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September 30, 2005
Ubuntu, part XII
C|Net has another article I read today, this one on Ubuntu.
Quantifying Ubuntu's gains is difficult. For example, it doesn't show up in IDC's revenue charts, since it's available for free, even for those who want installation CDs sent to them.
Yes, they're going to run out of money, or maybe they're going to get some investors convinced free as in beer is one step away from huge financial gains.
I doubt it. But they could leave stuff lying around as a wrapper for Debian installs. Debian's the one we want, as long as it supports the cheap hardware I bought and doesn't take as much patience to install. ("Debian GNU/Linux ... comes with over 15490 packages..." and most of the time I use fewer than 100.)
Posted by Mark at 10:48 PM | TrackBack
Xorg hangs..., part II
... and it could be Mozilla. At least it happened while I was running Firefox. Then I got this in dmesg:
kernel BUG at mm/rmap.c:483!
There's a sort of stack trace after that. What does one do with that?
Posted by Mark at 09:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Looking for work
Nathalie's looking for work now. It's keeping her busy. It's curious to watch and to try to help someone who is clearly competent to do lots of things, but who has been out of the paid work force for so long.
It reminds me of what Joanne said about her fears of starting to work again after her boys grew up enough to go to school. Once she got back in, she realized there's not much to it. But when you're not working it seems so daunting.
At some point I'll be looking actively again. Not that I'd like to leave the team I work with now, but that thorough documentation is going to become a luxury people won't want to pay for. At least not while the people paying are CIOs and folks at that level. Our folks at that level and their folks at that level will figure most useful info can be gleaned either with Google, or somehow through support. It could be made to work, especially the second one. Though I don't know if it'll be easy to make money from that and to slam IBM for doing so at the same time.
Hope Nathalie finds something she likes.
This evening I took the car home because I had to be here in time for Nathalie to go to school for a parent-teacher meeting. France Inter was broadcasting a program of interviews with social workers and employment agents who made it sound like their jobs were mainly to get people off the unemployment lists one way or another. More than one of them claimed the oft-repeated idea that France has plenty of jobs, people just don't want to work, is false, or at least misleading. There may technically be employers who're willing to take people in if they'll work hard under rough conditions in a precarious position far from home at bad hours for a pittance. But those positions are going unfilled.
Most of the interviewees thought the criteria would eventually push more and more people off the unemployment lists one way or another, usually leaving them in dire straits. Hard to see how that might turn around.
Posted by Mark at 09:01 PM | TrackBack
Garbage in, garbage out
C|Net has posted an article about some guy that posted a draft of his article on Wikipedia to prove that lots of eyeballs and keyboards would not fix all bugs.
He posted a crummy, error-laden draft of the story to the site. .... The idea is that, despite the fact that anyone can work on any article, Wikipedia's content is self-cleaning because its community keeps a close eye on the accuracy of articles and, in most cases, acts quickly to fix errors that find their way into individual entries.
Huh? That's like saying open sourcing stuff doesn't work because not all of the projects we started on SourceForge have grown into software industries. Why would the rest of the world suddenly have infinite time to clean up your valueless mess?
Posted by Mark at 02:34 PM | TrackBack
44:34/157
Silly 10 km run before lunch. Jumping, skipping, sprinting, surging, and jogging. Matt has more sinus trouble and so didn't want to run.
Since I got the new bike, I've ridden very hard into work and back home. The heavier, fatter wheels make it more of a workout. The fact that you can, and therefore ought to, look for ways to go offroad also make it more of a workout. Between that and the speedwork this week, I have sore legs.
Posted by Mark at 02:22 PM | TrackBack
September 29, 2005
44:33/149
Tried some cross-country running since I'm thinking about short routes around here at work. Looks like I ran something on the order of 9 km, based on my time and pace.
It's a little damp today in order to enjoy running across the fields. And there are plenty of burrs. My socks are full of them.
Posted by Mark at 09:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 28, 2005
Valence plage
A while ago Roch, Gilles, and I were joking over coffee about trying to guess the new sea level just right and buy a house in the Rhone valley, somewhere like Valence. If you did it just right, you'd have beachfront property in 2050 or whenever.
The BBC's now running an article about disappearing Arctic ice:
[Scientists] say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century.
