So, A completely non-existing French team lost against a....nearly completely non-existing English team. Too many bad decisions, too much bad kick play, too many lost balls....and even no luck (the English try...damn). The French team couldn't win with such poor play (even when they were leading by 9-8, we both were completely sure they would lose on a penalty kick). What's pretty sad is that England nearly showed nothing too and, therefore, both teams made this the worst match I've seen in that world cup. Hopefully, Argentina and South Africa will show some better play tomorrow. However, when I see this, I nearly regret that France eliminated New Zealand. The All Blacks could never have played as bad as France did and they would certainly have kicked out that boring English team. Definitely, I'll be South African or Argentinian next Sunday (I have a small preference for being Argentinian, indeed).

Via Eric Goldman’s recent recommendation, I decided to give Pandora another shot. The short version: Pandora is an intelligent predictive personalized Internet radio service with an arguably sustainable and protectable business model. And by “intelligent,” I mean there are real human brains at work. As Eric explains:

Pandora’s main competitive differentiator is its “Music Genome Project.” 50 trained musicians with at least a college degree in music (called “music analysts”) listen to songs all day long and rate each song on 400 different musical attributes. See the 2005 WSJ article discussing them. By profiling songs this way, the system can predict that a person who likes an artist’s song might like other songs with similar musical attributes. From listening to Pandora for many, many hours, IMO the system isn’t perfect, but it does a pretty good job, and it has definitely hooked me on music that I wouldn’t have listened to otherwise.

They have apparently cataloged approximately half a million songs and the database continues to grow apace. There is also a collaborative-filtering aspect, similar to Netflix and Amazon. I suspect this hybrid between the “wisdom of crowds” and the “wisdom of experts” will be the future of most large content projects (including wikipedia). My first few hours have returned excellent results. I created a for-working “station” called, lazily, “The Bad Plus Radio” (described as “Avant garde and angular funk/jazz, but not so dissonant that you can’t do mind-taxing work while listening”). You are welcome to listen as well. (See also my Pandora Profile.) The “artist seeds” for the channel include the following:

• The Bad Plus (of course)
• Bill Frisell
• John McLaughlin
• Medeski Martin & Wood
• Thievery Corporation
• Bred Mehldau
• Oliver Nelson
• Ornette Coleman
• Keith Jarrett

Pandora has played several tracks by these artists, but is increasingly mixing in other artists that match up on some axis of preference. I’ve thumbed-up and thumbed-down several tracks from beyond the “seed” set (and will continue to do so), thus driving the predictive engine. I look forward to creating some entirely different channels and publishing the URLs here. Although supposedly the “free” version is ad-supported, I haven’t heard any ads yet. Maybe that is still to come. In any case, it is probably worth the $36/year subscription cost. Beyond the specific content I’m enjoying here, it is nice to see a Web 2.0 (or pick your favorite version) business model that doesn’t require a leap of faith to see how it can work. Of course, they have a Facebook app as well.

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I am not even sure what to make of this article, written by a professor at a well-known university, on the perils of advising graduate students. Given that I have been sitting at my computer for nearly 12 hours straight and since 4 a.m, I don’t think I am really in a state of mind to think too much of it. Neither do I have much experience doing this (though whatever experience I have had, it has been good so far), so I can’t really comment back via personal experience. I only hope that her/his experience was the exception or that he/she allowed too many boundaries to be crossed, but whatever the case, interesting food for thought. I am sure a graduate student could write an interesting counterpoint, talking about all the questionable things their professors did back to them too and knowing the web, I am sure that will be forthcoming soon.

That's my new goal, use full-time in the lab where I work debian/kfreebsd and install it in at least one server working 100%. The only problem I've found is the non-compatibility with LVM in freebsd, I will have to test with vinum or just put a little disk on that machine and connect with NFS to another machine with linux and LVM. Even in test period kfreebsd seems pretty stable, the only thing I can't get working on the desktop is X but since I don't need it for the tests I'm running that's no such a big deal... Congrats to the guys of the kfreebsd port! I could be joining pretty soon I think since the desktop that's for tests now I could get it to work seriously on porting to kfreebsd.

The Reader monad is a simple and easy-to-use structure from the Haskell library that solves a common problem.

