Fireflies

February 5, 2012 – 1:35 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (0)

Long Ago And Far Away

February 5, 2012 – 1:26 pm

It’s easy to lose perspective with one’s nose pressed up against the local affairs of this evanescent speck of dust we call home.

So: zooming out just a little from U.S. politics, here’s a nice example of gravitational lensing: a “magnified” galaxy that we see as it was two-thirds of the age of the Universe ago.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (0)

Wash-ashores

February 4, 2012 – 4:57 pm

For the past month or so, common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) have been stranding themselves in record numbers on Wellfleet’s bay and harbor beaches. Here and here are some video clips from CNN.

Wellfleet has always been a hotspot for this sort of thing; the clean cold waters of the harbor are full of good things to eat, and the tidal amplitude can exceed twelve feet. But what’s been happening lately is puzzlingly anomalous, and nobody has an answer.

I’ll be spending the next week or so out there, and will see what I can learn from the professionals on the scene.

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (3)

Skunk At The Garden Party

February 3, 2012 – 11:18 pm

There was a positive jobs report today, and the markets, starved for encouragement, rallied. Obviously any upbeat economic news is to be welcomed, but it’s election season too, and so for the loyal opposition these little silver linings come complete with little clouds. (Those who found the Bush years unbearable often found themselves rooting for things to go badly in Iraq, for example.)

But there’s no question that good economic news is what the nation needs, so it would be churlish of me to rain on the parade.

Fortunately, I don’t have to, because the sedulous statistics-gatherer @Iowahawkblog spent the day doing just that. Here are a few of the observations he made as Friday rolled along:

— UNEMPLOYMENT DOWN!!!! because 1.2 million people mysteriously dropped out of the labor force last month.

— If the labor force participation rate was at Jan 2009 level, unemployment would be 11%.

— %of population over the age of 16 with jobs: Jan 2011, 58.4%; January 2012, 58.5%.

— There are 1.5 million fewer people working today than in Jan 2009. There are 13 million more people on food stamps.

— America added 2.3 million more jobs in the last 12 months. It added 3.56 million more adults.

— Today there are 3.06 Americans employed for every American on food stamps. This is the lowest it has ever been. Ever.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (33)

Post-Racial America

February 2, 2012 – 4:03 pm

Just saw this, from our “uniter”-in-chief:

Today, we’re announcing the 2012 launch of African Americans for Obama.

There’s no better time than African American History Month to consider the tremendous progress we’ve made through the sacrifice of so many””or a better time to commit to meeting the very real challenges we face right now.

Visit africanamericans.barackobama.com for more information about all the ways you can get involved””from attending HBCU organizing workshops to becoming a Congregation Captain””and say you’re ready to keep making history. Thanks, and see you out there.

Does this mean the Republican front-runner can now announce the launch of Caucasian Americans for Romney? If not, why?

Update, February 3rd: a great many people pass by here every day. Nobody has an opinion about this? Is this topic really that radioactive?

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Ging

February 1, 2012 – 11:01 pm

I just ran across an old article by my sigung for many years, Master Yee Chi Wai (aka Frank Yee). It’s a discussion of the many varieties of ging, or internal power, that are cultivated by the advanced Hung Ga practitioner.

The Hung system, in which the student must endure years of grueling stance and grip training along with high-impact conditioning of the forearms, is generally considered one of the most “external” systems of southern kung fu, and as such it gives the acolyte effective fighting tools earlier on than some of the more “internal systems” (such as ba gua, which by the way is pretty nifty stuff, as you can see here). But as the student advances, and understanding deepens, the system’s internal aspects come to the fore — one’s movements become smaller and more economical, and there is less and less reliance on athletic prowess, imperviousness to pain, and brute strength. In particular, three things happen: 1) the body learns to relax and deliver power only at the moment it is needed; 2) the practitioner learns to bring that power smoothly from the foundation — the legs, hips and waist — to the striking hand, in a rising, gathering wave; and 3) one learns to release all of that focused, concentrated power into the target through the striking hand, rather than letting any of it get “stuck” along the way.

This transition from external to internal as the years go by is a good thing, because, having worked at this stuff since I was 19, I am now a weather-beaten 55-year-old with creaking knees, and am simply no longer capable of the lower-body extravagances the style demands of a younger man: octopus-like leg sweeps, leaping to one’s feet from a floor-level crouch while spinning a seven-foot halberd, and so on.

