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February 28, 2006

Dapper Drake Flight CD 4

I tested the LiveCD version of Ubuntu 6.04 Flight CD 3, due to release in April. It's close enough now for horseshoes and hand grenades, so I've actually installed Flight CD 4 on this laptop.

My first impression is that the install went more smoothly for 5.04 and for 5.10, but then I did wait until those were fully baked before trying to install.

• What's with the huge pause after the kernel gets loaded and the installer starts?
  Was Ubuntu trying to start an X-based installer and couldn't get X configured for the laptop?
• How did I so easily manage to perform an OEM install?
  I didn't notice anything was amiss until it asked me for a user password without allowing me to provide a username. It just seemed like the install was bugged. Then I got out of that, ran sudo oem-config-prepare after updating 233 packages (!).
  This left me in a state where I had to go to failsafe install. I couldn't get my user added with the right groups to do any administration. It's not clear to me whether that's a bug, or something I was supposed to know since I installed as an OEM. But installing as an OEM was pure accident.
• Has Evolution gotten good enough to give it a chance?
  Thunderbird should at least be a default option for the mailer.
• Ekiga Softphone (the program formerly known as GnomeMeeting) now helps me get signed up with a SIP address at the associated website. Very nice.
• Sound setup still does not seem to work.
  Had to killall esd before ekiga could get configured.
• Although I had to identify the trident driver in xorg.conf using a text editor, at least the default vesa driver worked fine. No weird colors on the laptop screen when X starts.
• Whereami and a wizard to configure should be there by default if anything looking like a laptop is detected.
  If I had the energy I'd do the work myself.

If I had the energy, I'd get to work on Matt's idea of network-based configuration settings. One should not have to set up one's browser and emailer each time one changes systems.

Update: It wasn't enough to add the trident driver in the appropriate section. I had to make the Device section in xorg.conf look like this:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Generic Video Card"
        Driver          "trident"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
        Option          "ShadowFB"      "true"
        Option          "accel"
EndSection

Otherwise the windows get repainted very slowly when scrolling or being displaced.

Posted by Mark at 11:24 PM | TrackBack

Pffsssttt...

BBC News has an article about GOOG shares deflating. George Reyes is quoted as remarking, "The search monetisation gains have now been largely realised."

Web 2.0 and house prices to pop at the same time?

Posted by Mark at 07:47 PM | TrackBack

New shoes, same as the old shoes

Got a new pair of ASICS Gel 1100 shoes today, my old two pairs having lost most of their cushion. Funny to run in new shoes.

I did not realize that ASICS stands for Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, which is translated on my shoebox as Sound Mind Sound Body.

Wikipedia.org says theirs is a variation on mens sana in corpore sano:

Over time, the phrase has come to mean that only a healthy body can produce or sustain a healthy mind.

The phrase is taken from a longer sentence, "Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano," which may be translated: "You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body," which is a very different thing than the current meaning above.

Good point.

Posted by Mark at 07:22 PM | TrackBack

Where the job growth will be

Forbes.com has another article on jobs, this one about where the good job growth will be in the US over the next few years. If you dream of working in teaching, health care, or software, you may be able to maintain gainful employment in the US for a little while.

It will be a messy process for job seekers to navigate through. Jobs will come and go. There is no guarantee that available skills will match the openings, or that the openings will be where the appropriate skills are.

In other words, stay on your toes. Hope you don't ever get too satisfied and no longer be able to dream of spending most of your waking hours with the dying, the ignorant, or the hopelessly unusable inanimate abstraction.

Posted by Mark at 07:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

87% disgruntled

Forbes.com is running an article entitled Finding Your Dream Job. The suggestions are if your fed up with your current job to define just how, write up a clear description of what you want in a job, make sure it matches with what you do well or can learn to do well, and make a plan to switch as long as it fits wtih your family.

One of the guys interviewed, "Garfinkle, founder of Dream Job Coaching in Oakland, Calif., says studies have found that 87% of workers are unhappy with their job."

Suggesting it's possible to find a dream job is about 87% wrong. If they cannot find people who'd do it for free, which is probably why they're paying, it's not going to be anybody's dream unless the nightmare they've lived so far makes it look good by comparison. Problem is a more realistic alternative title, Finding A Job That Doesn't Keep You Contemplating Suicide (or Homicide), wouldn't be too catchy.

Posted by Mark at 06:56 PM | TrackBack

Down below the fog

The fog and a few flakes of snow came down off the mountains as I rode up through Chapareillan, Myans, then back to Montmelian and Pontcharra. Even on a chilly, windy Tuesday afternoon there were quite a few riders out. I met perhaps 15 in just over an hour, counting a couple of groups of 4-5.

Hope Nath, the children, and her parents are not freezing up their in mountain fog like we encountered last Friday. Most of the mountain tops I noticed even down this far were shrouded in mist.

Posted by Mark at 04:16 PM | TrackBack

Music for running again

Caress of Steel dates back to 1975, back when Alex Lifeson was still listening to Led Zeppelin and hadn't yet floated off into the pastels of the mid 80s. According to Wikipedia, this album was a flop. It is dated and in many respects silly. The 20 minute Fountain of Lamneth idea just doesn't come off that well over 30 years later.

But it's good for a short, up tempo run. The interplay of these three guys jamming provides a solid metronome. The Necromancer, though a corny idea, still sounds effective. The sort of Lord of the Rings aura, Geddy Lee high nasal vocal, blown dry hair, and goofy bell bottom pantleg ambiance balances out how heavy Lifeson seemed to think he was. Thankfully these guys took themselves less seriously than Metallica later did with their extrapolation of what was going on here.

Plus, Neil Peart grooves his way through. His grace-under-pressure percussion motivates well during a run.

Posted by Mark at 03:48 PM | TrackBack

What is identity soon

Finally listened to the second annual Identity Gang podcast, from Gillmor Gang at the tail end of last year.

Although I'm not sure to have take much that's concrete away from their discussion, I understood one thing in retrospect.

On one hand, the longer I live over here in the land of Descartes, near where Hegel and Nietzsche scaled intellectual peaks, the less I can get in tune with the overarching nature of Kim Cameron's laws of identity and meta identity management and the more I feel comfortable with Dick Hardt or Johannes Ernst simplifying things for us intellectual lightweights.

On the other hand, like the hypothetical users in the discussion, what I'm most worried about is interoperability and participation in my own identity. Maybe even Buddy Guy practices JS Bach lute pieces when nobody's listening.

Posted by Mark at 01:57 PM | TrackBack

Perfect, except for the seeds

This is not exactly a cooking entry. No cooking is involved. You take a banana you need to eat because you have too many of them getting ripe, and you mix it with a fistful of frozen raspberries.

The mixture would taste even better if the raspberries were fresh, but is nevertheless delicious without any additional ingredients. The texture is better than soft serve ice cream, since the banana makes it exceptionally smooth and creamy.

Except for the seeds. The whole dessert is full of raspberry seeds that stick between your teeth. As the rest of the dessert is so creamy, the seeds stand out more than they do in other desserts such as frozen raspberries with apple sauce.

Any suggestions on handling the seeds?

Posted by Mark at 01:45 PM | TrackBack

Heavy rain coming

Metcheck.com's predicting ugly weather coming up this weekend in Paris, where Stu, Luke, and I are going to be running.

What I look forward to most when I'm out there running 21 km (13 mi) are the expected 39 kph (24 mph) winds out of the southwest. Maybe I should pack a parachute. At least I'm not trying to qualify for anything or expecting to run a particular time.

Posted by Mark at 01:38 PM | TrackBack

37:32

No heartrate for this one. Didn't have the strap that fits over my chest. My avg. pulse must've been approximately like the other day.

Posted by Mark at 01:33 PM | TrackBack

February 27, 2006

Webcam on Ubuntu, part V

This evening both audio and video worked between GnomeMeeting and NetMeeting. I'd turned off sound events at startup in Ubuntu. That seems to have the effect that the audio settings in GnomeMeeting work, rather than breaking silently.

Thank you to the developers who put whatever is built in to break feedback loops.

