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July 31, 2004

Democracy inside

If democracy means "Participation by the mass of people in the decisions that shape their lives," what would it feel like to treat your body as a democratic organization?

Posted by Mark at 02:30 PM

Rumors

Slashdot ran an article yesterday, saying Lockheed is replacing 10k Sun workstations with Linux boxes.

A couple of folks from Lockheed commented "That's news to me and I work at a Lockheed branch." Maybe the story got inflated in the telling.

On the one hand if it were true, that might be a big hit on a potential repeat sale for Sun when all those Lockheed workers get around to replacing their SPARC workstations. On the other hand, it's not like they're going to over to the Dark Side. Heck, they could even drop the idea of getting Intel machines from Dell or whoever and decide to buy AMD from us with Java Desktop System (SuSE Enterprise Linux inside).

From a longer term view, may Ed Zander should've opened up Solaris on his watch. Or maybe they'll all come back when we deliver on throughput computing in another year or so.

Posted by Mark at 02:26 PM

July 30, 2004

Slowly hobbling

Today I ran 10 k slowly (46 minutes). Even that hurt my right shin. It feels like I'm running off balance.

Posted by Mark at 03:45 PM

Not a great anything

My brother Matt sent a link to Paul Graham's essay on great hackers, what they have in common, and how to aspire to become one. Paul has inspired me to list a few reasons why I consider myself great at nothing:

• Lack of stick-to-it-iveness
• Inability to hold large contexts
• Absence of flow, or rather, can only flow while unconscious (sleeping)
• Stultifyingly slow to react
• Excruciatingly dull blogging

Posted by Mark at 08:51 AM

July 29, 2004

Shin splints

Although I seem to have something like shin splints in my right shin, I've continued to run. On Monday I tried to run hard, and was limping until Tuesday evening.

Tuesday I ran a short distance with friends. Yesterday I didn't even run. Today I ran gently with Stu about 11 k, but we took well over an hour.

My leg seems in better shape. Hope running slowly for a while will let it heal.

Posted by Mark at 08:45 PM

July 28, 2004

Doclet heaven?

Boy, are there a lot of Doclets for generating output from Javadoc!

The question forming in my mind is this: How many of these really work?

Would it even be possible to create some sort of conformance testing suite for Doclets?

Posted by Mark at 02:02 PM

July 27, 2004

Interchangeable people

Saw Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday. Even outside the US, the film drew a big crowd.

Phil and Eric said they found it too politically oriented, too full of propaganda, and thus not quite as good as Bowling for Columbine, which I have not seen.

Phil said he could imagine all the same events happening in France, but you'd have to divide the sums by 1000.

We recreate this system every day. We teach our children to recreate it. It's at work, at home, in our own heads. Some peace glossary at Berkeley defines propaganda:

Control of information, ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause

Even there you see the combat metaphors. Opposing causes, warfare. Hope seems hard to find.

Posted by Mark at 11:17 PM

7 hours

Just noticed that I've done 7 hours of meetings today. That may be a record for a normal work day.

No wonder I haven't gotten anything done ;-)

Posted by Mark at 07:08 PM

July 26, 2004

No questions asked JDS, part III

Well, although I didn't manage to connect at home, everything works well from the office.

We even have a little video from Jonathan Schwartz right on the desktop when we login for the first time, explaining how Java Desktop System is strategic for Sun ;-)

Posted by Mark at 05:15 PM

July 25, 2004

20 minutes: journal gratuit

On Thursday, July 15, I received No. 555 of 20 minutes, a journal gratuit (free -- as in lunch -- newspaper) published by 20 Minutes France, SAS, which is a Paris-based company. No. ISSN 1632-1022. Over the last couple of years, traditional reader- and advertising-supported French newspaper publishers have either complained about the journal gratuit phenomenon, or have hopped on the bandwagon. One talk show on France Inter radio suggested young people with less spending money had flocked to the new newspapers, which publishers distribute near public transportation stations in French metropolitan areas. (Like Lyon Part Dieu train station, where I received my issue.) This aroused my curiosity about the content of a journal gratuit.

What I found bored me more than anything else. 20 minutes appears to have been designed specifically for those of us waiting to do something either useful or fun, who given a cultural background that frowns on such Zen non-activities as sitting to sit or waiting to wait, feel compelled to fill the time with some sort of production or consumption. Reading the newspaper, we have a diffused sense of doing something, keeping up with the world, even as we read, "RELIGION Babarin opere: Le cardinal Philippe Babarin a ete opere lundi d'une hernie. Selon son entourage l'intervention s'est bien deroulee." (RELIGION Surgery for Babarin: Cardinal Philippe Babarin underwent surgery for a hernia Monday. Sources close to Babarin say the operation went well.)

20 minutes, at least the issue I was given, includes no letters to the editor. This omission seems odd, since I recall hearing somewhere that letters to the editor tend to attract more readers than most other features. Instead, the last page offers "une nouvelle inedite ecrite par un lecteur" (an original story written by a [20 minutes] reader).

Furthermore, 20 minutes appears aimed so squarely at M ou Mme Tout Le Monde that even the overt advertising carries little of the amusing bias one discovers in US monthlies such as Wired, a catalog for well-paid, post-adolescent, male IT enthusiasts, or Harper's Magazine, which caters to left-leaning post-adolescents who cynically accept that exposes about US aggression in Iraq get paid for by Shell, GM, and BMW ads.

In 20 minutes, the large cover picture of Chirac looking concerned about the nation or life in general or something may say less than mere arithmetic observations about the surface areas devoted to various topics. I therefore examined this copy of 20 minutes with measuring tape in an attempt to learn something specific that perhaps Herman and Chomsky had not already prefigured.

Full disclosure: I did this exercise quickly, over breakfast this morning and did not fully document my findings so as to render them easily reproducible. In other words, measurements may be valid only to about one significant digit, and might turn out somewhat to significantly differently if you did them. Clearly, the results would carry more weight had I taken the time to provide operational definitions for my observations. That said, you can download the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet used to calculate sums.

Factoids:

• This issue of 20 minutes includes 24 pages, each with 29 x 21 cm of usable column width, for a total surface of 1.46 sq. meters devoted to content.
• Space devoted to advertising*: 0.83 sq. m
• Space devoted to news**: 0.17 sq. m
• Space not devoted either to news or to advertising: 0.46 sq. m
• Ratio of advertising to content: 57%
• Ratio of non-advertising, non-news to content: 32%
• Ratio of news to non-advertising, non-news: 36%
• Ratio of news to advertising: 20%
• Ratio of news to content: 11%

* Counts infomercial articles, except those for whole businesses rather than specific products, politicians not ostensibly or immanently running for election, entertainment and sports events that either already happened, are sold out, or are still in production

** Does not count faits divers, sports, local color, pictures (as opposed to informative charts and graphics), vacuous banalities and platitudes not contained in the body of an article, comics, word games, etc.

