Mark's Blog

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September 30, 2004

Red Hat buys our old server code

For those of us working on a product shared until a couple of versions ago with the Netscape folks, today's C|Net article on Red Hat buying the code from AOL is interesting.

I wonder whether they'll ship the sources, maybe even outside of their Enterprise Linux product. I wonder whether they'll move the documentation into DocBook. I wonder whether it'll have any impact on our strategy with those products at Sun.

Posted by Mark at 06:00 PM

Le Pinet

The point of taking the train and bringing my bike in this morning was to go for a ride with the guys this noon. Seven of us went to a place called Le Pinet, which is up on the Belledonne side.

Beautiful day. All I need to learn to do is come back down without being scared, braking, and turning with my handlebars instead of leaning into the turns.

Posted by Mark at 01:53 PM

Taking the train

This morning, as threatened, I took the train into work, biking down to the station in Pontcharra, riding the train to Gières, then riding along the paths and back roads to work.

It almost took me longer to get my shoes, helmet, and gloves on than to glide down the hill to the station. At the station, however, the train was late and I was early, so I waited for about 25 minutes not moving, just talking with a couple of guys who work in Meylan and regularly bike and take the train. Unfortunately for them, they have no showers at work, so it's not too convenient in the summer.

One of the guys noted that my full-price, round-trip ticket for today -- cost 11 euros 40, roughly equivalent to the real cost of driving -- would nearly buy me a 1-week pass if I get my paperwork in order, to show officially that I'm using the train to go to work. And the cost may be even slightly lower if I get a monthly pass.

The ride from Gières is long enough that I need to shower, but not really long enough to be much exercise. I nevertheless wore cycling gear. Yesterday I bought full-fingered gloves and shoe covers both rated to be okay down to about freezing, and a cheap pair of cycling shorts to keep things from getting bunched up under my leggings. Never felt cold, but this morning it must've been a balmy 8 degrees C.

Important point: My Look pedals with soft plastic cleats are not the answer if I start commuting in earnest with the train. Too much walking involved.

Posted by Mark at 11:28 AM

September 29, 2004

There and back again

Yesterday was the first day I rode both to and from work, each trip during periods of fairly heavy traffic. I also ran at lunch time, still jogging slowly to get completely used to my orthotic inserts.

Things to remember:

• Must look into shoe covers for riding in chilly weather.
• Even when riding only two hours a day, shorts that don't bunch up in the crotch are a prerequisite.
• The same national road that feels like a bike trail at 7-8 am or 3:30-4:30 pm in August feels like a traffic jam at 8:30 am or 6:30 pm in town.
• Roadwork inevitably leaves the roughest edges along the outside of the road.
• When taking the car the same week, don't hesitate to leave a set of clothes at work.

I expect to try riding the train with my bike soon. Less convenient than taking the car, but probably more convenient than riding all the way in.

Posted by Mark at 12:28 AM

Skips in RSS?

Huh? Since I updated the configuration to publish the first 500, instead of the first 40, words of each article, Movable Type seems to have resyndicated everything on the top page of my blog.

The strange behavior? When I look at the results through bloglines.com, this entry is missing.

Posted by Mark at 12:09 AM

September 28, 2004

56:52:98

Matt was right that the new bike would make a difference. My previous record was 1:02:45:22.

Not only did I make it from home to work in under an hour, but this time includes slowdowns in Crolles and St. Ismier because of dense traffic. The slowdowns there are bad because they happen on downhill slopes. Also I had a big pack on my back, because I'd not thought to bring in clothing and shoes yesterday for today.

Posted by Mark at 12:01 PM | Comments (2)

September 27, 2004

Scary

If you haven't read the article in The Register on how the Feds not only managed to protect the US from Cat Stevens by diverting his plane to Maine, but also decided to tighten security as a result, check it out.

At work, we've all taken training on complying with export regulations, which help us protect the US from invasion by Albanians carrying sharp pencils, or something like that. It's very important that each law abiding citizen do his part to make the world safe for democracy.

Posted by Mark at 09:01 AM

September 26, 2004

Bloom

Weather in September has caused the flowers to bloom again. Some slightly overexposed specimens follow.

Posted by Mark at 08:28 PM

Success

While we still slave over software at work, Andy succeeded in getting out of the rat race for a little while. If you're planning a trip out to the Hawaiian islands, he can guide you on some nice hikes. Check out his great hikes site for the beautiful pictures.

Posted by Mark at 08:34 AM

September 25, 2004

Col du Granier

This afternoon, Nathalie agreed to let me take my new bike for a ride. Since I've been itching to do it for a while, but my old bike wasn't up to it, I rode to the Granier Pass.

Granier Pass lies at 1134 m elevation, 9 km outside Chapareillan. You start at about 280 m elevation, so you average an almost 9.5% grade. It's not all uphill however, because there are two spots where I could coast, although not for long. There's also a couple of flattish spots where you finally get out of first gear and stop huffing and puffing so much.

That means there are also parts that just hurt. At a few points you look forward to sharp left turns because they have a few meters of almost flat road around the outside edge, and you can rest your quivering legs for a second.

