fwaggle.org

There’s some really goofy behavior in software these days – it’s enough to make you scream. Go ahead, do it – I’ll wait… there, doesn’t that feel better?

Thunderbird 3 is quite annoying at times, but on the whole it’s rather nice to use. My main annoyances are it won’t save my settings to keep the message pane closed (I hate automatically reading every mail I click on, sometimes I want to leave things unread but move them around, for example)… every time I restart it I have to hit F8 to get rid of the message pane again.

Another thing that bugs me is the behavior of GMail’s “All Mail” folder – to be fair, there’s bugs about it, the Mozilla team are trying hard to figure it out, and it’s probably GMail’s fault for not really following the IMAP specs… but basically I get notified twice of every new email, once for the root folder and once for “[GMail]\All Mail” – despite the fact [GMail] is unchecked for “check this folder for new messages”.

But the real doozie probably has to go to Visual Basic… yes, I started doing a little more lately, mainly because Sabriena wanted an app built and VB’s the quickest and easiest way for me to bang one out. Anyway, I’m probably doing something wrong, but suppose the following:

Dim strSomething as string
strSomething = "a"
If IsNumber(strSomething) And Int(strSomething) > 0 Then
Debug.Print("Something: " & Int(strSomething))
End If

First of all, I’m not entirely sure why typecasting a string to an Integer has to throw an exception if it contains non-numeric data – to my knowledge atoi() et al work okay if you send them “123a”, it’ll return an integer equal to 123, won’t it?

Anyway, the issue I was having is in most language I’ve ever tried, if you have a conditional and the first condition is false, the rest of the conditional isn’t evaluated. You can do things in C like “if ((someptr = malloc(8)) && strcpy(&someptr, “omfg hi”))” and if the malloc() fails then the strcpy() will never be executed.

VB fails spectacularly in this respect – in the above example the IsNumber() is completely useless because it will try and typecast the string to an integer anyway – throwing an exception. The only solution I found is to do a nested If, with the typecast inside the If block for IsNumber(). This works and throws no exceptions.

I’m sure the reason this hasn’t been fixed is that there’s probably some retarded programming out there that relies on this behavior, and the shitstorm will be bigger than it would if they just left it.

Being a moderate in such a polarized political climate as the USA sucks. I think mainly it has to do with how ignorant most people are to how much the two-party system sucks… everything is “us vs them” on every issue.

If I say how much I can’t stand the neo-conservative stance of the current republican party, I’m painted as a socialist lefty with no work ethic or family values. If I say I think Obama was a fraud and there’s absolutely no change going to accompany his presidency, that he’ll just do every damn thing the democrat party’s done – well then I might as well be a churchie redneck with a mullet.

If I say that safe-sex education (in addition to the continued use of abstinence encouragement from parents, I don’t think anyone’s suggesting we don’t tell our kids not to do it) is important in keeping the numbers of unwanted pregnancies down, well apparently that makes one a pedophile (I wish I were joking about this one).

If I’m upset because the people who haven’t worked a job in years eat, sleep, watch TV, and just generally live far better than my family – who have struggled and actually for a period been effectively homeless… well then I’m either a callous, heartless person or worse: I’m somehow a racist. Because, you know, all lazy welfare trash are black*, and if you hate lazy welfare trash that means you hate all black people as well.

What sucks about US politics is not entirely unlike ordering cable… if you want one little feature, you are forced into every damn thing that goes along packaged with it. If you want your gun owners’ rights protected, well kiss goodbye your ability to get an abortion should the need arise, your right for two consenting homosexual adults to be recognized to be as happy as the rest of us, etc.

You can’t protect a woman’s right to her own body without ordering the full Nanny-state package along with it. I’m not against abortions completely, but a woman under democrat-only rule has the right to terminate as many babies as she likes… but dog forbid the state execute a convicted mass-murderer, or that I play Grand Theft Auto!

It’s kind of pathetic that with the majority of political discourse, it’s made up almost entirely of two groups of people who believe everything their group tells them is right, and do nothing but sling mud at each other and using straw-man arguments. Kind of pathetic that everyone is either a churchfag or a socialist and that not a single one of us is recognized as being in between.

What’s even more pathetic is that this consumer-culture that abounds in the United States, you’re far more likely to wind up keeping your IQ reading about the latest dumb-ass celebrity gossip, idiots putting tapeworms in themselves on purpose, the whole “hcg diet protocol” thing (because getting off your arse once in a while is un-american, we all want a pill or a shot to make us shit chicken-grease so we can keep eating that KFC – consume consume consume!)…

No, the fact is that anyone remotely intellectual should be interested in politics, but US-politics is so fueled by intellectual retardation on every front that you’re actually stupider from having participated in a discussion… that’s what’s truly pathetic.