wingolog

Woop, been a bit busy. Time to flush the backlog.

"media"

I hope that this year people stop making media players and start making media creators. Of course players are necessary and good, but they're the most basic part of desktop media. hadess, think you'll pull a Knuth this year?

discussions

I had a long day marking and invigilating at school[0]. I meant to go to town to backup the ministry's server, but had to stay until 5 at the school. I needed a beer. Ended up talking about HIV with a fellow that
stays at our house (you could call him a brother). He hasn't been tested, but he has two kids with different women. Now he plays it safe, using condoms, but obviously not before. 20 to 30 percent of Namibians are HIV-positive. I don't see an end to this situation anytime soon. I think I'm going to distribute condoms to my classes tomorrow. (No, grade 9 is not too early. And yes, people normally start around this time. No, it's not that different in America either.)

I heard an interesting statistic from a friend, for which I'm trying to find the references. This 30% rate is a current rate. Most of those people will die from AIDS. But people are being infected all the
time. What it means is that my learners have approximately a 60% chance that when they die, it will be from AIDS. Scary.

[0] That's "grading and proctoring", for americans.

interesting reads

SXML, and the whole of oleg's web site. dot-scheme, seems really easy -- guile-gnome looks more complicated than it is. They avoid targeting CLR bytecodes by using a managed C++ glue layer. The idea turns my stomach, but hey, it goes a long way towards solving scheme's age-old shared library problem. Transcripts of "Dartmouth Symposium on the Future of Computer Music Software", 2002. Wish I could get to the rest of the articles in that issue!

It seems GCC supports lexically scoped nested functions in C, but with a caveat: "If you try to call the nested function through its address after the containing function has exited, all hell will break loose." Tempting.

other things

I think we've seen the last of the rain this year. I'm looking forward to a holiday of sitting at home hacking -- it's been too busy lately. I've started using `M-x compile' in emacs. Don't know why it took me this many years. Debugging is next.