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October 31, 2005

3:41:43/160

Tommy Hendricks used to say if you're going to play a wrong note, play it loudly.

My splits started out okay. At 7 km, I was at 29:19, at 1/2 marathon, 90 minutes. A little slow, but not dire.

Not dire, except for the cramps. At 16 km, I was already suffering, try to relax my feet to keep them from knotting up. At the halfway point, I was fighting severe cramps, the kind where your toes start to curl in and your muscles go into spasms you cannot relax.

I didn't get anything like that in Lyon until nearly the end of the run, probably 20 km later than today. I considered giving up and finishing the half marathon which had started simultaneously, but some child on a bridge above us had asked me at 18 km, "How many kilometers are you running, mister?"

"42 kilometers," I replied.

At 22 km, my legs came to a stop at one point. I got them going again, but was losing time seriously. At 28 km, I was 2:02 already.

At somewhere around 30 km, I could not run due to cramps. At 32 km, I could barely walk. I think 32-35 km took the longest. For minutes at a time, I balanced on the side of the road in immobile agony. I'd already thrown in the towel at that point, but decided the quickest way to get it over with would be to finish walking, maybe jogging. After about 35 km, in a foul mood, I managed to start jogging again, interspersed with lots of walking.

Given the situation with my legs and feet, I never seem to have hit the wall, even though the refreshments were not only sporadic, but also mainly just plain bottled water. I was going too slowly to hit the wall. There's a 3-hour marathon in me. I'm sure.

Next season I'm going to skip the marathons, however, and run only shorter races (5-21 km) instead. 18 weeks down the drain for a few cramps is simply too frustrating.

Posted by Mark at 11:42 PM | TrackBack

Pretty soon now

Time to stop taking liquids. Another two hours and it's time to go. Joanne says she's feeling nervous about it. I'm pretty jittery. Hope I don't get too nervous and try to follow Matt around the first 1/2 marathon, then end up bonking at 25 km.

Posted by Mark at 04:55 PM | TrackBack

Woke up too early

The time change bothered me less yesterday. I woke up too early this morning and couldn't fall asleep again. The thought of running at night didn't bother me before, but now seems like a real drag. At least the weather forecast is mild. Maybe I'll take a nap on the floor of my office at some point.

As I checked out three books for three weeks from the bibliothèque anglophone in le Touvet and didn't do enough reading last week, I'm trying to catch up. I'm not going to make it. But I've started both books that are left.

The first is Pigs in Heaven from Barbara Kingsolver. She's so good at telling a story, but I'm too fidgety to listen right now. Maybe I can renew the book.

The other is The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. He's lucky there are creationists around, since they act naturally to select for survival only those Darwinist ideas that withstand motivated criticism. I enjoy his book, but if he's trying to convince me to convert to atheism, well... I'm not convinced. The longer I live, the more I write, the less convinced I am, period.

None of that shakes my belief in God. I mean, I check myself, "Do I believe in God?" The answer comes back, "Yes." Strange that belief in God doesn't get cut away by Occam's razor.

I also believe there are other people who just as naturally come to the opposite conclusion. They check, "Do I believe in God?" The answer comes back, "No." Still other people must get the answer, "I'm not sure."

It seems that one could apply rigorous scientific method here with secret balloting and double blinds and the whole nine yards, and the statisically significant sample would come back with some believers, some non-believers, and some sitting on the fence. So I'm looking for Dawkins to give up arguing with people over whether there's a God who created everything and instead try to explain how belief in God evolved. But this morning all he wanted to tell me about was eyes and evolutionary convergence on isolated continents.

Posted by Mark at 08:12 AM | TrackBack

October 30, 2005

StyleCatcher nevermind, part III

Jason Lefkowitz's site and mine got upgraded at the same time, because my brother's at the same hosting service. Jason kindly left me a note to his entry:

Turns out that StyleCatcher has problems with old versions of the Perl module libwww-perl (aka LWP). My box was running LWP version 5.64, which is an old version, vintage 2002 — the latest one is 5.803, which is what 6A had been using for testing.

Huh?

$ head movabletype/extlib/LWP.pm
#
# $Id: LWP.pm,v 1.118 2002/02/09 18:45:42 gisle Exp $

package LWP;

$VERSION = "5.64";
sub Version { $VERSION; }

require 5.004;
require LWP::UserAgent;
# this should load everything you need
$

So if they're testing with 5.803, how did I get 5.64 with the upgrade I downloaded from their site?

Library versioning makes all software people look brilliant. It's the software engineering equivalent getting your picture taken while picking your nose.

At least StyleCatcher now sorta works.

UPDATE: Beckett is great. I feel like Wonder Woman with all these stars.

Posted by Mark at 09:31 PM | TrackBack

14:46/170

One last run, something between 3-4 km, before the long one tomorrow night. My actuals now show the times for the last 18 weeks' training.

Posted by Mark at 01:52 PM | TrackBack

Schema Repository, part XIV

Joanne has more man pages to generate from schema objects. At first we thought it was just two pages for attributes, but then we noticed a configuration object class we'd missed, and the two attributes we'd seen were something like two out of twenty.

Joanne would like to go ahead and use my repository, in case we need to touch the whole batch of pages again. Maybe I never should've done something so complicated. But I can still see how this thing could be useful. So in a way I want to work on it.

In the meantime, I'm going to have to explain to her how I hack the LDIF to load into the repository, and how I fix errors afterwards with an LDAP browser, then save the content of the repository to LDIF.

I also need to show how I have a global variable for the repository deep within one of the classes, and out of disgust with doing the job only halfway have left it there, so probably nobody but me can use this thing.

Ah, software! So hard to do anything useful to other people that won't make them want to write it over themselves. I take my virtual hat off to all of you real developers out there.

Posted by Mark at 10:01 AM | TrackBack

Info value increases with sharing

According to Reuters, IBM is linking it's software for enterprise search with Google's desktop search tool. IBM's VP of content management claims the IBM software helps employees get at content that's not posted:

Typically, it is hard to reach inside a company except by trawling through many different programs.

That makes me wonder how much Google indexes of Sun's internal email archives would be worth. At Sun the formula for the elixir of eternal youth is probably right next to somebody's recipe for the philosopher's stone about 8 indentations down in some email thread that nobody can search out because that alias only got archived on individuals' machines.

The expansion of open source software grew with web search capabilities. That correlation could be like ice cream sales and deaths by drowning. Ice cream sales and drownings go up with temperature. Open source and web search usefulness go up with network accessibilty. But mere network access isn't going to result in heavy sharing for all sorts of new stuff. You have to be able to find out about it.

Today it's still often easier to learn about things going on outside the company, because you can stumble over them in a search. There's a tendency to want to protect intellectual property carefully, in the same way you do your financial information or customer relationship data. Perhaps there's a portion of that data in a state where you don't want to share it too openly. (Not sure what.)

But are we really benefitting for example from people posing (and then of course answering) the same question multiple times on widely read internal aliases because they couldn't easily find it with an intranet search? Are we benefitting from people tending to start their own solution to a problem doubtless already solved internally by someone else because they couldn't find it with an intranet search?

The value of the information in these solutions clearly increases with sharing. And those are just two things I can think of off the top of my head with the children fighting in the background and Tim wanting to push me away from the computer so he can use it.

Posted by Mark at 09:22 AM | TrackBack

6:09 am

6:09 am is the time Emma turned on the light in the hall and came into our bedroom this morning. The kids didn't understand that time changed this morning. All of them were awake by 6:28 am. Could be a long day.

Posted by Mark at 09:04 AM | TrackBack

October 29, 2005

Soy vermicelli and shrimp

Nathalie figured we could eat soy vermicelli if I'm carbo loading. These were 60% soy, 40% potato. Very starchy.

150 g soy vermicelli             200 g frozen cocktail shrimp
2 cloves garlic                  2 oz. shitake mushrooms
1 medium-small onion             Soy sauce
1/2 tsp. ginger                  Bouillon
1 jar chop suey vegetables       Cilantro
1 1/2  tsbp. cooking oil

1. Cook the vermicelli and rince them with cold water so they stay separated.
2. Dice the garlic and onion, and the ginger if it's fresh.
3. Heat the wok.
4. Drain the chop suey vegetables.
5. Put the oil in the hot wok and add the garlic, onion, ginger for a minute.
6. Add the shrimp, still frozen, then the vegetables and mushrooms.
7. Season with soy sauce and bouillon, including a tbsp. or two of water if necessary.
8. Add the cooked vermicelli and stir fry.
9. Pour out on the serving plate and sprinkle with cilantro.

Turned out surprisingly good. I only stopped after 2 3/4 helpings.

Posted by Mark at 08:01 PM | TrackBack

Symphony no. 5

Strange melodies from the 5th symphony by a guy with bad eyes. What I like most about Shostakovich's symphony no. 5 is the first movement. You can almost see the violent weather, the rain falling and thunder crashing.

