Friday, August 01, 2003

Vicious Little People. There are two kinds of gay-bashers.  There are those who do it on autopilot, because of tradition/upbringing/culture/religion, and there are those who use hate as an outlet for their anger and dissatisfaction. There are no legitimate, logical reasons to be anti-gay.  If you are anti-gay, it is for one of the reasons noted above.  You can argue about "anti-nature" and all that kind of crap until you're blue in the face, but for any contrived example you care to give, there are a thousand counter-examples.  The well-meaning amongst the "auto-piloters" are trying to find a way to shoehorn some grain of logic into their mindset.  I have yet to see a single argument that makes any sense. It's all a matter of license versus liberty.  Unless you have a really good reason for it, you're not allowed to mess with your neighbor's life.  Gay people are the neighbors.  All they want is to be left alone, and to be able to participate in the basics of our society.  You want to exclude gays from your church?  Go right ahead.  I don't care.  When you want to exclude them from being able to designate their life partner as legally such, or deny them the ability to inherit from a partner, or to be able to see that person in a hospital or sign for medical treatment, you've gone too far.  It's a matter of liberty.  Doesn't it strike anyone as ludicrously ironic that the Catholic Church is making pronouncements decrying homosexuality when it is clearly at the most painful crossroads of its life cycle, based in part on failing to acknowledge the repressed homosexuality of a goodly number of its clergymen?  I must caveat this with the note that there's nothing that connects abuse with a priest being gay.  Sexual abuse comes from heteros too. 12:02:01 PM    comment []

Air Security and the TSA. There are exactly three useful things that the TSA does.  First, they are in charge of making sure that the cockpit doors on planes are reinforced.  That's an excellent start.  Second, they put Air Marshals on random flights.  I think that is an excellent step as well -- every hijacker needs to be wondering if there's an armed "passenger" hidden somewhere on a flight.  There might be, there might not be.  Hijackings are so rare that, well, I think it's quite effective as a deterrent.  Third, the TSA ensures that there is matching of fully scanned bags to passengers, ensuring that any bomb attempt must be accompanied by a suicide, and it has to get past scanning. All the shoe checking, passenger screening, identification, and other crap is just plain useless.  And they're spending a mountain of money to do it. Funny.  I feel like I used to support the TSA, in the aftermath of 9/11.  I thought it was a good idea to get serious about the problem.  Now I'm not so sure that we've really gotten anywhere. Here's my list of what works: Pilots with guns.  Special training, plastic bullets.  Makes total sense. Reinforced doors with redundant cams displaying the passenger cabins. Baggage matching. Baggage scanning. Will every arab-looking passenger have to remove their shoes from now until the end of time? 11:47:32 AM    comment []

Stupid Garbage Collection. For the love of God, if you're a library writer, never call System.gc().  If you call it, you don't have any fucking clue what you are doing.  I mean it.  Say, when you call that function, how long is it going to take?  The answer is...YOU DON'T KNOW.  Are you running in a big app?  A little app?  One that's had its garbage collection finely tuned?  Are there millions of objects or just a few thousand? YOU DON'T KNOW. So don't call it.  Ever.  Want your finalizers to run?  Tough shit.  Don't call System.gc().  Maybe your finalizers will never run.  Too bad.  If they must run, put the cleanup operation on a proper queue, set up a thread to check it, and do the work explicitly.  There is precisely one place to make this kind of decision -- at deployment time.  In certain very limited circumstances, an application deployer might decide that in a given situation, it is sensible to run System.gc() at certain times.  This can usually be done with scripting or some other kind of facility that is built into the app. I am tired of being bitten by "libraries" that think they need to make deployment decisions. 11:39:52 AM    comment []

I Don't Want To Be Right. Paul Krugman has an opinion piece in the NY Times today...he's saying basically the same thing that I've said too.  Yes, it's some pretty serious doom and gloom.  The lesson here is that there's gravity in this country too.  What goes up must come down.  In 1999, did anybody think the stock market was going to crash?  Yes, some people did.  The system reaches an unstable point, and will violently correct itself.  The real question is, how will that correction happen? In the case of the stock market, it is a dramatic repricing of just about everything (an adjustment).  What we really don't know is what happens when the superpower of the world needs to undergo a massive adjustment.  What mechanism would be used?  What happens if the whole thing just grinds to a halt, deficits are spiralling out of control?  Where is the safety valve? I really don't know much about the economics of meltdown.  My guess is that the currency markets will be the first to gyrate...as the US $ starts to drop precipitously.  But that will have something of a balancing effect, as US exports get cheaper for the rest of the world and US imports get more expensive.  Since so much of US consumerism is based on cheap crap (in both senses) from other places, anything that makes imports more expensive is going to result in a real inflationary push. Hell, I don't know.  I think we need to start worrying about this.  I think we need to find a way to keep capital moving around, encourage new business, encourage productivity.  I just wish that more things were made here in North America, things that people want. 11:32:01 AM    comment []