Mark's Blog

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June 30, 2004

(Attempting to) Work from W2K

It's been a long time since I booted this system, W2K. Almost immediately, something has gone wrong and I cannot cut and paste. A virus? A Service Pack? Who knows? Who cares?

I did manage to find a way to get around the NTFS read-only problem by coming in this way and using explore2fs. Thank you, John Newbigin. At least I can now safely use this partition for something.

Posted by Mark at 09:46 PM

Blogging for dollars

Jonathan Schwartz started a blog, maybe timed to catch JavaOne. Who knows whether he'll have time to keep it up.

At least he knows enough HTML to code anchor tags. I find that somehow reassuring.

Jonathan reminds those of us blogging for work to "be responsible." (Suggestions summarized by Tim Bray.) Most of the suggestions concern writing itself. In a nutshell, the more you write something people want to read and the more you spin it into the ongoing conversation out there on the web, the more people will read it and think about it and link to it.

But there are two suggestions in there that could be open to debate:

1. "Don't Tell Secrets .... it’s not OK to publish the recipe for one of our secret sauces."
2. "Think About Consequences .... it’s all about judgment: using your weblog to trash or embarrass the company, our customers, or your co-workers, is not only dangerous but stupid."

Concerning the first one, well, one could have a long discussion about intellectual property. A Google search for those two words results in about 7,670,000 hits. Basically, which is more important: humanity benefitting from a good solution to a problem as early as possible, or major stockholders getting a monopoly hold on the idea? (There, is that sufficiently oversimplified? ;-)

Concerning the second one, you have to read between the lines a little bit. It looks like the consequences are that your bad taste could somehow hurt the company, for example, when one of our sales folk is out there negotiating a discount and the customer is able to Google out your blog entry that the product in question sucks. (Why would the customer would even be talking with our sales folk about a product anyone thinks sucks? What would that say about the customer in question?) Between the lines, the fnords appear to say, "Think twice about coloring outside the party line. This whole warning has nothing to do with products and criticism of your peers' work, everything to do with criticism of your betters. Recall that we can lay people off, that your job category is moving to 'low-cost locations,' and that you need us more than we need you."

Odd how that last bit comes in at the same point in the article where news magazines put the nod-to-a-dissenting-view material. Close to the end, but not close enough that you'd read it if you just skipped to the end. And I'll bet Tim Bray did that almost by accident.

Posted by Mark at 02:58 PM

5:28:89

On Dana's suggestion, I ran a mile. Or, rather, 1609 meters. It took me 5:28:89, which I don't think is my best time ever. It does, however, suggest that after a year of running my cardiovascular system has gotten back into roughly the shape it was in when I was 14 years old.

Two blasts from the past following that run:

1. Iron taste of blood at the back of my throat 10 seconds after stopping.


2. Accidentally turned the shower down too far, and the water turned cold. At this point I remembered my week in Richardson, Texas, where I failed to become a door-to-door salesman. Southwestern Company handlers had us take cold -- instead of hot -- showers in the morning, ostensibly to wake us up more effectively for a long day selling.

Posted by Mark at 01:07 PM | Comments (2)

Understanding Power

This blog has mentioned Understanding Power four times already this month. Let me encourage you once again to have a look. If you're in the US, it's liable to be on some shelf at the public library.

I can think of at least two routes to further investigation leading from this book. You could follow the footnotes. You could also, and this looks like a potentially more courageous route, work to rebut the arguments made in the book. If you take the second route -- honestly, in scholarly fashion, avoiding sloppy shortcuts or unwitting apologies for the status quo; I'm talking about the high road to rebuttal, where you come up with a more plausible explanation of the facts that stands up to careful inquiry -- let me know about it. Sounds like it would make an interesting read.

Posted by Mark at 07:05 AM

NTFS blocks Linux

When you're stuck and don't have enough space, it's a drag to be reminded that Microsoft does what it can to keep Linux developers out of the game. The NTFS module on my JDS install can only read, not write to, the Windows system partition, which has 4.5 GB of therefore unusable free space:

lethe:~/redhat # df -h 
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda8             8.4G  4.5G  3.9G  54% /
/dev/hda6             7.6M  6.5M  790K  90% /boot
/dev/hda1             7.5G  3.1G  4.5G  41% /windows/C
/dev/hda2             2.0G  914M  1.2G  45% /windows/D
shmfs                 489M     0  489M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda3              53G   27G   24G  53% /mnt/redhat
lethe:~/redhat # mkdir /windows/C/redhat
mkdir: cannot create directory `/windows/C/redhat': Read-only file system
lethe:~/redhat # 

I'm not going to mount it read-write yet, without Googling around to see what I'd be getting into. It's not that I care about the Windows stuff. I just don't want to lose my backup files now.

Maybe the new modules let you write safely. Maybe Sun can now get this straightened out given our new relationship with Microsoft. In any case, I don't want to go on a wild goose chase today.

I had it to be able to work on FrameMaker, for which we don't have a Linux version, only Windows and Solaris. Maybe I should try installing Solaris x86. Whenever I get out of this current mess.

Posted by Mark at 06:52 AM

June 29, 2004

ide=nodma

Right now, I'm copying about 1.8 GB of stuff from one partition to another. This kernel booted as follows:

title failsafe
   kernel (hd0,5)/vmlinuz.shipped root=/dev/hda8 ide=nodma apm=off \
   acpi=off vga=normal nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3
   initrd (hd0,5)/initrd.shipped

The killer at this point is ide=nodma. Seems to have slowed the disk down about 1000x. Funny how there can be system bottlenecks like that even today.

Posted by Mark at 10:38 PM

Painful

Well, I mentioned earlier today that I made a little mistake with an extra /. It looks like I have at least 9 GB of stuff I wish I'd backed up, and not enough space to do it cleanly on any single partition. Maybe I can copy over Ethernet to the laptop, which seems to have plenty of space.

It looks like what went first was /usr/bin, so the system is possibly beyond the point where I can repair it faster manually than reinstalling and reconfiguring. I'm reduced to using the bridled version of JDS that sort of works on this machine.

A full backup of the partition would've been 37 GB, and I'd have had to have a good backup policy even with the equipment to back that up. Perhaps it makes sense to buy a second 80 GB disk and just copy the whole thing every week. Too late now, in any case. Besides, if I had that much space, I'd just fill it up, or do a third rm mistake...

Posted by Mark at 10:31 PM

Burning CDs on JDS

Sometimes the command line interface can save you from making a bunch of coasters. After screwing up my Red Hat system at home this morning, I found the .iso files for the CDs on the network somewhere, and went to burn them onto CD-Rs.

A Sun Support Forum entry, Re: How I can burning a CDRom?, explained how to do this using the Gnome GUI. One step threw me:

Click [Write files to CD]. A screen will pop up and ask where the file should be written to. Select the directory and fill in the name of the file which will be created. Press [OK].

I still cannot figure out what the name of the file is supposed to be. I somehow ended up burning a CD with one file, a .iso. That when you mount it contains a .iso, and so on, apparently ad infinitum. Had to download the entire 639 MB .iso again.

Do it with cdrecord. If you're not sure how, Google for instructions. Worked for me.

Posted by Mark at 02:00 PM

Why doesn't rm have undo?

That makes two times in my life that I've really done something stupid with rm at home where the system's not backed up. Once I accidentally deleted a bunch of files for a project I was developing. Today I accidentally said /usr when I meant usr... as root. Hope I can find the old Red Hat 9 CDs somewhere. Who knows how much time an extra / will cost?

Posted by Mark at 06:46 AM

June 28, 2004

Slow

Today the temperature rose to almost 35 degrees Celsius at noon. I walked out of the air conditioned office and took a lungful of air that could've come from a swimming pool under a greenhouse.

It took me 1:03:09 just to run 14k. Maybe the half marathon last Friday hasn't finshed with me yet. I never did wake up today.

Posted by Mark at 09:26 PM

Google and Online Help

As you know from reading my blog, I spent some time leading a workgroup defining a common approach to online help. JavaHelp 2 offers both server-side and client-side context sensitive online help with lots of trimmings.

Trouble is, I think I quite using online help when I left Windows and got Internet connectivity. At that point, I started reading web pages.

