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October 31, 2004
20.32 km
Rode Nath's exercise bike this afternoon, after having ridden to Chambéry this morning. Nath usually rides for 30 minutes, so I tried riding 30 minutes as well.
The readout told me I'd ridden 20.32 km, and burned 427 calories. That's a lot fewer calories than I burn when running hard for half an hour. No wonder running's harder work than cycling.
Posted by Mark at 08:16 PM
Scary monsters
We had monsters at our house for Halloween today.
Their grandmother made their costumes this morning.
Posted by Mark at 08:10 PM
October 30, 2004
Remodeling, part III
After having so much trouble painting the ceiling in the bathroom, we finally got around to papering with fiberglass paper that I'll try to paint starting tomorrow.
The fiberglass paper sticks with glue like a thick version of Elmer's that I remember from school. I guess once you put it on -- especially after you paint it -- you never take it off.
Posted by Mark at 09:15 PM
Cold ride
This morning I left at a few minutes after 9 am. The temperature was about 45 degrees Fahrenheit, though the day was clear. I rode until a few minutes before 11 am. When I returned, the temperature had warmed up to 50 degrees.
With shoe covers, good gloves, several layers, and a windbreaker, I felt okay in the sun. A few kilometers of road on the Belledonne side of the valley lay in shadow at that hour, however. Riding through the 45-to-50-degree shade at high speed after having broken a good sweat makes chilly work, even if you have plenty of clothing.
Posted by Mark at 09:05 PM
October 29, 2004
Last weekend
Some of the pictures from last weekend.
Timothee took good care of his girls.
Posted by Mark at 07:27 PM
Broken windows
Something strange happened on the Vaio laptop. Every time I try to copy paste from the memory stick, Windows 98 crashes and reboots. Had to move images in place with pscp.
Posted by Mark at 07:08 PM
Comment spam, part III
Got hit with another rash of comment spam. It's almost enough to make one want to turn off comments.
Posted by Mark at 07:05 PM
October 28, 2004
Night out
Nathalie and I went out to eat alone together last night for the first time in a while. She wanted to go to a Japanese restaurant.
You don't know how much you can appreciate a meal until you've spent months and months straight hurrying through each and every dinner with three children at your elbows. I'm sure Nathalie envies my lunchtimes at work.
It almost seems strange now to be able to finish a sentence or two of conversation without being interrupted. You find yourselves drifting off into silences now and then, mainly because you can.
The food was good as well.
Posted by Mark at 06:44 PM
Mini triathlon
Today's mini triathlon started with full-extension, olympic hedge clipping along the entire length of the yard. Unfortunately, my time wasn't very good. It took a total of four hours to trim the top and sides on the south edge of our yard. The inherent difficulty in the hedge clipping event lies in overcoming stiffness in the muscles at the top of your back. Those get strained as you lean forward and reach out at shoulder height to snip twigs almost beyond your grasp.
The second and third legs were stunted versions of the traditional bike race and run. I took off on the bicycle at 3:30 pm but only rode over to Les Marches. Although I didn't get rained on, puddles had gathered everywhere the road wasn't almost perfectly flat. It had drizzled this morning and some of the afternoon. Had to wipe the bike down completely, and to clean, oil, and grease the chain.
After deciding not to ride only 20 km, it made sense to go somewhere on foot. I thought Dana was going to want to run. We'd had a big lunch. But I guess he's taking it easy today. I only ran as far as Chapareillan. Dana says the edge of Chapareillan and back is about 8 1/2 km.
Posted by Mark at 06:37 PM
October 27, 2004
La Chapelle-Blanche
This afternoon I climbed up the hills on my bike to a little town called La Chapelle-Blanche, which is half way between Pontcharra and La Rochette. Coming from Montmélian, you have a view on the way up that extends all the way to Chambéry at one point.
On the other side, you descend quickly to the lake by La Rochette. Quickly enough that I feel nervous, despite the road being relatively straight until the last right turn.
I found the short, low-traffic road from Les Marches to Montmélian as well. You end up near the station in Montmélian and have a relatively steep decline to the roundabout leading towards the autoroute.
