May 31, 2004
Illiterate writing story
Working with Kino and the captured digital video from our new camcorder, I feel like an illiterate trying to write a story. No idea what to do to get something worth watching out of the clips I took. Garbage in, garbage out.
My only consolation is that the children's grandparents have been putting up with uncut video until now, so any improvements I learn to make should have huge impact to the quality of their viewing time.
Perhaps I could get this working as a webcam, I don't know.
Posted by Mark at 03:01 PM
Webcam
Apparently, webcams work by repeatedly uploading JPEG photos to a website, and having the client browser refresh repeatedly. I imagined they'd instead have a directory for peer-to-peer connection. Does instant messaging work by upload/download as well?
I guess the upload/download way of doing things makes sense, however, from a design point of view. I was imagining two peers with webcams having a videoconf conversation, but probably 99% of the webcam traffic is porn, with some lonely guy watching canned or (more expensively) live sex videos. The model for that is broadcasting, and handling all the peers would be too much. If you want high quality video, get a faster connection.
I also looked quickly at webcams, on Amazon.com for the reviews. For $40, you can buy a webcam at Amazon, one that reviewers claims works fairly well. Finally we have wireless telephones that don't require you to stand still next to wall outlet, and along come webcams. Pretty soon, you'll have to sit still in good lighting with the processor and main fans whirling in the background.
Posted by Mark at 02:06 PM
May 30, 2004
Month of birthdays drawing to a close
Today is Nathalie's birthday, the last birthday in our house until Emma's next year. We had a quiet day, except for several phone calls.
Tuesday is my first day back at work in a while. Nathalie says it'll be hard for her and the children to adjust to that, probably as hard as it was to adjust to my vacation.
Posted by Mark at 09:03 PM
May 29, 2004
Going Up the River
Joseph T. Hallinan wrote Going Up the River in the late 1990s. In his book, Hallinan tells a series of non-fiction stories about prisons around the United States, based on history, statistics, interviews, and trends that make you wonder whether Kilgore Trout (Kurt Vonnegut) was writing fiction or futurism in Venus on the Half-Shell. (Recall the planet where everyone ends up in prison?)
Hallinan brings to light many interesting aspects of the US prison system of which I was not totally ignorant, but of which I never connected the reality with the implications. I knew, for example, that prisoners in the US may work for private companies. I'd caught part of a reportage showing prisoners working as telemarketers. I did not realize how widespread the practice has become, nor did I understand that in states with very low unemployment in the late 1990s, some businesses were essentially relying on inmate labor to keep wages down. Organizations such as the National Center for Policy Analysis actively lobby for more access to inmate labor.
We don't have too many people with good resumes in prison, yet, but that situation should not be too difficult for insightful politicians to correct.
Another example of things you half knew that this book examines: manadatory prison terms for many offenses. In the mid-1980s Congress eliminated much of the judges' discretionary power to sentence convicts to shorter prison terms than allowed by law. Today, judges read term lengths for many crimes off a chart, which identifies ranges from mandatory minimums to maximums. Furthermore, folks sentenced to such terms do not get out on parole. As a result, the courts filled the prisons to overflowing, with all of the wonderful consequences that produces.
Anyway, read the book before you vote for somebody who says they want to get tough on crime. Just think about it.
Posted by Mark at 07:05 AM
May 28, 2004
First certification
This morning I took and passed my first ever certification examination, Sun Certified Programmer for Java 2 Platform 1.4. My score was only 47/61, or 77%, however. I wonder if I'd have done better had I taken the exam in February, just after studying the material for the first time. (I learned using Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates's Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide, on loan from Gordon.)
Ostensibly, in passing the exam you demonstrate that you know the Java language. I would refine that to say, know many of the basics of the Java language. Passing the exam still does not prove I know how to write a real Java program, and in fact, I've only written a couple.
So, in addition to perhaps brushing off what little I know of statistics, I may consider taking the developer certification exam, for which you actually do some programming. It would be cool to get back to the sort of hobby I had with WebMan and that I've let slide. (WebMan would almost be worth rewriting, but perhaps not quite.)
