Yesterday I went to activate phone service out at the farm. It got me to thinking a bit about how things change, and how they stay the same, too.
Before I go on, I'll have to say that every one of my history books is in storage, so if I get some details wrong, it's because I'm not remembering correctly.
Anyhow, phone service came to our community via an unusual route about 100 years ago. It wasn't Bell/AT&T or some other company that brought it there, as it was most places. I'm sure they figured that a small, scattered rural community would cost too much to support. So the community organized, built, and supported the phone system themselves.
Even today, roads around here can be impassible after a good rain. I'm sure that, in the early 1900s, before heavy road-maintaining machinery, things were worse -- and, of course, transportation was a lot slower then anyway. There were real problems: getting the word out about funerals, being able to summon a doctor when necessary, or letting people know that church was cancelled because of too much snow.
People in the community saw a phone system as a real need. So did the churches, which have left a legacy that is still reflected in phone company territories today.
Once phone service arrived, it was used for all the things that people expected, of course. But it also proved to be an important part of the social fabric of the community. Since party lines were the norm, it was possible to announce things to every listening subscriber pretty quickly. Older people remember announcements of fresh fruit arriving at the grocery store, funerals, or other news of the day.
To place a call, you would pick up your phone and turn your crank. That caused a bell to ring at the telephone office, which everyone called "Central." The operator would connect to your line and ask whom you wanted to talk to. The operator would then send the distinctive ring for your party down their party line, and patch -- manually -- your call through to them. And, if he was busy, the operator wouldn't listen in on your conversation -- but others on the party line very well might.
Central's hours were published. If you were making a call in the middle of the night, you were going to wake up someone at Central to do it -- plus everyone on the entire party line. So calls after hours were rare.
Fortunately, while some of the old Central operators were still around, some people in the community wrote down some of their stories.
There were some people in the community that were notorious for eavesdropping on other people's conversations. Two brothers one time figured that they knew somebody was listening to their conversations, so they devised a code. One called the other, and said, "I'll be going to McPherson in the morning for band practice." That meant something along the lines of going to town to buy groceries.
A few days later, their prime suspect came up to him and said, "What on earth are you going to band practice for? I didn't know you knew how to play an instrument!" Apparently she realized she was had when he burst out laughing uncontrollably.
The Central operators learned to know the habits of telephone users. Sometimes they would connect calls without even bothering to ask who people wanted to talk to -- and seemed to always get it right.
The phone system supported itself for about 50 years. But as the rest of the world moved on provide direct dialing, this proved a controversial subject in the community. People liked having their operators. The people that worked at Central were everybody's friend. They were people that were there, 24 hours a day, to assist with any emergency. They would gather volunteer firefighters to help fight a fire, or be able to spread community news quickly. This wouldn't be available with the newer phone systems. How would the community be informed of events quickly now? Who would just happen to know whose house the doctor was at when he was urgently needed?
The change was resisted for some years, but eventually the finances of the telephone cooperative turned out to be in deep trouble. Operators grew to be much more expensive than automation, and in the late 1960s, the telephone cooperative was no more -- sold to a phone company from a small town more than twice our size, and a for-profit company at that! Central no longer existed. I remember reading about this event -- it seems people were sad about that for quite some time. They felt that they had really lost an important part of the community when Central went away. Some machine locked in a cabinet doesn't care for people the way Central did. Even today, the older people in the community sound a little sad when they remember telephone modernization, and get the wistful look of somebody that has just remembered something that they miss.
The phone company that bought the system wasn't an AT&T, though. It was a small, independent phone company. To this day, that phone company serves only the two communities. And it was this company that I called yesterday to establish service out at our house.
They had already upgraded our lines -- over a mile of new copper, benefiting only us, at no charge to us -- last fall. The box was already on the outside of the house. Just need to get it activated.
So I called the phone company. They said I needed to drop by their office and sign some papers. Uh-oh, I think -- this is a bad sign. Sounds like a bunch of phone company bureaucracy.
But not so much. I went to the office and signed up. They asked the usual questions: name, address. Plus a few that bigger companies wouldn't ask: who used to have service at that address? Of course, most people would know that answer in our community. I couldn't have told you in Wichita, Dallas, or Indianapolis.
