When I was young, about 1992, I played through Wolfenstein 3D. It was great fun. When DOOM came out later, however, I found it to be boring. It was a better game than the Wolfenstein one, but not so much better that I wanted to spend time on it. I never even looked at Quake, or any of the numerous newer games released since. Partly this was because I had converted completely to Linux, and most of the games didn't work on it. Partly, however, I didn't really care, since my favorite games were C and Python. I have friends who play a lot, though. I even know a game design professional, Ville. Recently I asked him to to show me a good selection of games, primarily first person shooters. I saw, and played, Quake 2, Quake 4, Far cry, and Halo. They were all quite impressive, and pretty enjoyable, with Ville giving me advice all the time. Since Quake 2 works on Linux these days, I bought the CD-ROM and installed it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on my laptop. It doesn't make any sounds at all, and sounds are fairly important for the game play. It does work on my desktop machine, so I've played it with that, despite the mouse trouble I have: my optical mouse seems to be incompatible with fast paced game playing, or possibly it is the surface of my coffee table. Either way, occasionally (and usually during a fight) the character starts looking straigh up at the ceiling and rotating along the vertical axis several times a second. It takes a couple of seconds to fix this. Not very good for survival. I'd fix it by trying a new mouse or getting a mouse pad, but I'm not sure I enjoy a first person shooter game enough to spend any effort on that. I've now played Quake 2 for a number of hours, and died a dozen times I think, without advancing very far. As long as I can spend time lazily shooting at alien monsters, I'm happy, but running around in mazes or figuring out which magic buttons to press in which order (after running through the maze to find them), has begun to bore me already. The fact that I find the quick pace of game play during close combat more frustrating than rewarding isn't helping. I will probably occasionally return to Quake 2, because the immersion in a glorious 3D world is so enticing, but I probably won't ever become enthusiastic. There's other kinds of games, of course. Foobillard, for example, gives much of the same kind of "wow, it's like the real world" experience to me than Quake 2, but I can take my time aiming before shooting. Also, of course, billiards balls don't shoot back. Unfortunately, I had to purge foobillard from my machine because it is too much fun, and I'd start a game (or a series of games) every time I had to wait for a compilation. One minute of fixing code and starting make, fifteen minutes of playing billiards, is not a good formula for productivity.

A month between postings. Who needs regular updates? I've got a few of these weekend weeviews piled up, so I'm going to do them two at a time every couple of days. Omega Man Charleton Heston makes this post-apocalyptic world view quite the masterpiece. Considering his current stance on guns, it is easy to throw a couple of cheap shots at the movie in which he plays a gun-crazed doctor. Thinking you're the only one left in existence has got to be pretty hard on the psyche, and it shows in the character. Robert Neville (Heston's character) obviously doesn't think he's really alone, just the only one left who shouldn't be shot on sight. The rest of the human race was hit by a crappy plague, 28 days later-style. This plague apparently doesn't kill all brain functions, but only crams you into a religious sect which could only be described as luddite. Movies aren't interesting without a love interest, so Heston finds out early about Lisa (Rosalind Cash) who is keeping a set of children who are immune. Robert is also immune, and hopes to create a serum from his blood. This 70's end of the world is remarkably watchable, although it has it's moments of Action Movie. The acting is well done, although the cult of luddites is somewhat overplayed and has strange overtones of vampirism for some reason. Omega Man gets a 7. (imdb, amazon) Conquest of the Planet of the Apes As a child of the 80s, I never saw any of the original Planet of the Apes movies, and always assumed they were campy and not well done. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they actually have a plot and are interesting. This fourth movie in the series of 70s movies presents it's moral message with a generous heaping of.. it's moral message. Years after his parents travelled backward in time in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Caesar, the only talking ape left, is incognito with the circus master who raised him and comes to the city for the first time. At this time the plague which killed all pets has already ravaged the nation, humans have decided that apes are more useful as slaves than pets, and already have a large monolithic "Ape Management" section of government. Caesar gets thrown through the system when his "owner" gets brought into questioning for.. questioning the treatment of an ape. Being highly intelligent, he quickly gets snatched up for his skills by a top government official. Starting an underground resistance movement is the next step, and dominos start to fall from there. Conquest.. then degenerates into a large-cast action film, with hundreds of extras in a street-level ape vs. human fight. It's not the most interesting movie ever, but considering my expectations I can happily give it a 6. (imdb, amazon)