Posted by Mark at 06:48 PM
Hedges
It's been days since I've checked my email at work. Going out of town and then having lots to do on my vacation have kept me away from the computer.
In the spring that I managed to clip the whole hedge in about 1 day's worth of work. It may take a little longer this time. This summer the laurel bushes grew much more than last. They still look full, even after having been clipped.
Posted by Mark at 06:37 PM
October 26, 2004
Rain, part V
Lightning hit the Fort Barraux early this morning. The rolling thunder apparently rattled windows in the next town. The charge appears to have blown one of our fuses upstairs.
Posted by Mark at 09:48 PM
For her
Idealists make terrible lovers. They can adore, worship... idealize, but lose interest in the consummated, the requited, the instantiated. What you deserve is a romantic handyman.
Posted by Mark at 09:46 PM
October 25, 2004
Revision
Why revise? You tell me that all quality resides in forthright revision, that glinting passages, even whole shining nuggets, can only be found, not brought forth whole.
But I'd tell you there's no point panning for gold flakes in this muck. This is the literary equivalent of small tallk we make to keep each other at arm's length.
Words keep me from conveying what's really on my mind.
Posted by Mark at 07:41 AM
Wakeful
Slept terribly during the night. Maybe even Ghislaine's mild coffee was enough to wake me after a couple of hours sleep.
Posted by Mark at 06:38 AM
October 24, 2004
Quixotic
Borges absolved me of my dilettante sins: "There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless."
Posted by Mark at 10:37 PM
Scrapbook
Fuller wrote he kept a scrapbook, though he didn't call it that. Drucker claims the executive must review the written record to identify his strengths and weaknesses, to find out who he really is. Drucker and Fuller see writing as contracts with themselves; the salient achievements of a man's life he records in contracts (with himself). This ensures his progression, and permits analysis then correction of failures to progress.
A man's life must resemble history, not literature. A man's life has nothing romantic to offer. His story is not a story, just a history.
Good history and literature do not betray their origins, which are in revision. The unexamined life is not worth living. The unexamined blog not worth writing.
It is only numerically true that in the infinite library, all books exist, and so must the supreme book. In reality, all of us wander endlessly through hexagons of gibberish.
Posted by Mark at 11:33 AM
Downhill
One long, whitish-gray hair is growing in my right sideburn. I looked at the copyright dates for Borges publications. Ficciones wnet in 1956, though first published in 1944, when he must've been in his mid 40s.
The Chronology at the back of my copy of Labyrinths provides much more. Borges had his first poems published when he was in his early 20s. At my age, he worked as an editor.
While furing the imaginary ascension of Tlö, Borges continued his revision of the unpublished translation of Browne's Urn Burial. I write no poetry, only simple schema repository code, fragmentary blog entries, man pages for a small, forgotten collection of superseded directory tools.
Posted by Mark at 09:29 AM
Zahir, part II
Borges has me puzzled.
Why tigers? Why coins? What does N T 2 mean? Why does he recall Clementina Villar at the end? What was the idealist trying to forget?
Posted by Mark at 08:24 AM
October 23, 2004
Long ride
Th drive to Fléville-devant-Nancy took us 5 1/4 hours, with a 10-minute stop after Bourg-en-Bresse. Far too much time after lunch with three not sleeping in the back.
Posted by Mark at 07:22 PM
Indian summer
Nathalie's chiropracter says we're having an Indian summer. So the transition to winter will come abruptly. Although the leaves are turning the tomatoes still grow.
At 8:30 this morning, I could still ride with only shorts, no leggings.
Tim ran 2.2 km in the Courseton over 15 minutes. Almost overheating in his sweatpants.
Posted by Mark at 11:20 AM
October 22, 2004
War on terrorism
According to Google:
As defined by the FBI, "the unlawful use of force against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in the furtherance of political or social objectives". This definition includes three elements: (1) Terrorist activities are illegal and involve the use of force. (2) The actions are intended to intimidate or coerce. (3) The actions are committed in support of political or social objectives.
(Source: http://www.mema.domestic-preparedness.net/glossary.html)
Google brings up a few definitions for war, most of which don't fit when those on both sides cannot be easily identified. Here's one:
Condition of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties. 2. The period of such conflict. 3. The techniques and procedures of war; military science. 4. Condition of active antagonism or contention: a war of words; a price war. 5. A concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to something considered injurious: the war on drugs.
