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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