Then they asked when I'd like service to be activated. "As soon as possible," I say, figuring that this would be a couple of weeks like it is with AT&T or Sprint. "Well, we probably can't get out there for a couple of hours. Would it be OK if it's on at about 3?" Yes, that would be fine!
Now, how about DSL? "Well, we're a little backed up on that right now." Uh-oh. Sprint took several weeks when they *weren't* more backed up than usual. "So it'll probably be Monday or Tuesday before we can get out there. Should I just have the installer call you and arrange a time when it gets closer?" Yes, that would be fine, too!
Now, how about finding a phone number.
Out comes a large paper book. Yep, paper. They paged through it, and told me that my grandpa's old number would be available if I wanted it. I said yes -- after all, we've got his old address, so might as well keep the same phone number. OK, no problem. She whips out some white-out, whites out grandpa's name, and writes ours in. Done.
Now, do we want any optional services? Caller ID, call waiting, voicemail? How much is caller ID, I ask. $5 a month. We'll try it for now. "OK". A box was checked on the form and that was that. No high-pressure sales pitch on taking "the works" for some poorly-disclosed price, providing a ton of services I'll never use and don't want. No confusing "discounts" for having The Works and DSL at the same time.
Then I ask about an unlisted number, or at least an unlisted address. We figure that anybody that we really want to be able to reach us will figure out how without using a phone book, and these things get in so many databases these days. Sprint charged almost $10/mo for a fully unlisted number, but only a few dollars a month to just keep our address off the directories.
Our new company charged 50 cents a month for a fully unlisted number. Done.
Now it's time to pay for the first month's fees and the setup. Oops, I've forgotten my checkbook in the car. No problem, the secretary says, I'll watch your baby while you go get it! Jacob was with me, but had fallen asleep, so I brought him inside in his car seat. I went to get the checkbook -- just out the door and close by. I was back in a few seconds later, and the secretary was already on the other side of her desk talking and playing with Jacob. "My baby's 12 now," she said, and for a second, looked like a person that was remembering Central.
Or, Cleanliness is next to godliness
The last time when I blogged about Spam fighting
Mail
Filtering With CRM114 Part 1, I left y'all with visions of
non-converging learning, various ingenious ways of working around a
unclean corpus, and perhaps a sinking feeling that this whole thing
was more fragile than it ought to be.
During this eriod of flailing around, trying to get
mailtrainer to learn the full corpus correctly, I upgraded
to an unpackaged version of crm114. Thanks to the excellent
packaging effort by the maintianers, this was dead easy: get the
debian sources using
apt-get source crm114, download tghe
new tarball from crm114 upstream, cp the debian dir over, and just
edit the changelog file to reflect the new version. I am currently
running my own, statically linked 20061103-Blame
Dalkey.src-1.
Cleaning the corpus made a major difference to the quality of
discrimination. As mentioned earlier, I examined every mail that
was initially incorrectly classified during learning. Now, there
are two ways this can happen: That the piece of mail was correctly
placed in the corpus, but had a feature that was different from
those learned before; or that it was wrongly classified by me. When
I started the chances were almost equally likely; I have now
hopefully eliminated most of the misclassifications. When
mailtrainer goes into cycles, retraining on a couple of
emails round after round, you almost certainly are trying to train
in conflicting ways. Cyclic retraining is almost always a human's
error in classification.
Some of the errors discovered were not just misclassifications:
some where things that were inappropriate mail, but not Spam; for
instance there was the whole conversation where someone one
subscribed debian-devel to another mailing list, there was the
challenge, the subscription notice, the un-subscription, challenge,
and notice -- all of which were inappropriate, and interrupted the
flow, and contributed to the noise -- but were not really Spam. I
had, in a fit of pique, labelled them as Spam; but they were really
like any other mailing list subscription conversations, which I
certainly want to see for my subscriptions. crm114 did register the
conversations as Spam and non-Spam, as requested, but that
increased the similarity between Spam and non-Spam features -- and
probably decreased the accuracy. I've since decided to train only
on Spam, not on inappropriate mails; and let Gnus keep
inappropriate mails from my eyes.