But the ging! As any lifer like me will tell you, that just grows and grows. And a little goes a long way.

The article is here. It’s rather technical, and certainly won’t win any awards for prose style, but I thought if any of you out there are involved in the martial arts you might enjoy it.

By Malcolm | Posted in Martial Arts | Comments (8)

Battle Royal

January 31, 2012 – 9:50 pm

Here’s an all-Macbeth smackdown: Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Patrick Stewart, and the late Nicol Williamson go head to head to head in the steel cage.

Who claims victory?

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

Blasphemy Mucho

January 31, 2012 – 3:08 pm

Dennis Mangan brings us news from the prestigious London School of Economics — where the Student Union has declared “Islamophobia” to be “racism”, and has appointed itself to identify, root out, and prosecute blasphemy against Islam.

This craven gesture is not only an affront to freedom of speech, and to freedom of thought itself, but it is also shamefully muddle-headed: Islam is of course not a “race”, but is rather an infectious package of ideas and ideology capable of taking any human brain, of any race whatsoever, as a host and vector.

While we busy ourselves confiscating toothpaste and strip-searching incontinent great-grandmothers, the real jihad — the non-violent conquest of the West — proceeds apace. And we’re glad to lend a hand.

By Malcolm | Posted in Jihad | Comments (1)

Spring Is In The Air!

January 30, 2012 – 9:15 pm

How wonderful it is to see democracy flowering at last in the Maghreb! It would be too much, though, to expect everything to be put right all at once, after so many years of ruthless oppression.

Even though Egypt’s newly elected political leaders have now consolidated their parliamentary power in the wake of last year’s exhilarating “Facebook revolution”, their chief ideologist Yusuf al-Qaradawi (last mentioned in these pages here and here) realizes nevertheless that the long-overdue reforms his homeland yearns for will take time to implement, and must be phased in gradually.

Patience! It may be several years, for example, before there can be any chopping off of hands.

Learn more here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (1)

The Great Divide

January 30, 2012 – 11:51 am

At the Washington Post’s website there’s an item titled “Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.” The article looks over the gap between Presidential job-approval and job-disapproval ratings (by respondent’s party affiliation) over the years, and concludes that Mr. Obama has divided the nation more than any third-year President ever has. (In a recent poll, 80% of Democrats said they approved of his performance, while only 12% of Republicans did.)

But as divisive as Mr. Obama’s presidency has been, it would be wrong (at least in part) to blame the man: the issue is systemic. We read:

What do those numbers tell us? Put simply: that the country is hardening along more and more strict partisan lines.

While it’s easy to look at the numbers cited above and conclude that Obama has failed at his mission of bringing the country together, a deeper dig into the numbers in the Gallup poll suggests that the idea of erasing the partisan gap is simply impossible, as political polarization is rising rapidly.

Out of the ten most partisan years in terms of presidential job approval in Gallup data, seven ”” yes, seven ”” have come since 2004. Bush had a run between 2004 and 2007 in which the partisan disparity of his job approval was at 70 points or higher.

There is a broadening ideological schism in American sentiment on major issues of fundamental importance: the ever-increasing scale of federal spending and scope of intrusive federal regulation; nation-building abroad; the indifference of the Federal government to most illegal immigration, and outright antipathy to states who try to act when Washington abdicates; institutionalized racial and ethnic preferences that consistently disfavor white, Anglo-European people and culture; refugee-resettlement scams; foreign aid to nations that hate us; radical multiculturalism and non-discrimination; and so on.

The rift between these two constituencies is only getting wider and deeper and angrier, and that trend isn’t going to change. So as I’ve been saying for some time now: the practical issue is not that liberals and conservatives disagree about these things — it’s that they can’t get away from each other. This seems to me little different from the religious and ethnic tensions that have torn countries apart, often violently, throughout history. Such things rarely turn out well, and I don’t expect this will, either.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (13)

Mitt Schlag

January 29, 2012 – 11:16 pm

Hey, maybe we’re going to win this thing after all!

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

John Bushnell

January 29, 2012 – 12:06 am

The music biz isn’t always fair. A lot of mediocre talent makes it big, and there have always been world-class players who never get the wider recognition they deserve, and spend their working lives playing for a devoted local following far from the big-city spotlight. One such is my old friend John Bushnell, whom I’ve known since we attended the fifth grade together, back in my hometown of Princeton, N.J.

