Fix various warnings when building with LLVM 3.5.

- warning: absolute value function 'abs' given an argument of type 'long' but has parameter of type 'int' which may cause truncation of value [-Wabsolute-value]
- warning: 'this' pointer cannot be null in well-defined C++ code; pointer may be assumed to always convert to true [-Wundefined-bool-conversion]
Avoid calling methods on NULL pointers wherever possible.

The trick we use to allow this is undefined behaviour and is not
liked by LLVM. We should stop using it but it has the potential to
break to many things for a minor release.