Somehow the whole thing calmed me down quite a bit. I've been running so little lately, and dreaming about bad things happening Monday night. In one dream version, a huge earthquake topples building all along the course. We end up having to stop and help the injured, then run through rubble while trying to make up for lost time. I finish in 4:30.

At the end of the allegro non troppo fifth movement, I was thinking of leaving my watch at work.

Then the loud bit at the end seemed contrived, self-mocking. I wonder why Shostakovich ended it like that. But I didn't wonder long. Diane got up from her nap and wanted me to read Dumbo to her.

Posted by Mark at 03:05 PM | TrackBack

Don't knock 'em, join 'em

This is not a review of the original smear work -- because I'm too lazy to find my login, and BugMeNot.com doesn't do it for me here -- but a sort of grin and shake of the head at the virulent BoingBoing response.

Apparently a journalist named Daniel Lyons's piece called Attack of the Blogs got published at Forbes.com. Surprise, surprise, on the hard-to-completely-censure WWW some folks are saying things about companies, and not all of it is hagiographic. Furthermore, it's not all from the lunatic fringe which comprises about 98% of the Web:

Some companies now use blogs as a weapon, unleashing swarms of critics on their rivals. "I'd say 50% to 60% of attacks are sponsored by competitors," says Bruce Fischman, a lawyer in Miami for targets of online abuse.

Nicely placed free ad, Bruce. (You now owe me part of 1/1660 of $0, which is what my blog is worth.) I agree that you should position it that way, because if it's just customers idly dissing companies who potentially accidentally gave them bad goods or services, there're no deep pockets to sue.

Stepping back, why does this sort of stuff get Slashdotted, BoingBoing'd, etc.? Who cares? I mean, journalists evidently do, because if blogging gets more interesting than journalism, it's going to be hard to keep getting those same writing jobs. Think reality TV, cheaper for the same audience. We'll all have Google ads down the sides.

Companies perhaps care a little bit, because whereas they can count on journalists to censor themselves effectively, bloggers have less to lose (unless they misstep and say something nasty about their own bosses).

So there's potentially some reason for companies to want to keep the gossip under control, especially given how flaky investors can be. Perhaps Sun actually did do the right thing, by encouraging it's own employees to blog about work. Employee bloggers will be sure to censure themselves. Once in a while someone forgets, but it's usually pretty mild, like not being in a complete mind meld with whatever tack management just took while you had your head down, working. Most of the time it's free advertising and page rank. Once you let people go internally like that, you also have a potential army of bloggers saying good things for each malcontent out there. A no brainer.

Posted by Mark at 02:36 PM | TrackBack

October 28, 2005

Jini starter kit with Apache licensing

Integration Developer News has an article about the new Jini starter kit which the folks at work have put out there under the Apache 2 license, on the theory that it makes it easier to contribute to the technology.

Nigel was telling me the other day about the distributed transaction model they have in there. Sounds amazingly cool to have abstracted it out in a way that other software could just plug in, but there's a question still in my mind about how you get distributed transactions to be as performant as possible without undue wizardry. Would actually using the API get the mind tied in knots, like it can with security?

The LDAP model basically says, "We give you best effort, rather than distributed transactions." So the model is loosely consistent, generally returning a response to the client of the service much faster than if it were to guarantee transactions. There are ways then to hide the complexity behind a point of entry to the service, but it still gets very hairy for somebody.

One thing Nigel said to me was that the folks actually coming to the Jini table and wanting real involvement were not first time distributed system builders. In many cases they'd tried and failed before, and now wanted to benefit from a model that had been thought through by experts.

Posted by Mark at 08:25 AM | TrackBack

Boys and misshapen ears

According to Dr. Sax, boys don't hear as well as girls. That's perhaps why the default volume level on my MP3 player is too soft. But the original headphone wire inevitably broke next to the plug, so I bought a pair that clips onto the ears.

Two problems:

1. Whoever's ears served as a model do not correspond to mine. Although the phones fit to some extent, I lose everything below about speaking frequencies, and I the max volume on the MP3 player is barely enough.
2. The phones I bought tend to lose the capacity to play lower frequencies when filled with sweat, making the first problem worse still.

That said, the design of having headphones clip over the ears is the right one. Run with phones that wedge in the ear and you'll start to lose them if you sweat much. But which pair should I have bought?

Posted by Mark at 07:50 AM | TrackBack

October 27, 2005

Halloween haircuts

The three children went in for haircuts this afternoon. Emma was proud of the result. Emma wasn't supposed to get her hair cut, but once she was there she talked the hairdresser and her mom into it.

Tim didn't seem to care much one way or the other. I guess he's given up on long hair like the Jedis.

Their mom didn't notice she had the "Nightshot Plus" feature of the camera on. It gives a sort of Halloween glow to the pictures.

This makes it obvious that I'm not a web page designer, doesn't it?

Posted by Mark at 09:05 PM | TrackBack

$0.00

Posted by Mark at 05:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

20:12/178

The fun run turned into a workout when Matt decided to come along. We chatted for the first 5 minutes, in between breaths, then ran quite hard for a while along the 5 km route.

My heart rate was 193 when we got up the hill, and 193 at the very end. I'm almost over my cold. Probably shouldn't have run that fast.

Posted by Mark at 01:47 PM | TrackBack

More tulip bulbs

In a CBROnline.com article about the base.google.com thing, whatever that was, I read:

Just days before the partial launch, when Base was still in rumor form, eBay's market capitalization lost about $2bn. The company got lucky - Microsoft lost $5.6bn of market cap due to speculation about a non-existent Google service earlier in October.

I want to be able to whip that out the next time someone argues investors are rational.

Posted by Mark at 01:41 PM | TrackBack

October 26, 2005

Letting CIA employees torture people

WashingtonPost.com has an article following up on the Bush administration threat to veto an anti-torture amendment. Apparently:

The Bush administration has proposed exempting employees of the Central Intelligence Agency from a legislative measure endorsed earlier this month by 90 members of the Senate that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoners in U.S. custody.

It strikes me that this sort of thing might go through quietly if it were coming from another administration. The Bush administration is no doubt reflecting something close to the naturally prevailing approach to this area of national security.

Even in the rule of law there's a threat of coercion. Once you build that in, the end always justifies the means, doesn't it? There's a Führerprinzip right in the middle of it.

When I look up fascism in my Gnome dictionary client, I see:

A political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government; -- opposed to democracy and liberalism.

So fascism is, for example, what you have at work. Democracy would be:

Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the people.

Liberalism gets me:

Liberal principles; the principles and methods of the liberals in politics or religion; specifically, the principles of the Liberal party.

The thing is, democracy is also:

Government by popular representation; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained by the people, but is indirectly exercised through a system of representation and delegated authority periodically renewed; a constitutional representative government; a republic.

In other words, it's theoretically what we have. What is the word for a system where coercion is absent? (I think it's anarchy, but the 1913 Webster's didn't like anarchists.)

Posted by Mark at 09:16 PM | TrackBack

Tag URI

Unique, human-tractable URIs, called Tag URIs, are apparently now defined in RFC 4151. If I made one up for this entry, it might be:

tag:mcraig.org,2005-10-26:mark:blog:2

The sticky part seems to be the suffix, mark:blog:2, which could be a lot of other things. How can I make sure that's easy to handle?

Posted by Mark at 01:28 PM | TrackBack

Taking a rest

My schedule says I should go 5 km today, but I have a mild sore throat, and have even felt a little feverish. Also, another fun run is scheduled for tomorrow.

Posted by Mark at 01:26 PM | TrackBack

October 25, 2005

Tough year for new constitutions, part III

BBC News reports the official vote in the Nineveh province as being 44% in favor, so the constitution passes. The victors have the UN stamp of approval.

An interesting aspect of this is the full results by province, at the bottom of the article. Some of the provinces have truly extreme positions in favor or against, 97% to 3% and thereabouts. It leaves the suspicion that after the US pulls military personnel out of the country not everyone is going to be content to settle down and work under this constitution without further discussion.

Of course the editors at BBC News title that, "Iraq voters back new constitution."

Posted by Mark at 08:21 PM | TrackBack

Interpretation

Alan Watts wrote somewhere about interpreting the future from the cracks in tortoise shells. He observed that the wise would in fact gain intuitions about what's coming next from looking at the tortoise shells... by understanding their own reactions to fixed, traditional interpretations.

When PKD created an author who wrote his novel from looking at the yarrow stalks, he seemed to be saying the same thing.

Yesterday the oracle's counsel was perseverance, following rather than leading, K'un / The Receptive. That's the hexagram Faust should've received.

Yesterday I thought I was coming down with a cold. Today I have a slight cold.

Posted by Mark at 03:07 PM | TrackBack

30:28/147

Easy 6 1/4 km for the first fun run. Only Johan came along.

Posted by Mark at 02:24 PM | TrackBack

fortune

When I first tried Slackware, one of the things I liked was the message of the day being a fortune cookie.

You can often get that today from the command line. For example:

$ fortune
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.

It's somehow reassuring that the sys admins didn't forget to install fortune on the SunRay. Prevents you from taking your situation too seriously. I wonder if they avoided installing the "offensive" cookies.