A couple of years ago, the situation got even more titled in favor of the web with the advent of Google. With Google's advanced search capabilities, even with just "I'm Feeling Lucky," it takes me less time to look up the answer to my question in some mailing list than to search through oodles of "help" somebody threw together to explain their application before anybody used it.

In that vein, I once suggested to the group that unless you can access the online help over the web, it's probably nearly worthless. I wonder how close to true that is, statistically speaking.

Posted by Mark at 09:20 PM

June 27, 2004

What the heck?!

I read in somebody's blog a few minutes ago (and then lost the link), about The Sellotape(R) Company's website copyright page, which indicates you cannot link to their site. Huh?!

Of course everybody is carefully following this legal advice, including the Google bot.

A search for Sellotape turns up about 49,600 results, the first one being the home page of the company's site ;-)

Posted by Mark at 10:13 PM

Shooting without a story

Just captured 23 minutes of climbing and related shots.

Shooting as if watching watching, shooting without a story, makes for tough editing, I can tell that again already. We didn't for example shoot anybody looking up at the climbers. We also missed shots of the climber reaching his goal, which he did several times. We didn't shoot the wall very well.

We also had lots of badly framed shots and jittery shots with the person filming either yelling suggestions to the actor, or commenting the action. What I learned from Rubin's observations and from watching our own rushes, can be summed up in two rules:

1. Don't move the camcorder
2. Don't participate

Shooting according to these two rules feels odd at first. You find yourself in an editing frame of reference. You do not also exist socially in the film. It resembles writing about software more than blogging. Both you and the reader look on as observers and partners. Each time you tell instead of show, you interrupt and bother your partner. Each time you show instead of tell, your partner gets it almost telepathically.

Posted by Mark at 07:24 AM

Climbers unleashed

Yesterday afternoon we went for a picnic and some of us went for a climb up next to the Dent de Crolles. This marked the last get together of the year for Tim's climbing club. You might like the view we had of the Belledonne from the Chartreuse side climbing site.

The climbers had all practiced inside at L'Espace vertical in St. Martin d'Heres, but many of them had not yet tried any real climbing outside. So they stood in line to get their harnesses and helmets checked.

Of course they felt like experts with ropes and carabiners once their gear was in place. So they all rushed up to the wall.

It looked like so much fun, we had a few observers who decided to get involved.

An exhausting afternoon for people who had to skip their nap...

...but a fun one for everybody.

Posted by Mark at 06:17 AM

June 26, 2004

Memory stick photos

Mom sent the 128 MB memory stick for the camcorder that I asked her to buy from Amazon (1/2 price compared to retail here). The following are some of the 200 photos I shot this morning. (The stick can hold 790 640x480 images, which I've scaled down to 240x180 here.)

Nathalie of course didn't want me taking her picture before 10 in the morning...

Posted by Mark at 10:36 AM

Solaris libre

Speaking today of software libre, I watched JohnnyL and Glenn on internal newscast yesterday talking about getting a license for Solaris that lets the open source community get all the code we can legally put out there. It seems to me we already allow you to get the code, but maybe that was not so well publicized. Apparently this video is going to appear on the Internet real soon now, but I cannot find it yet.

The guys look determined, but also a little uncomfortable with this move. Not a new thing. Ed Zander came to Paris in the spring of 1999, and did Q&A for employees. At the time, I'd just joined, so I asked him what Sun was doing around Linux. He answered that Linux probably wouldn't even have happened had we made it easier for people who became Linux enthusiasts to get Solaris, perhaps by opening up access to the sources in the mid-90s.

Not sure that Linux wouldn't have happened, but I get the impression that we (Sun) have understood the issues for a long time, that what we're struggling with is not understanding the problem, but reconciling the open source model with control over our "intellectual property." Scarcity thinking again. We even reportedly have some customers -- probably guys that go to the Pebble Beach Golf Club with Scott and our Executive VPs -- who are afraid that if we open-source everything, quality will go down.

You can ignore those fears about quality. You'll still be able to get a Solaris distro from Sun that's gone through all the rigor of all the Solaris gates, and been regression tested in many, many different configurations. You can run your business on Solaris.

I can imagine a lot of good things happening, however, if we get a license that lets top-notch developers take what they see as useful in the kernel and try it on Linux. And vice-versa in Solaris. There must be a number of not so lovely hacks around, but there must also be some really nice code in there in both places. A shame to have "intellectual property" issues stand in the way of comingling that.

Posted by Mark at 07:23 AM

You can count on Debian

Back in the late 90s, I bought a Gateway laptop. That was before we had cables at work to lock laptops to our desks. The laptop was stolen. We never found out by whom, though you had to badge to get into the building.

Anyway, since this happened at work, Sun was able to have it replaced, so on recommendation I got a Sony Vaio. The Sony laptop of course makes a good first impression, what you'd expect from Sony. It also has some flaws: the keyboard's too small; the battery only lasted about 3 months; the sound card only lasted about 4 months; you sometimes get electric shocks when you touch it in the wrong place; the surface above the processor heats up such that you can no longer rest your palms while typing after the laptop's been running for half an hour; much of the hardware remains unsupported on Linux because Sony refuses to release the specs; etc. But it sure looks hip. Almost as hip as an Apple portable.

I'd installed Java Desktop System on the Sony laptop. That went fine. Fastest Linux install around. But I couldn't figure out how to read from a little memory stick we got to take pictures with a Sony digital camcorder. So I decided to put the factory version of Windows 98 back on and try that.

I followed Sony's instructions, using the recovery CD. This of course didn't work, since nobody expected you to recover (sic) to Windows after being smart enough to partition the whole drive for Linux. ("Cannot find C:... call tech support.")

I then tried Java Desktop System. Version 1 did not target laptops. (I know this because I spoke with the guys at Sun who built it on top of SuSE enterprise edition. They were aiming first at workstations.) Java Desktop System wouldn't let me repartition, or at least I couldn't see how to do it, and when it loaded modules, Java Desktop System made itself incapable of reading from the CD it had just loaded the kernel and install program from, which is attached by PCMCIA and the BIOS knows how to read at boot time.

So I rooted around, and there were the CDs I had burned to install Debian Woody. It's true, I'm just not enough of a geek to appreciate Debian entirely. Right at the install, the Debian folk put you in charge. (For those of you who like analogies, Debian is a distro from the future where we've made the transition to participatory economics and people expect to take charge, so the Debian installer and all the rest of it seems very natural.) I had faith that when all else failed, free (as in libre) software would save me from bad engineering. I plopped the first Woody CD in the drive and rebooted.

No problem. In 30 seconds I was in cfdisk. In 2 minutes I'd partitioned the drive for Windows 95 Fat 32. Debian not only saved me, it didn't even complain that it had let me recover the capability to install a proprietary OS with a bunch of proprietary drivers whose engineers needed assistance from a bunch of free software dudes just to get their own software to function.

Can we attribute all this to GPL? Well, only after a fashion. It seems to have more to do with why the folks making Debian keep going. They love what they're doing. The engineers at Sony probably like what they're doing, but they're getting paid to do it, and many of them probably would not do it the same way if they weren't getting paid. I'd pick labors of love over labors for money every time I have a choice. Imagine a world where people work hard on things that they want to do, share the chores, and don't mind taking charge. I'm pretty sure the Debian folk already live there.

Posted by Mark at 06:51 AM

June 25, 2004

1:30:04:87

If Stuart's measurements are close to correct, I managed to run a half marathon in 1:30:04:87 today. Tried to go faster at the end and come in under 90 minutes, but just couldn't get my legs to do it.

At 1:01:30, I was feeling pretty thirsty. At 1:15, I was drying out. At the end, I was sweating less than when I ran 10k yesterday, even though today was hotter. Need to figure out how to take some water for runs that long.

Posted by Mark at 02:51 PM | Comments (1)

Open to freak ideas?

It occurred to me early this morning, the time of day when dreaming or whatever has resolved most of the contradictions that bubble up slowly, and I can see all the motes in my brothers' eyes very clearly.

