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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.

bike1-20050928.jpg bike2-20050928.jpg
bike3-20050928.jpg bike4-20050928.jpg

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:

  1. Find the pid for xorg and kill -9 it.
    At this point everything in the session gets lost but I still...
  2. pkill -u <user> to finish off the processes still alive after xorg dies.
  3. 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

album cover 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:

20050924.jpg

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.

book cover 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.

orthotics-20050921.jpg 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.

To the moon and back

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:

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.

20050917.jpg

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

darth-tim-20050917.jpg

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

breakfast-20050916.jpg

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

darth-tim-20050916.jpg

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.

Posted by Mark at 04:09 PM | TrackBack

September 15, 2005

Longer

Like everybody else I tried Google Blog Search, but since I wasn't looking for anything in particular, I ended up two degrees away at an article by Jeff Galloway on how long your long runs should be.

Jeff expects me to peak at 30 mi (48 km) before tapering. Hmm. That's 10 mi (16 km) after the wall. Even if I go slowly, won't that break me down more than it'll build me up?

According to Jeff, you get the benefits just by covering the distance. So walking is okay, even recommended. Jeff writes, "Everyone should take a one to two-minute walk break every two to eight minutes on every long run."

I wonder how many young children Jeff had when he came up with this weekend program, and whether he was getting along with his wife. This sounds a little bit like Matt recommending that I skip most of the long runs and ride the bike instead because on the bike you can go much further than you can on foot, 6 hours instead of 2:30.

Let's face it. Running is good, but it's basically pointless once you do more than about 2-3 hours per week. After that you're not running for the benefits. A max. of 2:30 in training on the weekends is enough for me right now.

Posted by Mark at 09:08 PM | TrackBack

Abraham Lincoln and my legs

Abraham Lincoln was reputed to have responded to the silly question, "How long should a man's legs be?" with, "Long enough to reach the ground."

It turns out my right leg isn't quite long enough. Or maybe my left leg's too long.

Yesterday evening the podiatrist showed me my right leg is slightly shorter than my left, which explains the slightly asymmetric wear patterns on my running shoes. He also wondered if I had back problems, which I have had from time to time.

I used to think backaches came from being too fat and out of shape. Then when I lost weight, I thought it was my bed. Maybe a better explanation is mismatched legs.

The podiatrist is pretty sure he can fix the mismatch by adding a bit of extra thickness to the right orthotic insert of my next pair. Must go to the doctor's tomorrow to get the prescription I was supposed to have to go see the podiatrist, so he'll be able to make me the pair of orthotics. (Securité Sociale paperwork requirements)

Posted by Mark at 08:31 PM | TrackBack

41:29/151

Easy 8 km recovery. Most gnats I've ever swallowed.

Posted by Mark at 04:57 PM | TrackBack

What I understand

Reading does not seem to teach me very much. Part of the problem lies with how passively I read. It feels as though I do not do the necessary work to create a sort of dialog with the text. Should I write in the margins? Shouldn't I run out of space that way?

I have books on the shelf and on my night table where the possible margin markup could go on for a long time indeed. One on my desk right now, La Société du Spectacle, by situationist Guy Debord, has me stumped line after line. What the heck is Guy writing about? Nathalie had a look and told me the difficulty I am having does not stem from weakness in my knowledge of French.

When you have a discussion with someone, it becomes difficult to carry on when she cannot pick up on what you are putting down. Your interlocutor will hint or even state outright that you have gone beyond the limits of communication into monologue. Schooling at some point managed to get around this institutionally by permitting the teacher to blather on beyond the limit, then even assign homework to students in order to check how far they followed, which could explain why children have such a difficult time adapting to the classroom.

In writing I find it easy, even natural, to continue after I have lost the thread or no longer understand what I'm on about. If you have read the unrevised writings of others, you know what I mean. You also know what I mean if you're tried to read Guy Debord. In any case, writing may allow you to figure out exactly what you wanted to say, but it doesn't force you to do so.

Lately realizations appear independent of language. First I understand, then I may try to write down what I understand. Often I find I get lost communicating what intuitively seems fully understood. For instance, I know my way around, but have difficulty explaining how to get from one place to another. In terms of knowing my way around in fact, when I have to explain how to get somewhere, then certainly I do not know the way.

At some level the same holds true for concepts. I cannot recall understanding something in words. Yet everyone I meet with few exceptions (people who have disabilities) can translate their inner thinking into some sort of words at some level. I wonder if Chomsky had the right idea when he wrote about Universal Grammar. Would such an entity be too complicated to work with in practice?