(Source: http://www.gunnerynetwork.com/glossary/w-glossary.html)
Definition 5. seems to fit. So a war on terrorism amounts to "a concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to the unlawful use of force against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in the furtherance of political or social objectives."
That definition casts a fairly wide net.
What conditions would bring about the end to a war on terrorism? Would those unlawfully using force simply have to stop doing so? Or would they have to prove they wouldn't do so in the future? Or would it suffice to use force unlawfully in desperation, rather than the in the furtherance of political or social objectives? Is a war on terrorism like a war on drugs, in that it's never really over?
Posted by Mark at 10:08 PM
Personas
Steve Calde wrote an article on Using Personas to Create User Documentation that I read about in somebody's blog.
When I went to read the article, I saw it started off:
This article assumes that you already have a set of good user personas, presumably based on good design research performed as part of the product development process.
Steve, could you give me a real example of software:
- That really does require documenting, because the user interface cannot be intuitive enough to avoid documentation
- For which the prerequisite design research has been done
Such software must exist, but no examples spring to mind.
Posted by Mark at 09:26 AM
October 21, 2004
Another 10k
I forgot my watch this noon. However slow I was, at least my feet and legs are fully used to the orthotics. And it was so warm I almost took my shirt off.
Posted by Mark at 10:11 PM
Work and retirement
Dana's brother Neil is working again for the State of Kentucky. He's also retired from the State of Kentucky.
If you've not followed the latest news in France, you'll not know about Sarkozy claiming he'll keep Camdessus's report on how to get France working again on his night table for regular bedtime rereading. Michel Camdessus suggests that France allow folks drawing a pension to go back to work while keeping their pensions.
Dana didn't agree with me when I suggested this was a sort of subsidy for employers. I think we were disagreeing over terms. Subsidies involved direct payments to those subsidized. In this case, the payment's going to the worker, and the cost reduction's going to the employer.
Under this system, people like me get to compete for work -- by definition something nobody wants to do, but has to because he needs the money -- with people having a lot more experience than we do, and costing our employers a lot less. And this in a system where real unemployment is high and getting higher. Sounds brilliant.
Posted by Mark at 10:09 PM
Baptism
Dana brought a CD with some photos from his last visit.
Here's a nice one of the E terminal at Charles De Gaulle, shortly before it collapsed.
Posted by Mark at 09:52 PM
Outstanding
My mother must've had extra space in her suitcase. She brought awards I received in high school and junior high school. Maybe she couldn't bear to throw them out, but didn't really want to dust them any more.
The best one is a gold-colored medal encased in a huge cube of plexiglas. The medal reads, "Kentucky-Indiana Academic Challenge Race For Excellence." I cannot remember what that was. In any case, it's been downhill from there ;-)
Posted by Mark at 09:48 PM
October 20, 2004
On-time arrival
Mom and Dana arrived on time today. No delays, although they had a close shave in Paris, whereby one bag didn't make it on the same flight, and they very nearly got pushed to take the next plane.
Posted by Mark at 05:10 PM
Hitchiker's Guide
Hard to tell who Douglas Adams intended to put on with his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Borges, for his story about Tlön, etc.? His editor? Me, for buying the book?
Did he affect sloppiness through careful editing? Why does one get the feeling that one's been had, even as one continues to read? Laziness?
Posted by Mark at 07:24 AM
October 19, 2004
59:32:64
For 14k. Yes, I've slowed down. Part of this is no doubt psychological.
Part of it may be that the effect I hoped for in going to do boot-camp aerobics Monday and Friday is not actually happening. Maybe there's nothing to increase your running speed like more running.
Posted by Mark at 01:59 PM
October 18, 2004
Progress
Nathalie bought herself an exercise bike today at Decathlon, where twice a year they help people sell their old sports equipment. The bike runs with adjustable magnetic resistance, and counts the calories as you burn them.
Timothee and Emma have been taking turns. Tim burned 10 calories and came down to tell us about it. Emma burned 2.2 calories over a period of about 5 minutes. The seat was much too high for her to sit down.