My lowest gear is 30 up front for 23 in back. Several slopes had me wishing for larger cogs in back. Also I need to adjust the tension on the front derailleur. I cannot get it to stay in the right position for using cogs 2-4 in the back when on the 30 up front. But they told me at the shop there'd probably be a few things to adjust, and the 3 month tune up is free.

It's about 17 degrees C down here in the valley today, but I could see my breath up there. My toes and fingertips were cold right at the top.

And they were freezing for the first half of the descent. I'm thankful to Matt for his suggestion about only breaking in the straightaways, since that gave me something to think about. Otherwise the midwesterner in me would've filled my shorts had everything not puckered up in terror. I understood why you need glasses for those rides when a tiny little speck of something almost went in my right eye. You need to be alert like a fighter pilot.

All in all, highly recommended, but only if you have faith in your bicycle and especially in your brakes.

Posted by Mark at 06:12 PM | Comments (2)

September 24, 2004

Saving energy

I've been reading Alan Zelicoff's book on Saving Energy without derision (5 MB PDF), in which Zelicoff takes a look at how everyone can save money while saving energy. His book got Slashdotted, so the link points to a copy I downloaded.

Granted, the book needs an edit. Zelicoff also goes to a lot of trouble to justify buying solar panels compared to T-Bills, but so many people invest in neither their homes nor treasury notes for the full 30 years, and it's probably easier to get your money back half way through a treasury note than half way through the useful lifetime of a voltaic cell. His idea of combining sex education with conservation class is a little weak, and he knows it. Maybe we'd do better to teach how to do the kind of fact finding prerequisite to making up your mind based on the facts rather than on "attitude" as Zelicoff calls it.

Yet he's put a lot of interesting tidbits, observations, and common sense in only 83 pages. Definitely thought provoking, and kind of entertaining as well.

Posted by Mark at 10:02 PM

More biking, part II

I woke up this morning wanting to take a ride. It's dark and raining steadily outside, however, and I have lots of work to do. Plus I need to get the kids partially ready for school.

Anyway, what I bought is a road bicycle. Road bicycles are built for riding fast on roads. They're not good for much else. Yet a reasonably good road bicycle is very good at going fast on roads.

The guy who sold me the bike sized it relatively large (61 cm frame) after taking my measurements. Here's what it looks like from the side and what I see when sitting on the seat looking down.

Although this bike is not the most expensive you can get, it has at least one part that looks really cool, which is the front fork. Unfortunately my picture of it is not good, but it fits very smoothly into the frame and gives you the impression that this bike is built to leave other people choking on your dust.

As you can see from the other photo, there are plenty of cogs on the rear sproket. 9 in all. So you have enough gears that most of your shifts are small, incremental changes. If you ride much at all over changing elevations, you know that's cool, too.

Posted by Mark at 07:20 AM

September 23, 2004

Quince jam

Karine, one of the lead Directory developers, got about half our quince.

She gave me a jar of quince jam today. Quite good, though almost too sweet. Luckily Nathalie made waffles for the kids' dinner, so it was just the right day to receive a gift of quince jam.

Emma and Diane loved it. We finally had to take the jar away after Diane stuck her whole hand in it trying to get a fingerful.

Posted by Mark at 09:38 PM

More biking

After snapping the front break cable on my old bike, I stopped riding this week, instead wearing in my orthotic inserts by running gently with Stu, and then with Stu and Lana.

But today I bought a new bike. Stu took me over to Decathlon to take delivery at lunch time. That I cannot really afford it was conveniently forgotten as soon as I got the pedals sorted out.

I didn't have long, so I rode out from La Tronche up the national road to the first intersection at St. Ismier, at the top of the long hill. Tearing down that hill was a gas, although I had to break for and route around a slow moving camper at one point.

A complete absence of mechanical concerns made the ride more fun than any I've had since using Rob's bike.

Rob said we ought to go out for a ride at some point. Then before I left work, Matt was explaining how to check that the seat's set up right, and said we should go out for a ride sometime at lunch. I asked him about Granier Pass. He kind of laughed and said he only knew it going down, but it had some great turns. He apparently barrels through those turns like a motorcycle racer, leaning precariously, his inside knee almost touching the ground. Matt says he comes back down from the Chartreuse into the valley over the Granier Pass sometimes.

I asked him if he'd learned how to fall. He said he hasn't fallen in a turn like that, but instead has always managed to pull out of it enough to straighten out and run into the bushes on the side of the road. He used to do a lot of mountain biking. One thing he learned was never to break in the turns, even if it meant going off into the brush.

His wife races, however, and she's fallen off more than once. Ice is the main culprit according to Matt.

Posted by Mark at 09:30 PM

Flatland

Geoff Arnold mentions in his blog a site called The Political Compass, which purports to let you know where you stand on the political chessboard.

I'm having trouble figuring out who I ought to vote for, so I'm going to try it. Here goes.

And it's looking bad right from the start.

