People With Ultimatums

Rudy sez:

...commentators all over the political spectrum are saying that one of the reasons that Democrats lost the election is that they are "elitists" and "out of touch" with the "moral values" of Americans. But you know what? The problem is not that Democrats are out of touch with Americans. It's that these so-called "Americans" are out of touch with America as a concept. While all of these pundits are decrying the division of America as somehow the province of "liberals" and their misunderstanding of the middle and south of the country, how about just the occasional fucking word about how Bush's constant berating of "intellectuals" and "Massachusetts" is more divisive, as if somehow Illinois, Pennsylvania, California, and New York are filled with eggheads who only theorize and refuse to get their hands dirty in the real work that all those amazing "real" Americans engage in every day.

Apparently some of you think the south of this country deserves some sort of pass, because... God, I don't know, your reasons are so shitty and irritating that I can't even remember any of them. And neither, apparently, can this guy. But I could have told you that ignorance wasn't a fucking virtue before this election. And I know you guys think that ignorance plus poverty makes 'em okay, but look: When people get too poor, sometimes you just have to kill them, because clearly they didn't want it bad enough.

John Ashcroft resigns?! Apparently some of you saw this coming. Sez he:

The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.

Buh?!

I submitted my partially-working thread-cancellation patch to the Guile people. The more I think about it, the more I think my code was working and was actually exposing some SEGVs in their code. I mean, it was crashing when I pushed a quoted symbol into the list of cancellation expressions, and the crash happened in one of their symbol lookup functions, so... I don't know. Hopefully someone will look at it and get back to me before they release 1.8.

I also packaged and made preliminary releases for gzochi-client, gzochi-common, and gzochi-server. Peep it here. If you have any sort of UNIXy operating system, I encourage you to download it and give it a shot. Hell, even if you've got Windows, all you need to do is install Cygwin, and you should be able to use my stuff. Throw me a god-damn bone here.

I've also started working on that ncurses renderer for XUL -- after getting into a heated argument (well, not that heated) with some creeps at the Mozilla Foundation. For some asinine reason, they don't want to write a DTD for XUL, because then XUL wouldn't be "extensible" any more via this language they've got called XBL. This is retarded! If you develop a "technology," or whatever they're calling XUL, and you want developers to use it, you need to make them some kind of promise that it's safe to use -- this promise is called a "standard," and even if part of this standard is that core functionality can be extended. You just include the extensibility in the standard, so that your developers know the ways in which your thing can be extended. Fuck! God damn it. Their other rationale for not coming up with a standard is that "Mozilla is not a validating XML parser." Jesus Christ! These people who don't believe in DTD validation, much less don't believe in Schema validation... the horrible, anxiety-producing code you must write -- huge if-blocks scrabbling to figure out what to do if you come across an element that isn't a member of some array you put together somewhere. People: Whenever you write parsing code for a particular "document type," you are damn well writing a DTD / Schema validator from fucking scratch!

Okay, okay, you're bored -- I can read the writing on the wall. Fine, here's some more stomach acid, this time from The Register:

Your primary and secondary schools will continue to turn out third-rate pupils with limited opportunities, while you enjoy the satisfaction of making it on your own without health care when a catastrophic illness bankrupts your family.

Your agricultural universities will continue issuing Ph.D.s in football, and bogus Protestant Evangelical and Fundamentalist theology, and how to jerk off a bull safely. Your children will learn to borrow enough money to erect chicken houses so that they, like you, can take custody -- not possession, but custody -- of Tyson's chicks, feed them, rear them, assume losses from those that fail to thrive, and in the end earn just enough money to service their endless debt, and realize a profit of perhaps $12K a year. Your bank thanks you; Tyson thanks you; George W. Bush thanks you; and I thank you.