My memories of exercise bikes are of Granddad and Grandmother riding an old bike with mechanical resistance. We had to speak loudly over the noise. This one is nearly silent. My computer's fan makes more noise.
Nathalie's not yet an endurance sports enthusiast. She's been pedalling for almost 5 minutes and is complaining about getting too warm.
Posted by Mark at 08:10 PM
October 17, 2004
Rain, part IV
An hour after writing that we couldn't go out, the rain had cleared enough for me to get Tim out of the house. We rode to Chapareillan. He used that as an excuse to have a second snack when we got back home.
He rode fairly quickly towards Chapareillan. On the way back, he was tired. I hardly had to pedal. One unfair aspect is that I can coast downhill much faster than Tim; another is that I can downshift without my dad's help. At least I didn't have to take a shower.
Tim needs to take a shower, however. He hit every puddle he could, and of course has no fenders on his bike.
Posted by Mark at 06:04 PM
Rain, part III
Nobody can play outside here today. It's just too muddy.
For a while, they stopped screaming. Tim was building pyramids and Emma was making a puzzle.
Posted by Mark at 03:57 PM
Remodeling, part II
I got tired this morning of sanding the ceiling and tried to apply a coat of primer before having removed all the paint. I'd encouraged myself by sanding down to the plaster in a number of spots, removing plenty of paint flakes and looking, according to Nathalie, like an extra from the Night of the Living Dead.
Unfortunately, when I started rolling primer onto the places I hadn't yet tried to apply paint, even more, larger flakes broke off.
While sanding, I noticed some of what I was removing appeared to be traces of wallpaper. Maybe the reason the ceiling looked so bad before is that whoever painted it before me had to remove wallpaper and didn't perhaps adequately get all that cleaned off. That might explain not only my troubles, but also why the existing paint was so ugly.
As cleaning everything away down to the plaster looks like an all-day sanding job, we've decided to look into papering the ceiling, then painting that.
Posted by Mark at 03:52 PM
Vendemiaire
When Nathalie bought me some of Alain Brumont's Madiran as a gift, she also bought us two 50 cl bottles of his Pacherenc du Vic Bilh Vendemiaire Octobre 2000, the grapes for which must've been harvested about 4 years ago this month. We were eating foie gras as a starter, and felt like drinking something smooth.
It's a golden yellow wine, round and sweet with plenty of grape flavor, and a few other flavors underneath. We drank it a little too cold at first. More of the scents come out when it warms up just a little. Too bad we only have one more little bottle.
Posted by Mark at 03:39 PM
October 16, 2004
Remodeling
Nathalie's given herself the project of fixing up the bathroom downstairs to the extent that she can do so without changing the furniture or the tiles. She cannot paint the ceiling. Too exhausting she says. So I started by sanding it down this morning.
Trouble is, the paint flakes off when you try to put new paint on. This may turn out to be exhausting indeed. I think I may need to take all the existing paint off the ceiling.
Posted by Mark at 08:06 PM
Rain, part II
It was supposed to rain this afternoon. Instead we had a few breaks in the clouds from about 1 pm until about 5 pm.
Tim and Emma were at a birthday party, and Nathalie took Diane on an errand. I tried to paint the ceiling in the bathroom downstairs, but realized I was going to have to strip all the old paint off or it wouldn't work. By that time I'd already painted part of the ceiling, so I decided to go out for a ride before the rain came back again.
I did a short circuit, something on the order of 25-30 km, out through Pontcharra, around to Montmélian, back up to Les Marches and through Chapareillan to Barraux. Most of that is flat, or nearly flat, so I took the few hills in pretty big gears.
My hands were cold when I got back, despite my fall gloves, which are rated for -5 Celsius.
Posted by Mark at 08:03 PM
October 15, 2004
Participative
If you haven't had a look at the National Initiative For Democracy, go ahead. Former lawmaker Mike Gravel is working to get US voters to give ourselves the capacity to legislate in parallel with our representatives.
Posted by Mark at 10:45 PM
Red Harvest
Fishing around for something to reread a couple of nights ago, I found a book of Dashiell Hammett's detective novels. The first he called Red Harvest, in which the protagonist cleans up a mining town called Personville. Personville went bad when the guy who more or less owned the town brought in crooks to help him break the miner's union, and the crooks stayed on to run the place for him.