Very often, it's the case that you have a lot of functions that all need to use the same values. For instance, you might be laying out some text on a page, and you need to keep the details of the page size around in all your layout algorithms. Typically, you handle this situation by adding a new parameter to all your functions which represents the state. So,


layoutPage :: Text -> Page


becomes


layoutPage :: PageLayoutParams -> Text -> Page


This works just fine, but it can get really ugly. Every single function gets a new parameter, which must be threaded through to every related function that it ever calls. This causes visual clutter, particularly for functions that don't actually use the parameter themselves but just pass it on.

A function written in the Reader monad is augmented with a hidden parameter. For the hypothetical example above, we would write:


import Control.Monad.Reader
type LayoutFunc = Reader PageLayoutParams

layoutPage :: Text -> LayoutFunc Page


Note that the Reader monad is partially applied here. The result, LayoutFunc, is a new monad that adds a parameter of type PageLayoutParams to any code that runs inside it.

So, now that we have this monad, how do we use it? The "ask" operation retrieves the parameter that's hidden in the monad:


ask :: Reader a a


or, specialized to LayoutFunc:


ask :: LayoutFunc PageLayoutParams


In order to remain close to the example in question, I will provide specialized type signatures for the rest of the library functions. You can find the generic type signatures in the Haskell library documentation for Control.Monad.Reader.

Suppose that layoutPage started out like this before it was moved into the monad:


layoutPage st txt =
let width = pageWidth st
...


In the Reader monad, this becomes:


layoutPage txt =
do st - ask
let width = pageWidth st
...


As you can see, we've gone from one line of code to two. As this is clearly unacceptable for a clutter-reducing device, the Reader module provides a convenience function encapsulating the above pattern:


asks :: (PageLayoutParams -> a) -> PageLayoutFunc a


This allows us to simplify the monadic implementation to:


layoutPage txt =
do width - asks pageWidth
...


It's quite common, when multiple functions share context information, to invoke a function in an altered context. For instance, we might have a layoutSubPage routine that changes the page width:


layoutSubPage st newWidth txt =
doLayout (st pageWidth = newWidth txt)


The Reader equivalent of this idiom is the function "local":


local :: (PageLayoutParams -> PageLayoutParams) -> LayoutFunc a -> LayoutFunc a


local executes an operation in a context modified by its first parameter. For instance,


layoutSubPage newWidth txt =
local (\st -> st pageWidth = newWidth ) txt


Finally, to actually invoke a computation in the Reader monad, use runReader:


runReader :: LayoutFunc a -> PageLayoutParams -> a

main = showPage (runReader defaultPageParams someText)


For much more information on the Reader monad, see All About Monads, or the Haskell library documentation.

Last week I helped Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter kick off their book release party in New York City. The book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software is the first academic book length piece on free software proper that among other things examines the repercussions of such elements as language use (free software vs open source) and licensing (such as non-copyleft licensing). Here are my opening remarks, which don’t give justice to the book but give a small taste of what is in there. Samir and Scott are computer scientists, philosophers, and political thinkers and bring these positions and perspectives to bear in their work. While I tend to avoid the discussion on the differences and divergences between free and open source software and licensing (just because I ask a set of questions that tend not to go into that territory), they spend a hefty about of time on this sort of engagement And what is so useful about their approach is that it is technically detailed and carefully analyzed, clarifying the stakes involved in choosing a certain set of licensing over others, or the political implications of language use. Along with this focus, there are many other threads they unpack and one of my favorites is on the aesthetics of code, which I discuss with some detail in my opening remarks with the help of one of my favorite literary writers, Susan Sontag. The conversation that followed was lively, in part because there were a number of people in the audience who are also very familiar with FOSS (Somewhat unbelievably, there were 3 anthropologists there who study free software, myself, Jelena Karanovic, and Anita Chan). And I think one of the most interesting questions was launched by Anita who asked the authors what they meant more precisely by the promise of FOSS as well as liberation. The conversation that followed was too rich to recount here, but something that I raised and I do think is important is the relationship between the buzz word of the last few years, Web 2.0 and FOSS. Web 2.0 is related to FOSS in so far as Web 2.0 refers to a suite of technologies that allow for the creation of user-generated content and collaboration. FOSS refers to a development methodology that is based on promiscuous sharing of code and collaboration. The similarities, however, end there because much of the Web 2.0 infrastructure is proprietary. FOSS by definition is non-proprietary. But I think that soon we are going to see more Web 2.0-like companies open up their infrastructure entirely or at least important components. One example of a new technology that is Web 2.0-like and is entirely free software is a activist networking tool crabgrass that is pretty impressive (I have used it to coordinate my move and am using it now to coordinate a collaborative grant). It is still under development but once released, it will be a great boon to any group that needs to collaborate and organize and coordinate:

Crabgrass also provides a public advocacy centric view of content so that people can learn more about issues and organizations through social relationships. Blog tools, voter guides, petitions, event organizing tools, and action alerts are being added to the functionality of the platform. Crabgrass integrates wikis, asset repositories, task lists, calendars, polls, and meeting schedulers into one tool which allows groups to manage their internal organizing.

The other technology that I am excited about and that I have already written about is Kaltura. As I mentioned, Kaltura is important because it lowers the bar for collaboration, providing tools to facilitate video editing. But what I find as interesting and as significant is that they are perhaps the first large-scale Web 2.0 company that is actively seeking to enter the territory of FOSS and in this respect, once they do so, they will lead the field, not simply for technical reasons, but because they choose to make and engage with open source technologies. Bringing Web 2.0 within the orbit of FOSS and brining FOSS within the orbit of Web 2.0 can only work to bolster each other, and this is where I think, at least part of the promise of FOSS lies.

One of my dissertation thesis advisors, Christopher Kelty, is teaching a superb looking course at Harvard this fall on networks. The only thing I would add to that syllabus right now is a book by a department colleague, Alexander Galloway, who just published a book with Eugene Thacker The Exploit. And while I have not read more than a chapter, what I like about it is its experimental style. They open this book with the following orientation:

It is our intention in this book to avoid the limits of academic writing in favor of a more experimental, speculative approach. To that end, we adopt a two-tier format. Throughout Part I, “Nodes,” you will find a number of condensed, italicized header that are glued together with more standard prose. For quick immersion, we suggest skikking Part I by reading the italicized sections only…. In this sense, we hope you will experience the book not as the step-by-step propositional evolution of a complete theory but as a series of marginal claims, disconnected in a living environment of many thoughts, distributed across as many pages.

The good thing is while the form is experimental, at the sentence level, things are quite clear. I have often had the experience of reading experimental work whose content was the experiment but not the form, and basically I did not understand a thing. In this case, it is the form that achieves their desire to explore and present their marginal claims. Annemarie Mol in The Body Multiple also uses a two-tiered experimental approach that is just fantastic, especially since her writing is especially accessible.

Interested in what it would be like to digitize a good chunk of the New York Public Library? If yes, join the good folks at the library who are experimenting and implementing new methods, protocols, and best practices and documenting it all on a very nifty blog, NYPL Labs. One of the brains behind these mass movements and migrations is Josh Greenberg, the Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship. In many respects, it is a dream job for an academic (he got his PhD from the venerable Cornell STS Program and is the author of a forthcoming book, From Betamax to Blockbuster: The Invention of Movies on Video) because he can have a more dramatic and lasting impact on the world in comparison to most social science and humanities work, and in the process he and others will collect and gather all sorts of experiences that I am sure will become rich food for thought and future academic work on digitization, cultural preservation, and access.

There are quite a few important events related to Ubuntu -- and to free software communities more generally -- in the Boston area in the next few weeks. I plan to participate in many of them. First, this coming Saturday, October 13, there will be an Ubuntu install party hosted at MIT and organized by the Ubuntu Massachusetts local community team. It promises to be a lot of fun and a great opportunity to have a gaggle of geeks install a free OS on your computer for you. If you've been thinking about installing free software but been hesitant (my guess is that this is not the majority of my readers), this is the event for you. I'll probably be doing RockBox installs as well so backup your music and bring an iPod if you're unfortunate enough to have funded Apple through the purchase of one. Next week on October 18, Ubuntu Massachusetts will be hosting a party at the Globe Bar and Cafe to celebrate the (scheduled) release of the Gutsy Gibbon. I am not thrilled about everything in this release -- like Compiz by default -- but I am happy about the progress of the distribution both technically and in reaching out to an ever-wider and ever-larger group of users. On the week of October 29-November 2, Canonical is hosting the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Cambridge. I'll definitely drop by for a least a day or two to make some strategic interjections and to participate in a few specifications that I care about. The summit is just down the street from my office at the Hotel at MIT so I have little excuse to not show up. I'll also being hanging out with friends from Ubuntu during the week. Finally, as part of the Ubuntu conference, Canonical is sponsoring FOSSCamp. It promises to be a Foocamp/Barcamp style "un-conference" with a focus on free software and open source. I'll be there and, if there's demand, will run sessions on Selectricity and a quick Making Debian/Ubuntu Packages for Sysadmins talk -- basically a more polished version of what I did at the Ubucon in New York. All events are open to the public although people who are not Ubuntu developers may be a little bored at the developer summit. I look forward to seeing both old and new faces around the project in the next month.

