Anti Bernie Sanders Bias in the NYT

One doesn’t have to look far to find anti-Bernie bias in the media, generally in the form of ignoring the fact that he exists. Here’s one I noticed yesterday in the NYT, in an article talking about what a clown Trump is.  At one point they mention “Polling shows that he would enter the general election trailing badly against Hillary Clinton”

That plays well into the establishment message that we have to settle for Clinton because Bernie Sanders would be unelectable, and we need Clinton to make sure that (pick a Republican) doesn’t win.   Never mind that polls show that people prefer Bernie Sanders over Trump by a much wider margin than they prefer Clinton.  Clinton currently leads by 11.2 points, while Sanders leads Trumb by 17.4 point.  In other words the preference of Sanders over Trump exceeds peoples preference of Clinton over Trump by more than 60%.

The NYT doesn’t seem to find that newsworthy.

Powerline, git, Fedora

I recently discovered powerline, thanks to a Fedora news article. Getting powerline running on your Bash terminal is completely trivial and discussed in the article. You just:

Install powerline.

  sudo dnf install powerline

Configure your shell to use the powerline daemon.

bash

Add this to your .bashrc

  if [ -f `which powerline-daemon` ]; then
     powerline-daemon -q
     POWERLINE_BASH_CONTINUATION=1
     POWERLINE_BASH_SELECT=1
     . /usr/share/powerline/bash/powerline.sh
  fi

fish

add this to ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

set fish_function_path $fish_function_path "/usr/share/powerline/fish"
powerline-setup

Configure powerline to display git information

If all you want to do is get the git branch displayed on your powerline, that’s pretty easy, see for example this excellent article. But after I discovered powerline-gitstatus, I just had to have it.

Install the powerline-gitstatus segment:

pip install powerline-gitstatus

Setup a configuration

I’ve put my powerline configuration up on github, so if you like, you can start with my configuration, and play with it from there simply by clone my powerline-configuration repository into your local .config directory. I.e.:

cd ~/.config
git clone https://github.com/spacemoose/powerline_cofiguration.git powerline

Otherwise you can copy over the default configuration and follow the directions here.

Try out your new configuration

Since this article is focused on customizing our shell prompt, we are dealing with the powerline daemon, which means we must run

powerline-daemon --replace

when we want to see what effect our changes might have – BUT before you do that, I highly recommend running powerline-lint in case you forgot a comma somewhere.

Org2Blog

Aah, good news. There’s a plugin that lets me post to my wordpress blog using Emacs org mode. The github repository is here. The mainpage documentation creates an unecessarily complicated picture of what has to be done to get this puppy running. On emacs 24.5.1 all I had to do was:

  • installed org2blog using emacs package manager.
  • install the following two lines to my .emacs:
(setq org2blog/wp-blog-alist
 '(("a-name"
 :url "http://username.your-blog-address.net/xmlrpc.php"
 :username "your-username"
 :default-title "Hello World"
 :default-categories ("org2blog" "emacs")
 :tags-as-categories nil)
 ))
login with
M-x org2blog/wp-login.
post to drafts
M-x org2blog/wp-post-buffer

And hey presto, I’m up and running. I can write my posts in a first class editing evironment, using a first class markup language, and just export it with a keystroke (there are default keybindings, but I’m not using them yet). More’s possible, but for the moment I’m satisfied with that. For example, there are instructions on the github page explaining how to create a post template, and how customize your authentication, but so far I haven’t felt the need.

Now, let’s see if this leads to more posts on my part.

Exporting unicode code-snippets to PDF from Org-mode

Since I started using org-mode some years ago, I’ve wound up using other document and prensenation tools (like LaTeX, Word, PowerPoint…) less and less. I find it the most convenient way of generating virtually any kind of document or presentation.

Now I’m working a great deal in Unicode. Org-mode itself has no difficult with unicode, but exporting to PDF goes through the LaTeX engine, and one has to do a little extra work to make sure that works seamlessly.

The simplest means I have found to getting LaTeX to interact correctly with Unicode is to use Xetex.  One needs to:

  1. Install XeTeX (use your system’s package management).
  2. Tell org-mode to use XeTeX when generating the PDF’s from the latex files — see the elisp snippet below.
  3. Remove inputenc and fontspec from the list of default packages that org includes when exporting LaTeX.