The book describes a rough guy in a rough situation. Although I wouldn't want the protagonist, or probably the author, as my manager, he tells a good story.
Posted by Mark at 09:39 PM
Google desktop
Check out this idea: Google Desktop.
It's almost enough to make you want to run Windows. A real shame they don't support useful operating systems, yet.
Posted by Mark at 02:40 PM
October 14, 2004
Buz
Sun has a project going on that looks like a next-generation Hubbub. Ludo got me playing with what internally is Project Buz.
Some of the coolness, not all of which is implemented yet:
- People represented by their photos
- One-click phone conferences
- Meeting scheduler
- You can define multiple groups
Looks quite promising, but humans will have to evolve real time scheduling and multitasking capacities.
Posted by Mark at 01:49 PM
Aaarrrghh
Got all ready to go for a bike ride today at noon, but we've had rain and lower temperatures the whole day so far. Unfortunately I was so ready to bike that I forgot to bring running clothes. So I'm taking it easy today, the first whole work day in a while with no exercise.
Posted by Mark at 01:40 PM | Comments (2)
October 13, 2004
41:43:55
My feet and legs have become used to the orthotic inserts, but I've lost ground training. My legs felt unusually heavy for the first 2/3 of the 10k, and I wasn't breathing easily. Psychologically, I'm in the dog house. I'd guess that tiredness from yesterday's ride only accounts for part of my slowness.
Running seems a more internal sport than cycling. By that I mean your performance when cycling depends on externals like hills, valleys, flats, wind. At times you must work very hard. Other times you coast. When running on a mostly flat surface, you simply have to force yourself to work hard steadily. The landscape has much less to do with it, internal rhythm and motivation much more.
Posted by Mark at 02:05 PM
October 12, 2004
Rain
I dropped out of a meeting this afternoon a quarter of an hour early in an attempt to beat the rain on the way home, but only succeeded in getting dripped on almost the whole way.
It wouldn't be so bad, except that the faster you go, the less you can see. Also, evening rain tends to bring twilight early.
Posted by Mark at 08:05 PM | Comments (1)
Games
Again, I've gone back to playing around with schema entries, and refactoring a bit to see what I can keep from my play. So I only need a little code to list the schema definition objects:
public static void main(String [] args) {
Hashtable env = new Hashtable(11);
env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,
"com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtxFactory");
env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, LDAP_SERVER);
try {
DirContext ctx = new InitialDirContext(env);
DirContext schema = ctx.getSchema("");
Attributes attrs = ctx.getAttributes(getSubSchemaSubEntryDN(ctx));
HashSet schemaObjects = getSchemaObjects(schema, attrs);
System.out.println(schemaObjects);
ctx.close();
} catch (NamingException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
Now, if only I could remember what I was trying to do before I started playing around...
Posted by Mark at 02:04 PM
Darker days
I rode in to work this morning, starting at about 7:45 am, which is about as early as I can comfortably start now. It's a little frightening riding down the hill next to La Buissière in twilight.
I'll also have to leave by 6 pm, since it's starting to get dark earlier. Batteries power the lights on my bike. It's enough perhaps to be seen, but not enough to see crud in the road.
Furthermore, 10 degrees Celsius (50 F) is about as cold as you want it to be before you consider other methods of locomotion.
Posted by Mark at 09:17 AM | Comments (1)
October 11, 2004
Contrarian minds
Sun has a feature that's been going on for a while, Contrarian Minds. I didn't realize it was out on the external web.
Go ahead. It's almost infinitely richer than the eleven words.
You might want to potentiate your experience with some Kafka, Hesse, or Chomsky beforehand.
Posted by Mark at 09:41 PM
Indigence
The word of the day at dictionary.com is indigence: "A state of extreme poverty or destitution."
There would be a lot to blog about at work if I weren't in fear of getting read just in time to get fired. Maybe they could even use incriminating prose to fire me cheaply. There must be a clause in my contract whereby inappropriate sarcasm may lead to termination of employment without severance.