Posted by Mark at 02:11 PM
May 27, 2004
Sun's Identity Management software
CNet ran an article, Software maker unites Windows, Unix, covering Vintela Inc.'s software that lets you do single sign on and manage LDAP-based authentication on UNIX/Linux using Windows management tools. The writer's name appears as David Becker.
Maybe David hasn't heard about Sun's Waveset acquisition. Maybe he thinks you'd rather manage all your UNIX/Linux identities through Windows. Maybe you would.
If you'd rather have it the other way around, Sun has quite a bit of Identity Management infrastructure worked out already. Maybe we've spent too much time working on the software, and not enough time working on the advertising.
Posted by Mark at 09:12 PM
May 26, 2004
Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness
Visit Darren Barefoot's Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. Particularly mentionable: this entry Darren says comes from a DVD manual.
Posted by Mark at 09:26 AM
79 hits for mark site:mcraig.org
Google apparently botted through the RefEntry project that I did as an independent study class at ACCIS. It does not yet seem to have noticed my blog.
To me, that means that my blog essentially does not exist on the Internet. I'm writing entirely to myself. These hundreds, even thousands, of words are the wired equivalent of pushing a shopping cart full of half-empty sacks down a dirty alley, muttering to oneself.
Posted by Mark at 09:22 AM
Daily average 80 hits
Movable Type must do a fair amount of traffic with the server. I imagine Webalizer inflates, rather than moderates it's average daily hits reports. But mcraig.org traffic went to 80 hits an average day when I started using Movable Type to blog.
This is up from an average of 42/day in April, when I started trying to figure out what I wanted to put up on our website. Even the spike induced by my brother in July and August of 2003 was much lower (33/day, 37/day). I haven't looked at what might be causing this.
Either that or it has nothing to do with us, and instead represents somebody hijacking our site as a source of spam. How do I read the server logs?
Posted by Mark at 09:14 AM
May 25, 2004
Online help years later
Since 24 September 2003, I've chaired a working group focused on bringing online help for all of Sun's Java System server products into line for use in our common web-based sys admin console.
In chairing this group, I've come to understand partially why Jon Bosak once suggested to go off and learn General Robert's Rules of Order. The chair's role should go to someone who knows how to chair working groups. Ready, fire, aim.
It appears Microsoft created WinHelp in 1990. Help online existed before then, but WinHelp looks like the most widely recognized grandfather of what we talk about in the work group when we say online help. We target JavaHelp as the help engine, and JavaHelp systems resemble WinHelp in the same way that HTML Help resembles WinHelp.
Anyway, when asked to chair a work group recommending something online help related, I wondered, What? Why didn't we take a decision on what to use years ago?
Part of the answer may lie in how UNIX folks approach problems, which you may describe with the adverb unregimentedly. Locally, you may find lots of discipline (although I somehow doubt it). Globally, it looks like Brownian motion (maybe it is Brownian motion). When we eventually get somewhere, the roads in and roads out shall have heavy traces of our passage.
Buckminster Fuller claims to have lived off precessional effects. Precession: Systems in Motion with Respect to Each Other Involving 90 Degrees. Off on tangents. This looks different from Brownian motion, which has a random character.
Perhaps Robert's Rules of Order can channel an essentially Brownian system into a precessional system?
Posted by Mark at 01:47 PM
Understanding interrelationships
In continuing to reread Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path, which I now notice that I appeared to have reviewed at Amazon, where I complained that he told us, rather than showing us, what to do, it occurs to me that despite my BS in mathematics, I almost completely ignored a crucially important branch, namely statistics.
In Fuller's world, principles describe interrelationships in aggregates of observations. The science for studying principles of aggregates of observations we call statistics: "a branch of applied mathematics concerned with the collection and interpretation of quantitative data and the use of probability theory to estimate population parameters" (source: Google search).
What a shame that I did not choose to learn statistics with a vengence when I had more time, that is, when attending university, or when virtually wringing my hands over my failure as a manager-by-influence, that is, when working as Sun Sigma Black Belt In Training. More evidence that I do not always recognize how good I have it, and when I do, I sit back and enjoy it.