The trend graphed over the last 27 years makes it look like everything will have melted by 2080 if current trends continue. Yet they show a spike in there in the mid 90s when ice coverage reached the same extent as the early 80s. I guess you have to be an expert to understand the trends in detail.
Posted by Mark at 09:24 PM | TrackBack
New bike
Nathalie gave in and let me buy what I think of as a boy's bike, compared to my man's (road) bike. She said it's her anniversary gift to me. I took delivery today, left my car at work, and rode this and the train home.
They guy who sold it to me said I need to wear the disc brakes in by breaking hard the first hundred or two hundred stops, rather than breaking slowly, a good excuse to get the rear wheel in the air, and skid like somebody Tim's age.
The mud on the front tire in the bottom right photo comes from trying to ride up the trail on the hill in front of the house. The gearing's right for that, but you'd have to be more expert than I am to keep the bike upright on the trail I took. It got so steep and bumpy I couldn't keep the front tire on the ground. And I couldn't keep my feet on the pedals. Had to walk the bike up part of the way.
Decathlon sold me the bike with platform pedals that your feet do not adhere to. I suggested to the sales guy that didn't make sense, but he only wanted to sell me additional pedals or a more expensive bike with SPD pedals. So I took the SPD pedals off the road bike and put them on this one, putting the Look pedals back on the road bike. That makes the road bike even more serious, and (I hope) let's me keep my feet on the pedals of this one.
Actually riding on this thing is hard work on the road, but great fun when you get off the road onto trails. Decathlon hardly inflated the tires for me, leaving them at about 2 bars, so coming home it felt like I had two flats. I pumped them up higher after changing the pedals. Hope everything still sticks when I try that trail again.
Posted by Mark at 08:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
New home
Mom and Dana's offer on the house they were looking at was accepted. So they're planning to move. They've lots of work ahead getting the house ready for sale, then moving all their stuff. But I guess the biggest decision has already been made.
Posted by Mark at 08:49 PM | TrackBack
37:09/157
That'll teach me to do sprints the day before I'm supposed to do hill reps. Couldn't maintain the intensity from the sprints yesterday with Matt. Never got my heart rate above 183 as far as I could tell, and the 7 hill sprints were tough.
Posted by Mark at 02:37 PM | TrackBack
September 27, 2005
48:05/157
Matt and I only did 10 km. But we ran hard for part of that. The first 2.5 km took us 9:15, then we jogged for a while. As we came back we did three intensely hard sprints. Last one raised my heart rate to 191 bpm according to the monitor, three beats shy of my theoretical max.
Posted by Mark at 04:01 PM | TrackBack
Ubuntu, part XI
After some fiddling with xorgconfig, I got Xorg functioning on the laptop from work. For some reason the Debian X configuration program didn't associate the Trident video card with the trident driver by itself, perhaps because the particular card in the laptop is something called XP4m32, which isn't in the database. As Gilles said of laptops, the hardware's just too specific.
The internal wireless hardware is recognized out of the box, but I have no wireless network at home, so haven't tried to configure it.
Whoever said "Go" for that annoying little blue mouse nub in the middle of the keyboard needs to review the test plan. Ostensibly that thing is so you can use the mouse even if you cannot figure out how to use a touch pad. (In other words, it's useless even from a design point of view.) In fact it's there to send the mouse pointer in random directions firmly to the edges of the screen so you get to use X without a mouse.
Under Windows Ludo showed me where to look to deactivate the blue nub. Need to Google for the answer in Xorg terms.
Posted by Mark at 06:48 AM | TrackBack
September 26, 2005
Xorg hangs...
...and it seems to be related to something in Mozilla. That bug I found still seems to be stuck in assigned. Red Hat was telling people to upgrade.
Xorg hangs fairly regularly when we're using Firefox or Thunderbird. I get a situation where Xorg is eating up 99.x% of CPU time according to top. Usually I can plug a laptop in and dhcpd still responds, so the laptop gets a connection and I go in over ssh to clean up.
Cleaning up means:
- Find the pid for xorg and kill -9 it.
At this point everything in the session gets lost but I still... pkill -u <user>to finish off the processes still alive after xorg dies.- If gdm doesn't take give me another login screen, kill any extra gdms, and
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart.