I've also waffled over time about whether or not to treat
newsletters from Dr. Dobbs Journal or USENIX as
Spam or not -- now my rule of thumb is that since I signed up for
them at some point, they are not Spam -- though I don't feel guilty
about letting
mailagent squirrel them
away mostly out of sight.
A few tips about using mailtrainer:
- Make sure you have a clean corpus
- Try and make it so that your have roughly equal numbers of Ham
and Spam
- Don't let mailtrainer quit after a set number of rounds. I use
a ridiculous repeat count of about 100 -- never expecting to reach
anywhere close to that. Instead, I set the streak to a number =
number of Spam + number of Ham + 10. This means that mailtrainer
does not quit until it has processed every email in the corpus
correctly without needing to retrain. Letting mailtrainer quit
after it repeated the corpus twice, but before it got a streak of
correct classifications left me with a filter with
horrible accuracy.
- Make sure you have a clean corpus (yes, really)
- While the ratio of similarities between .css files to
the differences between .css files is a fun metric, and I
use it as an informal, rough benchmark while training, it is not
really correlated to accuracy, so don't get hung up on it, like I
was. Usually, the value I get when training from scratch on my
corpus is somewhere around 7.5; but over time the ratio degrades
(falling to about 5), while the filter accuracy keeps
increasing.
- Train only on errors. The good news is that both
mailtrainer and mailreaver already do so, so this
is easy rule to follow. The reason is that you should only be doing
minimal training, in case you have to modify/change the underlying
rule in the future. So your filter should be trained to correctly
classify the mails you get, but don't shoot for overwhelming
scores.
- Use mailreaver. It has the nice behaviour of asking for
retraining when it is unsure of some mail, and it caches mail for
some time which really helps in training and rebuilding
.css files. The reason mailreaver learns faster than
mailtrainer is just this feature, I think.
- Stash mails you train on in your corpus, and don't hesitate to
re-run mailtrainer over your corpus again after you have been
training the unsure emails. When you train single emails, the
changed filter may no longer correctly classify some email in the
corpus you train with. Running mailtrainer over the corpus adjusts
the filter to correctly classify every mail again. I generally
retrain about once a week, though I no longer retrain from scratch,
unless I change the classification algorithm.
So, the
Apple iPhone has been launched, it was brought to my attention as actually being announced by the MD at work, who appears to have become a complete apple freak (poor bastard... or is that rich bastard to be able to afford apple's mediocre offerings and be happy about it?). Anyways - from reading the
story from
BBC News and the
official website, here's my conclusions.
First off, when marketing a phone, how about you actually mention it's phone capabilities as the number one priority? I'd like to know about the sound capabilities, the battery life, the overall user feel for it as a phone... maybe I'm odd, but a phone has a purpose, it should make and receive calls, and it should do that job *well*, with good quality voice, a decent (filtering) microphone (it's a mobile, you'll be walking whilst speaking on it, reducing the background noise is a selling point), but apple appear to have mostly avoided talking about this. Instead, the first thing that you're told about from the news story is the unique user interface - great, so we have a touchscreen "whoop, de, do!". Worse still, from the official site, the first thing that springs out is that it's a "Wide Screen iPod" - it's a phone, if I wanted an iPod I'd buy a damned iPod - as it stands, for my music needs I have an
iAudio M3 which suits my portable music experience really rather well. I choose that on the basis that it provided ogg support out of the box, didn't require any magical software (I run linux on my machines, it presenting itself as nothing more than a USB hard disk was fantastic, and means that I can use it for other things when needs arise). For a phone I want something that actually behaves like a phone, looking at the iPhone it's primary purpose appears to actually be a media player - that's not good.