So  I added the following to my .emacs


;; fontify code in code blocks
(setq org-src-fontify-natively t)

;; Delete inputenc and fontenc from the default packages.
(setq org-latex-default-packages-alist (delete '("AUTO" "inputenc" t)
                   org-latex-default-packages-alist))
(setq org-latex-default-packages-alist (delete '("T1" "fontenc" t)
		   org-latex-default-packages-alist))
;; Add minted to the defaults packages to include when exporting.
;; alternatively you can add these by customizing org-latex-packages-alist.
(add-to-list 'org-latex-packages-alist '("" "minted") ("" "fontspec")

;; Tell the latex export to use the minted package for source
;; code coloration.
(setq org-latex-listings 'minted)

;; Let the exporter use the -shell-escape option to let latex
;; execute external programs.
;; This obviously and can be dangerous to activate!
(setq org-latex-pdf-process
'("xelatex -shell-escape -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory %o %f"))

 

You can find my emacs configuration on github.

Ferguson Missouri

I’ve been unable to avoid reading about what’s been happening in Ferguson, Missouri.  It’s hard to imagine how it feels to have your son shot down callously by law-enforcement, to have nothing happen to the shooter, and to have the follow-up disregard and disrepesct the victims and the concerned citizens affected by the murder.

What’s more dismaying is the fact that whites across America are not in an uproar about how their fellow citizens are being treated, simply because of their skin color.  The sentiment seems to be “c’mon we have a black president, this couldn’t have been racism”.  The degree to which people are selectively processing events in order to maintain this kind of attitude is impressive.

For me it’s absolutely clear that Police are predominantly racist.  I suspect black policement are equally or more racist on average than their white colleagues, although I have to admit that’s only a supposition.  I did have one experience which fixed this opinion in my head though.

Years ago, while studying at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, I caused a traffic accident with my bicycle.  I pulled into North Avenue to see if I could safely make a left-hand turn (traffic blocking my view to the right).  A truck was coming fast so I pulled back.  The driver panicked (after whipping past me),  and slammed on the brakes, causing the aged sedan behind — driven by mid thirties black man with partner and two children as passengers — to collide into the truck.

Now, It was entirely clear that either I, or the white truck driver was to blame, but of course the police (one black, one white) ran the drivers licenses of all involved.  The black family man must have an outstanding warrant, because the police cuffed him and took him away in the patrol car.  Okay, so far so good, sucks for the guy but presumably he did something to get himself in that situation.

The man was at all times polite and helpful.  Despite this, the black police officer felt the need to humiliate the guy in front of his children by hoisting him up by the trousers (classic bully wedgie) and shoving him into the police car — laughing while doing it.

I suspect the white cop wouldn’t have behaved that way.  I’m think, having had my own encounters with the police (and being white) that a white guy in that situation would have been treated a little better.  I am sure that if the guy had been white and wealthy, he would certainly have been treated differently.

So maybe it’s not racism.  Maybe it’s classism combined with a callous, bullying, us-vs-them mentality.  Maybe the racism is merely a coincidence — the high correlation between poverty and race caused by our racist history.  I can’t really say.   Either way, the behavior is shameful, and we need to do something about how American police behave.

London today.

In London today for a bit of a holiday.  It’s a stopover on the way to Norwitch, where we’re going to a friend’s wedding.

We took the train through the chunnel.  There are a number of trade-offs involved in traveling by rail over travelling  by air.  The total travel time increases, but that increase is less significant than one might think at first glance.  First, we save the trip to the airport, which saves about a half hour.   Second, the airport wants us to check in 90 min in advance, which is unecessary at the train station.  For a trip to London, the train station is in the middle of the city.  Once the train arrives, we have arrived, whereas arrival at the airport means another hour till we get to our destination — given the need to get luggage, disembark, etc.  Finall, If I take the average of airplane delays (in my life maybe a half hour) and subtract the average of train delays (less than a minute on the average in my life), I arrive at a compensation of 3 hours, door to door.  So for short trips — which from Switzerland means Italy, Germany, France, etc. it’s often more efficient use of time.  Of course, going to London takes 8 hours by train, given that one has to transfer from Gar de Lyon to Gar de Nord, and the ridiculous checkin procedures for the chunnel train.  The flight is approximately 2h, meaning  door-2-door time of 5 hours.  So I would save 3 hours travelling by plane over travelling by plane.   Overall it’s a loss, but not a terrible one.

There are other concerns.  Of those 8 hours, I spend a couple of hours in Paris’s largest rail stations.  I find this enjoyable.  It’s a brief visit to Paris, in which one sees only a little of the city, but rather a lot of the cities’ people.  While it doesn’t really count as a visit to Paris, it counts a great deal more than a stop-over flight would.  It’s rather the same when travelling through a country by train.  When one travels over an area by plane, one sees no more of that area than one would on Google maps.   When you sit on a train as it travels through a land, it makes stops.  People embark and disembark.  Often you get to observer a small slice of their life as you rocket through through their lands at speed which were unheard of even a hundred years ago.    So it’s my belief that one sees and experiences more by rail than by air.