It's been quite a while since my last post, so this will mainly be an update on what I've been up to the last weeks or even months. Overall the past time has mainly been pretty busy. It was the end of the semester, a time that always brings a lot of work, and in this case it was the end of my last semester, which adds a little extra pressure to the whole business, since I didn't only have to take care of the usual stuff, but also had to arrange for an appropriate topic for my upcoming thesis, which is always a kind of a "balancing act". Things are however looking good now and I am quite confident that I'll be able to spend the six months I have for my thesis on a subject that actually interests me, my tutors, complies with the official guidelines, has some purpose beyond getting me a Master of Arts AND EVEN has a realistic chance of actually working out! Yay academia! Apart from university work I've been kept additionally busy by my jobs, which unfortunately also both had a kind of peak during the last weeks. The problem about this is, that actually both of them were intended to be "only-jobs" since they both provided me with enough money and consumed just as much time as I could spare during the semester. But then I got accepted for both of them and absolutely couldn't decide which one to chose (one was at the university as a teaching assistant, the other at a pretty cool IT security consultant's) so I did both and have been juggling those two, my studies and actually getting to sleep/eat every now and then during the last weeks. This has been pretty exhausting, but on the bright side, I have a little spare money now to spend while the holidays. (Luckily both bosses are on a 3-4 week trip in August :)) One thing that suffered rather greatly from my very tight schedule this semester (apart from my horribly neglected sweetie of course) was my Debian/Free Software work that got almost entirely stalled ever since I returned from DC6. So I hope to be using the more quiet summer months to spend some time on this, maybe write a nice new talk and package some things I've had my eyes on for quite a while already. Oh, and I'll sleep. A LOT! PS: Last night, to celebrate the end of the semester, we went to see the Pirates of the Caribbean double feature. Hilarious!! Go see it!

See Dr Dave Blog Archive Critical Announcement affecting ALL Wordpress users. I don’t know if this is a hoax or for real, but since the price for believing this in the first case is merely a slight embarrassment, I’m taking this advice.

I’ve been doing some overdue hardware upgrades on my little server/community ISP. 500GB drives have dropped to the $200 range, and while they’re not necessarily the cheapest per gigabyte storage, it’s a so much more efficient use of space and electricity that it seems a waste to buy a smaller capacity drive. So I bought two internal 500GB drives and one external 500GB so I can have a backup some place other than the backup server in my basement, in case the house burns down or someone decides to break in and steal all the computers (note to thieves: please don’t do this). Since I’ve been burning through hard drives (literally!) at a rate of about one every six months, I decided to do something about the temperature in the case. The CPU has been hovering dangerously around 60 degrees celcius for a long while, and the drives well into the 50’s — except the one drive with its own personal fan, which is happy to hang out in the 30’s. (I’ve got three more hard drive fans en route). In any event, I’ve never bought a CPU fan before, so I just picked out a random one that seemed better than what I had. Little did I know what I was getting. When I took the new fan and heatsink out of the box, I was reminded of Crocodile Dundee: That’s not a CPU fan, mate. This is a CPU fan. Pictured below is the TITAN TTC-NK15TB/SC(RB) I bought for the low price of $31. Although this image doesn’t show the Japanese anime decoration on the top, it captures the size. The old fan/heatsink combination was about 20% the size of this one, and not nearly as shiny. I realize for all you case-modder/overclocker/slashdot/gamer types, this is probably a puny cooling apparatus, but for me it was pretty exciting. Now my hands are apparently permanently covered with blue thermal grease, and my CPU is running at a cool 40 degrees. Oh, well, here is the top view: Of course, no one ever sees that, except the person installing it.