Wammu just got one of long wanted features - notification on incoming calls. It uses D-Bus and Desktop Notifications, so you are probably lost without some modern Linux desktop. The implementation was quite easy, if I would know that using notifications is so easy, I would have written this sooner :-). So if you have phone connected to Wammu and somebody calls you, notification pops up and allows you to accept or reject the call. I doubt anybody needs more than this :-). The next step will be SMS notifications, but those will be a bit more complicated.

There's this thing going around on Facebook suggesting you are smart if you can read a paragaph where the middle letters of the words are scrambled. Everything old is new again, since I remember reading about this in 2003. As far as I remember being able to read the scrambled text was not related to intelligence in any way. Anyway, as a Friday afternoon distraction I wrote a little javascript to scramble text.

Plain	Scrambled
Hello This is a paragraph that you will still be able to read even after it is scrambled, the only rule being the first and last letters remain in place. This javascript will try and be fairly smart about not moving around non-alphabetic characters too.

Scramble It Ahh, the good-olde Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm, friend of the first year tutorial!

For once, Clint blogged on something that I can understand. I don’t buy everything he says, but in the case of DSA, the part where he says “you cannot have a functional and respectable subgroup if it maintains autonomy like that” is a real problem. The leadership problem I mentioned is real. And it can theoretically be solved by undelegating one of the problematic side of this DSA-internal dispute. But which one? Given the unwillingness of Joey to discuss the problems, he makes an easy target… which would leave DSA up to Ryan, James and Phil. But is that a desirable thing? If DSA is perceived as being an “autonomous” group which is not involved in Debian’s main discussions and which is somewhat disconnected from Debian’s day-to-day life, it’s largely due to the behavior of James and Ryan. E-mail communication with them is very difficult as they’ll respond only if they really care about something. And despite the setup of the request tracker, they have barely been able to make proper usage of it… the idea was to use RT tickets to track everything that DSA does but they don’t use it as such. For example, James setup a “wikiadm” group and he never reported anything to the related ticket (#194) (I did it myself once I found out). Also there’s an internal ticket about the replacement of ftp.debian.org (that I created because ftp.d.o ran out of space regularly) and AFAIK Jeroen has been in touch with James to setup that replacement, but nothing got reported to the tracker. Ryan promised me once to put his DSA TODO list in the tracker so that other people can jump in and help out. He never did. So while Joey is definitely a pain for DSA, at least he’s a visible participant of the team and he interacts with the community. James and Ryan are not, they interact only through private channels and do not share their opinions or their vision of Debian.
I believe this is a real problem. On the other hand, most of the interesting changes in the last months are the results of James’s work. But he’s also implicitly blocking addition of new members as long as the leadership problem is not solved. I tried to fill the communication void of the DSA team by various means. I follow everything as closely as I can so that I can report changes on other channels, mailing lists when needed. I made efforts to document stuff on the wiki page, etc. But this is not a long term solution, the communication issue must be fixed within the team. The path ouf of this mess is still not very clear, but something is going to change soon. Not quite sure what though. What would you suggest? And if you were DPL, what would you do? Since private discussions and negotiations lead nowhere, it’s tempting to bring the issue in the public area. In theory, they have no way to escape discussions and they’ll have to communicate their grudges against the other side if they want to have some fair judgment between both parties. Unfortunately, given the habits of James and Ryan, they probably won’t participate in any public discussion and either resign or stay where they are waiting for any decision… Comments welcome. Partagez cet article / Share This

I've written before that uClibc is currently not acceptable for the Debian archive maintainers because the licence notices in the source files are incomplete and there is no complete per-file breakdown of contributors and licences. No wonder, there are over 2,000 source files. Thus, I'm setting up a database that will allow me to map file content to people. I'm not sure there is existing software to do that, so it's going to take a while. Until then, uClibc for Debian can be downloaded from uclibc.debian.net (source, amd64 and m68k, the latter cross-compiled using the emdebian toolchain).

