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January 31, 2006
Should give in to check up
Went to see Dr. Handtschoewercker, my chiropractor, today, who sent me home without treating me. He told me to go see my regular doctor, telling me anything he'd do would be like fixing the alignment of a car that may have a few key parts missing.
Work piles up quietly, like heavy snow. That's nothing new.
I've dropped caffeinated beverages. Coincidentally I'm dead tired all the time. It's not clear whether that a cause-effect relationship or a chance correlation. Today on the DRS list, I noticed mention of the results of a study showing caffeine before exercise seriously decreases blood flow to the heart.
That leaves salt. I'm trying to avoid extra salt. If it's not salt, it's potentially something more ominous. After seeing Dr. Handtschoewercker, I've decided to go see my doctor even if the wait is long.
Posted by Mark at 09:29 PM | TrackBack
Going postal
If you were to walk down the street asking people about stressful jobs, what would they answer? Looks like another person who worked at the post office lost control. Terrible news.
Curiously, a bit of Googling for most stressful jobs brings me to another BBC article... about the stress of working as a librarian. Before the study leading eventually to the article, librarians were thought to have one of the least stressful jobs.
Posted by Mark at 09:18 PM | TrackBack
56:18/135
Gentle jog around the lake with Stu and Joanne.
Posted by Mark at 05:40 PM | TrackBack
January 30, 2006
33:39/152
Gentle jog with Phil. Something's wrong. I've been exhausted all day.
Posted by Mark at 05:43 PM | TrackBack
January 29, 2006
Chat perdu
Ce weekend un petit chat noir, malade et qui ronfle en respirant, se trouve a la porte de notre maison. En voici une photo un peu floue :
S'il est a vous, ou que vous voulez vous en occuper, laissez votre email en commentaire.
(We all feel horribly callous. If we take him in, however, we'll have to keep him and take him to the vet and so forth.)
Posted by Mark at 12:06 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Staline et la révolution
Jean-Pierre Juy who I met through Antonia, my colleague, lent me Staline et la révolution: Le cas espagnol by Pierre Broué. Pierre was a fairly well-known French historian, an expert on Trotsky, revolutionary history of Europe in the 20th century, and so forth. According to Jean-Pierre, most of Pierre's work has not been translated to English. Indeed Amazon seems only to have his book on The German Revolution in English. The rest is in French.
Pierre passed away recently. Jean-Pierre helped set up a retrospective yesterday and this morning at the Institute for Political Studies over at the campus in Gières. I'd never heard of Pierre Broué until Antonia suggested I go to to the retrospective. I went to a couple hours of that. It turned out to be geared for people who know European 20th century history better than the average American (me). Tim and Diane told me they wanted to go along. I think it was a wise decision to leave them at home.
This book gave me the same trouble as the retrospective. If I understand this correctly, part of Pierre's contribution to analysis of events from the historical materialist's point of view is that you fail to tell the full story when you examine history abstractly, outside its social context. In other words you need to know the people you're writing about. So he apparently investigated his subjects quite thoroughly, writing about them when he felt he'd understood the context. (Although one of his colleagues yesterday said his knowledge was both wide and deep enough you had to be pretty good to catch him out when he was extrapolating or making something up to support an argument.)
What I glean from Staline et la révolution is a weak version of what went into writing it, as somebody who doesn't know C at all reading K&R in a hurry. Still Pierre paints a convincing picture of how Stalin's bureaucracy managed in mid 1930s Spain to crush the very sort of thing the communists were supposed to be trying to hasten, according to Marx et al. I put the book down thinking that idealism mixed with organized violence, even "resistance" is probably almost always a poison cocktail.
Posted by Mark at 11:21 AM | TrackBack
Hamas wins Palestinian elections, part V
Yes, I saw the BBC article about Hamas wanting to form an army, "defend our people against aggression," according to the Khaled Meshaal quote. The article gives me the impression the report is digging for ways to see Hamas as unreasonably agressive, although none of the factual content so far points to that conclusion.
Posted by Mark at 11:12 AM | TrackBack
Children of multiple parents and XSL
One thing Matt did in his configuration mapping was to define a sort of object inheritence mechanism. Similar configuration objects inherit their attributes from abstract parents, so similar configuration objects can share children.
Big deal? Well, yeah, not really. Except in terms of how this works for documentation.
One of the output formats for the documentation of this configuration interface is man pages. My aim is to be able to let the reader type man configuration-object-name or man configuration-object-attribute-name and either way get the doc. The man command, at least on Solaris systems, supports two kinds of pages, regular pages, pages containing normal content, and shadow pages, pages that point to regular pages. Shadow pages can only point to one other page, however, not multiple pages. Thus for configuration attributes present on many objects, I created individual pages, which reference the parent configuration objects having the attribute as a child, but also document the child. Furthermore, the way the man command on Solaris systems works, I didn't want to reference the child-of-multiple-parent attributes in the RefName elements of the parent pages. That would've gummed up the works of our tools to build books from RefEntry elements, which is what I'm constructing.
Okay, if you're still with me, you'll see that I needed a way to determine which of Matt's XML children had multiple parents, and which did not. The language to transform his XML into SolBook (like DocBook) RefEntrys is XSLT. After struggling stupidly with XPath expressions for a while, I found somebody's email that put me onto the scent of xsl:key elements.
What I did in the end was first to write a first XSL transformation to flatten Matt's document. By flatten, I mean the first stylesheet leaves only concrete configuration objects that directly include their inherited attributes. Other than that it simply makes copies of the content. Making a whole new document is probably a waste in terms of system resources, but it sure makes things easier for the human being grasping to understand the problem.
Next I create xsl:key elements, one on the parents indexed by name, one on the children, indexed by name. Keys are created as top level elements. When I then come to the point in the stylesheet where I need to decide whether a child has a single parent or multiple parents, I can just select the parents of the child using the key() function. In the second stylesheet, I have the following:
<xsl:key name="children" match="child" use="@name" />
<xsl:key name="parents" match="parent" use="child/@name" />
...
<xsl:for-each select="parent/child">
<xsl:sort select="@name" />
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="count(key('children', @name))=1">
<!-- Child is unique. Make a shadow page. -->
<xsl:call-template name="shadow">
<xsl:with-param name="child" select="@name" />
<xsl:with-param name="parent" select="../@name" />
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<!-- Child is a duplicate. Make a real page. -->
<xsl:variable name="multiple" select="key('parents', @name)" />
<xsl:call-template name="real">
<xsl:with-param name="child" select="." />
<xsl:with-param name="parents" select="$multiple" />
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:for-each>
Notice the count() function is the test to check whether there's one or multiple parents.
Posted by Mark at 08:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
It could be worse
As you can perhaps guess, I read BBC News mainly because of the latest headlines, feed-reading bookmark in Firefox. If it were another source, I'd scan those headlines, like a kid with a TV watches the ads.
Today BBC News is posting that race organizers in Lahore, in the east of Pakistan, are going to have 6000 riot police on site for their mini-marathon. Two members of the police for every five runners. It's not totally clear, but it seems to be a 1 km race. (So somebody should win in less than 3 minutes.) Apparently muslims want to prevent women from participating with the men, and the police are around to prevent disruption of the race. If I understand correctly, under Islam women and men are not supposed to run together. There must be a lot of folks who are upset if organizers think they need that many cops.
I'm glad we only need a few cops when we run here. They're not riot police, either, but instead around to help direct traffic, so runners can concentrate on their races, and drivers don't accidently run anybody over.
The cops I have seen at races are very hands off, very tolerant. Near the end of the Grenoble marathon when I was cramping up so severly I literally couldn't walk, I was physically next to some folks from the police there to direct traffic. They must've thought people like me were completely nuts to be putting our selves through that, almost to the point of needing a representative of law & order to step in and prevent us from harming ourselves, like I'd imagine they'd do if you tried to jump off a tall building for example. Yet they all remained very polite and restrained. Maybe they see lots of suffering.
Posted by Mark at 06:53 AM | TrackBack
January 28, 2006
Hamas wins Palestinian elections, part IV
BBC News has yet another one in this saga. It's primarily a reprint, but there's some that's new and newsworthy:
Israel has indicated that newly elected Hamas legislators will not be granted free access between Gaza and the West Bank.The BBC's Richard Myron in Jerusalem said it means Hamas MPs in Gaza will not be able to travel to the Palestinian parliament in Ramallah in the West Bank, as they would have to cross Israeli territory.