Yesterday was such an insanely long day -- we woke up in a tent, had breakfast over a Treo, then released a lot of software and went to sleep in the middle of the night. It seemed like 4 days, not 1. And this morning I had to take our new mini-SUV into the shop for its first maintenance checkup. For the last 6 years, I've driven a beautiful old wp:Citro n DS station wagon, but around the time Amita June was born I decided I wanted her to learn to drive on it. Maj and I decided that that meant it had to be taken care of a little better, so I put it in storage and we bought at 2005 Hyundai Tucson. (The Hyundai people here in Quebec pronounce it like "Tux-awn", to our endless amusement.) It's weird having a new car -- like, newer than 1972. Parts are not only plentiful but inexpensive. There is a selection of multiple mechanics in my major metropolitan area that can service the vehicle. And people don't point and wave when you're driving, or stop you on the street to tell you stories about how their grandfather used to drive one on their family farm. We'll be driving the car to wt:Boston next week for Wikimania 2006, so I'm glad it went to the shop. It should be in good shape for the drive -- I hope the rest of us are. tags: hyundai tucson citro n ds quebec new car

Slides Speaking of Wikimania -- I'm nowhere near ready for my presentation. Jeez, how'd it get to be almost-August already? Thankfully, no one else I've talked to is really ready to talk, either... so at least I'm not the last one to get my homework done. tags: wikimania presentation slides

Software The OpenID software I did for MediaWiki went out yesterday, and I got a lot of good feedback on it. OpenID requires that some state data is stored between participating servers, and the code I wrote uses the memcached client built into MediaWiki to store it. Not optimal but it works. Well, better today than yesterday, that is. There were some pretty gruesome bugs in the implementation that were only showing up for some exceptional circumstances. So I adapted the JanRain unit tests for the other storage classes to my Memcached class, and that helped a whole hell of a lot for debugging. Yay, unit testing! Some people are still having problems with the software, though. The main thing I've found is that the key-value pair output required by OpenID for its inter-server communications is sensitive to extra whitespace thrown in. Why would there be extra whitespace? I've found that a lot of PHP libraries have bits of whitespace at the end, after the closing ?>, and that will show up in the output. Whether it matters depends on how sensitive the output format is to whitespace. In the case of OpenID, the answer is: pretty sensitive. But I'm looking forward to having some more people try the OpenID MediaWiki extension out. tags: openid mediawiki extension unit test php whitespace

Wikipedia's 25th of July Spot-on satire from The Onion: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence. I quote:

• "On July 25, 1256, delegates gathered at Comerica Park to sign the Declaration Of Independence, which rejected the rule of the British over its 15 coastal North American colonies," reads an excerpt from the entry. "Little did such founding fathers as George Washington, George Jefferson, and ***ERIC IS A FAG*** know that their small, querulous republic would later become the most powerful and prosperous nation in history, the Unified States Of America."

Does the fact that I find an Onion article funny say more about my declining humor standards, or about their recent improvements? I don't know. tags: the onion wikipedia satire

Four ideas I was very interested to see Tim O'Reilly's Four Big Ideas About Open Source. I think that there are some fascinating developments over the last few years that have fallen under the rubric of wp:Web 2.0, and I think they affect those of us who put our hearts and minds into Open Source software. I think this was part of his keynote at OSCON 2006, which, y'know, I'm not techically at or anything. It briefly crossed my mind, but I've got too much to do for Thermidor and Fructidor to flit off to yet another conference -- this one only tangentially involved with what I do for a living. Still, it's interesting that Open Source software and Web services are crossing paths. FLOSS has been critical for making Web services possible, but taking that up to the meta-level and seeking the same freedoms from Web apps that you expect from "regular" software... that's a Moebius strip of rights right up in there. tags: floss open source oscon tim oreilly