When I left New Jersey and headed for Gotham back in the mid-1970’s, I managed to land a job in a top recording studio, and since then I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with many of the world’s best guitarists. But I’ll put John up against any of them.

You tell me. Here’s how John plays the blues. And here’s his version of the immortal Voodoo Chile.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (4)

Benthic Bafflement in the Baltic

January 28, 2012 – 1:40 pm

Here’s a curious item: a strange, roughly circular object, about the size of a 747, found last July at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. It even comes with what some are calling “drag marks”, hundreds of feet long.

It looks like this:

What is it? A UFO? Kvenland?

I’m dead boring when it comes to this sort of stuff — so I’m guessing that it’ll turn out to be a geological feature of some sort: a protuberant basalt column or such like, and those “drag marks” just a “shadow” caused by seafloor currents.

But hey, you never know. Maybe Kvenland.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (6)

Nuggets

January 27, 2012 – 11:21 pm

Here, courtesy of Bill Vallicella, is an appalling story: a young woman who has eaten nothing but chicken nuggets all her life, and was finally taken to the hospital after collapsing. I suppose this is no different from somebody drinking herself to death, but one does wonder what her parents must have been thinking. (Our own son was a very choosy eater, so I understand how difficult it can be — but the lovely Nina and I did at least manage to get a modest variety of groceries into him, and now he’s 6’4″.)

What is also appalling is that this lurid item is what I’m passing along today from Bill’s exceptional website; in particular he has just written a set of three pieces on the “illusion” of free will (here, here, and here) that are far more worthy of comment.

But so swamped have I been with work the past couple of days that I’ll have to pass, for now (other than to say that Bill rightly zeroes in on the distinction between, on the one hand, deliberation and choice — which we certainly are capable of, and are central features of our humanity — and, on the other, non-deterministic, “free” deliberation, which I believe is asking too much).

Do go read them yourself, though. And if you like, we have a linked series of posts of our own on the subject, beginning here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Frightful

January 27, 2012 – 12:08 am

I’ve been working all day, with no time to write. I won’t send you off empty-handed, though: here’s a singular series of illustrations made by the artist John Vassos for his 1931 collection Phobias.

By Malcolm | Posted in Art | Comments (1)

The Bubble Test

January 25, 2012 – 8:12 pm

Are you tucked away in an elite intellectual and cultural cocoon, isolated from America’s ‘vibrant’ popular mainstream?

One can only hope. Find out here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (9)

Gas Guzzler

January 25, 2012 – 10:24 am

With a hat-tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s something new about to make its debut: the Tata MiniCat. Not what you want for traversing the Interstate system, but perfect for getting around locally — and cheaply.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (3)

Fish Story

January 24, 2012 – 11:34 pm

We were on the road all day, so all I have tonight is this odd item from long ago, in which goldfish bowls were banned in Monza, Italy. Apparently, according to the town council’s Giampietro Mosca, a fish kept in a curved glass bowl “has a distorted view of reality … and suffers because of this.”

Nonsense. The same could be said about most of my liberal friends, and they seem perfectly happy.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (18)

Here Comes The Sun

January 24, 2012 – 1:02 am

It seems old Sol has just launched a gigantic flare our way — the biggest in seven years — and we will notice its effects on Tuesday.

While you’re waiting, here’s a fantastic gallery of solar images. My favorites: numbers 15 and 16.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (1)

Software Professionals: A Field Guide To Indentification

January 23, 2012 – 10:56 pm

Here’s how you can tell working coders from computer-science Ph.Ds:

Make them mad. We all know when you’re angry you should count to 10; this should be sufficient for distinguishing the two species.

The Coder:

“zero…one…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight…nine.”

The Ph.D:

“one…two.”

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (4)

Buffalo

January 23, 2012 – 7:16 pm

Bored? Then spend a few minutes contemplating this grammatically correct and semantically coherent sentence:

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Read all about it here, and here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Language | Comments (4)

This Ain’t No Party

January 23, 2012 – 6:39 pm

Here’s a funny line:

“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

Funny? Well, not so much, maybe. According to a tart item at the Corner yesterday by Mark Steyn, Mr. Romney actually said this in a stump speech to explain his rationale for running. I’m still trying to figure out whether the quote is genuine or not, but the fact that it even seems plausible to the many people who, according to my brief web search, appear to have taken it as genuine indicates that we have a problem here.