Our correspondent says if Israel does chose to confine Hamas legislators to Gaza, it will make governing the divided territories even more difficult.
So the democratically elected representatives, one of whom in the last article was saying they want a unified government, is going to be prevented from governing, probably for security reasons. In your mind, you can transpose that for your country. Imagine a nearby powerful nation steps in after your election and says, "Sorry, the elected representatives cannot meet because they pose a security risk to us."
Surely Israeli authorities are in good faith, doing this only to protect their population.
I wonder if Richard Myron's going to get in trouble for having stated the obvious.
Posted by Mark at 01:10 PM | TrackBack
Hamas wins Palestinian elections, part III
BBC News is now reporting on clashes between Palestinians. The reporter has done a pretty good job of twisting the English language into giving the reader the impression that Palestinians are a naturally violent people -- the photo helps here, too -- and that Hamas is somehow to blame, although no actual facts in the article point to that interpretation. Instead the Hamas quote this time concerns senior Hamas official Ismail Haniya's views on how their organization wants to build a government:
"When we are calling for unity and partnership it is not because we are afraid or weak or incapable of facing the challenges ahead, but because we believe in unity."
Hey, them's fightin' words! Or at least they sounded that way to whoever in Fatah got upset (or paid) enough to pick up a Kalashnikov.
That must be why the rest of the article is devoted to how the US administration, the European Commission, and Israeli authorities have taken a tough stance on Hamas's election win.
I don't know Hamas from any other political party. Their management is probably like management everywhere, and it'll no doubt all end in tears. On the other hand, it seems like there's still the possibility to prevent breakdowns before negotiations which could save lives, and bring a measure of security and peace to the place.
Maybe in the effort to help that happen a few journalists and editors could step across the normal editorial line. If they were to lose their jobs at the BBC, they're still obviously good at twisting facts around to appear say what they don't. Marketing organizations everywhere are hurting for those vital skills.
Posted by Mark at 10:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
1:42:24/156
Felt like burnt toast from the first step, but figured I should get one long run in this week. So I took it easy.
This morning when I woke up my throat was slightly sore and my ears stuffed up. It took about an hour to become fully awake. During the night Diane was coughing off and on. She's also been having the same kind of night terrors Tim had last year, right as we're trying to go to bed. Hope she gets well soon.
Posted by Mark at 10:32 AM | TrackBack
January 27, 2006
Cold, cold, cold, part II
BBC News has articles today about a Russian gas pipeline into Chechnya that was damaged and left Chechens freezing. This one is reportedly an accident.
Italian authorities are accusing the Ukranians of siphoning off Russian gas.
An interview covers Gazprom's global ambitions:
We would like to transform our company from being the world's leading gas company into a world leading energy company.
If you were a potential Gazprom investor, you might admire management's tough negotiating style and singular focus on getting the most out of their customers. You might however worry that your investment might end up in somebody else's Swiss bank account, too.
Posted by Mark at 08:39 PM | TrackBack
XSLT once every six months
XSLT, a functional language for tranforming XML documents, is one of those programming languages I use for a couple days no more than twice a year. Each time I use it I get faster at learning it.
Matt wrote a big part of one configuration tool as an XML file mapping a public interface for configuration onto the private, internal interface. He's write to do the mapping in a declarative language. Furthermore I can generate reference documentation directly from his map file.
The biggest problem I have with XSLT in this case is that the documentation generated from his map file consists of multiple files. You cannot do that in a non-implementation-dependent way with the 1.0 version of the language. In 2.0 the functionality is there, but the tools don't seem to recognize 2.0, yet.
So I'm dumping it all into a single stream of output, then writing a tool to clip the big stream into little documents.
Another problem I found is how I don't really know how to think in a functional language where the basic unit is a tree. Took longer than expected.
Posted by Mark at 02:06 PM | TrackBack
28:16/175
Felt okay once I got out there. This was uphill through Montbonnot and back down.
Posted by Mark at 02:04 PM | TrackBack
Hamas wins Palestinian elections, part II
BBC News is running a follow up piece to the Palestinian election results story. Israeli authorities apparently declared they won't deal with a Palestinian government including Hamas. That would apparently be seen by Israeli authorities as negotiating with terrorists. It's understandable that if you see an organization as existing mainly to threaten you, you wouldn't want to collaborate with its members, no matter how clearly they got elected.
Interestingly, the BBC News reporter doing this story copied and pasted precisely the same quote from Mahmoud Zahar used in the previous article I cited yesterday. In fact a lot of the new article is a rewrite. Reuse is one way to keep your costs down.
The Israeli position does however hold out what looks like an olive branch. From great distance behind the recycled news I've read in the last 10 hours, it looks like Hamas could come out with a formal statement like, "We don't want Israel's destruction, especially not harm to the Israeli people. In fact, we want to live in peace and freedom with our Israeli neighbors. We renounce all violence except the reluctant violence of self defense. We look forward to negotiating with the Israeli people a end to this longstanding conflict between us, an end to the conflict that protects the safety, dignity, and democracratic rights of everyone on both sides."
On the one hand, it might take amazing faith on the part of Palestinian authorities to hope that Israel, the US, and others would be willing to give the results of the election a chance. On the other hand, I wonder if many cool headed people on both sides don't already feel that way.
Update: According to Aljazeera.net, Zahar is already talking about extending a year-old truce with Israel. Hmm, why wouldn't that get reported by BBC News?
Posted by Mark at 06:46 AM | TrackBack
January 26, 2006
Cold, cold, cold
Another article about a contentious situation in the BBC News concerns how they're freezing in Georgia. Russian authorities maintain that the explosions damaging natural gas lines were perpetrated by terrorists. Georgia's president has another view, expressed in an earlier article:
Mr Saakashvili said the gas pipeline was blown up in "an area fully under Russian control... with a heavy presence of Russian border guards", where there were no local insurgents."They happened at the same time, and basically they didn't affect supplies to Russia proper, so we can conclude that it was a very well-organised and very well-co-ordinated act.
"We've received numerous threats by Russian politicians and officials at different levels to punish us for basically for not giving them pipelines," the Georgian president said.
Not so far away, the Ukrainian government got a vote of no confidence after partially caving in to price hikes for Russian gas. Russian gas producers had cut the Ukraine off for 3 days in the dead of winter to soften up the negotiations.
This all happened after gas prices were doubled, "As part of a series of recent price hikes for former Soviet countries." I'm writing this from the comfort of my (Russian?) natural gas heated home, where it's only a bit below freezing outside.
Posted by Mark at 09:18 PM | TrackBack
Hamas wins Palestinian elections
The BBC News reports that Hamas won a 76/132 seat majority in the parliamentary election there, with 77% voter turnout.
Palestians being probably a lot like the rest of us, statistically speaking, I find this an interesting fact to hold up in comparison to media coverage of the situation in Israel and Palestine. Specifically, if Hamas really is a terrorist organization, why would they get almost 58% of the seats in parliament?
Observers praised the election process, with EU monitoring team leader Veronique De Keyser saying the poll was "free and fair under severe restrictions", referring to Israeli measures to limit voting in East Jerusalem.
So apparently this was a democratic election. Logically then either:
- Palestinian voters on the whole feel so desperate about their circumstances that unlike normal people turn out en masse in free elections to get themselves represented by terrorists.
- A majority of Palestinian voters don't see Hamas as a terrorist organization, but instead as the least bad choice on the ballot.
The article does have one quote from a Hamas representative, co-founder Mahmoud Zahar:
"We are not playing terrorism or violence. We are under occupation," he told BBC World TV."The Israelis are continuing their aggression against our people, killing, detention, demolition and in order to stop these processes, we run effective self defence by all means, including using guns."
Maybe there's a mix of desperation and a different point of view.
Posted by Mark at 08:35 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
28:18/127
Gentle recovery jog around Montbonnot. Set out with Phil, Karine, Nigel, and Jerome, but ran with Karine when we split up. I'm basically taking this week off, until I feel good again.
Posted by Mark at 01:06 PM | TrackBack
January 25, 2006
33:18/135
Easy jog with Nigel this noon. Too tired to do real training.