I've just released a new, completely re-written version of Unperish, my program to automate the mechanical steps of releasing a free software project. It is now completely based on plugins, so it should be easy to adapt to other people's needs than mine. For example, although it currently only supports Bazaar as a version control system, it should be quite easy to write a plugin for any other one. After that is done, the rest of the existing plugins will still work, and can take care of things like building a Debian package with pbuilder, checking it with lintian, linda, and piuparts, and putting the results in an apt repository. Git, for example, should be especially easy. I haven't written a git plugin yet myself, since I don't use git. The README has instructions for writing plugins, and if anything is unclear, please ask me. I'd be more than happy to include any such plugins, or changes to plugins, that other people want to make.

Pia writes about the difficulty in getting young women and young people in general into the computer industry [1]. While I agree that having more women in the computer industry would be a good thing, I have difficulty believing some of the claims that Pia makes. For example the claim that “[girls] are more career focused earlier in their school life“. I chose my career when I was about 11 years old [2] and several of my friends made similar decisions at similar ages. I would be interested to read anecdotal evidence from women in the computer industry about how old they were when they decided on their career and if their friends did the same, a reference to any research on this topic would also be useful. I tend to believe that boys are more career focussed at all stages of their life but have little evidence to support this idea. One fact that seems obvious is that the idea that “if you don’t succeed in your career then you can always marry someone who does” is almost non-existent among boys. It seems likely that such ideas have a statistically relevant affect on the focus on career of boys vs girls. Also the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that the MEDIAN income for women is significantly lower than for men [4], I find it difficult to imagine that girls could be more career focussed from a younger age and yet get significantly lower pay (note the fact that it’s median not mean income is very significant as it removes the “glass ceiling” effect). Phillip Greenspun writes about why there are so few women doing scientific research [6] and makes some good points about why scientific research is generally not well paid and therefore a university student would choose a career in some other area and suggests that it’s a macho thing that guys enter such competitive fields for relatively low wages. Maybe some women correctly assess the costs and benefits of a career in scientific research and then make the mistake of equating Computer Science to other branches of science. But the median income suggests that although there may be some valid reasons for avoiding science that would only cover a small portion of the problem (the difference in median income can not be explained by misplaced attempts to maximise income). One problem that is significant is the quality of school education for girls. Not only is there the issue that boys may crowd-out girls for some subjects that are supposedly traditionally for boys (such as all science) but even girls schools aren’t as good as they should be. Some time ago I was talking to a teacher at an all-girls school, the school was moderately expensive and parents were paying the extra money presumably to give their daughters educational opportunities that they might miss in a co-ed school. However the school did not teach hard maths (”Maths B” was the official name at the time) and only taught the easy maths (official name “Maths A” and unofficial name “Vegie Maths“) because they didn’t have many girls demanding it (which is probably difficult to measure if you don’t offer it as a reasonable option) and the girls who wanted to study it could always move to a different school. So the choice facing girls at the exclusive school in question was “skip the subject that is most useful for further studies in most science subjects” or “go to a different school and miss most of your friends“, this sort of decision would surely discourage some potential female computer programemers. Also I think that the difference between boys and girls in regard to studying computer science has a lot to do with the fact that given a choice between missing most of their friends and missing out on something related to computers would be a no-brainer for most boys. Paul Graham’s article about Nerds has some interesting points to make in this regard - maybe the problem is that girls aren’t Nerdish enough [5]. Pia also writes about parents and teachers advising children not do study IT because of a perceived lack of jobs. I think that the problem here is not just bad advice, but also a bad tendency to take advice. Someone who wants to study in an established field which changes little over time (law and accounting spring to mind) probably should take careful note of the advice that they are given - things haven’t changed much in the last few decades. But someone who wants to study in a field that changes rapidly and where every year has new and significant developments (of which the best example is the computer industry) should probably be quite skeptical of all advice - most advice about the computer industry concerns how things used to be not how things are. Finally when considering whether to accept advice you should consider who is offering it. For example advice from a hiring manager should be carefully noted (as the manager will tell you precisely what factors influence their own decisions on hiring). Advice from people who are successful in the industry should also be noted. Advice from a school career advisor who gets paid about 1/3 what any 25yo can earn in the computer industry should be entirely ignored. I wonder whether being hesitant to ignore advice is a problem for girls in this regard. When I was in year 11 I had to take a subject related to career planning. It covered some things that were of minor use (such as writing CVs) and had an assignment of writing a fictional CV for yourself a few years after leaving university. I received bad marks for preparing a CV that involved changing jobs as companies went bankrupt or projects failed due to bad management, I was told that if your employer fails in the market it makes you look bad! However my fictional CV did bear some resemblance to what really happened… In terms of what industries have jobs available, the best advice I can give students is to actively do some research of their own. It’s not difficult to get the jobs sections of some newspapers and do a quick scan to see how many positions are open in a field, and it’s even easier to do some searches on online jobs sites (which usually tell you how many positions posted in the last X days match your criteria). For example I just visited jobserve.com.au and found 1724 Engineering jobs and 5622 IT jobs advertised. If you compare this to the university intake (I visited the Swinburne university courses list [3] and found 25 IT courses vs 29 Engineering course) it seems that the ratio of Engineering graduates to jobs is not likely to be as good as that for CS graduates. Of course it may be that all the other universities have hardly any Engineering courses and balance the ratio out (but I doubt it). In any case this would be a good way of injecting some facts into a discussion of the relative merits of different career choices and avoiding it being an issue of parents/teachers not liking computers vs children liking them. Determining the relative pay rates of different industries is a lot more difficult (and requires a significant amount of work), some recruiting agencies publish statistics - but those stats only apply to the positions that they fill (which is a sub-set of the actual positions). Finally as a piece of advice for children, try and find a job that you enjoy. If you earn $30K doing something you enjoy then you’ll probably be happier than if you earn $100K doing something you hate. Also if you enjoy your work then you will probably be able to take the extra steps needed to become successful - often it’s not a choice between having fun or making good money but a choice between fun and good money or the absence of both. If someone tells you to avoid doing what you love and instead do something boring for some unsubstantiated belief that there would be more money in it then be a nerd and tell them that their opinion is not relevant (it does tend to make teachers angry though).