My life as a toolbar So, sometime in the last year I started installing Firefox toolbars. The main one that's useful to me is Chris Pederick's excellent Web Developer Extension, jam-packed with little tools that make my job as a developer that much easier. But I also install, well, pernicious toolbars. Judgemental toolbars. Toolbars that make me forget what really matters and turn the Web into a horserace or a highschool popularity contest. They're horrible, and they're addicting, and I can't stop using them. The Google Toolbar has some diddly little useless gadgets that I don't give a shit about, like searching my Gmail account for the given search terms (whoopee). What I loooove, though, is the wp:PageRank indicator. PageRank, of course, is the patented algorithm developed by Google founder Larry Page to estimate the importance of a page on the Web. It's incredibly accurate and valuable and though no longer the only criteria Google uses for ranking pages, it's still critical as a measure of the intrinsic value of a page. So, there's this little wp:progress bar on the Google Toolbar that shows the PageRank of any page you're looking at. It's an apparently logarithmic scale from 1-10, with the number showing up in a popup tooltip. Creative Commons? 9/10. Ted's story about the great worldwide race? 2/10. Technorati home page? 8/10. Male Secretary? 6/10. Wikitravel's France discussion? 3/10. And so on and so on. Even worse is the A9 Toolbar, which (again) has a whole bunch of bogus boring features, but also shows the Alexa ranking of any site you're looking at. Alexa ranking isn't some egghead hooty-tooty algorithm about the importance of a page -- it's a ranking on the Big Board of who's the most visited site in the world and who doesn't matter in the slightest. So, I can see that Flickr is ranked #41 today, le Sans Fil is #347,296, and wikiHow is #2248. Alexa is a lot more coarse-grained than Google's toolbar -- it measures the traffic to a given second-level-domain, not a particular URL. So any LiveJournal or Blogger site gets LJ's entire Alexa ranking -- not very useful. Still, I've taken to thinking almost entirely in terms of PageRank and Alexa rank. It's unreasonable. Every site I go to, my eye drifts up to my toolbars to confirm my idea about it. Do I really like Achewood? Sure, but it's only got an Alexa rank around 20,000... Doc Searls's blog has a PageRank of 8, which is really impressive; but... my page for 22 Prairial (Journal/22 Prairial CCXIV) apparently has the same PageRank. Holy moly! Why could that be? (I think it has something to do with the wp:Law of 22 Prairial, but I could be wrong.) Really, putting these numbers on everything is ruining the Web for me. It's turning me into a total jerk, too. I kinda want to go back to the time when I just found stuff on the Web and didn't think, "How do I measure up?" Thankfully the Yahoo Toolbar doesn't include anything remotely like rankings... just as well. Of course, that's the reason I uninstalled it, too. I can find my way to Yahoo! Canada Greetings just fine on my own if I need to. tags: google a9 alexa toolbar pagerank

John Goerzen professes not to understand the apparent inconsistencies in the Presidents positions on life issues. While I can't speak for him, I am as near to a "typical Republican" as you are likely to get around these parts and although I'm busy with other things I feel compelled to explain how they are in fact consistent.

The foundation is a belief in the innate dignity and right to life of Man simply by virtue of being a member of the human species. Therefore the default position in any case should be to protect against the unnecessary taking of life whenever there is a choice in the matter. Therefore abortion is wrong precisely it is as its defenders say a "choice." Stem cell research is also wrong on these grounds but as a clump of cells is not clearly a human being you can agree to disagree on that. Those who do think it is wrong should not be forced to participate in murder which is why the government is against Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research not against the practice altogether. (Also remember there are other sources of stem cells.)

The innate dignity of a person can be made forfeit by an act of will on the part of that person. Thus a murderer has no right to life, by his personal actions he has surrendered it. If fetuses started leaping out of vaginas and attacking people, they would forfeit their right to life too but they don't.

What John conspicuously fails to mention concerning the 30,000 Iraq civilian deaths is how they died and who killed them. In the vast majority of the cases it is at the hands of those who putatively were on their own side. So how is Bush or America morally culpable? In the few cases where Americans have deliberately caused civilian deaths, they have been punished for it. But where is the outrage when terrorists do not wear uniforms and deliberately hide amongst civilians and in religious sites? (May I note that such behavior is against the Geneva convention and UN resolutions though I'm aware such things only apply to Israel.) It is the Baath party and Al-Qaeda have right to life issues concerning the war in Iraq not the US.

You can disagree with any of these positions--even from a conservative or Republican point of view but my point is they are consistent. And I daresay being easier to understand, they resonate more strongly with the electorate than the muddled messages of the Democrats.

Hall and Oates in '08!

