There is much to be said for White Zombie played very loud as the soundtrack for a long drive.

Yes. Including “Hello, officer.”

(When we moved from DC to St Louis, a good friend gave us a mix tape for the drive – we called it “The ‘Hello, officer’ Mix” since it started with Ministry’s Jesus Built My Hotrod, segued into the 1000 Homo DJs cover of Sabbath’s “Supernaut”, and pretty much continued at that pace. Ah, good times.)

Oh. Wait. So are these guys: Los Alamos National Laboratory Researchers Accidentally Blow up Building with a Cannon.

Whoops. The Mustache of Disapproval radiates disapproval.

(via Mother Jones, via… TPM’s headlines/news aggregator, I think…)

“Did the framers of our Constitution ever envision something like a semi-automatic weapon?” [Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle] asked.

*sigh* Nor did they envision the Internet or Scientology, yet these are also protected under the Bill of Rights…

Three WA legislators have introduced a ban on so-called assault weapons, partially in response to the ambush and murder of a Seattle policeman. Ironically, the weapon alleged to have been used in this specific attack, while a semi-automatic rifle, is unlikely to be banned under any such legislation.

Listening to more than one child pipe up with variations of “you won’t ever die,” it occurred to me that one of the more poignant aspects of Peter Pan (and perhaps one of the keys to its initial success) is that it takes place a few short years before Nibs, Tootles, Slightly, Curly, and millions of other boys will be permanently Lost in the fire, smoke, and mud of the Western Front…

“Come again?” said Doc.

“Their brains are being pulled out by their ponytails.”

My feelings are… mixed.

[Anita] Dunn would never have used Hitler as a source for perseverance and setting the right objectives. Why[?] Because Hitler’s evil is self-evident. So why is Mao’s rancid evil not self-evident for a person like Dunn? Because she retains a double standard for far left totalitarianism over far right totalitarianism. It’s that insulting and morally disgusting double standard that gets my goat. Mao was responsible for the deaths of up to 70 million people – and Dunn sees him as a useful strategist.

The reason many people see Mao as a useful strategist is because, well, he was an excellent strategist. Hitler… not so much.

(Oh yeah… Mao was also a pretty decent writer. Hitler… not so much.)

Commentary would be superfluous, I think…

(via TPM)

Ahem. Programming geekery ahead…

While my company stays on the up-and-up when it comes to software licenses, we aren’t large enough to purchase them in the kinds of quantities we always need. Right now, for instance, we are unable to downgrade some netbooks from Vista to XP for an upcoming deployment of our software. While we’ve tested our software on Vista, we haven’t yet done as comprehensive a job of it as our XP testing. So, with great trepidation, we installed two versions of our software on these Vista machines and did some cursory acceptance testing. One version worked, one didn’t… and the exception being thrown was a particularly terse and unhelpful one (“An error in the application.” – that’s the whole exception message) from Managed DirectX. We use DirectX in both apps, and in the exact same way in both apps, so… WTF?

To make things better… neither version of the app throws any exceptions when installed on XP. So… WTF²?

For those of you unacquainted with debugging, modern development tools allow you to compile your code in debug mode or release mode. In debug mode, extra information is embedded in the executable that allows you to examine in great detail how the application works – at the penalty of decreased performance. When you ship releasable code, those extra symbols are stripped out and the application runs more efficiently. As a result, once your app is installed in production your options for debugging are pretty limited.

Still, ya dance with the one what brung you… and with what limited tools I had at my disposal, I could see… nothing. Nada. Zip. We’re trapping the error, so it isn’t even being written to the system logs (not that the logs would help much with such a terse message – it would add a cryptic HRESULT code, but that’s about it).

Many elements in our software have accompanying audio files, but some don’t. If they don’t require audio, we use a placeholder file, a properly formatted but empty media file. We also test for an audio file’s existence, in order to avoid an I/O error. The debug tools revealed nothing wrong: the file exists, the media object was being instantiated properly, the DirectX API was being invoked properly… WTF³?

After several hours of pulling my hair out, I decided to rename our existing empty audio file and replace it with a new empty file. Just to cover my bases, I re-ran the troublesome app version before replacing the placeholder file – and it ran just fine.

Go figure. It seems that while Managed DirectX on XP treats an empty audio file as a file with zero duration, the exact same Managed DirectX assembly on Vista appears to treat it as a missing file.

I musn’t be one of Emerson’s ‘great minds’ – foolish inconsistency like this drives me crazy. If only the kobolds and hobgoblins of consistency afflicted software developers more often…