I tried in the past to get Rob to read Robert Anton Wilson. He was steering me back to Russell and Penrose, but I'm both lazy and flaky, so it's like pushing a cooked noodle. But I got Rob to start Critical Path, warning him about the style, but not about something I'd missed, the part that must be in there somewhere in which Bucky concludes that dolphins evolved from humans or the other way around.

This almost got Rob to put the book down. In fact, I'm not sure he's not just hanging onto it out of good manners.

Arguably, Critical Path contains a lot more new information than Understanding Power. Noam's dragging us through the crap that we wade through, dogmatically holding our indoctrinated noses. Bucky's pointing to infinity and reminding us to leave the planet, showing us nature's path tangential to that of the mainstream thinking primate.

Noam even tells us why Rob can read Noam, but not Bucky. If you come up with something outside the mainstream, the proof required increases enormously. Noam knows this; he does it. Bucky doesn't seem to want to spend that much time on it.

So Bucky trots out some mixed primate and dolphin evolution, and that really puts us off. But when Noam in Understanding Power gets off track into some discussion about why if tabacco is legal, why shouldn't marijuana be -- Dude, you can smoke a whole pack of cigarettes and still drive competently, and most adults in the US are constantly in and out of cars, operating insanely complicated machinery like PCs just to get their jobs done, etc., serving those in charge -- and we just sort of gloss over that and get to the next section.

The logical conclusion to rejection of Bucky would involve ignoring everything that has such blips (this blog, lunch converstations, all of TV, your mom, most publications including Noam's, etc.). You confine your reading to logbooks from scientists, mathematical textbooks, and maybe some crap that's so complicated you cannot tell whether it's wrong or right, like Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

I have yet to meet someone disciplined enough for that. Let your freak flag fly.

Posted by Mark at 10:13 AM

8+ levels of hierarchy

Martin Hardee wrote about Tufte's original comment on AnswerBook (before the web version). Tufte's quoted as remarking:

Dr Spock's Baby Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most complicated 'product' imaginable -- and it only has two levels of headings. You people have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't even stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated.

IMHO, Tufte misjudged there. Babies come without history. As a parent, you know how to operate them almost intuitively.

The same is not at all true of UNIX.

Posted by Mark at 09:40 AM

June 24, 2004

15 minutes of fame

What does it all mean?

Just typed my name into Google and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky." I swear to you, loyal and adored reader, that I've never done it before. Honestly.

My Sun Software Forum persona came up with pointers to my answers on LDAP-related questions.

I then did it for the LDAP server architect I share an office with, and he of course came up... but not for LDAP!

Strange web topology.

Posted by Mark at 09:42 PM | Comments (2)

(Witch?)Doctors

Does it seem to you that people in rich countries operating as medical professionals in get more bad press on the Internet than do other people, like landlords?

You're right. A Google search for "landlord cause death" turns up about 162,000 hits. A turns up about 2,510,000.

How many of us face what we don't understand accusingly? When something bad happens? A Google search for "computer cause death" turns up about 1,940,000.

Posted by Mark at 09:31 PM

Homeopath

Luke gave me some advice yesterday to avoid caffeine, alcohol, sugar, chocolate, and so forth. I was having trouble sleeping.

I'd been drinking some Coke without sugar or caffeine. Luke wondered if I really though it had no caffeine. Who knows which vegetable extracts Coke really contains? (Read the label.)

"Besides, in really microscopic amounts like that, the effects can be homeopathic," he claimed. According to Luke at that time of day, when he looked tired, stressed, irritated that I wouldn't just catch on for crying out loud and politely leave his office -- no, he didn't know anything about JavaBeans(TM) technology -- many substances in minute quanties produce homeopathic effects.

This I ignored. Mostly. Echoes of Luke's advice produced a sort of homeopathic effect later on, however, that prevented me from getting to sleep. After watching Citizen Kane, I lie there awake, wondering what people say about me behind my back, imagining that I'd get an accurate picture of myself by triangulating on how people treat me to my face, how they treat me behind my back (if they even think about me at all when I'm absent), and how I see my own life.

I'd be better off working through Introduction to Mathematical Statistics...

Posted by Mark at 09:01 PM | Comments (2)

Why the manual sucks

In Understanding Power -- yes, I'm enjoying this one -- somebody asks Noam a question about why people in the US are "anti-intellectual." They discuss terms for a while, finding differences between "intellectual" celebrity and real intellectual work. Norm seems to come down on the side of real intellectual problem solving work, observing that a lot of what passes for "intellectual" work (leading to notariety in places that are not "anti-intellectual" such as France) strongly resembles clerical work you can do with considerably less effort than problem solving.

So then, Noam's questioner says, "But people do look down on people who read books."

And Noam answers, thinking of an imaginary, highly capable auto mechanic solving tough car problems, "But look, this guy may have read books--maybe he read the manual. Those manuals are not so easy to read; in fact, they're harder to read than most scholarly manuals, I think."

Writing software manuals (and their cavalierly misnamed cohorts called guides because they include procedures) being what I do for a living, I have some guesses as to why they're so hard to read.

Typically, you read the manual for hints on solving the problem at hand. The writer wrote the manual without knowing what problems you were going to encounter. The writer probably worked on it with the builders, rather than the users like you. The writer probably had to finish the manual, moving on to the next version or even a different manual both before you got the product it covers, and before learning enough to function as a real user. After publication, the manual content remained unchanged. If you're lucky, someone published errata (usually written on hearsay).

Futhermore, you come to read the manual with all the particular background knowledge that makes up your understanding of the situation, and probably with a number of preconceptions that, if exposed and reconsidered, would help you avoid getting stuck while solving the problem. The writer comes to write the manual with a totally different set of knowledge and expectations, probably without much background in the subject, most people who have background working as builders rather than writers since building has significantly higher status and probably higher pay, and vitually no knowledge of your knowledge.

So the writer may write straight exposition on an inadequately understood subject, whereas you are suffering through a complex problem solving situation, or are reading with the intention of solving problems. You experience that as the manual sucking.

Authors of scholarly works, on the other hand, typically have become experts on the subject matter, are writing for folks taking the same path toward expertise, and don't expect you to approach their work with the intention of solving problems. You experience this as the scholarly work being easier to read.

Posted by Mark at 04:33 PM

June 23, 2004

More music that's not for everyone

If Zappa's music isn't for everyone (see Zappa), then neither is Karlheinz Stockhausen's. But it's definitely for you.

You might want to start with Stimmung (at Amazon, details on ordering the CDs I have of 1969 and 1982 recordings).

I notice today that you can download MP3s here, in case you're not ready to spend $20 just on my recommendation ;-)

Posted by Mark at 10:44 AM

Why war

If you're one of the (relatively) many Sun blog readers checking out Richard Elling's ramblings, and saw this article on misuse of the term war, let me guide you to an answer.

Read Understanding Power, edited from a series of talks with Noam Chomsky. In there, you find a pretty good explanation of why if you don't have a war, you need to invent one. (Hint: It's the economy, stupid.)

What comes after the war on terrorism? Why else would we be looking for life on other planets?

Posted by Mark at 09:40 AM

Not so surreal

Last night, I blogged about Kerry asking Hunter S. Thomson to run as his VP. I couldn't figure it out. Must've been tired.

As soon as I woke up this morning, even at 5:15 am, the answer came to me. Imagine you're Kerry. You're worried about getting assassinated after the election. Who can you put only a heartbeat away from the presidency to ensure that even members of the psychopathic, lunatic fringe would think twice before pulling the trigger?

What a shrewd guy.

Posted by Mark at 08:08 AM

NameFinder

Sun employs this cool guy, Detlef Schmier, whose web app NameFinder has literally taken us all by storm. Detlef sent mail to the NameFinder alias last night mentioning that the version on our intranet has serviced 30 million queries, with about 2/3 of Sun people registered in there.

NameFinder gives you an easy-to-use web page interface to the information in your directory that just blows all client-side apps away. In other words, in two steps -- 1. Click NameFinder bookmark. 2. Enter name. -- I see somebody's contact details, calendar, location, reporting structure. In one more step, I get back a table comparing my calendar with that of the person in question to schedule a meeting this week. And there's more and more: alias expansion, orgchart generation, an interface for managing your calendar, ad-hoc group mailing, etc.