And of course we do have a problem here; the lack of a candidate who is both a solid conservative and capable of winning in November has me, and obviously the rest of conservative America, worried. There will be nobody riding up on a white stallion to carry the battle to Mr. Obama; it’s going to have to be Mitt or Newt (or certain defeat with Rick Santorum).

In South Carolina Romney only got a centrist, upscale fraction of the voters, while Gingrich grabbed everyone to the right. I’ll assume that in the general election this same conservative base, having no other choice, will rally behind whoever is running against Barack Obama, and so will vote for Romney if he becomes the nominee. The battle, then, is for those in the middle, and I think Romney has a better shot at those in the general election than Newt does — so I think the Buckley Rule (nominate the most conservative candidate who can win) favors Romney here. But does he have a better chance at winning the center than Barack Obama? Only if he ups his game considerably. Gingrich’s pugnacious resurgence, which will seriously test Romney’s mettle should give him incentive to do so.

I hope he can manage it. One thing all of us agree on: this election really, really matters.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (8)

Coming Soon!

January 22, 2012 – 11:39 pm

More on the blessings of socialized medicine, from the Daily Mail.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Discuss

January 22, 2012 – 11:26 pm

What say you, readers? Is this child abuse?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

Fun With Fluids

January 22, 2012 – 11:08 pm

When you mix cornstarch with water, you get a gloopy liquid with a strange property: its viscosity increases the faster you try to move through it or deform it. Back when my kids were in grade school, they informed me that the stuff now has an official name: “oobleck”.

It turns out that oobleck behaves very entertainingly indeed when pumped with low-frequency acoustic energy. Have a look here.

That’s oobleck at 30 Hz. at the other end of the acoustical spectrum is ultrasound, which is used in cool-mist humidifiers. Here’s a clip of that in action.

Finally, we have “ferrofluid”: an emulsion of surfactant-isolated ferromagnetic nanoparticles suspended in a carrier such as kerosene. Ferrofluid does some very entertaining things in a magnetic flux gradient, as you can see here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Snow!

January 21, 2012 – 10:17 pm

First real snow of the season here in Wellfleet. Here are two views from chez Waka, taken earlier today (and about half a foot ago).

Looking northwest, down the hill:

Looking east, out the back door:

I liked the way these tree-trunks along the lane looked in the grey light:

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (2)

Whoops!

January 21, 2012 – 9:52 pm

Off the coast of Brazil is a huge oilfield. Ensuring a stable source of Western-Hemisphere oil would be a good thing for us here in the U.S., especially given recent unrest in the Mideast, and uncertainty about the security of the Persian Gulf. So The Obama administration went to Rio last month to make a pitch for rights to the stuff.

Not a successful one, though: it looks like China’s going to drink our milkshake.

Oh well, at least we still have the Keystone Pipeline!

Oh, wait…

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Creative Destruction

January 21, 2012 – 12:41 pm

Here’s a cheery item: Bankrupt Solyndra is now smashing its inventory and throwing it into dumpsters.

I thought our American readers would find this of particular interest, having paid for the stuff.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Tom Ardolino, 1955-2011

January 21, 2012 – 12:54 am

Here’s some really terrible news that I just heard about tonight; Tom Ardolino, NRBQ’s longtime drummer and one of my favorite drummers of all time, has died. I don’t know what the cause was, but he’d been sick for a while.

Tom Ardolino just whacked the hell out of the drums, and played the biggest, loudest, fattest grooves you ever heard. What I loved more than anything about his playing was the way he’d find a place somewhere right in between straight four-on-the-floor and a shuffle, and just hammer the crap out of it. Kind of like this.

I always hate it when great musicians die, but this one hurts extra bad. Dammit.

We just posted a couple of NRBQ videos a week or two ago. Go watch ’em again.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)

Microsoft’s New App: A Goodthinkful Review

January 19, 2012 – 1:30 pm

My friend Danny Fisher’s website Wish I Didn’t Know has picked up a story about a proposed smart-phone app that will warn users about high-crime districts, presumably so that safety-conscious travelers can avoid blundering into them.

The app has apparently irked various interest groups, who I suppose think that gathering crime-rate statistics and making them available them to the public gives high-crime areas a bad name, or something.