Regularly when xorg dies from an abrupt kill, Gnome display manager gets confused.
The painful parts of this are not only that you lose whatever you were doing, but you also have to get a laptop out and boot it just to do the maintenance.
Mr. Bones suggests commenting out Option "RenderAccel" "true" in xorg.conf. I'm going to try that.
Posted by Mark at 09:54 PM | TrackBack
Running club, part II
I finally went and got a map. My plan is to trace out some shorter routes using the map wheel and set up a schedule. Would be so much easier if Google had better maps in France.
There seem to be lots of us who could use a couple of runs a week. With an additional bit of exercise, it should get you into the minimum maintenance neighborhood (30 Cooper points). That's what I'm going to plan anyway.
Lana's in town. She says we all look older. Said she and Stu went to a film with Larry, and that Larry's working himself to exhaustion. Called Stu Saturday afternoon at around 6 pm to check the show time to see what was the latest time he could leave work.
Larry probably has nightmares about business angels coming to take his soul as collateral.
Posted by Mark at 08:57 PM | TrackBack
41:32/147
8 km recovery run with the new orthotics. There's something strange about having both legs the same length. No blisters or anything like that, however.
Felt quite tired today. Good thing this is a step back week.
Posted by Mark at 01:55 PM | TrackBack
September 25, 2005
Dazed and confused under suexec, part II
Found some old mail from my brother to a FAQ at the place hosting this site. It of course explains the whole thing with suexec and having permissions like:
$ find . -print -exec chmod go-w {} \;
It would be nice then if my umask were not 0002. That means any time I unpack a tarball all the CGI file permissions are going to be wrong by default. The only one there sharing my group is my brother anyway. I wonder why I have to be so worried about that. Is it easier to crack our group than to crack our passwords?
Posted by Mark at 06:02 PM | TrackBack
Craig & Son (& Daughter) lawn care
It was supposed to rain here this afternoon. So far it has not.
At 9 am this morning I was out mowing the lawn. When I made it to the back yard, I had one helper, then two. First Tim came out. He's getting handy with the mower, and can do a whole row by himself. I have the video to prove it.
When Emma saw her brother mowing, she decided she couldn't be outdone. In the end, she did more rows than her brother. She also overcame her fear of the loud mower, although she found it a little bit harder to stay on the row. There were a few rows where the cutting of the grass itself took a back seat in the overall effort to keep the mower moving across the yard. She's proud of what she did, though.
Posted by Mark at 05:36 PM | TrackBack
Music for running, part II
Still cannot tell how to determine what to listen to in advance. Make a Jazz Noise Here, disc 2, seemed to work pretty well at the end of a long, exhausted run.
At least Frank doesn't say anything meant to sound encouraging. There's a point near and after the wall where encouragement just sounds fake, especially coming from encouragers who are safely immobile at the side of the road. This is not to say I invite discouraging words. I'm just saying I'll hear whatever you throw at me with a sort of distorted social perception, and will only recover my normal sociability after I stop.
Posted by Mark at 07:14 AM | TrackBack
Recovering
Last night at 9:10 pm I couldn't read anymore, so I turned out the light, got under the covers and fell asleep. Woke up first when Tim came into our bedroom complaining of a stomach ache, but rolled over to sleep again quickly after that. Nathalie told me last night I looked ill.
This past week I guess I went near the limit of how much exercise and work stress I can handle simultaneously. Did manage to let email slide for the most part. Was thinking of adding to my .signature, as a sort of disclaimer, "If you said it to me orally or in email, I've already forgotten it." I'm tempted to state, "If I cannot find it in our project plan, our bug tracking system, or using Google search, I've already forgotten what you said."
I'd love to keep track of all those little things in my blog, but Jonathan reminded us recently not to share confidential information. Apparently somebody leaked something. I get to leak about 5000 pp. of documentation, but only when we eventually release, if we do. Right now it's confidential. You have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. I think we have to invite you to look. If you really do want to review the Directory Server docs before they're fully baked, send me mail at work (first dot last at sun dot com) and I'll see whether it would entail so much legal work that it's not in fact possible. You'd probably need to be invited into the customer acceptance program or whatever it's called. (I promise not to forget what you write until I have it somewhere I can track it, and hope this has been a sensible way to share unannounced company information.)
