I mentioned last week that my parents have no aptitude for computers.

My father emailed me with a list of computer woes; notably, he was getting messages about no firewall. There was no way I was going to get to the bottom of the issue just by email or talking to him on the phone. It’s 5,000 miles from Seattle to Dublin, so I can’t drop by to take a look at the computer in person–much as my parents would like to have me visit.

I had tried using the built-in Windows Remote Assistance to trou­bleshoot issues on their laptop a couple of years ago, while they were …continue.

I blogged last month on Jim McDermott’s long-running First Amendment legal battle with John Boehner, the new Republican Majority Leader. The Stranger has a cover story giving a lot of detail on the case.

President Clinton will be appearing at the Seattle Center on June-3rd in a fundraiser for McDermott.

Update: The We The People event will be held from 5:30-7:30pm at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. Tickets can be ordered here. I just ordered tickets for Emma and me. See you there.

My opera education continues. Tonight, we saw Seattle Opera’s production of Verdi’s MacBeth.

I used to be very familiar with Shake­speare’s MacBeth, having studied it for two years in prepa­ra­tion for the Leaving Cer­tifi­cate (the major ex­am­i­na­tion at the end of Irish secondary school; ef­fec­tive­ly the entrance exam for university).

Verdi’s opera of MacBeth truncates Shake­speare’s plot, con­cen­trat­ing on the tragic flaw of the MacBeths. Their shared ambition, feeding off each other, both impels them to power, and leads to their ultimate downfall. The opera was written during the Risorg­i­men­to, when Italy was trying to break away from the Austrian empire, and doubles as a thinly veiled appeal to Italian patriotism.

I had more fun at Cosi Fan …continue.

Amy Sullivan has a piece in the Washington Monthly about the little-sung successes of the Democrats.

Apparently, there is some strategy and co­or­di­na­tion going on in the Democratic leadership, despite what the press might lead you to believe. The Dubai ports deal blew up because Schumer kept calling press con­fer­ences about it, though Schumer has hardly been credited with lobbing the grenade. Murtha was not left out in the cold by Pelosi and other Dems; it was a deliberate strategy to prevent him being labeled as a token hawk. And the Dems managed to kill Bush’s pri­va­ti­za­tion of Social Security, by dis­ci­plined attacks on Bush’s "risky" proposal. Their not offering …continue.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a C++ routine to parse decimal numbers using the overflow detection principles of SafeInt. I couldn’t find anything in the libraries that actually did a good job of checking for overflow.

Briefly, to see if unsigned values A+B overflow, check if (A > MAX_UINT - B). Similarly, A*B will overflow if (A > MAX_UINT / B).

// Convert a string to an unsigned. Returns 'true' iff conversion is legitimate.
bool
StringToUnsigned(
    const string& str,
    unsigned&     rUint)
{
    rUint = 0;

    if (str.empty())
        return 

I sometimes joke that I must be adopted because my parents have no aptitude for computers. I could make a similar joke about writing. Many of my immediate family, despite decent educations, seem to be incapable of writing a simple English sentence, much less a coherent paragraph.

One relative writes emails that are bereft of punc­tu­a­tion: neither a comma nor a full stop (period) is to be found. Capital letters occur, but too randomly for my liking. And everything is linked into one paragraph, no matter how long or disjointed. Yet, I’ve received adequately punctuated hand­writ­ten letters and postcards from him. I attribute his email sloven­li­ness to a com­bi­na­tion of …continue.

David Neiwert writes:

Go smugly amid the noise and haste,

and remember what peace there may be in stonewalling.

As far as possible, leave no chance of surrender

and be on superior terms to all other persons.

Speak your truthiness loudly and garbled;

and never listen to others,

especially not the wise and the well-informed;

they can all just go to hell.

Rest here.

President Al Gore on Saturday Night Live, spoofing the disastrous six years of Bush.

I first started blogging at EraBlog in February 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq war. EraBlog never really took off and now seems to be ex­pe­ri­enc­ing technical problems.

I’m reposting all of my original posts. I’ve cleaned up the links, where possible, and added an image at the top of each one, but have not otherwise modified the posts.

As you can see, Iraq weighed on my mind. And I was fucking right! Going to war was wrong, and even then I (like many others) could see that the case for war was lacking.

2003/02/07: Casus Belli

2003/02/07: Pencil Carvings

2003/02/07: State of the Union

2003/02/07: Hasbians: Bi for Now

2003/02/07: Barbara Lee: Public Enemy Number One?

2003/02/08: Bush-Iraq parody of Nigerian spam scam

2003/02/09: Casus Belli II

2003/02/09: TiVo

2003/02/09: Powell at the UN

2003/02/14: Patriot Act II

2003/02/14: Hans Blix …continue.

I remember about two years ago, before a trip across the Atlantic, trying to find websites that had street maps for London and Dublin – and coming up nearly empty.

Now, a year after it became available, I notice that Google Maps covers Ireland and the UK. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it does a piss-poor job of finding locations: try typing anything more specific than Dublin into the search box.

Google Maps now provides a basic ability to get directions between cities.

Some other map links:

• Irish sight­see­ing
• Maps of Ireland and the UK
• Via Michelin: driving directions