For a twist on this, you can always ask the oracle your question of the day.

Too bad they don't give you the fortune cookie right there when you login.

Posted by Mark at 02:18 PM | TrackBack

October 24, 2005

Tough year for new constitutions, part II

BBC News is running another article about the vote counting in Iraq of the constitutional referendum. According to the article, the attention is currently focused on the Sunni province of Nineveh:

In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, election officials in the provincial capital, Mosul, were quoted by an international news agency as saying the "Yes" vote had won by a huge majority.

Most impartial observers were perplexed and perturbed, the BBC's Richard Galpin reports, as the word on the street seemed to be that the majority had in fact voted "No".

But it was not clear, our correspondent adds, if the "No" voters had mustered two-thirds.

Now the investigations are underway to determine whether proper voting procedures were respected. What's Iraqi for hanging chads?

Posted by Mark at 09:38 PM | TrackBack

Vpnc works fine

If you don't want to have to recompile the kernel to use the Cisco VPN 3000, vpnc seems to work. Two things to keep in mind when using it:

1. You must be root (or sudo) when playing with your network interfaces, and so you must be when using vpnc.
2. You must open port 500 to isakmp UDP packets when you connect to the VPN.

I Googled for "cisco vpn itables" and found what I'd forgotten since I read Cisco's install doc for the VPN 3000 client.

Let me know if you want my conf or script to use vpnc.

Posted by Mark at 09:19 PM | TrackBack

23:17/157

5 km starting off with Jerome then doing the second half alone. I ran three hard repeats between 300-500 m. Highest heart rate I noticed was 191.

Posted by Mark at 02:12 PM | TrackBack

October 23, 2005

Bandage

Diane has a way of leaving her hands in door and drawers, especially when Tim's around. He rarely looks out for her, and the other day slammed her fingertip in the drawer, cutting it badly.

Diane got over it quickly, however. In this slightly overexposed picture, you can see her big bandage.

Posted by Mark at 08:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Unplugging the Gateway 2000 P100

Nathalie and I finally removed the old Gateway 2000 P100 from Tim's room. I bought the computer in early 1996 while I was studying in Strasbourg.

It was a state-of-the-art system at the time, with a Pentium 100MHz chip, 8 MB RAM, a 4x CD-ROM, and a 1 GB disk. It cost probably five times the price of the PC on which I'm typing this entry, although this PC has as much RAM as that PC originally had disk space.

The PC in the photo looks very much like the system I bought, although it's a P200 from Japan and has a tape drive.

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

Produits des terroirs

We went to Chapareillan over Emma and Diane's objections. In the end neither girl wanted to leave. Not because of the gymnasium full of cheese, cured meats, candy, mushrooms, wine, beer, baked goods, etc. from various places nearby and far away, but because they both wanted us to wait in the makeup line, where all the little girls were having butterflies painted around their eyes. It was a long line indeed.

Nathalie took the children on the petit train. The same guy from La Rochette hooks it up to his decorated tractor and tows the kids around for every village fair around here. Even Diane can see it coming from far away. If she noticed that Santa Claus was wearing overalls and a flannel shirt today, she didn't let on.

Both sisters watched their brother try his hand at archery. The local archery club had brought out bows, arrows, and a big target over styrofoam. Tim's first shot almost hit the bullseye. Then he got excited and less accurate.

Nathalie bought 12 bottles of bière du Chardon, the brewery Ludo introduced us to. I haven't been drinking much beer lately, but she wanted to try it. Also we're sure Michel and Dana and maybe my brother Matt will enjoy it when they visit.

Posted by Mark at 04:39 PM | TrackBack

Foundation and Empire

Today despite more interruptions, I managed to finish Foundation and Empire. Asimov's tells a good story, but sometimes I got the impression he was in such a hurry to tell more story that he didn't go back to edit the earlier parts. The dialogs in the second installment of the trilogy that went on to at least six books already started getting on my nerves by page 50.

Somehow it seems I ought to read Second Foundation if I come across a copy, because the whole thing is a classic of science fiction. Is there something that happens in the third one that makes the first two more worth it?

Next up: Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver, which is another title from the Bibliothèque anglophone in Le Touvet.

Posted by Mark at 02:46 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Gcompris, part II

Tim's been playing gcompris. I haven't been able to get at the computer since he started. He's been interspersing bouts of PlanetPenguin Racer, which is the new name for what used to be Tux Racer, the penguin going for bobsled runs on his belly. I also installed TuxTyping and TuxMath, but he hasn't tried them, yet.

Tim likes gcompris partly because it has been localized into French, so he never needs to ask me anything. He started playing with simple mouse and keyboard skills that he already had, on little games like navigating a labyrinth or kicking a soccer ball into the goal. But the latest game consisted of arranging numbers with the four basic arithmetic operations to arrive at a particular number. So he's perhaps doing himself some good.

UPDATE: Screenshot of Tim's game.

Posted by Mark at 02:39 PM | TrackBack

Gcompris

Since wine's hit-or-miss, I've installed something called Gcompris. Tim's going to give it a try. We'll see.

Posted by Mark at 10:04 AM | TrackBack

Bad wine, part III

A CD for 2/3 year-olds works under wine. It's called, appropriately enough, Maternelle : Petite section, with Lisette the duckling as the main character. Emma tried that for a while, but it's too easy for her.

Posted by Mark at 09:37 AM | TrackBack

Bad wine, part II

Tibili won't work under wine, apparently. The only debug errors I see are about missing fonts.

The main symptom comes when I start Tibili.exe under wine. It asks to load a Director movie file. I found one on the CD that's an ad for Wanadoo, the France Telecom ISP. So it runs that and quits shortly after.

Installation proceeded without a hitch. Just doesn't work, that's all.

The same is true for a promotional CD from Danone, who spent a lot of money to sell liquid yoghurt at extortionist prices under the Actimel brand. I'm surprised they didn't get censored for claiming roughly that their product is a miracle cure that let's you eat bad meals and nevertheless stay healthy.

Anyway, wine's missing emulation of a DLL:

err:module:import_dll Library MFC42.DLL (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Equipe Actimel\\JOUER.exe") not found

Changing the Windows environment (W98 instead of the default) doesn't help. I'm sort of stumped. Going to have to tell Emma that I give up.

Posted by Mark at 08:39 AM | TrackBack

October 22, 2005

Hiding from biometrics

You perhaps already skipped over this one that got Slashdotted, but the Visions of Science awards organized by Novartis Pharmaceuticals found some interesting pictures.

This one, called Hiding, shows someone who seems less sanguine about identity management than folks at work. I'm still getting over the fact that I have no privacy.

Posted by Mark at 08:33 PM | TrackBack

Anger management through exercise

During this taper in my training, I haven't been running enough to feel my body's in equilibrium. When I don't get enough exercise, my body chemistry is such that I get angry easily.

I must've been angry from about 1996 when I stopped going to school and started a desk job to at least 2003 when I started running again. You can see it in some of the family videos the kids watch.

The thing is, I need to run on the order of 60+ km (40 mi) per week to start feeling laid back. Overeating can overwhelm my normal body chemistry as well.

Posted by Mark at 08:16 PM | TrackBack

House for sale, part II

It sounds like Mom and Dana are going to move soon. The accepted an offer on their house after only a couple of weeks.

This'll be the first time in a long time that Mom or Dana has lived in a house in which neither Matt nor I have lived at some time in the past.

Posted by Mark at 08:12 PM | TrackBack

Wizards of Money

While running and commuting, I've been listening to music, but also to an old podcast by an actuary who goes by the pseudonym of Smithy. She's done 22 almost hour long episodes of the Wizards of Money, a show explaining how the economy works.

Smithy covers some of the basics, like how money is created, what markets are, how risk is managed, and so forth. She basically delivers the same content as professor Siegel probably does in the classroom, but comes at it from the opposite direction.

The points in Smithy's podcasts are a little harsher than Siegel's, because she's working to convince the listener that the economic system we have leaves some things to be desired, while Siegel's writing for the investor who needs to keep those thoughts "compartmentalized" as Ellroy called it. In the end, it's clear that the very highest returns go to investors who approach the business of making money like a Count Dracula and Charles Ponzi hybrid.

Posted by Mark at 10:28 AM | TrackBack

58:43/155

Approx. 13 km this morning around Pontcharra. I started gently and sped up, running very hard the last 1/2 km. My heart rate just before starting to run was 55. When I tapped the button to finish counting, it was 183.

My actual times are updated. Only one week of taper left before the race, so I have only about 19 km scheduled until Halloween.

Posted by Mark at 10:13 AM | TrackBack

October 21, 2005

GOOG P/E: almost 100

Don't take this wrong, I use the search engine all the time. But isn't the stock at least slightly inflated? According to Yahoo Finance, Google's P/E is nearly at 100, with the market cap at about $100B after they announced an upside earnings surprise.

This move apparently also lifted the whole NASDAQ by lifting other stocks as well.