Anyway, I'm recovering. Not so sore, but still tired. I finally got up a while after 5 am, which was 8 hours. The odd thing that happens to me after a 20-miler or further is that my digestive system seems to slow down. Doesn't get back to normal until the next day. Yesterday afternoon I had occasional heartburn. All that banging on the heels must throw the insides slightly out of whack. I don't know how those folks running 100 miles per week do it.
Posted by Mark at 06:39 AM | TrackBack
September 24, 2005
2:27:56/141
Dead legs. This morning's 32 km (20 mi) run was hard from the very start. Nathalie said I looked tired before I went out. I felt cold, listless, stiff. The view's nice, though. Here's the Chartreuse side:
Didn't quite hit the wall today. That may have been due to the bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar and frozen cherries at 7:00 am before running at 8. Felt like stopping at only about 20 km, however. My time appears to have been about 5 minutes faster than two weeks ago.
Posted by Mark at 03:52 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 23, 2005
3:09:00
The biking during my commute for four days this week amounted to 80.16 km in 3:09:00. So the average speed was 25.4 kph. But I'm generally either over 30 kph or for, all practical purposes, stopped.
This evening the students were going back home. Our train was so packed I could hardly board with my bicycle. The aisles were full of seated kids.
Right as I came through, some guy from the SNCF was passing out 1-page surveys. I had my hands full of frame and handlebars, so didn't take one. The girl next to me in the corridor was writing what seemed to be an angry note in the comments box.
True, the train's been late a lot in the evening, especially up to the middle of this week. The SNCF seems to be replacing the rails around Domene and Lancey. Between the flood and the tramway construction, they're falling behind between Grenoble and Brignoud. I can understand everyone's frustration. The flood days would've been even more frustrating if I had no car to take.
As it stands, I'm still glad to get the extra exercise and the time to read or relax while somebody else drives.
Posted by Mark at 08:39 PM | TrackBack
1:07:09/174
A disappointingly slow 16 km (10 mi) run considering how hard the last 1/3 felt. I was aiming to run the distance in 1:08:16 or less, so I did manage that, but it should've been easier. Maybe I'm just tired. Pedalling in this morning, I felt like my legs were weak. Same thing yesterday.
Despite those setbacks, I may have managed a world record nevertheless. Most gnats stuck to a single human being after only about an hour outside. There were literally hundreds of gnats stuck to the front of me. Got one or two in the eyes. Not sure, but I may also have inhaled a few. I was definitely spitting them out all along the river bank.
Posted by Mark at 02:33 PM | TrackBack
September 22, 2005
Bad for you
The BBC News is running an article about the dangers of smoking even a little bit.
Apparently earlier studies didn't find significant health risks from "light" smoking (up to half a pack of cigarettes a day). The study in question, lasting from 1970 to 2002, did however find some nasty results for light smokers:
Among women, smoking one to four cigarettes daily increased the chance of dying from lung cancer almost five times.Men who smoked this amount were almost three times as likely to be killed by lung cancer.
Nathalie and I are lucky not to be smokers. It's already tough for smokers to stop. Seeing that cutting back won't save you, that it's really all or nothing, must make it that much harder.
Posted by Mark at 09:23 PM | TrackBack
La Société du Spectacle
Ouf.
Getting to the end of La Société du Spectacle was straightforward. I just kept going through the fields of words I could pronounce and recognize without understanding. Debord might simply turn up his nose and mutter something about ces dupes who haven't even read Hegel, much less understood him.
I gradually realized my reading was simply to fill time, the mental equivalent of watching television or getting drunk. Certainly Debord wouldn't have written in that stupor. He was aiming to make sense, or at least to get a leg up on other guys who read Hegel and thought they understood it, at least well enough to make the appropriate vocalizations.
It seems like there's more to it that that. Mathematics exposes findings by starting with a defintion of terms, then a logical argument, to arrive at a conclusion consistent with the definitions and the rules of formal logic and of earlier conclusions based on the same approach. When properly applied, the mathematical approach leads to conclusions you can count on within their context.