Posted by Mark at 02:59 PM | TrackBack
DSL up
Nothing I did made any difference. Nathalie said the problem disappeared during the morning.
I'm guessing it was my DSL provider, Free, who broke something and now probably isn't going to tell me about it.
Posted by Mark at 02:49 PM | TrackBack
DSL down
Couldn't start working from home this morning. The DSL connection is down. The message flashed on the modem indicates according to the doc that the modem cannot authenticate with our DSL provider because of something in the DSLAM.
I tried the first suggestion, which is a hard reboot. After doing that three times, I tried the next suggestion that applied, which is to call France Telecom and ask if the line had been substituted. I'm not sure what that means techncially speaking, but seems like it would be some sort of hardware or software reroute of our normal telephone line that made it unavailable to our DSL provider.
France Telecom is of course fighting deregulation like IBM fighting to extend software patents to Europe. When you call the number they're required to provide to subscribers to get in touch with someone who can tell you whether they've done something that affects your contact trough their multiplexer to a competing DSL provider, something you'd only ever do in reality if they'd inadvertently or intentionally shaken up the connection between you and the DSL provider, who therefore is almost certainly your ISP, all their operators are "busy," but of course you can get in touch with them via the web...
Of course, it could be something Free, our DSL provider did, too. For some reason I cannot even bring up Free's website at work. France Telecom's site crashed Firefox last time I went there. BTW, when you go to France Telecom's website with the intent to find where to get help, you're going to spend a long time on RTC trying to get through. They conveniently put up a bunch of animated GIFs, and all the obvious links are for people who want to buy something.
Posted by Mark at 10:28 AM | TrackBack
Another short night, part III
Diane's ill, rash and earache. Horrible, short night. Nathalie's taking Diane to the doctor this morning.
Posted by Mark at 10:11 AM | TrackBack
January 24, 2006
Tour de France to start in London
BBC News says the Tour de France will be starting in London in 2007. They expect a huge turnout.
I wonder how much media coverage there will be for Dana if he rides across the middle of the US from south to north.
Posted by Mark at 08:26 PM | TrackBack
No caffeine
Drank no coffee or tea today. Almost fell asleep in my chair once this morning.
On the other hand, my heart was relaxing apparently. Before we went for a run this noon, my heart rate was 47-50 beats per minute while standing around waiting for the other guys to come out of the changing room.
Posted by Mark at 08:21 PM | TrackBack
31:48/133
6 1/4 km recovery run with Phil. We started with Stu, but he went further.
Posted by Mark at 01:32 PM | TrackBack
Another short night, part II
Got up at 4:45 am, having had a hard time going to sleep though exhausted at 11:15 pm. Cannot figure out how I'm going to lower my blood pressure readings, since they seem to have risen as I ate healthier, lost weight, and increased my physical activity.
Posted by Mark at 08:42 AM | TrackBack
Wireless access at home, part II
Slashdot.org ran an article about the State of WLAN Support on Linux. Somebody out there bought a USB adapter and couldn't get it to work with whatever distro and software was installed.
True, wifi support seems to have come late. Maybe people had to reverse engineer the drivers. Yet with PCI and PCMCIA cards and recent Ubuntu, I've had no problems at all. Matt was working with Fedora something or other and reported success as well. It's working right here on a laptop with some sort of built-in device. I don't know about USB adapters.
My point is this: If you're still using Windows because you're afraid your wireless adapter won't work under Linux, your argument may be outdated. You can probably get your work done with the GNU stack on Linux.
Posted by Mark at 06:58 AM | TrackBack
January 23, 2006
Hypertension
This is the second time a doctor has told me my blood pressure reading was too high. The Wikipedia article on hypertension says:
Diagnosis of hypertension is generally on the basis of a persistently signficantly raised blood pressure. Usually this requires three separate measurements at least one week apart.
That must be why I need to go back and get it measured several times again.
When Rantz first said it was high, I remember him talking about 14 over something. Today it was apparently 15/8, whatever that means, perhaps 150/80 mmHg. I felt oddly exhausted from the moment I got out of bed this morning. Maybe that's related to the measurements, or at least related in that I drank a fair amount of coffee.
Noakes writes, "Blood pressures that are consistently raised above 165/95 mmHg are a definite indication for drug therapy." Then he goes on to say that drugs typically harm your performance.
Statistically, exercise is supposed to help. Diet as well, including losing weight, reducing sodium intake, and reducing fat and cholesterol is also supposed to help.
I wonder about the pressure in the back of my head, which was fixed at one point by the chiropractor. I seem to be tense around the neck again, but I'm not getting the headaches I had before.
Posted by Mark at 10:16 PM | TrackBack
Dapper Drake flight CD 3, part II
My first job in QA is volunteer work. Not exactly high value add stuff. I just went down the menus and tried to start all the apps. There were several that didn't work in this alpha version, so I logged bugs, a few of which ended up being duplicates.
It's a good way to learn a little bit about the packaging system, though mine attempts to find causes are mostly stabs in the dark. After one of the Ubuntu core dev guys, Sebastien, noticed a set of my bugs were all due to the same missing library for handling SVG images, I realized one of my others was probably just a missing dependency that didn't get flagged somehow. When I found the right package, the problem disappeared.
Somebody in marketing once talked about "unattended complexity." Rob and Luke had that on their whiteboard. Flagging dependencies brings those words to mind. We sometimes have people ask, "What's the minimum set of packages we need to install to run your software in production?" If you start doing anything very interesting, that becomes a hard question to answer.
Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM | TrackBack
Disappointing checkup
Went to the annual work checkup. We have a new doctor, who declared me apte to work, but not to run. She said my blood pressure was too high. She also said that I should go to any pharmacy a couple of times over the month, then go see my regular doctor, tell him what I found, and have him try again.
I'm glad she told me that after taking my blood pressure again.
Will have to look into things I can do to bring my blood pressure down naturally, like not drinking enough coffee to keep me awake even through meetings, and not discussing work with anyone, ever.
Posted by Mark at 06:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
1:06:55/163
This was only about 14-14.5 km. I guess I'm tired. Hard at the beginning and hard at the end, but not for long.
Posted by Mark at 06:03 PM | TrackBack
January 22, 2006
Pyjama princesses
Nath took pictures of Emma and Diane wearing the wedding veil that Mom made for Emma's wedding costume.
Emma has become more discrete with her makeup... sometimes. The pyjamas don't really go with the rest of the costume, however.
Diane wouldn't let her go until she handed over the veil. Neither one of them wants to be the groom, and Tim definitely isn't interested.
Posted by Mark at 01:27 PM | TrackBack
100-105 km this week
Nath asked me after lunch if I wanted to run this afternoon. I said probably not. Tim and Emma went with me to play soccer at the field in Barraux this morning, and my legs were still tired and stiff. She wondered how far I went.
Without dragging out a map wheel and maps, I don't know exactly, but based on the times, heart rates, and what I do know, it looks like 100-105 km over the last 6 days. Maybe I should go try to beat Dana's family record of 70 miles (almost 113 km) in 7 days.
Nath figured all that running around in circles was pointless. I could've gotten somewhere had I gone in a straight line.
Posted by Mark at 01:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Nexenta OS
This morning I booted Nexenta OS which is the Ubuntu GNU stack of applications running atop OpenSolaris.
It runs fine on this laptop, though I couldn't find the wireless Ethernet configuration tools, so didn't get on the network. It recognized the Ethernet card, no problem, but I didn't feel like sitting next to the router, nor did I want to root around for a longer Ethernet cable while everyone else is asleep. Had I been able to get to Google, I'd've found this page about wificonfig.
In any case, Nexenta OS looks good, and seems like a brilliant idea for folks who'd like to run Solaris underneath and benefit from features like ZFS, but yet also benefit from tools like apt or Synaptic to manage the software installed on the system. I wonder how well Nexenta OS and Ubuntu would live together on the same disk.
Posted by Mark at 07:04 AM | TrackBack
January 21, 2006
2:16:14/153
Ran 30k around Pontcharra. By the end my legs were feeling wooden. Evening was falling as I finished. I watched as the clouds poured down over the ridge that separates us from the Chartreuse.
