Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Friday, 12 April 2002

# 8 PM

ten points for style

It is our policy to send copies of all notices of alleged infringement to third parties who will make them available to the public.

... and to put a link to the notice at the bottom of any censored search result. And the notice has to include the URLs that were censored. Nice end-run.

i hate computers, computers hate me

Well, Windows, at least, is not currently my friend. I sat down last night to do my taxes. However, I didn't ever get to run the program, because Windows decided it was Not Happy about various hardware upgrades being perpetrated behind its back (the last time I booted that partition was to do last year's taxes). So it refused to talk to the network until I reinstalled it. Which, as you know, takes hours; the more so since I stubbornly tried several other things first, refusing to believe that it had to be reinstalled.

I did finally get the thing working, and about halfway through the taxes, but I'm too tired to finish. And they're due Monday. Bleah.

(What does the network have to do with taxes? Mainly, that one of the upgrades was the video card, so I needed the right driver or I was going to be stuck working in 800x600 16-color VGA mode, which is No Fun. Also, it tends to be necessary to download a batch of updates to the tax program.)

# 4:20 AM

Stayed up all night reading Kushiel's Dart. It's a alternate-Renaissance fantasy which gets major points for not using any Extruded Fantasy Product tropes. The distorted mirror of Europe that she's using occasionally becomes obnoxious (choice of words to render in French .vs. English, for instance) but the story takes hold and doesn't let go. Unfortunately it's 900 pages long, which is awkward when you start reading at midnight.

Now I'm working my way through Little, Big, which is another very long book but one that I can only read in small doses. I'm not sure what I think of it yet.

I found the C library bug. Someone converted a chunk of the RPC code to thread-safety without thinking it through, and the obvious change was wrong. (Hence recompiling the aforementioned tiny file outside the library, and therefore with thread safety turned off, made the bug vanish.)