With the iPhone only having a touch screen interface, and from everything that I've read there's no stylus and the "finger is the ultimate pointing device", I'm just expecting that within the first 2 weeks you're going to have a scratched or smudged screen from usage alone, add in the fact that it's a mobile phone, and therefore generally treated with contempt (neccessity rather than luxery), and that most people carry mobiles in their pockets without any form of protection (easy and fast access) and you've got a recipe for disaster! The touch screen is going to be hit (wether you like it or not) whilst the phone is in your pocket, it will wear - there's no question in my mind about it. Touchscreens aren't designed to be smacked around 24/7, they're touchscreens - they respond to touch! So, assuming that you're shiny new iPhone is sitting in your pocket a lot of the time that's a lot of usage of the touchscreen - they're not designed for constant pressure (think about what happens to pockets in trousers when you sit down...), so I don't think that, overall, the sensitivity of the screen is going to last very long. It's only got a fairly narrow screen too, so what about those of us with not entirely slender fingers? When composing SMS messages on it with the on screen qwerty keyboard, do you really think that you're going to get the right keys every time? Small, on screen, buttons and pubs do not mix - and I'd hasten a bet there's a fair number of SMS messages sent from, or on the way back from, the pub, with a predictive text system at least you can almost work out what the heck the person was trying to say - this is a whole new ball game.
The iPhone also makes the phone functionality only available after you've hit the part of the screen that says "Phone", now, I don't know about other people, but if I'm being given a number, I tend to just start hitting the right buttons on the phone, I can store the number later (via the call register or whatever) and hit call, now there's an extra step to getting in touch with people.
From the official site we have the words """ iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. """" - now, err, just when did a phone require you to use anything other than your fingers? Please tell me, I'm dying to know - I've never yet needed to use my feet to operate my phone, have you? This is marketing gone insane - and what worries me is that people actually believe this bullshit.
Apple may have "revolutionised" the computer industry with "Mac OS X" (this is actually not something that I believe, and OS X actually makes me more frustrated than being sat infront of a windows desktop - and believe me, that's difficult), but this is a phone, how about they try making it about the phone first, and the next generation tart audio player second?
I'm willing to be convinced that I'm wrong, but I definately won't be going out of my way to aquire an iPhone just because the marketing spiel looks good.
The biggest party in Bavaria and part of the current german government, CSU,
has announced that they want to make the "production and distribution of
killer-games" illegal in germany. They claim it's because of a recent
highschool shooting (no fatalities except the shooter; there was one other
highschool shooting in germany a few years ago with 16 fatalities. Yes, that
is 17 fatalities in over 40 years, the 42 years old amok runner back then
didn't play killer games, I guess, although he used a flame thrower...).
This would make the production and distribution in Germany unlawful, since
we include games such as overkill, tremulous and openarena. Other
distributions such as SuSE probably include some games that classify as
"killer games" as well. Also note that "distribution" is a rather wide term.
Does it apply to web sites? ISPs? If there is an online killer game, is the
ISP "distributing" it?
Polticians (especially those from CSU/CDU/SPD) are such a bunch of idiots.
Please do NOT ever again vote for CSU. Software patents, killer games,
"Problemfrauen & Schadbären", surveillance cameras and other
surveillance, military inside germany (note that in desaster cases such as the
flooding some years ago we could already deploy soldats without extra laws),
shooting down of civilian airplanes, transrapid, reducing math and natural
sciences in highschools, "google earth threatens worldcup security", police
installing trojans on home PCs (because criminals don't install virus
scanners?), kicking "irritating" students out of school, study fees, ...
Often they make George W. Bush look like a genius, don't they?
They don't do any important stuff, but just say whatever a majority people
might want to hear. They waste our money (Transrapid). They destroy our
biggest resource (changes in school system and university system, which will
reduce average knowledge in germany a lot). They do lots of stupid things,
which heavily invade privacy or public safety (military, surveillance) with
no benefits in safety and many of which even where only stopped
because they violated our constitution.
Do not vote for them!
[Updates:
Daniel, sorry for posting a non-english post to planet. I again put it into the wrong category; I intended to do a longer post (this one) in english later on. For clarification: CSU is the sister party of CDU, these parties have an arrangement not to compete by region and are closely affiliated. On the nation-wide level they have a joint list, which often is called CDUCSU. So they're not just an "affiliate", but a strong part of the ruling party.
Holger Levsen pointed
out we are likely going to violate some laws much earlier by distributing
("hacker-") tools such as nmap, ettercap or whireshark.]