Posted by Mark at 08:12 PM | TrackBack
Bringing them up right
Nathalie's bringing them up right. As we were cleaning up this morning, I had to stop Tim and Emma from fighting over who got to push the vacuum cleaner around.
Posted by Mark at 01:08 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Dapper Drake flight CD 3
A few days ago the announcement went out that Ubuntu 6.04 (aka Dapper Drake), slated to release in April, was in more widespread alpha testing. Although I figure they wouldn't do what they call "flight CD 3" without first doing flight CDs 1 & 2, I downloaded the LiveCD version to boot and run the system from CD.
(Do we do a LiveCD with OpenSolaris? I guess the answer is yes, again yes, and wow! this one looks cool, as long as we means "the set of hackers out there on the Internet." Better review that soon.)
The LiveCD works well out of the box. The only bugs noticed so far are that the network icon seems stuck with a "do not enter" icon, despite the fact that I have wireless Ethernet running fine, and that the device manager won't start. If this LiveCD is a good indicator of what's going to come out in April, the upgrade should be smooth.
Posted by Mark at 08:28 AM | TrackBack
Wired in print
Yesterday I read through the December issue of Wired magazine, which Ludo brought back from the US.
You could say that it's normal for what is essentially the last-minute Christmas shopping issue to have extra ads. This issue was almost nothing but ads, though. Even the articles themselves were infomercials. I found some content between ads, but not much. The message of this medium seemed to be, "Consume! You gotta have more stuff! More!"
No, I don't, and neither do you.
There were a couple of articles aiming to get you on the paranoia bandwagon. They're sort of tongue in cheek, however, with the following quote from Chris Sleat, who works as CEO of a company making software that helps determine whether a patient has been infected with a bioterrorist agent:
"A lot of people are kind of glomming on to this [homeland security] market," he adds, laughing as he pours himself a cup of coffee. "That's capitalism."
There were also a couple of articles on the great things capitalism-fueled, high R&D spending might bring, like substitutes for petroleum, and carbon structures with characteristics that make them better for certain things than steel or plastics (though they're also practically indestructible waste once you've finished using them). Interspersed one finds nerd culture articles. (Somebody's remaking Star Trek again.)
In the end, it's probably pretty cheap if you subscribe. The advertisers have already paid for your copy. Of course you get what you pay for.
Posted by Mark at 06:52 AM | TrackBack
January 20, 2006
Informal Directory Server training
Gave a day's training today with the next version of Directory Server, based roughly on training Rob Byrne gave the doc team back in 2001 or 2002. Of course the concepts are mainly the same. I didn't try to cover all the new features in detail. By standing on Rob's shoulders so to speak I managed to prepare the whole day's worth of content in about an hour.
It helps if you already know what you're talking about before you start. In the same vein I never studied specifically for exams, and am awful at cramming. It's like cooking. If you have to follow a recipe step by step you're either making something completely new for the first time, cooking something that may well be too complicated to be worth it, or getting out of your depth.
When we get closer to releasing a public version of this software I should prepare of version of the training you can do at home. The new CLI simplifies life immensely. You'll be pleased once you get your hands on it.
Posted by Mark at 07:54 PM | TrackBack
46:24/173
Didn't have much time this noon, so I ran hard. Uphill over to St. Ismier, then across through to Montbonnot and back down. Hope it was more than 10 km ;-)
Posted by Mark at 07:52 PM | TrackBack
Another short night
Woke up before 5 am again today, although I tried not to fall asleep until almost 11 pm. Today Diane was crying out about something. Nath went to see her. Yesterday it was probably just me. Completely exhausted is a bad condition in which to start another busy day.
Posted by Mark at 06:44 AM | TrackBack
January 19, 2006
What podcasts are you listening to?
Ludo asked today. He suggested the Gillmor Gang, but I haven't tried it.
The last podcast I listened to carefully was an old speech from Martin Luther King (last Monday) that he gave one year to the day before he was shot. The Reverend first explained why he thought the US should end the war in Vietnam, and then described his vision of a revolution of values. The second part is probably why they shot him.
I've also found a series from the Center for Economic and Policy Research covering mainly basic economics and statistics. (Bias: left of US center)
An interesting podcast was an interview with Nicky Hagar, a New Zealand activist, about PR. Cannot recall where I got it. The file I have is NickyHager-PR.mp3. Also listened to Robert Fisk pitch his new book.
I tried balancing that out with some libertarianism. I listened to one show from Against The Grain, an interview with a guy's name I cannot recall talking about FEMA and Katrina and various other aspects of US society that run better under free markets than central planning. I tried listening to the Canadian libertarian candidate interview downloaded from Radio4All.net, but it wasn't vary satisfying. Dad suggested somebody better but the name must be stowed away somewhere in my work mail.
I don't feel like listening to anything that reminds me of work. Both Libertarianism and Gillmor Gang would do that. Maybe I'll try Escape Pod, which Andy suggested. I've downloaded one, but haven't listened yet.
Posted by Mark at 08:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Emma reading
After a disappointing day at work, during which I spent a long time demonstrating to myself how little I really know about sizing Directory Server, I came home late. Emma had finished her dessert and was reading a Mimi Cracra book.
Emma was struggling. Mimi says things like "houla," and "glagla." Emma had difficulty recognizing these as words she knew. She's also still working on sounds that letter combinations make in French. But she was persevering, working harder at it than Tim would've done had he not learned to read without trying.
Posted by Mark at 08:35 PM | TrackBack
1:09:25/162
Started out slow with Stu, Joanne, and Nigel. We'd barely gone a couple of miles when they decided to turn back. Don't feel very good today.
Posted by Mark at 01:59 PM | TrackBack
January 18, 2006
Not music for running, part II
Tried listening to Live/Dead while running today. This is the one that starts with a drawn out jam on Dark Star. Geoff Arnold called it, "one of the three greatest live rock recordings in my collection."
The performance itself isn't bad, though somewhat uneven. But somehow it's not for running, or running's not right for this music. It's not something I can put my finger on exactly.
Maybe I should go the other direction entirely, try listening to Glenn Gould.
Posted by Mark at 09:15 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
What you would write about
Paul Graham posted an article recently, How to Do What You Love. His article's not bad, though it hasn't answered the question for me.
He does help me understand why I'll never be a real writer, meaning someone who writes fiction. Not only am I not a very good liar, but I also don't work at it. I find myself writing blog entries, email, tech docs, not stories.
There's a story to tell. It's about a competent, promising technical writer gradually wading out into the deep end and eventually losing touch. The technical writer is either investigating why the rate of technical writers falling psychologically ill stands so much higher than the rate for those doing other jobs, or perhaps seeing the problem from the inside.
Over the year end holiday I started writing notes about this story, but couldn't see the situation clearly. I realized it would have to be written in the third person. That set me back a while.
I also realized while scribbling notes on paper with a real pen that writing at the computer leaves me distracted. I have difficulty thinking. Blogs, email, tech docs are all compatible with attention deficit disorder. Thinking through an elaborate lie is not.
Posted by Mark at 08:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
1:40:01/156
Started out with Phil. Ran around most of the 12 km circuit, but found it too muddy. Then went up hill to St. Ismier, back down through Montbonnot to the edge of Meylan and back to work.
Probably should go further. 100 minutes isn't long enough. The real training effect (or at least the perceived discomfort level) seems to increase significantly at about 105. Then I should probably run another 30-60 minutes to get real good from the workout. But it's tough to find the time.
Posted by Mark at 06:14 PM | TrackBack
January 17, 2006
Before and after
Voici the before and after photos, showing the influence that running a fair amount each week can eventually have on how fat you are.
My weight must've been near the max. in the photo on the left. In the photo on the right I'm 5 kg (11 lbs) heavier than when I was married. Leg muscle is compact.
Posted by Mark at 09:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
whereami for laptop network configuration
One of the Ubuntu Wiki's sent me to whereami, the network autoconfiguration utility you can get for Debian and therefore Ubuntu.
Configuration is done using two files, detect.conf and whereami.conf, the former being used to set up your network connection including which interface you use and how you get that configured, the second for other actions you want to script depending on the network configuration. /etc/init.d/whereami start runs at boot time, though you can also of course sudo /etc/init.d/whereami stop; sudo /etc/init.d/whereami start any time you change networks.