Financially, there’s a real penalty for travelling by train.   This is not because air-flight is more efficient than train travel.  Quite the opposite in fact — the efficiency of train travel, and the implications for that on climate change and resource consumption,  is our primary motivations for choosing it over flight.  This is simply an artefact the enormous subsidies that airlines enjoy.   Should rail travel enjoy such a large level of support from our taxes, the economics of rail travel vs air travel would likely  change.  This can only change if governments begin to show more wisdome with regards to issues like climate change and resource consumption, which in turn is only likely to improve when citizens grow more wise.

Which brings me to the real reason we travel by rail, even when there is a financial and temporal price to be payed.  When we travel by air we rob from future generations and the poor of the planet, as it is future generations and the planet’s poor who suffer most from climate change our modern excesses.  Once, when explaining my reasons to a  colleague who should already have understood them, he replied with some banality about the need to be happy balanced against some uncertain future.  For the vast bulk of human history people have been unable to travel by air, let alone travel cheaply with wanton abandon.  Are we only now able to be happy?  In fact evidence suggests that modern excesses only make us less happy.   While I can’t prove it, I’m comfortable asserting that selfishness and short-sightedness can only diminish our happyness.  Implying that flying is a vital component of happyness is as absurd as asserting that the the suffering of climate change is uncertain, or even in the future.

Cleaning out “using namespace std;” declarations from header files.

I recently had to work with a very large codebase, in which each and every file included a header file with the statement “using namespace
std;” in it.
This led to the situation that hundreds of header files, using std strings, pairs, etc, were using those items without any std:: dereferencing.

Cleaning this situation up by hand would have taken weeks and been error prone, so I wrote a little script to do it for me, and called it standardize.pl

The variable possible_offenders is a list of std c++ names which are frequently in place in the code in question.

The script recursively searches a directory for for .h and .cpp files. For cpp files, it checks if any of the possible_offenders occur in the file.  If so, it adds a “using namespace  standard” directive if none exists.  Thus cpp files are changed minimally.

For header files, all occurences of “using namespace std” are removed, and all occurences of possible_offenders are prefaced by an explicit std:: namespace specification.  Care is taken not to change occurences in comments or in quotations.

If you are faced with a similar situation, you can find the script on github: https://github.com/spacemoose/standardize

cout, buffering, and premature pessimizations.

The other day I was in a discussion with some c++ developers, where one of them stated, most definitavely, that “cout is not buffered”.   Now I have to admit that I was flabbergasted by how wrong this assertion was, and my first instict was to question the capabilities of the developer in question.  As I look back on the vast majority of the code that I have worked with however, it’s pretty clear that most c++ developers are either unaware that cout is indeed buffered, or they are unaware of the side effect of std::endl, or they just don’t think about the impact it causes.  Consider the following two lines of code:

  std::cout << "some text" << std::endl;
  std::cout << "some text\n";

Now, neither of these lines of code is more readable than the other.  Neither is more maintainable than the other.   The endl variant can however take significantly more time to execute than the \n variant. Why? Because std::endl has two effects:

  1.  It inserts a ‘\n’.
  2. It iinserts a std::flush into the stream, flushing the buffer.

If you are using a std::endl where a ‘\n’ will do (i.e. you do not need to explicitly flush the buffer), you are creating what Sutter and Alexandrescu call a “premature pessimization” in their excellent book “C++ coding standards”.   Despite this, the endl variant is much more common.  Whenever I ask anyone why they are using endl’s all over the place instead of \n,, the typical answer is “well, it’s more the C++ way to do things”.  That’s just not true — it’s not the C++ way to do meaningless resource comsumption.

Rule 1 is “don’t optmize prematurely.”  This means you should not make your code less readable, more complex, or less maintainable for the sake of dubious performance benefits.  A correllary to this rule however is “don’t pessimize prematurely”.  If two variants are equally readable, equally clean, and equally maintainable, prefer the more efficient variant.  This is just a question of correcting ignorance and forming good habits.