Much of the real crap I read looks like a caricature of mathematics. The worst of it usually starts with reams of definitions. The author redefines the world as much as possible instead of describing the existing world as economically as possible. Then woolly and jargon filled argument attempts to lead from the multitude of definitions to pithy, but perhaps unjustified conclusions.
In fact you cannot necessarily put your finger on exactly what was wrong or right. Allez, au hasard :
Le temps pseudo-cyclique consommable est le temps spectaculaire, à la fois comme temps de la consommation des images, au sens restreint, et comme image de la consommation du temps, dans toute son extension.
I don't own an authorized translation, but let me try to render that as: "Pseudo-cyclical, consumable time is spectacular time, both as time for consuming images in the restricted sense and as a representation of the consumption of time in its fullest extension." It reminds me of a book I once tried to read, The Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey. Reviews are rave at Amazon. Gee, this stuff must be good because somebody else says it is.
Posted by Mark at 08:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
BIOS problem, part II
Hmm. That was 7 times in a row. After the first 4, I quit doing resets and turned everything off. The last three times Xorg seized up almost immediately after the start of the session.
Now I've turned the printer power off. So far that seems to have worked. Strange.
Posted by Mark at 08:12 PM | TrackBack
BIOS problem
Something's not right since I plugged the printer in. Every few boots, the PC goes batty before I even get into the system, when the BIOS is still taking inventory. The screen gets all messy and everything hangs, even before grub starts.
I wonder if there's something funny about the USB setup I have. Not sure how to debug it.
Posted by Mark at 08:04 PM | TrackBack
Huh?
A less well garnished version of Luke & Rob's whiteboard. See huhcorp.com.
Posted by Mark at 05:58 PM | TrackBack
45:29/140
Easy 8 km recovery run with Jerome. We were talking about planning a couple of short runs a week and publishing the distances, routes, and dates.
Our idea is that other people at work would like to come out and run, but don't want to go necessarily very far or very fast. People have said that to me. Other people told me those people don't want to run with me while I'm training for a marathon.
Posted by Mark at 05:55 PM | TrackBack
September 21, 2005
EU constitution, part VI
The BBC News is running an article, EU admits constitution is on ice, in which they quote the European Commission President as saying he doesn't expect to see the EU constitution go through soon.
The Commission spent Tuesday "brainstorming" at a chateau in southern Belgium about the future of Europe.Mr Barroso insisted on Wednesday that the EU should not be nostalgic for the constitution, but should make the most of the existing treaty framework.
In a democracy if people don't vote the way they're supposed to, the best thing for the elected leadership to do is ignore the election results. Paying any attention to the people you theoretically represent is a complete waste of time.
Posted by Mark at 10:08 PM | TrackBack
Master of my tiny world
No real writing today, except email that'll potentially get lost. That's often what happens when you send something that could cause work for someone else, even if it's legitimate.
Instead, I wrote shell scripts and Makefiles to package man pages, making them easier to install. (Thanks to Christopher for his suggestions. It's great having your main customer right down the hall.) If you don't know what a man page is open a terminal window and...
$ man man
That's actually supposed to be a sort of UNIX joke. If you cannot open a terminal window, you no doubt do not need to know what a man page is. But you're probably missing the key feature of UNIX, which is a special brand of humor.
After that I worked out (with Eric and Armand, mainly Eric) much of what we need to know to be able to do online help with the doc tools in use at work, so we can also use those tools to localize it. I was muttering under my breath about our convoluted way of handling things, how tough we sometimes make things for the user.
Eric said something edifying at that point, "Solaris isn't an OS. It's an API."
That's actually literally true, because that's what people are buying. You get Solaris, and the API is stable in a rock solid way. It's so stable that you can generally just upgrade the system and all your applications will continue running, as will all your scripts. Not like GNU/Linux distros, where you expect your applications to survive to the next update only if you check everything or use only absolutely de facto standard stuff.
Of course that's a big pain in the keister... for the developer underneath the API. Developing underneath the API is like having unprotected sex. Lose continence for a moment and you pay forever after.
The "master of my tiny world" idea is the feeling of working in shell. You issue commands, one after another. That's all you do. And the system just executes whatever stupid orders you give it. It's worse than a cynical employee, because even a cynical wage slave won't just take any stupid idea you have to its logical conclusion, no matter how many important files are destroyed.