Posted by Mark at 10:13 PM | TrackBack

Tech documentation fundamentals

Bob DuCharme has written a succint description of the documentation you'll need for your next product. In a very small nutshell, you answer Bob's questions:

How do I get up and running with this product? How do I make the product do this particular task? What will that aspect of the product do for me?

He's right that the hard part is answering the middle question. Most of the software I've doc'd is aimed at people who build and manage systems. Often the list of tasks you have in the beginning is oriented more towards problems the product creates for the user -- things you have to do to get the product to do anything at all or at least anything interesting; things you know how to explain -- rather than problems the user had in the first place, the problems that brought the user to your product.

The real value we can provide then is in understanding real tasks a user's trying to accomplish, and showing how to do those. Are we writing the task-related docs too early? Perhaps in many cases we should plan for the User's Guide part to grow only after we've finally understood what users are trying to do.

Posted by Mark at 06:30 PM | TrackBack

Top of the housing bubble perhaps

According to a headline at WSJ.com, new home sales fell 5% in January. That's probably just for the US right now, but maybe it's headed this way.

Would be a good time to sell our house no doubt, but global warming has not yet advanced to the point where we can live outside here in the winter. Nor is free wireless Internet available to everyone living out of cardboard boxes under bridges.

Posted by Mark at 06:22 PM | TrackBack

30:24/152

Easy pace around the 6 1/4 km route with Phil and Nigel.

Posted by Mark at 02:24 PM | TrackBack

February 26, 2006

Webcam on Ubuntu, part IV

I can manage to get GnomeMeeting from one system to call NetMeeting on the laptop from work, which has Windows on it. I can get audio from NetMeeting that plays back through GnomeMeeting and vice versa, but I cannot get audio with the webcam to work in GromeMeeting. I cannot even get the text to go through for reasons I do not understand. Quite frustrating.

Furthermore, it's not clear how I can post my H323 address out through the NAT, nor can I figure out how I'm going to be able to find someone else's H323 address. In some ways it feels like this stuff's not quite ready for prime time on Ubuntu.

Posted by Mark at 02:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Webcam on Ubuntu, part III

Hmm. Hmm. The audio works fine at the command line. I've recorded a short test with the rec and play commands.

rec -d /dev/audio1 test.wav; play -d /dev/audio test.wav

The Gnome applications I've tried, such as gnome-sound-recorder, do not seem even to be using the microphone.

Posted by Mark at 09:58 AM | TrackBack

Webcam on Ubuntu, part II

Although I can load the quicktime module I built and can get the webcam to work, loading the module at system startup results in things going haywire. Here's what I see in dmesg:

[4296518.087000] quickcam [52.080121]: failed qc_capt_get()=-90
[4296518.087000] quickcam [52.080128]: failed qc_v4l_read()=-90
[4296518.111000] quickcam [52.104330]: submit ISOC_URB 0 failed
[4296518.111000] quickcam [52.104344]: failed qc_isoc_init()=-90
[4296518.111000] quickcam: unable start isoc

When I remove and reinsert the module:

[4296548.265000] quickcam [22.253775]: ----------LOADING QUICKCAM MODULE------------
[4296548.265000] quickcam [22.253787]: struct quickcam size: 3904
[4296548.270000] quickcam: QuickCam USB camera found (driver version QuickCam Messenger/Communicate USB $Date: 2004/12/30 10:00:00 $)
[4296548.270000] quickcam: Kernel:2.6.12-10-386 bus:1 class:FF subclass:FF vendor:046D product:08F6
[4296548.270000] quickcam [22.258686]: poisoning qc in qc_usb_init
[4296548.280000] quickcam [22.268615]: E00A contains 08F6
[4296548.280000] quickcam: Sensor VV6450 detected
[4296548.326000] quickcam [22.315156]: Quickcam snapshot button registered on usb-0000:00:02.0-2/input0
[4296548.362000] quickcam: Registered device: /dev/video0
[4296548.362000] usbcore: registered new driver quickcam

Hmm. At least /dev/video0 works after that. What must I do to get the microphone to work?

Posted by Mark at 08:51 AM | TrackBack

February 25, 2006

Webcam on Ubuntu

You can tell by my expression that getting everything working is not quite easy, yet.

First, I followed instructions from somebody in Belgium. A nice scrip, though I didn't know that lsusb would tell me what I needed to change in the Perl line. (This QuickCam Messenger is product id 08f6.) Also, the latest version of the driver is 1.1 rather than 0.8.

Next, I needed to get gcc-3.4 installed. The one by default is 4.0.

After a bit of playing around, I can see the video feed. Yet I cannot get the audio worked out. Will have another look later.

Posted by Mark at 03:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Ski vacation

Everyone piled in the car a little while ago. They're headed up to the mountains to ski.

They were trying to figure out how to get up there without going into the thickest part of the traffic. Of course Saturday afternoon during school vacation is a bad time to drive up to the mountains, but everyone goes then.

They all looked excited. I don't think anyone realizes what it's going to be like for three adults and three children to spend a week in a 290 sq. ft. apartment.

Posted by Mark at 03:30 PM | TrackBack

1:37:16/164

Usual Saturday morning distance. A nice day to run, but my legs are tired.

Posted by Mark at 03:10 PM | TrackBack

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, which I think of as being five years after the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik encouraged the US to react by pushing science in schools over some other subjects. A few years later when I was going to school, history had been almost left out of the curriculum. We no longer studied Latin either.

Kuhn examines the history of science, in particular what we thought of in school as physics and chemistry, to disclose how science evolves from one paradigm to another, passing through periods of relative calm "normal science" punctuated by crises provoking revolutions, when scientists' consensus worldview moves from an older, well-explored paradigm to a newer paradigm, one which does a better job of resolving the problems that led to crisis. It is, according to Kuhn, the rigidity of the scientific approach that forces scientists from paradigm to crisis. The trained scientist notices interesting anomalies when the current paradigm is well understood, and the methods of measurement it suggests turn up data that do not fit the paradigm. In a way the best creativity arises when the most rote and disciplined application of the current consensus is accompanied by a capacity to drop the current way of looking at the problem and try other approaches.

This book was not for me a page turner. I had to force myself to read it. Yet it is worth reading. I wonder about its implications for the study of history. I wonder how it applies to things I do. It ends with Kuhn comparing his explanation to Darwinian evolution in biology, which is to say that science does not progress towards a goal, but instead evolves to more and more complete and specialized explanations of observable facts. For some reason that's a calming thought.

Posted by Mark at 09:45 AM | TrackBack

Puppet show

Nathalie had this photo in her camera. Tim did his puppet show a week or two ago.

He's the one standing behind the green puppet on the right. Most of the photos turned out too dark.

Posted by Mark at 09:23 AM | TrackBack

February 24, 2006

Collet d'Allevard in the fog

Nath started joking with Colette at lunch that I was going to miss out skiing with them next week, and that I'd be jealous. I don't care too much. My skiing technique is too lousy to take the interesting trails or go off piste. I'd rather run or go biking.

But Nath sounded like she wanted to go, so I asked Colette if she minded watching the kids. She didn't mind. We ended up getting there shortly before 3 pm, so bought passes for the end of the day. They've gone to magnetic cards that let you through the turnstiles. Seems to work all right.

Conditions were less than perfect. As 5 o'clock approached, the fog got thicker and thicker. In the end we could no longer see more than about 15-20 feet ahead of us. It was getting hard to stay on the trails because we couldn't see from one baton to the next. Down at the bottom most of the snow had worn away as well. The last few hundred meters were crusty ice with a light dusting of fake snow here and there.

But we did have fun for the first 90 minutes. We could get above the worst of the fog by taking the ski lift up to Super Collet, where the snow was thicker and we even saw the sun through the thickening cloud cover.

On the first descent, when we could still see, I stopped to wait when we got back down to the lift. Nathalie took a while to catch up with me and she was breathing heavily. I go slowly, but she had to stop along the way to rest her legs now and then. That's the difference between running after the little ones every day, and running around outside 6 days a week.

Posted by Mark at 06:29 PM | TrackBack

41:15/159

Jogged over to Chapareillan and back. Not sure why my heart rate is so high for such a slow run. Must be the hills.