So far the only thing I do in whereami.conf is set proxy preferences for Firefox, but since it's just a shell script with location information, I could do just about anything. Highly recommended if you have a portable computer.
Posted by Mark at 04:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
1:24:26/150
Slow for the first 3/4, harder for the last 1/4. Not sure how far this was.
I started out gently with Stu and Nigel, and it felt so good to have temperatures above freezing that I just kept on jogging.
Posted by Mark at 02:16 PM | TrackBack
January 16, 2006
50 milliseconds
Perhaps you already read this from Slashdot.org's feed, but Nature.com is covering findings that show the first impression of a web site is made in as little as 50 milliseconds, about the time it takes to watch one frame of a film.
What's more, these impressions jibe with judgements made after more scrutiny. It appears that we reinforce our hunches mentally to confirm what we already thought. "The tendency to jump to conclusions is far more widespread than we realize," according to researcher Gitte Lindgaard.
Posted by Mark at 09:52 PM | TrackBack
Merging $HOMEs
There's a nice Linux Journal article on unison, which is a good way to keep in sync once you were foresightful enough to set a home directory up properly.
But why didn't I think in the first place about setting up one of the PC disk partitions as a permanent $HOME for everybody's stuff? Now I'm trying to go back and synchronize things between the two systems I have installed on the PC, in preparation of syncing with the laptops, and eventually organizing a sync with my work $HOME for those mornings or afternoons when I'd get more done by shutting myself away and ploughing through some work.
I read a NYT editorial in which the writer was complaining about slow network access. Apparently some Scandinavian ISPs are offering Gigabit speeds to your house for the equivalent of about $100/mo. If I had that kind of access, the very next thing I'd want is all my data mounted from the network and backed up by competent professionals. Mobile high speed access and almost no local data. That would be the cat's meow.
Posted by Mark at 09:05 PM | TrackBack
39:40/123
Very easy recovery run with Phil. This was only something a bit over 7 km.
Posted by Mark at 01:24 PM | TrackBack
Mount Pisgah
Mom and Dana walked some of the way to Mount Pisgah. They couldn't take the road all the way in to the parking lot, and ended up having too far a hike therefore to do the whole thing on the spur of the moment.
Mom noticed a bunch of big rhododendrons growing out of the rock next to the road along the way. Mom says they're going to try the hike today with water and a picnic lunch, weather permitting. Dana tells me that the weather's often permitting during the day where they now live, or at least has been the last few weeks. It's up into the 60s (F) during the day. But they get big temperature swings, sometimes 35-40 degrees between nighttime lows and daytime highs.
Posted by Mark at 06:51 AM | TrackBack
January 15, 2006
Station de Granier, part II
Here's a cobbled together picture of most of it. It's not a big place, but there was plenty of snow, and it's cheaper and closer than the bigger ski resorts.
Notice how we didn't have lots of clouds today. I don't think we spotted a single cloud the whole time we were in the Chartreuse.
Posted by Mark at 05:14 PM | TrackBack
Station de Granier
Today Nath decided we should go to the Station de Granier, which is only a few kilometers away as the bird flies, behind the ridge that ends in Mont Granier. This may have been the first time Diane went skiing instead of sledding. She probably skied a total of 40 minutes, but enjoyed it plenty. She told the woman renting skis that it was, "Too super!" They have a flat, short "baby" slope where it was easy to have her ski between our legs.
Another nice feature of the baby slope is that we could let Emma go unassisted, which built her confidence. Nath says Emma has forgotten how to ski in parallel. So she was trying to snowplow down a fairly steep blue slope, and had to do the last bit on her bottom. She wasn't phased however and enjoyed the whole time we were there.
Tim of course reckons he could've done a lot more impressive skiing if he hadn't had to wait sometimes for his middle sister and his mom.
He enjoyed the steep blue slope, but also the shorter green slope and the baby slope while he was waiting to go higher.
Posted by Mark at 04:52 PM | TrackBack
January 14, 2006
Wireless access at home, part II
The old laptop I'm using to write this entry has a PCMCIA card plugged in, and so is the third wireless device configured to use the home network. I'm at Tim's desk.
My hope is that I can get him to play some of the educational games on the computer if he has network access, too. In the past I tried to get him to do that, but he figured a computer without an internet hookup is useless. So the only one he used was the PC upstairs, the main machine I want to use as well.
Although it's PIII 500 MHz processor and 128 MB RAM make this Vaio a relic, the only serious shortcoming I see against using this one for what Tim and Emma and potentially Diane want to do is that the sound card is somehow broken, probably as the result of a fall a while ago. No way to hear, "Hi! I'm Barbie!" when you visit Barbie.com.
Posted by Mark at 10:41 AM | TrackBack
1:34:50/164
This is me getting into a rut, but I ran the same route again as last week, about half marathon distance. Nath went to work this morning helping a guy with his English lessons. She's also got another student starting later this week, but that will be while the children are in school. The rest of today she's at a framing class.
So I didn't want to go too far or get worn out. Need to be wide awake and relatively unstressed when taking care of the children, lunch, dinner, chores and so forth.
That said, this morning 13 mi was tough. Not because it is hard to run that far at this pace, but because almost the whole time it was so cold I had thoughts of just giving up. Starting out at about 8:35, the air was bitingly cold. My toes were numb soon, and stayed that way for the longest time yet, about 10 km. After that they went numb again twice as I turned into the shade of the mountain.
When I stopped, though I'd just run uphill in -- finally -- some sunshine, ice fell off my neck warmer. This wasn't just a few ice crystals, but multiple dollops of crushed ice.
Posted by Mark at 10:31 AM | TrackBack
January 13, 2006
New hardware breaks video device, part II
Jean-Luc and Fabio suggested the problem was with interrupts. The fix that worked was to boot with pci=noacpi. So now both Xorg and the wireless adapter work together:
Interestingly I now have even more things doubling up on the same IRQs, but it nonetheless works. I've not yet figured out what perturbs the signal strength, but it fluctuates wildly, at times dropping down as low as 66%.
Posted by Mark at 08:19 PM | TrackBack
18:09/174
Ran out of time this morning, had to run fast and not very far.
Posted by Mark at 12:08 PM | TrackBack
In Praise Of Idleness
I ran across this paper in a blog Andy suggested. Bertrand Russell appears to have written In Praise Of Idleness in 1932, at which time he seemed aware of potential problems in the USSR, yet also a little too hopeful about a society that had already by then been divided into the bureaucratic commissar class and the rest, instead of the rich and the rest. Furthermore, Russell defines work either as physically moving stuff, or as directing stuff to be moved. I sort of do the latter in that I instruct machines what to do and write recipes for sys admins and developers. His categories seem to ignore what Drucker called knowledge work, but then he wrote this before Drucker wrote all that.
Anyway, Russell's argument still holds some water. What if he's partly right? Where specifically is he wrong?
Posted by Mark at 08:45 AM | TrackBack
Rough
Some blog, or maybe it was an RSS feed from a news service, had a link yesterday or the day before to an article on researchers finding that the moment some people get out of bed, their reaction times are worse than when they are somewhat drunk.
I usually get out of bed feeling ready to go, but sure felt awful this morning. After going to bed late having failed to figure out why installing new hardware would break my Xorg setup, already exhausted from the cold yesterday morning and the day before, Diane got me up repeatedly after 4 am. First time she had the covers off. Subsequent times it was nightmares or whatever. Fell asleep for a while. At 7:12 Emma came upstairs to the bedroom to ask if she could go downstairs.
Got up to get Emma's breakfast and Nath's coffee. Could hardly walk straight. I drove in to work this morning, but only after breakfast, coffee, shower and shave. I fear spending too much time in bitter cold while being exhausted might lead to a cold.
Posted by Mark at 08:30 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 12, 2006
New hardware breaks video device
No idea, and cannot find a clue. When I start Ubuntu 5.10 after having plugged in the wireless card, the wireless card is recognized and works fine (although not on 5.04). But my xorg.conf doesn't work. Something weird is happening with my video. From dmesg:
[4294758.173000] agpgart: Found an AGP 2.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0. [4294758.173000] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode [4294758.173000] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:02:00.0 into 4x mode [4294764.798000] NVRM: RmInitAdapter failed! (0x12:0x3a:1167) [4294764.798000] NVRM: rm_init_adapter(0) failed
Xorg fails with a message that tells me it cannot read or write or something from /dev/nvidia0. Of course the permissions on that device are crw-rw-rw-, so something weird is going on. I reinstalled the packages thinking perhaps something had gotten corrupted, but that didn't help.