First, the statements expect you to come to them in a certain frame of mind, that frame of mind you have when watching television innocently, willing to believe everything they claim about the crap they peddle without criticizing. It's not that I don't ever want to be in that frame of mind, it's just that I don't want to make any major political decisions such as choosing a US president, a superindendent of schools, or a local mayor in that frame of mind. If you typically watch television that lazily and your critic muscles have atrophied, trying not looking at the picture. Or try watching a show for which you are definitely not the target audience. (Hint: you can tell easily by the ads.) Or get a transcript. Even relatively awful television can be entertaining if you watch it actively, aiming at understanding the context, seeing what they leave out compared to what they emphasize, etc.

Second, for each cotton candy statement, either I Strongly disagree, Disagree, Agree, or Strongly Agree. The test comes without options like Don't know, Not sure. Those are the options I usually select for trick questions. I also use them when I genuinely don't know or am not sure. For instance, "Our race has many superior qualities, compared to other races." Context, please?

Choosing to use Disagree instead of Don't know, Not sure...

I answered Disagree to nearly everything, so they put me near the center of Flatland. Interestingly, just by disagreeing nearly all the time, you go pretty far towards what they calll Libertarian.

So I tried it again, trying to imagine myself as a leftist idealist, but taking the stuff at face value like a good consumer. Hilarity breaks out at, "All authority must be questioned." You have to check Strongly agree unquestioningly. This put me about as far Left as you can get, and as far Libertarian as possible.

Now trying it as a discerning, moderate, proud American with a sense of Christian values... This whole thing looks a little like a leftist plot to me now... Goodness, so that's what Margaret Thatcher felt like. Looks like I came out pretty close to Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush, too.

So, what was the point of all that?

Posted by Mark at 07:00 AM

September 22, 2004

Whois

Some oddness looking at the statistics for this site:

• 15.12% of the hits are coming from an IP address registered to Microsoft Corp.
• 9.72% of the hits are coming from another IP address registered to Microsoft Corp.
• 2.73% of coming from some nameserver registered to a company in Poland
• 27 hits came from a server in navy.mil

Why is Microsoft generating 25% of the traffic on our site? Maybe you'll find a bunch of banner ads for Microsoft products in old blog entries I haven't read in a while.

What tripped off those .mil servers? Maybe I accidentally did something to jeopardize Sun's export clearance and will soon be tried for treason and failure to protect national security. (Already searched my blog for "terrorist." No hits were found. Until now.)

Posted by Mark at 10:24 PM

1 subscriber

Bloglines.com says I have 1 subscriber. Namely myself.

I don't of course read my blog through bloglines.com. But it lets me check that the feed works.

Not sure why I do that. Maybe I should start recording myself talking to myself as well, just to make sure I'm mumbling clearly.

Posted by Mark at 09:42 PM

September 21, 2004

Candidate criteria

In case you're a presidential candidate out there wondering how you can get my vote, voici my top ten list of presidential candidate criteria:

1. Shall replace property with p2p participatory protocol while in office
2. Practical, pragmatic, bottom-up, top-down, idealistic, visionary
3. Discordian
4. Transcends hierarchy
5. Female
6. Lazy, impatient, proudly presumptious
7. Self-taught, really
8. Deeply honest
9. Allergic to prisons
10. Unwilling to be elected president

Send me your handwritten resume and I'll let you know how you score.

Posted by Mark at 09:25 PM

A record

In the past day, I've had 3 different guys as my manager.

Perhaps not a world-record, but probably a personal best.

Posted by Mark at 09:05 PM

September 20, 2004

Voting, part II

Well, I looked around a bit more and have decided to cast my vote with the Pansexual Peace Party.

I hereby appoint myself the Party's presidential candidate. If elected I promise not to spend it all in one place, and to read the US constitution at least once all the way through.

Posted by Mark at 10:29 PM

Voting

I'm not sure who I ought to vote for in the US presidental election this year, so I asked Google.

Typing in "Who should I vote for?" and clicking I'm Feeling Lucky brought up a page entitled Why Christians Should Not Vote for George W. Bush, written on 15 February 2004 by Dr. Patrick Johnson. Dr. Johnson concludes that Bush's record shows him to be far too liberal (that is, left wing) to deserve Christian votes.

Dr. Johnson seems to suggest that I vote for the Constitutional Party candidate, who according to their site is Michael A. Peroutka.

Mr. Peroutka stands for God, Family, Republic. In fact, the Constitutional Party posts a mission statement. This one's a little clearer than some of the others I've seen lately:

The mission of the Constitution Party is to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity through the election, at all levels of government, of Constitution Party candidates who will uphold the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. It is our goal to limit the federal government to its delegated, enumerated, Constitutional functions and to restore American jurisprudence to its original Biblical common-law foundations.

Hmm. I'm glad Google resolved this little question for me in such a straightforward manner.

Posted by Mark at 09:54 PM

Mission

When you look up the word mission at Google, one of the definitions found is:

the guiding vision of an organization that describes its goals and purpose (source)

So why is it frequently so difficult to figure out from our mission statements what the heck it is we're supposed to do?

Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM

September 19, 2004

Vide grenier

This morning we went to Barraux for the street sale.

More than 100 people had come to unload their extra stuff. Emma bought dolls. Tim bought books, trading cards, and marbles. Diane bought a few books.

And I forgot the camcorder once again.