Posted by Mark at 06:41 AM

September 14, 2005

Trying Windows

We have shared laptops at work. I was having a hard time with the stupid little knob in the middle of the keyboard causing the mouse to drift, and was not managing to turn that off in Xorg without also deactivating the touchpad. Furthermore, I wanted to try out the wireless network at work.

So I'm trying Windows. First thing that happened when I got on the network was a virus attack. I guess you do need an antivirus program if you aren't using Solaris or Linux or some other some other UNIX variant.

It's okay, but I wouldn't want to have only Windows. All the good applications of course have to be installed by hand. The default shell is awful. They hide the configuration files in the browser. It's a pretty nasty user experience.

Posted by Mark at 01:56 PM

45:01/159

Tempo run for a bit more than 10 km, starting off with Nigel. After about 15 minutes I started working progressively harder until about 30:00, then backing off gradually to a jog starting at 35:00 until the end. Tomorrow's a recovery day.

Posted by Mark at 01:51 PM

September 13, 2005

Ooops

Sometimes MT seems hung, but I guess it was just the trackback ping that got generated for the last entry. Never really understood those. Maybe I should turn them off.

Posted by Mark at 10:50 PM

Ubuntu, part X

Norm Walsh tried Ubuntu, and it seems to work for him.

He got the VPN up using the open source client. I didn't even realize such a thing existed, and was using the closed source tarball with the config files from our IT folks.

When I set up the open source client, I found traffic getting stuck at port 500. Know I've seen that before...

Posted by Mark at 10:50 PM

42:28/167

10 km of fartlek along the Isère at lunch. Funny that I'll do this same distance tomorrow as speed work (tempo run) and give myself 2 1/2 more minutes to finish. Don't tell my boss I play harder than I work.

Posted by Mark at 02:59 PM

September 12, 2005

27:59/146

Recovery jog with Nigel around the 6 1/4 km circuit. Felt okay, a little guilty for not doing much today. The air was cool, though humid.

Posted by Mark at 05:33 PM

Another flat, part II

On Dana's suggestion, I looked at rear wheels when we made a shopping trip Saturday. I saw one without a freewheel for 39 euros. It looks like I might have to adjust the brakes if I get a wheel of a different sort. Of course I already have to change pedals if I want a sportier ride. My SPDs are not nearly as smooth as the Look pedals that came with the bike.

I also saw what looked like more fun, but is an order of magnitude more expensive. That is getting a mountain bike. The mid range bikes looked sturdy but fun. Bring on the tramway construction, rivers downs mainstreet, glass, etc. I'd be goofing off all the way to work.

There are more responsible things to do with the family's income, however.

Posted by Mark at 06:37 AM

Step back week

This week I only have to run 63 km (39 mi). It's a relief. Rest after training lets the body rebuild.

I need some rest for my mind. Or what I need is mind training, combined with mind rest. Raising children is conducive to a sort of mental exhaustion that doesn't do the adult any good. In school we learned there was a negative correlation between IQ and raising children. In real life we understand why: overtraining your irritation and frustration centers.

Hope Nathalie can get a step back week as they go to school.

Posted by Mark at 06:25 AM

September 11, 2005

Ubuntu, part IX

There is one thing I ought to complain about: Firefox hangs.

Every once in a while, Firefox hangs, Xorg goes into neverneverland and eats up all the CPU cycles doing nothing. I can ssh in from the laptop and kill Xorg to have everything recover, but the only thing I can do on the PC itself is reboot. The keyboard just stops responding.

I cannot figure out why this happens, but it does. Ugly bug.

Posted by Mark at 09:57 PM

More music

Listening to Calogero, who Nathalie had me go see with her back around Emma's birthday in Grenoble.

calog3ro The guy definitely sings better than I do, is richer, better looking, speaks better French. His approach to the music reminds me of Pearl Jam years ago. Not sure exactly what it is, but a sort of smooth effort that lasts through a song.

There's also a sort of decay in there somewhere. Like what happens when you go over your limit in a run and end up hanging on for dear life. Hard to describe.

Posted by Mark at 09:44 PM

Ubuntu, part VIII

Huh? Things have changed since 2.4.21. I thought I couldn't get my CD to burn under Ubuntu last time. sudo cdrecord -scanbus shows only my scanner.

This time I'm less sleepy. Googling to an Ubuntu forum answer by somebody with the handle "skoal," I learned that you don't necessarily need one of those odd SCSI device numbers. You don't need hdc=ide-scsi at boot time. All you need is the regular /dev/hdc style device name and away it goes:

$ cdrecord -v dev=/dev/hdc wizom.iso

So, uhh, how the heck did I just burn a CD as me? Not even sudo. That was very strange, but it worked.

