Patrick M Brennan

“Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”
    – Senator Rick Santorum

Even though he wrote it three years ago, I only read Rick Santorum’s vile words today, and I have only one thing to say to a man who blames my home town for the sickening pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church : Go Cheney yourself, Rick.

Isn’t it so very Republican of him to do that? Pedophile priests were and are all over the country. In every diocese, the institutional response to child abuse at the hands of priests was to cover it up, to shuffle the offenders around, to protect the institution at the expense of the victims. When people finally had had enough of the institution’s lies and evasion of responsibility, they finally organized and sued. (And where did they do that first? Boston, that’s where.) But Rick doesn’t have any issue with the institution, which enabled the abuse and covered it up. Cardinal Law is a big wheel in Rome now, after all. Not an issue, says Rick. It had nothing to do with the institution. Instead, Rick blames it all on Boston (which is code for Liberals and Democrats).

See? Says Rick. It’s all the Democrats’ fault. How very, very Republican of him.

Meanwhile, on Planet Reality, a Kentucky diocese has agreed to a $120 million settlement with fifty years’ worth of children abused by priests, the largest ever such settlement. A similar settlement has been reached with the Diocese of Orange County California. Gee, it seems to me that Kentucky and Orange County are pretty “conservative” places. What would Rick say about that? Never mind, I already know. He’d blame the Democrats.

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”
    – Pig-Faced Hack Karl Rove, impugning my patriotism again.

And then there were the people who saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and figured that it was the the perfect pretext for the big war in Iraq they’d wanted for years. There were also the people who saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and prepared to use it as a campaign issue.

Oh, hey, those were the same people – and Karl Rove was leading the whole pack of them.

Recycled old joke of the day: How can you tell Karl Rove is lying?
answer: he’s still breathing.

You may recall that a few weeks ago, Dick Cheney said that the Iraqi insurgency is in “its last throes.” That would have been good news, except for that fact that it’s not true, and a lot of people got a good laugh out of how Dick expects us to keep swallowing his bullshit. I mean, they would have gotten a good laugh out of it, but some of them got killed for his bullshit, and the rest of us didn’t think that was very funny.

Well, it turns out that Cheney wasn’t lying to us, he was just misinterpreted. “Look it up in the dictionary,” he said. “See? It says right here: ‘throes (n.) : a violent period’. So there, I was right.”

Well, sure, Dick, except, you know, it wasn’t the “throes” bit which we thought was a stretch. We know it’s violent in Iraq right now. It was the “last” part.

“Oh, that,” said Dick. “See, I was misquoted. I said last throes, but I meant to say, lasting throes. You know, I meant, “these throes are gonna last a long time.”

Well, how long would that be? Dick said 2009. Other people, people without a track record of lying, say, oh, maybe, 2012.

Andrew Sullivan posted this remembrance today:

Today is the late math genius’s birthday. Turing was a brilliant Englishman, one of the founding fathers of computer science, and a patriot whose cracking of the Nazis’ Enigma Code was critical to winning the war against Hitler. His amazing work was rewarded by being offered the choice in 1952 of choosing chemical castration or imprisonment for being gay. Two years later, a broken man, he killed himself. Today is a day for honoring him and the countless men and women over the centuries whose gifts and dignity were obliterated by ignorance, oppression and hate, hate that is still being excused and perpetrated today. May those of us lucky enough to have been born in their wake never forget what they went through, never forget the cruelty and evil they had to confront, and do everything we can to prevent these wounds being passed to the next generation.

I wish I believed that a lot has changed since the 1950s. Turing was an atheist as well as an intellectual and a homosexual. I am confident that he would not last long in the political climate of these times, regardless of his accomplishments and contributions.

Last week, I was assigned to fix a very subtle bug in our product, and I found myself very hard-pressed to figure out what exactly the problem was. A little bit of digging convinced me that it wasn’t a client issue, and I am primarily involved in the client side of our product. I asked a couple of the server guys what their opinions of the bug were, and we narrowed the search down to a single flag which was apparently not being set correctly… even though we could plainly see the code which was setting the flag correctly.

This is one of those bugs which causes programmers to tear their hair out in frustration. We can see it’s correct, the code is clearly correct, yet the output is clearly wrong. Of course, in this case, as in most such cases, we aren’t seeing what we think we’re seeing, which is even more occasion for a programmer to tear out his hair.

My colleague discovered that in an obscure bit of server-side JavaScript code, there was a simple and maddeningly easy-to-miss error. In fact, the flag was being set correctly, but the thing that it was being compared to wasn’t being set correctly, due to a pseudo-syntax error in the JavaScript code. My colleague had inadvertently typed a ‘:’ where he meant to type a ‘.’, so a line which should have read
foo.bar = 1;
turned out as
foo:bar = 1;
Instead of creating an object property foo.bar which equals 1, we set a global variable bar which equals 1, and the statement which does that is labelled as foo. (How useful is that?) Later on, we evaluate flag == foo.bar, which will always be false, because foo.bar was never initialized, and this was the proximate cause of our bug.