So I’m planning a new box for college, and have come up with a tentative parts list. I am soliciting any advice and comments that people would be willing to offer. CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2000MHz HT 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Dual Core Processor - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103562
$169 (This was $289 2 days ago when I was pricing it - sweet) Motherboard: ASUS A8N5X Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131569
$84.99 RAM: CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145587
$207.00 Video: eVGA 256-P2-N553-AX Geforce 7600GT CO 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130283
$169.99 (Before $30 mail-in rebate) Hard Drives: I was originally planning on doing 3 Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144701, $82.99) in a RAID-5 (software) configuration but there is currently a sale on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140) for $99.99 and I might just order three today. Enclosure/Power: Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450Watt SmartPower 2.0 ATX 12V V2.0 for AMD & Intel systems Power Supply - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811129155
$104.99 (But that’s a one-day sale price, I think it’s like $109.99 normally, though this is the 2nd day in a row it’s had a one-day sale. Both before $15 mail-in rebate). Optical Drive: Reusing my Sony DVD Burner from my current box. Not including shipping or rebates, the total price comes out as: $1035.94 Advice, comments, etc. are most definitely welcome as I don’t follow the hardware market.

For all haskell-loving folks out they, consider these lines as an addon to your .bashrc:

    if which ghc >/dev/null
    then
	    function hmap   ghc -e "interact ($*)";   
	    function hmapl   hmap  "unlines.($*).lines" ;  
	    function hmapw   hmapl "map (unwords.($*).words)" ;  
    fi	

This is somewhat an replacement to "perl -e", for cases where haskell does the job nicer. So, you like triangular text files? Then try

cat /etc/passwd   hmapl zipWith take [1..]

In most cases, you want to run hmapl with map or filter as the first argument, e.g.

cat /etc/passwd   hmapl map reverse
w hmapl 'filter (List.isPrefixOf "j")' # essentially grep ^j
man ghc hmapw 'filter (all Char.isAlpha)'

Sound Juicer "I Need A Little Love To Ease The Pain" 2.14.5 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. This releases rolls in the bug fixes from 2.15.4:

• Add date information to all possible albums (Alex Lancaster)
• Improve GStreamer error handling (Tim-Philipp Muller)
• Don't crash when re-opening the Preferences dialog
• Clear the genre field when re-reading the disk

Sound Juicer "Two Undernourished Egos Four Rotating Hips" 2.15.4 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Not a lot going on, sorry.

• Add date information to all possible albums (Alex Lancaster)
• Improve GStreamer error handling (Tim-Philipp Muller)
• Don't crash when re-opening the Preferences dialog
• Clear the genre field when re-reading the disk

For a couple years, I've routinely used Ampad Quad Ruled Steno Books to make notes to myself on just about everything. This morning I realized I'm using the last one from my most recently acquired package of 12... so, naturally, I tried to order some more. They're gone. Apparently, nobody sells a quad-ruled steno pad any more. I even called Ampad corporate customer service, where a very helpful woman poked around on her computer and confirmed that the product has been discontinued, and the last case in their inventory shipped out as part of an order to a university bookstore in early April. There aren't any more in stock, and they probably won't ever print any more. Grumble. At least I can still buy quad-ruled engineering pads, even if they are clumsier to carry around...

Those who enjoyed my presentations at Linux Conf Australia 2005 on software defined radio are invited to join me in a loud cheer in support of the latest court action involving the now-infamous HDTV "broadcast flag"!

Occasionally, the list of things I really should be working on gets a little overwhelming. Late last night was one of those times. So, I spent a couple hours playing with the pile of PDP-11 parts... Took the BA-11N apart far enough to extract the backplane, and added the wires necessary to support 22-bit addressing. Put everything back together, and had a bit of a scare since I couldn't seem to get the console talking to me again. Found a problem in my serial cabling, after which all was well. Dug the DELQA out of the stack, stuck it in the chassis below the KDJ11-D/S, and confirmed that the Decserver 550 firmware still in the CPU board was able to discover it. Extracted the CQD-223/TM SCSI board from the s-box front panel it came in, and realized it's not going to fit into the slot spacing of the BA11-N as-is. The problem is that the 50-pin header for the drive cable is straight, so by the time you put a cable on it the stack is too thick for a backplane slot. So, either I need to scare up a Qbus continuity card or something to let me skip a slot and give the card double height, or alternatively I can replace the 50-pin header with a right-angle box header and the card should fit... At that point, I decided I'd made enough progress, and called it a night.