Posted by Mark at 09:16 PM | TrackBack
New orthotics
Today I had some new orthotic inserts finished. The three primary differences with these are the soft heel center to allow shock absorption in my shoes more than my feet, the built up area behind the balls of the feet to rotate more weight beyond the balls of the feet onto the toes, and the raised right heel to equalize total leg length.
The podiatrist reminded me that I need to get used to them gradually, so I might not run in them right away. I don't have any runs shorter than 8 km (5 mi) until mid October though so I'll try them for that length next Monday. My hope is to be able to use them in earnest starting next week which is a step back week.
The podiatrist molded these inserts right onto my feet. He heated the basic orthotic assembly on a machine that pulls them together as they heat by vacuum pressure. Then he puts the orthotic inside a plastic bag, ties that onto the foot, positions everything, and has a tube to generate a vacuum inside the bag. You wear the warm othotic until it cools in the shape of your foot. After that he finishes the job, cutting, grinding, adding the raised heel, and so forth.
So far they feel okay, but I've only walked around the office and home for a couple of hours.
Posted by Mark at 08:42 PM | TrackBack
50:00/166
Tempo run this noon. I had the wrong shirt and got too warm. Ran between 11-12 km I guess.
Posted by Mark at 06:22 PM | TrackBack
September 20, 2005
Back to the moon
The BBC News has an article about NASA's plan to send people to the moon as a first step to put people on other planets.
It looks like they're using the same models they used before I was born. Either that technology was pretty good when they first came up with it, or else they're not spending much on the sexy new look.
Posted by Mark at 08:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Overwhelmed
We're at a point in the project where I've become a bottleneck again, but it's a great excuse to focus on the work. Writing, scripting, playing with the latest builds, all things much better than email, meetings, slideware and stuff like that.
Unfortunately I seem to get much more of the latter than the former. The higher you go up the ladder, the worse it gets. By the time you take a Director's job, you do nothing interesting any more at all.
Posted by Mark at 08:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
1:12:58/164
Chilly fall weather, helped me remember I forgot tape for my chest. This was roughly 16 km, maybe a bit more. Felt cold and tired most of the time.
Posted by Mark at 02:43 PM | TrackBack
September 19, 2005
Blackhole in time
Email. Get near it and it sucks time in. How did we ever decide it was such a good thing? It could be worse, though. We could still be stuck with telephones only.
Posted by Mark at 10:44 PM | TrackBack
MovableType upgrade, part II
3.2 seems to build faster that 3.1x now that I've turned on dynamic whatever it is. It really makes a difference. If you do use MovableType, upgrading to 3.2 seems to be a good idea.
Posted by Mark at 08:56 PM | TrackBack
Fall, part II
Nathalie turned the heat on in the house today. I zapped my watch by pulling a polar fleece top off too fast.
On the way home I got rained on. Cold knees. This is definitely fall weather. Nathalie told me the weather report said there might even be frost in some spots.
Posted by Mark at 08:43 PM | TrackBack
39:08/153
8 km recovery run today. There were a couple of times I felt like running harder, but then this is a 90 km week. There'll be time to run harder.
Matt said he'll be out running with me. Apparently he bet some friend he could beat him in the half-marathon on Halloween.
Jerome and I realize we're too late to set up an official running club, so we may set up an unofficial one. It's probably up to me to suggest a first meeting.
Posted by Mark at 01:10 PM | TrackBack
Fall
Sunup at 7:33 am, 10 C (50 F) when I set out to take the train, gray morning under clouds and mist. Had to wear tights instead of shorts. Early fall seems to have arrived.
Posted by Mark at 10:15 AM | TrackBack
September 18, 2005
StyleCatcher nevermind, part II
It works after I upload the themes. Always wanted to have a black web page, so it'd look like I play a lot of video games. (Folio theme from the styles library)
Posted by Mark at 10:01 PM | TrackBack
AdSense makes sense?
Good grief, it seems to be showing up more and more. AdSense on your blog? Does Google have so much money from selling stock they can pay people to post blog entries?