Technically, the typo is not a JavaScript syntax error. JavaScript lets you define statement labels for reference by the break and continue statements. Therefore, when my colleague ran this code, the compiler gave him no indication that there was an error of any sort. However, there were three opportunities for JavaScript to help us out before this trivial error propagated into something which sucked up several expensive hours of our company’s time. See how JavaScript failed:

(1) the typing mistake was repeated three times in the file, creating three labels with the same name, and JavaScript never complained that we were recycling labels.
(2) the label name was identical to a previously defined object, and JavaScript never complained that there was a collision between the names. (this is a “feature” of JavaScript.)
(3) when bar, a previously undefined variable, was written to, JavaScript never complained about that, either. (this is another “feature".)

JavaScript is great, but it’s a simple language meant for small-scale rapid development. It’s not a good match for large-scale system programming, and unfortunately we’re locked into it here for a number of good reasons. Though they’re good reasons, we could still use better tools, to scrub this code for more errors I’m sure are lurking in there somewhere.

At the same time, I can take comfort in the fact that we’re still a small company, so the impact of our typos aren’t very widespread. Some of the worst bugs in history have been due to simple typos, such as the Mariner 1 crash. Of course, nobody would dare to write a control system for a rocket using JavaScript. No, instead, they’d use a serious, industrial-strength programming language for the job, like Ada.

My play Get Out of My American Way, which was performed at the Fourth Boston Theater Marathon in 2002, has been published by Baker’s Plays in their BTM4 Anthology, which is on sale here. (Better late than never, I suppose).

My short plays dog_eat_dog.com and Simbiotic have been accepted for publication by JAC Publishing. These will be available shortly as individual books.

Finally, my short play Bits was performed at the 33rd Annual Playwrights’ Platform Summer Festival of New Works this June, and will be performed at the XXX Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Original Short Play Festival in July. I’m not sure how I feel about performing at an XXX festival, but I am proud that the Platform has been at this longer than Sam French.

Treason never looked so smart! Dannika’s set to go straight to the best-dressed list at Gitmo in this charcoal grey outfit by Gia Sarlocci. Its bold lines and flattering cut make her the envy of Democrats/Traitors everywhere. This bold ensemble looks right at home wherever enemies of America gather: in a George Soros board room, hanging out in Hollywood with the liberal elite, or out on the town after a hard day at MoveOn.org! Dannika proves you don’t have to look like a hippie, or a Muslim, to hate freedom. It’s a look that might be called conservative, except Dannika believes in free speech, limited but effective government, fiscal responsibility and the separation of church and state. It’s a shame she’ll be trading it in for a burlap hood and an orange jumpsuit, but at least she’ll look great as she’s riding the CIA’s Gulfstream to Cuba!

I started a Blogspot blog today: patrickmbrennan.blogspot.com. This is another idea I had to get around the trouble I’ve been having with Blogger. No FTP issues between Blogger and Blogspot! (Well, what would I expect? Probably Blogspot’s servers are sitting right next to Blogger’s; the publish was certainly quick.) And I can blog again that way. Seriously, I’m starting to get annoyed by this problem. How many blogs do I have to maintain, after all? The count is up to four at the moment:

www.pbrennan.net : Where I want to blog, but Blogger won’t let me.
www.pbrennan.net/wordpress : Where I don’t want to blog, but I can.
patrickmbrennan.blogspot.com : Ditto.
world.std.com/~pbrennan : Where I used to blog, but I don’t anymore.

Obviously, I want to pare this list back down again. To ONE blog. Are you listening, Blogger?

Sometime around 2:00 this morning, I was in the baby’s room (having taken the baby and left my wife in our bedroom to sleep), trying unsuccessfully to rock my daughter to sleep in the glider rocker. At least she was calm. I was only half-awake at the time, in my bathrobe and slippers, and when I looked down at my feet I saw one cat dozing next to my left foot, and the other cat soundly sleeping with her head propped on my right foot. And I thought, this is a great image. Here I am, the ur-Daddy, father and protector of small creatures.

You see now what sleep deprivation does to you?

So, I’m thinking about just giving up and moving everything from Blogger to WordPress. Blogger has taken three weeks so far to fix a simple FTP issue with my ISP, and they haven’t responded to repeated email requests for information. Rather than rely on them, I’d rather have my own solution installed on my server. It’s just simpler all around, except for one major problem – migrating all my posts from Blogger format to WordPress format. There is an easy way to do it, but I can’t use the import script everybody else uses, because that relies on Blogger’s FTP working correctly – gotcha!)

Do I really want to do this? Suffer through weeks of translating hundreds of posts, and more weeks of tweaking my template, until I’ve got some reasonable approximation of what I’ve had for the past couple of years? I don’t know. It’s not as if I need a project to fill all my time – I’ve got those in spades.

<whine>All I wanted was a simple tool which enabled me to make timely posts to my website without fussing with a lot of nitty HTML code. Why is everything so much more complicated than it seems at first?</whine>

When I think of Caribbean fun, I think of Bill O’Reilly.

That’s why I’m really disappointed to discover that the Caribbean cruise with Bill O’Reilly has been cancelled for lack of bookings.

I can’t imagine why. I mean, really, ask yourself: Who would you really rather be on a cruise boat with, than a loudmouth obnoxious control freak, boor and serial sexual harasser? It’s like being stuck in an elevator with this guy, and he’s yelling, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut UP!” Or else he’s whispering in your ear, “once people get into that hot weather they shed their inhibitions, you know they drink during the day, they lay there and lazy [sic], they have dinner and then they come back and fool around…” For a week. And you’re seasick.

Fun, huh?