I finally got around to uploading images to my Flickr account today. Normally my Mom and Dad call me if I haven't uploaded new pictures of their granddaughter for more than 72 hours, but Dad's busy with an IPO road show, and Mom was, y'know, just bitten by a rattlesnake. So they've had other things to think about. They got me on the horn yesterday, though, and I promised I'd upload some shots from July before we go camping today. I've got a couple thousand shots up on Flickr, but most of them are private for friends and family only. I know it's kind of paranoid, but I guess it just seems more respectful to the little one to let her make her own privacy decisions with respect to her own image. Of course, I can't help leaking a few nice ones every once in a while, like Amita June in the baby pool across the street in Parc La Fontaine: What's a father to do? I've gotten used to Flickr, and my whole family and circle of friends uses it for sharing photos. It's one of my first stops on the Internet Procrastination Tour. I haven't really had as much luck with sharing video, though. I've tried a few of the video-sharing services, but none of them has worked out very well for me. I hope Flickr eventually gets into the video game. tags: flickr amitajune mom dad parc la fontaine

Rant and rave So, I've been using computers on a daily basis for more than 15 years. I get occasional back and arm pain, I'm very lucky in that I haven't had an wp:RSI blowout in that time -- knock on wood. I'd like to keep it that way. Most of the things I love to do and that give me creative satisfaction involve writing at the keyboard. One thing I do to try to stay healthy is use Workrave, the Gnome tool for splitting up your typing sessions into reasonable chunks. It takes over your screen and forces you to take a rest every 5 minutes or so, and makes you take a long break every hour or so. I definitely feel my best when I've got it running. However, I also find it insanely frustrating. Right as I'm in the middle of doing something, a little indicator pops up in the center of my screen flashing red and telling me to stop working. Workrave is excellent at getting in my way, like a cubicle-mate who asks you stupid personal questions just as you're getting settled in to a groove. So while Workrave keeps my hands and arms pain-free, it also keeps me at an elevated level of frustration all day. I wonder: is the advantage of keeping my typing rate slower worth the disadvantage of raising my blood pressure to the boiling point? If your computing tools are aggravating you by design, is there another ergonomic problem going on? What's the balance to be struck between physical and mental stress? tags: workrave stress rsi aggravation

Erich blogged that most TV these days is still shot in 4:3 rather than 16:9. At least in the English speaking world this is normally the case, especially for things intended for export. 4:3 would be a deliberate choice rather than the path of least resistance. TV stations can choose to buy and screen 4:3 versions (and will usually do this where they can’t broadcast 16:9) but that doesn’t mean that the production wasn’t done in 16:9. Of course, if there’s no sign that your national broadcasters are going to go to 16:9 this makes very little difference to you. As far as computers go I’ve been using a 16:9 screen for years - I find it useful in much the same way that people find multi-headed displays useful. You can get a bit more on screen at once than you would otherwise which makes it easier to keep an eye on some extra terminals, an IM client or web browser windows. Besides, my glasses mean that the world tends to have a definite widescreen frame to it for me.

Ah, the classic DBus performance issue has reared it's head on Planet Gnome again. I'll chip in my thoughts on this, as I've done a fair bit of profiling on a large user of DBus. When I first ported of EDS to DBus, it didn't perform as fast as the original ORBit implementation. However when I dug out OProfile I discovered that the main bottle necks were deep in EDS itself, and DBus although in the profiles, wasn't anywhere near the top. We spent a few months optimising EDS-DBus (there was some serious low-hanging fruit) and by the time we'd done the obvious optimisations, EDS-DBus was faster than upstream EDS for the typical usage (running a book view, which happens every time you search in Evolution). For some methods EDS-DBus was still slower than EDS, and getContacts() is a perfect example. This method takes a query, builds the set of contacts that match, and sends it back to the client in a single list (compared to book views that do the same thing incrementally, and provide future updates). When profiled you discover that libdbus and libc are the top offenders, taking almost 70% of the runtime. The benchmark was asking for all contacts, so EDS-DBus was sending a 150 contacts as vCards over the bus in a single list, which amounts to about 100Kb of data. Now, this gets copied when it enters the library, copied again as it enters the sockets to the bus, which then sends it into another socket to the client, which then makes a copy. These copies really hurt, and are one of the things that ORBit does better than DBus: it copies less frequently and has generally had more optimisation time. There are several ways of making it better.