Conclusion: You get what you pay for.

Posted by Mark at 10:20 AM | Comments (1)

July 24, 2004

Holding out for Java ES.next

When Matt Swift came to work with us, he was looking for the quick start guide to using Directory Server. He's right, we ought to have one of those. Our current docs are written for folks deploying large-scale directory services. We're missing a tiny quick start version for hackers.

Since I reinstalled Red Hat 9 at home, I was hoping that the Directory Server from the latest version of Java ES would run there. But alas, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 appears incompatible with Red Hat 9 to the extent that it doesn't really work. Maybe it'll be closer if we support a more recent version of RHEL in a future update of Java ES. Holding out on the quick start until then.

Posted by Mark at 03:50 PM

No questions asked JDS, part II

JDS installation for iWork almost went smoothly. I encountered one little bug that means you cannot finish installation until you manually install a package from the 3rd of 3 CDs, but other than that, it went fine.

Cannot connect over to my other system. The firewall seems to be letting DHCP through, because get an address from my desktop. After that, nothing else works. Not ping, not ssh. Ahh, the joys of being your own sysadmin...

Posted by Mark at 11:24 AM

No questions asked JDS

Sun's iWork program lets us connect through VPN to our internal network, so we can more or less work from anywhere with an Internet connection.

The first time I installed Java Desktop System on a laptop, I configured everything to be able to connect to work. These days, Sun IT provides us with a version of our Java Desktop System with some extra tools to make it all work more smoothly. So I'm installing that.

Not sure how much simpler things will turn out with the iWork version of Java Desktop System, but this sure is the most straightforward OS install I've ever done. Even more streamlined than Solaris. You just drop the bootable CD in the drive and restart the laptop.

It's so smooth, I'm sort of scared that I won't be able to figure out how to do any of the system administration for the inevitable stuff that won't work the first time ;-)

Posted by Mark at 09:24 AM

Impossible to back up

Once you start playing with digital video, you start having comparatively large volumes of data you'd like to back up. Theoretically, you can put your work on master tapes. Theoretically I write because I have not yet managed to get that to work.

So at 1 GB per 4.5 minutes of video, things quickly got to the point where I cannot back up my home dir anywhere but another hard drive. (No money for a DVD burner right now.)

When reinstalling everything, I have this mental picture of me with a limited number of vessels pouring precious liquid from one to another, hoping not to find any cracks.

Posted by Mark at 09:16 AM

July 23, 2004

More on security

This stuff sure seems complicated to me.

Latest challenge: understand SASL enough to write some good examples.

Posted by Mark at 07:06 PM

July 21, 2004

Secure with head in sand

Back when my brother and I started playing with gpg, I hardly understood what the heck was going on. Assuming I'm roughly as dumb as the average network user, there must be a lot of us folk out here cluelessly attempting to secure our data.

On a slightly more frightening note, I'm now opening ports in my firewall for work, probably way too widely. Why don't I understand? Partly just laziness. Partly the situation is bad-habit forming like drinking and driving, in that you often get away with it until you have an accident, feeling secure since you cannot see the danger with your head buried in the sand.

Security software works fine "when used as directed," PKD wrote in Ubik. Trouble is, the directions are complicated enough that everybody except Luke just sucks it and sees...

Posted by Mark at 10:50 PM

HPL

Houellebecq's biography of Lovecraft convinced me to read some of his finest short stories. Many appear online, though apparently no longer in PDF.

If you have never read any of Lovecraft's short stories, try At the Mountains of Maddness.

Probably works better in printed form, after midnight. The story's not so short.

Posted by Mark at 07:58 AM

At long last!

Finally, I found the problem with the VPN client. My firewall wasn't letting in the traffic from the server side. Shouldn't that have been obvious from the logs?

That, believe it or not, was in the Cisco docs, although the details don't quite apply in my case, which is perhaps partly why I skipped it on the first pass.

Posted by Mark at 12:02 AM

July 20, 2004

Now with logging

Okay, I am the end luser here. I've got logging turned on; the doc doesn't help. Here is an excerpt what I get to try to decipher:

4      21:41:24.902  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     CM/0x43100002^M
Begin connection process
                                                                                
5      21:41:24.902  07/20/2004  Sev=Warning/2  CVPND/0x83400011^M
Error -28 sending packet. Dst Addr: 0xC0A800FF, Src Addr: 0xC0A80063 (DRVIFACE:1236).
                                                                                
6      21:41:24.916  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     CM/0x43100004^M
Establish secure connection using Ethernet
                                                                                
7      21:41:24.916  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     CM/0x43100024^M
Attempt connection with server "vpn.example.com"
                                                                                
8      21:41:25.137  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     CVPND/0x43400019^M
Privilege Separation: binding to port: (500).
                                                                                
9      21:41:25.137  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     CVPND/0x43400019^M
Privilege Separation: binding to port: (4500).
                                                                                
10     21:41:25.137  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/6     IKE/0x4300003B^M
Attempting to establish a connection with aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd.
                                                                                
11     21:41:25.207  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     IKE/0x43000013^M
SENDING >>> ISAKMP OAK AG (SA, KE, NON, ID, VID(Xauth), VID(dpd), VID(Nat-T), VID(Frag), VID(Unity)) to aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd
                                                                                
12     21:41:25.208  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     IPSEC/0x43700008^M
IPSec driver successfully started
                                                                                
13     21:41:25.208  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     IPSEC/0x43700014^M
Deleted all keys
                                                                                
14     21:41:30.242  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     IKE/0x43000017^M
Marking IKE SA for deletion  (I_Cookie=2064A5FC4423F0EF R_Cookie=0000000000000000) reason = DEL_REASON_PEER_NOT_RESPONDING
                                                                                
15     21:41:30.781  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     IKE/0x4300004A^M
Discarding IKE SA negotiation (I_Cookie=2064A5FC4423F0EF R_Cookie=0000000000000000) reason = DEL_REASON_PEER_NOT_RESPONDING
                                                                                
16     21:41:30.781  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     CM/0x43100014^M
Unable to establish Phase 1 SA with server "vpn.example.com" because of "DEL_REASON_PEER_NOT_RESPONDING"
                                                                                
17     21:41:30.782  07/20/2004  Sev=Info/4     CM/0x43100011^M
Attempt connection with backup server "vpn2.example.com"

It's just so obvious! The when I google for DEL_REASON_PEER_NOT_RESPONDING, even the discussions are incomprehensible. No wonder Sun IT only wants to support this on platforms they control.

