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What I love about open source

Bug [ 1033686 ] GImage::GImage(filename) dies on certain images
Submitted by: sascha
Date Submitted: 2004-09-23 17:45
Changed to Closed status by: vejita
Closed as of: 2004-09-26 01:14

Three days! How rad is that?

Translation for the non-software-developers out there: I found a bug in the g3d library, and reported it by filing a bug in the project's bug tracker. A developer named Corey -- not at Brown, not someone I've ever met -- identified the source of the bug, fixed it, and committed a fix, within three days of when I filed the bug.

This is an everyday thing in the land of open source, sure, but it's the first time that it's happened to me.

Try that with a fucking Microsoft library.

Thank you, Corey! Thank you, Morgan!

what? incarcerated people can't vote? people convicted of felonies can't vote?

Wait, I must have missed part of social studies -- people who were convicted of felonies can't vote!
Actually, I've done some research, and it turns out that in many states, the right to vote is automatically restored when a person finishes serving a sentence, parole, and probation.
However, in the states that I've checked, people who are incarcerated can't vote. How the hell is this legal?

Part of the Fourteenth amendment:
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age,* and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

So -- from that we learn that people denied the right to vote because they're incarcerated still count towards the population count for purposes of determining representation. Oof. I looked through the rest of the amendments, and as far as I can tell, it's not legal to discriminate on the basis of sex, race, previous condition of servitude, age above eighteen.... but it seems to be legal to remove the right to vote because people are incarcerated.

This really bothers me. It takes all the inequities of the criminal justice system, magnifies them, and perpetuates them. Incarceration could be a time when people learn about how to participate in democracy. Damn.

superintelligent apes

So I was reading a paper on interdisciplinary scientitic visualization at the same time that I was watching the Daily Show, and, as sometimes happens, the two verbal streams crossed. I ended up perceiving something like this:
"One of the driving motivations in our recent work has been to consider what superinteligent apes would do for eight hours a day if hired by a visualization lab."

deleting files in Win XP SP2

Why the hell does it take >30 seconds to delete a 1 kb file in Windows XP?
...and we don't get WinFS until when?
I'd stop using windows entirely except that...
a) work buys me fast windows laptops
b) work doesn't buy me fast macs
All the other reasons, I'd be willing to work around for the massively improved goodness of a mac... but since my current mac is slow-ish (667 mHz G4) and doesn't have a ton of memory (512 mb)... it's not as fast as my windows tablet... except when it comes to deleting files.

Color Schemer Studio

Color Schemer Studio is darn cool. The next time you need a new color scheme, give this a try. You might need a new color scheme RIGHT NOW!

So amazing I had to blog it

I'm leery of all of the... everything around 9/11 today, because it seems like it always works out to making Bush look good somehow. In fact I spent the hour from 4-5 am (insomnia) watching Bill Moyer's take on the 9/11 Comissioner's Report... then for the rest of the day it was super-hard to find any decent tv that wasn't 9/11 related. But this... this is a 9/11 thing that I'm actually glad I clicked on. Hint: look up.

QTVR panorama: Tribute in light, 09/11/2001



From the BoingBoing archives -- this full-screen QTVR panorama of the light tribute to victims of 9/11, shot by Jook Leung. Link

SourceForge.net: Project Info - Graphics3D

This is what I've been working on for the past few days: SourceForge.net: Project Info - Graphics3D (C++). I learned to use it a bit this weekend, then spent this week learning it more thoroughly... then I spent today converting a tutorial for a Brown Computer Science class into a more general form.

This marks my first-ever check-in to an open source project. It's about time!

Flip... Flop?

"This is still on Zell Miller's Web site, from March 2001:"

Bradbury Software - FeedDemon RSS / Atom Feed Reader for Windows

FeedDemon by Bradbury Software is the best RSS reader I've found yet. They've put more energy into presentation than other readers I've tried -- yes, even shrook and NetNewsWire. For the last month I've been reading RSS with the sage extension for Firefox, which is fast but minimal. FeedDemon
is prettier. It also has nice support for RSS enclosures.

looking young (warning: self-centerdness ahead!)

Four days after I turned thirty, a baby-boomer man I met at a friend's wedding said, "You're what, 22?" in the context of telling me he'd been married to his wife for 33 years. A few weeks earlier, I was carded in a bar -- I was ordering a virgin margarita -- and when I didn't have my ID, the bartender suggested that I go get it if I wanted to keep playing pool there -- not even because she didn't want to serve me alcohol, but just because she didn't think I was old enough to even be in the bar. On my reecnt trips to Microsoft, people I meet often ask if I'm a student, although at least they tend to think I'm a PhD student or post-doc, which would at least be age-appropriate. The last few days, I've been meeting new students, who assume I'm an undergrad. The moment when I say "I graduated in 1997" there's always a pause, and some disbelief, and then some embarassment; am I offended they thought I was ten years younger than I am?

I'm not offended, but I'm curious about it. I think there's a few factors that come together to make me come off as young. In everyday life around Providence, I dress very casually, and I prefer clothes so comfortable I could sleep in them. Not exactly a businesswoman's wardrobe, and in fact when I "dress up" -- or my equivalent thereof, which involves ironed button-down shirts, sometimes a blazer, and slacks -- I "pass" as more like mid-to-late-twenties. I'd like to think that my personal carriage is more of an adult than a college student, especially in the business sphere. The last factor, of course, is my face, and especially the skin on my face... which is as soft, lightly freckled, and pink as when I was eighteen. I also have dark circles under my eyes, just like my brother's. Odd, because I don't think either of our parents have that particular feature. (Do you?) I don't know how i got this skin; I certainly haven't worn sunscreen as much as I should, or moisturized as much as I should. The one thing I do that's theoretically good for skin is drink a lot of water. Relatives out there, do other Beckers look young? Did you look young when you were 30-ish?

I think this all brings me to an awareness that I will need to work extra-hard to come off as professional in professional settings.

G3D, GPUs

I've spent the afternoon getting G3D installed on my tablet. G3D is a platform-independent 3D graphics library written in C++ by several Brown grad students. I had fun keeping track of changes to the install process for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 -- the last documentation had been written for Visual C++ 6 and Visual Studio 98.

I must be better at all this than I was a year ago, or maybe this install process was easier than getting InSpace to run on my machine. I spent days and days on that, but I just couldn't get it to go. I gave up when it turned out that I had spent hours trying to compile some obscure package from UNC with Visual Studio .NET. The definitions of C++ had actually changed between when the code was written and when I was trying to compile it, so that effort was a bear. Unfortunately, I let my difficulties working with InSpace keep me out of doing 3D work. Now I just kind of want to do some 3D work, especially 3D work with the GPU: graphics programming unit: hardware dedicated to accelerating 3D graphics math. It's just all so HOT right now.

Enough writing -- it's time to code!