Posted by Mark at 09:33 PM
October 10, 2004
Absentee ballot, part II
It looks like I was too quick to conclude I had only three choices for president in the upcoming US elections.
Inside the ballot appears the space for voting for declared write-in candidates, of which there are several according to Northwest Indiana News.
Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM
Subdivision
Today we went to visit one of Nathalie's friends, who lives with her husband and two boys on the other side of Lyon.
Their house stands in an almost US-style subdivision. For several years, apparently, they even had a restriction on growing hedges in between the houses to avoid cutting each yard into a separate parcel.
Stéphane said he bought the house there with his boys in mind. It's definitely good for them now, with very few, slow moving cars, lots of friends nearby, horseback riding, tennis, even a swimming pool, all within walking distance. Maybe a few years from now it will seem small, lacking in privacy. Maybe people just don't feel that way if they grow up in a suburb of Lyon.
Posted by Mark at 08:53 PM
October 09, 2004
No training wheels
Emma managed to ride her bicycle today not only with no training wheels, but also with no one standing by to rescue her from falling. She still has some trouble mounting and dismounting, but rode all over the soccer field in Barraux. Pretty soon she'll be able to ride to Chapareillan with us.
Posted by Mark at 08:06 PM
Silliness
You probably already heard about this at Slashdot, but two of the presidential candidates, Cobb and Badnarik, got arrested crossing a police barricade... to attend a debate between Bush and Kerry.
Nice publicity stunt. Cobb even got quoted as saying, "These are not debates, these are infomercials." Almost as informative as the content of the debate probably was.
Apparently there were so many people at Washington University that night with nothing better to do than wave signs that, "Streets around much of the campus were barricaded and guarded by police, including two dozen in riot gear near where hundreds of placard-waving protesters massed." What if they had an election and nobody came?
Posted by Mark at 08:04 PM
Puncture
This morning near Baberaz on the way to Chambery, I rolled over something sharp in the road and punctured my rear tire. Whatever it was left a visible hole in the tire, not just the tube. I wonder if I ought to buy another tire.
Luckily, I'd taken Rob's advice and had an inner tube and little pump in a bag underneath my seat. My tires are clinchers, so I deflated the inner tube and used small steel tire irons to remove the back tire. I learned there that I need softer tire irons. The steel ones scratched my rim a little.
Good thing I had a second inner tube. It wasn't until this morning that I noticed the glue in my patch kit had all dried up inside the tube.
For the pump, I need to replace the CO2 cartridge. To use this pump, you first inflate the tire a bit by hand to verify everything, then use the cartridge to inflate the tire to full pressure. Inflating the tire to full pressure by hand with my tiny pump doesn't look feasible, since full pressure for racing tires is about 120 psi. The guy who sold me the bike told me the way to avoid knocking the rims out of true and breaking spokes is to keep the tires fully inflated, so I don't want to ride without being able to do that.
Since I didn't get a long workout, I decided to charge the hills going home. By charging the hills, I mean riding up each hill in a gear just higher than the highest I can do without slowing my cadence, and then trying to keep the cadence anyway. After the first hill, my leg muscles were suffering. By the last little rise outside Barraux, I almost cracked. Your heart and lungs also get a workout when you ride like that.
Posted by Mark at 11:36 AM
October 08, 2004
Intellectual property, part V
We received email confirmation today that our application is scheduled to be filed Tuesday. Will it someday be work $92M to somebody?
Posted by Mark at 08:34 PM
Not enough sleep
For the last three nights, Diane's been waking up at 11 pm, ready to go. We then cannot get her back to sleep. Last night, I finally rocked her to sleep at 2 am.
For a while, we put her light on. She ended up getting out of her bed, going downstairs in the dark, and climbing into Emma's bed, which woke Emma up. Nathalie got upset when Emma arrived in our room, and we'd been trying to sleep for hours. She only found out this morning that it had in fact been Diane who'd gotten Emma up in the middle of the night.
Posted by Mark at 08:25 PM
Home computer
Janetta sent around this photo of what the RAND Corp. expected in a home computer of 2004. Here's the thumbnail:
To read the text, click the image to load the larger photo.
