It should not come as a surprise that almost across the board, Republicans oppose this policy change. From the article:

Republicans, who voted overwhelmingly against it, cited statements by some military leaders that they need more time to study how a change in the law could affect the lives and readiness of service members.

Here’s what I haven’t heard anyone say in response to this: why do we care what the brass thinks about the “readiness” of service members to have out gays serving with them? How does that take precedence over eliminating blatant discrimination in military policy? Some things are more important than appeasing some homophobic bigots in the military.

The case against repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” is usually put this way (to quote John McCain):

I think it’s really going to be very harmful to the morale and effectiveness of our military.

The interesting part is that this argument is not new. As is pointed out by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in the article, the objection about “morale” is the same that was made by the people who opposed racial integration in the military 60 years ago. This was a cowardly and disingenuous argument then, and it remains so today.

The argument is cowardly because it implies that it is asking too much of the men and women in the military to serve honorably regardless of the sexual orientation of the people with whom they work. There are no evidence that the military will encounter huge problems when they abandon “don’t ask, don’t tell.” On the other hand, there are examples to show that letting gays serve is not a problem; one is the IDF. It is a sad coincidence that Israel abolished the last of their restrictions on gays in the military in 1993, the same year that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was adopted.

The argument is disingenuous because it’s really a more politically correct way of expressing an ugly, bigoted sentiment. In 1948, when Members of Congress suggested that allowing people of different races to serve together in the military would undermine morale, I contend that this primarily sprung not from a concern about tensions in the armed forces, but from the strong racist tendencies of the day. Politicians couldn’t come out and say that they just didn’t want blacks serving alongside whites, so they had to frame it in anxiety for the effects on morale. The same thing is happening with respect to gays in the military today, and when the Republicans trot out this flimsy assertion it is the same shiny wrapping on the same rotten core.

(Somewhat related aside.) A long time ago, it was Mormon doctrine that the mark God made on Cain was, to quote Brigham Young, “the flat nose and black skin.” Henceforth Cain’s descendants were cursed with this mark, and people who are born this way are so cursed because they were less valiant in the pre-existence. This was why blacks were prohibited from the priesthood in the LDS church (in which essentially all the males become priests). In 1978, the leaders of the LDS church said that they had received a revelation that all worthy males could be ordained, regardless of race. (Presumably, this was almost as humorous as God revealing that polygamy should no longer be practiced in 1890, just when the outside pressure on Utah was the strongest.) Nowadays the conventional Mormon explanation for the denial of the priesthood to blacks is that the white members of the church weren’t ready for it.  Sound familiar?

In all these instances, the real anti-minority sentiment has been hidden by a veneer of concern for the feelings of the majority. This is invalid. Blacks and gays don’t get their rights when the majority stop feeling squeamish. They are born equal, and the majority don’t grow to accept that until they are forced to confront it.

What if this were bold?

There was a fairly recent change to Gmail, where infrequently used labels could be hidden. It lets you keep your important labels in the left sidebar, and if you have 10 more hidden labels you click a little button that says “10 more” to show a menu with all of these labels. Chats, Sent Mail, Drafts, Starred, All Mail, Spam, and Trash also behave like normal labels for this purpose. This is a nice feature, in my opinion. I usually don’t care about how many spam messages I have, so I can tuck it away from my normal view. More importantly, I use a lot of filters (50 or 60) to organize incoming mail under labels (I have 32 at the moment), but  most of these only occasionally receive mail and it’s nice to have them hidden too.

When a label has unread messages in, it turns bold. For me, this used to mean that to see if I had any new mail, I looked both at the top of the inbox and scanned the labels for a bold one. Now, to see if any of my hidden labels have new messages, I have to click the button to show these labels. The fix, in my opinion, is to turn the “25 more” text bold when hidden labels have unread messages (see picture). I know it’s small, but this would save compulsive email checkers like myself a fair amount of annoyance. (Yes, I’m aware that I can just move all my labels out of this menu, but I like this feature too much to stop using it because of this.)

A small caveat here is that if you move the Spam label into this menu, you will always have unread messages (unless you don’t get spam, or mark it as read). Spam could be ignored for the purposes of bolding the button, but this might be considered unexpected behavior. Regardless, I’m sure the smart people on the Gmail team could figure something out.