Posted by Mark at 10:24 PM | TrackBack

Tough year for new constitutions

BBC News is running an article about how long it's taking to count the votes in the Iraqi referendum on the proposed constitution there. It appears there were some irregularities, and even the officials were unclear on what exactly the predictions should be.

Provisional results indicate that two Sunni Arab-dominated provinces have rejected the constitution, but that a third province did not apparently reach the two-thirds threshold needed.

Two-thirds of voters in three provinces must reject it for the constitution to fail.

During a visit to London last week, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said initial information from the field indicated the constitution had been backed, though she later retracted her statement.

The deputy speaker of the Iraqi National Assembly, Hussein al-Shahristani, announced in a speech in Najaf on Wednesday that the draft constitution had been approved.

My bet is that the constitution will eventually be approved, although it'll take the authorities some time to get the count straight. Especially if the initial count turned out wrong with respect to the way it was supposed to turn out.

Posted by Mark at 10:13 PM | TrackBack

MovableType & junk removal

MovableType 3.2 does a pretty good job removing junk. It also holds some comments or trackbacks until the author approves. We have a lot less raunchy porn advertisements to read that way, and it robs the guys doing that from improving their ratings at Google at our expense.

But here I am, responding to a comment on my own blog, and:

Thank you for commenting. Your comment has been received and held for approval by the blog owner.

In the same browser the password manager lets me login without asking.

Posted by Mark at 09:24 PM | TrackBack

Bad wine

A long time ago, I built wine, the WINdows Emulator, for Emma so she could run Tibili, which is a program for children learning to read French. Back then I got it working. Not so this evening.

I tried creating symlinks to the wine drives, but to no avail. Every time I start Tibili.exe, xorg dies and gdm restarts it. A quick way to kill your X session. This is the version of wine I get with Ubuntu 5.04.

Posted by Mark at 09:06 PM | TrackBack

28:15/165

Ran the 15-rep, 40/20 workout, which for me is running 200 m, waiting 20-22 s, then going again. After that's over and you've had a shower, you're fairly relaxed.

Posted by Mark at 02:48 PM | TrackBack

October 20, 2005

Fun runs starting next week

On my way around the 6 1/4 km circuit today I passed Jerome running the other way. He was on time; I was late. Then I met him back at work.

We decided one of us should send out a mail to commit to running Tuesdays and Thursdays at lunchtime. So I did. I decided to call them fun runs, since most people at work probably associate me and running with grimaces, wheezing, sweat, and pain. That's training. This is different. We'll see.

Posted by Mark at 09:28 PM | TrackBack

Tech entries rebuff readers

According to Mom and Andy, the least comprehensible and therefore least interesting of entries on this blog are the tech entries dealing with computer software. (What does Bryan's mom think of dtrace?)

Of course, the tech entries are the ones I search for each time I forget how I did something. I rarely go back through my blog to browse the pictures. That's why I set up a huge page that holds them all.

Posted by Mark at 09:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

LDAP client SDKs

Ever since I found out one day that the Directory SDK for Java docs were some of the hardest hit straight HTML on docs.sun.com, I guess I've wondered which Java-based toolkit has the most followers. But how would you really know?

Googling for ldap java sdk brings up the Netscape-branded doc to the Directory SDK for Java, with the 4.0 Programmer's Guide at docs.sun.com close behind. (Both docs cover essentially the same code base.)

If I change that to directory java sdk, the Java standard page pointing to JNDI rises further up the stack of results, but the Directory SDK for Java remains in the "I'm Feel Lucky" spot.

A Googlefight of JNDI vs. Directory SDK for Java leaves JNDI on the ropes, but only by about 10%, though JNDI kicks LDAP Java SDK's butt.

Back at Google, in their directory, Directory SDK for Java is the highest-ranked page for all of Computers > Programming > Languages > Java > Development Tools.

People are going to be making jokes about LDAP client code like they used to joke about Cobol before the year 2000. Incidentally, Java demolishes Cobol in a Googlefight by a ratio of about 346 to 5.

What to conclude? There are still lots of developers out there at least checking out, and linking to the doc for the Directory SDK for Java, which is still version 4.x. (Version 4.x started in 1998 and has been reasonably stable.) Funny that would last so long, even with JNDI being handled through the JSR process and being a part of the Standard Edition SDK, so available everywhere, for the last couple of years.

As you may or may not know, JNDI is a more generic API that lets you do directory client applications, but also applications that work with other sorts of naming systems, like DNS or file systems. Directory SDK for Java sticks close to the LDAP protocol, so developers who want to do just directory clients may find it a closer fit.

Posted by Mark at 08:30 PM | TrackBack

24:40/164

6 1/4 km. Started gently and sped up some. Was thinking about work.

Turns out I ran faster than race pace, which is 4:16/km or 26:40 for this distance.

Posted by Mark at 03:04 PM | TrackBack

October 19, 2005

Should we have frequency monopolies?

Forbes.com is running an article about Eben Moglen's challenge that the FCC broadcast frequency allocation model is outmoded:

By using open-source software and low-powered “mesh networks” that can sniff out open frequencies and transmit over them, Moglen says, “we can produce bandwidth in a very collaborative way,” including transmitting video and telephone conversations that would normally ride on commercial networks.

Okay, as long as those frequencies are truly open. It may be that new software, by using bandwidth differently, can work around the problem, sort of like you can have DSL and voice telephone on the same line. In any case, it would be nice to see broadcast bandwidth financed by big advertisers come under competition from smaller transmitters and peer-to-peer communications.

Posted by Mark at 08:27 PM | TrackBack

45:58/154

Warm up and cool down jogging with Matt around 5 intense hill reps in Meylan and Montbonnot. Thinking of doing the 15-rep, 40/20 workout this Friday for the last of the speedwork.

Posted by Mark at 03:44 PM | TrackBack

October 18, 2005

Making the right mistakes, part III

This one's about dill pickle slices, and this is a wrong mistake. This morning at 6:45 am putting delicious slices of dill pickle Nathalie made herself into my ham sandwich for lunch seemed like a good idea. By 1:10 pm when I ate the sandwiches, I found out it was a bad idea. The sliced tomato didn't make the bread soggy, but the pickles sure did.

Posted by Mark at 11:11 PM | TrackBack

Making the right mistakes, part II

After writing up a review of Jakob Neilsen's article on blog usability, I noticed this in the summary at the top of the page:

Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.

First of all let me tell you as a technical writer, you must not trust the author. Never trust the author, even when the author is yourself. By its very nature, writing allows us to create mental plates of spaghetti, whose complexity can easily escape us even as we believe we remain in control. You may be sure you are too smart for that to happen. In that case, start writing software.

Weblogs are too internally focused and ignore usability issues not handled by the weblogging software, true. Most people who blog do so not because they have "vastly intelligent personal epiphanies and deep, stunning perception" (Matt's words) to share with the world, but because they feel like blogging, which they can do these days because blogging software is usable... for the blogger. The reader doesn't even enter into the consideration. If the blogger did have to consider the reader, most of us would not blog. When I think about you, Gentle Reader, it's usually because I worry that if I write down what I really think, you'll misunderstand and get upset with me. I rarely think about how usable my blog might be for you, focusing instead on the content. In fact, I don't expect you to read my blog through my blog anyway. I expect you to use an aggregator such as bloglines.com.

To new readers: "The universe is no place to start." Most of the way I understand that is in a fortune cookie I can no longer find. The author said, in essence, that progress comes not from the cutting edge, but from those things we can do without thinking about them. So Neilsen has a point there, the site needs to be so usable you simply find what you're looking for without noticing it. I don't know what you're looking for, and I sure don't know why you're looking here.

Posted by Mark at 10:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

About Mark

I'm Mark Craig, husband of Nathalie, father to Tim, Emma, and Diane, brother to Matt, who registered mcraig.org, and lets me keep web pages here. I live in Barraux, France, a town on the border between the départements of the Isère and the Savoie.

You'll still know nothin' 'bout me, but here's my CV. I work as a technical writer, writing mainly nonfiction about software.

This blog is mainly nonfiction, too. If you read it regularly, you will notice most entries seem like notes to self: running times, writeups of how I installed some software or burned a CD, recipes, links to articles, photos of the children. I'm not an inventive person; my valedictory address to the Rogers High School Class of 1988 was about continuing education. This weblog is just an external part of my memory, one that I can search easily.

Posted by Mark at 10:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Making the right mistakes

Janetta sent me a link to Jakob Neilsen's Top Ten Design Mistakes, in which Jakob writes:

Some weblogs are really just private diaries intended only for a handful of family members and close friends. Usability guidelines generally don't apply to such sites, because the readers' prior knowledge and motivation are incomparably greater than those of third-party users. When you want to reach new readers who aren't your mother, however, usability becomes important.

This blog must qualify, therefore, for a usability waiver, right?

But I could add a picture, something about me, links to what people might want to read again (if I ever write anything like that). MovableType could make that easier than it does today, letting you add that bit when you set up a blog.

Posted by Mark at 01:52 PM | TrackBack

43:00/159???