Posted by Mark at 10:28 AM
October 07, 2004
Misanthropic
After finishing up The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, I cast about for other bedtime stories, read a few pages from my cheap paperback copy of Justine by the Marquis de Sade, and settled into The Quantity Theory of Insanity again.
What ever happened to my copy of Grey Area? And why reread stories by an author who doesn't seem to like his characters?
Posted by Mark at 08:57 PM
October 06, 2004
Fear of StarOffice?
The Register has Steve Ballmer acknowledging that StarOffice, and by extension OpenOffice as well, exists in competition with Microsoft's big cash cow. There must be some big customers complaining they cannot see why they should pay through the nose for office productivity (sic) software.
Ballmer's quoted as disparaging StarOffice because, "It’s not compatible with Microsoft Office and it’s missing key applications like Outlook." There probably are some things that aren't compatible. That's perhaps because StarOffice and OpenOffice use a public standard XML format to store documents, whereas other folks rely on proprietary formats to get your arm and leg.
It's not entirely clear why Outlook would be considered a key application, except by people who write email viruses. You definitely don't need it to send mail, manage your contacts, keep your calendar up to date, or any of that sort of thing. Perhaps it's key to keeping users captive and to propping the stock price up.
Maybe Ballmer's finally learning from Andy Grove. Someone once suggested that Intel went out of its way to prevent potential competitors from dying off completely, because Grove realized Intel's monopoly would be unambiguously identified as such had they no viable competition at all.
Someday we'll learn about the hush funding wired from Redmond to a student bank account in Finland back in the early 90s.
Posted by Mark at 09:28 PM
1 in 6
This blog includes about 1 image for every 6 entries. Since entries with images often include more than one image, images are few and far between. Definitely fewer and father between than the Dilbert feed at Tapestry, which is also more entertaining than this blog.
You can view all the images I've uploaded in alphabetic order at http://mcraig.org/mark/images/ (712 KB).
Posted by Mark at 09:03 PM
SLAMD open source
As Ludo mentions, Neil Wilson's stress testing engine, SLAMD, has been released under the Sun Public License. In other words, you can get the code.
As always, Neil's done a prodigious job documenting his work. And SLAMD has been in use stress testing big directory service deployments for a couple of years now. Check it out.
Posted by Mark at 03:56 PM
October 05, 2004
Intellectual property, part IV
Today, the patent lawyers contacted us with papers to sign concerning our application. Lana sent them back by mail.
As always with legal documents, I found some strange provisions when glancing at the fine print. Apparently we risk incarceration for getting our addresses wrong.
It reminded me of Frank Zappa as the Central Scrutinizer on Joe's Garage. Something about various everyday activities you may be performing that could result in the death penalty.
Posted by Mark at 09:37 PM
Under an hour
This evening was the first time I've had a tailwind coming home.
I didn't catch my time this morning, as I was wearing long sleeves that somehow rubbed against the stop/start button on my watch. When I got to the parking lot at work, my watch was at 37 minutes and counting. So I don't really know how long it took.
Nor do I know exactly how long it took to ride home. But there are storms brewing, so I had tailwinds some of the way. I left no earlier than about 6:05 pm, and arrived before 7:03 pm.
It was definitely easier. I had lots more energy left at the hill leaving La Buissière.
Posted by Mark at 09:06 PM
October 04, 2004
A good writer back
Andy came back to Sun to help with Java Enterprise System documentation. I spoke with him today and he sounded enthusiastic.
That's good news for Sun, though I'm not sure whether it's good news for Andy. He had a pretty nice idea started on the side.
Posted by Mark at 10:58 PM | Comments (2)
Hardly socialist, part II
As Dad noticed, my entry on Robert Tressell's book and socialism in France was unclear. By measures like how much of the economy the state controls, and definitions like the ones you get at Google for socialism, France is obviously socialist. In fact, by those standards, even the French right (and probably the far right) is socialist.
If you read Robert Tressell's book, you come away with a different definition of socialism. Tressell's socialism is a system essentially void of ownership, based on a utopian core of working together, sharing, true democracy, rational governance. It's not clear whether we could ever reach such a system, but what I meant to point out was that we definitely cannot reach such a system by electing representatives to bring it about for us.
