Wow! What a week. (Click here for all of this week's photos) On Sunday afternoon, we walked into the house and saw this:



Yes, over the weekend, the cabinet makers had installed the cabinets earlier than expected! I never expected that I would get excited about kitchen cabinets, but I sure was. They look great.

My grandma's china cabinet is back up in the dining room. They've removed the tile from the dining room, exposing the wood floor underneath. The floor restoration people have spent some time doing some patching already.

Doors and doorjams are starting to go in. Trim is arriving. And the wood in the wall alongside one of the staircases has been seamlessly extended.

It's exciting. (photos here)

And check this out:



That hunk of ice is the exhaust from our furnace. No joke! The furnace is so efficient that, when its running, it's a moist and slightly warm breeze blowing out of that exhaust pipe. In winter, it condenses and drips down below, forming an ice hunk.

So I got home from a place that is best described a meat market meets speed dating at the cost of a strip club, or worse. Overall, it was an experience to be had. I danced with some girls, got some phone numbers, lost a phone number, perhaps caused by a second girl putting her number in my rented phone. Oh yeah, and no one spoke English.

I've managed to go out dancing all night long (until 7am) two days in a row. There are some good parties in Seoul. Sleep is definitely not for this week.

British now divide by zero. Either this "Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading's computer science department" is a crappy computer scientist (not to speak of his mathematical skills), or this is a case of really bad journalism. Apart from having some facts wrong (infinity and -infinity aren't numbers, they're symbols outside of the numbers), he basically defines "0/0 = Nullity". Well, some of us might prefer the name "NaN" for this. "Not a Number". In floating point calculations, 0/0 may (if you've disabled exceptions) return NaN. So it is nothing new. And it's not particularly useful either, because all it solves is not having to raise an exception, but being able to continue your calculations (which will continue to return NaN) and handle the error at the end. With modern languages designed around exception handling, this of course is rarely ever used anymore. Some simple calculations you might find convincing: 2 * Nullity = 2 * (0/0) = (2*0)/0 = 0/0 = Nullity Nullity + 1 = (0/0) + (1/1) = (0*1 + 1*0)/(0*1) = 0/0 = Nullity Nullity / Nullity = (0/0) / (0/0) = (0/0) * (0/0) = (0*0)/(0*0) = (0/0) = Nullity So if you ever have Nullity anywhere in your equation the whole equation equals nullity. There is no way to remove Nullity from your results, since even Nullity/Nullity is Nullity. So you could just call it "I divided by zero, so the result is invalid". Thats probably not as pretty as "Nullity", but as useful. Some simple calculation, why you must not be allowed to divide by zero (independently from any nullity or whatever):

1*0 = 0 = 2*0     (This equation is right, isn't it?)
1 = 2             (I divided by 0 on both sides, removing the *0 factor)

This works for any number, not only for 1 or 2. So: if you divide by zero, all your numbers are equal (if you keep standard calculus rules such as associativity, distributivity etc. used in above equations). If that is okay for you, then you can divide by zero. I do prefer having 1 life to 0 life. And if 1 = 1000000, can you give me $1000000, I'll give you $1 back tomorrow... But: Maybe it's just a bad piece of journalism. He's a computer science guy. Maybe he knows about NaN. Maybe he's just trying to teach kids to use NaN when calculating, instead of teaching them to never divide by zero. There might be didactic benefits from this approach. The 1200 year old problem (Pythagoras, cited in the article lived 2500 years ago, I have no idea how they made up this number) IS easy to solve, if the result is called "invalid" instead of just having no valid result... That won't make your airplane land better, if it notices it's current height is Nullity... and what if his heart pacemaker obtains a result of "nullity", what is it supposed to do (as opposed to noticing it miscalculated?) [Update: he has published papers on this, too. Unbelievable... So above theory that it maybe is good for educational purposes is incorrect. Anyway, journalists shouldn't have reported on this without talking to some serious mathematicians...] [Update: Zoy, thats why I wrote "if you keep standard calculus rules such as associativity, distributivity, etc. - and I find these exceptionally useful. The last example is not using his rules, but standard math, but treats zero like all other numbers, to show that a canonical extension will just not give useful results. My whole point is NOT that you can't define 0/0=Nullity, but that it's not compatible with the standard calculus we're used to and relying on.]