Posted by Mark at 10:26 PM

Better than release notes

In trying to get my VPN working -- so I can work part of my 35-hour week at home when I cannot be in the office -- I ran across some exciting reading at Cisco. It's even better than our docs. Hundreds of lines of "good" log output.

You scroll for what seems like forever to get to a section entitled What Can Go Wrong. Of course nothing in there helps. Could be the wrong version?

Posted by Mark at 10:13 PM

Election at Bosch

This morning, I caught a few minutes of TV news, France 2. It seems the workers at some plant belonging to Bosch voted 98% in favor of a plan to extend the work week from 35 to 36 hours, without pay hikes. (According to my records using Hours for Palm OS, I worked 94:35 from June 30 to July 13, or 47:17:30 per week, not counting breaks, lunch, running, and so forth. I work in France, home of the 35-hour work week.)

The reporter made this sound like the wave of the future at a time when Raffarin's government under Chirac's orders wants to introduce more flexibility into the apparently overly rigid branch agreements around the 35-hour work week. The head of Human Resources at the Bosch plant claimed the vote was a big victory.

As an aside, perhaps for balance, the reporter explained the terms. Employees voting against the measure knew they would be laid off. (18 accepted that.) Had the measure not been adopted as suggested, Bosch would've delocalized to the Czech Republic where wages are lower, and closed the plant. In return for the vote of confidence, the management has agreed to keep the site open for a while and to look into ways of perhaps keeping it open longer. (Gee, I can think of one. How about working an additional day a week with no pay increase?)

Looks like a harbinger of what to expect in other branches. Need to learn to be even more flexible. That goes along with the ending to another reportage, according to which Turkey has a lot to offer, making the nation a great candidate for entry into the European Union. (The work week mentioned there lasts 45 hours.) According to the reporter doing that story on France 2, high unemployment in Turkey is offset by the growth rate that reached 10% last year.

Sounds wonderful... for professional investors and their wealthy clients. Surely the majority of the 82% of French voters who elected Chirac in the 2002 presidential election belong to one of those two groups.

Posted by Mark at 09:10 PM

July 19, 2004

Almost done

I've reinstalled everything at home. Seems to work. Couldn't recopy .gnome stuff over the top of what was already there, so next time I should work as root before copying everything. Hope there's not a next time too soon.

I tried installing JDS. Once again, I got stuck when installer loaded some module or other for USB and my mouse and keyboard stopped working. In a way, I wasn't sure I could get everything properly installed and configured with JDS without a lot more work that what I already did. Funny that it works so well on the laptop, but so disappointingly on my desktop PC.

This time I have just Red Hat 9 with a 2.4.21 kernel. I'll try 2.6 again later, but don't have the energy today.

Nor do I have the energy to install the VPN module. Hope to fix that tomorrow evening.

Posted by Mark at 11:44 PM

22:51

My right shin still bothers me, so I went and bought new, well-cushioned shoes, suggested according to the wear patterns on the other shoes I have. These I took up to Rochasson from work in 22:51. Not sure how far that is, but there are several steep spots. The two minutes from 18:15 to 20:15 were on the little heartbreaker of a shortcut in between the houses. My round trip time was 42:23:70. I took a longer route coming down than going up.

Yesterday I went for a bike ride, but it's just not the same workout. Biking without toeclips leaves the entire workout in the thighs. At Chapareillan, I started up toward the col du Granier, but chickened out. First, it was hard work. Second, my bike's breaks sort of work, but not enough to stop the bike on a good downhill run. Even just on the rolling hills between Myans and Les Marches, or the long slow hill from Les Marches down to Chapareillan had me nervous. What seemed most different is how on the bike I could hardly work my muscles hard enough to get out of breath. Legs gave out before lungs.

Posted by Mark at 02:22 PM

July 18, 2004

Focus on the leader

Slashdot had a story yesterday with a link to Business Week's an article on how Scott McNealy's painted Sun into a corner.

This morning I threw out an old copy of Business Week with Scott sitting there grinning, back when we were making huge advances and the stock was flying.

The focus remains squarely on the top of the pyramid. Not that anyone would expect them to report on the likes of those of us at the bottom of the pyramid, nor that we necessarily make any difference either.

But it's somehow not quite right in the context of Sun to say the head guy is completely in charge, that it's either all his fault or all thanks to him, at least not in software. In hardware, maybe the whole 19th century organization as if we were an army makes sense. It software, it seems fundamentally flawed, which is why guys at the junction between software and hardware, like Erik Nordmark, once said to several of us who'd come to see what he does, "Ideally, we'd just interact directly with no management at all, based on the work we have to do."

We haven't been doing enough of that, partly because we have lots of middle managers who are thinking along 19th century organizational lines.

Posted by Mark at 03:02 PM

Cultivating boredom and dullness

While cleaning up the bookcase and an adjacent box of assorted junk, I realized:

1. Well over half the books I own were intended as non-fiction.
2. I've written only one work intended as fiction, Who Shot RR?.
3. More than 12 tapes survive from the days when I used to record music with Dave, Daryll, and Brian.

I listened to one of those tapes, 8 songs Daryll and I recorded in the summer of 1993. After that, it felt like time to move away permanently, which I appear to have done since September of that year.

For one reason or another, Dave wasn't recording with us. I cannot recall why. The recording sounds like it's bubbling up through a film of old dishwater. Neither of us could mixdown like Dave.

In retrospect, all Daryll's songwriting from that summer strikes me as the sound of his marriage falling apart. My clueless guitar playing doesn't help. We should've called our recording Clowns at the Funeral. It takes all the wind from your sails and yet leaves your ears hot with embarrassment, an long, objective, critical look in the mirror. You could've said it was cute, but we were twentysomething going on early retirement. At least Daryll could sing.

Posted by Mark at 02:23 PM

July 17, 2004

Tour de france

For the first time this tour, I took time out to watch. (Pretty good suggestion, Dad.)

Today the guys had a grueling stage in the Pyrenees with 7 climbs up to mountain passes, taking just over 6 hours to ride a bit more than 200 k. The cyclist with the yellow jersey, Voeckler, comes from Schiltigheim, down the road from where we used to live in Alsace. He managed to hang on to his lead even when Armstrong really charged up the last long slope, staying 22 seconds ahead overall. That means Voeckler lost something like 9 minutes to Armstrong over the last two days.