Posted by Mark at 01:54 PM

Coupe Icare

Yesterday afternoon Nathalie and I took the children to the 22nd Coupe Icare in Lumbin. The Coupe Icare has added so many attractions and you have to park so far away that it almost doesn't make sense to go.

We did see a few hanggliders and paragliders with smoke pots strapped behind them, looping and zooming down from St. Hilaire. We also saw the biplane doing loops and climbs and barrel rolls.

The kids got some stale, overpriced candy, but didn't get to go on any of the rides.

Too bad we forgot to take the camcorder.

Posted by Mark at 07:24 AM

September 18, 2004

LDAP schema repository. part II

After a long hiatus, I started playing again with the schema repository idea.

The object of my play at this point is to pull the schema definitions, which are attributes values, off cn=schema from a directory, and to have objects for handling definitions in a Java program. JNDI seems to have most of what I need, but I'm also using the java.util.regex so I have the list with which to call lookup().

Maybe I've missed something, but it looks like the tools JNDI provides are great for handling the schema definitions of a particular object or attribute, but not so natural when you want to manage the schema itself, independent of any instantiated objects.

Posted by Mark at 02:28 PM

September 17, 2004

Flat, part III

After fixing the tire this morning, I rode the bike into Barraux this afternoon to check that everything was working.

Both derailleurs seem slightly out of adjustment. The bottom bracket seems less and less well adjusted, too. And then on the way down the hill, I snapped the front brake cable.

Posted by Mark at 09:06 PM

Ashamed to back out

Okay, I got tired of how little I really understand about kernel configuration, so I dropped Windows 98 back on the Vaio.

Emma doesn't care.

Posted by Mark at 04:20 PM | Comments (1)

Pay us to stay home

Buckminster Fuller observed in Critical Path that we'd probably be better off as a society if those of us doing jobs that don't contribute anything had the means to stay home.

I used to think that didn't mean me. Recalling that while reading a related observation in the middle of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, I must confess I probably burn up more wealth than I create.

First of all, I work on a team doing a multiplatform LDAP server. That's okay, because whether you realize it or not, LDAP servers are fine and useful devices. And ours is pretty good, especially for big jobs. Trouble is, we have duplicate functionality with several other similar servers out there. In fact, we intentionally work on duplicate functionality. This is called competition (as opposed to cooperation). We of course pass the costs on to everyone supporting us in our efforts not to cooperate.

Second, I write product documentation. I may read how others explain things, and I may cross reference their good explanations. But a lot of what I do is rework, reformulating things discussed or even written down internally, things that could be located using Google if only we weren't so busy trying to hold on to our intellectual property.

Third, most of the documentation I do write is written very early, before partners and customers get the "finished" product and start figuring out how to troubleshoot it in their environments. Let's face it, there are two times you definitely read documentation:

1. When you install the software without somebody around to help
2. When you try to fix the software and have nobody around to help

Since I don't write documentation with real users for real users, whether I cover the needs of people actually using the software is hit or miss.

Fourth, I spend a lot of time ostensibly working, but in fact going to meetings in which we discuss how to work without addressing any of the other points here.

Fifth, I blog and read email. (But today's technically a day off ;-)

Posted by Mark at 02:38 PM

Gentoo, part II

With the previous Gentoo install, I built a 2.4.26 kernel. Couldn't get the support for my Sony memory stick working.

From a quick search on Google, it looked like people having luck with memory stick support were using 2.6 kernels. So I tried Gentoo with a 2.6 kernel. No dice.

I'm going to have to eat my words pretty soon if I don't get this one solved. (BTW, JDS does not seem to want to be installed on my old Vaio.)

Posted by Mark at 02:07 PM

Flat, part II

Today's a day "off" (i.e. babysitting), so Diane helped me fix my flat tire.

First we took the old tube off and fixed one hole. Then we put it back on. We pumped it up. Then we took it off and fixed another hole. Then we put it back on again. Then the nylon sheathing burst at one point along the wall of the tire.

So I took Diane to the sports equipment store in town, which is not cheap but probably works out cheaper than driving to Chambery. The tire I got for less than 6 euros. It says "Made in Vietnam" on the side. I also decided to invest in a new inner tube, since the one I have now has 3 patches including one put on last year. The inner tube cost me less than 3 euros and was also from Southeast Asia. Nothing seems to leak so far.

While at the sports store, I also noticed name brands, but not for the style of tire I was buying. For example, I saw some Michelin sew ups. They were priced at 39.90. The pair of those probably weighed less than the single clincher and tube I bought.

After putting the tires and one fender back on my bicycle, I noticed the front derailleur was rubbing and the bottom bracket is loose. That bike's becoming higher maintenance than my old car.

Posted by Mark at 01:56 PM

September 16, 2004

Interruptions

I work in an office. At least I attempt to work in an office.

The more problems you know how to solve, the more likely all your time is spent helping other people solve problems, in contradistinction to the model proposed by Brooks in his book on the Mythical Man Month, wherein those most capable of problem solving are surrounded by a team of helpers who enable the problem solvers to do so.

Posted by Mark at 11:15 AM

September 15, 2004

Gentoo

"And now for something completely different..."