• Those nice people at Collobara have batshit insane cunning plans for a SHM-based transport, instead of sockets. This would reduce the number of copies, but does introduce some, well, interesting locking fun.
• Almost half of the copies could be removed by creating a private connection between the client and the server, missing out the bus entirely. I plan on doing this for the book views as they are heavily used and the bottleneck is, again, the copies.
• Obviously, heavily profiling and optimising libdbus to remove any redundant copies would help. There may be cunning ways to avoid some of the copies for certain situations, and allowing those to happen in the GLib bindings would be useful.

In conclusion, the DBus vs ORBit performance issue isn't a real one generally. It's a rare case where the cost of the transport is the bottleneck (generally only in fake benchmarks), and when the transport is the bottleneck, there are generally other ways of optimising the code: as Havoc says DBus makes doing true asynchronous method calls trivial, and if you are sending huge amounts of data down the bus a private connection should be used (which will also make you a nicer citizen on the bus, as sending huge messages will clog up the tubes). NP: Kind Of Blue, Miles Davis

At home I run an Ubuntu server which I unfortunately upgraded to the sigh Edgy Eft. Damn, I used to think Debian unstable was unstable! On the couple of occasions the machine wasn’t broken, I stupidly did a dist-upgrade. When will I learn? Perhaps I like to “repair” a broken system to learn more about my system. Who knows. Anyway the last dist-upgrade with X failing to start with some “fixed font” error, had me thinking about rolling back updates. As far as I know, downgrading to dapper requires some precarious apt pinning and some praying. I should try that. Rolling back and comparing with old versions could be easier. Of course there is the great resource of Debian snapshot though I usually just download the package I require by hand. I could try set it up with apt, but I highly doubt down grades work with wild inter-dependencies like the X server suite. Anyway it could be better integrated. Like a version control system, without the conflicts. ;) I can’t help but think why should my box ever be broken? If an upgrade b0rked, why doesn’t it just go back to the last working snapshot? Oh well, we’re still miles ahead of Windows update. Though having to restart firefox is almost as disruptive as rebooting the entire system.

Happy 1 Thermidor to everyone -- I'm sure you're all busy meditating on the virtues of epeautre (wp:einkorn wheat), the wild grain to which this day is dedicated on the French Revolutionary Calendar. Thermidor is best known for wp:Lobster Thermidor, but also for the so-called wp:Thermidorian Reaction, a revolt by moderate revolutionaries during the French Revolution against the bloody excesses of the Committee for Public Safety. I think about this because I've just been reading Bob Sutton's blog today based on the reference in Ross Mayfield's blog. Sutton is the author of an upcoming book called the No Asshole Rule (pardon my French, but that's just the name of the book). It's about how poisonous, unhealthy personalities can ruin a workplace, and how beneficial it is to support your reasonable, human employees by kicking out the jerks. They're happier, more productive, and more loyal if you show some compassion and get rid of the a-holes. Coincidentally, I also saw the Top 5 reasons why The Customer Is Always Right is wrong on reddit. It also recommends against allowing unpleasant people to ruin your workplace environment -- but here, the culprits are the customer, not other employees. I especially liked the stories from Southwest Airlines. I think I'm going to have to pick up this Nuts! book about SWA business theories. Why all the thoughtifying about jerks and meanies in business? Because I think the same principles might be applicable to Open Source and Open Content projects. Specifically, with Debian, we've had a few personalities who generate a lot of discussion and attract a lot of attention, causing some real Excedrin headaches. The project as a whole has tended to bend over backwards to respect these individual's rights and personal values and blah blah blah, but maybe it's best to just say, "You're causing more conflict that you are providing value and no matter whose fault it is, we as a group will do our job better if you leave." In another realm -- that of wikis -- I know that I personally lean on longtime Wikitravel administrators, experienced users, etc. to be "the bigger person" and treat obnoxious personalities with respect and decorum. The theory is that every user counts, and any contribution is worthwhile. But maybe it's better sometimes to show some loyalty to the established contributors with a proven track record, and let the occasional mouth-foaming weirdo go wander off and bother someone else. We've got a real conflict-averse culture at WT, but sometimes it might be good to say, "We welcome everyone's input -- except yours." tags: thermidor wiki ross mayfield no assholes rule bob sutton the customer is always right southwest airlines debian wikitravel conflict