Ran the 6 1/4 km then the 4 km routes, starting off with Joanne, Nigel, and Stu who were doing 16 km.

Had to guess at my stats, since I seem not to have effectively pressed the start button, thus the question marks after the time and average heart rate.

Posted by Mark at 01:46 PM | TrackBack

October 17, 2005

Safer war

BBC News is running an article about a report from a place called Human Security Centre that says wars are becoming less frequent and are killing fewer people.

Although the Human Security Centre concludes the UN has been instrumental in this trend, BBC News found someone too play that down. The same guy, Mr Greene, is quoted on why wars lately are less deadly:

The fall in the number of deaths per conflict is due to a change from large-scale war between huge armies with heavy weaponry to low-intensity conflicts that "pit weak government forces against ill-trained rebels."

This is one case where you hope they don't make too much progress. The report also doesn't cover the latest numbers from the conflict in Iraq, but the conclusion is that those numbers would materially change the conclusions.

Posted by Mark at 09:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Penultimate Truth

PKD published The Penultimate Truth in 1964. In 2025, he has most of humanity living underground, building robots for what they were told was war raging above ground. It turns out an elite few living in vast demenses above ground, benefitting from all the work done by those struggling underground, using the robots as servants, inventing further lies televised underground to keep the "tankers" slaving away in their holes.

The novel segues from this strikingly contemporary setting into whodunit intrigue as Nicholas St. James, tanker and elected President of his tank gets forced up above ground to find an artificial pancreas for another tanker and gifted handyman. What makes power struggles tick? Why do they seem to perpetuate themselves? These are the questions Dick seems to want to answer with The Penultimate Truth.

Posted by Mark at 09:15 PM | TrackBack

32:35/168

Approx. 7 km as a tempo run. Started out with Nigel, sped up until the last 2.5 km, then took it easy.

Posted by Mark at 04:24 PM | TrackBack

Comparing *n*x

OpenSolaris.org is running a short article on the similarities and differences in Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD kernels.

It makes sense that Solaris and FreeBSD would share features, since Solaris grew out of SunOS. But there are also lots of synonyms in Linux as well. It's all *n*x I guess.

Interestingly, Linux gets some of it's speed for handling page faults by being less platform independent. From my 30000' idiot's view, that makes it look like the way to support more hardware is less through hardware abstraction, and more through open source. So that would mean we're doing at least one thing right by getting Solaris out there.

I wonder if the gatekeepers in the Solaris model of development will enable innovation as fast as in Linux. After all, on Linux, you expect things to change when you get a new kernel. With Solaris, we've been trained to expect the API to remain solid no matter how big the upgrade.

Posted by Mark at 10:08 AM | TrackBack

October 16, 2005

Bibliothèque anglophone

Late this afternoon we went to the bibliothèque anglophone in Le Touvet. They just started in January, but have people coming from around the area to borrow English language books. Lots of bicultural families.

I borrowed three books. My night table is overflowing. But not as much as Timothee's. He read his 4 books before going to sleep tonight. Emma and Diane had me read a story about Albert Le Blanc, a white teddy bear from France who looks sad, but in fact is not sad. They both had me translate as I read, but didn't mind hearing it in English. Emma understood more than she thought she would.

Posted by Mark at 09:55 PM | TrackBack

Tired

I slept all right last night, and have been sleeping more than usual lately. But I'm tired early, and sometimes still tired in the morning. Maybe the fall's doing this. Nathalie and the children seem tired as well.

Posted by Mark at 09:53 PM | TrackBack

Tennis

Timothee and I hit the tennis ball around for half an hour this morning. The court we used in Barraux has suffered from erosion, but it was good enough for us. Tim has more control than last time we played. There was less time spent chasing the ball. On a few occasions we even managed to get a short volley going.

Nathalie showed up with the girls after stopping by the bakery. Emma and Diane were wearing their long skirts, but still wanted to try. Emma's not quite to the point where she can hit the ball. She did manage to hit it over the net a couple of times. Diane's not quite to the point where she can figure out what she's trying to do.

Nathalie tried a few volleys with Tim. He has been practicing in the garage. It's not clear whether his serve has gotten as much attention as his imagination. He sees himself standing way back, slamming an ace past you as you struggle to keep up. The frustrating part of sports is how it makes so little sense to apply great force until you have great control.

Posted by Mark at 11:41 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 15, 2005

Jedi

Mom sewed Tim a Jedi costume. Here he is showing it off:

Posted by Mark at 10:23 PM | TrackBack

Mackenzie II

We took the kids to the restaurant in La Rochette this evening for dinner. Emma and Tim love choosing from the menu.

Emma ate everything on her plate, and a little bit off her brother's plate. Diane and Tim shared mussels. Diane ate three times as much as her brother. But then he had a chocolate fondue with fruit for dessert, eating more than any of the rest of us.

They seem to be sleeping now. Diane almost didn't last until the end of the meal.

Posted by Mark at 10:12 PM | TrackBack

Ubuntu, part XV

For DSL, I used pppoeconf. That took about 30 seconds. Strange that the network-admin app doesn't help you fix that.

For Xorg, I followed the instructions on the Ubuntu Wiki. Another couple of minutes. You have to install a package, play with xorg.conf, and restart Xorg.

Haven't taken the time to do more.

UPDATE: xsane works right off the bat now. No need to sudo.

Posted by Mark at 10:06 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Ubuntu, part XIV

Well, I installed 5.10. Ubuntu still doesn't offer to let me configure DSL at install time. It hairs out configuring the network, and even the manual config doesn't offer to help me get DSL going. It's either DHCP or static.

Next, no nvidia driver for Xorg. So I'm stuck in 640x480 until I figure that out. I must've done something under 5.04, where I am now, and forgotten about it. Couldn't Nvidia just let that stuff be open by now? This chipset is 2003 technology, or maybe 2002.

The desktop is slightly cooler, in that the partitions got mounted and came up right away.

I did have some trouble getting everything going in the beginning.First I had the printer turned on. It was doing it's flake-the-BIOS-out routine, and the installer got hung twice, once while I was trying to create file systems. After I turned that off, things went smoothly until I got stuck in 640x480 without network. It's not that I'm really stuck to be sure, it's just that it's not smooth enough.

Posted by Mark at 05:41 PM | TrackBack

Ubuntu, part XIII

Downloaded the new Ubuntu, which I intend to install soon.

This one is called Breezy Badger. Maybe it's a joke about Linux on a Dead Badger, I don't know. But I do find it reassuring to get a distro from people as oblivious to marketing as the folks at Debian, where Ubuntu comes from. Let them waste their time focusing on what they're doing rather than on packaging to attract people who pay attention to that sort of thing.

Maybe we should get a little less slick at work. Our site's looking too cool these days.

Posted by Mark at 03:22 PM | TrackBack

New bike, part II

Slightly irritated today with the folks at Decathlon.

When I found time to carry out Dana's suggestion and tighten the cable to the front derailleur, I notice the guys who put my bike together were either too lazy or too cheap to snake the front derailleur cable through the housing designed to hold the cable on the derailleur. They had cut it short, pinching it only at the tip of the derailleur. There's not enough cable to set it correctly within the housing. No wonder it came loose so soon.

When I more or less managed to pull the cable tight enough anyway to fix it temporarily again, another flaw made me frown. Two of the teeth on the large front chainring are nubs, and at least one other is ground down. That couldn't be me. Granted I've ridden off road a little, but I've had the bike less than three weeks.

Next week I'm going to take it back to them and demand they fix this stuff. I hope the guy who sold me the first bike is working then. He seemed to have more pride in his work than do his colleagues.

Posted by Mark at 03:12 PM | TrackBack

1:30:58/144

This morning I didn't run until almost 11. Nathalie had her first assigment just beyond La Rochette, and she didn't make it back until 10:45. She's helping a girl who has to pass the bac next year and according to Nathalie has quite a bit of work left learning English.

Meanwhile I worked with Tim on math, geometry, and regional French specialties, everything from munster cheese to caramels to coppa. His assignment was to read a few pages about which foods originated in which regions, and to locate some of them on a map of France. For extra credit, he had bananas. Think départements d'outre mer.

At almost 11, I went out for 19.6 km (12,2 mi) around Pontcharra. My legs felt wimpy today, slightly out of joint with some tiredness at less than 15 km. The pace at around 4:38/km (7:28/mi) seems okay for a long run, especially since my average heart rate was down around 74% of max.

Near the very end I tried speeding up. My body reacted slowly. It had settled in to the easy pace. My heart rate took a while to rise, hitting only 160 in the last few seconds.

Next week I start the taper in earnest.

Posted by Mark at 02:51 PM | TrackBack

October 14, 2005

Revolution OS

When documentaries about OSs win prizes at film festivals that are not apparently only for geeks, what can we conclude people are forgetting to pay attention to?

Posted by Mark at 04:33 PM | TrackBack

Gastrobiking

Cleaning out my Inbox -- think Aegean stables -- I save from deletion a great link Matt sent: Gastrobiking. Unfortunate that many of their internal links break.