My brother Matt suggested I try Gentoo Linux. Why not?

Gentoo is not for marketing dudes, but it comes with nice documentation for newbies. Don't try it unless you've grokked Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, however.

Good thing Google is there when you need to learn something. The first bit I had to learn was passing ide2=0x180,0x386 to the kernel on the install CD so my Vaio could read the CD-ROM after the system settings replaced the BIOS. Then at the end, I'd forgotton to set a root password. This was the first time I've edited files with echo and sed because no interactive text editor was available.

Posted by Mark at 05:06 PM

Some adjustments needed

Got the orthotic inserts for my shoes this morning, and ran 10k this noon.

At about 7k I stopped to remove the inserts. On my feet, each insole has a blister about 3 cm long with pink liquid inside. It felt like I had gravel or wood splints fastened to the insole of each shoe, especially the left one.

The thing is, at first you don't know whether the painful bother is part of the correction or more of the problem. Guess I need to make another appointment with Dr. Couture.

Posted by Mark at 01:36 PM

September 14, 2004

Pot calls kettle black

Forbes sent me a link to an article by Steve McGookin on blogging, in which I read:

Of course, another inevitable, but potentially negative, aspect of life in the blogosphere is the tendency to reinforce partisanship. Most politically-inspired blogs are opinion-based and naturally from one side or the other. Blog readers can therefore, if they so choose, exclusively read only those blogs which reinforce their own beliefs. By allowing the audience to actively choose the opinions it hears, by implication, as Cass Sunstein argues in his excellent book Republic.com, we also allow it to filter out those opinions it doesn't want to hear.

Of course, all Forbes readers spend their evenings reading Chomsky's essays and books about participatory economics, maybe with a nightcap of http://socialistworker.org/. Balance is everything.

Steve, I'm a happy Amazon.com user, but didn't know they had a political commentary section until you pointed it out. Must've been filtering out crap I didn't want to wade through.

Posted by Mark at 09:56 PM

Flat

My aim today was to ride to work and back. But Nathalie had to come and get me 1/3 of the way back from work. My back tire blew out at the roundabout on the edge of Crolles. I didn't have a replacement inner tube, nor tire irons.

Good thing my inserts are supposed to be ready tomorrow morning. Should be able to start running again.

Matt Swift, one of the developers on Directory Server, does lots of biking. When I told him I was riding in and back home sometimes, he said I ought to be able to do it in 45 minutes (avg. speed about 43 k/h). Considering that it takes about that long in the car, I guess that he's either overly optimistic or almost ready for the Tour de France.

Posted by Mark at 08:51 PM | Comments (2)

September 13, 2004

Quince harvest, part III

We ate quince mousse for dessert this evening.

It's tasty. My stomach feels like I ate half a bowling ball.

Posted by Mark at 08:41 PM

Text and context

When I was pretending to study German at Indiana University, one of our professors urged us to consider only the text, not to read things into the text. This he probably did to force us to concentrate on the German. Ich bin einfach zu faul eine Sprache durch lesen und schreiben zu lernen.

For lazy students of foreign languages, that may be good advice. Yet I tend to agree with Borges, that context carries as much meaning as the text.

In that state of mind, I'm very slowly reading another book that Stu lent me, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Written nearly a hundred years ago in Britain, Tressell's book almost seems more real now as we relive it. If Dilbert seems too silly, have a look.

Posted by Mark at 08:38 PM

All quiet until 7:15

In addition to picking quince this weekend, we got Tim a new bed and put Diane in his old bed. Tim also got Nathalie's desk, which she hardly used. A great occasion to move everything around in four rooms, and to transfer all of the stuff Nathalie had amassed on her desk to a new chest of drawers she had me assemble.

Nathalie said at one point she felt it was almost as bad as moving. By Sunday evening, however, everything was done except for the curtain Emma's going to have around the head of her bed.

All three slept in this morning. Diane hasn't yet discovered that she can get out of her bed by herself. As soon as she does, we'll probably start seeing her at 6 am.

Posted by Mark at 08:27 AM

September 12, 2004

Quince harvest, part II

We haven't eaten the mousse, yet. It tastes good, though perhaps a little too sweet. After you push the quince through the sieve, and cook the pulp with brown sugar and lemon juice, it becomes quite thick, more like paste than sauce.

If you're going to try the recipe, you may want to use the microwave rather than the oven to cook the quince. I cooked quarters 40 minutes in the oven and they were still hard. 4 more minutes in the microwave turned most of them to pulp.

Posted by Mark at 09:22 PM

Quince harvest

Today we picked the quince on our tree. We got about 55 between maybe 150 and 750 g, with most I would say about 300 g. Quince are typically quite large, and much harder than most fruit. I had to leave 3 at the top that I couldn't easily get to on the ladder.

Although I don't have any rum in the house, I'm going to make Spuma di Mele Cotogne (quince mousse; ingredients quince, brown sugar, lemon juice, cream, and rum) from a recipe Dad found on http://www.foodtv.com/.

Nath's hairdresser and my colleague Karine already took orders for all the quince. They're perhaps thinking of jams and quince paste rather than mousse. Quite popular fruit around here.