Got an LDAP directory for your organization? Then you gotta have NameFinder. Get it now before the marketing dudes notice how much of a killer app it is and start trying to prevent people from getting it easily.

Posted by Mark at 07:36 AM

June 22, 2004

Summertime

It's now summertime in the northern hemisphere.

Do you know how your reindeer are taking it?

Posted by Mark at 10:20 PM

Surreal political calculations

JWZ blogged today about an article on yahoo which quotes John Kerry as inviting Hunter S. Thomson to run as his VP in the US presidential election.

Huh?!

I'll admit it's been a while since I've lived in the US, but isn't the whole war on drugs thing still going full tilt? What calculations would lead a national politician with a reasonably fair chance of being elected president to joke about that?

Posted by Mark at 10:05 PM

Tempo run

Hal Higdon suggests in his intermediate half marathon training writeup that once a week you do a tempo run. "This is a continuous run with a buildup in the middle to near 10-K race pace."

My first tempo run was today, doing 10k in 41:56 with splits as follows:

1. 11:09 at 2.5k
2. 20:57 at 5k
3. 31:25 at 7.5k
4. 41:56 at 10k

I found it difficult to build up gradually. It felt like I was flying along from about 4-5k. Then I had to force myself just to run hard to about 6k and sprint about a half kilometer beyond that. As soon as I slowed down after the sprint, by legs felt very heavy. Slowing down was almost more painful than running hard at that point. After what seemed like jogging back, I had enough at the end, however, to sprint like somebody who hadn't just run 10k. I usually don't have near that much left.

Posted by Mark at 09:39 PM

Where to run nearby

Semi-marathon de Lyon 26 Sept. 2004

Marathon de Savoie

Semi-marathon de l'Isere (cancelled)

Posted by Mark at 07:12 AM

June 21, 2004

Half marathon?

Running a marathon seems like too much right now. Hal Higdon suggests you prepare 18 weeks in advance, with long runs every Sunday. I'm sure Nath would love it when I tell her I'm going running for 3 hours, leaving the 3 little ones at home on what's supposed to be a vacation day for her.

It looks like the Grenoble half marathon planned for Sept. 1 got cancelled. The one in Chambery is already over for this year. Need to look around and find something for the end of summer, beginning of fall.

Posted by Mark at 10:53 PM

100th entry

100 entries in this blog in a little over a month. I'd never have done it if it had to be on paper.

Now if only it were as easy to log tidbits of video.

Posted by Mark at 05:28 PM

Back to developer doc

After having led the doc team for a couple of releases working on installation and reference stuff with only a little bit of plug-in development doc thrown in for good measure, I finally get back to the fun stuff. This time it's for directory client SDKs that originated at Netscape. One for Java code, the other for C. Wish I could concentrate on that exclusively.

Sun's also doing more complete solutions for identity management than ever before, including Directory Server Enterprise Edition at the data layer. So a big part of each week goes to making the docs for that even more complete. I can see the next big peak we need to reach in that area: how to say even more in 2/3 fewer words and pictures...

Posted by Mark at 05:26 PM

June 20, 2004

The critics

In an Interview with Noam Chomsky by Chomsky and Timo Stollenwerk, Chomsky says, "In France there's very little [media criticism, analysis, discussion]." I wonder if he's thinking of l'Observatoire francais des medias. Rob, who reads a lot of medialens.org articles, says he went to a meeting a little while ago of a group just starting in Grenoble to research local media derapages as l'OFM calls them.

More power to them. At some level, it seems that Chomsky and Herman have shown the essential points, and this further work resembles going over theorems in statistics or classical analysis: good for the thought muscles, but perhaps not advancing the cause. L'OFM goes beyond the analysis, calling for legislative measures "destinées à modifier le fonctionnement des médias." Would any of the four measures truly move editorial boundaries out and render the media more democratic?

Posted by Mark at 09:49 PM | Comments (2)

How do I export it?

Kino cannot export digital video back to my camera. At least I cannot figure out how to do it. I mailed the developers for help, but this is definitely a blow I was not expecting.

So in disgust I saved my movie as AVI and wiped 14G of captured video from my disk. I'm sure I'll regret it. Or at least someday figure out how this stuff works. Maybe I should give up and start saving for a Mac.

Posted by Mark at 03:10 PM

Home town indoctrination

The collection of interviews on the Propaganda Model in Understanding Power helped me get into the fears of reporters trapped by the confines the model predicts.

When I think abstractly about professional reporters avoiding stories that upset advertisers, I can easily label them as cowards more concerned with preservation of their advantages than with doing good work. When I think concretely about how I'd report on Jean Vettier here in Barraux spending the money on a new mairie instead of a new school, I start to see what seem like their point of view.

When all that was going still news, I went to get my hair cut at Yvonne's. Our top local hairdresser was worried about her taxes increasing by 25% if the new school went through. She seems quite pro-Vettier, probably voting like many of the local folks who've lived in Barraux or nearby for a long time. I didn't ask her how buying the new mairie would affect her taxes or what she thought of that. But if I don't even ask the hairdresser tough questions, out of a mix of something like politeness and indoctrination, would I ever be willing to cover something like Vettier's failure to keep electoral promises. Especially when he could easily rezone the land between our house and the fort up the hill to put some buildings in, very simply knocking down the value of the house, for which my banker has me over a barrel.

Vettier also owns the strip of land directly south of the house. He could decide to store his garbage there. He may own the strip on the north side as well, though that one has no frontage.

Weird how coercion goes hand in hand with scarcity, n'est-ce pas ?

Posted by Mark at 08:53 AM

Is this for Real? (cont'd)

Looks like a potential Aha! moment in the continuing saga of trying to understand digital video: RealProducer cannot understand compressed .avi without the proper codec support. (Whatever all that means...) That may be why I was getting only audio, no matter what settings I used to encode the .rm file.

Posted by Mark at 08:28 AM | Comments (1)

June 19, 2004

Is this for Real? (cont'd)

Ok. I'm stumped.

I downloaded the .rpm, forced it to install the beta realplay client over the working realplay client. At least it works. But it looks like only the audio got rolled into the file I generated!

When I run mplayer on the .avi version I used to generate the .rm, I get both sound an video. (mplayer absolutely chokes on the .rm, but does say the following:

Video: no video

when I run it.) What's up with RealProducer Basic?

I give up for tonight...

Posted by Mark at 11:42 PM

Is this for Real?

RealProducer 10 runs on Red Hat for me, but unless you pay almost $200, you cannot encode in anything but Real 10 format.

I created a Real 10 version of the movie burned to VCD this morning. (Watch out: 11 MB file behind that link! Still uploading as I write this.) Of course that won't play properly on my realplay 8 for on Red Hat. All I get is the audio.

So I tried downloading the beta player for Linux. I got the Helix player first -- which doesn't recognize Real 10 format! At the bottom of the page, I saw the RealPlayer 10 beta, so I got those 6+ MB of stuff, and the file wouldn't extract.

Anyway, let me know if you read this, try out the video, and it works for you.

Posted by Mark at 11:19 PM

Two hours of dancing

Emma danced three numbers with the other girls in her group. There are I guess four different dance groups, so we hung on through two hours of dancing counting the intermission.

I filmed until the battery went dead, but missed some of the best moments, when Diane was clapping her hands. Still need to make room on my disk to capture and edit all that, but I haven't yet figured out just how to transcode the existing NTSC footage to PAL, and so don't want to wipe off what I have.

Posted by Mark at 11:08 PM

Almost time for the dance

Last night was the end of the school year bash. Emma and Tim came home at 10 with assorted junk they'd won at the fair. I filmed a lot, but not sure if any of it is worth using.

Today, the house is calm.

Tonight Emma has her end of the year dance show. Nathalie's repairing her top hat. No picture of that, yet.

Posted by Mark at 05:17 PM

VCD quality

The video CD I made uses a compression ratio of about 20:1 compared to the digital video source. Without even looking at the videos side by side, you can tell the VCD is of significantly lower quality.

Guess it's time for DVD burners to come down in price... Blank DVDs at my favorite supplier in Grenoble are about 5 euros, and a DVD burner is about 100 euros. That's only twice as expensive as the CD burner I bought, but that makes DVDs on the order of 15x more than the CDRs I got.