• [1] http://pipka.org/blog/2007/10/09/getting-girls-and-gen-y-into-it/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/23/the-start-of-my-computer-career/


• [3] http://courses.swinburne.edu.au/


• [4] http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs%40.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/96e08af8f4178a45ca257306000d4fd4


• [5] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html


• [6] http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

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I've been meaning to write this for weeks. Hopefully I can still remember everything. So Sarah had a c-section the day before we were scheduled to have our c-section class. We'd both read a bit though, so it wasn't like we were going in totally uninformed and unprepared.. Firstly, Stanford Hospital's operating room area is rather mind-blowing. Sarah was transferred from Lucille Packard Children's Hospital to Stanford because they could get an operating room there sooner. The transfer was trivial, just roll the whole bed down the corridor, through the magic double doors into the operating rooms. The doors in question have a whole heap of video cameras pointing straight down, so they see everyone that gets wheeled in and out, which I found interesting. Good for records of patient movements I guess. Anyway, through those doors is a maze of corridors. There was a light-up board hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the main corridor with lights for all of the ORs. I think there were about 20. The illuminated ones were available. We went down a corridor, and past a few ORs. Outside of each one is a big stainless-steel scrub area. We got to "our" OR, and they transferred Sarah onto the operating table. Because of her heart condition, they wanted to have an arterial line in her for the duration of the procedure. This is some sort of gadget that goes into an artery and monitors your blood pressure beat by beat. The "interesting" thing with the anaesthesiologist was the New Zealand woman that we'd seen when we had an anaesthesiologist months prior, but the appointment was with a different anaesthesiologist, and this New Zealand woman was "observing". At the time, the anaesthesiologist we had the appointment with told us that she was going to be on vacation at the time of the delivery, so she wouldn't be attending. So I don't know if the Kiwi woman got promoted out of "observing" to "doing" in that period, or what, but she reintroduced herself to us in LPCH prior to moving to Stanford as being our anaesthesiologist for the delivery. Anyway, in the OR, they handed her the arterial line, in it's plastic packaging, and the first thing she asked was whether it came with anything else to put it in. At this point I figured she hadn't put one of these in before. (The answer to her question, by the way, was "no") She then proceeded to have a terrible time getting the line into Sarah's arm. Normally intravenous lines go into a vein, but this has to go into an artery. Apparently when you go poking an artery, it spasms. It then becomes very hard to get it into a moving target. She had a few goes on one arm, then gave up, and had to move over to the other arm. Sarah doesn't like needles at the best of times, and getting this honking great big thing in was no picnic. The bruising on both her wrists afterwards was phenomenal. She tends to bruise fairly spectacularly whenever they stick a needle in her. I almost stepped in and asked if it was really necessary that she have it, because they were having so much trouble getting it in, and it was clearly hurting Sarah. I think someone else ended up getting it in, not the anaesthesiologist. Not "that" one anyway. There were heaps of people in the OR. Next, came the epidural. Again, we had the inexperienced anaesthesiologist. This time she said to someone else how she was so nervous because there were "too many eyes". Not really reassuring. They gave Sarah a numbing injection first, and then proceeded to poke her in back with the epidural catheter needle