Posted by Mark at 05:58 PM

September 10, 2004

16:07:24

Almost a minute faster than yesterday rolling over here from the train station at Gières.

I tried going around the back way. Took one wrong turn, but that doesn't count. The route along the river looks flatter and shorter.

Posted by Mark at 03:33 PM

Directions

If I believe that governance through hierarchical management does not work very well in our problem space, then you could say it shouldn't bother me not to have directions from management, nor should it bother me when management directions appear ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness, or when they seem obviously wrong.

That's not what bothers me. It bothers me when those upstream function as bottlenecks, or introduce overwhelming volumes of unnecessary noise. (I'd get more specific, but would need to be outside the system where those up the hierarchy control the resources.)

Do I create the system myself? If so, how to I change that?

Posted by Mark at 09:42 AM

September 09, 2004

Paris drop-in center view

Nice cliché.

Posted by Mark at 10:48 PM

17:04:27

From the Gières/Universités station, even taking an initial wrong turn, then riding an out of the way route around tram construction, I can get to work in about 17 minutes.

I wonder if there's not a faster route through Gières, then crossing the Isère on a main road rather than the foot and bike bridge near the university.

Posted by Mark at 10:58 AM

September 08, 2004

Self censorship

We have an internal alias at Sun for people who are blogging, mostly people who are blogging at blogs.sun.com I guess. It's a pretty high traffic alias.

On one hand, this is a sort of encouragement to let it all hang out. Everything that's good for Sun, anyway. On the other hand, there's a whole lot of mind control going on.

Mostly the mind control is voluntary self control. People into their jobs enough to blog about them are likely to show enthusiasm about the company and what they're doing, to fall well within the boundaries of what we're permitted to think about. Some minor criticism of the system will come in entries like what Dave Levy wrote about Maximising Creativity, wherein Dave very mildly criticizes "hard arse" managers, and enourages them to let their employees think for themselves instead. But that's not exactly incendiary.

Some of the mind control comes from the authorities like Tim Bray. Tim's come out on more than one occasion to remind us vaguely of the bad things that might happen to employees thinking too far outside the box when blogging on a sun.com site or elsewhere. So we don't share inside information, and we don't air dirty laundry.

Those little reminders go a long way, no doubt. After all, we work under free-market capitalism, so nobody's afraid of losing his job. Not only that, but we all think it's normal to have signed contracts whereby Sun Microsystems, Inc. owns our thoughts and controls what we say and write. All of us believe unreservedly that power to the hierarchy will always remain the ultimate solution to governance questions, and that people higher up or having managed to gain control first should hog and hold sway over available resources. We live under democracy, not fascism, although we often hear at work -- the place we have to go to scrabble together our livelyhoods -- that, "This isn't a democracy."

Just gets you all fired up to work hard, doesn't it?

Posted by Mark at 10:25 PM

Children and IQ

The Register ran an article today about an article in the Sun summarizing alleged Kinsey Institute research that says having children lowers your IQ.

The Kinsey Institute calls the scoop "a hoax... we have no reason to believe that IQ changes after childbirth." But you hardly need a research grant to double check the conclusion.

If you don't have kids, you can approximate lab conditions. Get some obnoxious people to live with you, invite them to interrupt you constantly and especially when you're trying to think, then follow you around to soil the place every time you clean up. Make sure you reproduce said conditions 24x7 for several years between IQ tests. For best results, ensure the conditions persist during the IQ test.

Posted by Mark at 09:18 PM

27:02:43

27:02:43 was the time it took me around noon to ride from the Grenoble train station parking lot to the door here at work. I was not at full speed the whole time by any means. This time includes taking several wrong turns and backtracking from those, plus occasional stops for indecision. In town I also had a few red lights.

Trouble is, even if I could reduce that to 20 minutes, it would still be a bit long.

I've been over to the university grounds several times, but never found the train station over there. Maybe I should have another look.

Posted by Mark at 02:19 PM

Looking for work, part II

I stayed off line most of last night. Nathalie was using the connection to look for work.

Some of what she found led to laughter, then to darker thoughts later at night. Service-public.fr has links to the official announcements for jobs you can get without competitive examination.

For example, if you want to be one of several thousand ouvriers d'entretien et d’accueil déconcentrés -- seems to translate to janitors and greeters with attention deficit disorder -- working for the French school system, read the job offer that starts:

En application de l’article 1er du décret n° 2002-121 du 31 janvier 2002 relatif au recrutement sans concours dans certains corps de fonctionnaires de catégorie C de la fonction publique de l’État, pris en application de la loi n° 2001-2 du 3 janvier 2001 relative à la résorption de l’emploi précaire et à la modernisation du recrutement dans la fonction publique ainsi qu’au temps de travail dans la fonction publique territoriale, des recrutements sans concours, par listes classées par ordre d’aptitude d’ouvrier d’entretien et d’accueil des établissements d’enseignement du ministère de l’éducation nationale auront lieu au titre de l’année 2004 dans les académies ou les vice-rectorats sous la responsabilité du recteur ou du vice-recteur.

So as long as you've got a few years of law school under your belt, you should be all set to apply for work as a bewildered broom-pusher.