In the article, we read:

Sarah E. Chinn, author of ”˜Technology and the Logic of American Racism,’ told AOL the app is ”˜pretty appalling.’

”˜Of course, an application like this defines crime pretty narrowly, since all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods.’

”˜I can’t imagine that there aren’t perpetrators of domestic violence, petty and insignificant drug possession, fraud, theft, and rape in every area.’

That’s just fantastic, and highly original, too. Just to be clear, because this is such a piercing insight that you might not get it right away: if you were to imagine that a neighborhood with, say, fifty street assaults a week is somehow a more dangerous place for a stroll than a neighborhood with five such crimes per decade, you’re thinking too narrowly. Instead, the right way to understand crime rates, in light of Ms. Chinn’s intellectual breakthrough, is to assign them only two possible values: 0 or 1. And since “all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods” *, we can narrow the range even further: everyplace just gets a 1! Done.

(Somebody should tell Microsoft this, by the way — because as a professional software engineer, I can tell you it will make coding this app one hell of a lot easier. Fewer bugs, too, I’ll wager.)

So there you have it — a breathtaking unification, a Great Leap Forward in what was until now a dauntingly complex field of study: all crime happens equally, everywhere. Move over, James Clerk Maxwell!

Read the rest here.

* I’ll confess that I’m having trouble remembering the last time there was, for example, a gang-related drive-by shooting in Wellfleet, MA (pop. 2750), but just to be sociable I’ll defer to Ms. Chinn as to whether “all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods”. She is, after all, a published author.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (16)

Senate To Toothpaste: Back In Tube!

January 19, 2012 – 12:28 pm

Lawrence Auster brings to our attention (with pithy comments of his own, here) an article from the Daily Mail on the SOPA bill that has been getting so much attention. (I’ll confess I haven’t read the dense 78-page bill itself yet, but from all the summaries I’ve seen it does indeed appear to be a real stinker.)

Read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Technology | Comments (0)

Heckuva Job!

January 18, 2012 – 6:34 pm

Sorry to harp on politics today, but President Obama has now petulantly squashed the Keystone Pipeline project, which had broad support, would have created many jobs, and would have decreased our reliance on Mideast oil. Even his own base was divided on this one, with unions supporting it and environmental groups in opposition.

Detailed commentary here.

Is it November yet?

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

And Away We Go

January 18, 2012 – 3:31 pm

In a gratifyingly swift response, those non-recess “recess” appointments the President made a fortnight or so ago are now being challenged in court.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Brain Damage

January 18, 2012 – 1:22 am

Well, Wikipedia’s down for a day. This should reduce the apparent know-it-all-ness of the blogospheric commentariat by about 98%, I reckon. (Fortunately I downloaded a copy, so I should be OK.)

Feeling a little better today. Should be my old self shortly.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Pfffft

January 16, 2012 – 11:20 pm

Still under the weather here, and in my depleted state I seem to be losing the battle with the blank page. If brain not in better shape soon I may have to turn things over to my Super PAC for a few days.

Update: OK, here’s something, in case you missed it over at Kevin’s place: Just who or what was Tom Bombadil, anyway?

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

No Post Tonight

January 15, 2012 – 11:49 pm

I’m not at all well tonight — I seem to have caught a nasty sinus cold, a rarity for me — and it’s all I can manage to keep the conversation going in our “What Is A Nation Anyway?” thread.

Back to normal soon, I hope.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Pat Buchanan on Ron Paul

January 13, 2012 – 10:09 pm

Pat Buchanan has now lost his TV gig for crimespeak, but he’s still got his website and newsletter. In his latest offering, he examines Ron Paul’s candidacy, and what Mr. Paul’s investment strategy says about his view of the near future.

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

1/13/12

January 13, 2012 – 11:55 am

Well, here it is again: Friday the 13th. I consider them auspicious, but I’ve already written about that several times (such as here and here), so for today I’ll just note the event en passant, and get on with other things.

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Comments (4)

What Is A Nation, Anyway?

January 12, 2012 – 11:13 pm

With a hat tip to Dennis Mangan, here’s a provocative item:

Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses

Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship.

Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional.

“Human rights do not prescribe national suicide,” Judge Asher Grunis wrote in the judgement.

How about that! “National suicide”. Amazing that somebody can get away with calling a spade a spade like that in this day and age. As Dennis remarked (my emphasis):

Judge Grunis appears to be sound on what exactly constitutes a nation, that is, it consists of a people, not anyone who can manage to get to a physical location.