Maybe we'll have to live with VCD temporarily.

Posted by Mark at 11:09 AM

First VCD

I've created a first VCD, mainly of the time around Tim's birthday this year, and of our trip to see Fred and Virginie in Osny.

No frills. Not even titles. Or French dubbed into English ;-)

Worse, it won't play in our DVD player, although it plays on the computer just fine. I'm hoping that the trouble lies with NTSC vs. PAL, and so will send this one back to the US anyway. Cross my fingers.

Posted by Mark at 07:45 AM

June 18, 2004

Off the main stream

After Reagan's death, I neither saw nor heard dissenting mainstream media coverage in either the French or English. If you get off the main stream, some editorials look as nasty as the mainstream media was laudatory. Check out the article at Socialist Worker.org titled Good riddance.

Authors Alan Maass and Lee Sustar don't refrain from direct insults -- for example, "The truth is that Reagan was an ignorant bigot...," or "Reagan was a widely seen as dimwit--even by his supporters." This comes up again if you search Google news, e.g. The Crimes and Times of Ronald Reagan. You have to start getting into blogs (!?) before you find something anti-Reagan but with balanced tone.

Posted by Mark at 10:56 PM

Trying to create a VCD

When I asked Fabio how you split sound and video with Kino, he just looked at me and said, "For that, I use a Mac."

Basic editing with Kino works quite well, even for a newbie. Trouble comes when you want to start coloring outside the lines, and most instructions you can find look like back-of-the-napkin notes by somebody who's intimate with multiple multimedia formats at the I-can-read-that-file-in-hex level.

So I've compiled all the tools necessary. I hope. We'll see if I manage to make a video CD from my 23 minutes of newbie-edited footage.

Posted by Mark at 10:31 PM

More on upgrading the VPN

What's really not helpful about the log messages -- see Upgrading the VPN -- is how they say:

Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr1

And that's it. Nothing about why the gateway ignores you. No hint at what that reason might be.

Why tell you anything? They gave you the source code... for the kernel module. Not for the client.

$ grep "gateway" *
... (nothing with the string in question) ...
Binary file vpnclient matches
$ strings vpnclient | grep gateway
Lost contact with the security gateway. Check your network connection
Contacting the gateway at
$

And I wonder why Sun IT doesn't want to support it on Red Hat...

Posted by Mark at 09:46 PM

Prison poisoning the community

Rob sent a link to an interesting cover story at The Black Commentator. "One out of eight prisoners on Earth is African American."

Strong encouragement to stay out of prison if you can, and a good argument against current severe sentences for essentially victimless crimes, like getting high with unregulated drugs. Would political action reduce the problem? If so, what's the right lever?

Posted by Mark at 12:02 PM

June 17, 2004

Upgrading the VPN

Sun's upgrading the hardware (or whatever) used for the VPN. At home I'm still running Red Hat 9, and I guess that's not a supported platform.

The software is from Cisco. Partially documented, documentation almost incomprehensible. I should probably just know what to do with this by osmosis or something, but I don't (real IP addresses replaced):

$ vpnclient connect holland
Cisco Systems VPN Client Version 4.0.4 (B)
Copyright (C) 1998-2003 Cisco Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Client Type(s): Linux
Running on: Linux 2.4.21 #1 SMP Mon Jul 28 18:39:02 CEST 2003 i686
 
Initializing the VPN connection.
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr1
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr2 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr3 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr4 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr5 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr6 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr7 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr8 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr9 (backup)
Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client
Reason: Remote peer is no longer responding.
There are no new notification messages at this time.
$

What? I missed a step here...

When your VPN connection works, at it was a minor pain getting it working the first time, the last thing you want to do is upgrade the software to something even less scrutable than last time.

Posted by Mark at 10:27 PM

40:00:26!

The psychological barrier of 41 minutes is gone. I just ran 10k in 40:00:26.

My splits were as follows:

1. 9:28 at 2.5k
2. 19:26 at 5k
3. 30:15 at 7.5k
4. 40:00:26 at 10k

Unfortunately for appearances, I sounded like a wounded air mattress, and was sweating like a warthog. But it was for a good cause. Under 40 here we come! (Unless it was the Solipred (cortisone) I got with the antibiotics for my sinus infection.)

Posted by Mark at 01:07 PM

Abundance

• Monogamy goes away?
  Scarcity: I love you; I cannot love another; We must love exclusively. (If monogamy is natural, why would anyone even think about cheating?)
• Money goes away?
  Scarcity: I have it; You want it; We cannot both have it; We must trade; To avoid carrying everything we have with us, we need symbolic trading; I know, money...
• Property goes away?
  Scarcity: We cannot both have it; One of us must have it, exclusively; Let's be fair, though; OK, let's have property and ownership, ruled by explicit contract (law).
• Envy goes away?
  Scarcity: You have it; I won't it; We cannot both have it; I covet it.
• Sharing comes back?
  Scarcity in abundance: We cannot both have it; Can we grow, make another one? If not, can we share? If not, do we have to go back to scarcity for this one?
• Government goes away?
  Scarcity: We must have a system for controlling distribution of critical resources; ...
• Work stays, right?
• Does religion stay?
• What happens to obviously limited resources for which we do not have substitutes?
  Why don't any examples come to mind?

Posted by Mark at 08:41 AM

Scarcity

When I sat down to lunch yesterday, the guys were discussing guys who'd managed to strike it richer than they had. The usual animosity surfaced in the form of cynicism, etc. It's so natural.

Or is it?

If we're all constantly reminding ourselves there's not enough to go around, we get stuck in the capitalism vs. communism debates again. Yada, yada, yada. But what would a world without scarcity look like.

Posted by Mark at 06:48 AM

June 16, 2004

Library of Babel

Jason Ryder wrote about Blog Taxonomy about a year ago, but using Bloglines for only a couple of days has made it clear that it's hard to determine in advance what blogs you want to read.

Gideon Rosenblatt says in this Taxonomy Primer entry, that taxonomies faded a bit as full-text search technologies, "matured to the point when they became really useful." Taxonomies are allegedly coming back -- I know we're using them inside Sun. But even if we do solve the problem of shifting contextuality so those who know what they want to retrieve can find it more quickly, how the heck do we help ourselves when we don't know what we want to retrieve?

Trial and error. All I need to find what I didn't know I was looking for is infinite time. Or it'll be like the rest of the web, and infinite monkeys will eventually reduce the number of paths taken.

Posted by Mark at 05:06 PM

Distance learning

One of my degrees came through distance learning. I learned by reading and doing. Reading books and working out exercises either on paper or on a computer.

That should transfer easily to reading web pages and working out exercises, right?

I'm taking a course now in Launching and Sustaining Virtual Teams over the Intranet. And it's not working for me. I realize I cannot get myself to read a bunch of text online. When there's too much text on the page, I can barely get myself to read the first sentence before scanning.

Furthermore, the exercises are all of the form, "Answer these questions about your team," or, "Complete this worksheet based on your team and answer these questions." It's going to be a lot harder next time to convince me to take an online course.

Posted by Mark at 11:35 AM

Cinema vs. DVD

Rob and I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 at the cinema in Grenoble last night. The unintentionally flanged sound from their old hardware almost added to the rerun quality of some of the shots.

DVDs offer what seems to be better picture and sound quality. The screen size makes a big difference, however. It's like the difference between phone meetings and face-to-face meetings.

You pay for the deeper participation, though. Cost to two people to rent a DVD for 5 hours: 1,50 euros. Cost for two tickets on a week night at the cinema: 12 euros.

Posted by Mark at 11:04 AM

Careful what you write

Halina Tabacek got invited to the latest McNealy Report radio show. She said:

You have to be careful what you write because somebody might actually read it.

On the one hand, not sure what that means for blogs. This blog's been Google'd by now, but I doubt from the webalizer output that anybody else is reading this.

On the other hand, when you put something in documentation, especially tucked away in the reference, somebody somehow gets in there and reads it. You'll get readers coming back wondering why they cannot increase nsslapd-db-logbuf-size without rebuilding all the databases. (I now realize I cannot remember what the answer is.)