It seems that some people with heavily customised Ubuntu installations have had problems upgrading from dapper to edgy. While we do test upgrades as much as we can, there’s no way to test every possible permutation, so problems do creep in. Here’s a checklist to perform before upgrading to minimise any problems you might have:

• Make sure you have the ubuntu-minimal and ubuntu-desktop packages installed (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc. should use the appropriate meta-packages for their distribution). This may require removing some replacement programs you have installed, but you can always put those back after the upgrade process.
• Check for any locally installed packages, you can use aptitude search '~i!~Oubuntu' to get a list of them. Some of these may cause conflicts with the upgrade process, it may be worth removing them and putting them back after the upgrade.
• If you have manually installed any software from upstream, and not used Ubuntu packages (especially the Nvidia or ATI binary drivers), revert those to the Ubuntu-provided versions before upgrading.
• Use the update manager, as described in the release notes, and not apt-get dist-upgrade. While the latter may work eventually, it will require more manual tinkering than the automatic upgrader.

If, after taking all of these precautions, your upgrade still fails; please file a bug report, and try to include as much information as possible. Provide the list of packages that failed, and if possible the error message provided by them. Provide /var/log/dpkg.log and the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade.

Fantastic beginning to the weekend - was in Norwich from Thursday, saw the Dave and the Becca on thursday night - many many thanks to them for floor space thurs and fri and for generally just being fantastic people (with tea *and* coffee, no less - and a silly beepy tivo box for even more fun - and for introducing me to the american chopper type show thingummy - and for letting me watch the a-team!) Then, serious amounts of thanks to Noodles and Kathy (who I appear to not be able to find a link for :( ) for inviting me to the wedding and the reception - was fantastic - you're both such absolutely lovely people! Pictures so far appear to be available from Becca and Dave, Burly and Steve McIntyre - hopefully more soon... specially from Dave Noble (can't find him *bah* he needs more google juice the damned slacker ;) which should be cool! Saturday was absolutely brilliant - including talking about atmosperic physics, failing a-levels, and random universities doing questions (hey, I can't entirely remembere - someone bought a half barrel of nero and some port, and lots of red wine... I wasn't *entirely* sober ;). Saturday morning was a bit of a blur - I remember watching the A-Team and then food in the Glass House with Dave and Becca (thanks guys, you rock!) then I wandered to the Fat Cat and met with Eli and Dave Noble, a while later Rob and James and Kaz arrived and we played Munchkin, which was a very very silly game but quite fun (thanks James and Kaz - you're both mildly insane - but it's always fun when you come to the pub!). Went home with Eli, tried to escape because of the annoying giggly evil students from hell, started wandering back towards the train station and a random bench to sleep on, then got emotional black mail and ended up back at Eli's - ho hum. Went to catch train at around 10am Sunday morning - discovered trains from Norwich weren't running - replacement bus service from Norwich to Diss left Norwich at around 10:25am, got to Diss, had a 10 to 15 minute wait there (mmmmm, bacon roll and a coffee!) then straight to Liverpool Street, wandered straight off to the underground and got the circle line to Victoria, got to Victoria around 13:40 ish, wandered to look at the boards and saw a 14:17 from Victoria round half the planet to Brighton - thought to myself "not in any rush" and wandered off and found food and then wandered round the WHSmith in Victoria station.... got out of there, glanced at the board again, Victoria to Brighton train had been cancelled - wondered what to do - announcement over the tannoy that to get to Brighton the best idea was to travel to East Croyden and the train would meet us there. So, grabbed that train, got to East Croyden, jumped on the train (first 8 carriages Brighton, back four Plymouth... so, jumped on somewhere around the 7th carriage from what I thought was the front - turned out to be the back - wasn't entirely sure what was going on so when it stopped at Gatwick wandered further to the front of the train a lot, found an empty pair of seats and sat down. Got to Three Bridges and there was a delay, it was announced on the train as "We're waiting for the conductor, he's missed a train and is currently in a taxi, there's at least a 10 minute delay before he gets here", so a load of us bundled out of the train on the basis that that was very much long enough for a cigarette break - just as we were finishing the conductor turned up, so we all got back on the train for the "scenic" route to Brighton (yay for going round the coast), finally got in to Brighton at 17:05, so wasn't too bad, only about 6 and a half hours for a 3 and a half or 4 hour train journey ;). Grabbed chinese on the way home, watched some Morse - all was well with the world. Lots of beeping this morning around 8.30am, ignored it, finally re-woke up at about 10:30am (ish) - watched some more Morse, grabbed some lunch and then watched more Morse until going to the pub quiz tonight. Charly, Julius and Pieter turned up for a quick drink and then all left me to fend for my self at the quiz - I came in my usual place - very last (by over 20 points, no less ;) - but had fun, so who cares :) Anyways - it's now tuesday morning, so probably time for some good ol' fashioned sleep type stuff... might put on the next episode of Morse for the hell of it (might even manage to stay awake through it!). Tomorrow is probably more Morse, some work on the django packages (just got the first bug report in for those) and possibly applying some of the patches to the scrobbler packages to close some of those bug reports too. It appears that upstream for xmms-scrobbler has disappeared a bit, so might have to look at that a lot closer over the next few months - have some time off work soon - last day this year being the 15th (also happens to be when work are planning the "christmas do"). Wow - that was a ridiculously longer post than I though it was going to be! Night all!