Posted by Mark at 08:52 AM

September 07, 2004

Looking for work

Nathalie concluded last night that when Diane turns 3, it'll be time to start looking for work. She's apprehensive.

Maybe she has the same feeling we all had when we were looking for work right out of school. You're not sure what's out there. You're even less sure what you want. Even little things, like writing a letter to an employer, can be a big deal.

In a way, Nathalie ought to go right into management. If people had their heads screwed on correctly, she could walk into the interview, mention that she's spent 7 years with no break, dealing with up to 3 or more tiny children screaming for attention and even screaming during the night, handling things like diapers and vomit, and never did she commit murder or even get arrested. They'd sign her up on the spot.

Trouble is, most guys hiring see it as a weakness that you ever got caught out in that position...

Posted by Mark at 06:35 PM

September 06, 2004

Shamed into it

Shamed by my admission yesterday that I still have Windows on a laptop, I decided to install Sun's Java Desktop System on that one, too.

In fact, it's the second time I've installed JDS on that system, and I'd forgotten that JDS doesn't recognize the PCMCIA CD-ROM, so I loaded my iWork CDs onto the desktop PC and am installing from that.

Few things are as boring as loading software onto a system.

Posted by Mark at 09:18 PM

Where not to focus

Not sure why I picked up Microsoft Secrets over breakfast this morning. Maybe it was my last blog yesterday.

In any case, it seemed like a different book from when I first read it back in the late 90s while working at Wincap. More likely the reader has changed.

What leapt out this time was not Microsoft's manager's views of how to write and test software, but a few paragraphs of Microsoft upper management mildly regretting how bad their middle management seemed.

Back when Microsoft was securing it's monopoly on the desktop and during the development of the business that made that monopoly possible, senior executives realized middle management at their company didn't rate highly... Apparently the problem was not worth trying to fix, nor did it have an impact in the grand scheme of things.

Posted by Mark at 09:43 AM

September 05, 2004

Long time, no video

It's not that we haven't been shooting any video. It's that I haven't been editing any video.

I like editing video, but it's hard to do it with someone tugging at your leg. Or asking you question after question.

In addition, it's about time to match the backup battery Mom gave us with a backup hard drive. I still haven't taken the time to figure out how to put the edited video back on a master tape. (Surely must not be that hard. Yet, again, problem solving is something hard for me to do either when I have people competing for attention, or when I'm tired in the evening.)

Posted by Mark at 10:01 PM

Dosemu

C|Net appears to have run yet another story Friday about Linux posing a threat to Microsoft. It's not clear how Linux poses a serious threat to Microsoft. Perhaps if you run a monopoly you need to pretend you're in danger from the competition. The more your friends in the media publish the story, the more true it sounds to people who only have a dim understanding of what's going on.

It's kind of like the folks in Washington saying the US is in danger of being invaded by Iraq, and the press falling into line. Or I take that back. Microsoft will probably stop short of dropping huge bombs approximately on people who write open source software.

Anyway, we still have two systems running Windows. Tim has the old Pentium 100 based PC running Windows 95. And I have an old Vaio laptop running Windows 98, because I was too lazy one afternoon to figure out whether Sun's Java Desktop System includes support for Sony compatible memory sticks. It probably does, but I had a couple of photos to upload, and took the easy route of reinstalling the laptop from the boot CDs. I figured certainly Sony would support the memory stick, and they do. It's kind of a drag to have the system crash on boot about 1/3 of the time, but I only use it every other week.

Tim occasionally runs Windows 95 to play games. His games include Adibou and Tibili. Under Linux, he also likes to play a Quake demo we downloaded, but that one would never run on the old system anyway.

Emma's computing is system independent. She plays Flashware at Barbie.com, and that's it for now.

Beyond the drivers for handling the memory stick, I have one lingering possible use for Windows, that of opening some old Cakewalk for Windows files I created in 1996. Any time I get nostalgic, I can use dosemu to play old shareware, like Duke Nukem 3D.

Interestingly Duke3D works better in dosemu than it ever did on my on the PC Tim now has. It even runs in 800x600 instead of 320x200. I wonder if somebody has updated that one to run it on a more recent underlying platform. Quake is humorless by comparison.

Posted by Mark at 06:12 PM

Mortality

Yesterday evening I had about 8 minutes to rent a DVD. I ended up leaving the rental place with Lost in Translation.

The critics claim it's one of the best pictures of 2003. At one point, I looked over at Nathalie. She had her head back and her eyes closed.

Lost in Translation has long silences, lots of implicitness. The last song in the film part, Just Like Honey -- was it part of the Hollywood ending or preceding it? -- came out when I was 15. I remember the guitar as much more wildly distorted, melting down than the mix in the film, but maybe I'm confused. The quality of the guitar with the guy singing so softly in the foreground seemed to be the main attraction of that song, but who knows? Even I'm getting older.

Then I went to return the DVD. On the short trip back, I turned on the radio. France Inter was playing some early 60s Miles Davis. Right as I pulled up to the house, the program segued to a song from the early 80s, Be In My Video that Frank Zappa recorded for Them Or Us.