Posted by Mark at 08:39 PM

Four years ago

Nathalie reminded me that it's 9/11 today. Four years ago I was sitting in training. Like most people my first reaction to the news was, "Now that's not a very tasteful joke." It's a real shame it wasn't just a joke.

Posted by Mark at 03:41 PM

Jake rips it up

Andy blogged about this Quicktime flick of Jake Shimabukuro ripping up While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the ukelele. Somehow .mov files don't automagically come up in something that can read them on my home system. Totem must be lacking a Quicktime codec. Anyway I didn't download the thing at first, because it's 28 MB, and I have a slow connection and a short attention span.

In the end I downloaded it. Jake's amazing. I think he forgot the gently part, though. I'm not sure about the weeping either. It's more like, While My Ukelele Catches Fire and Burns the House Down.

Posted by Mark at 03:28 PM

Bizutage

It's that time of year again.

I was half asleep after watching a video -- The Final Cut; I couldn't stay awake -- with Nathalie. Rain was pouring down outside as I drove back from returning the video. A teenage girl comes up to my car:

Can you tell me the way to Saint Marcel d'en Bas?

No, sorry.

It takes me a long time to remember the names of places. Later Nathalie said the kid I talked to wasn't joking. Saint Marcel d'en Bas is up the hill. Not ideally located with respect to the station in Pontcharra, given that it was getting quite late, the rain was getting stronger, and none of the bizuts down there seemed to have a clue or a car.

The bizutage tradition is something I avoided in the US, since I wasn't a fraternity type of guy. I avoided it in France because I went to University. There wasn't enough esprit de corps to abuse each other gratuitously. It's too unscientific and episodic to cause real brainwashing, right? Not nearly as effective as putting people through boot camp, or having them work for a living.

By the time I got home I'd awakened enough to worry that those kids were going to get sick or worse out there. Nathalie said never mind, they'll get out their mobile phones and call someone if it gets too bad, or they'll sleep at a bus stop. And I guess we've all done worse than that voluntarily at one time or another.

Posted by Mark at 10:16 AM

Robin Hood

Nathalie bought the children some used Disney cassettes a few weeks ago. One of those was Robin Hood. Diane still watches a bit of that one every day.

I'm not sure whether Tim's interest in archery came from that, but he finally got his wish yesterday. He got himself a bow and arrow set from Decathlon for 20 euros.

We made a target out of an extra bit of styrofoam insulation and some leftover wallpaper. He's been playing Robin Hood.

What's difficult for him to grasp is that although it's okay to shoot arrows at the target, it's not okay to let them fly over the house, nor is it okay to shoot at birds either in the yard or in the trees. He's been able to hit the target several times in a row from a few steps away. So he decided we ought to go hunting this afternoon in the Chartreuse.

Posted by Mark at 10:10 AM

September 10, 2005

Enemy combatants

Granted if what they print about him is true, Jose Padilla has plotted some nasty indiscriminate killings and is not the kind of guy you want going about his planned business. But if it's true, why don't we charge him with something?

There's an article about the court decision on WashingtonPost.com. It's interesting that our laws led the court to conclude with judge Luttig that:

the President of the United States possesses the authority to detain militarily a citizen of this country who is closely associated with al-Qaida, an entity with which the United States is at war

Presumably they don't have enough to accuse this guy with breaking the law. Maybe it's like that guy that ran from the British police after the bombings there: He looks suspect. They've therefore locked him up for three years. Hey, if you're him, maybe that's better than getting shot.

Padilla was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport in 2002 after returning from Pakistan. The federal government has said he was trained in weapons and explosives by members of al-Qaida.

Al-Qaida. We're not at war with something identifiable by people outside the fighting. Think about that. Everything you know about al-Qaida originated either with either freaks who think blowing up people will make the world a better place, or with people you have absolutely no reason at all to distrust, namely politicians. It's like being at war with the Illuminati.

WashingtonPost.com says only two citizens have been designated as enemy combatants, so I guess there's not much reason to worry. Especially if you're pretty obviously not part of al-Qaida or the Illuminati.

Posted by Mark at 08:04 PM

Music for running

My MP3 player has been nice to have on days I don't have to concentrate on running fast. Both of the albums I've been listening to the most are Nathalie's, and they're both out of date (last century).

Sting's a witty guy. He has some pretty good musicians on Ten Summoner's Tales:

album cover thumbnail

That one's somehow good for forgetting about the run and enjoying the music.