Posted by Mark at 03:40 PM | TrackBack

21:48/173

As far as I know, I've never run the 6 1/4 km (3.9 mi) circuit this quickly before. The time translates to a 3:29/km (5:37/mi) pace. That's 47 s/km (75 s/mi) faster than race pace, but it's only 15% of race distance. At today's pace, I start to have air and lactate trouble after less than 3 km. Need to work more on my fatigue resistance.

Posted by Mark at 02:25 PM | TrackBack

October 13, 2005

Got a job

Nathalie called me at work in the early afternoon to say she'd gotten her first job, which is tutoring English to a girl in La Rochette. She's going to work 1:30 each Saturday, probably in the mornings.

Posted by Mark at 08:50 PM | TrackBack

54:48/142

Easy jog with Nigel around the lake, 10.6 km. Nigel's getting ready to go for the half marathon in Grenoble on Halloween.

Posted by Mark at 01:49 PM | TrackBack

How do you go DITA together?

There's a blogger over at O'Reilly writing on Going DITA. The idea seems to be catching on to the extent that DITA's a buzzword elsewhere besides OASIS and IBM. Everything now has a lot of SGML flavor, as in Sounds Good Maybe Later.

Seems like what's missing are the tools and the frameworks for building tools that make it easy to come up with your own document classes. Would the Linux Documentation Project move to DITA if the tools to do so were freely available?

Posted by Mark at 11:55 AM | TrackBack

October 12, 2005

Counter-Clock World

Counter-Clock World was the first of the three Philip K. Dick paperbacks I've read. What an ugly cover.

After 1986 the Hobart effect sets in on Earth. Time flows backwards compared to the way it flows today. The old-born awake from their graves and must be dug up. Sebastian Hermes does this for a living, bringing people back to life at his vitarium. When he discovers Anarch Peak, nearly messianic preacher, is about to be old born, Sebastian digs up the body, and the rough stuff starts. Lots of people don't want great figures to come back into the world of the living.

Counter-Clock World strikes me as classic PKD, when he was casting around for a novel on par with Ubik or Man in the High Castle, but hadn't yet reached the VALIS summit. His characters are so easy to believe, having all the foibles of real human beings. No heros, just real people stumbling through particularly difficult lives. The scatalogical ironies of time running backwards lighten up the story, which the despair might otherwise flatten. Not his best, but worth more than the 50 cents I paid.

Posted by Mark at 08:59 PM | TrackBack

30:00/162

30-minute tempo run today. Ran medium for the first 15 minutes, then hard to very hard for 10, then gradually cooled to a slow jog at 30:00.

At about 21:30, I was working hard, but felt as though I were making no progress. Not sure what that is. I wonder if other runners have the feeling as well. To me it feels that I'm moving almost in slow motion, although theoretically I'm running very hard. It's as though time slows temporarily.

Posted by Mark at 02:42 PM | TrackBack

Repository API

The LDAP schema repository grew until I managed to do what I wanted, but since then I've not gone back to finish it.

Sombody's blog took me to a newer version of the specification written up as JSR 170, Content Repository for Java(TM) technology API. So there's a standard proposed API that perhaps I should use... but the spec runs to 297 pages and stays completely generic. Hmm.

Posted by Mark at 10:52 AM | TrackBack

October 11, 2005

55:40/156

Set out with Stu and Nigel at their longish run pace. They did 14 km in about 90 minutes, and I ran with them for about 3.5 km before heading off.

I did a total of 12 km, so must've done the last 8.5 in roughly 33:10, which is approximately race pace average. It seems like I ran about another 5 km relatively quickly, then did some fartlek stuff, with 4-5 sprints and strides to work on form.

Posted by Mark at 08:21 PM | TrackBack

First flat on the new bike, part III

No flat this morning, so I rode the bike and train in.

When I was almost ready to leave, Nathalie said, "So you're going by bike." I said goodbye to the children. She asked, "Do you trust your bike?"

It didn't seem to be worth saying anything but, "Yes." Yes, technically I have to trust the pieces of my bike to work in the way they're assembled.

What I do not trust is my own ability to assemble and adjust them correctly, or to notice when I've done something that will cause a flat. But now that I think about it, why should I trust the components to function the way I expect them to? After all, somebody else built them, probably under adverse corporate conditions.

In the end I should say that I trust the components more than I trust my capability to keep them in adjustment. And I try to abstract away from that while riding so as not to get so scared I have to get off and walk.

Posted by Mark at 11:18 AM | TrackBack

October 10, 2005

First flat on the new bike, part II

Not sure whether this is advancement of the last few years, or whether it was already true before, but I don't seem to have to use tire irons with either bicycle bought since 2004. You change the tire and the tube with bare hands, and so are less likely to puncture the new tube before you even get the tire inflated.

I could find the little hole in the inner tube, a very small hole indeed. Maybe the puncture was a pinch, as there appeared to be a little crease in the tube with a half moon shape around the tiny puncture. I cannot tell for sure, and could find nothing sharp anywhere inside the tire or the rim. Right now I simply hope the flat doesn't come back in the new inner tube.

Next, the chain has been rubbing since at least this morning on the outside of the front derailleur when I use the small sprockets in back. So I used the screw adjustment on the front derailleur cable holder next to the levers to pull that more taut and push the derailleur out. This only partly resolved the problem of rubbing. The front derailleur is well centered when the chain's on the little chain ring in front. I'm not so sure about centering on the other two.

Dad and Matt suggested I might want a stand. It sure would've come in handy tonight. Adjusting the derailleurs and having to hold the bike at the same time is a pain. The same's true for adjusting the wheels that have disc brakes when you put them back on. The disc brakes themselves are fine, but the tolerance is tiny. You have less than a milimeter to play with on either side of the disk.

Derailleur and brake adjustments remind me of tuning a guitar with a floating bridge. For someone with no patience and no dexterity, both are a sure fire way to raise the blood pressure.

Speaking of bike related things that would raise my blood pressure, my brother Matt apparently built a bike himself from components. Bravo, Matt!

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

Invisible panel icons, etc.

Nathalie called me to say she was having trouble printing. She'd shut everything down before she called, however, so I couldn't do phone support when she called.

Now that I've booted and logged in, I see the icon right there on the panel, complete with a red exclamation point:

When I click that, I get a dialog box:

All I needed to do then was cancel the duplicate print jobs, and resume printing.

But Nathalie says she didn't see the icon. Thinking back to what Carole once said about how her parents used the computer, I realize that there's a big difference between what end users see and what somebody who has played with and built software sees.

Posted by Mark at 08:26 PM | TrackBack

First flat on the new bike

I'm not on the train right now. My front tire went flat on the new bike. Haven't investigated yet. Nathalie thought it would be better to come pick me up than to wait for me to fix it and have me come home much later.

Posted by Mark at 06:32 PM | TrackBack

36:19/149

My 4 km route must not be quite 4 km. Ran it twice today for almost 8 km.

The nice thing about this route is the gentle uphill if you start clockwise, then the long gentle downhill. You can get a fair amount of practice going with the flow downhill. For me, going with the flow in this context means trying to impede your progress downhill as little as possible, letting gravity do the work, but without jarring the teeth out of your jaw. Hard to make it as smooth as running on the flats.

Posted by Mark at 06:28 PM | TrackBack

October 09, 2005

Books in la Buissière

The village of la Buissière had a sort of book festival this morning, complete with a room full of local authors. It feels strangely uncomfortable to thumb through someone's work right in front of the author. I didn't end up buying anything in French.

But I did turn up three Philip K. Dick paperbacks for a total of 1 euro 50, which Nathalie ponied up since I almost never have any cash. (I'm waiting for my biometrics to take over from coins.) He always had terrible titles and these are no better: The Penultimate Truth, Counter-Clock World, Our Friends from Frolix 8. But his science fiction is usually pretty good, sometimes almost unbelievably so.

Posted by Mark at 08:49 PM | TrackBack

1999 Montus

Nathalie had confit de canard on the menu for lunch today, so I opened a bottle of 1999 Montus. I was worried that I'd be opening it too early, but in fact it's delicious now. Very smooth, plenty of flavor, some of the tastes reminded me of the cherries in the syrup I made for cornmeal pancakes with Emma this morning.

Posted by Mark at 08:44 PM | TrackBack

Fall colors returning

The fall colors are coming down from the mountain tops now.

We've also seen snow on the peaks since last week.

Posted by Mark at 07:04 PM | TrackBack

Smiles

Posted by Mark at 07:01 PM | TrackBack

Miserable in the middle

That company Granddad didn't understand, Yahoo, was running an article about people in midlife being unhappy despite their doing financially fairly well. The writer says studies have found people's happiness is U-shaped over their lifetimes:

It isn't clear why we become grumpy in middle age. It could be that we become increasingly disenchanted through our 20s and 30s as we realize our lives won't be everything we hoped. Eventually, however, we adapt, which is why our happiness rises as we grow older.

Alternatively, it could be that midlife unhappiness reflects the pressure of time, with folks in their 40s caught between family demands and long hours at work.