Posted by Mark at 08:51 AM

June 15, 2004

User and task analysis

Brian Ehret did some second-degree user and task analysis for Directory Server. By interviewing users with a moderate amount of experience, Brian got close to observing what these folks are doing with the software, and how often they're doing it. The picture that came back from the 6 or so interviews Brian did strikes me as similar to the 70 minutes of raw footage I had before starting to make the rough cut edit. You can sculpt at least one, probably several, stories from the raw material... which one best reflects reality? Is your story enough to constrain your design?

Right now, what I'm doing for the next big version of the product cannot reasonably be called user and task analysis. Hackos and Redish say user and task analysis starts with observing real users in situ, then continues with hypotheses, tests, more hypotheses, etc. to identify models for designing user interaction.

My aim is more modest. We have too much documentation today. I know the docs as well as perhaps anyone else, and even I have to use Google to find what I want. So perhaps I should call it task classification, or use distillation. Ideally, the end product is Elixir of Directory Server HOWTO. (Cures asthma, liver spots, postmodern anxiety, stinkfoot, and a host of other ailments, too.)

Posted by Mark at 10:55 AM

Life and art

Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Heinlein, et al. have written novels whose characters eventually become aware they live in a novel.

How can you be sure you're not living in a novel? When the editing's this bad, you call it a rough draft, not a novel.

Posted by Mark at 06:16 AM

June 14, 2004

First rough cut

After what seems like many hours, I've managed to cull and edit 70 minutes of raw footage to a rough cut of 25 minutes.

I'm too tired of it to watch it again right now, and probably still need to cut half again before it'll be worth watching.

Posted by Mark at 10:08 PM

Not Kino leakage

Fabio explained to me today that Linux caches very aggressively, so what I'm seeing is the kernel filling up the pages in memory with digital video. The content in cache doesn't go away because the kernel doesn't flush it once it's loaded, until it's displaced by another application.

I'm not sure I understand why things slow down later. Maybe it has something to do with how the kernel takes care of a pretty large number of pages in cache.

If I live to be 1000, I promise to read the kernel source before I die...

Posted by Mark at 09:22 PM

Reorganization

This current reorg is the first to significantly and directly influence my work. Reorgs before tended to mean only network repair and rerouting.

This time, an online help work group I chair needs dissolving into a larger effort. 14 of us have worked since last September to resolve divergence in online help authoring toolsets. Our goal centered on recommending a single toolset, and helping all teams converge as quickly as appropriate. Post-reorg, we no longer need to decide which toolset to recommend -- that's taken care of -- and the focus has shifted to getting everyone on this toolset.

We did manage to develop and weight over 100 objective criteria on which to judge prospective solutions, not including cost criteria. We have also nearly completed investigations of several toolsets so that we can evaluate them. We ended up doing this work fairly carefully, and should be able to reuse it in determining what capabilities to implement next for the common toolset.

(If you're wondering what took us so long, we meet for only 1 hour every 2 weeks, and we went through the entire process twice. It was almost March before we knew enough to throw out our broken work. If I had it all to do over, I'd more quickly accept "culling.")

Posted by Mark at 09:40 AM

June 13, 2004

Culling video

Given the way we shot footage when Mom first gave us the digital camcorder last month, it's hardly surprising how long it takes to mould it into something watchable. I'm probably not culling enough.

The video runs the gamut. We have everything from couch potatoes...

...to heavy jazz cats.

Rubin uses culling to refer to the process of throwing out portions of the raw footage so you can manage the rest. I'm searching for diamond dust in a mount of dirt. In 70 minutes of NTSC, you have 126000 frames to choose from.

Reminder to self: shoot less before editing.

Posted by Mark at 09:16 PM

June 12, 2004

Autobiography of a loser

Back when I used to think I might want to write a book to read, rather than consult, I realized all of Borges ideas for books lie beyond my lazy reach, Dick has a better mind, and non-fiction would involve the kind of deep research that produces a Pavlovian procrastination reaction.

One remaining idea I summed up as "autobiography of a loser." A self-absorbed, embarrassing-even-while-auto-derisive protagonist, saved only by your feelings of superiority. Then I realized it would have to be humorous, and decided to go to bed.

Posted by Mark at 09:25 PM

Monster trucks coming soon

Diane and I were returning from an errand when I glimpsed the posters that reminded me of Tim's hot wheels puzzle. Airbrushed, gleaming, flying trucks.

I'm not making this up. Somebody has decided to bring monster trucks over here this summer. Salvador Dali stepping out of a car full of cherries seems tame by comparison.

Posted by Mark at 09:01 PM

Open source online help

Roger Brinkley mentioned the other day in a meeting that we really ought to think about supporting online help for open source projects. But I realize that since I built my first working kernel, I can perhaps count the number of times I've really needed online help on Linux on the fingers of one hand, as opposed to a web browser or a man page.

But Binky is probably right for people using IDEs like Rave or NetBeans. Paul Fussell was showing off the cool help feature they've put into Rave, as sort of always-present commentary that changes as the focus moves around. The idea is that JavaHelp will go out as an open source offering... all we need to do is get Java everywhere you've got X.

Posted by Mark at 01:52 PM

Kino leakage?

My PC at home has 1 GB RAM. I'm learning to edit video using Kino as the editing tool. Pretty cool so far.

Dude, something in there leaks.

Before I start Kino, I have about 200 MB memory in active use, and about 300 MB total according to top. After loading Kino, doing very minor editing on an hour of crap I shot before I knew what I was doing, and then shutting Kino down, top says I still have about 200 MB memory in active use, but 987 MB in use. Why doesn't the kernel reclaim all that inactive memory? Are we talking serious leakage?

And why don't I get to the swap point? I've only got 1.5 MB of swap in use.

Posted by Mark at 09:44 AM

Online communities

LinkedIn, orkut. Pet rocks of the early 00s?

Maybe I'm too introverted to start looking for other people when I finally get some time to sit down in front of the machine and interact at my speed, rather than social speed. Do LinkedIn and orkut give you what extraverts miss when they sit down at the world wide library of Babel?

During the 15 minutes I was interested in that stuff, I ran across a (successful?) businessman who I also went to high school with. Andrew Conru runs a variety or more or less smarmy Internet-based contact services, including ones like FriendFinder Inc. If you Google for Andy, however, you quickly come across sites like ALT.com, "World's largest personals for BDSM/Alternative lifestyles!"

What were online communities for again?

Posted by Mark at 07:08 AM

Rise of blogging

Estimates of the number of blogs out there vary. I thought Tim Bray guessed something like 2 million yesterday. A quick Google search led me to Perseus Blog Survey, where the estimate stands at 4.12 million, on the order of a blog for every 1000th human.

It struck me yesterday as I drove home after the talk that blogging answers two questions about personal websites reasonably well:

1. How do I keep the content fresh?


2. What lets me do that with almost no effort?

By definition, a blog answers the first question more easily than anything else out there, except perhaps randomly generated content. (And even I don't read my randomly generated content very often.)

These days, blogging software such as the stuff I'm using right now makes it very, very easy. You need to know how to read, and you need to know how to type. But that's about it.

Two improvements that together might take fast growth to explosion:

• Voice to blog interface - I can now blog without having to do it from a GUI.


• Wireless connection for voice to blog interface - I can now blog from wherever the ideas occur to me.

Posted by Mark at 06:45 AM

June 11, 2004

Still invisible

blog site:mcraig.org turns up no hits at all. Remind me not to go into sales ;-) I could however perhaps have a second career in bird watching or burglary...

Posted by Mark at 11:03 PM

Bloglines

Ludo's been using Juicy News Network internally at work to read weblogs. I stopped when jnn went on a rampage and slashdot.org cut me off for overscanning the news.

So I've gone to try bloglines.com. Now will I actually feel I've learned something each day from all those headlines?

Posted by Mark at 10:58 PM

Most popular results for Zappa

According to Amazon, Frank's most popular works are:

1. Apostrophe
2. Hot Rats
3. Joe's Garage

No idea what to make of that. Why is Hot Rats in second place? Why are only albums from the 1970s listed?

Posted by Mark at 10:24 PM

Books on blogging

Amazon lists many books on blogging. A quick and dumb search at Google -- book blogging site:amazon.com -- returns about 246 hits.