Oh well. You are what you is.
Posted by Mark at 08:10 AM
May 24, 2004
More Directory Server docs
As I vacation, my teammates have published the final versions of Directory Server, Administration Server, and Directory Proxy Server docs, all of which belong to Sun's Java Enterprise System 2004Q2 release.
This release runs on both Solaris and Red Hat systems. You can download it from Sun's web site. The current license model lets very small businesses, less than 100 employees, get the license for free, although that does not include support. I guess that makes it a little like getting a Linux distro. We need some more evaluation documentation, though.
Posted by Mark at 09:02 PM
Estimations
Yet again I find my estimate of how long a task will take off by half. I expected it to take me two days to cut the hedges. It total it took 2 hours a few days ago, and 6 more hours today.
Because I do not keep track of my time, I simply guess how long tasks take. I often miss by a large margin. Good thing I do not have to guess right in order to eat or sleep inside.
http://hours.sourceforge.net/ seems like a possible way of keeping track of what I do. Maybe I should find the key to the cabinet where my Palm has been locked up at work for the last year.
Posted by Mark at 08:50 PM
May 23, 2004
Critical Path
Rereading Buckminster Fuller's magnum mainstream opus, Critical Path, has convinced me to avoid fine-tuning my so-called career. In the baseball metaphor, I've been trying to decide just how to hold my glove to catch the ball, but the batter just hit the ball to the other side of the field.
Homo sapiens, according to Google's (define: homo sapiens) link to http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn, refers to "the only surviving hominid; species to which modern man belongs; bipedal primate having language and ability to make and use complex tools; brain 1400 cc." The category seems overly broad, since it includes both Bucky and me. Do I belong to the same species as that guy?
Posted by Mark at 08:19 PM
Back home
It turned out to take a little over 7 hours rather than 9. I had miscalculated entirely, thank goodness. 7 with 3 little ones in the back seat is enough, however.
The visit felt like sitting on the porch must have felt to people of our socioeconomic status a hundred years ago, just sitting there gabbing, maybe eating and drinking, occasionally going for a walk. Even in this day and age, the most we do outside formal work consists of do-it-yourself home improvements, car repairs, etc. No art, no real writing. We remain stuck at homo faber, unable to evolve to something more thoughtful.
Posted by Mark at 08:02 PM
May 19, 2004
Going off the air
Today we're driving to Paris to see my wife's family. At least nine hours in the car with three children who don't want to be there. Then three full days with 7 children ages 2-7. Then we come back in the car.
My enthusiasm knows no bounds. I'd almost rather do phone support.
Posted by Mark at 06:14 AM
May 18, 2004
Tog on Software Design
In reading Bruce Tognazzini's book on software design, I wonder why given the choice between a Linux system and a Mac, I choose Linux.
Maybe I have some silly sense of the mystique of having to know the history of the system in order to know what to do with it. Maybe I do not like the idea of someone else deciding what I should be trying to do. Maybe I just enjoy spending time getting nowhere with my system. God is nowhere. God is now here.
What does Tog do with his spare time? His Zen Garden? Zazen?
Perhaps he has a point that computer software should be designed for maximum user productivity. Corporate buyers want to pay for that. To some extent, though, they've agreed to pay for whatever pipe dream they got swindled into by a sales dude under pressure to make numbers. As the decision rises to the CTO level, and the CTO loses clout than the CFO, the folks making the purchase decision get further away from the real world of usability.
What do they know about the usability of an embeddable OS microkernel, or even a directory server? They don't. They will only know when we overstretch, trying to do too much, in too little time, with too little idea what the users need, and things break severely. Then it costs a lot to fix everything, and the managers stick their heads in because it's causing them problems.
Why choose Linux? Because in the real world, people will try something if the purchase price is low enough. They'll eventually end up putting up with something they don't want, simply because it costs less up front.
How else did Microsoft beat Apple?
