An Exercise In Futility

The pope might be on his deathbed. Quick, someone stick a feeding tube in him!

In the referendum on election reform (May 17, 2005), vote Yes for STV! STV may not be the best form of representative voting, but it is certainly better than the current “first past the poll” system!

People always get it wrong. Even I used to: The steeper the learning curve, the easier it is to learn! The curve is a graph of “learning” vs time, time being on the X axis. If the curve is steep, that means you’re getting a lot of learning done in a shorter amount of time, than say, if the curve was shallow, in which case, it would mean that your learning is being drawn out over a long time period. The learning curve is not like a hill climb — steep does not equal hard!

I was made aware of this odd behaviour in C++ today: A destructor for a derived class will not get called unless the BASE DESTRUCTOR is virtual! This Article is self contradictory in some cases, but it does illustrate the point. The behaviour manifests itself with both the g++ and VC++ compilers, so it seems to be a deliberate “feature” of the language.

I’m moving all of our music (CDs) to mp3 format, and i’m going to dump them all onto a little box (which i don’t yet have) which will reside in the living room, on the house’s network. Basically it will be a dedicated mp3 server which happens to be connected to the stereo system. There are currently 901 songs in the archive, comprising 2 days, 13 hours, and 33 minutes of listening. I think i’ve ripped about 1/4 of our collection, which will mean we could end up with about 240 hours of music in total. Not too shabby!