Reading about Jamie Zawinski's problems with purchasing plumbing parts (look for 'side-outlet elbows' and read until 'Construction'), I started wondering about the automatic ordering system that shop used. To compensate for the obvious stupidity in the staff, I wondered whether their ordering computer might have a system of automatic adjustments for stock re-ordering quantities. Then I wondered what the thresholds might be to increase the per-restock quantity. Finally, I entertained myself with the idea that, just maybe, jwz's rampant purchases triggered the stock computer to put in an order for some huge number of 4-way pipe joints, which then sat in stock for years and years, because the average consumption rate for those pieces is probably a hell of a lot less than the 10-per-week that the computer saw over the month in question.

My work permit in Canada expired on December 1 (that's 10 Frimaire for you French Revolutionary Calendar fanatics), so I needed to renew it. It's possible to renew these things by mail, which is worrisome and time-consuming, or even to go into an office in Montreal (near-mythical, crowded, reportedly ineffective). I've never liked doing either, so whenever we have to deal with immigration, our family drives the 50km down to the border with the US. They have a big immigration facility there, and if you drive out of Canada and back in again, they have lots of nice officers in bullet-proof vests to deal with any immigration issues on the spot. It's called "driving around the flagpole" here, but Maj and I try to make a trip out of it when we have to go. So we drove down to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks last Friday morning -- sufficiently distant and different to seem exotic, without being too far away for a weekend trip. Plattsburgh, the nearest American town to us, is, well, kinda boring. We've spent a day in Burlington (Vermont) before, and that was pretty fun, but we wanted to try something different -- so Lake Placid it was. Friday was a crummy day for a drive, though -- there was snow and freezing rain in equal measures, so the roads were a little dangerous. The hood of our car kept building up this several-inches-thick icy-snowy mass that I was afraid would rip off the hood and go careening into the dark, so I kept stopping to chip it off with my handy ice scraper. Once we got down to the Adirondack park, though, the rain was just a regular drizzly non-freezing kind, and we could actually enjoy the scenery. The roads in were remarkably small -- hard to believe that not one but two Winter Olympics were held at this remote location. When we got to town, we took a look around at the main drag -- a single street that fronts onto Mirror Lake and points directly into the Olympic centre. We stopped at the Great Adirondack Brewing Company for a late lunch, and had a nice crabcake and caesar salad with roasted shrimp. Maj is a little squeamish about eating seafood in the mountains -- with good reason, since she's been burnt before -- but we both ate up anyways, and it was real good. Amita June had a grilled-cheese sandwich that came with french fries shaped like little happy faces. Awww. We then went to check into our motel, the Wildwood Inn. I've got a weakness for a certain kind of woodsy mountain motel -- lots of wood paneling and alpine flavor -- and I especially like paying motel prices. The Wildwood was just what I like -- clean, inexpensive ($65/night), and charming, with a nice view from our room out onto Lake Placid proper. It also had a nice big indoor heated pool complex and free WiFi. (On that subject -- why is it that so many motels in North America now have perfectly acceptable free WiFi, but major hotels in big cities charge you $30/night for crummy WiFi with complicated authentication schemes that take half an hour to configure? Is it just because the big hotels charge too much for everything, or is it because they know they can rake business travelers over the coals and it all will go on the expense report? It makes me really mad to pay for WiFi, and it makes me extra-mad that it's usually so complicated and of such poor quality. Anyways.) We took a big nap and went out after dark (4:30PM) to look at the town and get some dinner. Unfortunately, it was still raining big fat cold raindrops all over downtown. The ski season was supposed to start this weekend in the Adirondacks, but with all the rain they canceled opening the runs, and with the bad weather and no skiing the town was pretty empty. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed, and when we eventually got to one, the Black Bear, we were the only people there. The Black Bear turned out to be really nice. They had a good selection of organic vegetables and seafood nicely prepared but not too fancy -- what we Californians call "California cuisine". I dunno what anyone else calls it. Amita liked it because they had a big chalkboard on the wall and she spent most of her time running between our table and the board or drawing big jagged marks on the wall. That night the wind and storm howled outside our motel room -- I dreamed the place was falling down. When we got up in the morning, though, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside -- the first one of the season! Maj and Amita June went outside on the motel lawn to play around -- Amita doesn't remember last winter, I don't think, so snow is new all over again for her -- and I went to clear off the car. Then we went downtown to get some breakfast. We shopped for books (I bought James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder) and winter gear (Maj almost but didn't buy some boots) walking up and down the main street in the light snow, then piled into the Soulshine Bagel shop for some bagel sandwiches and coffee. The food was good -- the bagels were thick and doughy, not like the little Montreal bagels I've grown fond of -- but the place only took cash, and we hadn't gotten out any American money yet. Oops. They were nice enough to take our Canadian cash, which earned them a decent tip, and then the three of us walked back to the car in the snow, Amita trying for the first time to catch snowflakes on her tongue. After our nap, we went out with good intentions to go visit the Olympic Centre and get ourselves a little bit of cultural value from the trip, but the early dark and our darker natures drove us instead to the Lake Placid Pub in a residential area right by Mirror Lake. The Pub was great -- really good beers (I liked the 7% Ubu Ale) and fine pub-grub. There was a table of kids next to our table, and they had a little table barbecue on which they were making s'mores. They kept handing Amita their extra graham crackers, which she noshed contentedly. This morning we went to the Saranac Sourdough deli and bakery for an early breakfast. It was right across highway 86 from our motel, and they had great pancakes. I had a big spinach-crab frittata with sourdough rye toast -- really satisfying. We took the long route back to Montreal -- west through Saranac Lake then north up to Malone (New York), a little town on the Salmon River with a big collapsed mill in the middle of downtown. By the time we got down to Malone, all the snow was gone, and it was back to that bitter snowless winter look all over the place. Malone had some nice architecture, but we ducked into the homey Nancy's Village Diner for some lunch. Then out onto the road again, through Chateaugay and Mooers and back to the border after a brief stop at duty-free. Our immigration issues took about an hour -- that was pretty good turnaround -- and we were on autoroute 15 back home to Montreal pretty quick. Not far from the border, though, the snow started coming down hard, and by the time we got to the St. Laurent river it was sticking to the road, making driving a little hazardous. But we managed to get home OK, glad for a nice little weekender. tags: lake placid montreal new york saranac lake adirondacks immigration snow maj amitajune

My toga rocks! That is all.