thing. Sarah was flinching when they did it, and they kept yelling at her not to move. Apparently it didn't hurt, but it caused discomfort every time they tried to get it in. Eventually the associate professor of anaesthesiology stepped in and got it in. Later, they said that Sarah had a slightly curved spine or something, and that had made it a bit more complicated. I'm not begrudging the obviously inexperienced anaesthesiologist for anything. Stanford is a teaching hospital, and doctors have to get their experience somehow, but I think that when the patient is conscious, it's important to come across a little more confident. So once they got all of that sorted out, they could get her lying down on the table and get down to business. Apparently one of the side-effects of the epidural is that it can cause your body to think it's got hypothermia. Part way through the procedure, Sarah started shaking uncontrollably. I can't remember whether she complained about feeling cold or not. She also got a really itchy face. Apparently that's a side-effect of morphine. Sarah also doesn't tolerate anaesthetics very well, and started feeling nauseous part way through the procedure. Sure enough, as has happened countless times previously post-operatively, she threw up. At least we had warning and I got a kidney dish in place in time. That was about all the eventful surgical stuff. They had the usual screen up from about her neck area, so I couldn't see what they were doing. After Joshua was delivered, one of the nurses asked me if I wanted to see him, and took me around from her left shoulder where I'd been sitting to around below her right foot, to where they had him in one of those perspex portable crib things. I could see a lot of red out of the corner of my eye, and I could have seen a lot more if I'd bothered to look, but I was more interested in seeing my son at that stage. They let me bring him back around to where I'd been sitting previously, to show Sarah, but it was hard getting him up to a point where she could see him properly, and she was partially out of it by this stage. I think she dozed off for a little bit not long after that. I forget what time we got into the OR, but they started the operation in earnest at about 10:00am, and we were out of there by 10:45am if memory serves. The nurse in charge of the recovery room really didn't want me there, so I went back to LPCH with one of the nurses to spend some time with him while he was weighed and measured, and I took some photos, and held him. This was good, because I got to have a good cry on my own with him. So overall, in my "I'll never be squeezing a watermelon out of my nether regions" blokey perspective, having seen what Sarah went through, and how much discomfort that it looked like she was going through, both in the OR and afterwards, I'm not convinced c-sections are any less painful than a vaginal birth (taking the average case of both). I think you're trading some "short term" (depends on how long your labour is I guess) pain for some "long term" pain while you recover from your incision. Granted, Sarah wasn't really laid up all that badly for all that long, but it still didn't look all that pleasant. I guess really only the women who have done both delivery methods can really comment. All I know is I found it very difficult watching Sarah go through so much pain. So much so that I'm not really looking forward to that again. Maybe, hopefully, after her aorta is repaired, they'll let her delivery vaginally next time. I'm not holding much hope though. The high-risk obstetricians are fairly paranoid. There's also the possibility the baby will make the decision very easy for everyone by being breech. Sarah raised an interesting point today. Why didn't they just knock her out with a general anaesthetic? There was no need for her to be conscious for the delivery. That would have spared her the pain and suffering of getting the arterial line in, and they wouldn't have needed to bother with an epidural. One for her to ask the obstetrician at her follow-up appointment.