Too tired to think about it now. Going to bed.
Posted by Mark at 11:17 PM | TrackBack
Biking and frost, part II
The weather had warmed up tonight, although it was still freezing. This morning I was convinced they'd have to amputate my fingers and toes.
I thought about people riding to work in Chicago in the winter, or in Minneapolis. It could be worse.
Posted by Mark at 09:21 PM | TrackBack
Moment of wisdom
There's a lot of crap on Slashdot.org, but occasionally somebody writes something intelligent:
If people wanted quality, Budweiser would not be the King of Beers.
Posted by Mark at 09:15 PM | TrackBack
Wireless access at home
The wireless router box was delivered today. It's fun to configure.
Ludo said the latency would increase, but I haven't noticed that yet here on the portable. The download speed right now on the Free.fr DSL line is 568.81 kbit/s down, 139.68 kbit/s up, so higher on both ends than the theoretical max. Don't see anything there about latency.
Posted by Mark at 08:44 PM | TrackBack
1:00:20/140
Gently up to Corenc and back down with Jerome, Phil, and Stu. Not as cold as yesterday.
Posted by Mark at 01:43 PM | TrackBack
January 11, 2006
And now for something completely different..., part II
This was the photo of the only two guys not watching Mr Bean that day.
Posted by Mark at 09:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Trackback and comment spam down
If you have a blog, you no doubt get spam in the comments and through trackbacks. By the way, the difference between comments and trackbacks are that comments involve somebody leaving a note on one of your blog entries, whereas trackbacks are links back from someone else's site on which they cited your entry. MovableType 3.2 has a ranking system for filtering out the comment and trackback spam. It works fairly well.
A while ago, however, I was submerged with trapped spam, hundreds of comments and trackbacks each day. That seems like a lot for a blog only a handful of people read. I felt compelled to get rid of junk comments and trackbacks by hand, for fear of slighting someone out there who left a legitimate comment that got filtered.
For some reason the comment spam recently dried up. Even the trackback spam is at a trickle of a few per day. Why is that?
Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Star network, part II
Apparently my guess about a hub-based network at La Poste was right. My package is now in Saint Laurent de Mure, east of Lyon.
UPDATE: If you examine their site, you can see on the popup map of France that they have a delivery office in Grenoble. Saint Laurent de Mure is a hub.
Hope the people sending packages across Nice don't have to have them go through Cavaillon.
Posted by Mark at 06:06 PM | TrackBack
Upgrading a SunRay
Fabio upgraded me from a SunRay 1 to a SunRay 1G. Steps:
- Pull out the cables and JavaCard badge.
- Switch SunRays.
- Plug the cables and JavaCard badge back in.
It took about 1 minute. Didn't even have to log out, of course.
Posted by Mark at 05:04 PM | TrackBack
1:51:00/159
Unpleasantly cold and humid. This was only slightly faster than last time, but at 7 bpm lower heart rate on average. Stu reckons it's about 24 km. I couldn't convince either Stu or Luke to run the whole thing with me.
Posted by Mark at 02:08 PM | TrackBack
Tough year for constitutions, part IV
2005 was, as I wrote before, a tough year for constitutions. Yet I didn't mention the Kenyan draft constitution voters shot down in November.
BBC News online is now running an article covering opposition leader Odinga's claims that he fears for his life. Sounds a bit rougher than what happened in France.
According to the BBC, Kenyans also voted against the draft constitution because:
Although it was not a vote of confidence on his three year-old administration, there is no question that many Kenyans will have voted "No" in part because they are disillusioned with the government which has been mired in corruption.
That would then explain why Kibaki sympathizers would like to shut down the opposition. The only other thing you have to assume as an ignorant outside observer like yours truly is that politics in Kenya are handled by violent strongmen. The CIA doesn't put it that way, though their article does mention corruption, Kibaki's nearly 2/3 majority victory during elections (significantly smaller margin than Chirac if you remember), and that the Kenyans in 2003 had made progress against the corruption.
Unlike the French news media, the BBC doesn't entirely discredit the idea that some Kenyans might, unlike busy legislators who represent their constituency, might actually have read the text and come to their own conclusions.
Posted by Mark at 07:23 AM | TrackBack
Star network
The other day I ordered some stuff from a store in Grenoble. Perhaps I should've avoided the shipping charges and ridden over there on my bike, but it's inconvenient and shipping the box from the store out to Montbonnot (10 km) shouldn't be an expensive big deal.
Except the French postal Colissimo service appears to be organized as a star network, with the hub being far away in Lyon. That's where online tracking says the package is now.
Maybe something more peer-to-peer is just too hard for the post office to organize. The package is identified at pickup and assigned an ID, so it seems like they have the information in the system by the time they start physically taking anything anywhere.
I wonder if they put everything on a train. Seems like if they transported it by rail, at some point it would have to loop back across precisely the same tracks, as there wouldn't be a large number of stations. Maybe they truck it all the way over there so they can truck it back over here. It reminds me of those flights where you start out in the opposite direction so the airline can take you to the hub.
Maybe the package hasn't moved at all. Only the ID is stored in Lyon.
Posted by Mark at 07:07 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 10, 2006
35:55/169
Stu said this is 8 km. I wonder if we measured something wrong. Ran very hard in the middle, but not at the start or the end.
Posted by Mark at 02:09 PM | TrackBack
Biking and frost
Another bitingly cold morning commute with the bike and the train. My toes felt cold even after I had a warm shower.
But at least I wasn't sitting in traffic, which seemed backed up all along the autoroute. With gas at 1.215 euros/l, it'd be a shame to sit there getting annoyed while puffing even more exhaust out into the valley.
Posted by Mark at 09:32 AM | TrackBack
January 09, 2006
Star Wars in Paris
Didier told me he took Johan to Star Wars: L'Expo at La Cité des Science in Paris.
Tim wanted to know all about it. Unfortunately I'd not grilled Didier for enough detail, so I didn't have the answers. I guess we'll have to take him at some point when we're visiting up north later in the year.
Posted by Mark at 08:58 PM | TrackBack
Aunt Arlecia et al.
Since Mom moved to North Carolina, she's a lot closer than she used to be. She went to visit Aunt Arlecia, who I don't know yet, and who lives in Greenwood, South Carolina. They watched home movies. Mom's also planning to visit her cousin Gordon sometime, now that she lives only 120 miles away. I'd heard we had family down there but never really realized it. In the US you can end up having lots of family you never see.
Posted by Mark at 08:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 08, 2006
37:07/164
We're having two lunches out this week at work, so I decided to run today rather than tomorrow. Went over to Chapareillan and back to do some hills.
Posted by Mark at 06:31 PM | TrackBack
Voice over IP
The number has been attributed for the Freebox. I picked up the phone and got a dial tone.
Dad had called this morning already. I called Mom's. Dana answered to say that Mom is out today on a visit. We talked a while and had a fully acceptable connection, with only a few strange noises. Seems to be usable.
Posted by Mark at 04:47 PM | TrackBack
And now for something completely different...
We took so many pictures with Nath's new camera between Christmas and New Year's.
This one is at the opposite end of the spectrum from concerns of central planning vs. subsidiarity. It's the whole family watching Mr Bean together.
Posted by Mark at 10:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Replacing central planning through subsidiarity
One of the ideas spread by Peter Drucker among others was that central planning's not very well adapted to the system we have today. The principle of subsidiarity -- top Google link today; I know nothing at all about Acton or Bosnich or their ideas -- gets us more effectively and efficiently to better results. There's no point in communication all the way up a hierarchy and all the way back down if the decision affects only a few parties communicating peer-to-peer, and those few parties understand all the relevant facts.
Notice subsidiarity doesn't prescribe eliminating all centralizing aspects of planning, just the aspects that reasonably can be done with smaller, simpler, decentralized structures. There may be some activities better coordinated centrally. Many sense a tendency, however, especially among those reaping benefits out of planning centrally, to overemphasize the number of activities requiring central planning. I'm one of the people who senses that tendency. That sense reinforces my feeling that republican forms are imperfect. They cannot take subsidiarity very seriously in practice.