I did actually get around to upgrading the OpenID libraries on Wikitravel, so it's now possible to log into the site (Special:OpenIDLogin) using an i-name. Yes, those are all real things. I'm not making that up. As I mentioned before, I got gratis i-names to give away; try http://xri.net/@gratis . tags: openid inames wikitravel login

UN/LOCODE One of the difficult things on Wikitravel has been using public-domain lists of cities, states, and countries to automatically build a geographical hierarchy. There are some good lists out there, like the ones from geonames.org, but they have too much information -- every hill, bush and pond. Other sources of info have too little information -- just countries, like the CIA World Factbook, or just some major cities. The best list I've found so far is the UN/LOCODE list. It's built in a hierarchy -- country, sub-divisions, then cities -- and since it's principally for business applications, it only lists cities that have important businesses (for a fairly light definition of "important") or a transportation depot (like a bus stop, a train station, or an airport). These turn out to be just about the smallest types of cities that you'd want to write a travel guide about, so it's a pretty useful list. After a lot of hacking, testing, and review by Wikitravel users, I've now got a LOCODEbot adding LOCODE locations to our shared site (used by all the different language versions). It's going pretty slow and steady, but it should be done in a couple of days. tags: unlocode toponymy cia world factbook wikitravel

Parallel distribution, again, again So, Benjamin "Mako" Hill and James Grimmelman have done an excellent position paper on parallel distribution in the Creative Commons 3.0 licenses. I could try to describe the process, but I think they've done a great job with it. I heartily recommend this for anyone interested in DRM and Open Source and Open Content licenses. tags: cc mako james grimmelman parallel distribution drm

Too competitive So, I started watching my site creep up the Alexa listings of most popular personal sites in Montreal. Kind of sad, isn't it? tags: montreal alexa me

Scott James Remnant summarises the different path taken by Ubuntu about firmware as having set them on Slippery Slopes. As a reaction, FSF has backed an Ubuntu-based distribution which takes a more debian position about programs (but not manuals) called gNewSense Alex Valentine commented:

"Yet another FSF forking project, quite an innovation. Let's take an existing project that works fine and make less compatible, in the name of "freedom," and plop a bunch of Gnu/ GNU/labels/."

Ubuntu seems to be getting criticised a lot this week and there's enough people who don't think it "works fine" to start a distribution. JOOI, what else were FSF forking projects? I can think of several reimplementations, but not that many forks. thebluesgnr commented:

"An Ubuntu guy complaining about forking... unbelievable."

Pointed at the issues by Josselin Mouette’s post, I got aware of a list of issues posted by JP Rosevear, which is a reply to Mark Shuttleworths post to the opensuse mailinglist. Note especially point 2, which is: “Preventing the Debian GNOME maintainer from updating GNOME packages until after Ubuntu LSO had shipped because you had hired him.” If this issue is true, it’s the worst thing I ever heard of regarding Canonical. I mean it’s bad enough that points 1 (“Having a stated policy of not funding any significant new software development because the Return on Investment is not good enough”) and 3 (“Not releasing any source code for launchpad/rosetta/malone to maintain a competitive advantage”) certainly are true (even though I can’t prove and therefor don’t 100% believe the second part of #3). But unless there is a very good reason to delay the submission of the patches developed to “upstream”, Debian.
It’s bad enough that Canonical hired the most active Debian Developers, depriving Debian of much of their time, while not really supporting Debian (i.e. while not actively submitting patches to Debian). It would have been better for the community if Canonical had hired less active DDs (or even non-DDs). Sure it would have been harder to select some sufficiently qualified people for the jobs, but the total outcome whould have been better IMHO (getting time from previously uninvolved people, while keeping the existing contributors). Anyway, I really would like to know wether the mentioned point #2 is true, and if so wether any valid reason for doing so could be given before I set my opinion about this issue in stone. One thing is sure however, I’m becoming more and more critical regarding Ubuntu and Canonical over time while I once hoped that the opposite would become true for those criticizing Canonical at that time. Actually I still hope so (and thus I hope reason to become less sceptical again).
Another thing is also sure: If Canonical wants to use Debian as a base for much longer, it should make damned sure to work with Debian more actively instead of seemingly working against it (more or less openly). Update: As also pointed out in a comment below, a post by Scott James Remnant proves point 1 from the the aforementioned list and gives a further hint that point 3 might be true. More precisely it says “we have a policy of not doing our own software development, but only packaging what others have developed”, which probably means “not doing our own major software development”, since - as a comment to that post also says - Canonical did some software development, like launchpad/rosetta/malone and some other relatively small projects.