Posted by Mark at 10:02 PM
May 17, 2004
Ugly fonts
Perhaps you are experiencing them as well? Ever since I upgraded to Mozilla 1.6, my fonts have been hideous. But then, Palatino looks bad even in Opera on Red Hat 9.
Palatino seems to be the default recommendation for my this weblog, according to the CSS. Probably looks great on a Mac.
The fonts in my resume look disasterous as well. Could be something to fix before I try to go get another job someday.
Does anyone else out there get the feeling that this is entirely too complicated on Linux, and probably UNIXes as well? Someday I'll have to read the story of how it got like that.
Posted by Mark at 10:46 PM
Ask The Oracle
Now instead of throwing three coins or searching for a hexagram thrower at google, you can use mine. (I love pretending that someone else might read my blog someday.)
Ask The Oracle gives you another way to tell your fortune, in a fashion infinitely more inscrutable than fortune(6), because you have to understand not just the hexagrams, but also their interpretation.
So far, I've asked the Oracle once, and received the Chung Fu (also spelled as Kung Fu) hexagram in response. Maybe my question itself had no meaning. At any rate, I'm not sure what to make of the answer.
Posted by Mark at 04:21 PM
May 16, 2004
Fun with hexagrams
In playing around with the hexagrams, I've now noticed that the Wilhelm translation, mentioned at http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/ching/src.html does not have unique English spellings for all the hexagrams.
This breaks my script, or rather, my script breaks on that feature of the list. The Legge translation (Bantam Ed., 7th printing, picked up used in Menlo Park for $1.50) has the same feature. I suppose I'll have to distinguish with the additional text, or numbers, or something.
That aside, I'm close to having XHTML for each of the hexagrams, with the appropriate bits of the Wilhelm translation. Has anyone written a program that interprets the outcomes of its own inquiries to the oracle?
Posted by Mark at 10:22 PM
May 15, 2004
Detached
Strangely, although I've been on vacation less than two weeks total, work email has started to lose it's interest. I've detached from my job.
If the interruptions were fewer, would I take the extra continuity to think? Between hedge clipping, painting, diaper changing, cooking, I've read almost to the end of Drucker's Best Of book. (Peter Drucker, not Tom Peters. Do not confuse these two guys.)
Drucker starts with an assumption that, since increasing standards of living have spread to the majority of those of us in developed countries, we cannot get by without more of the same. Either we push for further increases, or something falls apart. In other words, the plea for equitable redistribution instead of further increases does not reflect a request most of us want to make. Drucker has a point there. You have to live frugally around here to avoid using more and more. As Woody Allen joked, "The food's terrible. And such small portions."
If I agree with Drucker's assumption there, the path gets slippery. In the knowledge society, we have a great need for generalists. We call them managers. They organize specialist teamwork to produce the increases we cannot do without. If work concerns " the occupation for which you are paid" (because nobody would do it for free), and you seems to fall more into the generalist category than the specialist category, and you could do managerial work, maybe you should think about looking for managerial work.
Especially when other specialists do better specialized work than you do.
Rien faire, rien laisser faire, tout faire faire. If you do it right, it should get easier rather than harder. On the other hand, I've copped out twice. Maybe there won't be a third time.
Posted by Mark at 09:47 PM
May 14, 2004
Fun with CSS
In an effort to relearn some Perl, I've started writing a CGI similar to ching(6). In itself that has nothing to do with CSS. But ching(6) in text format has the hexagrams a nice ASCII art, with each trigram labelled inline. It looks for example like:
--------
-------- above Ch'ien The Creative, Heaven
--------
--------
-------- below Ch'ien The Creative, Heaven
--------
Having redone the hexagrams in PNG format, I'd like to get the same effect... with CSS if possible. I've not been able to layout the table correctly:
 | above | Ch'ien The Creative, Heaven |
below | Ch'ien The Creative, Heaven |
I don't want to resort to each line of the hexagram being it's own image, as that spaces it too much. That's what was done for the HTML version of ching(6).
So how do I do this properly in CSS, knowing that my hexagams are always 128 px wide and 94 px high?