The announcers were claiming it's all decided now, that Armstrong has basically won. Granted, I don't know much about the context, but that seems an amazingly quick judgement when you watch how these guys ride, and how fast they can gain or lose a minute. Four other cyclists are with 3 1/2 minutes of Armstrong, and this is after 58 hours of riding, but not quite 2/3s of the way through the tour. Suspenseful.

Posted by Mark at 07:53 PM

2.6.7, part IV

Yesterday, I tried reinstalling the old modutils, and reinstalling my 2.4.21 kernel from `make install`. I tried recreating links by hand to the modutils the boot process seemed to be looking.

Today, I decided to back everything up onto the laptop, at least everything I think I ought to salvage. Maybe I'll resort to reinstalling everything.

My computer has become a waste of time.

Posted by Mark at 07:34 PM

July 16, 2004

Examples: doc or code?

Netscape used to consider sample code part of the documentation:

Whether describing how to create hierarchies of objects in JavaScript or offering sample code to copy and paste, DevEdge Online documentation includes a variety of references to guide and assist development using Netscape products and technologies.

When reading with a developer or sys admin hat on, I certainly see sample code as belonging to the documentation. Why ask the question, then?

• We deliver sample code with the bits, not with the docs.
  In other words, you may be able to copy code directly from the HTML version of the docs, but it's rarely as easy as it ought to be.
• Sample code sometimes looks like somebody wrote and formatted it as the last little task to complete before sending a status report and leaving for a long weekend.
• Documentation and examples get out of sync.
  That's like your right hand getting out of sync with your left.
• Most "documentation" tools and formats force you to do some processing in order to include source code even from common languages verbatim

Yet another ease of use problem. What's a good fix?

Posted by Mark at 10:04 AM

July 15, 2004

2.6.7, part III

When I thought I was debugging, I was in fact rendering the 2.4.21 kernel unbootable.

Wish I'd had as few problems as Norman Walsh.

Too discouraged to go any further today.

Posted by Mark at 08:51 PM

July 14, 2004

2.6.7, part II

Got tired of make install failing, so finally I just created an entry next to the other ones for grub and rebooted.

2.6.7 boots, but with some failures. X of course does not work, because of my on-board Nvidia graphics support. I even hosed my 2.4.21 nvidia.o impatiently letting the Nvidia module builder overwrite the old module. On-board Ethernet didn't work either, so there I was stuck without even web access.

By then I was flustered and had to calm down for a while before managing to think naturally and debug the problem. Guess it's time to read up on 2.6 before I try to go further.

Some of the dmesg makes good copy:

...
ehci_hcd 0000:00:02.2: irq 5, pci mem f881c000
ehci_hcd 0000:00:02.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
irq 5: nobody cared!
Stack pointer is garbage, not printing trace
handlers:
[] (usb_hcd_irq+0x0/0x70)
Disabling IRQ #5
...

Why change the kernel, anyway? That's a good question. Maybe if you're not good enough to fix things that are broken, you naturally start trying to fix things that aren't.

Posted by Mark at 10:02 PM

2.6.7

Building the 2.6.7 kernel, I notice the changes -- no more make dep, modules are now .ko. I also notice that something's fishy with the ACARD SCSI module:

[root@lethe linux-2.6]# make install
make[1]: `arch/i386/kernel/asm-offsets.s' is up to date.
  CHK     include/linux/compile.h
Kernel: arch/i386/boot/bzImage is ready
sh /usr/src/linux-2.6.7/arch/i386/boot/install.sh 2.6.7 arch/i386/boot/bzImage System.map ""
No module atp870u found for kernel 2.6.7
mkinitrd failed
make[1]: *** [install] Error 1
make: *** [install] Error 2
[root@lethe linux-2.6]#  ls /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/scsi/atp870u.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/scsi/atp870u.ko
[root@lethe linux-2.6]#

Furthermore, during the make, this went by:

Kernel: arch/i386/boot/bzImage is ready
  Building modules, stage 2.
  MODPOST
  CC      drivers/ide/pci/amd74xx.mod.o
  LD [M]  drivers/ide/pci/amd74xx.ko
  CC      drivers/scsi/atp870u.mod.o
  LD [M]  drivers/scsi/atp870u.ko

Hmm...

Posted by Mark at 07:14 AM

VCD working

For partial closure of the VCD story, let the record say Mom has long been playing the first VCD in her DVD player. She agreed to attempt to record the content on cassette for Granddad.

Posted by Mark at 06:42 AM

July 13, 2004

Socionics vs. MBTI

After failing the Socionics Type Assistant test, I kept looking for adjectives. I managed to cobble together 50 and 49.

The Socionics Type Assistant says INFP.

If your type is INFP a.k.a. Intuitive-Ethical Intratim "The Romantic", you are confident and concrete regarding your own beliefs and fantasies, creative and inventive regarding how excited others are about you, delicate and insecure regarding your understanding of how things work, and you wish to have a clear perception and consistency regarding your physical strength or position of authority.

That doesn't seem like me. Maybe forcing myself to select a bunch more adjectives than I feel apply led to false results. Maybe that does describe me well, and I just don't like it.

MBTI said INFJ a while ago. I'm no longer so sure.

Posted by Mark at 10:34 PM

Failing

I just failed the The Official Cynic's Self-Test.

According to a site defining Cynicism, 'The name Cynic actually comes from the Greek word kynikos, meaning "dog-like."' In what way is a dog self-sufficient?

So I tried to take a Socionics test: "We hope you will enjoy using this psychometric application." (I misread psychomimetric.) I failed that one, too, while using the Socionics Type Assistant. I'd only found 15 words each that describe my Normal mode and my Reversed mode. Each list appears to include the same 240 adjectives.

Posted by Mark at 09:38 PM

Rathole (verb)

Dennis used rathole as a verb today. I'm not sure whether it's one word or two.

rathole (verb)

To enter a restricted discussion space from which it is hard to return to the larger discussion; Example: "The Working Group Review Board has no charter or rules of governance. We just rathole on one random topic after another until it's time for lunch."

Posted by Mark at 07:13 PM

Don't let kids think

Jamie Zawinski wrote about ClearChannel rejecting an anti-war ad. The folks interviewed play squarely into Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model:

"Never has anyone said to me from Clear Channel corporate that I should or should not put up copy because of its political ramifications,'' Meyer said. "That's contrary to the principles of the company -- we're in the business of maximizing profits for our shareholders.

Meyer said ... [ClearChannel] generally does not run copy that would be unsuitable for children or cause them to ask difficult questions...

Quotes from an SFGate.com article, Bay Area group in flap over anti-war billboard.

