« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »
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 dir