What sort of a system would take subsidiarity very seriously in practice? I haven't experienced one yet. Some say we already have the best possible alternative, market-based republican democracy. We may have the best alternative of what already exists, but is it the best possible alternative? Or can a more subsidiarian system exist?
This reminds me of the old joke about the mathematician, the physicist, and the engineer. The three get jailed by an evil tyrant. The tyrant leaves them in their cells with nourishment in tin cans, but with no utensils to open the cans. All they have are whiteboards and whiteboard markers. The tyrant goes away and forgets about them.
A month later, the tyrant comes back to see who's survived. He finds the mathematician dead from starvation next to a whiteboard proof showing how a tin can be turned inside out through any point on the tin's surface.
The physicist is dead as well. The whiteboard is covered with equations, and there's a tiny slit in the top of one of the cans, but the pieces of food inside were too big to get through the slit.
In the engineer's cell the whiteboard bears a few seemingly unrelated doodles. Various tins have been bashed open. The food has leaked out and smeared onto the floor, ceiling, cell bars, and so forth. The engineer is alive though.
If a more subsidiarian system exists, there may be some worthwhile time spent thinking about it, but there may also be a need for heavy prototyping. Who knows how violent the prototyping would need to be. With luck any necessary violence could be directed at inanimate tin can-like things. The proof would be in survival at the end. The problem might well look unsolvable initially.
As Gilles said the other day about the problem of getting a globally unique value from a weakly synchronized distributed system, the general case is not solvable. But all the specific cases end up either being solvable, or the problem gets redefined.
Posted by Mark at 09:33 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
This was the first time I'd read Lewis Carroll's stories Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass in their entirety.
The paperback is old and full of brittle paper. The stories run on like someone's dream, but the jokes do not seem dreamlike. Were Dogdson's dreams full of language games and little girls? Apparently he also wrote whimsically about non-Euclidean geometries, and found them inferior to the original.
When they give me the MMPI and ask me whether I liked Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, I'll tell them I preferred Borges's Circular Ruins. Borges also sometimes found originals inferior to copies.
Posted by Mark at 08:01 AM | TrackBack
January 07, 2006
Minor hacks
Most of the things I claim to repair are insubstantial. This afternoon, I managed to fix to tiny but real broken possessions: a rake with a broken handle, an under-the-seat bike bag for carrying what you need to change an inner tube.
The workspace downstairs is set up in a functional way, because Michel did all the organizing. It's like getting on a Linux system or Solaris at work. All the tools and materials you'll need are close by and quick to hand. (For OpenSolaris.org to make it with a wider crowd, lucky there's such a thing as the GNU stack.)
The rake now has a thicker, longer handle. The metal raking fingers all seem to be in relatively good shape, despite abuse, and despite the rake being quite cheap.
The under-the-seat bag broke after I started using it with the mountain bike, riding off road. It fastened under the seat with a thin plastic piece, attached by a plastic post. The bumping and occasional crashing led to the post snapping off. It's now fastened with a couple of screws and bolts.
Posted by Mark at 06:23 PM | TrackBack
Online robbery, part III
Well, it's not broken, at least as far as the Internet connection is concerned. I'm going to put in a wireless network at home, however. My hope is to be able to add systems without having to add wires.
I called the telephone number. The program that responds says the number hasn't been assigned yet. I'm curious what has to be done for the number to be assigned. Do they rebuild the database every few hours? Do they have to run a series of test programs? Does Free have to submit some sort of formal request to the telephone company?
Posted by Mark at 01:23 PM | TrackBack
Online robbery, part II
Okay, Free.fr only stole a week, apparently.
The Freebox came this morning. The initial hookup ended in the modem showing ERR 1. The good thing about working in software is that you never expect anything just to work until you've jiggled it a little. Free's help line is reputed to be crap, but they had even thought to send troubleshooting doc! I didn't find ERR 1, but I did find a short section on hard reboot (6 power cycles), and the system seems to have come up all right.
Had to go pick the children up from school, so I haven't tried the Internet connection, yet. Will give it a whirl.
I went online here with the old connection and selected a telephone number. They say it takes 48-72 hours. I hope that's worst case. Theoretically calls to land line phones in France, Germany, the US and several other places are now officially paid for as part of the subscription.
Posted by Mark at 12:11 PM | TrackBack
Third guitar
When I had a new neck pickup put in my electric guitar a couple of years ago, I also bought strings. I was hoping to play more at the time. Since then I have not played much.
The strings were packed in a plastic bag with a label telling me it was made with:
Corrosion Intercept Technology, developed by Bell Labs.... Each Corrosion Intercept bag employs a plastic which contains a gas neutralizing barrier in the polymer matrix. This barrier reacts with an neutralizes gasses which cause materials to tarnish.
It works better than the old waxed paper envelopes. The two year old strings I put on last night sound like new.
Posted by Mark at 10:33 AM | TrackBack
1:41:27/154
The sweat that got through the pores of my running clothes and the fabric of my hat froze into crystals this morning. It took about 8 km to get warmed up.
This was the same route as two weeks ago, more slowly than that run on Christmas Eve, but also more slowly than the previous time, where my average heart rate was 5 beats lower.
Not sure why my heart rate would be faster. Did I eat too much over the holidays? Ran sooner after breakfast? Weather was not as cold? More tired this week? Fighting off a bug?
Posted by Mark at 10:24 AM | TrackBack
January 06, 2006
Online robbery
We're switching our DSL provider to Free.fr. It's great.
I don't actually have the hardware. Online I see the box is theoretically somewhere in the same department as Lyon according to the French postal tracking site. So there's no way using what they've done for me, yet.
They have however managed to bill me already. That must've been a part of the fine print I misunderstood. The part where in a regular human language it would be obvious that they don't actually have to provide you a service to start taking money out of your bank account.
Posted by Mark at 08:52 PM | TrackBack
Another digital camera
Nathalie got an inexpensive digital camera for Christmas. It is more sophisticated than Emma's, with zoom and various different kinds of functionality. It also takes 5 Mpixel snapshots.
Those lead to 2.4 MB JPEG photos. No wonder it takes a second for them to get written to the flash memory chip. It took me several minutes to download a copy of her photos, but then I noticed 118 photos take up 277 MB of disk.
The downside is that the camera doesn't do a pre-flash, so you get red eye. That can be fixed using the Gimp, as I did inexpertly with the photo in this entry (reduced 10:1).
Posted by Mark at 08:34 PM | TrackBack
Two guitars
Both my classical guitars are cheap student guitars. I bought new strings for them from Woodwind & Brasswind, who seem now to have a store in Paris. They also have a store in South Bend, Indiana.
The first classical guitar is an Epiphone. It sounds like they added three layers of polyurethane too many. It's also missing a knob off the screw to wind the G string, so I tune that one with a pair of pliers.
The second guitar doesn't seem to have a name. It's frets are tiny little wires. It has a fairly bright sound, but unfortunately this is because they skimped on wood. The neck is bowed now such that the D string buzzes at the 12th fret. I got a sturdy case with it that's worth as much as the guitar.
Classical guitars sound nice when the strings are new. Even with a cheap guitar like one of mine you can hear nuances in the strings that don't come out in the same way with steel stringed acoustics or electrics. Not as impressive as a piano, but pleasing nonetheless. Once I manage to get the guitar to hold a tune, I could sit there all night and just make enjoyable (to me) noises.
Posted by Mark at 08:11 PM | TrackBack
34:23/141
Jogged up the hill through Montbonnot and back down with Nigel.
Posted by Mark at 02:01 PM | TrackBack
January 05, 2006
49:05/144
Gentle run with Jerome up to Rochasson and back.
Posted by Mark at 01:55 PM | TrackBack
January 04, 2006
BMI
The WikiHow has a How To today on calculating your BMI, Body Mass Index.
While I ate and drank like there was no tomorrow between Christmas and New Year's, my BMI rose from 23.2 to 23.8, which is still in the healthy range apparently. According to the BMI calculations there, I could technically go as low as 71.4 kg (158 lb) and still not be unhealthily thin. Boy, would I ever be hungry, though.