Posted by Mark at 10:15 PM
May 13, 2004
Looking for a virtual house
Some people enjoy working around the house. My father-in-law, for example, spends most of his time looking around the house, even our house, for things to fix or improve.
He seems to enjoy the kind of concrete, as a opposed to symbolic, problem solving that working around the house represents. Mom says she enjoys having something to show for each project she finishes, too, so she weaves fabrics and makes clothing. She also brings a suitcase full of crafts for the children every time she visits.
I dislike working around the house more than I dislike other work. I get little satisfaction from finished handiwork. Physical things not attracting my attention fade from my sphere of awareness. My ideal home would exist for me unnoticed, a natural fit for focusing the mind on thoughts.
Posted by Mark at 08:46 PM
May 10, 2004
More Paradise and Power
I've started reading Kagan's afterword. Apparently Kagan did not write this book primarily as an apology for the US military's overthrough of Saddam Hussein, but to explain how in his view Europeans live in post-war paradise, and Europeans owe that situation to what many non-Americans consider US imperialism. Kagan wrote all this intelligently, backing up many of his affirmations about mindsets on both sides with quotes and opinion polls results. Perhaps he doesn't take his research as far as Chomsky does his, but Kagan clearly goes far enough to convince the choir he's preaching to. those who don't hear a thicket of contradictions in place of a sermon.
Kagan has me wondering how many of my ideas and especially beliefs would appear strikingly foreign to someone in another frame of reference. Dad must have felt something like this when I sent him that book from Bourdieu. Maybe I should have made that Michael Moore. Michael Moore's books seem to sell faster than Kagan's, but they share something I cannot quite put my finger on, something that Chomsky's books, for example, don't have.
Posted by Mark at 09:50 PM | Comments (1)
May 09, 2004
Sunshiny afternoon
Jesus fed the multitudes on loaves and fishes, and many see miracles in his capacity to gather up more leftovers than he started with. One might also explain this as the church potluck effect.
Each churchgoer attending the potluck brings a dish large enough to feed his party. At the end, you gather up the leftovers -- usually more than you need to feed everyone at the potluck. No veteran potluck organizer feels surprise when this happens, though he may continue to believe in the miracles of the loaves and fishes.
Our barbecue today finished with more grilled meat than a church potluck. Luckily, we had sunny weather after a week of rain. Good thing we have a large freezer.
Posted by Mark at 09:08 PM
May 08, 2004
ChorusOS and Jaluna
Sun acquired Chorus Systems in late 1997, apparently with the notion of using the Chorus microkernel as the basis for a Java operating system, but also to help Sun expand into the Network Equipment Provider market. The Chorus microkernel offers real time capability, hardware abstraction, and virtual memory. Above the configurable microkernel layer, Chorus provides support for distributed systems and different operating system personalities. In other words, you can have an incarnation such as ChorusOS 4.x, with a POSIX personality based on Free BSD, that gives you API compatibility with other UNIX systems, making it easier for Network Equipment Providers to have applications running all the way from the base station controller into the large backend systems, using the same code. Other incarnations provided PSOS APIs, for example. This has probably enabled compatibility with VxWorks as well, and of course means that you can port Linux on top of the microkernel.
At the end of the last century, the Network Equipment Provider market was expanding quickly. Sun folded ChorusOS into the Netra HA Suite for customers in this market. Netra HA Suite provides a level of API compatibility between ChorusOS and Solaris systems that lets NEPs write once, more or less, for applications running across their network infrastructure. Netra HA Suite also provides a distributed, container-based architecture for high availability across the network infrastructure. In other words, NEPs writing to Netra HA Suite can have applications fail over quickly and statefully from one hardware node to another, over the network, no matter what.
When the NEP bubble popped, and Sun was not in the market for devices, the folks who invented the Chorus microkernel went on to found Jaluna. Jaluna appears to have opened the source for the basic system, gone more heavily into Linux, and aimed at providing more functionality at the high end. An interesting historical wrinkle in all this: Tilly Bayard-Richard managed to take all the documentation we wrote in or had moved to Sun's SolBook format, a subset of DocBook, and use open source tools to rebrand and republish it without extensive modification to the content. You can see the results here at Jaluna.