Russel Coker wrote in
etbe: some random Linux tips:
Prefixing a bash command with ‘ ‘ will prevent a ! operator from running it. For example if you had just entered the command ” ls -al /” then “!l” would not repeat it but would instead match the preceeding command that started with a ‘l’. On SLES-10 a preceeding space also makes the command not appear in the history while on Debian/etch it does (both run Bash 3.1).
It’s pretty easy to get the Bash shell to ignore lines starting with a space in its history: Just add
export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace
to your
~/.bashrc. Alternatively,
ignoredups ignores duplicates and
ignoreboth ignores both.
It’s also possible to tell Bash to ignore lines which match a specific pattern. For example,
export HISTIGNORE=" *:~/*"
will ignore any command starting with a space (emulation the
ignorespace option to
HISTCONTROL) or starting with
~/ (any program/script in or below your directory).
Personally, I just use “
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth“.
..or he's not telling us something. If the multi-year exclusive agreement is true, then the goals are probably unachievable. In the keynote yesterday, Jobs put out there that almost a billion phones are sold each year to consumers. Granted, most of these are regular phones without the whiz-bang and special features of the iPhone -- and are usually free to the consumer, subsidized by the contract agreements. Still, he set what most would consider a modest goal, of getting 1% of the cell phone sales - 10 million phones, by the end of 2008.
However, lets do some napkin math. A very small percentage of phones out there today are smart phones.
C Net says that 37.4 million smart phones out there. This is probably a pretty conservative estimate by now -- the Gartner study was released in October. Let's give the smart phone people the benefit of the doubt and say that usage triples by the end of 2008. That makes about 100 million smart phones out there. 10 million is ten percent of that market.
Let's look at the math another way. Cingular has
58 million subscribers. Assuming that they gain 20% per year, they will have 68 million at the end of 2008. If Apple is aiming at 10 million phones, that is one out of every seven Cingular customers. Next time you walk down the street, notice count 7 people that you can notice have a phone. If Apple makes its goal, one of those 7 people will own a iPhone, and will have shelled out at least half a grand on it.
These are amazingly high goals for a company that is new in the market. Granted, the iPhone is pretty revolutionary, but I don't think Steve is that crazy. I'm betting that he has something up his sleeve that will help him meet or beat this 10 million goal.
My
Notetak
application is slowly maturing. Some day in the relatively
near future I expect it to get so mature that I need to start
refactoring the code so that it isn't utter crap.
So far I've developed Notetak by doing random quick hacks, as they
have occurred to me, without caring much about maintainability,
unit tests, or such. This is fine for the crude prototype phase
Notetak is currently going through, but it's getting to the
point where making changes meets with internal resistance,
since I first need to figure out a way to avoid breaking
unrelated things.
Now that I have some idea of how the application should
behave, refactoring it to be nicely coded is easier. Heck,
it's still only 374 lines of Python, plus a .glade file,
so rewriting it from scratch should only be an evening's
work.
Anyway, I'm pretty happy with it now. It fits fairly well
into my simple GTD workflow, it's pretty quick to work with,
and generally doesn't get in my way. I miss undo/redo, and
the UI is ugly, and there's no pretty icon, but the core
functionality is there, and is satisfactory.
(374 lines of Python to build a useful GNOME application is
pretty good, I think. The combination of GTK+, PyGTK, Python,
Glade-2, and libglade, is a very powerful combination indeed.)
About a year and a half ago (has it been that long already?), I
blogged about
wanting to write some gobjects. People did give me pointers to some
documentation then, but for various reasons I never looked into it in
detail afterwards.