I couldn’t find anyone else talking about this. This may be due to poor Googling on my part, or perhaps nobody else really cares. Hopefully other people have thought about it and we can get the attention of somebody at Google.

Edit: I found another person’s idea for a solution to this problem here.

There is a slight improvement; http://www.ctrl-c.us/ now redirects to http://ctrl-c.us/ :-)

OK, it’s now way past my bedtime. I’m getting up in just a few hours to go on another epic hike. Pictures to follow.

SWIG is a great tool that supports a host of high-level languages; I’ve only ever used it with Python. At the other end, you get your choice of C and C++—crappy languages aren’t really my thing, so this tutorial will be about C. I’m going to use Python 3 because all the cool kids live on the bleeding edge. This requires SWIG 1.3.37 or better; if you’re on Ubuntu like me, you’re going to have to go grab it from the website and compile it yourself (I’m using 1.3.39). Also, remember that you need the header files for python installed (python3-dev on Ubuntu). If you’re too lazy to copy-paste, you can download the files here.

We’ll start out with the obligatory hello world program just to test that SWIG is set up correctly. First make a C function that prints the text and name it hello.c:

#include<stdio.h>
 
void hello() {
    printf("Hello, World!\n"):
}

Now we’ll get SWIG to generate a wrapper for us so that we can call it in Python. Make a file called hello.i and put this in it (my code highlighting isn’t feeling very confident about SWIG files, sorry):

%module hello
%{
    void hello();
%}

This file is the interface file, and it tells SWIG what functions and data structures are going to be shared between C and Python. Now we’ll have SWIG process the interface file to make a wrapper for a python module:

$ swig -python hello.i

This should generate two files: hello.py and hello_wrap.c. Compile the C files:

$ gcc -c -fPIC hello_wrap.c hello.c -I/usr/include/python3.0 -I/usr/lib/python3.0

Make sure that the direcotories are correct. Unfortunately, gcc generates a warning when I compile, which is bothersome as I’m a -Werror kind of guy. The -fPIC flag is necessary, because we’re making a shared library the python module is going to use:

$ ld -shared hello.o hello_wrap.o -o _hello.so

If that works, you are ready to fire up Python and try it. At a Python3 prompt:

>>> from hello import *
>>> hello()
Hello, World!

Easy, right? Now I’ll show you some of the features that I most frequently use. First, we’ll pass some data through by wrapping a C function to multiply integers. Make a file called swig_intro.h, and put in the following declaration:

#include<stdlib.h>
#include<stdio.h>
 
int mult(int a, int b);

Then in swig_intro.c we can write

#include "swig_intro.h"
 
int mult(int a, int b) {
    return a * b;
}

Finally, the interface file, swig_intro.i, will look like this:

%module swig_intro
%{
    #include "swig_intro.h"
%}
 
int mult(int a, int b);

To make things easier, let’s write a makefile for this little project:

TARGET     = swig_intro
CC         = gcc
CFLAGS     = -g -fPIC -Wall -Wextra
HEADERS    = swig_intro.h
SRCS       = swig_intro.c
INCLUDES   =
INTERFACE  = swig_intro.i
SWIG       = swig
 
LDSHARED   = ld
CSHARED    = -shared
 
OBJS       = $(SRCS:.c=.o)
 
IWRAP      = $(INTERFACE:.i=_wrap.i)
ISRCS      = $(IWRAP:.i=.c)
IOBJS      = $(IWRAP:.i=.o)
 
PYTHON_INCLUDE= -I/usr/include/python3.0 -I/usr/lib/python3.0
PYTHON_SO     = .so
 
all: $(SRCS)
	$(SWIG) -python $(INTERFACE)
	$(CC) -c $(CCSHARED) $(CFLAGS) $(ISRCS) $(HEADERS) $(SRCS) $(INCLUDES) $(PYTHON_INCLUDE)
	$(LDSHARED) $(CSHARED) $(OBJS) $(IOBJS) -o _$(TARGET)$(PYTHON_SO)
 
clean:
	rm -f *_wrap* *~ .~* *.pyc
	rm -f *.o *.so *.so

If that works, you can launch a Python3 shell (from now on I’ll assume you do the import first):