Liberty seems like too much work. Let's just go back to believing what we're told.

Posted by Mark at 09:34 AM

July 12, 2004

What gets measured...

...is what gets done. Nath got my watch band replaced. One shouldn't pretend to train without a watch.

After a weekend of limping up and down stairs, I followed Dana's suggestion to see if the shin pain depends on my shoes. I ran today with my old pair. Those old worn shoes had me feeling the stones underfoot, but my shin doesn't feel sore right now. I was hobbling along for about the first 4 k, however, though it was beautiful weather for a run, low 20s centigrade, not too much sun. When I got to the 5 k mark at 21:36, I realized I needed to speed up to finish 14 k in an hour. I didn't make it out to the bridge (halfway) until 30:10.

Then the combination of having a stopwatch ticking on my wrist and the shin pain leaving almost completely about 8.5 k into the run pushed me onward. I ran the second half in about 29 minutes to finish in 59:10:98.

Posted by Mark at 02:36 PM

July 11, 2004

And speaking of Chomsky

The New York Times sends me daily email dispatches of top stories in a Chinese water torture attempt to get me to subscribe. You'd have to be a professor or at least a fast reader to have time to go through it all.

Today they're running a story about the International Court of Justice ruling finding, "that the construction by Israel of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and its associated régime are contrary to international law."

From the NYT: '"I believe that after all the rancor dies, this resolution will find its place in the garbage can of history," said Raanan Gissin, senior adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.' The same place where they keep Saddam's arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The very next sentence: "The United States reiterated Friday its belief that the barrier's fate should be determined by diplomatic and political negotiations rather than court decisions."

Posted by Mark at 09:49 AM

Random premises

Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski wrote Designing From Both Sides of the Screen, which I'm reading to counterbalance a book Stu lent me called The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Franzen seems first to have contacted, then to have dated, and finally to have moved in with the same muse that tortures Luke's nightmares, descendant from hrönir of whatever killed the Elder Race, and whose telepathic control beyond time caused the Thule Society to look mistakely to the North, leading them away from Lovecraft's Antarctic Atlantis. (Barjavel found it, too.)

Ellen and Alan start with the premise that you "Understand users' needs." That sent me back to Jonathan, where Chip with salmon melting in his pants listened to Doug considering purchase of an alternate personality, even to our Jonathan and his robots. Jonathan, stubble rather than ponytail, engendered embarrassment which led me, as though holding in a sneeze, to refrain from seeing Ellen and Alan's reverse-brainstorming-envisioned starting point as Antithesis before yet another synthetic, foreshortened, vignette Chomskyesque pre-cognizant, early-morning flash critique of the Entire System (aka Black Iron Prison) under which the lure of stock options and the weight of our furniture prevent nearly all of us from true software development.

Logicians say that "From False Premises Come False Conclusions." The statement implies a belief in effect from cause, in the possibility of tying the two together through logical argument.

The best we could do under the circumstances of the second law of thermodynamics coincided with delivery of 3000 pages in words and pictures, with artifacts such as nsslapd-autosize-cache: "This performance tuning related attribute is turned off by default. It specifies the percentage of free memory to use for all the combined caches." Users of course have issues, needs, and concerns of their own, just like Iraqi children.

To abuse the is of identity: The universe is not malicious. It's random.

Posted by Mark at 09:15 AM

Hrönir

In Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius [ES] Borges describes archeologists' use of hrönir, secondary objects multiplied from lost originals, to augment and improve the past.

Google returns no definition, yet. The Wikipedia article seems painfully premier degre, although admittedly Rome wasn't built on Internet time. Of the languages invented for the Web, perhaps only Perl would allow you to say something like, "Upa tras perfluyue lunó." (Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.)

"Occasionally a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater," so imagine in what dilapidated state this blog maintains... what?

MovableType has an enticing little utility down the left-hand edge of this browser page:

By sheer force of will, and hours of editing, could one polish this into something more archetypical?

Hrönir like Lovecraft's Necronomicon (recursive hrönir?), Eckel's Thinking in Java, even ordinary novels preserve interesting shadows of the ideal. But could one through carefully maintained hrönir preserve the dull, everyday Brownian boredom of our lives? Through painstaking editing, discipline, and unyielding regimen of creation preserve the second law of thermodynamics itself?

Posted by Mark at 07:28 AM

July 10, 2004

Home with the kids

Nath wanted to go into town for the sales today. I stayed at home with Diane and Tim. We tried out the new playground equipment up by the gravel soccer field in Barraux. For a two-year old, Diane does a good job of climbing around.

Later Tim managed to capture a lizard in his bug examination apparatus.

This lizard wandered in just before Tim walked by. Perhaps it was looking for bugs.

Lucky we had the camera. Tim wanted to hang on to the lizard until his mom came back, so he could show her what he found. But he agreed a picture would be enough, so we took a few shots and let the lizard go.

Posted by Mark at 09:16 PM

July 09, 2004

Overdid it?

Since I went for a half marathon length run a couple of weeks ago, I've had a bit of soreness down the front of my right calf next to the shin bone.

Yesterday I ran 14 k, then went again about 7 k with Karine, Didier, and Jacques's wife, whose first name I've forgotten, but jogged slowly most of the way. This evening my leg feels fairly sore. It hurt for about the first half of the 10 k I ran at lunchtime.

Hope it's not going to keep me from running at some point. I've almost convinced myself to sign up for the Marathon de Savoie in mid-September.

Posted by Mark at 09:34 PM | Comments (1)

Le cirque

Tim finished a week of summertime circus class today with maybe 15 other children. The younger ones did gymnastics and some basic juggling. The older ones did more advanced juggling and learned to walk on a meter-high rubber ball, or ride a unicycle around the Salle des pieds nus.

In the end, they showed off what they learned. Diane loved the spectacle.

It was pretty exciting. Tim still has some blue around his eyes and cannot get to sleep.

Posted by Mark at 09:19 PM

Looking out the window

Today's snapshot out the window at work.

Posted by Mark at 09:09 PM

Why tech writers don't categorize like readers

Vesa Purho suggests in Documentation or Training? — Boundaries Get Blurred that readers shouldn't have to decide whether they're looking for documentation or for training. Sounds good. From personal experience, I'd throw troubleshooting, aka support, in there as well.

And we therefore put the boundaries back in for the same reason programmers came up with scripting languages, object-oriented programming languages, and tag libraries. The writers couldn't handle it.

Good documentation fills the gaps between what you're trying to do with the thing you're reading about, and what its exposed parts seem to let you do. But the exposed parts, sometimes known as the user interface, depend intimately on you, more than on the subject of the documentation.