Since yesterday, though, that's changed. For the last two days, I've
been writing on something which I'll eventually release to the world as
libgjs:
wouter@country:~/code/c/libgjs/src$ ./gjstest
There are 1 joysticks on this system
Joystick 0 is a Logitech Inc. WingMan Gamepad Extreme,
with 10 buttons and 4 axes.
wouter@country:~/code/c/libgjs/src$
Wonderful, isn't it? Obviously the above doesn't require the 306 LOC
that I've written now (which isn't much, but that's mostly because I had
to read a lot of documentation in between); but when finished, the API
of that library will be approximately something like this:
if(gjs_joystick_get_max>=0)
GjsJoystick *joystick = gjs_joystick_new(0);
if(joystick->buttons >= 1)
g_signal_connect(joystick, "button-pressed",
start_firing, NULL);
g_signal_connect(joystick, "button-released",
stop_firing, NULL);
g_signal_connect(joystick, "axis-moved",
move_crosshair, NULL);
gjs_joystick_set_interval(1);
where
start_firing,
stop_firing and
move_crosshair are, obviously, callback functions (they get the
button or axis number as a parameter). The
set_interval
function sets the time between two polls of the kernel device file; this
will use the
glib mainloop, but it'll also be possible to use a
different event loop with
gjs_joystick_poll and/or
gjs_joystick_poll_all.
As of now, it's almost finished; only the signals seem to be
something I'm having issues with still. But that's only a matter of not
having used
gdb enough—I'm sure I'll get there.
What gave me the sudden idea to write this library? Something silly,
really: for a project I'm currently negotiating, it might be nice if I
knew how GObject works; and what better way to find that out than by
writing something fun for it? Exactly.
Update: Bugs squashed, and the library (along with a
small test/demo application)
is available. Please try it
out and let me know what you think.
Justification.
Currently there is a huge mess of files and folders that start with a “.” in any users home folder. There is no structure or policy on how applications should choose file and folder names for data that needs to be stored in users home directory. Additionally there is no established consistency between Gnome, KDE and most other applications. Gnome application have part of their configuration information in gconf folder and other part in a gnome subfolder. KDE applications have a complex structure under .kde/. And most other applications either have one file directly in users home folder or have their own dot-folder there.
Problems.
There are two major problems with current ad-hoc approach:
-
Namespace pollution of users home space. In any desktop system “ls -al” in the home folder would be a very lengthy affair. Moreeven this namespace is folded - KDE and Gnome apps live in their own subfolders.
-
Lack of structure in folders makes it much harder to properly understand their purpose. For example, if a user has misconfigured an application and would like to reset it to default settings, it currently could be hard to figure out how to do that. Especially without losing his data in that application.
Proposal.
I propose to implement a policy on where an application can store data and configuration information in users home folder. Such specification would be proposed as an extension for FHS, first implemented in Debian and then promoted for inclusion upstream and in other distributions.
Structure.
I propose a following structure for a users home folder:
-
data/appname/ - each application, that stores user data in application-specific format, will have to store this data into this folder. Only configuration information that is essential to load this data would be permitted into this folder (in hidden dot files). For example, Evolution could store emails and email access information here.
-
.conf/appname/ - each application that stores any configuration information whould have to store all of it in this folder. GConf will have to also store applications configuration info here. If this folder would be deleted, application must revert to default configuration, but still be able to fully access user data in data/appname/ or other, generic folders (below). For example, if .conf/evolution/ is erased, then on next start-up Evoution should still be able to access all email that is stored in data/evolution/ without any configuration wizards.
-
.tmp/appname/ - each application that would need to create temporary files that survive reboot, would put them here. These folders can be safely deleted at any time with no data or configuration loss. For example, Firefox cache information and Nautilus thumbnail cache would have to be here.
-
Desktop/ - the desktop folder, just like it is now
-
Media folders - (Documents/, Photos/, Videos/, Music/, …) a suggestion of basic document structure for user to use or ignore. Applications dealing with particular media types would default to use files from such folders, but should also cope with working with any other folders on users choice. For example, a screensaver with slideshow function would by default use photos from Photos/, but will have to have a configuration option for user to change that setting.
-
Additionally I would propose having a .mounts/ folder where applications could mount user specific media and other mounts, such as FUSE. For example, FUSE could be used for automatic archive introspection.
Benefits
The main benefit for such system for me is twofold:
-
SBackup can be configured to exclude .tmp/ and .mounts/ by default thus saving significant space in backups.
-
A tool can be made to restore settings and/or data for specific applications in an uniform fashion.
So, any suggestions on the idea and on where this should be best discussed?