Posted by Mark at 10:21 AM | TrackBack

February 23, 2006

Interlocking theories and gibberish

Over at Wikipedia.org, I found an article that draws Castaneda and Thomas Kuhn together, concerning chaos magic:

The idea is that belief is a tool that can be applied at will rather than unconsciously. Some chaos magicians think that trying unusual, and often bizarre beliefs is in itself an experience worth having and consider flexibility of belief a form of power or freedom in a cybernetic sense of the word.

At one end of what I'm reading this week lies Castaneda, to whom applies what Borges's narrator of the story of Tlön observes of his friend, Bioy Casares, who seemingly comes up with the encyclopedia article on the imaginary land as, "a fiction devised by [his] modesty in order to justify a statement." At the other end stands Kuhn, explaining The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by means of scientists' dependence on paradigms.

Funny how the most entertaining stories are the fake ones. Kuhn knocks me out like melatonin. Yet he doesn't knowingly introduce fictions to justify his statements. Once you start introducing the fictions, where do you stop?

Posted by Mark at 10:10 PM | TrackBack

22:47/145

This was me running at the track with Tim. He wanted to prove he could run 1 km quickly. We ran the first km together (6:43), then I ran 4 x 400 m repeats in less than 90 seconds each, taking an easy lap in between.

It's been a long time since I've run on the track. My legs are tired this week. At the end of each lap even an approx. 6 min/mile pace felt like hard work. Compared to my winter long run plod speed, 6 min/mi is hard work. According to Greg McMillian's calculator, I should be running 10 to 20 seconds per lap faster when doing 400 m in earnest. 1600 m repeats should take me about 5:40 or 5:50 a piece.

Taking it too easy has made me lazy. I've forgotten what it's like to make an effort. Took me 3 1/2 laps to find a compact rhythm with more efficient form.

Tim didn't want to run after the first km. We could only stay another 15 minutes before he started getting bored. He was proud of himself, however, and considers his performance today indicative of superior fitness. He says he's ready for the kids' race in Pontcharra this fall, and probably the olympics soon thereafter.

Posted by Mark at 02:24 PM | TrackBack

Web-based web page editor

Most folks creating their own web pages are probably already doing it through their browser, by blogging. There are however cases where you may want to create a static page or two. We create them at work, for example, as cover pages for documentation snapshots we post for review, for some of our plans, pages we expect people to link to directly and perhaps consult frequently.

If you know HTML, you probably end up editing your static pages in something like vim or bluefish. If you don't know HTML, maybe you export to HTML from a office program like OOo Writer or OOo Calc. A recent alternative for folks who do static pages and want to be able to edit them without having installed software is Google's beta Page Creator.

I gave Page Creator a whirl. It puts your home page under a URL at their site. You can see the page I created here.

If you wanted to create static sites with this method, you could use HTML redirects from your main site, or just link from your blog. It's not immediately clear how you're supposed to do a backup. Maybe the idea is that you crawl through the pages starting from your home page. Maybe in this Web 2.0 world, you leave the backup to someone else.

Posted by Mark at 09:27 AM | TrackBack

February 22, 2006

The Active Side of Infinity

Who is more Yoda-like, Juan Matus or Peter Drucker? Picture Peter Drucker wielding a green light saber.

Carlos Castaneda apparently died the same year The Active Side of Infinity was published. This particular book covers a period preceding don Juan's departure with his coterie on the next part of the trip.

I still don't know what to make of Castaneda's work. It runs the gamut from slapstick comedy to spiritual fiction, leaving the sneaking suspicion that perhaps he's not in fact making all of it up. Although the italicized concepts like seeing, dark sea of awareness, and so forth leave the alert reader surprised that such nonsense still remains a pleasure to read, there's a sort of gestalt that holds together quite well, and a few ideas, such as flyers, almost too far out to fake.

In the end this book is a relief. Maybe I should read more fiction.

Posted by Mark at 08:46 PM | TrackBack

Drudgery of planning

This morning and part of the afternoon I began to consider what I'd ask for if this were mainly a plan-based economy rather than a market-based economy. Easier said than done.

While out running I realized that the near totality of what I have is not so much what I want but instead what I thought I needed at some point. Even on my bookshelf I found almost no books I would have on my shelf even if there were a big lending library of English-language books nearby. I'd surely keep Philip K. Dick's book VALIS and the collection of stories by Borges called Labyrinths in English translation. Yet those are only two books. Why do I have multiple shelves full? (Couldn't I share some of this stuff? Books are useless when sitting on shelves.)

Once I started looking at what I sort of feel I have to have, but do not really want (house, car, furnishings, etc.), I realized that figuring out my hypothetical, first draft request was not only not going to be easy, it was also going to be drudgery.

The market relieves us of this particular drudgery. As you can tell after spending a few hours with children who watch television, enterpreneurs see advantage in figuring out for you what you want, whether you actually want it or not. They've done a good job for me, and my own ability to determine what I want has atrophied. I sit there staring at a blank piece of paper and all I can come up with is, "Running shoes to replace worn out pairs."

Would the drudgery of planning be worse than the drudgery of working extra hours for capital's rent? Certainly the answer is yes if I leave it up to central planners. But am I not doing something very similar to that by leaving my planning up to entrepreneurs and salespeople?

Posted by Mark at 08:20 PM | TrackBack

1:30:55/146

Not much motivation. Dead legs.

Posted by Mark at 07:54 PM | TrackBack

February 21, 2006

False Prophets

Rob lent me this book, False Prophets, in which James Hoopes, a history professor, retraces the lives and works of American management gurus Taylor, both Gilbreths, Gantt, Follett, Mayo, Barnard, Deming, and Drucker. Hoopes sees the gurus as wanting to skirt around and finally in this century striving to downplay or even eliminate the role top-down power must play in the hierarchical organization, eventually suggesting to managers they should be showing the way through some inspired form of moral leadership.

As Hoopes observes, this suggestion serves mainly to prevent those at the tops of the orgcharts from confronting the top-down power they exercise whether fully consciously or not. This missed confrontation may ease the conscience of those who believe in democracy and also function as corporate dictators. Yet Hoopes argues that in the end it not only further alienates those subjected to disingenuously wielded power, but also prevents those at the top from correctly interpreting situations in which they must lead those beneath them.

Hoopes offers his criticisms from near the center of mainstream corporate America. On the one hand, his book therefore could be read by folks at the tops of the heaps, encouraging them to face their top-down power head on, and to use it without obfuscation. On the other hand, the gurus worked hard to establish their apology for tyrannical power in the midst of what's supposed to be a democracy. Once we started being honest with ourselves, there'd be more explaining to do. A public works program for management guru/apologists, anyone?

Posted by Mark at 07:54 PM | TrackBack

1:17:24/146

Going up the valley towards La Rochette turned out to be a mistake. Where the sun doesn't shine for more than an hour or so per day, the frost had still not lifted even at 11:30 am. Ended up turning around partly from discomfort (I hadn't worn a hat), partly to make it home for noon.

Posted by Mark at 04:39 PM | TrackBack

February 20, 2006

Paper for digital storage

Today I went to see my doctor to finish off the high blood pressure question. He looked at the results from a couple of weeks ago when I wore the portable blood pressure measurement device all night, and spent a little more time than the cardiologist saying the high readings appear to have been a fluke. Today he said my blood pressure was douze sept. I guess he meant 12.7 over something not worth mentioning. Either that or he mean 12/7, which is 120/70. Neither reading is cause for alarm.

The interesting part of the visit came when he confused me, or at least my job, with another American he treats. This other guy apparently is moving to China to work on productizing the use of paper for digital storage. He wasn't talking about punched tape, but instead storing digital information in paper fibers. Presumably we have better preservation technology for paper than we do for magnetic or optical media. Perhaps we now have techniques for cramming lots more onto paper.

I recall reading something this, but cannot recall where, nor what would bring it back up. Google's not helping.

Posted by Mark at 06:05 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

37:19/168

Tempo run to Chapareillan and back. Easy warm up and cool down. Ran hard up the hill on the way back. Top heart rate was about 94-95% of theoretical max.

Posted by Mark at 10:16 AM | TrackBack

February 19, 2006

Favorite option

The 3D acceleration seemed slow on this system. This is the test.