For example, using a washing machine to clean laundry exposes parts that you model with abstractions like water temperature, spin speed, trays for detergent and fabric softener, start buttons, etc. Reparing a washing machine exposes belt drives, rotating drums, internal plumbing, etc. You can almost keep the distinctions clean there. Washing machines expose two nearly distinct user interfaces. Most writers, given a bit of understanding about washing machines, could information map out not only how you use a washing machine, but also how you troubleshoot it, and therefore everything you as a reader need to learn about it, unless you're the one doing R&D in washing machines.

Categorization gets murkier when you look at troubleshooting software. Interestingly, and although we writers try to pretend it's not so, the only time most of us return to documentation after we install software is to troubleshoot. Online training? Maybe it's taking off economically because it's subsidized by companies who somehow got sold on the idea as a cost-cutter. My experiences with online training have been uniformly disasterous. Troubleshooting with help from Google? Now there's something real.

But troubleshooting real software feels hard to do, let alone to understand enought to write about. What do you write when you realize that this blog entry is already far longer than anyone is willing to read, and yet even explaining the background needed to understand what can go wrong with multi-master directory server replication takes much more? You try to find good examples and hope they'll fit. (Another reason to expose you're *-interest mailing lists to Google.)

Hard work, even for an expert. Writers who try it may come back with just a FAQ and a bunch of good intentions, maybe a reference in Related Reading to Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. So we categorize like writers, because we end up with writing we can do.

This is turning into an apology for Bryan Cantrill's 368 p., 1.3 MB DTrace guide, written by Solaris kernel hackers rather than somebody with a tech writer job title... Or the GNU make doc. If you want something written just for you, write it yourself.

The beta version of the DTrace doc incidentally has no occurrences of "trouble" according to Acrobat Reader.

Posted by Mark at 07:47 AM

July 08, 2004

videoconv.sh, Part III

Maybe it's my DVD player.

I've burned another CD, this time in SVCD format. The parameters must be close to right, and it of course looks fine in mplayer.

When I put the CD in the DVD player to watch it on television, the player cannot recognize the CD content.

Posted by Mark at 06:34 AM

July 07, 2004

One to hang up behind Rochasson

Saw this one last weekend.

Posted by Mark at 10:40 PM

Java GetOpt method

This afternoon I was looking around for a getopt() Java equivalent. Looking on Google with "I'm Feeling Lucky," and what do I run into?

netscape.ldap.util.GetOpt!

Of course I was playing with the examples for that SDK. I looked around gently for netscape.ldap.util.kitchenSink, but maybe that class isn't public.

Posted by Mark at 10:37 PM

videoconv.sh, part II

In videoconv.sh, I wrote, "It looks like perhaps something may be goofy in the options passed to mplex." Sure enough, my version of mplex has no -m option...

The script also has a hardcoded value for PAL speed video (25 fps) with the -F option getting 3 (value for NTSC: 4).

Posted by Mark at 10:26 PM

5 hits from US Military

mcraig.org got 8 hits from the Seychelles in June, but we also got 5 hits from domains allotted to the US Military.

A search for Chomsky brings up 5 hits in my blog. But 2 of them are dated July 2.

Maybe they're asking the oracle about potential bombing patterns in Syria?

Posted by Mark at 10:21 PM

Domaine Alary CDR La Jean de Verde

At Domaine Alary, geneology seems to run in the family. They've traced the Alarys back to the mid 17th century, and have a couple of paintings showing the closest branches. These folks have been doing wine off and on since way back when, and seem to have become pretty good at it.

La Jean de Verde starts out very round, but then as the roundness fades, it finishes with a long tannic crescendo, where you get the idea that it'll be around for a while before all the tannins have settled back into the background.

Posted by Mark at 10:03 PM

Domaine de Durban Muscat de Baumes-de-Venise

Ludo suggested we visit the Domaine de Durban. You wind around for 2.5 k uphill behind Baumes-de-Venise. In the end you get to the Domaine, which has a couple of worn natural pillars at the entrance, and an amazing view of the valley.

You can see the place where you enter to taste in my earlier posting Cotes du Rhone, first photo at the top left.

As Nath says, their Muscat tastes nothing like the generic Muscat de Rivesaltes her parents used to buy. Powerful floral nose, very round, not too liquoureux.

Posted by Mark at 09:55 PM

Domaine de Amouriers VDP Les Hautes Terrasses

This vin de pays is not your average table wine. When I brought it to my nose, I smelled everything from cherries, to the grapes, to hot dried prunes. It lasted about 12 seconds before going away, with only a little of that sort of peppery background you find in wines from that part of the country.

Incidentally, when I went outside early Sunday morning at the gite, I smelled that pepper background. Not sure what it comes from, but it's there.

Posted by Mark at 09:48 PM

Marcel Juge Cornas Cuvee C

Marcel Juge invited us in to taste in his den. His wife must've been off making lunch.

He had a bottle that had been open for a while, which we tried. We also tried the Cuvee C freshly opened, before tasting it against a Cuvee generique. Mr. Juge explained that he decided to name it C after talking with the folks at the Repression de fraudes. Apparently European law is very strict about calling it a Cuvee Coteaux or Cuvee des Terrasses, and he didn't want to get into any trouble.

One thing that struck me about his Cornas is the absence of woody flavors. It's all grapes. He explained a lot of things during the hour we were with him -- how to grow tomatoes, why concours are no guarantee of quality, where his affectionate cat came from -- but one thing I remember is his condemnation of overly oaken wines. In his opinion, many winegrowers allow too much wood tannin from the oak casks, tannins that never smooth like natural grape skin tannins.

Posted by Mark at 09:42 PM

Wines from last weekend

• Marcel Juge Cornas Cuvee C(oteaux) 2000
• Domaine de Amouriers VDP 2003
• Domaine de Amouriers VDP Les Hautes Terrasses 2000
• Domaine de Amouriers Vacqueyras 2002
• Domaine de Durban Muscat de Baumes-de-Venise 2003
• Domaine de Durban VDP Blanc 2003
• Domaine Alary CDR La Reserve du Vigneron 2002
• Domaine Alary CDR La Jean de Verde 2001
• Chapoutier Cotes du Rousillon Villages Occultum Lapidem 2002
• Chapoutier Cotes du Rousillon Villages Domaine de Bila Haut 2003
• Delas Freres Coteaux du Tricastin 2003

Posted by Mark at 09:27 PM

Yikes, my mail!

I'm playing around with old software docs, in which it recommends you add something to your prefs.js to bypass having to get an SSL certificate. So I try that.