Posted by Mark at 05:42 PM | TrackBack
StyleCatcher nevermind
Seems like I've run into whatever Jason Lefkowitz encountered. I've gone back to all defaults in an attempt be download the styles, but nothing doing.
Shucks, I guess I'll have to figure out manually how to download a new, gaudy style each day.
Posted by Mark at 05:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
MovableType upgrade
Just upgraded to 3.2. Must've been the permissions thing last time. Seems to have gone okay.
Posted by Mark at 03:32 PM | TrackBack
The Daily Drucker
Dad gave me an survey of Peter Drucker's work called The Daily Drucker.
I had a tough time getting started, as the book has these annoying action points after each of the daily Drucker readings. Of course the actual texts from Drucker are all quite good. Even if you don't necessarily agree with his editorial line, you cannot deny Peter Drucker's capacity for seeing the big picture, usually at the expense of some generally accepted banality that doesn't fit the facts.
A moment ago I finished the 15 February reading, "Salvation by Society," in which Drucker wonders what comes out of the collapse of Marxism. I guess he wrote that when it was happening. Drucker sees people casting around for another savior from outside, but hopes the collapse, "May even lead ... to a return to individual responsibility." As in other cases, it appears many of us still haven't caught up with the management guru's hopes.
Posted by Mark at 02:57 PM | TrackBack
Street sale in Barraux
Nathalie's working at the street sale. Has been there this morning since 4:00 am when Michel and I went with her to set up tables and chairs.
Later we took Colette and the children. Emma bought a mechanical braiding machine. Tim bought a small pinball machine and Star Wars trading cards. Diane got three very large books. Michel was reading from Sleeping Beauty. Diane's sleeping herself now.
I'm exhausted, so Nathalie must feel even more so. I'm supposed to record the reruns of E/R if she's too tired to think about that this evening.
Posted by Mark at 02:54 PM | TrackBack
Software glitch weekend?
Firefox and Xorg did their thing and hung everything a few seconds ago. I couldn't even get and address from the DHCP daemon on the system to be able to go in there and kill Xorg.
Maybe I shouldn't be playing with any software this weekend.
Posted by Mark at 02:52 PM | TrackBack
Dazed and confused under suexec
Okay, I'm back. You may not have noticed, but I tried to update to MovableType 3.2.
Everything just broke. It appears there was a problem with who ran what. At least that's what's fixed it. I finally found warnings about all that in the server suexec doc. Everything was set up as my user, and my brother's user, which I guess is our real sys admin, is the identity the server's taking.
Couldn't the server just tell me that in the logs? This message is not exactly edifying to the vulgate:
Premature end of script headers: /path/to/test.cgi
This can mean, AFAIK:
- You've put a DOS file on UNIX or vice versa.
- There's a bug in your script.
- Suexec doesn't like the permissions you've set but is too secretive to let you know directly.
- Something even more mysterious is wrong.
What I really do not understand is that I had the same ownership and permissions as I have on some CGIs I wrote and the other ones work!
Security through obfuscation? What happens when a smarter fool comes along?
Posted by Mark at 02:23 PM | TrackBack
September 17, 2005
Another flat, part III
Road bike tires are usually built to weigh little and translate as much of your pedaling power into forward motion as possible. They're susceptible to cuts.
My rear tire has 3 of these kinds of cuts. Underneath is a layer of Kevlar. Yet I decided to change the tire today in case the recent flat was due in part to gravel, sand, or glass getting inside one of the cuts.
(Yes, I do bite my fingernails.)
Posted by Mark at 08:28 PM | TrackBack
Chinese economy
The BBC News is running an article about the OECD report on the Chinese economy. According to the article:
[The OECD] predicts that China will overtake most Western economies in the next five years.
Presumably that's not on a per capita scale yet. Interesting.
Posted by Mark at 05:50 PM | TrackBack
Dark lord, no chocolate sandwich
He's gone over to the dark side but we had to take several photos to avoid seeing unbrushed hair sticking out from behind the mask.
Posted by Mark at 11:16 AM | TrackBack
Cynismes
Read Michel Onfray's Cynismes out of curiosity, and because I ought to read more French. Onfray's book was easy for me to read although I know little about ancient Greek philosophy.