$ glxgears -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark
6004 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1200.728 FPS
7212 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1442.209 FPS
7209 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1441.750 FPS
7213 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1442.500 FPS
7060 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1411.919 FPS
6305 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1256.035 FPS
X connection to :0.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).

You can also get -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark with -printfps. Too bad.

Posted by Mark at 08:54 PM | TrackBack

Amazing speed

Diane and I watched some speed skating before it was time to take her bath. The best woman in the bunch did 1 km on skates in less than 1:17. That's as fast as the guys riding in the Tour de France!

We were both impressed, though somebody liked tickle matches more than the Olympic games.

Posted by Mark at 06:00 PM | TrackBack

Tim takes to the trees

The horror film forgotten, Tim's once again wanting to take to the trees. He's installed what he calls a pulley system in one of the evergreens in the back yard, and has been hounding me to find some boards so he can build a fort up there.

This morning we talked over the plans, which involve walls, windows, and a roof, plus a stairway. He graciously suggested that to save wood, we could potentially leave the vertical backs of the steps unfinished, relying only on the railings and actual steps themselves. He's probably given up on carpeting, at least in the stairwell.

After he'd talked most of it out of his system, he was willing to discuss the more mundane points of construction. The problem was that we cannot go to the town dump today to look for old boards. It's not open. He wanted to start on the roof right away instead. He ceded the point however that it would make sense to start with the floor before deciding on the roof. He also admitted that he'd need to pick a pine tree with branches roughly at the same level all around if we want to have boards nailed to more than one branch.

Now he wants me out there so we can clean the selected tree and prepare it for boards as soon as we get them. I was really hoping he'd go back to the horror film script, but a tree fort is no doubt more useful to an 8 year old boy.

Posted by Mark at 03:18 PM | TrackBack

Once again without instruments

Lately it's been warm, though mainly rainy. Today the rain had dried for the most part, yet it is still warm enough to ride. Although I wore my winter clothes, it was primarily to be comfortable. My hands and feet fared lots better than last Sunday.

Didn't take anything to measure my progress, but just rode up over the hills to Chambery and back. I've been out for at least a little real exercise every day since February 6, though some days I've been taking it easy. Still I don't want to work too hard on these off days.

Posted by Mark at 03:10 PM | TrackBack

More online robbery

Now that I'm looking into things at Free.fr, I also see that despite their posted tarifs for telephone calls, they've been charging us for calls they say are no additional cost.

It's not much money, but needs to be corrected. Since it's going to cost me time to fix their mess, I wonder what I can do to cost them as much as possible. Maybe some letters to editors would help.

Update: Aha! The thieves seem to have protected their theft on a technicality. They don't propose the offer, but I have to go read 20 pages of fine print again to find the differences between what they proposed to me at the end of December and what I'd have to accept now that I'm signed up. Hmm. So if I'm going to get a fair shake for my work, it's going to need to cost them dearly.

Another update: It's not 20 pages. It's 41.

Posted by Mark at 01:03 PM | TrackBack

Connection down all morning

I have not yet figured out where the problem occurred, but our DSL connection was interrupted again all morning. Our provider of course provides a procedure that systematically blames France Telecom. Yet I don't recall ever having more than momentary outtages, always fixed by restarting the software connection, when France Telecom was our provider.

The technical people at our provider are probably aware this sort of thing happens, because in general they're quite competent. Maybe it's at the transfer of the ATM frames from FT equipment to Free.fr equipment. Maybe it's just that the bankers who own Free.fr figure consumers will have no recourse, and will just blame FT, even though they're aware the problem is on Free.fr's side. If we, Free.fr's customers, could find that out, we could perhaps force them either to give us money back pro rata, or with a penalty, such that they'd be forced to provide higher quality service.

Posted by Mark at 12:48 PM | TrackBack

February 18, 2006

The end of sleep

According to a digg on Sky News, sleep may soon be a thing of the past. Scientists are finding out how to medicate us so we hardly need to sleep, with the expectation according to Russell Foster at Imperial College London that:

"In 10 to 20 years we'll be able to pharmacologically turn sleep off. Mimicking sleep will take longer, but I can see it happening."

Great for taking care of sick kids, surfing late into the night, or meeting impossible project deadlines. Maybe that'll reduce our life expectancy enough that we won't have to work through age 85.

Posted by Mark at 04:09 PM | TrackBack

Diane's handwriting

Nathalie was surprised Friday to see Diane rush to her seat at the beginning of the school day. She wanted to write something down.

We have no idea what it means. She's doing a good job getting the letters right however for someone not quite four years old who's never been shown specifically how to write.

Posted by Mark at 03:53 PM | TrackBack

1:34:37/163

Another Saturday, same distance. This was a late morning run after the rain, just before lunch. I picked up the pace somewhat.

Ought to buy new shoes soon. The two pair I've had since early last summer are worn enough to feel it.

Posted by Mark at 03:41 PM | TrackBack

Die on the job

According to Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University, my kids will retire at age 85, BBC News reports. Shripad gives some sound reasons based on demographics, increases of life expectancy, and the cost of medical care.

In the US, the cost of social security and medical care would almost double if people retired at 65 under Tuljapurkar's scenario.

But an increase in the retirement age to 85 would bring costs down to today's levels.

(See the seminars at CEPR.net for an explanation of why I mention medical care, but not social security. In a nutshell, social security costs make up only a tiny part of social security and medicale care costs.)

Maybe he's aiming to get us to commit mass suicide. That would bring down the cost of medical care, wouldn't it?

Seriously, the thought of a whole society of people working 60-65 years under approximately the same conditions as now has me recalling what Ripley said in one of the Alien movies about an aborted colony planet that got infested. She said something like, "Nuke it from orbit."

Posted by Mark at 06:00 AM | TrackBack

February 17, 2006

Intuition justified provided advance notice

New Scientist has a Slashdotted article covering research findings that suggest you'd do better not weighing your options too long on complicated decisions. Of course this is great news for the INFJs among us who typically reach conclusions before we're sure what the issue is.

Or is it?

It seems you have to give your unconscious mind a chance to mull things over while your conscious mind is occupied elsewhere. According to the findings, it doesn't help to make a quick decision if you haven't primed your unconscious mind beforehand.

Posted by Mark at 10:03 PM | TrackBack

Some vacation

We have 25 vacation days a year in France, plus 12 instead of a 35-hour week. Plus I think I have some days for seniority. Estimating based on the legal working year of 215 +- 2 days, for the last year I kept track, I worked approx. 50-hour weeks on average. Yet I am out of the office therefore more than most of my US-based colleagues.

Next week is one of those weeks. I've learned that when you take a week off, people route around you. When you take a day off, you have to catch up as if you'd just gotten a day behind.

What am I going to do with my time off? Take care of the kids, maybe work in the yard. I also have some longer term plans, but it'll probably be impossible to achieve anything, since the kids are on vacation as well. The alternative was to saddle Nathalie with the three of them full time. Not a fair fight in winter.

Posted by Mark at 07:51 PM | TrackBack

37:40/137

Easy jog with Nigel.

Posted by Mark at 02:18 PM | TrackBack

February 16, 2006

Capitalism for Beginners

Capitalism for Beginners is another of Antonia's comic books from about 1981. I read this one last night instead of watching Combien ça coûte ? with Nath.

You can perhaps see the characters on the "business cycle" starting with Adam Smith and finishing with Milton Friedman steering. At the end of the second oil crisis in the west, this book has Friedman and the monetarists appearing on the scene to send the Keynesians packing. I didn't get as much out of this one as the one about Marx's work on the subject.

Milton Friedman's book, Capitalism and Freedom, has been in my Amazon wish list since I read Hahnel's book on economics. Friedman's book seems like it might be the canonical text on how markets set you free, even though he was writing against central planning by a commissar class. (Note to rhetoreticians: Always set up a straw man.) Furthermore understanding Friedman seems fundamental to understanding how we see capitalism.

Posted by Mark at 08:20 PM | TrackBack

49:07/168

Up to St. Ismier and back down through Montbonnot. Ran fairly hard but felt slow and tired today.

Posted by Mark at 08:16 PM | TrackBack

What are the facts

On France Inter this morning Stéphane Paoli interviewed Ali Larijani, who claimed IAEA inspectors and their cameras were on site in Iranian enrichment plants.