Dana once said every for every unit of weight you lose, you should be able to run 2 seconds faster per unit of distance. Trouble is I cannot recall what the units were. Even if they were kilograms and miles, then dropping to the lowest healthy weight, if I could do that, might result in my being able to run a mile in under 5 minutes. If it were pounds and kilometers, I'd really be flying.
Of course the likely events that would bring me down to a BMI of 20 are grave illness and widespread famine, either of which would no doubt have serious negative impact on my capacity to train.
Posted by Mark at 08:53 PM | TrackBack
PlayStation all day
Tim apparently played a lot of SSX, the snowboarding game, today. After dinner he played with his sister, then his mom. He was about 25% faster than yesterday evening.
Must keep your priorities in life straight, you know.
Posted by Mark at 08:39 PM | TrackBack
1:51:07/166
Not sure how far. It's chilly out there, so to avoid getting cold I ran a little bit more quickly than I might have. Things started to get tough at around 1:46.
Posted by Mark at 02:40 PM | TrackBack
January 03, 2006
The Minority Report
The Minority Report is one of the stories in this fourth volume of short stories from PKD. I'd read it once or twice before, but had forgotten many of the plots. Not his best work, yet the pages keep turning.
Most of these stories seem almost within reach compared to later work like Valis. By that I mean it seems that through hard work, dedication, relentless revision, someone could actually write stories this good. Maybe Dick wrote them as fast as he could type. He claims in an appendix to have seen the Perky Pat story in one quick flash, watching his children play with Barbie dolls.
This is going to show my incompetence and complete hopelessness as even a minor creative force, but I'm not sure I even know what he means.
Posted by Mark at 09:36 PM | TrackBack
The magnificient seven
Here are the seven who were together most of last week at Mamie and Papy's.
Posted by Mark at 09:07 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
An overabundance of patents
Jo sent a link to a Business Week online article about "The Patent Epidemic:"
Massive overpatenting, the professors say, "creates an unnecessary drag on innovation," forcing companies to redesign their products, pony up license fees for technology that should be free, and even deter some research altogether.
Apparently some companies are getting into thickets of patent infringement suits. Some are the same companies who pay their employees to come up with patentable ideas. I wonder how much a patent lawyer's firm gets when a patent the firm has written up gets accepted by the patent office.
This page about What things cost suggests it's a boatload more than the inventors get. Hmm.
Posted by Mark at 08:52 PM | TrackBack
Surf your weight down
According to a C|Net story:
An About.com online survey of more than 1,500 adults found that losing weight is at the top of the list for nearly half of people who make New Year's resolutions. Of those, 42 percent said their best weight-loss tool will be the Web, where they participate in support groups, subscribe to online diet sites and gather other relevant information.
Gerard Depardieu, when an interviewer remarked how much weight he'd lost, said something like, "Yes, in the last 15 years I've lost about 300 kg."
My brother does IT infrastructure for a business based on this sort of thing, though they get people directly involved in the support for weight losers. Guess those are good stats for the company where he works.
Posted by Mark at 05:42 PM | TrackBack
28:11/158
6.5 km starting out with Stu, Nigel, and Phil. Ran it as a sort of tempo run with a fast middle.
Posted by Mark at 02:18 PM | TrackBack
Dispute over natural gas
As winter continues, the Russians and Ukranians are having difficulty agreeing on the price of Russian gas through the Ukraine. It's on the news in France, because this country depends on Russian natural gas in part. Forbes.com also has a writeup.
Putin reportedly set the terms for a new Ukraine contract--three months of gas at last year's prices, then an increase to market rates. Ukraine had been paying about $50 per thousand cubic meters of gas; Russia was looking for $230 before the talks broke down Sunday.
Slight difference in views on the price there. Russians claim Ukranians are siphoning off gas, which Ukranians deny. I wonder why they don't both gang up on the western European countries to loosen the purse strings. No doubt the Ukrainians are asking for lower prices so they don't die of hypothermia, not because they'd rather buy 1G iPods with the money instead. I would expect them to take a clue from civil suit lawyers in the US and go after the deep pockets, wherever those pockets happen to be.
Right after the above quote by the way was the quote from the WTO rep:
"These countries should pay today's market prices for their energy to improve the efficiency of their economies," Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization, was quoted by AFX as saying of former Soviet satellite states.
I agree. Let's also charge people the oil prices cited in Critical Path, the ones with the externalities figured in, to improve the energy efficiency of our economies.
Posted by Mark at 07:09 AM | TrackBack
Outage, part III
More power failures during the night. When I woke up this morning the clocks were all flashing.
Nath said I was exaggerating to say we get one power cut per month on average. She may be right if we count each group of outages in 24 hours as one cut. Often when we get one, though, we get several. For example, yesterday evening we had at least a half dozen. If you count them individually, I'm fairly certain we get one a month on average.
Our electicity does not provide five 9s of availability. In software and computer hardware, when you want high availability you use redundancy to prevent a single point of failure from causing a service to disappear. Maybe there's not a good way of doing that on the part of the electric grid that reaches Barraux.
Posted by Mark at 06:50 AM | TrackBack
January 02, 2006
Next race: half marathon in Paris
Although I still do not have my certificat médical, I signed up for the Paris 1/2 marathon in March, and bought tickets to take the train up there.
Thinking it would be much worse, I got round trip first class tickets on the train for 104 euros. It might be more expensive to drive, and certainly much more of a pain. Strange. Hope I didn't pick some option I'm not eligible for.
Posted by Mark at 11:25 PM | TrackBack
Spring cleaning needed
Looked in my home directory on the PC, since I'm still thinking of backing it up and moving stuff.
$ du -hs .
20G .
Only 10G of that is SVCDs, and 6.7G is ripped music. But that still leaves more than 3G. How did I accumulate all that stuff?
Posted by Mark at 11:22 PM | TrackBack
Outage, part II
What do Barraux, St. Petersburg, Menlo Park have in common?
Regular power outages. We just had another couple. EDF, the French electricity company, is being privatized. They took some of the cash they got selling stock and put it in home appliance and electrical equipment manufacturers. Now they have to get people to buy a bunch of new fridges, washing machines, TVs, DVD readers, PCs, etc. So they're power cycling in out of the way places to cause extra equipment failures.
Posted by Mark at 10:52 PM | TrackBack
Genuine laughter correlates with superiority
According to the Discovery Channel online, genuine laughter emerges involuntarily and uses a different part of the brain than fake laughter.
The study on which the article is based led researchers to guess that perhaps, "people who spontaneously laugh more are genetically superior to those who hardly ever chuckle."
Fake laughter develops later than genuine laughter. You don't get really good at it until you have to laugh at your boss's jokes. At which point it's obvious that fake laughter correlates with inferiority. How else do you explain having sunk to a position where you have to laugh at those jokes?
Posted by Mark at 09:51 PM | TrackBack
Outage
Tim was upset. The power went out here in Barraux only 10 minutes after I got the PlayStation set up for him.
Nath got him a PAL PlayStation. She wasn't sure how to hook the thing up. In fact it was simply a setting on the TV to take input not from the antenna but from the other line.
When the power came back on, Nath played three games of SSX, which is a game Joanne recommended. You snowboard down some fairly hairy slopes, racing with computer players, listening to what is supposed to be snowboard music. I guess you could also race against another player on the same PlayStation. Maybe Tim and Emma will try it together.
Posted by Mark at 09:39 PM | TrackBack
49:40/126
Very slow 8 km with Phil at noon. Very wet but not too cold.
Posted by Mark at 02:31 PM | TrackBack
January 01, 2006
Pictures from Christmas vacation
Haven't downloaded pictures from Nathalie's camera yet, but here are four from Emma's camera.
Diane's eating mussels for Christmas dinner. Emma's posing in front of her grandparents' microwave. Timothee's on the TGV coming home today. The girls are at the dinner table in Desvres with their aunt Jeanne and uncles Fred and Mike.
Posted by Mark at 10:12 PM | TrackBack
Happy New Year
None of our trains were late today, so we managed to make it from Desvres to Barraux in only about 6 hours.
Last night Tim managed to stay up almost as late as I did. I was tired from running so went to bed at about 1:30 am. Nathalie came to bed probably about 2.
The trip today was exhausting. Emma and Diane are still too young not to get rambunctious after only the first hour of riding. Then you have wiggle worms for several more hours.