Last time I heard Zappa on the radio must've been Valley Girl 20 years ago. A couple more times and I'll be ready for Life Story Net.com like Granddad.

Posted by Mark at 08:48 AM

Parliamentary assistant

Jon Bosak and Ken Clements propose a parliamentary assistant to replace many of the chair's functions with a web server based application to faciltate the parliamentary process online. As Jon observes, we can use Robert's Rules of Order, since organizations have been debugging those for well over 100 years.

I guess I buy the idea, or I'll at least listen to the first part of the pitch. When I was first trying to get involved in DITA after IBM took it to OASIS, I couldn't get past an internal server error at http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/portal/ that prevented me from signing up. Karl Best told me by email he'd put their IT staff on it. I finally gave up trying to be part of that parliamentary process.

Moralité : The process itself may have been thoroughly debugged, but many web applications have not.

If Jon and Ken have an open source implementation, I wonder if anybody doing participatory economics has tried to adapt it for their negotiations.

Posted by Mark at 07:06 AM

September 04, 2004

The Zahir

At least two books have the quality that I can reread them repeatedly, perhaps even again and again without putting them down, and yet the more I reread, the less I feel I've understood. One is VALIS from Philip K. Dick. Another is a collection of stories and essays from Jorge Luis Borges called Labyrinths.

In The Zahir, Borges almost recounts the story of himself writing what James E. Irby rendered into English as The House of Asterion. So if you recall a slightly misremembered House of Asterion while reading about unforgettables in The Zahir, you wonder what it was, thinking perhaps Borges means for us to understand it was whomever Clementina Villar stands for, rather than some small chunk of change with a couple of scratches.

What elaborate and elegant modesty! To this guy Zappa would say, "Find her finer..."

Posted by Mark at 09:03 PM

Biking again

Nathalie got my wheel back from the shop. The guy there finally found a lever long enough to unscrew the freewheel, apparently. It ended up costing my 20 euros and a spoke to have the broken spoke replaced.

And one of us, either he or I, made the freewheel stick worse than it used to. When I stop pedalling, I need to move the chain to the larger sprokets on the back. Otherwise it pops off the end of smallest cog, as the derailleur cannot absorb the sudden jerks and extra slack. Furthermore, if I get off the bike and hold the pedal still after starting the back wheel turning, the back wheel will actually come quickly to a stop. Hope it doesn't break someday in a dangerous fashion.

The ride itself took me out past Myans, where the bike trails let you ride on to Chambery. Since I hadn't had anything to drink before leaving, and it's 30 C (86 F) in Chambery right now, I turned around shortly beyond the point where the trail traverses the autoroute. Maybe I can get out there tomorrow before it gets warm. Chambery is closer than work.

Posted by Mark at 05:32 PM | Comments (2)

September 03, 2004

Cirque de St. Même

The day before Dad left, they went to the Cirque de St. Même in the Chartreuse.

The girls may not have made it all the way, but they had a good day.

Posted by Mark at 08:44 PM

September 02, 2004

Miolans

When Dad was here, we visited Miolans castle.

A good one for the children. Nice herb garden.

Posted by Mark at 09:54 PM

September 01, 2004

US politics

This other guy from Indiana sums up better than I'd have done what we US citizens of voting age have to look forward to in November (or a little later if the Supreme Court has to select the US president again):

Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Ignorance is bliss, right?

Posted by Mark at 11:06 PM

Gmail

Ludo invited me to use Gmail, so I thought I'd try it out.

More than another web-based email site, Gmail gives you Python access to a GB of web-accessible space.

$ df /gmailfs
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
gmailfs                1024000         0   1024000   0% /gmailfs

Interesting idea... I didn't see right away how to mount the file system through the firewall at work, however.

Posted by Mark at 09:30 PM

What is documentation?

A search for define:documentation at Google, returns many definitions, one of which seems wide enough to fit the whole thing:

(2) Instructions or descriptive information about a product or program.

It turns out we have evidence that readers consider anything they can get their hands on describing a product or program or how to use one as documentation. We do not seem organizationally to have figured out what this says about how we ought to work and what we ought to deliver, probably because this implies everybody writing mail is potentially creating documentation.

We put pressure on ourselves to publish as little noise as possible. Yet, the higher you set your standards to filter noise, the more likely you are to filter out relevant information. Also, if those producing the "noise-free" information have less of a clue than those generating "noisy" information, you end up with a situation where readers prefer noisy information channels to which they can apply their own filters (such as Google).

What does it all mean? Maybe we could save our readers trouble by doing 3 things simultaneously:

1. Scale back traditional documentation production to installation, migration, thorough reference, and troubleshooting
2. Turn up the noise to "publish" everything we know would fit the readers' definitions of documentation, leaving the filtering to readers; facilitate generation of good noise around the product
3. Focus documentation resource on improving writeups for heavily accessed noises, and for documentation customers are literally willing to pay for

This implies a much more reactive documentation effort than anything we've done so far. It also assumes we can make the measurements we need.

It does mean doing the bulk of the documentation work needed couldn't happen by design without real reader involvement, since what we document lastingly would be what people are trying to read about. It might reduce the complaints about lack of customer feedback.

Posted by Mark at 06:57 AM