That made me wonder how many books Amazon carries on about diaries. My first attempt to find them -- book diary site:amazon.com -- brings up about 490000 hits, the first page full of which refer to some book called The Black Book: Diary of a Teenage Stud, Vol. I: Girls, Girls, Girls. Hmm... A reviewer observes, "If you liked Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging then you will enjoy this book." Hmm...

howto diary site:amazon.com? Nothing much. I notice near the bottom that Emacs has a diary mode. (Why not?)

keeping diary site:amazon.com? This brings up The New Diary: How to Use a Journal for Self-Guidance and Expanded Creativity. With all 12 reviewers giving it 5 stars, this book scores higher than perhaps any of those devoted to blogging.

Out of something like 246 authors who've already published books on blogging, how many of them examined a bunch of software? How many of them looked first at what you might do with the content?

Posted by Mark at 10:14 PM

Zappa

While writing that last blog entry, I noticed a review at Amazon.com for Zappa's Mothers of Prevention, in which the reviewer claims, "This music (like most zappa) isn't for everyone."

The author of that statement has a point. If you want something in the background that you don't actually listen to, or don't want anything too interesting disturbing your fantasy about the person jumping around in the foreground of the music video, don't listen to Zappa. Furthermore, if you get upset by cynicism, you might want to steer clear as well.

Otherwise, you can probably go ahead. For a guy who made dozens of albums, he managed to pull off quite a few good ones.

Posted by Mark at 09:07 PM

When I shot Reagan

When I shot Reagan, in February of 1981, it happened during 5th grade creative writing class. (Reagan did get shot in 1982.)

For some reason, they had us write stories and then bind them into books. My formulaic little story complete with mispellings, an all Northern-European-American cast, and police officiers who scream, "Doggone it," in disgust when losing the trail of the President's killer, attributes the killing to Walter Chronkite (Krankheit?), then probably nearing retirement. (Walter outruns the cops from the White House through a forest (!) to his getaway car.)

French news has been covering Mr. Reagan's passing daily since it happened. Today, it seems Mrs. Thatcher paid her respects.

Please excuse those of us who went through puberty while those two held office. "While the effects ... on the well-adjusted child may not be cataclysmic, the emotional damage is more subtle," or whatever testimony Frank Zappa captured in Porn Wars.

Posted by Mark at 08:55 PM

A top entry at blogs.sun.com

The hottest blog at blogs.sun.com is by MaryMaryQuiteContrary, who's in marketing and started to blog to get the word out about our last show in China.

Mary's a newbie, and a non-technical person. She says people love pictures. So here, I'll upload a little one...

Here's my ugly mug: .

This Mary says is part of her job. I guess it should be part of our jobs as well. Bryan Cantrill, way down in DTrace for Solaris app perf tuning, told us all about guerilla marketing. Mary is out there doing it.

Posted by Mark at 05:25 PM

Tim Bray on blogging

Tim Bray's giving a talk on blogging right now at work. Specifically http://blogs.sun.com/. He says he was hired partially to get Sun blogging.

Blogging seems to be growing at a rate of doubling every 4-6 weeks. This reminds Tim of the early expansion of the web.

Tim says:

• Blog's are one to many (mostly), you know who you're reading


• You don't have to update often, but you have to provide a syndication feed and keep it kicking over
  If you don't know about newsfeeders, go to http://bloglines.com


• To be read, you need to interest your readers


• Some bloggers are more popular... but you don't need to be in the top-read to be successful. If you write hard-core tech stuff, you might not have many readers, but the blogging world still needs you.

Tim's rules on how to succeed come next.

Dos:

1. Write what you know about.


2. Point to other people. People link back.


3. Read the good blogs in your area so you can react.


4. Making it shorter takes time, but it's worth the investment.


5. Human interest stuff is okay, but look prof. and polished (spellcheck, etc.)

Don'ts:

1. Write what you don't know about.


2. Fail to show respect. Dis'ing customers or Sun or employees.


3. Tell secrets.


4. Speculate about product ship dates, financial issues, and stock prices.

Posted by Mark at 05:18 PM

Haircuts

Last night, I failed again to notice that Nathalie got her hair cut.

Married guys should notice their wives haircuts before they notice anything about the appearance of their female colleagues. Yet another primate taboo?

Posted by Mark at 03:25 PM

Truth or meaning

Rob explained that Penrose, in Shadows of the Mind, argues we need a non-computational model to understand consciousness. Rob has also been reading Betrand Russell, telling me Russell's investigation of language seems a lot more tractable than Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

I find Wittgenstein about as tractable as Joyce.

Rob wants to understand Truth from a philosophical point of view. He told me aims at placing discussions of Truth in Media in an appropriate context. Before he had to go to a meeting, he admitted that learning all the background may not prove useful in lots of cases. Most professional mathematicians do not lie awake at night worrying about Goedel's incompleteness theorem. They just get on with their work.

Jacqueline has taken the boys to Spain on vacation. (Where she was mugged! Horrible.) Lonely male idealists spend too much time thinking about things. Elvis had a point there.

Posted by Mark at 02:15 PM

June 10, 2004

Schoedinger's Cat Trilogy

Rob called Wilson's Quantum Psychology, "Shit Psychology." I guess Luke would've agreed with Rob, had he read it. Maybe Irishmen who stayed in Ireland don't get along with Irishmen who left for the US.

Wilson prefigured Rob's argument in 1979, when he published the Schoedinger's Cat Trilogy, a rehashing of many of the same psychedelic visions Timothy Leary wrote up in Neuropolitique and Infopsychology or whatever that book was. Wilson reasoned humans descended from primates, primates throw shit to show displeasure or spread shit to mark their territory, and humans use of shit metaphors hark back to such earlier concrete uses of the substance.

Rob, as an ape, attacks Wilson, as a primate, throwing shit on Wilson's Quantum Psychology.

I seemed to have quantum mechanical trouble today, not sure whether an email had ever left my mind. One of the eigenselves entered multiverse with no money. Other attributes: no poverty, no property. Another entered multiverse with no money. Other attributes: that eigenself lived as a slave at the bottom of a Phonecian vessel carrying oxen for trade. Another entered multiverse with no quantum mechanics.

Posted by Mark at 09:12 PM

June 09, 2004

Intervals

Went running intervals this morning. I'm almost back to normal.

The trouble now is that as the sinus infection receded, my sense of smell came back... just as I was entering the changing room to go take a shower.

Posted by Mark at 10:55 AM

No more oil, part II

96 euros. For 96 euros, he put premium oil in the car and told her it was up to me to check the level.

It felt like buying Microsoft phone support.

Posted by Mark at 08:23 AM

June 08, 2004

No more oil

Nath called this morning to say she'd taken her car to the garage. Bricali diagnosed one problem quickly: he found no oil in the motor. He lent Nath his courtesy car, and told her something about how using cheap, no-brand motor oil might have caused this. (And I don't think Bricali had to study psychology to make that sales call.)

Coincidence: This happened once before with the same car. Coincidence: Nath's father and two brothers like cars so much, they rebuilt a late 60s Matra, including the parts, by hand in their garage. Their sister, an ESFJ, does not check the oil, even after the little red lights go off indicating the problem.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind as an explanation. Sun sold so long almost directly to engineers. Now we're selling to the CIO or CEO. These guys pay someone else to check their oil for them preemptively, but they no longer want to pay very much.

On the one hand, you can understand how Leary thought of H.O.M.E.s while sitting in solitary confinement at the bottom of Folsom Prison. On the other hand, you realize how difficult we may have (not just Sun, everybody) selling software to people who don't want involvement with technology.

Posted by Mark at 09:41 AM

June 07, 2004

Sun getting into blogging

Sun has apparently decided to get into blogging externally. We're using Roller Weblogger externally, which is a Java application. (I did not use a Java application for external blogging, since our ISP charges extra for Java and Servlet support.)

So I have two internal blogs at this point -- yes, I only use one -- and this one already... Do I want another. At least I'd be able to Google through that one.

On a more practical note, what's the point? Why are we getting into blogging? Is there some way this will lead towards collaboration? Is it the next email? (It's almost better writing to yourself, since no one gets upset if you forget to answer.) I just hope we don't see any of us starting 24 x 7 webcams of our desks or whatever.