The other one is The Hush by Texas. The musicians are fine, and the music probably used to be trendy, but the main reason is for Sharleen Spiteri's voice.

album cover thumbnail

It's headphone music, better if you can listen carefully. When Sharleen does those things that always sounded a little effeminate coming from Prince, they just sound feminine, infinitely more pleasant than, "My legs hurt," or, "I cannot breathe deeply enough."

Posted by Mark at 11:09 AM

2:32:52/151

Not another soul out running this morning, though I crossed a number of cyclists. It was a nicer morning to run than ride, however. Cool enough when starting out that I felt cold for the first 5 km.

This was the first of three 20 milers (32 km) in preparation for the marathon Halloween. Although I ate breakfast this morning, the last 5 km were still tough. But the pace is within the suggested range, and my heart rate was only about 78% of max. so I guess that's okay. I was running slowly enough to whistle and sing to myself after the battery in my MP3 player went dead.

Posted by Mark at 11:01 AM

September 09, 2005

ML-1610

The ML-1710 driver doesn't seem to be working for the ML-1610 printer. Nathalie got something to printer earlier today. Since then, we've just been getting garbage and blank pages.

It's quite frustrating. Guess I'll have to reset the root password to know what it is just so I can install my printer. Cannot figure out how to do it with sudo.

Right now I cannot even get a test page to print properly... reinstalled the same driver, power cycled the printer and it worked. If only I knew why.

Posted by Mark at 09:13 PM

2:00:31

2:00:31 is the time I spent cycling this week. I'm at 1972.4 km on the odometer, but am running more than I'm biking. This week I rode only 52.53 km (32.65 mi), whereas I've already run about 54 km and still expect to go out for a long run tomorrow morning.

Posted by Mark at 08:59 PM

Stinky

Joanne and I were at a demo of some new functionality in the server this afternoon. She noticed the room stank. I guess it's hard to get everything clean in there.

I told her that was nothing compared to the guys' shower. Even though I didn't wear my t-shirt every day I ran, it still smells like a wet dog. And I'm just one of many guys using those facilities.

Some guy wanted to use the gals' shower because it stank too much in the guys'. Joanne wouldn't let him in. She didn't want him slobbing up the place.

I was thinking about Dawkins's birds later on. If society were dominated by women, would the guys' shower smell better? Would I have to shave my legs, too, and get the little bit of fat by my belly button and on the top of my buttocks, fat that won't go away, liposuctioned? Matt suggested I have that fat liposuctioned off my midriff and injected into my lips to make them more generous and smoochy.

Posted by Mark at 08:37 PM

1:13:37/172

Approx. 16 km (10 mi) relatively hard, with a push at the end. Given how hard I ran, this may have been more than 16 km. Not sure.

I read in Higdon's book on running fast that trained runners can benefit from up to 4 hard sessions a week, so that's my 3rd. It felt okay. We'll see how the run tomorrow goes.

I made the mistake during winter training for the Lyon marathon of running my only 32 km (20 mi) run relatively hard, then not backing off right and not eating enough carbs during the taper. This time I'm not going to use the long runs for running hard, except perhaps 3/1 if I feel really fresh.

Posted by Mark at 05:25 PM

Sport

This morning, with my rear wheel repaired, I felt a burst of energy riding in to work. The nice thing about biking is the sense of speed that you actually are generating through your own power.

Hope it didn't overdo it for my run later today, or for tomorrow morning. Still have 48 km to do this week in two runs this noon and tomorrow morning.

Posted by Mark at 09:55 AM

September 08, 2005

Another flat

As I wrote this morning, I didn't take my bike to work. After dinner I had a look at the flat rear tire.

The hole in the inner tube was one of the smallest I've seen so far. It was small enough that I almost missed it, even when I held the tube under water. Repairing it with a patch turned out to be impossible. The only patches I have are twice the diameter of the 19-23 mm inner tubes.

Hope it doesn't go flat tomorrow. The tire has 3 deep cuts in the surface, one all the way through to the inner threads and two that stopped at the layer of Kevlar or whatever it is that lines the tire. That's why most people who weigh 83 kg (183 lb) don't commute on road bike tires.

Posted by Mark at 09:26 PM | Comments (2)

41:04/148

Felt weak and negative for 8 slow km. Probably from two hard sessions in a row, and not sleeping enough last night. I woke up too early.

Didn't ride to work today either. The weather's fine, but I discovered a flat rear tire when getting ready to leave.