Posted by Mark at 07:13 AM
May 07, 2004
Lightweight DS Install Doc?
Sun's current Directory Server inherited code primarily from Netscape Directory Server, but also took some pieces from Sun Directory Server, and from Innosoft Directory Server. As I understand it, all of these inherited code from the original UMich Directory Server. I write product documentation for Sun's Directory Server, an in particular, I've written installation documentation for the product.
For Sun's Java™ Enterprise System 2004Q2 release, we've done away with installation documentation in the Directory Server documentation set itself. Instead, everything sits in the Java Enterprise System Installation Guide. In a way, this looks like a good thing for people taking Java Enterprise System as an integrated software stack.
For those just checking out Directory Server, especially on Linux, it's crazy. One antidote might be to write a Sun DS Evaluation HOWTO.
Sun DS Evaluation HOWTO (Outline, partially stolen from the LDAP Linux HOWTO)
- Quick Start (willing to accept defaults to get it running ASAP)
- Introduction to Directory Server (LDAP, history, features, performance, scalability, non-free)
- Installing Directory Server (bits, components, layout)
- Configuring Directory Server (architecture, local/remote mgmt., perf. tuning)
- Running Directory Server (start/stop, console, monitoring)
- Directory Data (Schema, DITs, LDIF, import/export, backup/restore, replication, grouping)
- Directory Access (ACI/ACL, password policies, accounts, SSL, SASL)
- Directory Tools (ldap*, perf. tuning tools, JNDI, LDAP C API, plug-in API)
Posted by Mark at 11:35 PM
CV with OpenOffice
Sun layoffs having gone into a third round recently, I decided the time has come to brush off my CV. So I tried the OpenOffice resume template. The result looks okay in StarOffice format, strange in PDF (on Red Hat 9 anyway), and downright ugly when exported to HTML (somewhat cleaned up version here).
Perhaps I should have another look at HRMML. I downloaded HRMML-recruit.zip, however, only to find that laying out the sample resume.xml with the sample resume.xsl does not work with xsltproc:
$ xsltproc resume.xsl resume.xml compilation error: file resume.xsl line 1 element stylesheet xsltParseStylesheetProcess : document is not a stylesheet $
I can fix that, but then I get a whole bunch of errors like:
compilation error: file resume.xsl line 119 element value-of xsl:value-of : select is missing
Does one have to roll one's own set of woodworking tools before one can put up a single shelf?
Posted by Mark at 09:41 PM
Over a year now
I started running regularly again over a year ago now, in April 2003. At the outset, I ran 6 1/4 km (3.9 mi) three times a week. My weekly distance now lies at over 50 km (over 30 mi).
Running hits your joints harder than other aerobic sports, but it remains the fastest way for me to get a workout. My 14 km (about 8 3/4 mi) Monday and Friday runs now take less than an hour sometimes, and rarely much more. That's something like using energy at 12x the normal rate, so gives my heart, lungs, and muscles a chance to recover from sitting in front of a screen so much of the time.
My record speed for the old 6 1/4 km run stands at 23:21. That works out to a 3:44 km (5:59 mi). When I was less than half my age, the fastest I managed to run 1.6 km was 5:23, which is a 3:22 km. So after a year of running, I feel I'm in better shape than I've been for a while.
One guy at work who has run several marathons suggested I try one. I've seen good training suggestions for free on the web, such as those at Halhigdon.com. But when I start thinking about running a marathon, I realize I don't just want to finish without injury. I want to run it in a respectable time. Doing that is probably still a way off.
What is a respectable time? My aim for 10 km is under 40 minutes. That means 1 km every 4 minutes average for 10 of them. A 6:24 mi pace for 40 minutes, in other words. Right now, my best times are over 41 minutes.