Greg Kroah-Hartman's new book
Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is now available in stores, as well as for download on his website.
To quote
O'Reilly:
Written by a leading developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel, Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is a comprehensive overview of kernel configuration and building, a critical task for Linux users and administrators.
No distribution can provide a Linux kernel that meets all users' needs. Computers big and small have special requirements that require reconfiguring and rebuilding the kernel. Whether you are trying to get sound, wireless support, and power management working on a laptop or incorporating enterprise features such as logical volume management on a large server, you can benefit from the insights in this book.
Linux Kernel in a Nutshell covers the entire range of kernel tasks, starting with downloading the source and making sure that the kernel is in sync with the versions of the tools you need. In addition to configuration and installation steps, the book offers reference material and discussions of related topics such as control of kernel options at runtime.
A key benefit of the book is a chapter on determining exactly what drivers are needed for your hardware. Also included are recipes that list what you need to do to accomplish a wide range of popular tasks.
It's yet another great book licensed under
a Creative Commons license. It's good to see that more and more books are now being freely licensed...
Just a quick alert since it's quite widely used and since I've completely
missed the
media coverage and
only noticed it when logcheck started sending me long emails every hour:
relays.ordb.org was shut down, you may need to adjust your mailer's
configuration. At least they've not blacklisted the whole Internet (yet.)
Richard MacManus: “Instead of using the entire product suite of a Google or an MSN or a Yahoo, you [should be able to] use the particular apps you like most from not only big players - but small startups too.”
I agree wholeheartedly. I’m a big believer in the componentization of the web, as I’ve
written about before. Without a way to write independent apps that integrate with each other regardless of where they’re hosted, the future starts to look more and more like the mainframe era (albeit with better graphics).
The world needs only five computers (shaping up to be Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, Windows Live and Yahoo!). However, we need to ensure that these five computers operate more as computing utilities where a thousand flowers can bloom than as centralized monoliths where the only way to integrate is to be assimilated.
Dear lazyweb,
- I've tried to avoid join or start flamewars in the Debian mailing lists. I think i managed this task very well.
- Based on my experience into pkg-perl, i had the idea to start a related Python project since there were a lot of Python modules out there and just a few packaged. I've founded python-modules with Guilherme Pastore (pkg-python name wasn't available) and we were joined by Raphael Hertzog some time later.
- I had the idea and talked with Otavio Salvador in Brasilia, Brazil during a cluster, linux and FOSS community gov't related event about the ltsp status in Debian and how it would be cool start a project in cooperation with Ubuntu. We've founded pkg-ltsp and had a online meeting at #ltsp were ogra and mdz (from Ubuntu fame) participated too. Since then, ltsp in Debian is way better than it was. I did technically way less than i could to the project itself, but i've an entire year to fix this. Thanks vagrantc and pere too for all the hard work and help.
- Merged debian-desktop development page, mailing list and alioth project in a focused thing with permission of the founders and was joined by pkg-gnome, pkg-kde, pkg-xfce, pkg-galago and tasksel members. The group did some great stuff together and it was just a restart.
- Worked very hard on Custom Debian Distributions camp, specially with Vagrant Cascardian on Simple-CDD for Etch.
- Joined pkg-gnome, tasksel and a lot (really) others projects that i did my best to help.
- I did my first security upload.
Looking back, what a insane year, but not due to the Debian related stuff that was fun to do, to say the least. Anyway, i hope to write similar stuff in the next year but with a even more exciting content. Thanks for those that helped me and those who did something for Debian in the past year. See you!
Long-ago
San Francisco Cacophony Society leader and early
Burning Man organizer
John Law is
calling for the release of the Burning Man trademark into the public domain. An interesting story and some interesting questions about process. Burning Man is an event and a culture dear to my heart; I wonder how this is going to work out.
Thanks to
Scott Beale for
his story on the subject; he knows the principals much better than I do.
tags:
burning man john law trademark public domain
Dear Lazyweb
So, I was trying to read some documentation on my little Toshiba Port g and also lie down on the couch and also drink a beer, and these three activities weren't mutually compatible and I spilled some beer on my keyboard (and lap). Doh.