Mr. Who? No.. mr is a Multiple Repository management tool. With lots of people using svn with no real reason to switch, and some people using git because it's the cool thing of the day, I need a way to be able to checkout and update from multiple repositories, in multiple revison control systems. There are probably many scripts already written to do this; mr(1) is my attempt, and since it's very configurable and has a very short name, perhaps it will be useful to others in this situation. An example is probably worth 1347 words (according to wc -w mr). One thing not shown here is that it can look for .mrconfig files not just in the home directory, but inside the repositories it checks out.

joey@kodama:~/src> mr update
mr update: in /home/joey/src/dpkg
Already up-to-date.
Already up-to-date.
mr update: in /home/joey/src/linux-2.6
Already up-to-date.
mr update: in /home/joey/src/mr
Already up-to-date.
mr update: finished (3 sucessful; 1 skipped)

Here's my current ~/.mrconfig file.

[src/mr]
checkout = git clone ssh://git.kitenet.net/srv/git/kitenet.net/mr
[src/linux-2.6]
checkout = git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
# I only check this out on kodama, otherwise skip it.
skip = test $(hostname) != kodama
[src/dpkg]
# A merge of the upstream dpkg git repo and my own personal branch.
checkout = git clone git://git.debian.org/git/dpkg/dpkg.git && \
        cd dpkg && \
        git remote add kite ssh://kitenet.net/srv/git/kitenet.net/dpkg && \
        git fetch kite && \
        git checkout -b sourcev3 kite/sourcev3
update = git pull origin master && git pull kite sourcev3
commit = git push kite
# My home directory, which I keep in svn.
[]
checkout = svn co svn+ssh://svn.kitenet.net/srv/svn/joey/trunk/home-$(hostname) joey
# run svnfix after each update
update = svn update && svnfix

PS, what should "mr clean" do?

A couple of years ago, I had an apparent lapse of judgement and bought a 21" Dell LCD because it seemed to be a good monitor and a good price. Even after my earlier experiences with Dell.

Last winter, it developed an odd dim area in the shape of an L. It was under warranty.

I made the mistake of contacting Dell support. It probably took 2-3 hours of calling before they agreed to replace it. I'm pretty sure I said each of these things to them at least 5 times:

• No, it does not have an Express Service Tag. It has only a serial number tag, and no, it is not the same format as the Express Service Tag.
• No, my computer doesn't have an Express Service Tag either. It is not a Dell computer.
• Yes, it is possible to use a Dell monitor with another kind of computer.
• Yes, I did buy the monitor from Dell. Would you like the order number?
• No, hooking it up to another computer doesn't change it. Do you remember I told you that the area looks green even when the monitor is OFF?
• I was just talking to someone else, who was going to transfer me to some other department, but (hung up on me, sent me to a busy signal, sent me to a menu that accepts no input) instead.

Eventually I spoke to somebody that understood the concept of a serial number and agreed to send me a replacement monitor. I made the mistake of giving them a shipping address for that.

Ever since then, they have sent me stupid catalogs.

NO, DELL, I DO NOT WANT TO BUY A FLAMINGO PINK INSPIRON NOTEBOOK

that is what I think each week when I get such a catalog.

I have gone to their website to try to get off of these mailings. They have different privacy forms for their different units (home, small business, etc.), and I sent in a removal form for all of them. That didn't help. I called their customer service department, and after getting the run around yet again, they said they'd take me off right away. That didn't help either. This was all months ago. They are blatantly violating their stated privacy policy.

Today I got another magazine. Featuring Flamingo Pink inspirons yet again. And a page that says "Raze your standards." Need I say more?

I will therefore be following the advice of Junkbusters.com and will file a Prohibitory Order against Dell at my earliest convenience. That's the first time I've been motivated to do that.

And if they don't honor that, they'll be hearing from the postal inspectors.

Dell has now become my most despised company ever. Yes, even more than Sprint.