31 October 2018, mid-morning
“Go back to China,” some old man yells at some old lady at Lansdowne station. I am walking in to the station, while he is leaving. We come to the same shitty Presto turnstile.
You often wonder what you’ll do or say when you bump up against stuff like this. It’s been so long since I have heard some proper-ass racism in the city. (Has it? I can’t recall, anyway.)
“What the fuck did you say?” So I guess that’s what I am doing.
I stop him from leaving because I want to hear him say something, but he mumbles and pushes past me. The moment is over in seconds. I realize I wasn’t going to get anything worth hearing.
So I turn and yell at the two men working in the operator booth, dealing with the women who was told to go back to China. She’s agitated as well. “What are you even doing when this shit is happening right in front of you?” None of us our white. I bet this old brown dude I am now talking to has seen some shit.
“This happens all the time. Some people are crazy. You just got to ignore them.” Now I am the crazy person he needs to calm down.
I tell him nothing changes if no one says anything as I walk away, but I suspect he is the one that’s right.
Life | Toronto
18 October 2018, early morning
It turned out Demons in Paradise was a documentary. I’m not sure why I thought it was going to be a fictional retelling of the war in Sri Lanka. No matter, it was an interesting film all the same. Directed by Jude Ratnam, the film is a look at the violence of the civil war through the lens of his family’s experience with the war. The movie’s narrative seems to move from violence inflicted on the Tamil community to violence inflicted by the Tamil community (upon themselves). The movie opens in Colombo, discussing Sinhalese violence. The movie ends in Jaffna, discussing Tamil violence. In between is a brief coda in Kandy, that feels a bit out of place except that it separates these two chunks of the film. Ratnam managed to get people to be quite candid about their experiences. An ex-LTTE fighter talks about the TELO massacre. People from other groups talk about the random violence they committed. The film also asks the question (but doesn’t answer) why the civilian population was so blasé about the violence being committed in their name. I liked the film. My friend Fathima (who shuttered her blog!) thought it was muddled and poorly executed. We are a complicated peoples.
I saw Demons in Paradie at Jackman Hall as part of the Rendezvous With Madness Festival.
Movies
- Portrait of a Campaign.
The process selects for candidates who are good at raising money, not winning votes. Fundraising consumes an inordinate amount of our candidate’s time. A campaign that was supposed to be about the voters is instead focused entirely on a class of fickle donors. Going through the slog of perpetual fundraising convinces our candidate that there has to be a better way.
There is! And her opponent has found it.
The incumbent is a middle-aged Republican man who haunts his district like a ghost, appearing once or twice a year for just long enough to frighten children, though never long enough for witnesses to gather. He got elected a few terms ago and has coasted through re-election ever since, often with over 60% of the vote. His comfortable victory margins are less a reflection of his political prowess, and more a symptom of the fact that he has never faced a strong opponent. Every two years, a political novice appears, fails to raise significant money, loses to him by 80,000 votes, and exits the political stage.
- The Movie Assassin.
I’m not sure how to sum this up neatly, but it’s a good read.
Everyone talks about the country falling apart in November 2016, but maybe it fell apart in November 1996, when America went to see The English Patient. What if we had all turned to each other and said, “This garbage is our idea of rave-worthy cinema? Anyone else see a big problem here?”, and then there had been a massive riot?
This pull quote doesn’t sum up the article, but it’s pretty great.
- Toronto raised my friend. Then it failed him.
In the negotiations over Uber’s regulation two years ago, the city tried to placate cab companies worried about competition by levelling safety standards down, rather than up. That is, instead of imposing the same rules on Uber that the taxi firms faced, it eliminated most of the rules for everyone.
21 August 2018, early morning
Walking home along Bloor at night a stranger turns to me and says, “I interviewed for a job and they offered it to me.” She was so excited she wanted to tell someone, I suppose. We chatted briefly as we walked. I asked her where she was going to work. What she was going to be doing. And then she was on her way.
I had a very long day, but that was a good conclusion.
Life
30 July 2018, early morning
I wrote this in 2007, when my life was all C and C++. I was working on migrating something that morphed from a small focused C program to a larger messy C++ program. I don’t remember why I didn’t publish it at the time. I’m sure I had more I wanted to say. Or maybe this advice is bad and with my forgetting all the C++ I used to know I no longer remember why.
—
I should write some posts about cleaning up old and poorly written programs. As software develops over time it sometimes ends up a huge unmanageable mess. It takes concerted effort to keep source code neat and organized. Furthermore, spending the time to think about how you organize your software will save you time in the long run. So, my first piece of advice for you budding software developers — i’m looking at you here Shima — is that source files should be as small as possible, and no smaller.
If you are working in C++ (or a similar object-oriented language), header files should be used to declare classes, and source files should be used for their definitions. Inline function should go in their own file as well. You should be able to look at a file and know what its contents are. Languages like C++ are fairly easy to work with because the structure of your code in the file system generally mirrors the structure of the program as discrete objects.
When working with a procedural languages like C, it is sometimes harder to see where things should be delineated. It is easy to fall into the habit of having one mother-of-all header files that contains all your declarations, and one source file with all your functions. This is stupid. Code should be organized such that unrelated functions, typedefs, structures, etc, are kept apart. Digging through a 3000 line source file looking for a function definition will make you crazy. You shouldn’t need a fancy IDE to manage your software projects.
Regardless of the programming language you are using, related functionality should be grouped and declared in their own header files, with definitions of functions in their own source files. Dividing your source code neatly in this fashion allows code that requires this functionality to (ideally) #include just the definitions it needs, and no more. You should be able to look at the #include directives in source file and header files and understand the dependencies of the code contained within; you should be able to see the relationships between the functions in your program. If you are lazy about the file structure of your source this becomes difficult. Don’t be lazy.
Computer Science | Code
- Go First Dice.
A set of dice that have the following properties: 1) There will never be ties. 2) Each possible ordering of the players (determined by highest result, next highest result, etc) has a mathematically equal chance of occurring. 3) The above conditions hold for every subset of the whole set.
18 June 2018, late morning
Train to Busan is a Korean Zombie movie. The movie’s main protagonist is a Korean salary man, played by Yoo Gong, who is estranged from his wife and slowly becoming estranged from his daughter. For her birthday his daugther wants to go visit her mother in Busan, and so he agrees to make the trip their, planning to get back before lunch to continue his work day. Then all the zombies show up and it’s fucking mental till the end of the film. Train to Busan is expertly done. There is plenty of mellow drama, as the passengers you love on the train are slowly killed, one by one. Much of the movie is about the journey Yoo Gong’s character takes from being selfish and self involved to being selfless and helpful. He learns these things from the various passengers on the train. The main villain of the movie is another passenger who can be see as the end-game for a salary man like Yoo Gong’s character if he doesn’t change his ways. This movie is excellent.
Reviews of Train to Busan on Rotten Tomatoes.
[1] Movies