Very unfashionable notion these days, that.

What say you, readers? Should Israel be allowed to define itself as home to “a people”?

If you say ‘no’, then why not? If you say ‘yes’, then you probably know what I’m going to ask next.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Foreign Affairs | Comments (101)

Gut Feelings

January 12, 2012 – 4:17 pm

In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, the magnum opus of the extraordinary Greek/Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, the central character, Beelzebub refers to the unfortunate inhabitants of Earth — us — as “three-brained beings”. This is in alignment with Gurdjieff’s division of the human organism into three parts: the intellectual center, emotional center, and ‘moving’ or ‘instinctive’ center.

The emotional ‘brain’, on this view, is distributed throughout our middles, with a particular concentration in what we call the ‘solar plexus’.

I was reminded of all this when I saw this article the other day.

For our other mentions of Mr. Gurdjieff in these pages, have a look here, and for related posts try our ‘Inner Work‘ category.

By Malcolm | Posted in Inner Work, Science | Comments (4)

Tech Talk

January 12, 2012 – 12:52 pm

This post is something a little out of the ordinary, one that most of our readers will want to skip: it’s a Javascript hack for Microsoft Visual Studio that solves a problem I had at work today. I couldn’t find anything about this online, and once I’d got it sorted out I thought I’d make it available here, so that the next poor wretch who wants to know how to do this won’t have to puzzle it out for himself.

One thing we Windows programmers sometimes need to do is to generate C++ files representing the classes exported by a type library. Visual Studio 2010 has a tool for doing this, called the MFC Class Wizard. (You launch it from the menu bar: Project -> Class Wizard…)

When you use the Class Wizard to create these files, it does two things. First, it renames the exported classes according to the MFC naming convention, by dropping any ‘I’ or ‘_’ prefix and replacing it with a ‘C’. (E.g., an exported class called IBaseClass will be called CBaseClass in the output file.)

The other thing it does is to generate a separate header file for each exported class — so that two exported classes IBaseClass and IUtilityClass will end up in two files, CBaseClass.h and CUtilityClass.h.

But what if you want to keep the class names the same, and merge all the declarations and definitions into a single header file? You have to go through the classes one at a time, in each case explicitly changing the auto-generated class name back to the original class name, and replacing the auto-generated file name with name of the single file you want as the output. (The Wizard is smart enough to merge the code, Dieu merci, but you still have to tell it specifically what to do every time, one class at a time.)

Yesterday I needed to generate a wrapper file for the Outlook Redemption type library, which exposes zillions of classes and methods. I was retrofitting the wrapper classes into some legacy code, created long ago, so I wanted all the class names to match the names in the type library — and I wanted it all in a single header file. To munch through these classes one at a time would have taken me many, many hours, and would have been inexpressibly tedious. I knew that if I could somehow get the Wizard to skip the automatic renaming of the classes, and to generate the same output-file name each time, it would do the whole conversion in just a minute or two. But where was this configured? I looked online for a while, but couldn’t find what I needed. So I dug into the Visual Studio installation directory, and finally found what I was looking for: an HTML file that defines both the Wizard’s UI and the Javascript that does the actual work. A few quick hacks, and the problem was solved.

The file is here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\VCWizards\CodeWiz\MFC\Typelib\HTML\1033\default.htm.

All of this auto-generation work is done in the function AddClass, which starts at line 527.

The per-class filename generation is done at line 590:

Files_Array[oGeneratedClasses.options.length-1] = strClass + “.h”;

To force the Wizard to merge all the classes into the single file ‘YourFileName.h’, just change this to:

Files_Array[oGeneratedClasses.options.length-1] = “YourFileName.h”;

To prevent the renaming of the generated classes, look at these lines, starting at 559:

var strInterfaceName = oInterfaces.options[i].value;
var strClass;
if( strInterfaceName.charAt(0) == ‘_’ || strInterfaceName.charAt(0) == ‘I’ || strInterfaceName.charAt(0) ==’i’)
       strClass = “C” + strInterfaceName.substr(1);
else
       strClass = “C” + strInterfaceName;

if (IsInGeneratedList(strInterfaceName))
…

Change this to:

var strInterfaceName = oInterfaces.options[i].value;
var strClass = strInterfaceName;

if (IsInGeneratedList(strInterfaceName))
…

And that’s it! Don’t forget to put it all back, or at least to change the hard-coded filename next time you want to use it. (What would be even better would be to add some new code to expose all of these as options accessible directly from the UI, but I haven’t bothered.)