Ok. Mozilla seems to run fine. The example I'm hacking on doesn't work, but that's fine, too. It was written for Netscape Communicator and things have probably changed.

What I did was let applets access the network without authorization, so I go to turn that off. At the top of prefs.js is something that looks like a comment, a line starting with #. So I add a # in front of the line I added and restart Mozilla.

No mail. Nothing is configured. Getting your mail configured with the right filters and everything is of course something that only takes a couple of hours... if you can remember what you did, and have all the account details handy.

No error messages, all the stuff is still there in prefs.js.

Take away the #, and my mail conf comes back. Whew!

I guess I'll take that recommendation out of the docs when I update them...

Posted by Mark at 11:23 AM

Java Studio Creator

You can get a 30-day trial version of Java Studio Creator from Sun. Creator's a web application IDE that makes it easy to build data-driven, JSP-and-Servlet web apps. Creator comes with an app server, and single-click app deployment, so you can see the results right away.

Not sure what the logo means. Looks like a crystal ball:

By the way, that logo is probably copyright of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

I tried a tutorial this morning. Worked fine. Then I tried another. This one worked fine as well.

My only criticism of the quick start is my general criticism of multipurpose IDEs: I just managed to do something, but have no idea what it is I just did. I mean, in the first tutorial, where you're just pulling the value out of a text field and putting it in an output field, I could see what was happening. In the next one, where you're getting drop-down list values out of a database, I could see what was going on to that extent, but had no idea what was really happening. And this was just the second 10 minutes using the IDE.

Maybe that's just because the database is something provided and I don't know anything either about it's content or about SQL or JDBC. So I suppose the target 10 million developers out there do know this stuff, or at least know about it in the context of the development they do.

Posted by Mark at 09:07 AM

July 06, 2004

videoconv.sh

In the ongoing saga of converting my .avi files to a video CD, I've started using a front-end to vcdimager called videoconv.sh, since vcdimager doesn't handle the conversion to mpeg, and that seems like it may be what I got wrong before.

Unfortunately, videoconv.sh seems to have a little bug that I only noticed 90 minutes into the conversion. In an attempt to cleanup potentially large temporary files, the script deletes them inside the for loop that processes the .avi files, right after the temporary files are supposed to be used. Trouble is, the temporary files are not used, and so are deleted before they get processed into something else. Since lav2yuv in quiet mode generates 1 line of output per frame (29.97 frames/second in NTSC) processed, you can hardly scroll back to see what happened unless you were prepared in advance to expect errors. I'm too trusting ;-)

It looks like perhaps something may be goofy in the options passed to mplex. Another step in the saga...

Posted by Mark at 10:26 AM

July 05, 2004

Index funds

> My idea is that if you buy the total market with something like
> that you are going to do pretty well for little input on your part as
> long as the total economy is pretty much o.k.

At one level, I agree.

At another level, I see us lemmings all going over the cliff. By investing in index funds, we buy representative samples. A representative sample must by definition be weighted in favor of big companies who make up larger shares of the market. So we can consider this a conservative investment, in the sense that it tends to help conserve the situation we have.

We're also going to keep our hands off, not even voting at board meetings. Board meeting elections look almost identical to what they taught us in school concerning elections in totalitarian places. Somebody to whom you have no access gives you limited yes or no choices concerning issues whose context you barely understand. You're job is to vote intelligently. Occasionally, some "progressive" group gets a buys some stock -- democracy, but for owners; where'd they get this idea? -- and makes a motion to say, "This company has to respect human rights in China," or something like that. The annual report makes this look like an extremist position, so the few people who vote don't even go along with that.

We're hands off, but somebody must not be, so who? The choices are: the guy running the fund; guys running companies owned by the fund. Now, the guy running an index fund has a relatively straightforward job. He doesn't pick stocks. No voodoo. He looks at the market positions, which tell him which stocks to buy. The hard part maybe lies in taking big positions without getting caught doing it by other guys who just stand by, knowing you're going to take a big position, and cash in on that buy with financial levers that push the money from your pocket to his. But other than that, the index fund could almost be run by a simple computer program.

Probably the guy in charge of the index fund is, however, going to try to have some influence on the CEOs of his largest positions. He doesn't want them doing anything very obviously disasterous. He wants them to follow the rules and so forth, so at least when things tank it's not his fault, and he can still get his salary and bonus and golf club membership for doing something a simple computer program could do. On the whole, he must leave it up to the CEOs, though. After all, they're supposed to be motivated to run their companies well.

Therefore the system puts the decisions squarely in the lap of the guys running the biggest companies. The system tells them, "Everybody's going to be hands off about this. Basically, you have one imperative: You'd better look good in the market. If you don't, our fund has to drop you in favor of one of your peers. Everybody's retirement, college money, whole way of life is riding on this. Do what you have to do, but you'd better look good in the market."

Then we get laid off when we're perceived by our CEO as not making our company look good in the market. And we get a whole lot more nervous about how our investments are doing, so we check the prices a lot. But we still don't change the message to the CEOs.

Indeed, we intensify the message as more of us retire, or are out of work because the CEO decided to lay us off, and get more worried about our investments. The system reinforces the pressure on the CEOs, and these guys, partly due to our hands off attitude, have both high pressure and absolute discretionary power. It seems amazing they stay as human as they do.

Hmm, great thoughts for a Monday morning...

Posted by Mark at 09:39 AM

Bad wine?

Mom wrote:
> How do you know if a wine is bad? Just because it tastes
> like vinegar?

I used to wonder, too. Then one day I opened a bottle that had gone bad.

When that happens, you find the distinction less subtle than you perhaps originally imagined. I wonder if the mystique of subtlety surrounding wine arises from the difficulty we have describing tastes and smells.

A way to look at this is to say, "How do you know if a tomato is bad?" Tomatoes resemble wine in a way. They're both produce. They both may improve with age. They both can go bad. We've all had a tomato that got moldy. Some of us didn't notice and we ate a bite. That's the experience with a wine that's gone bad.

We've also eaten disappointing tomatoes that hadn't gone bad, but had no flavor, had disagreable flavor, or had a mealy texture. We've also probably eaten a few tomatoes that made us say, "Wow! That tomato tastes delicious."

Wine seems similar. So setting aside wine that has gone bad like a moldy tomato, I would say you know a wine is bad if it doesn't taste good to you. That explains as well why you want to taste wine before you buy it.

Posted by Mark at 08:43 AM

What's a blog, Mark?

Dad wrote:
> By the way, what's a blog?