Posted by Mark at 10:43 PM
Red Hat buys our old server code, part II
Red Hat's VP of Engineering claims they needed ex-Netscape products to do stateless Linux and virtualization.
Maybe they are further behind Sun in blade computing and N1-style virtualization than I noticed.
Posted by Mark at 02:15 PM
October 03, 2004
Crowds
After rereading Poe's story about The Man of the Crowd, I wondered about the quote from La Bruyère at the outset.
How would I react to the noisy social dimension of real democracy? Would it feel even less private than what we have now?
Posted by Mark at 08:33 PM
Hardly socialist
Robert Tressell's book, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, has a passage near the end where Barrington explains Socialism to his colleagues as they wait for the rain to stop falling so they can finish painting outside.
Tressell seemed to suggest workers voting for Socialists would bring Socialism. Eventually, the representatives would replace the current system with a new one.
The French have elected lots of Socialists. You might think France would have a Socialist system. The Socialists did nationalize a few things once upon a time. Tressell wouldn't call it a Socialist system, however. France lies only a bit to the political left of the US.
Posted by Mark at 08:26 PM
Intellectual property, part III
Our boss believes in intellectual property. If I got raises, bonuses, and mountains of stock options under the same conditions he does, maybe I'd believe in intellectual property as well.
What if the foundation of our economy were not ownership? Would we all starve and freeze?
Posted by Mark at 08:57 AM
October 02, 2004
Headwinds
While Tim was riding around Fort Barraux, I had a little time to ride as well.
I went over to Pontcharra, and was going to try to ride north along the river. That proved to be a dirt trail. Not compatible with my bike.
So I rode over to the roundabout at the lake in La Rochette. Unfortunately there was a headwind coming back, so the cars passed me going downhill.
Then I took the road from Pontcharra out through Laissaud and up to Montmélian. Had some headwinds there.
But the heavy headwinds were going north from Montmélian up to the roundabout where you can turn left to go through Les Marches. That stretch is also slightly uphill, though not as much as the ride out to La Rochette. So although I had plenty of ventilation, I didn't cool off.
The hill up to Les Marches almost felt easy by comparison, and I stayed near the same gearing as the slight, but long rise from Montmélian, except near the crest. The only part of the ride where I got really to fly was from Les Marches down to Chapareillan.
From Chapareillan, I went to pick Tim up in Barraux. Now that I've been riding for a few weeks, that hill up from the roundabout at the edge of Chapareillan no longer feels like much.
Posted by Mark at 06:02 PM
Fashion, offroad biking
Emma had a big day today. This morning, her mom took her to buy new clothes. Then they ate together at Mc Donald's... and her brother didn't get to come along! Finally she spent the afternoon at her friend's house. She looks exhausted now.
Diane got her first bottle of perfume -- smells like candy -- and a skirt for winter. She's proud of both.
Tim went for the first 2-hour round of mountain biking club. They rode around Fort Barraux, off the beaten path. He only fell off 3 times, and seems to have enjoyed it immensely. The low point for him today was afterward when he realized Emma had been to Mc Donald's without him. He must've cried for 15 minutes.
Posted by Mark at 05:50 PM | Comments (1)
JDS iWork Client v2.0
Today I did some beta install testing for the new version of Sun's iWork client OS and software for PCs. It went even more smoothly than with the last version.
For this one, Sun IT has worked out issues like network configuration. It's now organized so you don't have to set preferences when you go onto the VPN. You can just browse or use IM without even considering proxies.
Some of us unfortunately cannot do that with mail, yet. (I still have to get on the VPN to get my Sun mail.) There's also a little inconvenience, maybe a bug, whereby my home dir does not get mounted automatically when I get on the VPN, but that's not a big deal.
Getting better all the time. I wonder how many companies around the world are looking at this kind of solution to their PC management problems.
Posted by Mark at 05:44 PM
Absentee ballot
The absentee ballot La Porte county sent me for the upcoming US presidential election arrived in today's mail. It looks like I have three choices for President: Bush, Kerry, Badnarik.
Posted by Mark at 05:33 PM
October 01, 2004
A walk in the forest
Went for a walk in the forest last Sunday with Ludo, Veronique and the girls.
The kids looked glad to be outdoors.
Posted by Mark at 05:38 PM