Useless Inc. - Tidbits: 11 Aug 2005

Tidbits: 11 Aug 2005

I had started to write an article about event shimming in .NET Remoting (yes, I know there are such articles already, but I couldn't find one that was easily accessible and understood) yesterday, but simply crashed and slept over 9 hours. Now I'm at work, so I guess it'll just have to wait until later today or tomorrow. That said, there's the usual variety of things of interest:

GuestMaps are a really awesome third party tool based on Google Maps; the idea is that you basically put a map on your site and it allows your readers to mark where in the world they are. I would've put one myself, but I'd rather save myself the embarresment of finding out how many readers I have
China's on the news again, this time for putting a young man behind bars for political activies (posting "harmful" essays on the 'net). There are two things I find extremely worrying about this: the first is the way the Chinese propaganda machine operates, specifically the official reasons for incarcarating the man: "[he] jeopardised national unity and territorial sovereignty, spread lies and disturbed public order and social stability". There is also the reason given by the Chinese government for its attempts to monitor internet cafés: "[they] can affect the mental health of teenagers while spreading unhealthy information". The second is that any "western" country with its eyes on Chinese business is decidedly ignoring these increasingly dangerous signs of human rights violations, turning a blind eye to what will undoubtedly come back to bite everyone on the ass.
The Commentator is really funny. I'm very glad it is a joke, because after showing it to some of my colleagues I was a bit worried that they might actually use it.
There is this movie I was attempting to find for ages. I haven't seen it since I was 6 or so and only knew it by its Hebrew name, the direct translation being "hole in time". Well thanks to the wonders of the 'net I was finally able to find it: it's called Biggles: Adventures in Time, and according to one reviewer it sucks rather badly. Excellent! I'm waiting for my copy and will post my opinion when I have one.
Go play Psychonauts.
Here's an interesting article explaining why you must never use "double-checked locking", which is an (apparently broken) technique for saving some CPU cycles on synchronization checks. If you do any performance-savvy multithreading code it's an absolute must-read.
This is absolutely awful.