Posted by Mark at 11:12 AM

September 07, 2005

Vpnclient working again

I'd suspected as much. Whatever it was in dnsmasq and maybe ipmasq, everything worked okay when I stopped those before initializing the VPN modules.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq stop
Password:
Stopping DNS forwarder and DHCP server: dnsmasq.
$ sudo /etc/init.d/ipmasq stop
Disabling IP Masquerading...done.
$ sudo /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start
Starting /opt/cisco-vpnclient/bin/vpnclient: Done
$ vpnclient connect ...

After that I could get my work email and so forth. Great.

Posted by Mark at 06:50 PM

37:22/146

Six hill reps of approx. 200 m each with jogging in between. Warmed up before going gently uphill towards Montbonnot and cooled down after coming downhill from Meylan.

Instead of staying on the same stretch of hill the whole time, I used three different hills and only ran the same section once. I'm not sure that's good training, but I didn't feel like thinking about the same section of hill 6 times.

Posted by Mark at 10:02 AM

The closer you get

The closer I get to a really hard workout, the more I want to do something else. From far away, a hard workout looks like a great idea. Aerobic capacity, muscle recruitment, running economy, all of it will improve dramatically as I recover.

Before I set out, the body's signals seem louder than normal: shins and hamstrings tight, back tired, alignment not right, shoe wear has the ankles at unfortunate angles, stomach feels bloated, shoulders tense and anxious. When I get into running, even my heart and lungs feedback stress. My inner voice echoes tiredness. The conscious mind doubts even from its comfortable position.

Quickly after peak speed is reached the whole body is awash in stop signals. That's what top performance feels like. Awful.

You cannot hold top performance very long. But if you do not get injured and you allow your body time to recover, your body and your mind may get better at pushing to higher limits, up to a point. (Note: If you manage to ignore the body for very long, you'll probably just get injured/overtrained and your performance will decline.)

As Tim Noakes observed by studying runners throughout the recorded history of running, those who train and race hard for years eventually suffer from whatever it is, partly muscle damage, that causes their performance to decline. According to Noakes the decline seems to relate less to aging than to some sort of limit in the body's ability to recover. This suggests to me that more gradual improvement, time to relax from training, and more variety might be the keys to higher performance over the long term.

Posted by Mark at 07:46 AM

September 06, 2005

Ubuntu, part VII

After formatting the file system around bad blocks, I installed Ubuntu on the Vaio. Works fine with xfce instead of Gnome, and so do dnsmasq/ipmasq.

Proof is that I'm on DHCP to the PC from the Vaio here writing this entry. All I need to do now is snake a cable further away and I can waste time writing blog entries while Tim plays TuxRacer or Emma plays games at Barbie.com.

Posted by Mark at 10:04 PM

Unproductive time

I'm reading an article at C|Net by Ed Frauenheim in which he interviews Bill Coleman, senior VP of compensation at Salary.com.

Apparently Coleman found surfing to be the primary time wasting activity, with interoffice visits and personal business fairly far behind. The average US worker responding to the survey wastes over 2 hours a day, which is an hour more than managers expect. I haven't looked at the survey itself.

My guess is that estimate is off by a bit for software development. We can spend engineer years doing ostensibly productive work that turns out not to be of much value. You can go into the office and see smart people working very hard at great personal sacrifice wasting time. That's probably true in other industries as well. With the right strategy, the actual waste may be 20%. With the wrong strategy it can be 100%.

One other thing I see in the office is that people waste less time when they believe in what they're doing. Adults are better at smoothing that out, but if you don't believe me have your kid clean his room. Then let him do something he likes. If you try to work on efficiencies in getting the room cleaned, you waste not only his time but also your own.

Posted by Mark at 09:22 PM | Comments (1)

Too broke to split

Fred Clark blogged about an article at DelawareOnline.com suggesting:

People living in the path of Hurricane Katrina's worst devastation were twice as likely as most Americans to be poor and without a car -- factors that may help explain why so many failed to evacuate as the storm approached.

....

Two in 10 households in the disaster area had no car, compared with 1 in 10 in nationwide.

Technically that still leaves 8 in 10 with cars, probably an average of enough seats to evacuate not only the people, but also the pets. Imagine evacuating by carpool.

Posted by Mark at 09:14 PM

Magic fingers

The Register is running a piece about car seats that give your hind end a shake when you appear to be nodding off at the wheel.

Apparently the technology can improve reaction time a couple of tenths of a second. That currently can prevent up to 15 per cent of rear-end crashes. Experts are working on ways to give drivers an extra half a second, thereby reducing "rear-end crashes by as much as 60 per cent."

