Rants from Vas

I’m really glad Nick D’Arcy has been dumped by Swimming Australia. Athletes should be held to a high standard of behaviour, being in the public eye as they are. Other sporting bodies should take note. What I’m not impressed by are the idiotic media statements made by D’Arcy’s supporters. Here’s a sample of what his coach Brian Stehr had to say:

I’m still in shock. When do you stop punishing somebody. Fair enough he did the wrong thing, he did a silly thing, he knows that, everyone knows that, but this is getting ridiculous now.

They’ve stopped punishing him – he got a suspended sentence. He did more than a silly thing, he violently assaulted someone in a public place. He brought swimming into disrepute. Representing the country in a sport is a privilege, and Darcy’s shocking behaviour has resulted in him losing this privilege.

Here’s one from Nick D’Arcy’s father Justin D’Arcy:

It is now seemingly a matter of every other sporting body that’s subordinate to this (the Australian Olympic Committee) just lining up in a queue to punish him for precisely the same thing.

Are you completely blind? Your son violently assaulted someone in a public place. That kind of behaviour has consequences. He brought this on his own head. He’s only received a suspended sentence — a slap on the wrist. By his own stupidity, he’s given up the privilege of representing Australia in elite sport.

This sort of news for young people can be absolutely devastating.

Well, I never would have imagined… Come to think of it, maybe people would get upset about being punched in the face in a public place, too. Now who was it that did that? Oh, I remember: it was your stupid, violent, aggressive son!

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an elite cyclist, an elite swimmer, or someone else who’s given years of their lives to one of these major sporting bodies, there has to be some compassion at least in the way this news is delivered.

Compassion? They should make an example of him! They need to send out a message that this is not acceptable behaviour, and hopefully other athletes will take note.

Sometimes I really hate C++. Not just dislike it, but really, really hate it. This week, one of the most horrible language “features” got me again: the generated copy constructor. I understand why they exist — they’re necessary to allow C structures to be passed by value no extra effort. However, their behaviour causes a world of pain that should never have been inflicted on developers.

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Who exactly thought this sign was a good idea? After careful consideration, I think it means a book will set you back $35, but you must pay with exactly one $5 note, one $10 note and one $20 note — other combinations will be rejected. Literacy really is on the decline.

Also, what’s with the horizontal text alignment?

My comment spam filter has picked up a couple of spam comments of a new breed recently: spam comments advertising comment spamming services. It’s a bit odd on a number of fronts. First of all, why waste resources you could be using to push out spam for your clients? Or has the economic downturn affected the spammers’ business, too? Secondly, the comments were collected by my spam filter. That means the only person who will see them is me. And because the comments were caught by the filter, I’d be pretty dubious as to their ability to get anything advertising my services past anyone else’s filters. All in all, it doesn’t seem to be good business.

It’s undeniable that this week has been hot in Melbourne. Temperatures were in the mid 40s (over 110°F for the Celsius challenged). You don’t want to go outside, and there are three bushfires burning in the state. On top of that, Melbourne’s infrastructure doesn’t seem to be built for summer. There were over 200 cancelled train services in the evening peak; traffic was terrible; there were problems with the electricity supply in the afternoon.

But as if that wasn’t bad enough, there was a severe Slurpee shortage in the CBD. By four o’clock, most of the 7‑Elevens only had empty machines or liquid on offer. I hope this crisis is resolved in a timely manner. If it isn’t, it could lead to discontent, civil disorder or even deadly riots.

SBS showed Gérard Pirès’ film Les Chevaliers du Ciel last night. It’s got fast jets and hot girls, and it’s set against the backdrop of beautiful France. What’s not to like? I’ll tell you what — the stupid English translation of the film title: Sky Fighters.

The French title means “Knights of the Sky” which, besides sounding a lot classier, has completely different connotations. You see, when we think of knights, we think of honour, chivalry and adventure; when we think of fighters on the other hand, we just think of, well, fighting…

The irony is screaming:

It makes me laugh every morning I walk past!

Mobile data was one of the coolest things that came with GSM: I could connect a serial cable to my Nokia 5110 and get ISDN connectivity everywhere. It was billed at one cent per second and ran at about 9600 bits per second. Now most GSM and UMTS handsets can run a PPP server to allow a computer connected via Bluetooth or USB to access packet data services. Of course, since airtime is a limited resource, most carriers meter your use of mobile data services and charge proportionally. However, some US carriers are offering unlimited data use on certain contracts, and I believe AT&T’s iPhone contracts that include unlimited data usage are disadvantaging iPhone users on other carriers and stifling development.

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Most programming languages have flow control features of some kind. Yeah, I know there are some languages that lack them, for example early programmable shader languages, some macro languages, and I think some programmable calculators just run a program straight through from beginning to end. But by and large, programming languages provide ways to jump around within the code and write decision-making logic.

Fairly early on, people realised that the only things you really need for flow control are a way to make a comparison, and a way to conditionally jump to another point in the program based on the result of a comparison. On top of these primitives, you can build flow structures that are as complex as you like. If you look at the native machine code that computers run, you can see that this has really been taken to heart: most CPUs provide a way to store the result of a comparison and one or more conditional jump instructions. Early programming languages like BASIC and Fortran had flow control based entirely on these primitives, too. If you learned to program on an 8-bit personal computer, you’ll no doubt remember writing statements like “IF condition THEN GOTO line” all the time.

But in 1968, this form of flow control was about to get a major setback (at least in high-level languages), because Edsger Dijkstra had written what was to become a highly influential letter entitled “A Case Against the Goto Statement”. You probably don’t know it by this name, though, because it was published in CACM under the title “ Go To Statement Considered Harmful” (Niklaus Wirth, a CACM editor at the time, changed the title for publication). This letter criticised the goto statement and the form of flow control associated with it, instead advocating structured programming.

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Can someone explain to me why car magazines love the Hyundai Getz so much? Wheels gave it “Gold Star Car” in 2007; SHEdrives gave it “Best First Car” in 2007; it even got the NRMA/RACV/RACQ/AA “Best Small Car” in 2003 and 2005. I can’t for the life of me see why. Someone sideswiped my car, and the smash repair place has given me a Getz to drive for now. Now I know I can’t expect a loaner to be a particularly nice car, but I used to own a 2004 Echo, and I’ve spent enough time driving Pulsars, so I think I have a point of reference.

From the moment you sit down, you notice how cheap it feels. It has that hard, nasty, cheap plastic they’ve chosen for the steering wheel and dashboard. It isn’t comfortable, either. I’m not tall, but the seat feels too high. The gearstick seems a long way away down where they’ve placed it. It doesn’t feel good to drive, either. The brake pedal has very little travel and doesn’t give proportional resistance. The turning circle is too big for such a small car. The engine doesn’t deliver, either – you put your foot down and wait for something to happen; at least with an Echo, when you put your foot down it revs eagerly, and you definitely feel the pull at 6,000 rpm.

Sure they’ve thrown in lots of features, like power windows, power mirrors, audio controls on the steering wheel (which are on the wrong side – they belong on the left) and an MP3/WMA compatible CD player. But it doesn’t change the fact that that the car is lacking where it matters; extras don’t make a bad car better.