On BBC News this morning, Douste-Blazy says Iran has a secret weapons program.

According to a short resolution the IAEA is not able to prove that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran, and that Iran has been less than perfectly cooperative:

(f) Recalling that in reports referred to above, the Director General noted that after nearly three years of intensive verification activity, the Agency is not yet in a position to clarify some important issues relating to Iran's nuclear programme or to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran, (g) Recalling Iran’s many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with its NPT Safeguards Agreement and the absence of confidence that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes resulting from the history of concealment of Iran’s nuclear activities, the nature of those activities and other issues arising from the Agency’s verification of declarations made by Iran since September 2002,

So for Douste-Blazy, they're guilty until proven innocent. I cannot find anything stating how well the US and France are complying with IAEA inspectors.

Posted by Mark at 11:25 AM | TrackBack

February 15, 2006

47:02/128

Slow jog with Phil. He was as tired as I was. I'm kept up by Diane. He's kept up by bugs in the code.

Posted by Mark at 05:40 PM | TrackBack

Reassuring words

Forbes.com has an article on how to get fired, Stupid Is As Stupid Does. The themes are that you have no privacy, due to backups of everything you do on the computer, and that you'd better, "Be in tune with the corporate culture," according to a CEO of a coaching and out-placement company.

Blogging the wrong way is identified as one of the things that can get you thrown out.

I'm amazed this article made it into the list of things to publish. Clearly all of us have fully voluntary work agreements with employers, such that working for them is a contract we enter into freely on both sides. Employers trust us to try to do the right things, and we trust them to work unceasingly in our best interests.

So why would it be so easy to get thrown out that all you have to do is, like Bloomberg's employee, play solitaire on your computer during business hours?

Posted by Mark at 08:59 AM | TrackBack

Diane sick again

Yet another bad night. Diane had antibiotics for an ear infection only weeks ago, and now seems to have another infection in the same ear. Same symptoms. We're hoping spring will come soon and put an end to her illnesses. In between the ear infections she was coughing during the night. I think Colette ended up sleeping with Diane in her little bed most of Sunday night.

Nath called to say she has a doctor's appointment at 11 this morning.

Posted by Mark at 08:56 AM | TrackBack

February 14, 2006

And you thought my running entries were too much

This guy uses his watch plus Google Maps to upload traces of his actual runs to his blog.

He's willing to share the software, but you need a particular model of watch for it to work. Not sure I'd be willing to make the investment. I'm waiting for the heartbeat monitor to that sends email and lets you keep a running verbal account of how you feel, altitude, temperature, blood concentrations, brain wave activity, shoe wear and tear, etc., and uploads all that via wireless into an online expert system coaching program that whispers advice through your headphones.

Posted by Mark at 08:47 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Reintermediation

According to MSNBC, Warner Music experienced a large relative uptick in digital music sales this past quarter.

Warner Music, which went public last May, said digital revenues surged by 176 per cent to $69m in the first quarter, from the $25m achieved the previous year and up 30 per cent from the previous quarter. Digital sales now account for 7 per cent of overall revenue, the company said.

To what extent does that offset the money the majors claim to have lost by being disintermediated from the physical music media markets?

Posted by Mark at 08:38 PM | TrackBack

Notice a broken heart

According to a BBC News article covering a Dutch study, women are more likely than men not to notice their breaking hearts (when they have heart attacks). Women are more likely to attribute the symptoms to severe flu, and to experience pain in the shoulders rather than the chest.

Posted by Mark at 08:30 PM | TrackBack

Happy Valentine's Day

I didn't forget. Didn't get Nathalie flowers, either, but instead a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream.

Posted by Mark at 08:02 PM | TrackBack

1:14:13/133

Good long jog with Stu. Lovely day to run.

Posted by Mark at 01:55 PM | TrackBack

February 13, 2006

Hegemony or Survival

Noam Chomsky wrote Hegemony or Survival about the time the US administration was making the case to invade Iraq. In a nutshell he's looking at the push to world dominance by the US state through recent history, and some of the dangers the push has caused and continues to cause for human survival. I listened to the audio book version, which is Brian Jones reading the text.

Chomsky's generally preaching to the converted. His criticisms cannot make it in the mainstream, though if you're flaky enough to hear him out, his criticisms hold together. He's even come up with a plausible explanation of why his stuff won't be able to make it into the mainstream. What he writes ends up being too well thought out and documented to attack frontally, but there are two forms of criticism easily adopted, and that you can recommend to keep everything he says from getting to 99.9% of people.

1. Attack the character, not the content. Chomsky is a crank from the lunatic fringe.

2. Ignore what McGeorge Bundy referred to as critical "noises." We don't have time to listen to every sore loser and disgruntled leftist who hates America.

Both of those techniques work well. Consider this interview on America Morning with Chomsky and Bill Bennett. Chomsky takes a rhetorical beating from Bill, who's better at the TV game. (Maybe Bill's book is good, too. I haven't read it.) On TV image is everything, and time is short.

If time isn't too short to listen, you may find Chomsky's perspective entertaining, and occasionally even useful.

He fills some holes left in what I'd learned about history (very little).

He demonstrates rules of thumb for evaluating policies and procedures. Facts and actions speak more clearly than rhetoric and pronouncements, so check what actually happens regardless of what is said. Evaluate your friends using the same yardsticks you use for your enemies. Don't confound the representatives with the represented. History is usually written by the victors. When reading news, recall that the press is privately owned, and the customers are advertisers, not readers. Etc.

His sense of humor is blacker than Kafka and funnier than Dilbert.

The trouble I have with Chomsky and Marx (not with Hahnel or Alpert) is that the well-designed criticism goes on and on, and then the solutions proposed at the end seem wishful and insubstantial, an exercise left entirely to the reader. In the end, maybe that's right, though. After all, both these guys are leading to the conclusion that what we need is all of us getting involved and contributing. If we rely on an elite to decide what's good for us, we'll end up dead. The first step is to take charge of ourselves.

Posted by Mark at 09:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

41:53/155

Up to Rochasson and back down on the road past the church. It seems to be warmer this week than last.

Posted by Mark at 02:22 PM | TrackBack

February 12, 2006

Magic and makeup

Chloe and Matthieu have been visiting on the way home from skiing in Areches.

Although the boys spent some time with the PlayStation, the children have most fun with the costumes, of which there are two laundry baskets full. Matthieu pulled out Tim's magicians gear and showed us his tricks. The tough part is having to ask the audience how to perform the trick before you do it. Only spoils it for people over 8 years old, though.

The girls have applied lots of makeup in the last 24 hours. We had company for the aperitif this morning, Emma's former babysitter, Nathalie. From across the room Nathalie thought Emma and Diane had chapped and bleeding lips. They've both gotten the idea of which general part of the face to apply the lipstick, but haven't quite narrowed down the boundaries, yet.

Now we have three snowboarding on the PlayStation. They've come home from running around the lake near Les Marches in order to have a snack, and because the cold mist is coming back.

Posted by Mark at 04:58 PM | TrackBack

Soon to be a major motion picture

Tim's latest idée fixe is the horror film he's planning with buddies. So far the script is still unfinished, though he's been working on the story since last Tuesday:

UN Martien Nomme Phenix s'appreta a aterir sur terre. Il alla prisonnier le president du s.a.s. carmen et son cousin parte

He's already prepared the box to hold the DVD however, with space for a bonus disc including previews of the sequel.

Posted by Mark at 04:52 PM | TrackBack

Kapital for Beginners

Kapital for Beginners, a comic book by David Smith and Phil Evans published in the early 1980s, makes clear some salient points of Marx's theory concerning how capital and labor interact, and how the capitalist to prosper must extract surplus value, value that can be created only through labor. Since I have not managed to read even the abridged version of the real thing, I borrowed this one from Antonia.

This book and the book it dumbs down have at one level an hilarious ironic cast that reminds me of Kafka's parable of the gate or the Philip K. Dick's story, A Scanner Darkly, in which narcotics officer S.A. Powers investigates his own increasing addiction, eventually getting himself incarcerated and blowing his mind in the process.