If I can get 10 km in under 40 minutes, my hope is to be able to get 42 km under 200 minutes. I'd like to aim for 3:15. That would qualify me for the Boston Marathon in a couple of years from now. It'll probably take me that long to get that fast.
Posted by Mark at 09:12 PM
May 06, 2004
Reduction In Force
Sun has proceeded with another reduction in force, at least in the US. Our Director's job was eliminated, so she's leaving tomorrow. Strange to be out of the office while all this happens.
Today we met with Greg, who hasn't been in Grenoble since last summer, and with Mike Turner. This was Mike's first trip to Grenoble since Sun bought Waveset. Mike's working on instituting some changes in the way we offer software to our customers. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Seems like we could either return to the revenue-driven days before the bubble popped, or continue to wait for another hardware-purchasing wave to lift all boats.
May you live in interesting times, as they say.
Posted by Mark at 11:52 PM
Video Editing
Oof. Well, I'm now able to do some minimal video editing under Red Hat 9. It's taken hours just to get everything set up. (Yes, Americans will go to great and expensive lengths just to avoid paying for something.) My very first and huge movie includes 6 1/3 seconds of Emma happy to be getting ready to dance.
This was created with the raw1394 module for capture from a Sony DCR-TRV460 NTSC camcorder, then using Kino for editing, and finally mjpegtools to export to .mpeg. A monster file (3.5 MB) for such a short movie.
Let me know if you manage to watch it.
Posted by Mark at 11:36 PM
Project planning and life
My job has me planning almost any task that takes more than a few minutes. My natural reaction to groups of half-day tasks has become to want to plan it. I have come to resent long and late interruptions.
Nathalie did not react as I would have this morning. I've a long list of things to do for this vacation. She has a lot of things she'd like to do, and that she wants me to do, or condition what I do, but she has no list, no plan. She told me when I suggested we plan it that she didn't want to get stressed out about it. I said that we get stressed out when we don't plan and cannot finish everything we have to do.
We seem to be having this same debate at work. Those against planning correctly observe that we'll continue to have interruptions to handle, but then conclude from that there's little point in putting together much of a plan. Instead, they say we should find ways of working that don't involve planning. Others also start by observing that we'll continue to have interruptions to handle, and that the way to avoid being submerged by interruptions lies in fitting as many activities as possible to a plan.
Perhaps neither side really has the rhetorical upper hand. If we disagree permanently on this, how should we live with that? Must I plan spontaneity? Must I give up planning?
Posted by Mark at 11:34 PM
Encryption and convenience
Matt and I fiddled with gpg to authenticate and even encrypt messages. The p is for "pain." Maybe the last g is for "groin."
Part of the problem lies in that encryption cannot work if you cannot read the doc. And the doc really needs to assume you know nothing about it until you know, after which point you needn't read anything other than the man page or the code.
Of course the doc goes along as if you understood the underlying technology, which maybe you did when you read about it in a textbook, but you certainly cannot remember that now. One could get paranoid thinking about how easy it is to preven people from using encryption and authentication.
Posted by Mark at 11:31 PM
Don't Read This
I expect almost no one to visit my website, for the same reasons no one looks at pictures they have taken more than once, and top entertainers earn millions more than not-quite-top entertainers.
This same expectation reduces stress on the job, when writing about enterprise-class, market-leading software such as Directory Server. No one reads the documentation, so I can make all manner of embarassing mistakes without anyone ever discovering any of them.
One can bear one's soul on one's web site. Only God notices. One might as well be writing email to oneself.
Yet for nearly all of us, the only route to better writing lies in writing (and reviewing and revising) more. Writing mail to oneself can help us prepare for those 15 minutes when we have something to say to someone else. That's my working excuse anyway.
Posted by Mark at 11:27 PM
Using BlogEd
Someone once said speech originated as we had no other way to complain. Writing therefore developed not to keep track of how much we owed each other, but instead to let us refine our complaints.
James Gosling wrote BlogEd on the Mac. His README at the top of the CVS tree says, "I've only ever tried this thing out on MAC OSX, so your mileage elsewhere may vary." My mileage seems pretty good on Sun's Java Desktop System, although the HTML generated looks like it was designed by a developer, rather than a web master. It's not bad on Red Hat 9, but dragging and dropping images does not appear to work.