>>> from swig_intro import *
>>> mult(-10, 5)
-50

Behind the scenes, SWIG uses something called typemaps to specify how each type is from Python to C and vice versa. In many cases, such as this, we don’t need to worry about that at all, because SWIG has default typemaps for all the fundamental datatypes. For example, you might wonder what SWIG does with a C struct. Go ahead and add this definition to the header file and the interface file:

typedef struct Person {
    char *first_name;
    char *last_name;
    int birth_year;
} Person;
 
void print_person(Person *p);

and put the following function into the .c file:

void print_person(Person *p) {
    if (!p->first_name || !p->last_name) {
        printf("The person is not properly defined.\n");
        return;
    }
    printf("%s %s was born in %d.\n", p->first_name, p->last_name, p->birth_year);
}

Now recompile and try this:

>>> p = Person()
>>> p.first_name = "Paul"
>>> p.last_name = "Black"
>>> p.birth_year = 1977
>>> print_person(p)
Paul Black was born in 1977.

As you can see, the the struct Person was wrapped in a very simple Python class with the three public data fields first_name, last_name, and birth_year.

Next, let’s see how to use typemaps ourselves to pass a more complex structure from Python to C. We’re going to make a (rather contrived) C function that will return the product of a list of integers. We’ll do this by turning a Python list into a C struct that specifies an int array and a size. Add the following code to the header and interface files:

struct IntList {
    int size;
    long *list;
} IntList;
 
int product(IntList *l);

In the .c file, add the function:

int product(IntList *l) {
    int i;
    if (l->size <= 0) {
        return 0;
    }
    int ret_val = 1;
    for (i = 0; i size; i++) {
        ret_val *= l->list[i];
    }
    return ret_val;
}

Now we need to define the typemap in the .i file. This isn’t too difficult; we just make use of several functions from the Python C API:

%typemap(in) IntList * {
    if (!PyList_Check($input)) {
        PyErr_SetString(PyExc_TypeError, "Not a list.");
        return NULL;
    }
    int size = PyList_Size($input);
    $1 = (IntList *)malloc(sizeof(IntList));
    long *list = (long *)malloc(sizeof(long) * size);
    $1->list = list;
    $1->size = size;
    int i;
    for (i = 0; i < size; i++) {
        PyObject *item = PyList_GetItem($input, i);
        if (!PyInt_Check(item)) {
            PyErr_SetString(PyExc_TypeError, "List item is not an integer.");
            free(list);
            free($1);
            return NULL;
        }
        list[i] = PyInt_AsLong(item);
    }
}
 
%typemap(freearg) IntList * {
    free(((IntList *)$1)->list);
    free((IntList *)$1);
}

This also illustrates how to tell SWIG to free your objects and how to handle errors. Now we can see it in action:

>>> from swig_intro import *
>>> product(5)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: Not a list.
>>> product(["five"])
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: List item is not an integer.
>>> product([1,3,5,7,9])
945

As you would expect, transferring data the other way is similar. For an example, let’s make a function that takes a list and returns a dictionary mapping the list elements to their squares. Add these definitions to the header and interface files:

struct IntMap {
    int size;
    long *list1;
    long *list2;
} IntMap;
 
IntMap *square(IntList *l);

The actual C function will take a pointer to an IntList and return a pointer to an IntMap, allocating space for a second list as needed. The conversion to a dict will be specified with an out typemap. In the .c file:

IntMap *square(IntList *l) {
    IntMap *ret_map = (IntMap *)malloc(sizeof(IntMap));
    ret_map->size = l->size;
    ret_map->list1 = l->list;
    ret_map->list2 = (long *)malloc(sizeof(long) * l->size);
    int i;
    for (i = 0; i size; i++) {
        ret_map->list2[i] = l->list[i] * l->list[i];
    }
    return ret_map;
}

Add the typemap to the .i file:

%typemap(out) IntMap * {
    $result = PyDict_New();
    int i;
    for (i = 0; i size; i++) {
        PyObject *key = PyInt_FromLong($1->list1[i]);
        PyObject *val = PyInt_FromLong($1->list2[i]);
        PyDict_SetItem($result, key, val);
    }
}
 
%typemap(freearg) IntMap * {
    free(((IntMap *)$1)->list2);
    free((IntMap *)$1);
}

And we’re done!