In the US and probably much of the developed world, the line between labor and capital is blurry in the top quintile, where we'd expect to rely on equities for retirement. In other words, we aspire to finish our lives as capitalists, and indeed are so intent on getting there that we invest to ride big capital's coat tails as it exploits us while we work and aims to play us off against cheaper labor elsewhere. Our fathers and mothers working in the private sector eventually lose their jobs, but seem to make it to financial security, provided we keep the scheme going.

Most of my compatriots from the top quintile would likely remind me that Marxism has been proven to be bunk, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc being the ultimate demonstration. Interesting that this comic book points out (years before the implosion) that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Castro, and dictators like them missed the point. Or maybe they got a different set of points, those made by Machiavelli. Quoted in this book Rosa Luxemburg wrote instead, "Only the working class, by its self-activity, can bring about socialism. That means workers control. Nobody can bring about socialism 'On your behalf.'" Guess the French "Socialists" didn't read Rosa Luxemburg either.

Posted by Mark at 04:23 PM | TrackBack

War Fever

J. G. Ballard's collection of short stories, War Fever, is the only one of the author's books that I've read. In these tales Ballard's shows himself to as a master of extrapolation, in particular with the two stories that close out the book, one a set of 18 footnotes, the other an index for the imaginary autobiography of an imaginary 20th century mover and shaker.

Rereading this one again I remain surprised by the construction, and wonder at the density of the final index-story, feeling like I ought, one of these days, to figure out the story alluded to though the choice of page numbers.

If you write software manuals, you may aspire to the terse but pregnant style of K&R, despairing over ever reproducing it given how much less you understand your material than Kernighan and Ritchie did C. If you write short stories, perhaps you feel the same about some of Ballard's stories.

Posted by Mark at 04:09 PM | TrackBack

Through the frozen vineyards

This morning the sky was as clear as yesterday. We had heavy white frost on the yard and the cars. Last night I was so exhausted I feel asleep reading on top of the covers shortly after 9 pm. Then I woke up in the middle of the night and finally got up from 2:45 to about 5:30 before going back to bed and to sleep for 1:30. Since the other adults were sleeping, I took the 7-9 am shift with the four older children. Diane had also gotten up in the middle of the night and switched to her grandparents' bed, after wanting to turn on the light and play.

Nathalie slept in a little, but I brought her coffee at 9. I went to for a bike ride from about quarter past nine to quarter past ten. Though I met several cyclists, it was almost too cold to ride. My hands and feet hurt from the cold. They still tingle.

The scenery was a winter postcard, but without snow in the valley. A breeze blew the polution off to the south a couple of days ago, and so you can now see each edge of each ridge on the Chartreuse, especially in the cold morning. In the frozen vineyards, the wires that bare the grape vines glinted in the sunlight, giving the impression from far off of being powdered with shiny ice.

Posted by Mark at 11:09 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 11, 2006

Skiing in Areches, part II

Matthieu and Chloe are back from Areches. Both have earned their first snowflakes, having learned to ski this week. Both tell me it was too easy, no problem at all.

Posted by Mark at 06:53 PM | TrackBack

Flu coming perhaps

When I went to see Rantz a while ago, he was expecting lots of people with the flu this month. Some folks at work have said their kids got it this past week.

As I was running around Pontcharra this morning, I saw on two occasions boys throwing up on the side of the road. Diane's been coughing the last two nights, and she's still coughing a bit, but nothing more than that so far. Hope we don't get unlucky.

Posted by Mark at 02:21 PM | TrackBack

1:40:01/155

...and now back to our regularly scheduled program. Ran the 3 extended laps around Pontcharra starting from home that make for roughly half-marathon distance.

Unpleasantly cold starting out, as it was a very clear night. The scenery was particularly impressive however, with the mountains starkly defined against the blue sky.

Posted by Mark at 10:29 AM | TrackBack

February 10, 2006

Defeating Feature Fatigue

Janetta suggested I read Defeating Feature Fatigue, an article that appeared in Harvard Business Review of this month. Roland T. Rust, Debora Viana Thompson, and Rebecca W. Hamilton studied the effects of featuritis on short-term to long-term sales, finding that although feature richness attract folks who haven't yet tried a product, too many features reduce long term sales as even expert users suffer from the complexity of a single product with so many capabilities.

How well does something clearly true for telephones and DVD players map to software? Probably quite well for end user software, like browsers, mailers, and web applications. But what about the software used by people making that end user software or the software and hardware to support its use?

Probably a lot of the same findings still hold. Eric S. Raymond wrote up The Art of Unix Programming, including Basics of the Unix Philosophy, which has perhaps too many rules (17), though they all seem to have the same basic flavor. One that fits the context of this article is the, "Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do."

When we create without knowing what is needed, it makes sense to take a shotgun approach to features. After all feature richness attract folks who haven't yet tried a product, all other things remaining equal. Perhaps the way to Defeating Feature Fatigue for software lies in knowing precisely what it needs to do, and focusing on that. Easier said than done, especially when you're competing rather than cooperating.

Posted by Mark at 09:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Broken Gnome, part II

By the way, I found out Gnome was breaking because I'd set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in my environment, and some incompatible, contributed software libraries got linked in first. Boom.

The thing I hadn't see was that you can start a failsafe session on the SunRay, which doesn't try to run gnome-session. Good for debugging. Sort of.

After I removed LD_LIBRARY_PATH from my environment, I had to figure out which apps wouldn't open without it. And I still get two instances of gconfd-2. Shutting down the session only kills one.

Maybe I'm not supposed to have the contributed software binaries in my PATH?

Posted by Mark at 09:37 PM | TrackBack

47:55/165

Uphill to St. Ismier, then across through Montbonnot and back down.

Posted by Mark at 02:42 PM | TrackBack

February 09, 2006

How accurate is Wikipedia

As BBC News notes, the recent big hullabaloo is over members of the US congress editing their own biographies. Although the Wikipedia folks were stirred up, it's hardly surprising that some of those having the drive to win the hugest popularity contests of all would not feel undue moral discomfort about adjusting the online record. They probably see it as setting the facts straight.

What I found interesting in the article was this statement, "A December 2005 study by the British journal Nature found it [Wikipedia] was about as accurate on science as the Encyclopaedia Britannica."

In a way looking things up in Wikipedia is like getting support using Google to find answers in mailing lists, which is inevitably how it ends up when you're fixing something. That's an amazing realization when you think that, "I read online that...," is a euphemism for, "Here comes a tall tale."

Maybe the end has come for normally published reference works. And I can stop creating man pages.

Posted by Mark at 09:18 PM | TrackBack

To send the photos

Nathalie got a new digital camera for Christmas. The photos are at 5 megapixel resolution, so the JPEGs weigh 2.4 MB each.

She wanted to send 7 or 8 of these to her brother. We have asymmetric DSL, so uploading is only 1/4 the speed of downloading. Even at max. speed, each photo would take about 3 minutes to upload.

One of the techniques I showed her with the Gimp is that you can easily scale photos. When you make them 400x300 pixels, instead of their original size, the JPEGs weigh on the order of 40 KB, taking 3 seconds instead of 3 minutes each to upload.

Another technique, probably even more useful, is cropping photos. Why send all that space around the edges when you can just crop around the subject instead? Especially if you're going to shrink the photo, too. I've been trying to convince her to zoom in on her subjects, but in the meantime cropping is a partial fix.

In any case, it sure is easier than waiting for the paper photos.

Posted by Mark at 08:33 PM | TrackBack

Managed identity hell

In a world of no privacy and full management of your identity by your creditors, we'd end up like this guy who wants to order a pizza, the link to which Lana sent around. Thank goodness I work in software so I know nothing so seamless will every work. Right?

Posted by Mark at 08:27 PM | TrackBack

1:23:19/161

Nath suggested I should take a sleeping pill, so I took melatonin. The after effects aren't too awful, and last only a couple of hours after I wake up for good. Still woke up a couple of times during the night, but managed to fall asleep again.

I ran the first few km with Stu, Joanne, and Phil, then sped up a bit and finished 18 km, feeling better than I did yesterday. After a run like that I generally feel straightened out, probably a sign of endorphin addiction.

Posted by Mark at 03:44 PM | TrackBack

February 08, 2006

Long time, no book reviews

You probably are not wondering about this, but there's a reason why I've not published many book reviews lately. No, I'm not watching TV instead. I'm rereading the books I have.