Kind of makes you wonder how the engineers came up with this idea in the first place.

Posted by Mark at 08:57 PM

1:15:43/162

16 km as a 3/1 run, meaning I ran progressively harder for the last quarter.

It's nice to have an MP3 player for these runs where I only need to concentrate hard for a little while. Not only that but also the combination of Sharleen Spiteri's voice and endorphins completely drowns out the tedium, soreness, and 5000 footfalls per hour.

Posted by Mark at 02:27 PM

September 05, 2005

The Book of Lies

On my bookshelf are a few books so far beyond my reach that I should've admitted defeat before buying them. One of those is Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies.

There's very little I can say for certain about it. Moreover, as I look at my bookshelf this evening, all the jackets seem forbidding, everything from post WW II Hörspiele to Less Than Words Can Say, the latter title neatly describing most of what I write, including what I write for a living.

Crowley apparently first published The Book of Lies in 1913. He wrote, "Do we not find that the most robust of men express no thoughts at all?"

O!

Posted by Mark at 09:05 PM

Traffic jam

Armand gave me a ride home under the rain. We had a huge traffic jam, probably due to an accident, on the stretch between Montbonnot and Crolles. I'd've gotten home faster taking the train. Oh, well. I got to stay at work a few more minutes and send some more email.

I'm thinking about spending a week at work without reading email or going to any meetings. The downside is that after a week like that, it would be hard to explain my normal productivity level. The upside would be that they'd never find out about my productivity. Since I'd be off email and out of meetings, I'd probably cease to exist outside my own mind. Nathalie could pinch me when I'd get home to see if I'm not dreaming. Or I could just check the showers for corpses.

Armand had to pick his daughter up in Chambéry. I told him to drop me off at the autoroute exit, and biked home. He was already about 20 minutes late.

Posted by Mark at 08:47 PM

27:36/144

About 6 1/4 km this morning at a jog. My legs and body feel pretty good after a day off, though they bothered me last night.

Posted by Mark at 12:48 PM

Yelp

Woke this morning with a yelp at about 5 am. Nathalie woke up too. I couldn't explain anything so I didn't try.

As I turned over to go back to sleep, I tried to understand myself. The yelp had come when I turned around in the bathroom where I was standing and saw at least one, possibly several, human bodies hanging in the shower. They'd been deboned, or perhaps deveined.

In any case, the blood had been completely drained from the bodies, and they were opened as if someone intended to use the skins as rugs.

Before I wandered into the bathroom, I'd been at some sort of debauched aristocratic party. They were trying to convince us to drink a sort of highly alcoholic, Eastern European sparkling ice wine. It's not clear whether I was there as a guest or as one of the servants. Some of the guys were definitely gangster types, wearing royal blue robes, very blue eyes.

It seemed they were vampires. My logic said they wanted people to get drunk because although they couldn't drink wine themselves, they could get drunk if the blood they drank had enough alcohol in it.

Posted by Mark at 12:23 PM

September 04, 2005

Rainy days and time pressure

I may have made a mistake buying a train ticket for this week, despite gasoline prices at 1.30 euros/liter. Metcheck.com is predicting rain Monday and Tuesday. Also I have a 86 km week planned, though only one day of speedwork.

At work the stress levels are normal, but the workload is heavy, and will remain so for at least the next few months. Meanwhile I feel inhabitually tired, and now must take the 7:52 am train instead of the 7:00 am to help get the children ready for school.

None of the individual stresses are a big deal, but add them all up and they might be more than I want at once.

Posted by Mark at 08:50 PM

Gift

Gift in German translates to poison in English and French.

Somebody gave Tim a gift like that. It's a book of prints on cardboard that you cut out, fold in spots, and then theoretically glue together to make a fortress. The poison's not for him. He thinks it's great.

Unfortunately he cannot get it off his mind, and he can barely do any of the assembly himself. So if you do "help" him, you get to try to assemble the maddinging small pieces of cardboard yourself while Tim interferes with good intentions, and Emma and Diane try to prevent you from playing with Tim.

Tim's now up here with another piece under my nose as I type.

Posted by Mark at 05:33 PM

Practice

I'm reminded this afternoon why I did so much of my studying at night when working towards the degree in computer science.

Today I got the electric guitar out of its case. The electric guitar doesn't make much noise when you don't plug it in, or so I hoped.

It would be nice to practice 15 min/day with the Leavitt books. I have one of studies and the other on sight reading for beginners. I used to be able to read, though not very well, for trombone. On guitar, I'm at the See Spot Run level. Aural culture won't get me much further than 12-bar blues and imitations.