That sounds simplistic, but looks essentially right. A couple of mechanisms account for much of the drop in midlife. One is aging. The other is disillusion.

Sometime after 30, you notice that you're aging. It's not that you weren't aging before. But you weren't forced to recognize it. You could still feel immortal, and now you cannot. It is clear that you are going to die at some point. This is perhaps tougher to handle these days emotionally speaking than it has been in the past, since we are more alone than people have probably ever been. So the end of the self you spend so much of your time absorbed in may seem like a bigger deal than it necessarily is in the grand scheme of things.

Anyway, the visible aging, confronting your mortality, helps you get the full effect of the second mechanism, which is disillusion. This is not your adolescent or young adult disillusion, however. This freeing from false belief releases you from more than the realization that "Our lives won't be everything we hoped." Unless your standards were pretty low, you realized that before you got out of high school.

You used to think you could fix some things or at least end up doing more good than harm. Yet in your mid-30s, you realize not only that you're now closer than ever before to being able to do something about it, but that also you won't manage to do anything about it, and moreover as you grow older and weaker, your mind will end up letting you think it was all right -- "We adapt" -- that you did about as well as you could under the circumstances. So you can see that your children will grow into roughly this same realization, probably under similar or perhaps slightly worse circumstances, that you'll have done nothing to make those circumstances better, and that you'll be diminished into job-well-done contentedness at that point.

Posted by Mark at 05:16 PM | TrackBack

More conservative investing

On May 11, 1999, Granddad sent me a letter. It must've been soon after I told him we were moving to Lumbin, near Grenoble. Clinton was in the White House, and Granddad wasn't too impressed with him. He wrote:

And I can't understand the stock market either. Maybe it's because I don't understand companies like AOL and Yahoo. Yahoo sounds like you are whistling at a street walker.

When I first bought stocks in 1956 I went to the broker's and studied financial records of several companies for a couple of days. Then I bought fractional lots of IBM, GM, AT&T and a couple of others. I added to them as I had money. I also bought a fund but sold it a few years later when I noticed the fund's stocks were not as good as I picked.

My aim was to have dividend income equal to the difference between retired pay and what I made on duty. And when a stock didn't pay dividends I sold it.

A while later other investors were deciding they didn't understand why AOL and Yahoo had such stratospheric prices, either. I had a bit of SUNW I'd bought with part of my salary, with the end result that somebody else got most of that part of my salary. Hope they spent it well.

Posted by Mark at 03:25 PM | TrackBack

October 08, 2005

The Future for Investors

Dad sent Jeremy J. Siegel's recent book, The Future for Investors. Siegel had previously written Stocks for the Long Run, advising investors to buy index funds as a low cost way of beating many actively managed mutual funds. New research has led Siegel to this book, in which he proposes a D-I-V (dividends-internationalization-valuation) strategy over straight indexing for higher returns.

According to Siegel's research, you can beat the market investing in tried-and-true, high-value, high-dividend stocks that the market's not excited about, and you improve your portfolio by diversifying internationally using the same mind set about countries that you would about companies. The Future for Investors seemed to me full of echos of Dreman's contrarian strategies, where you tend to look for what has fallen out of favor, yet is still producing real profits and sharing them with investors.

The Future for Investors has its share of dark humor. Siegel starts out explaining the growth trap, which is what investors get stuck in when they pay too optimistically for high growth prospects. Then he shows the best performing stocks for investors from 1950-2003:

1. National Dairy Products (Kraft Foods)
2. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco
3. Standard Oil of New Jersey (ExxonMobil)
4. Coca-Cola

In other words, the best returns for investors came from companies that made it possible for Americans to eat lots of processed food, wash it all down with Coke, drive everywhere, and get addicted to smoking cigarettes. To paraphrase Keynes, capitalism is nasty, but it's the best we've got so far.

More black humor, Siegel's Future for Investors comes with his global solution to the demographic crunch in Europe, Japan, and the US. In a nutshell, these countries have approaches to paying for retirement that are basically Ponzi schemes. When the population is growing there are more young people joining the scheme than older people collecting payouts, so it all works. The danger for the Ponzi scheme retirement plans is the baby bust that came after the baby boom. If there aren't enough people buying into the scheme, eventually confidence runs out and things go sour for those left holding the bag.

Siegel says we shouldn't worry though. Developing countries with high growth rates will be there to buy our assets in exchange for their goods and services before the former get devalued. Demographics still look good for these countries. (For now, with so many not yet integrated into the industrialized economy and with probably a high proportion of uneducated women.) I guess you have to be a professor of finance at Wharton to bring forward a proposal to replace a dangerous Ponzi scheme with essentially the same one, except on a global scale, and then write:

As we look ahead to our and our children's welfare, there is no other economic goal that should have higher priority. We must embrace this future.

Overall, in addition to the humor, there's a lot of sound investment advice here. Not sure I'd know how to exploit all of it today without further investigation and thought. If you're a relatively serious investor, maybe you can use it immediately. Enjoyable reading, too.

Posted by Mark at 02:30 PM | TrackBack

2:36:28/143

Took it easy during nearly all of this morning's 32 km (20 mi) run, speeding up a little at the end to get my legs used to increasing the intensity when my body's tired. I'm pleased to be running roughly 20 x 7:50/mi at less than 74% of max heart rate, meaning probably less that 50% of VO2max.

Next week is a step back week. Then I start tapering. My actuals suggest I ran about 88 1/2 km (55 mi) in 6:50 this week. So the quality hasn't dropped off.

I also commuted three days this week with the bike, adding roughly another 2:15 to 2:30 in base exercise. My new bike doesn't have a computer on it, so I'm judging those times based on how long the commute's taken me in the past.

Had some discomfort periodically in my legs, but not much. Not as much as I'd usually expect near the end of a 20 miler. Maybe that's due to the slower pace. Did feel a bit tired starting out.

Posted by Mark at 02:11 PM | TrackBack

October 07, 2005

Stinks so bad

At work we have shower rooms. Pierre went in there and about passed out.

Some of us who get out and run or ride, play soccer regularly leave our stuff in the shower rooms. Apparently that's a no-no. Stinks too much.

Luckily the potential conflict between people who do sports and therefore have stinky clothes best not kept in our (shared) offices, and people who do not do sports and therefore get upset about other peoples' sweaty sport clothes has been intelligently resolved by the folks elected to handle hygiene issues at work. We'll have to clear the place out on a couple of days notice each time, "It stinks so bad the stones been chokin' and weepin' greenish drops," as Frank Zappa put it.

Posted by Mark at 06:39 PM | TrackBack

1:03:10/175

Faster-than-race-pace 16 km (10 mi) run on the same route as this Tuesday. It was tough. My right shin felt rough this morning, but feels okay now.

Posted by Mark at 02:22 PM | TrackBack

October 06, 2005

Mud, part III

While riding into work this morning, I managed to fall off my bike for the first time in years. Riding a mountain bike really is like being a kid again. I foolishly tried to ride lengthwise up a long, high stretch of gravel workers have dropped onto the bike path they're repaving down by the university. Couldn't get my feet out of the SPD pedals fast enough, and fell over to my right side. No pictures, sorry.

Posted by Mark at 09:15 PM | TrackBack

Chocolate

While looking for the carrot cake recipe for Joanne, I noticed my cooking category never took off. Running hasn't displaced eating, but has displaced cooking to some extent in the list of things I spend time doing.

What's taken over from if I'm still eating? Fruit, bread, leftovers, but mainly dark chocolate. Dark chocolate is perhaps the main reason I still weigh about 82-83 kg instead of 79-80 kg, which would be better for someone 189 cm tall running marathons. A 10 g square of very dark chocolate contains 50-55 calories, more than half as fat as butter.

Posted by Mark at 09:04 PM | TrackBack

House for sale

Mom and Dana are selling their house, getting ready to move. The picture shows the one on the market.

You can read the details and check for further pictures as well if you like. Mom and Dana have the place looking great on the inside, too.

Nathalie says she thinks the price is right. I'd move back in if we could take a few mountains home.

Posted by Mark at 08:49 PM | TrackBack

44:05/135

Easy recovery run with Jerome. We jogged the 3 km and 5 km routes.

Posted by Mark at 02:54 PM | TrackBack

Your next executive summary

On Ludo's suggestion, I watched Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 keynote. The content's fine, and he seems right about what he's calling Identity 2.0. But his presentation is almost like a TV commercial. You watch intently and very little sticks. It's even more a monologue than most presentations. Dick's singing over a playback. Better than most karaoke, luckily.

It's no doubt what our managers will soon be asking for in terms of presentations. Inherent in the idea of executive summary is that the consumer doesn't have to think deeply about what you have to say. (Does Scott Adams have a trademark on executive summary?) You can enjoy Dick's presentation without thinking at all.

Posted by Mark at 10:04 AM | TrackBack

October 05, 2005

Routes around work

I've finally gotten around to drawing up some routes to go with the discussion I had with Jerome.