Posted by Mark at 09:33 PM | TrackBack

Skiing in Areches

Nath took the three children to the ski station in Areches-Beaufort, where Colette and Michel are skiing this week with Chloe and Matthieu. I don't see any of them on the webcam.

The girls were very tired when they came back, although they'd slept in the car. Now they're having trouble going to sleep.

Tim was in better shape, and even agreed to help me set the table. Nath says she's exhausted.

Posted by Mark at 09:10 PM | TrackBack

19:42/152

Better than nothing is good enough.

Posted by Mark at 05:44 PM | TrackBack

No high blood pressure (on Saturday)

The cardiologist said with a smile that everything is okay because he didn't find anything. I didn't have the courage to punch him in the nose. He probably didn't mean it the way I took it, anyway. That was just expert talk for, "This problem is not worth explaining, so we're going to quit investigating now." In those cases you're supposed to trust the expert and respect his judgement.

Over the 22 hours 38 minutes I wore the portable device to measure blood pressure, systolic pressure was 125 on average, diastolic 77, with during the day 84.1% of systolic pressure measurements however over 120, and 95.5% of diastolic pressure measurements over 70. The highest measured systolic was 143. The lowest minimum diastolic was 54. My average measured heart rate was 59, ranging from a low of 46 to a high of 88.

Although I'm no expert, I surmise that if it were the last remaining plausible cause besides stress, too much salt in my diet, it would've shown up on Saturday as well. So by process of elimination, I conclude the measurements taken so far capture stress-related high blood pressure, and that doctors can do nothing about that but make me more alarmed.

My right hand was shaking involuntarily when I sat down to wait in a vacant office at the cardiologist's, and is still shaking a bit. My head hurts already. My eyes feel tired and heavy. Last night I had a few fits of trouble getting my breath, and found it difficult to fall asleep despite complete exhaustion. After Diane woke us up just after 5 am, I realized I wasn't going to sleep anymore. It's terrible when you get out of bed even more exhausted than before you went.

This is not related to running, which has tapered away to very little. (Sleep disturbance can be indicative of overtraining.) It's hard to go out, though.

Posted by Mark at 10:32 AM | TrackBack

February 07, 2006

Some disagreement over unemployment

We're at that point in every big project where it's on the mind. It's not entirely clear whether it's just my paranoia, or whether it's good intuition, but I worry about getting forcefully added to the ranks of the unemployed.

So in this frame of mind I noticed with amusement the BBC News article about French protests against the Prime Minister's CPE (contrat premier emploi) idea. The plan is to enact a law prolonging the trial period for young employees to two years, meaning essentially that instead of a 1-3 month trial period during which the employer can get rid of the employee without justification, the employer can get rid of the employee any time in the first 24 months without justification.

Since work contracts are entered into freely by both parties and neither party has an advantage in the negotiations, especially in France where unemployment of young people runs about 20%, employers welcome the proposition as a great way to combat unemployment.

According to a report I heard on the radio here, 52% of French voters surveyed think the law is not a good idea. That didn't show up in the BBC News article. Instead the BBC says this, which is total horseshit:

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has made it a priority to cut unemployment among young people.

Politicians, like managers and other people in favorable positions, prefer to be judged by their intentions, rather than their actions. Wouldn't you? Isn't that a damn good reason to turn the sound off and judge them purely by what they in fact accomplish, the part that could never be attributed to brownian motion, business cycles, or accident?

By the way, unlike the Fed, the European Central Bank is not legally concerned with limiting unemployment. According to the Federal Reserve Act, the Fed's monetary policy objectives are set up "to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates." (Emphasis added.)

Posted by Mark at 09:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Broken Gnome

Been having a strange problem at work on the SunRay. I cannot login to a Gnome session.

The tech support folks I spoke with couldn't figure it out. They did tell me one nice thing to know about the SunRay. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace twice kills your X server, so you can get back out to the login screen to try something else. CDE is still there, if unsupported.

I ran a cleanup script we have, but wonder what it's not getting to. It deletes a few of the configuration directories under $HOME. Maybe it doesn't get everything.

At work on the SunRay I notice that when I login there always seem to be two gconfd-2 instances running at the same time. On the laptop right here there's only one. Hmm. Not even sure what to google for.

Posted by Mark at 08:08 PM | TrackBack

31:21/151

Had a hard time getting started. Ran with Joanne uphill to the national road, across through Montbonnot, and back down.

Posted by Mark at 06:19 PM | TrackBack

February 06, 2006

Fat browser

Somebody's blog entry on Understanding memory usage on Linux got Slashdotted. I went over to look. It's mainly about the effect of shared library code and looking at this with pmap -d.

The example was with a KDE text editor, which apparently uses lots of shared library code, and so looks much more bloated under ps than it actually is. There are however other applications that not only look bloated, but also are pretty big.

$ ps -e | grep firefox
10447 ?        00:07:38 firefox-bin
$ pmap -d 10447 | tail -1
mapped: 156204K    writeable/private: 118824K    shared: 768K

That's Firefox with the aforementioned article opened, nothing else.

Posted by Mark at 10:16 PM | TrackBack

Ran out of Kaplas

Tim reminded me that I'd not posted the photo of his Kapla tower. He managed to use all 200 blocks in this one without making it too high and rickety. Tim's still a long way from the world record 51' tower, but the people doing that probably do not have to contend with Diane.

The idea to get these for Christmas came from watching the kids play with the blocks over at Ludo's. It really was a good gift idea, on the same order as Legos used to be. He seems to play with these more than he watches his Star Wars DVDs or plays with his PlayStation.

His latest idea is that, since he's able to build a tower that uses up the entire box of 200 blocks, he needs a whole lot more. Nath and I don't want that. When he gets all of what he asks for, he's no longer interested soon thereafter.

Posted by Mark at 09:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hawaiian islands have it all

Andy's posted a picture of somebody snowboarding in Hawaii.

He doesn't seem to have found anyone who has experienced a snow shower at much lower elevations on Kauai, yet, but I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by Mark at 09:37 PM | TrackBack

How we understand what to do

When we're trying to clarify and prioritize requirements for a particular project, it can be tempting to gather expert opinion on the subject and to delegate definition to those readily willing to write up their requirements.

That's the natural way to approach the problem, natural in the sense that water flows downhill. The experts of course have opinions. Often they (at least pretend to) know what they want. Those eager to explain their requirements give us easy targets.

The trouble with this approach is that we end up pandering to experts and to those who know how to state their requirements, rather than those who could benefit the most from our efforts or those who have the most to offer us in exchange.

Posted by Mark at 09:30 PM | TrackBack

1:04:41/170

Kept the tempo up, but felt sluggish. I've lost some of my edge, if I ever had one. I sincerely hope this was more than 14 km.

Posted by Mark at 02:57 PM | TrackBack

February 05, 2006

Overnight

Michel, Colette, Matthieu, and Chloe left mid morning today. They're driving up the mountain to the ski resort where both children are going to take lessons starting this afternoon.

The boys were together at the PlayStation first thing last night, and again this morning, though they took a few moments to get into Jedi disguise.

Diane was showing off her Sith frown, though the pink pyjamas kind of ruin the effect.

Emma and Chloe decided instead to get a little exercise before dinner. I'm sure Emma will be showing off her washboard stomach soon.

Posted by Mark at 10:51 AM | TrackBack

Very bad night

Boy, was I glad to remove this thing and turn the power off at 7:13 am this morning.

Last night we ate with Catherine and Andy and their friends Doug and Lorraine. Andy and Doug are both from Scotland. As a sort of ceremony, they wore their kilts. We ate haggis, potatoes, rutabaga, plus red wine and whisky.

Doug adressed the haggis with an impressive if mostly incomprehensible poem from Robert Burns, stabbing it with the ceremonial knife. I'd never eaten haggis before. Reminded me somehow of boudin noir.

When I finally got to bed after 1 am, I got to "sleep" in 40 minute intervals before the blood pressure machine would wake me up. Finally went to the couch in a daze after 4 am, when life had become so uncomfortable in my bed I could no longer keep from moving.

