
  • A talk at a conference (which ones?)

I’ll probably do some or all of these — but what would be most useful to you?

I’m hoping we can ship a Python-enabled gdb in F11.  Hopefully that will boost adoption.  I’m also planning to ship a suite of libstdc++ pretty-printers in F11, so even if you don’t write any Python yourself, you can still benefit.  (For those not following the progress, we have a feature that lets you write custom visualizers based on type; this makes printing a std::vector, or whatever, much simpler.)

And, by the way — Dodji is indeed awesome.  Go give him an ohloh kudo.

ELPA Update

I’ve been extremely flaky about ELPA lately, but the dam finally broke today, and I went through all my saved-up email and uploaded a bunch of packages.  Check it out.

I found out recently that ELPA has a competitor, ELM.  Anybody tried this?  If so, let me know what you think — is it better than ELPA?  Worse?  Are there ideas I should steal?

Literally

People were dancing in the streets in Boulder on Tuesday night.  The police shut down Broadway where it goes across the Pearl Street Mall.

We went down around midnight or one.  The crowd was young, for the most part; college students and Obama volunteers.

Still, I have never seen anything like that here since the Mall Crawl was shut down ten years ago.  Boulder is usually pretty staid.  I think it shows the depth of feeling about this election.

Debugging the debugger

After working on gdb for a while, I’ve noticed a funny flaw: gdb is too good at debugging itself.

I often hear stories of disappointment from gdb users.  It doesn’t scale well.  It doesn’t handle threads well.  It only has a vague understanding of the C++ that users insist on typing at it.  That was my experience, too, when I was working on C++ (or worse: Java) programs.

But gdb itself doesn’t use any of these features.  It is written in more or less plain C.  It is single-threaded.  It is not too big.  It does not rely on many shared libraries.  So, as a gdb developer, I find it is pretty easy to forget that it has flaws.

I once heard about a C++ compiler written in C++ where, in order to counteract this same sort of problem, its developers mandated that the compiler use every existing C++ feature.

For fun try to picture code review on that project.  “Bob, this patch looks ok, but I think you should use operator overloading and exceptions here.”

That said, I think the “share the pain” theory is one reason — among several — to change gdb’s core to be implemented in C++.

Another way to combat complacency would be to debug other programs while working on gdb.  I find this pretty hard to do, though.  I tend to allocate more and more of my time to hacking my main project at the expense of the secondary one.

When Robots Attack

Tonight we got one of the famed McCain robo-calls.  Living as we do in a swing state, I’m a bit surprised it didn’t happen earlier.

As these calls go, it wasn’t too bad.  There was only one lie, by omission.

What is weird is that, first, we’re registered Democrats.  Second, we voted by mail more than two weeks ago.  You’d think they would not have bothered.

The Dog Said Bow Wow

Years ago I read Vacuum Flowers and loved it — it was, and remains, one of my favorite cyberpunk novels. I remember believing at the time that Swanwick was a mysterious author; I heard a rumor about a sequel to Flowers but nothing else.

The other day I ran across The Dog Said Bow Wow in the library, and now I suspect that, as usual, I simply did not pay any attention to developments in the SF publishing world, but instead just believed I would somehow know. Most likely (continuing my tradition: I didn’t look), Swanwick has had a robust and verbose career.

Anyway, Bow Wow is a series of delightful short stories. I read it in one sitting. You probably will too.