So why complain? I have the code on my disk, right? Yes. It looks long. I feel tired.
That said, I probably ought to read the code. If you end up having to roll your own tool, you ought to know how a few work before you start rolling.
Posted by Mark at 11:25 PM
Of Paradise and Power
Dad sent me a copy of Robert Kagan's book, "Of Paradise and Power," in which Kagan explains how America and Europe differ in their approaches to foreign policy, and why this causes them to disagree publicly. I've read only 46 pages (of 158) so far. This book currently has Amazon sales rank 7517, so maybe Kagan's getting his money back.
In a ZMag article, Joseph Gerson calls Kagan, "The chief proponent for disregarding Europe and putting the 'old' continent in its place." I have not Googled around to see what his friends say about him, but he seems to sit near the middle of the American road.
Two things strike me so far. Only one of them concerns the book alone. First, Kagan says that because European policy makers know their militaries cannot engage in warfare without support from the US military, they promote multilateral action and seek to stop unilateral (US) action, reasoning from a position of weakness, but he also hints that European policy makers generally agree with US policies otherwise. If reasoning from a position of weakness, would you not fear most the biggest, toughest guy around, namely the US? Can one explain promotion of multilateralism more easily by including fear of the US as a primary ingredient, rather than fear of "failed" or "rogue" states. In recent European history, the toughest guy on around has tended to turn bully. In that light, European policy makers appease Saddam perhaps, but George W. definitely. Kagan overlooks this, perhaps because, "The United States is a liberal, progressive society through and through, and to the extent that Americans believe in power, they believe it must be a means of advancing the principles of a liberal civilization and a liberal world order." (p. 41) How could one possibly fear the US, therefore?
Second, Kagan follows the convention of identifying Europe and America, originally meaning those in charge of policy decisions, with all citizens of each nation involved. The French might call this an amalgam, a brutal shunting together of two or more concepts that do not mix naturally. After amalgamating his concepts, a thinker tends to overgeneralize attributes of the amalgam. e-Prime warns against the "is of identity" that allows us to make mental amalgams. Kagan has awareness of the problem at least in part, as he carefully disclaims early in his book that one should expect variation in opinion. Then he goes on to equate European and US policy makers with everyone living under their rule.
Kegan has good company in following this convention. It shows up everywhere from the New York Times to France Inter to casual conversation. Why do we all agree to amalgame things this way? Do our republics work so well that representatives can stand for us this completely? Their ideas are (sic) our ideas. When the King is (sic) the State, the State becomes easier to identify without statistical methods.
Posted by Mark at 11:23 PM
Using Movable Type
TWiki did not work for me. BlogEd is yet another client. Besides Movable Type has these cool pastel CSS defaults.
Installing this at our current ISP with no ssh -- ssh costs more than having the site itself hosted -- worked fairly quickly, taking me in total probably 1:30. I'm not particularly fast, so sat there staring at the 403 (access forbidden) error when Apache would not run mt-check.cgi. Finally, my sleepy brain decided to recall sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start, and I looked through the doc. It turns out you can drop an .htaccess file into the directory where you installed Movable Type and Apache runs the CGIs.
$ cat .htaccess Options +ExecCGI AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
BTW, I downloaded the full version + libs. This gives you all the Perl modules you need to run Movable Type so you don't have to install them on the ISP's system.
I've used BlogEd at work, and also at a test site. It's not bad, and it's in Java, so theoretically, I should be able to fix the small bugs myself. The code can be had through CVS. Trouble is, I want to blog, not write a blog editor. At least not yet.
TWiki looks good for categorization and collaboration. I envisioned a family site, with multiple players. But the troubles started when I tried to get a version of Net::SMTP working so TWiki could send notifications. I even got a notification or two by email, but finally just gave up. Comment if you like. When you cannot login to your ISP, you're pretty limited.
Posted by Mark at 11:21 PM