I hope this saves somebody out there a little time someday.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Tagged , | Comments (8)

Rivers Of Blood Must Flow!

January 11, 2012 – 7:04 pm

Meet Mercedes-Benz’s new spokesman.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Hear Ye!

January 11, 2012 – 6:35 pm

BE IT KNOWN BY ALL that Hizzonner Michael Bloomberg, Lord Mayor of Manhattan, Imperator of The Five Boroughs, Slayer of Term Limits, and Guardian In Loco Parentis of the Well-Being and Moral Probity of the Gothamite Flock, has of Late turned His Attention to the licentious Consumption of Alcoholic Liquors, and other stimulating Potations, by His intemperate Wards.

BE IT KNOWN ALSO that, Hizzonner having Determined, by the Light of His beneficent Wisdom, said Consumption to have become in recent Years EXCESSIVE, appropriate Arrangements therefore Soon shall be Made, throughout the Imperium, sharply to Limit the Vendition of intoxicating Beverages, so as to improve the Character, Comportment, and Eupepsia of His Flock.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

FLOTUS: Fed Up

January 11, 2012 – 11:07 am

Here’s a dispatch from our senior White House correspondent, Milton Polchek:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 –

Michelle Obama, the first black woman to serve as First Lady, took to the airwaves recently to express her irritation at being characterized as an “angry black woman”.

Mrs. Obama could not be reached for comment, but a close friend and confidante spoke to this reporter, on condition of anonymity.

“As a black woman in America, Lord knows Michelle has plenty to be angry about, and of course with decades of academic and professional experience in this area, she is widely regarded as an expert in the field. But this “angry black woman” thing just really, really pisses her off. She’s trying to keep cool about it, but frankly I can’t remember the last time I saw her get so mad.”

Her friend paused.

“…well, not lately, anyway. But I’ve been out of town for a few weeks.”

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (5)

The Deprong Mori

January 11, 2012 – 12:25 am

Here’s a curious item for you: the only recorded capture, in the Tripiscum Plateau of the Circum-Caribbean region of Northern South America, of the exotic Piercing Devil.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (1)

Pot Luck

January 10, 2012 – 9:12 pm

With thanks to our reader Pete K., here’s a heartening item from the frontiers of science. What’s more, the story introduces a new and important fundamental unit of measurement, which I think should be called the ‘marley’.

And here’s a related video.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (4)

Spring Has Sprung

January 9, 2012 – 2:19 pm

With a hat tip to VFR, here’s the Jerusalem Post’s latest report on the Islamist renaissance that is coalescing in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’.

Meanwhile, DEBKA reports that in Egypt, General Tantawi and the SCAF grow weary of their burden, and are negotiating an early handover of the reins of power to the Muslim Brotherhood (who reiterate that they are not bound by Egypt’s agreements with Israel). DEBKA also reports on a growing deployment of U.S. military resources to Israel:

Thousands of US troops began descending on Israel this week. Senior US military sources told DEBKAfile Friday, Jan. 6 that many would be staying up to the end of the year as part of the US-IDF deployment in readiness for a military engagement with Iran and its possible escalation into a regional conflict. They will be joined by a US aircraft carrier. The warplanes on its decks will fly missions with Israeli Air Force jets.

As a result of the political upheavals in the region, Israel’s security situation has deteriorated sharply in the past year, and the buildup of U.S. forces there is unlikely, in my opinion, to be reversed any time soon. This tightening encirclement of Israel by its mortal enemies, who are in political ascendancy on all sides, will lead to an increased Israeli dependency on the United States to guarantee its survival. This in turn will give the United States — whose current administration shows no particular fondness for Israel to begin with — increasing leverage with which to pressure Israel as regards its accommodation of Palestinian demands, which are themselves merely a proxy for the eliminationist sentiments of the regional Islamic community.

A commenter recently remarked, in response to my unvarying pessimism about how the ‘Arab Spring’ was likely to affect Western interests in the region:

In the end the “Arab Spring’ might turn out to be an unmitigated disaster but at the very least it allows for possibilities not imagined in many decades.