From the cover page:

Around Sun in Montbonnot you will find some nice routes to run, either on paths through the fields and near the Isère, or uphill along mostly quiet, residential streets. I've scanned the map for the area around work, and marked some of the shorter routes -- from approximately 3 km to approximately 10 km -- in red.

Next step is to send a mail proposal and get people together for a first run. I have several volunteers lined up to lead runners around these routes. May try a couple out tomorrow.

Posted by Mark at 10:49 PM | TrackBack

Mud, part II

The pressure's still more or less on at work. We're at the point of the project where I can now see just about how much more I bit off than the team can actually chew in the time left.

So on my commute today I looked for opportunities to get off the road and ride like a kid again. Almost made it up the trail I failed so miserably on the other day. Matt's right about riding offroad. The intensity varies much more than it does on the road, or running. My legs were burning and I was wheezing when I got to the top of that incline.

And I had mud splotches all over me. Although it didn't rain today, there's plenty of muck around.

Posted by Mark at 08:47 PM | TrackBack

$66/hr.

JoAnn Hackos has published through her Center for Information-Development Management newsletter an essay on cost estimation for documentation projects. Her "typical fully burdened cost for direct employees" comes to $66/hr.

Had I been able to collect $66/hr. for the hours I worked the year I measured, I'd be a lucky guy with about $142,560. Getting me to work must be a real burden on everybody.

Indeed the development process needs to be fairly mature to have everyone contributing each of those $66 hours into the resulting documentation for the project. It does make me think of a book I once read on Open-Book management, where you show employees the accounts, giving them a clear picture of how much money is getting spent on what, with the end result in most cases being that people more easily see how to improve productivity.

Posted by Mark at 05:38 PM | TrackBack

40:01/162

Ate too much raclette, drank too much wine, didn't sleep too well again. Lana and Stu came over for dinner yesterday. It was great to eat (and eat, and eat) with them, but I wasn't in great shape for a tempo run today.

This was only about 8 1/2 km, with only about 10 minutes for really hard running with 2 x 5 minutes of speed up and slow down on either side of that. The rest was at recovery run speed. In addition I may be fighting off the bug that got Diane, and now seems to have spread to Timothee.

Posted by Mark at 02:05 PM | TrackBack

October 04, 2005

1:10:03/168

Faster than usual, but not race pace for 16 km. I don't feel great today.

Posted by Mark at 03:29 PM | TrackBack

October 03, 2005

Turkey and the EU

BBC News online is running a story about the official start of talks between Turkey and the EU nations for Turkey to be included in the European Union. This has been a hot topic in France, where politicians are always on the lookout for something to say that can eat up lots of news program time while keeping internal problems off the table.

The BBC appears to be in favor of Turkey's inclusion in the EU, but at the same time shows a graph of popular support for Turkish EU membership. Hungary is the only country listed with the majority of those polled in favor. The EU average appears to be around 35% in favor. Less than 10% of Austrians are in favor.

Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik said her country was "listening to the people" by questioning full membership for Turkey.

...after a series of meeting with UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, it appeared she gave way.

Thank goodness Mr. Straw is there to prevent Ms. Plassnik from listening to the people. Where would Europe be if politicians actually tried to represent the people who theoretically voted them into office?

That article doesn't show what percentage of Turkish people want their country to belong to the EU. I found a Sunday Times article stating that "57% of Turks wanted to join the EU," though the number has dropped from over 2/3, and is lower than half among workers.

For European and Turkish investors, having Turkey in the EU is most likely a good thing. European firms will be able to outsource inside the economic space to a low cost work force, and EU finance rules will force Turkey to tame inflation.

Posted by Mark at 09:02 PM | TrackBack

Amakudari

Dad sent a link to a collection of reader suggested words from BBC news, which is the follow up to a previous article on words borrowed from foreign languages. My favorite candidate for inclusion in English:

In Japanese, amakudari, literally descent from heaven, describes the phenomenon of being employed by a firm in an industry one has previously, as a government bureaucrat, been involved in regulating.

Posted by Mark at 01:52 PM | TrackBack

37:59/216

Well, either I had a heart attack and died, or my heart monitor's not working properly. This was a gentle 8 km. The rest of this week involves more work, so I took it easy.

Posted by Mark at 01:07 PM | TrackBack

October 02, 2005

Connection

Looking at the details for the ADSL line here at home, we're 5252 m from the switch in Pontcharra. So it's not the last mile, but the last 3 miles. The loss is up to 59 dB. The best any DSL provider wants to guarantee is 512 kb/s.

Looks like France Telecom is still the cheapest right here as well.

Posted by Mark at 10:49 PM | TrackBack

Tower

Noémie and Tim built several big Kapla towers this afternoon. So did Léa and Emma. Ludo got a photo of everybody posed around this one.

Everyone had a good time over at Véro and Ludo's. Too bad when we tried the playground we were only there for about 15 minutes before getting rained out. Emma and Diane nevertheless tried the slide. They had to change their pants when they got back to the house.

Get the rest of the story a picture of the kids around the tower over at Ludo's home blog.

Posted by Mark at 09:05 PM | TrackBack

Mud

This morning I went out to get some fresh air. I managed to use Pierre's suggestion to get up the rocky trail leading to the plateau at the southwest tip of Fort Barraux. Then I went over to La Cuiller and came back around the front of Fort Barraux.

The mud on the access trail in front of Fort Barraux was clay mixed with a bit of dry grass and small gravel. My theory is that the ancient civilizations got the idea for bricks by riding their mountain bikes through just this type of stuff in light rain, after which the sun came out.

At one point I was in my lowest gear pedalling hard to go downhill. I didn't want to take my feet out of the pedals and get my shoes dirty, yet the huge clods of mud caught between my fork and tire in front, and my wheel and frame in back were compromising all forward progress.

Afterwards I hosed the whole thing down, but couldn't get the mud out of the chain, so I brushed it as clean as I could and dried it with rags before greasing each link. There was still some grit. Hope it doesn't rust. It's now clear why Decathlon specifically says these bikes are not built to be cleaned with high-pressure water jets. It's the first thing that comes to mind with that sort of mud.

Posted by Mark at 08:39 PM | TrackBack

Homework & the boob tube

Tim and Emma are doing their homework this morning. It's tough. Diane's watching television nearby, because she doesn't have any homework. Television turns normal children into catatonic consumers, fully incapable of thinking, much less doing any homework.

It was strange to see that Tim couldn't say his multiplication tables with the television going in the other room. No idea what 3x8 could be. All it took to get that capacity back was to leave the room with the television in it.

Emma was having the same difficulty understanding what she had to do. As soon as the television goes off, suddenly she understands.

We have involuntary labelling on cigarettes. We ought to have it on television sets as well: "Turning on this television reduces your IQ by half. Watching it reduces your IQ even further."

This point seems doubly important to account for when you think you're learning something by watching a news program, for example. My guess is that instant messaging has a similar effect.

Posted by Mark at 09:54 AM | TrackBack

October 01, 2005

Biking around Barraux

A couple of mountain bikers in town have organized fortnightly rides to teach the local children a bit about all-terrain riding. The first ride this fall was from 2-4 this afternoon. Tim wanted me to come along, so I did. There were groups according to the kids' experience, so Tim and I went with the beginner group, led by a guy named Pierre. Pierre later told me he'd worked as a mountain guide. He's a few years older than I am, but thinner and probably about as fit.

We started out by riding around cones, first relatively quickly, then as slowly as possible. After that we worked on standing up on the pedals, sitting down again, etc. Then we rode down some short hills. I asked Pierre how to ride back up those little hills. He showed me you need to stand up just a bit, keeping your butt on the point of the seat. That worked for me, but I'm still not smooth enough to do that on a long hill.

You cannot see the dirt on our bikes at this resolution, so you'll have to take my word for it.

It rained from about 3-3:15 pm, when we were at the foot of the hill around Fort Barraux. Nobody seemed to mind much. The kids were a little scared of going straight down the hill on their bicycles, however. Tim fell over once and decided to walk his down. After that we rode up the hill behind La Cuiller. Tim was getting hungry. In the end, he had a great time. When we came back home, he ate 4 big cookies and drank a large bowl of milk with protein powder that I keep for days when I run long. According to Tim, his muscles'll be ready for the Tour de France soon.

One clothing-related note: Don't wear tights with a long crotch. It'll get stuck in your seat at inconvenient times.

Posted by Mark at 04:53 PM | TrackBack

1:31:24/149

Getting up this morning I felt chilly again, as yesterday. So I ran with tights and a polar fleece top. Did these 19.6 km (12.2 mi) as a lazy 3/1, where I sped up for the last lap, but only to a somewhat harder pace. Basically I took it easy.

About 20 km is my favorite weekend morning run, maybe my favorite run, period. It's far enough that you feel like you've done yourself some good even if you run slow. Yet it's not really long, so you don't feel worn out afterwards. Wish I could say the same of a 20 mi run.

This run marks the end of a week off, during which I've run about 63-64 km and biked about the same during my commute. Next week it's back to work for a near 90 km push before tapering to Halloween.

Posted by Mark at 10:31 AM | TrackBack