Month: October 2008
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Feral Cats
Last Thursday we trapped five feral kittens living in our backyard. We took them to the vet on Friday morning, where they were neutered and were vaccinated for rabies. We picked them up on Saturday, and kept them inside. On Sunday we let the two males go. Today we let the three females go. Unfortunately,…
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Poverty
Today is Blog Action Day, and this year’s topic is poverty. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus famously said “For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.” This may have been intended as a reference back to Deuteronomy 15, in which Moses said that every seven years all…
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Exception Destruction
Languages that support exceptions need to support destructors or they need to support a try/finally construct. Otherwise using exceptions is too difficult, because if you have some local state to clean up in a function, you have to catch and rethrow every exception. The goal of exceptions in C++ is that code which does not…
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CD-ROM drives
I had an interesting experience this weekend. I bought some Fedora 9 CDs in order to easily upgrade a new laptop. Since I had them, I decided to upgrade one of my desktops from a CD rather than over the net (I usually install over the net, but, sadly but understandably, installing from CD tends…
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Kuttner and Moore
I’ve been reading some old science fiction short stories recently, and I was reminded of just how good Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore were writing together after they got married. Writing separately they were notable. Moore in particular wrote the Northwest Smith series of stories in the 1930s, which were pulp stories but nevertheless vivid…