Soon after I started plunking around, all three of them were lined up in my room. Timothee was telling me how to play. He wanted me to hand over the guitar. Diane was next in line. Emma, who'd been a little late arriving, was screaming that Tim was going to play too long when his turn came around.

In the time that I wrote this, they've lost interest of course. If I dare start playing again, they'll be back.

Posted by Mark at 05:13 PM

September 03, 2005

Back to school, part III

When I came back from running this morning, I expected to have Diane with me. Nope.

She decided this morning that she would rather go to school than stay home. We wonder how long the enthusiasm will last.

Posted by Mark at 10:49 AM

2:20:07/160

This concludes 7 days without a day off, during which I've run about 95 km (59 mi) in about 7 hours. My actuals show the times. I also biked, but only for 1:33:41, since I only took the train Monday and Wednesday.

Dana's done better than that. If I recall correctly, he's done 70 mi (almost 113 km) in a single week. I don't intend to match his record soon.

Today I went out before eating breakfast, because Nathalie needed me back here by 10 am. She's working at the Barraux library this morning. Although I had sports drink during the run, I started hitting the wall about 2 hours into the 30 km jog. The last 5 km were tough.

At the end, I kept thinking about men and women who finish 90 km -- which took me a week -- in one day at the Comrades Marathon. Kind of puts my dinky little standard marathon training plan in perspective.

Here's how much weight I lose temporarily on a 30 km jog. When I got up, I weighed 82.3 kg. Before and during the run, I drank approx. 2 liters of water with about 80 g of sports drink mix. After the run, I weighed 80.3 kg. If you figure I burn about 80 kcal/km, that's about 2400 kcal. Let's assume 1/3 come from fat (about 90 g) and 2/3 from carbohydrates (400 g), so that's a total of 90 + 400 - 80 = 410 g of weight loss that isn't water, or about 3 1/2 liters of water loss. Roughly a gallon.

Most of that ended up in my socks. My feet looked like they'd been taking a long bath. Some of it's still on the seat of my car where the towel got pushed aside.

Posted by Mark at 10:18 AM | Comments (2)

September 02, 2005

Dangerous

According to the BBC News, Venezuela's government is planning to force banks each to allow two state representatives onto their boards. They've also been aiming, "to ensure 20% worker representation in their board rooms."

Seems like they've been getting onto the radar. According to facts from the CIA World Factbook, that might be a dangerous proposition. Venezuela spends 1.5% of its GDP ($1.687 B) on its military. The US spends 3.3% ($370.7 B).

Speaking of the CIA World Factbook, there's an interesting factoid in there about the US under the heading "Illicit drugs:"

consumer of cocaine shipped from Colombia through Mexico and the Caribbean; consumer of heroin, marijuana, and increasingly methamphetamine from Mexico; consumer of high-quality Southeast Asian heroin; illicit producer of cannabis, marijuana, depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens, and methamphetamine; money-laundering center

The whole first part I was ready for. But I'm surprised the CIA characterizes the US as a money-laundering center.

Posted by Mark at 10:13 PM

Paper's a drag

Well, I found an appropriate USB cable at Super U in Pontcharra this evening after work. They seemed to be out of stock. The guy at the counter thought so. But some of their stock was on another shelf next to the printers and scanners.

We bought a Samsung ML-1610, and it was delivered yesterday, but as I wrote, I was waiting for the cable to set it up. The cable and printer work fine.

The drag was that Samsung folks had their driver installation work through a graphical tool that requires you provide the root password. Of course, Ubuntu uses sudo and never shows the root password to you. I think Eric told me OS X does that as well.

So I had to work out the driver thing manually. I didn't manage to do it through the gnome-cups-manager wizard. Ended up selecting the ML-1710 driver and going with that. It works, and I have this sinking feeling that to do better I'm going to have to read a book of man pages.

Posted by Mark at 08:38 PM

Back to school, part II

Nathalie took some pictures of the children going back to school this morning:

20050902.jpg

I think she also took better portrait photos with the old chemical camera.

Posted by Mark at 08:36 PM

Skipping bad blocks

The old Vaio laptop I have seems to have some bad blocks on the disk. Fabio suggested I make a file system that skips bad blocks. For example, with a Slackware install CD Fabio had lying around:

# mke2fs -c -c -j -m 1 -v /dev/hda1

This presumes the disk is already partitioned but nothing's been installed. The command doesn't seem to work with Ubuntu, because there's no badblocks command when you start installation.