So you might be curious if this performance difference is measurable, and the answer is of course it is.  You can test it yourself with the following benchmark:

#include <iostream>
#include <chrono>

namespace chrono = std::chrono;

int main ()
{

	constexpr unsigned int numLines = 100000;
	auto start = chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();
	for (unsigned int i =0; i< numLines; ++i)
	{
		std::cout << "This is a prematurely pessimized line" << std::endl;
	}
	auto pess = chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();
	for (unsigned int i=0; i<numLines; ++i)
	{
		std::cout << "This is not a prematurely pessimized line\n";
	}
	std::cout << std::endl;   // flush the buffer so the comparison is
							  // only biased in favor of pessimized
							  // code.
	auto np = chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();
	double durp = chrono::duration_cast<chrono::milliseconds> (pess-start).count();
	double durnp = chrono::duration_cast<chrono::milliseconds> (np - pess).count();
	/// Use cerr for benchmark results, so we can redirect the noise.
	std::cerr << "\n==============================\n"
			  << "pessimized code took: " << durp << "ms.\n"
			  << "unpessimized  took  : " << durnp << "ms.\n"
			  << "Buffering saved: " << durp-durnp << "ms., or " << 100* (durp-durnp)/durp
			  << "% speedup." << std::endl;

}

Compiling on gcc with -O2, I get the following results:

Output to termial:

==============================
pessimized code took: 5370ms.
unpessimized  took  : 4806ms.
Buffering saved: 564ms., or 10.5028% speedup.
~/Personal/Miscelaneous[master]$ ./a.out > /dev/null

Output to /dev/null
==============================
pessimized code took: 45ms.
unpessimized  took  : 6ms.
Buffering saved: 39ms., or 86.6667% speedup.
~/Personal/Miscelaneous[master]$ ./a.out > tmp

Output to file:

==============================
pessimized code took: 365ms.
unpessimized  took  : 79ms.
Buffering saved: 286ms., or 78.3562% speedup.

If you are writing code which uses output streams a lot, like logger functionality, or file output, this can make a huge difference to your resource consumption, and you’ll never see the needless waste in a profiler.  So form good habits.  Unless you need to flush the buffer for some reason (which in fact is a rare need unless you’re dealing with concurrency issues), prefer the \n construct.

 

Swiss nonconfrontationalism.

I have been living in Switzerland since September of 1996. At time of writing I have been living in Switzerland for 17 years. I would estimate I have lived in the United States for 14 years, and Canada for 12 years. So alltogether I have lived in the Canmerican culture for 26 years, some 9 years more than I have lived in Switzerland. This gives me an unusual perspective on the three cultures.

I have frequenlty heard the complaint that Swiss people are averse to confrontation, and as a result never say anything directly. This can manifest itself in wierd ways, like leaving notes in the laundry room saying “So bitte nicht!” (not like this!). I hear this criticism from Swiss people as much as I have heard it from fellow foreigners. People often make a conceptual connection to Switzerland’s political neutrality, which I never came to myself. I’m a big fan of Switzerland’s political neutrality. That national characteristic is a large part of why I feel at home here. I actually get a bit resentful towards foreigners who live here for the money, but despise Switzerland’s neutrality.

Until recently though I have still been critical of Switzerland’s aversion to confrontation at a personal level. For an American it makes navigating relationships with a Swiss partner fraughtful. Sometimes it seems the characteristic is taken to some cartoonish extreme — a case where this characteristic is possessed to such a cartoonish extreme as be unbelievale (at least to someone from without the culture). This can lead to some pretty bizarre relationship stories. As a result of collecting some negative experiences I could quite relate to people expressing resentment of this trait.

Now I find myself in a wonderful, happy relationships with a Swiss woman. While she is an impressive woman in her own right as an individual, some of the things that I love most about are quite “typically Swiss”. In fact she takes a real pride in being Swiss, and cherishes Swiss culture in a deep and meaningful way. She is wise in her love of her culture. She doesn’t love her country and culture indescriminately. She confronts many of the very real problems that Swiss culture does possess in a very head on and responsible way. Besides making her a remarkable human being, this characteristic makes her a remarkable teacher. The integration of Switzerland’s overwhelmingly large immigrant population is a real and pressing issue, and her ability to love and critisize her country simultaneously and intelligently, is a real gift to her students.

So my love and respect for my wife makes me look at certain aspects of Swiss culture in a more loving and respectful way. While Bettina’s tendency to avoid confrontation is afrequent topic of discussion in our family, my tendency to dive directly into conftration is of equal concern. I believe though that I have more to learn (and have learned more) from the Swiss characteristic. By now I have worked with a number of Swiss managers, and I believe that the most effective of these also pursued this path aversion-to-conflict.

The problem is that saying “aversion to conflict” isn’t really precise enough. At a cultural level the desire is avoid emotions flaring up durign a conflict, which would disturb the problem solving process. As I write that I find that I can’t help but think of Swiss political neutrality. So now that I am able to love them both, I see these traits as beeing two aspects of a single trait. When I resented one and loved the other I was unable to see the connection. I find that fascinating.