An electronic diary. Tim Bray, a sort of internet architect who works at Sun, told us the other day in a presentation that the number of blogs out there has been doubling every 4-6 weeks lately. When I was last out in California, John Fowler, our software CTO, told us Sun hired Tim to investigate blogging and how Sun should get involved. To kick it all off, Sun published a website of employee blogs: "Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything."

What seems to be at the root of that is something called RSS, Really Simple Syndication, a protocol for summarizing articles from diaries, journals, online news, really anything that's regularly published.

Even our ponytailed COO, Jonathan Schwartz, has started a blog.

So we can now smell the tulip (bulb) odor surrounding this phase of the phenomenon. Blogging's bound to go out of fashion soon, kind of like LinkedIn or orkut. Yet, you can imagine that rolling journals like server logs together using RSS or a similar protocol may well have a future.

One advantage blogging has over email is that I can write this up, send you a permalink, and it persists out there on the web as a bit of writing for which you can Google, and to which you can link. Disadvantage, as they say at Slashdot: it goes down on your permanent record.

Posted by Mark at 07:57 AM

July 04, 2004

Cotes du Rhone

Welcome to the photo follow up for our Weekend of wine tasting.

It may not look like it, but there's still a little space left ;-)

Posted by Mark at 09:34 PM

July 03, 2004

(S)VCD

Now that I have libpopt.so.1 and a working system again, I got the sources to vcdimager 0.7.14, compiled that, and started looking at creating an SVCD, which Fabio says ought to solve my problems. He figures I probably goofed somewhere along the way of creating a VCD manually. Plus VCD quality is lousy.

I got the conversion started. It was working at something like 10 dv frames per second. The 00:21:21;26 of NTSC video to convert includes 38418 frames, however. Don't feel like waiting an hour for that right now. We'll see perhaps tomorrow night.

Posted by Mark at 06:50 AM

Weekend of wine tasting

Nath, Stu, and I are taking a two-day trip to 6 wineries in the Cotes du Rhone, some around Valence, some south of Orange. No more email before tomorrow night.

Posted by Mark at 06:15 AM

July 02, 2004

Uproar over... docs

The running joke is that nobody ever reads the docs. It's not quite totally true.

After Richard Elling reported Sun BluePrints were going due to budget cuts, people came out of the woodwork to complain. The blog entry got cited even in The Register, now running a story about how the decision got overturned.

Posted by Mark at 10:36 PM

Stormy weather

When you wake up at 5:30 am, sometimes the sky is wonderful. A 240x180 pixel image doesn't quite do it justice.

Here you see the sky above Barraux a couple of mornings ago, after I deleted /usr/bin trying to get libpopt.so.1.

Posted by Mark at 10:25 PM

Seems mostly fixed

It looks like I've mostly fixed the mistake I made adding an extra / to my rm command the other day.

Rather than reinstall over my existing install of Red Hat 9, I found a system on which I could install all the packages, then copied over the missing files. I seem to have found most of it. Things appear to work at first view.

Posted by Mark at 10:13 PM

Email as a way of life

Norman Walsh, of DocBook fame, was at JavaOne trying to get his email over a broadband wireless connection. It turned out he had so much spam he probably wouldn't be able to download only 28 hour's worth of backlog email before his laptop battery went dead.

Right after the passage I quoted from Understanding Media this morning, Noam Chomsky, some time between 1993 and 1996, laments the fate of his colleagues whose work has begun to suffer because they're too connected, spending too much time doing email.

At work, we theoretically spend no more than a few percent of our time handling email. Yeah, right. Start counting it up. For me yesterday it was 1/3 of the day. And I'm a nobody.

Posted by Mark at 02:43 PM

Apemen

Almost halfway through today's run, I came upon a couple of guys running in the same direction. They'd just finished stretching, and took off shortly before I passed the spot where they'd stopped.

They seemed to run at about the same speed as I ran, or perhaps slightly slower. So I sped up just enough to catch them over the next kilometer, roughly.

30 seconds after I passed them, one guy said to the other, "Ok, I'm going to run a little faster for the next half a kilometer." They were at what was for them conversational speed, but it was a reasonable pace, maybe 13-14k/hr.

So that guy took off, speeding up to what would've been a sprint for me. His partner also sped up enough to pass me, but perhaps only half as much. I reached my halfway point then, and turned around.

Apes must do this, too. We'd have heard about it, but they're too smart to run.

Posted by Mark at 02:34 PM

Video saga

Having run out of time yesterday at work to prepare a fix for my blunder, I'm still working in degraded mode. I thought I could perhaps create an SVCD from 5 GB of video, but so far have not been able to do so. The problem: lack of space.

I need to join 6 video segments into one long segment. I have just enough space to fit all sources on my Windows partitions. At first I thought therefore that I should just bring over what I need each time I want to append another source to the joined segment. But that means I'd still need space for an extra segment. Rummaging around to see what I can squeeze...

...maybe I can find time to repair my Red Hat installation soon.

Posted by Mark at 06:53 AM

Face-to-face

In Understanding Power once again, chapter eight, a woman asks Chomsky what impact he believes the Internet might have on activism. This converstation took place somewhere between 1993 and 1996. One of his points describes why even an introvert such as yours truly considers Grenoble a good location to work for Sun, where people are constantly getting up from behind their desks and talking face-to-face:

I mean, there's something about human beings that makes face-to-face contact very different from banging around on a computer terminal and getting some noise coming back--that's very impersonal, and it breaks down human relations.

Sun management has not pushed our work from home program with the intent of keeping people even more divided and conquered. Yet, you can feel the effects of the program having been in place for a while if you work in Grenoble for a while, then take a trip to Santa Clara. Some people almost seem surprised when you show up unannounced at their office. If they're there.

It's true that face-to-face meetings can involve lots of non-work. If you measure results, however, you hardly care. People who engage in lots of non-work at work get to stay late and make up for lost (sic) time.

Posted by Mark at 06:40 AM

July 01, 2004

Cross-platform ID management

Luke Howard of PADL Software came in to see us today and talk about XAD, a cross-platform authentication and directory service. Cool stuff. He could run the entire demo on his laptop, which is a sort of nifty way to present it.

Sun's also has products for solving similar problems with Identity Synchronization for Windows and native LDAP naming for Solaris systems. I don't know whether you can run the demo on a regular laptop, but we have an architecture that really scales way up, with HA messaging underneath and everything.

We really do 18-wheeler, long-haul stuff well. It's the turn-on-a-dime, works-out-of-the-box, very-sleek stuff that I must admit Luke does well. You also get the impression he's a real fire-breathing hacker. Nice guy.

Posted by Mark at 08:57 PM