>>> square([1,-12,60000])
{60000: 3600000000, 1: 1, -12: 144}

I’ve only shown some of the more useful capabilities of SWIG that I find myself using a lot. For more information, consult the official SWIG docs. Unfortunately, they’re not entirely complete, so it is sometime easier to get answers by just browsing the built-in SWIG interface files to see how the typemaps work.

So, to keep my blood pressure down, I put things into perspective for myself by making a list of seven document formats Scribd could have chosen to use, but didn’t.

1. Upon request, print the document out and mail it to the users, preferably from a distribution center somewhere in Africa.
2. Put each word from the document in a Web 2.0-esque cloud visualization where the size of each tag reflects the relative frequency of the word’s occurrence.
3. Save the document as a series of images. Upload these to Facebook. When a user requests the document, tag the user in all of those pictures so that he/she can view them.
4. Offer RealPlayer streaming videos of somebody slowly scrolling through the document.
5. Record someone reading the document, set it to soothing piano music with a psychedelic visualization, and submit it to YouTube in a series of 10-minute segments.
6. Ask the user for his/her phone number. Split the document into 140-byte chunks and send them sequentially as SMS messages.
7. Write out the document in 1:1000 scale on the ground using large rocks. Then provide links to the appropriate Google Map coordinates.

The reason I’m so pumped about the Burton/Depp combination is primarily based on the great work they did with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. To fully explain how much I like this movie, a bit of background is in order. As a child, I absolutely adored Roald Dahl. I read and re-read almost every children’s book and short story he had written (my favorite was definitely James and the Giant Peach). My parents were not completely comfortable with this, and in general I would imagine that a lot of adults would find most of Roald Dahl’s children’s literature at least somewhat disturbing. This is for the same reason that it resonates so very well with kids: it portrays the world as an unfair, messed-up place, and a lot of the adults are downright despicable people. His stories generally involve children who are completely unsheltered from the cruelty of life. There is a definite touch of cruel humor to almost all of Dahl’s work and, as a child, I loved it.

When I eventually watched the first film adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the one that’s not actually titled ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’), I was thoroughly disappointed. It told a wonderful, magical tale with a happy ending, a nice, pro-family moral, and catchy music. But it didn’t convey the real spirit of Roald Dahl. It just wasn’t there. When Burton’s adaptation came out, I was expecting it to be the same, only weirder. In fact, I didn’t even watch it until one night when I was really bored more than a year after its release. When I did see it, though, I was completely floored. It was exactly spot-on to the image of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that I’d had in my mind all those years. It was like a piece of my childhood had suddenly been restored. Burton’s touch for dark humor made the movie an absolute masterpiece. Johnny Depp, who I wasn’t all that familiar with at the time, was a flawless pick for Willy Wonka. He fully realized the erratic, unforgiving, and wildly eccentric character given to us by Dahl so many years ago. After watching it, I realized that the 2005 movie is better than its 1971 counterpart by every standard I could think of (and I’m including the music; Danny Elfman’s score is compelling and impeccable).

The slightly odd thing is that I’ve found very few people who share my view. I find that most people who have seen both of the film adaptations for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory prefer the older one. I’m not quite sure why this is; I think that one reason is that a lot of people were more familiar with the film than the book as children, and thus didn’t identify with Burton’s version like I did.

This was supposed to be about Alice in Wonderland, though. Let me explain why this movie is going to rock: every quality of Roald Dahl’s Charlie that Burton and Depp did so well is even more core to Alice in Wonderland. This book is so much more bizarre, more unpredictable, more whimsical. It feels scarier and twists the reader’s expectations more. It is dark, capricious, and infinitely original. Drugs were definitely involved. Johnny Depp and Tim Burton aren’t just going to do it well, they are the best people in Hollywood right now to turn Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece into pure awesome on the silver screen. I can’t wait.

1. Make sure that you’re using the proprietary nvidia driver and that you have nvidia settings installed:

   sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings

2. Open up nvidia-settings (under System -> Administration in Ubuntu and System in Xubuntu).
3. Under “X Server Display Configuration”, you need to set each monitor to have the correct resolution. Also specify the layout you want, and change the configuration to TwinView. Finally, set the position of both to “Absolute”.
4. Now hit “Save to X Configuration File”. Save this to your home directory (i.e. change the path to ~/xorg.conf).
5. (Optional.) If you want to get rid of the NVidia splash screen every time X restarts, open the xorg.conf file in the editor of your choice and make sure that the line

   Option   "NoLogo" "True"

   appears under each “Device” section.