That’s certainly true. Likewise, if I were to put on a blindfold while driving, it would allow for possibilities not imagined by nearby motorists.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (0)

Ha!

January 8, 2012 – 11:06 pm

Gotta love this: the upstart Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, who has attracted nationwide attention for his ostentatious Christianity, is fond of associating himself with the New Testament verse John 3:16. For you damned heathens out there who may not be familiar with this oft-quoted passage, it says:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Here’s the sort of thing I’m talking about:

Well, in tonight’s unlikely Broncos win over the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mr. Tebow completed ten passes — for a total of 316 yards. Better yet: that’s an average of 31.6 yards per completion.

I don’t know if any of them qualified as a “Hail Mary”, but that’s pretty nifty work nevertheless.

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (2)

Tough Call

January 8, 2012 – 5:43 pm

So, conservatives: who’s our guy going to be? Heading into the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney has a commanding lead — and the other candidates spent most of Saturday’s debate snarling at one another, while hardly even taking a swing at Mitt.

There are two questions.

First: who out of this lot would, by our lights, be the best president?

Second, and far more important for the future of the nation: who has the best chance of ousting Barack Obama?

To answer the most important question first: I think the answer is Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich is simply much too off-putting to too many people. The reasons? There are several: his personal peccadilloes, his ostentatious vanity and haughty condescension (though of course you’re stuck with those that either way in a Gingrich/Obama contest), his petulance, his sequential fascination with a kaleidoscopic assortment of Big New Ideas, and more. (Even his portly middle, suggestive of hedonistic indiscipline, would no doubt be a liability in contrast to the imperially slim Mr. Obama.) I simply don’t think he would win, and if there’s one thing that all conservatives agree on, from the evangelicals to the Tea Party to the most socially liberal, godless “metrocons”, it’s that for Mr. Obama to get another four years in office would be a catastrophe for America. Mitt Romney, though brilliant by nobody’s assessment, looks radiantly presidential, holds his own well enough in debates, and clearly understands what all conservatives agree our next president must understand: the importance of a smaller, leaner, and less intrusive government to the preservation of America’s liberty and prosperity. It would be delightful to see Newt Gingrich shred Mr. Obama on the debating floor, but you can’t have everything, and it’s hard for me to imagine that Mitt won’t have a far broader appeal at the polls. I’ll invoke the Buckley Rule: you pull for the most conservative candidate who can actually get elected — and that’s Mitt Romney, I think.

As for the first question, about who would make the better President: for all of Newt’s brainy command of history, and his vast governmental experience, I’m still not sure that he’d be a better president. He has a tendency, rather like Toad of Toad Hall, to hop from one glittering attraction to another, and he has many enemies in Washington. I’m sure Mitt would be less of an activist than Newt — but Washington doing less looks pretty good right now, and I imagine most of his activism would be directed toward slimming the Federal behemoth, rather than dreaming up new and visionary initiatives. There’s no doubt that Mitt is far less imaginative than Newt, but that’s just as well, under the circumstances.

So: Mitt Romney it is, I guess. It’s hard to get excited about the guy, but if he can unseat Mr. Obama, that’s good enough for me.

Not everyone on the Right agrees, of course. In his latest essay, for example, Thomas Sowell makes the case for Newt Gingrich. I agree with much of what he says, as usual, but I think he overestimates Newt’s chance of victory in November, which completely undermines his argument. You can read it for yourself, here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (19)

Shame!

January 8, 2012 – 1:09 am

I’ve never been a fan of Rick Santorum, and I hope he doesn’t win the GOP nomination, because then I’d have to vote to elect him President. But any criticism I might make of him begins and ends with his public life: his opinions and intentions regarding government policy.

Not so for liberal water-carriers Alan Colmes and Eugene Robinson, who disgraced themselves recently by jeering at Mr. Santorum and his wife for the way they handled what is surely the most sorrowful calamity that can ever befall any of us in this vale of tears: the death of a child.

Mark Steyn lets them have it, with both barrels, here.

P.S. I realize that, as Ross Douthat says here, privacy is to some extent “a luxury of moral consensus”, and that Mr. Santorum has made a career of pushing politics into the privacy of the bedroom — which is a big part of the reason I don’t support him. But mocking a family over their grief for a dead son is simply beyond the pale, I think, and in another age would have been considered evidence of ill breeding.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (8)