Diogenes of Sinope and other Cynics after Antisthenes had "great disdain for the ... artificiality of much human conduct." (Source: Wikipedia) Onfray draws parallels between what those philosophers are reported to have said and done, and how we perhaps ought to let ourselves speak and act these days.
When I was 12, I probably would've loved Plato's Republic. Now that I'm 35, stories about Diogenes appeal to me. When I'm 58, will I be back to loving the Republic? Probably. I'm already far too lazy to bring my life into line with what I recognize as right and wrong.
Cynismes tells the stories of a few philosophers who didn't give in and conform, be the best they could be, obey, or align with management. Looks like an honest way to live, but a very hard way to live. I wonder how Onfray's doing.
Posted by Mark at 10:59 AM | TrackBack
2:22:27
2:22:27 is the biking part of my commute time for 3 days this week. That's a total of 2032.8 km since I got the odometer hooked up.
I'm not nearly as much of a biker as Dana, more of a runner right now, as shown by my actuals updated for this week.
Posted by Mark at 10:55 AM | TrackBack
1:33:25/143
This morning it rained before I went out. The weather was quite chilly in Pontcharra. Good weather to run long, but at a faster pace. I was just taking it easy for this step back week, 19.6 km (12.2 mi) longer run.
Some guy from either Mentor Graphics or Euromaster came up to me in the cafeteria yesterday, saying his team was looking for another guy to run a 24-hour relay this weekend. I told him I couldn't this weekend. Not only am I saving my energy for Halloween and have to help Nath and Barraux Bouquine, but also I need more than a half day's notice to psyche myself up for 40 miles of running over a 24-hour period.
He said his best time for the marathon was 2:42. Pretty good. I'll probably never be able to do that. Might be fun to go out and run with those guys, however.
Posted by Mark at 10:48 AM | TrackBack
September 16, 2005
Anonymous
On Darren Barefoot's blog was a link to a long article about how to disappear from your old life in the US.
Why is it interesting? Why does that cross the mind every now and then? We already live more anonymously than most people on the planet. I guess we feel overly watched. That and living mainly in situations where you feel you're only in charge to the extent that people higher up have forgotten about you, it all leads to a fascination with hiding out.
At work our CEO once was quoted as saying, "You've got no privacy. Get over it." To some extent, I have. But then I'm in a relatively anonymous situation, although I leave so many traces all over the place that anybody with an Internet connection can find me instantly. The key is being in plain sight but completely uninteresting to anyone who doesn't either live or work with me.
The best way to vanish is not to appear in the first place.
Posted by Mark at 10:07 PM | TrackBack
Rain to put us to shame
Andy and Sonja live on Kauai. Places on the island got a foot of rain. Around their house, they average 5 feet/year. From the look of the fronds in the background, they haven't been getting enough lately.
Posted by Mark at 08:54 PM | TrackBack
Picnic breakfast
This is what Nathalie woke up to. Emma had decided they should picnic in the living room for breakfast.
Posted by Mark at 08:52 PM | TrackBack
Dark lord with chocolate sandwich
He's headed over to the dark side of the force, but not until he drinks his milk.
Posted by Mark at 08:50 PM | TrackBack
High blood pressure
This morning I went to see my doctor to give him the podiatrist's prescription for the orthotic inserts and get my doctor's prescription. It's worth it to me, because it enables me to get reimbursed. (In this particular case it costs the Sécu, my insurer, and me extra money and time, but the idea is that in the general case in France, you always go to your doctor first before going to a specialist to save money overall. The system of course runs huge deficits because the population is aging and living longer, and therefore needs more medical care for longer, whereas fewer people are paying in compared to the number of people getting reimbursed. But apparently too many people were going to specialists they didn't need to see.)
Anyway, my doctor took my blood pressure, which was 14/7 in both arms. He says that's a little bit too high, but that it could be caused by fatigue. That fits with the quantity of training and work I have right now. Haven't had headaches or anything like that.
Posted by Mark at 04:14 PM | TrackBack
39:38/173
This is the first time I've recorded myself running 10 km in less than 40 minutes. It ended up being hard work.
When I got to the halfway point, I was at about 20:08, so decided to push it on the way back and see if I could beat my old 40 minute goal.