6. Move the file to the proper directory (you need root access):

   sudo mv ~/xorg.conf /etc/X11/

7. Restart the X server. The easiest way to do this is to log out and log back in.
8. Now the Xinerama info should be getting sent properly. In Ubuntu you can tell that this is the case if you are able to place your panel on just one screen instead of both of them (drag it around a bit). Unfortunately, Gnome doesn’t let you set separate desktop backgrounds, so if you want something different on each screen you’ll need to make an image the width of both screens added together and paste the two pictures in (you can do this easily in the Gimp). In Xubuntu, when you open up the properties for your panel, you’ll be able to choose the monitor on which it should appear. Additionally, Xfce allows you to set separate desktop backgrounds.

Unfortunately I was too lazy to rescue comments, so they’re all gone. We’ll have to see how commenting goes; right now I have to approve comments except by registered users, so at least the spam won’t be showing up on the site (just my inbox).

A couple of thoughts about Wordpress:

• My favorite part is definitely the admin experience. The admin pages have a beautiful layout with a very nice color scheme, rounded corners, and AJAX-y goodness. The admin panel is also very powerful and extremely intuitive; all in all, I love it.
• I think that the weakest part of Wordpress is actually the themes. I spent a ton of time trying to find one I liked and eventually settled for a moderately okay one. People who write Wordpress themes need to be introduced to two important concepts: (a) It is not an efficient use of space to only use the middle fifth of the monitor (see this crap-tacular example), and (b) An 10pt serif font is awful for a blog. People have big monitors these days, and readability is important.

Alright, I have to go to bed right now. I have been working on this instead of school work, which unfortunately leaves me with a register allocator to finish writing by the end of the day tomorrow :(

I saw something today, though, that was the proverbial last straw. It may be surprising, but what upset me was actually an attack on Palin. I read it in this Huffington Post article. Under the heading On Abortion, the author explains Palin’s (quaint, yet terrifying) views on abortion. She doesn’t believe in abortions even for rape victims, AND, writes Mr. Walls, (you can practically hear a scandalized whisper) she makes no exceptions, even for her OWN DAUGHTER.

It’s not just Mr. Walls and the Huffington Post, though. I’ve seen this played as some sort of trump card by many liberal blog sites and in many of the political stories I’ve read. In only the past few days I’ve seen at least five references to this fact.

It’s certainly true that this is Mrs. Palin’s position. She stated this in a response to a question during a debate in the 2006 gubernatorial race. It’s clearly on the record, and I feel confident that she would still back that statement completely.

Guess what? It doesn’t matter. It’s completely irrelevant.

It doesn’t mean anything if she opposes her own daughter getting an abortion if she were a rape victim if that’s her official political stance. It’s not draconian. It’s called having integrity.

In fact, I take issue with the person who asks such a question. There is absolutely nothing of political relevance that can be gleaned from her answer that couldn’t have been revealed by asking a question such as “Do you think that a teenager who has been raped should be permitted to get an abortion?”. The only difference in these questions is in the emotionality and sentimental weight they place upon her response.

This is a problem because emotion and sentiment are precisely what this country’s election system needs less of right now. We have reached a point where logic and level-headed reasoning plays almost no role in voters’ decisions, and each time non-issues like this one are paraded around it adds to the problem.

Interestingly, this is certainly not the first time this kind of thing has reared its ugly head in our elections. In 1988 Dukakis lost 7 precious poll points in a single night following a debate in which he was asked if he would support the death penalty for a person who raped and murdered his wife. His response? No. He wouldn’t support the death penalty in this case because he’d always been an opponent of the death penalty. This was an utterly useless question, yet it was one that probably cost Dukakis the presidency. All subsequent presidential nominees by the major parties have supported the death penalty in at least some cases.

What can we do about it? Don’t propogate irrelevant stories like this. Focus on the issues. Don’t vote without having logical reasons for your choice.

In the end, I hope Palin keeps sticking to her guns. When politicians are honest and give us straight talk (think McCain, but 10 years ago), we don’t have to analyze the nuances of their speeches and engage in endless political punditry. They’ll tell us what we need to know about them, we’ll be able to compare that to our own ideas, and then we’ll make informed decisions.

Like not voting for a right-wing nut job.