Posted by Mark at 09:19 PM

Sinus infection

The doctor diagnosed me with a sinus infection. Today, it warmed up to around 30 degrees C when I ran at noon. I didn't have my watch, but after about 10 km, I felt pretty tired and had a pounding headache.

The doctor estimates the antibiotics should relieve the pressure by 2 days from now, so I hope the Wednesday run feels easier. I should take my watch and see how much I've slowed down.

Posted by Mark at 09:05 PM

Virtualizing away from the disk?

In my entry entitled Learning JNDI I wonder whether we're virtualizing away from the disk. That is to say, when the disk access rate no longer holds up the rest of the server, will moving the database to memory for faster access help?

With a 64-bit server, we already support holding all data in memory cache. That memory cache remains volatile across server restarts. The disk therefore becomes a bottleneck when you write new data, and as we suggest you write that data to disk for safety.

Perhaps we could allow for duplicated, networked memory caches? We've seen it done in replicated databases. That would probably cost a lot to implement correctly.

Posted by Mark at 08:23 AM

June 06, 2004

Explanation for slowness?

This weekend, I've have fever spells and strong sinus headaches. My breath rattles in the top of my lungs, and I've felt dizzy since yesterday.

So maybe that's why I felt I was slowing down progressively as the week went by. May decide to go see the doctor for the first time in a couple of years.

Posted by Mark at 08:39 PM

June 05, 2004

Learning JNDI

The JNDI tutorial covers almost too much for the LDAP developer alone. Like a good ski resort has everything from flat green slopes to bumpy, steep black ones.

I've run through most of the first 5 trails, though my understanding of security mechanism leaves something to be desired. The title of the last trail, Building a Service Provider, makes me wonder. How hard would it be to write a directory service provider abstracted away from the specific backend? If you then can use redundant, failover-ready, in-memory databases as the backend, can you eliminate the problems you'd have had using disks during LDAP operations? (Perhaps we're already virtualizing away from the actual disk anyway.)

Posted by Mark at 11:01 AM

June 04, 2004

When you run out of flour

Monkfish was on sale today, so that's what we ended up having for dinner.

I was inspired by a recipe for medaillons de lotte au parmesan, but had no flour. So we used cornstarch. It turned out probably better than with flour, although instead of coating the floured (cornstarched) fish in egg, then rolling it in parmesan, I just added some shallots at the end, then finished by sprinking salt, pepper, and parmesan over the top.

The pieces of monkfish were cooked just enough and stayed chewy but tender. Delicious with zucchini baked in basil and olive oil, and a few dauphine potatoes.

Posted by Mark at 11:05 PM

June 03, 2004

LDAP schema registry

What would an LDAP schema registry do?

Would it follow The Schema Registry project at http://www.daasi.de/services/SchemaReg/? Is that not heavier than what we want to do?

Would it implement the MIME retreival, the search and browse interface? How would it allow versioning and change control? Would we associate schema-paks with specific versions of products?

Posted by Mark at 10:07 PM

Ubik and history

In Ubik, Philip K. Dick introduces a character with the mental capacity to change events in the past, thus changing the course of the present. When she, Pat Conley, does so, some other characters have residual memory of the unaltered course.

Do we have residual memory? Do we focus too much on the present? It seems that the Japanese originators of Zen Buddhism would rather we focus more intently on the present, perhaps at the expense anchorage in the past. Perhaps the Japanese at that time dwelled too much on fitting into a framework developed in the past.

In my high school experience, we, with a few exceptions of which I have scarcely dim memory, only looked back as far as the outset of the US civil war, which started in 1861. The overall tone sounded as though we ought to forget history, focusing instead on current events. Without the ability to compare and contrast, when your mental monologue loops on events that belong in a parochial Paris-Match, you read Nietzsche before you forget everything. He poked fun at guys reading the papers, thinking they had a richer idea of what the world's up to.

I no longer understand Socrates, no longer get the King James version, no longer recall the story of history. Maybe I never did. You can make it all up for me and I'll never know the difference.

Posted by Mark at 06:48 AM

June 02, 2004

By the way

I never did run enough kilometers while out on vacation. Tuesday at work I had a hectic day, but finally got out at 3:30 pm. Running a 41:46 10K felt like hard work.

Today I took it easy, went out at lunchtime, and had no watch on. The t-shirt I had on is all cotton, and is probably still dripping wet. At about 7-8K I started holding it out in front of me so I could breathe.

The funny thing out along the Isere the last two days has been the number of gnats that end up smashed from my chest to my neck. At least I didn't have to eat any today.

While we're talking by the way, Stuart managed to run his 10K in... 55:55. That was a record for him, and very much under the hour he planned to beat. Kudos, Stu!

Posted by Mark at 09:37 PM

A Picture of Nectar

Today in the car I listened to A Picture of Nectar, the first album I've bought in a while. Not sure I'd give this one as many stars as it got at Amazon, but maybe some of the sounds are missing in my car, which makes more noise than it used to.

As an aside, when Jean-Marc first rode in my car, he complimented the noise level. "Not bad for a diesel," he observed. "Yeah, but it's not diesel. It runs on unleaded," I admitted.

Some of the songs I heard first on A Live One. Matt bought that one for me a few years ago, and it was the album that really got me listening to Phish, then to Trey Anastasio. (I like guitar, and Trey plays guitar impressively well.) Trey has a bunch of good downloads right there on his site.

Anyway, A Picture of Nectar has yet to grow on me, although it probably will. I wonder if at some point you get to recognizing the same sorts of quoting in Phish that you do in Frank Zappa. I don't mean the 3rd party quotes. I mean the ones where he takes another look at his own music, or jokes about it.

Posted by Mark at 09:32 PM

Movable Type

Movable Type, the software used for this weblog, has apparently been upgraded. They've moved to a pay license model as part of the upgrade, although you can still use it for free if you're using it like I am, which is just for your own weblog that no one else will ever read.

The LICENSE under which I guess I'm using the software appears to be less restrictive than what I read quickly at their website. It looks like up to 2.661, you basically only needed to pay when using it as part of a commercial operation. For 3.0, it looks like you need to pay if you have more than 1 author or more than 3 weblogs.

Everybody's got to eat, so why not charge for this stuff. Charging people who are making money operating a business using your software seems reasonable as well. Paying $69.95 for a family's set of weblogs seems like a lot to me, but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

At work, we're using home grown software, and freeware to blog. The home grown software I'm using, however, was written by James Gosling, so maybe it's not cheap (although I imagine he's probably pretty productive writing software). It doesn't look quite as nice as Movable Type does. Maybe that's just a Sun thing. We have lots of highly intuitive people, and fewer sensing, aesthetic types. As a result, we don't really notice the lack of polishing, tending instead to look at the ideas rather than the artefacts.

Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM

Laptop vs. SunRay

On my desk at work, I have a Toshiba Tecra and a Sun Ray 1. The Sun Ray is connected to a 21" Sony-built Sun monitor with better resolution than the laptop, and my $HOME on the SunRay is backed up by our sys admins, whom I'd trust with all my data.

Yet I find myself using the laptop and leaving the SunRay aside. Why?

• Responsiveness: For example, starting a Gnome terminal on the SunRay just took 5 seconds, on the laptop it took less time than to move my mouse across the screen from the icon to the window that came up.
• Installing apps: on the laptop, I know the root password. Why should this be more important to me than backups?
• I'm not mobile enough: the SunRay lets you carry your session around the building, and in fact around the business, on your JavaCard badge. For the laptop, I have to lug the whole thing around, so I lug it home... but I use it primarily at my desk. Only rarely do I use it as a portable disk.

The responsiveness thing is a real issue for end users. Not sure if that's an RFE for the SunRay, but it should be.

Posted by Mark at 09:41 AM

June 01, 2004

Back at work

After a long vacation, to use up all the days that built up since French law brought about reduction du temps de travail, I'm back in the office.

The excitement this week seems to be about Directory Server Enterprise Edition, which will bring you everything you need to deploy and develop for massively scalable directory services, as the core data layer of your identity management solution. For now, it's mainly licence-ware, but we should be designing the architecture during the summer.

Posted by Mark at 06:48 PM