Nathalie was snoring when I left. I tried to read, nodding off now and then to be awakened by the infernal machine. I wondered if the stress I was feeling would show up in the blood pressure readings, and that made it even worse.

My wedding band seemed to be choking my ring finger, although it's usually nearly falling off in winter. The snug fit of the armband must've been preventing the veins from doing their job normally. Hope the children go easy on us today.

Posted by Mark at 10:02 AM | TrackBack

February 04, 2006

Heavy traffic

Michel, Colette, Matthieu, and Chloe are coming down to the Alps to ski. This is the first week of school vacation for the Paris zone.

We tried to convince them to make the trip Friday afternoon rather than Saturday, but they didn't agree and expected to be able to make good time. It turns out our estimates were better than theirs. By 3:30 pm, they'd only made it to Beaune, and were getting something to eat.

At present they're in between Bugey and Chambery, however. The thickest of the traffic must now be in the valley between Chambery and the Alps. Nathalie's telling them to get off the autoroute and onto the national road, but if I understand correctly they already did that.

Posted by Mark at 05:02 PM | TrackBack

Chat perdu, part II

The cat who tried to move in at our house last weekend is now gone.

Nathalie took her (her, it turned out) to a shelter in Le Versoud where the woman in charge felt optimistic that someone would take her. At the shelter they have antibiotics for the cat's cold as well, and can keep their animals indoors. So apparently the cat was happy to end up there for the time being.

Posted by Mark at 04:58 PM | TrackBack

Should give in to check up, part V

This morning at 7:15 I was at the cardiologist's office. His assistant attached some leads to my legs, arms, and chest and took what looks like an ECG. The doctor was very busy already before 8 am, but he came back and did an ultrasound and took my blood pressure. He didn't find anything worth noting. "Rien à signaler." He read my blood pressure as 14/8, which he said was okay.

I asked him if I could continue running, and he said no problem. His assistant who gave me the ECG said she was going to run the NY marathon this year. She'd never run a marathon before.

The atmosphere there at the cardiologist's office, which he shares with two colleagues and several assistants, looked fairly stressful. They seem to have a bunch of patients at once. All the patients I saw were guys, though some of us looked in good shape, and others of us looked like we were about to keel over.

The doctor's assistant ended up having me wait a while, then she fitted me with the apparatus I'm wearing now. It puffs up the cuff on my left upper arm every 20 minutes to take my blood pressure all day and night today. More than somewhat inconvenient, but I guess we'll know if my blood pressure is really high or if I'm suffering from white coat effect.

Posted by Mark at 11:03 AM | TrackBack

February 03, 2006

Imaginary burns

We ran a fire evacuation drill this afternoon. Didier and Bruno were on the phone in Didier's office. I completely failed to notice they were there. Christopher was doing the same hallway I was. I guess I noticed the door was closed and thought I'd seen it marked as closed with a PostIt, which is our code for defining a room as checked and emptied of occupants.

Had it been the real thing, the guys might have inhaled a bunch of smoke and died. Just to stay on the phone. Maybe they had the door closed to soften the piercing sound of the alarm. Next time I'll be more careful.

Posted by Mark at 08:54 PM | TrackBack

40:31/163

Rochasson, pushing it fairly hard going up, since I felt cold. Came down the long way.

Posted by Mark at 03:16 PM | TrackBack

movein.sh ?

My brother Matt and I were thinking about online backups. If you're like me, your ISP provides more space than you need to backup everything in your family's $HOMEs. The biggest pain in reinstalling is transferring files and setting up the $HOMEs again including configuration of preferences, etc. At home I don't want to run a file server for /home in the basement all the time.

So Matt's suggesting a movein.sh script that gets everything and sets it up for you, and you don't have to do that manually every time you bring a new machine online. Hmm. I wonder about authentification as well. What if I had LDAP-based naming on my machines, but left the server running at my ISP? It would be the opposite of high end.

In any case if a web-based service took the user auth and user data problems away from a particular home system, that might have a tendency to encourage people to change systems more often. I'd also be one step closer to work from anywhere.

Posted by Mark at 08:30 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 02, 2006

Should give in to check up, part IV

Other than my blood being fairly dilute, the tests didn't show anything odd. None of the measurements show readings outside the normal range. I write "dilute" because red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are all present in low-end-of-normal concentrations. Cholesterol and triglyceride readings are well below the risk thresholds. Creatinine clearance looks normal, as does the blood sugar level.

Posted by Mark at 07:39 PM | TrackBack

45:45/161

Tim would rather spend the afternoon with his friend Florent than with his dad after all. So I started out running with Tim biking alongside me. I had to push him up hills, then race to catch him going down.

After dropping Tim off at Florent's house, I picked up the pace to make it a sort of tempo run over to Chapareillan and back.

Posted by Mark at 03:03 PM | TrackBack

Should give in to check up, part III

Joanne told me yesterday I'm like her husband, Martin. If we could, we'd plan to take vacation to die.

This morning after I put out breakfast for the children I went in to get blood tests. Dr. Rantz told me to go see the cardiologist with the results of the blood tests so it would be easier to diagnose my blood pressure readings.

Later I called the cardiologist's office. The woman who answered the phone asked me if it was urgent. I told her it wasn't urgent, but that I'd prefer not to wait too long. She gave me an appointment for Saturday morning at 7:15 am.

Only after that did I notice the children don't go to school this Saturday. Yet Nath has to teach as usual on Saturday mornings. So we're going to have a babysitter come for the children. I wonder what sort of tests I should be prepared for Saturday.

Posted by Mark at 01:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Video games

Tim's off school today. His teacher is striking. I took the day off work. Nathalie has to work this afternoon, and somebody needs to stay with Tim.

Nath gave in to Tim's request to go have a look at used video games. So the three of us went to the store together this morning. The used video games are generally much, much cheaper than the new ones.

Nath didn't want Tim to get anything scary or violent. That's a tall order, it seems. Most games are either scary, or violent, or both. In the end Tim got one that's a little bit scary and violent, one released as part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy marketing campaign. He's playing that now. It comes with clips from the movie to help situate the butchery in some sort of story, and plenty of dramatic music.

Tim also got one of the Gran Tourismo series. That's as close as you can get to not scary and not violent, plus he can play with his sisters. Trouble is none of them know how to drive. I tried to explain that you're not supposed to accelerate into a turn, but maybe they need their uncles to give them a clue.

Posted by Mark at 12:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 01, 2006

2003 UB313 needs a better name

Scientists found what may be considered the 10th planet in our solar system, a Kuiper Belt object larger than Pluto, which they've called 2003 UB313.

The folks naming our products at work must share common ancestry with these guys.

"It can't get an official name until it has an official status and right now it doesn't have an official status, so it can't get a name," he said.

2003 UB313 lies 97 astronomical units away from the sun. TV reception must be awful out there.

Posted by Mark at 10:18 PM | TrackBack

/home at home, part II

I've finally taken the time to move everything in our /home at home over to a single disk. I checked that lots of things still worked, then eliminated the duplicate files. This leaves me with space to capture and edit video, or try out other OSs. If only I had the energy and the time.

Posted by Mark at 09:50 PM | TrackBack

Should give in to check up, part II

Dr. Rantz took my blood pressure and listened to my heart. He got 4 different blood pressure readings, from the high end of normal to even higher than last week. My right arm seemed to give higher readings than my left.

Thankfully there weren't too many folks in his office this morning. I was only a little upset and worried when my turn came rather than simmering with rage.

He wants me to get a blood test, then go see a cardiologist, which he said would take half a day. Nathalie called me at work to ask how it went. When she suggested I call the cardiologist right away, I snapped at her. The paper with the phone number is in the car; I'll call tomorrow. She must suspect I come to work only for social reasons. Admittedly I don't tell her much about what I do (or what I would be doing if it were possible to get some time to work on what I really need to do at work). By the time of night we could talk about that, she and I are both too tired for it. Furthermore, I don't even have the energy to explain my job to my manager, let alone someone whose eyes glaze over when the conversation turns in the direction of software.

At work the anger has been simmering for a long time, though the pressure's higher at this point of the project. Something tells me I'm not even working on the right problem.

Posted by Mark at 02:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

33:14/142

Another slow jog with Phil.

Posted by Mark at 02:39 PM | TrackBack