It takes a lot longer to make the file system than to install the OS. Everything was proceeding quickly until it got to the bad part of the disk.

Posted by Mark at 05:04 PM

58:21/174

Ran without looking at my watch or heart monitor. Ran hard. With the pace set according to my body, it turned out to be slightly faster than race pace.

I was starting to heat up towards the end. Hope it'll be cooler Halloween night in Grenoble.

Posted by Mark at 03:20 PM

Back to school

Today the children are going back to school. Diane's going for the first time.

I got them started and fed, letting Tim and Emma pick their own clothes. When Nathalie got up she made it clear I'd made a mistake. Guess you have to be dressed snapily for the first day of school.

No pictures, yet. I left for work before she could get their hair combed.

Posted by Mark at 08:37 AM

September 01, 2005

First 100 days

A well tanned Dominique de Villepin was on the news this evening to report on his first 100 days as French Prime Minister. (Now there's a hot news item for the political segment. Can you tell the French political class has been on vacation?) We'd just about finished eating, and the kids were each carrying on separate conversations.

For that reason the only part I caught was that he seems to use hair spray now, and that the unemployed really should get off their butts and get jobs already.

That makes sense. After all, official unemployment recently dropped from 10% to 9.9% while Villepin and the rest of the political class were improving their tans. Good jobs are plentiful now that structural employment issues have been resolved.

Posted by Mark at 09:36 PM

More flooding

I've not been following what's going on lately, but according to the BBC News, folks in New Orleans are having real trouble following the severe weather. Sounds like some people are taking advantage of the situation to steal other people's stuff. And then:

Medical evacuations from the Superdome stadium have been disrupted after a gun shot was fired at a rescue helicopter.

Indeed it looks several orders of magnitude worse than what happened here in Domène and Lancey. Dad sent email about reporters who are already assigning blame to various officials for what appears to be a very unfortunate, but natural disaster.

Posted by Mark at 09:21 PM

Cheepnis

We got the printer this afternoon. They've gone so far to save money it comes without a cable. Hey, you get what you pay for.

I have an extra USB cable lying around, but of course USB has multiple connectors. This was one of those underpublicized features of the standard. As described on the web, the USB committee members learned from the past:

The connectors which the USB committee specified were designed to support a number of USB's underlying goals, and to reflect lessons learned from the varied menagerie of connectors then in service.

One of the lessons no doubt learned by USB committee member companies, such as "Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Microsoft, Intel, and Agere," was that people reuse cables if they're too universal, so it's important to cable manufacturers to have lots of standard plugs and sockets that require the consumer purchase extra cables.

Posted by Mark at 08:59 PM | Comments (2)

Lore of Running

While I wouldn't recommend Tim Noakes's Lore of Running to anyone who has not yet tried to figure out how they can improve running speed, distance, or both, I also don't think anyone relatively serious about running should go without this book.

In over 900 pages, Noakes covers all the key aspects of running from physiology, to training, to what to look for in a pair of shoes. Although he's writing primarily for the runner without medical training, Noakes always references the scientific literature when making an argument he doesn't preface with a disclaimer that this is only his impression after years of running, studying running, and giving runners medical treatment.

Although it's written like a textbook, I find Lore of Running easy and mostly fun to read (for those interested in running). Highly recommended.

Posted by Mark at 09:41 AM

32:37/154

This time was for approximately 7 km. It's an easy day before running harder tomorrow, and then running 30 km Saturday.

Posted by Mark at 09:39 AM

Lining up

Dad sent me mail about getting gas in Indianapolis, Indiana. He went to a place where he could buy gasoline for just under $2.70/gal. There was a line of 50 cars ahead of him when he arrived.

At another gas station, he saw gas advertised at about $3.20/gal ($0.85/liter, which is bit over half what it costs here in France at the current dollar/euro exchange rate). The place selling gas for $3.20/gal didn't have lines.

Since I've been taking the (diesel) train and my bike to get to work nearly all the time for the last few weeks, I haven't bought gas for my car since July. My train ticket for going to work expired last night, however, and I took the car this morning.

Even at 7:00 am we had to line up, going through a section where the folks cutting grass had blocked a lane to bring their machines through. For the rest of the autoroute section, I kept my speed down around 110-115 kph (68-71 mph) max. The limit is 130 kph (81 mph), partly to conserve gas, partly because I've been driving more slowly in the last couple of years. Incidentally, France is considering implementing a 115 kph limit on the autoroute to reduce fuel consumption.

Posted by Mark at 07:36 AM