I dried it off as best I could, and turned it upside-down like a teepee to dry overnight so the booze and moisture and sugar would go out of the computer instead of further in. Which seems to have paid off: the computer's running fine now.
Except that the 'R' and 'G' keys don't work. They're not particularly sticky, they just don't register any key events when pressed. So, my question: what's my next step? Is there some trick I can do? Or am I just going to have to get good at lipograms?
Drop me a line at evan@prodromou.name if you have any ideas.
tags: lazyweb r g toshiba laptop beer keyboard
Father-Daughter Night
Maj started French classes at the fantastico Montreal YMCA Language School. (I'm taking classes in German at the Montreal Goethe Institute starting next week; we came up with the idea of taking language classes independently.) Since Mama was out of the house from 5PM to 9PM, I got to do most of the evening prep for the night.
Which was fun. I made Amita June and myself some ravioli and ros sauce, and we put a bowl in the fridge for Maj, too. Then we watched about 20 minutes of Babe, which had lots of cows and ducks and chickens and stuff she likes watching, but I was too worried that someone was going to get killed and eaten to enjoy watching it with her.
So we did a bath -- she figured out how to make her rubber duck squirt water into the air, and that was worth about 20 minutes of giggles right there. Then we read some books, and by that point she was really ready for bed, and fell right asleep.
We've been doing really good this week with going to sleep. I mentioned before that she's weaning from night nursing, so I'm doing most of the putting-to-bed and keeping-asleep work around here. It's been fun and rewarding; sleeping babies are great.
tags: amitajune ymca babe maj french language lessons
Snow!
It snowed today in Montreal! Just a little bit, but still. Hooray for us.
tags: montreal winter snow
Googie
I also stumbled across the word Googie architecture this evening. Interesting term and comfort food for the California native's soul.
tags: googie architecture california
yulblog
Tomorrow night (20 Niv se or 10 January for those of you who still use that oppressive Gregorian calendar) we've got the misnomered First Wednesday Get-Together for yulblog. The date was moved back from the very first Wednesday of the month to the second Wednesday to give some space around New Year's Day. I think the novelty has got people interesting in attending; I've talked to more than one person who's going to go. So, I'm going too. At the Quincaillerie at 980 Rachel, 8PM.
tags: yulblog first wednesday quincaillerie
Effin' MyBlogLog
So, I signed up for that MyBlogLog a while ago (see Journal/29 Frimaire CCXV), just to see how it worked. But I disconnected it from my own site since I thought the click-tracking was a little invasive.
But I must have some cookies still left around, because I keep looking at sites like Read/WriteWeb, which has a nice article about OpenID, and I'm reading along and then there's a picture of me right on the page. Inserted from the MyBlogLog script, but it scares the crap out of me when it happens. Effin' MyBlogLog!
tags: mybloglog readwriteweb
It's not the reason that you think. Sure, it includes a bunch of iPod functionality, but that's not what I'm referring to. Not the least of which is,
absolutely everyone is talking about this device. I haven't seen this much buzz over a device in a long time.
Buzz is definitely nice, and warranted, but that's not why either. Back in the day when the iPod was released, everyone thought that it was going to flop - because it had a hard drive, and almost all of the players at the time were using flash. The iPod changed the mp3 player from a device that had a tiny screen that you could display maybe 2 lines of text (if you were lucky), and that you needed a course in computers to use, to a high-resolution screen, easy to use device. Nothing else at the time was even close. It succeeded because of it's complete rethinking of the user interface, and that is why the iPhone is the next iPod. This got pretty long, so I'm cutting it. (Sorry, people who hate clicking!)
Continue reading "Why the iPhone is the next iPod."
I’ve just released pommed v1.1, which adds support for (some) PowerBook laptops. If your laptop is not supported, send us the content of
/proc/device-tree/model and we’ll send you a test-tarball.
gpomme received some improvements in this release:
- spanish translation
- now behaves correctly on multiple head setups
- supports loading an alternate theme using -t
- the background tile has been redone, it’s now nice & clean
The original tarball (available on Alioth, pommed project) contains an alternate theme for gpomme, named Tango. It’s not included in the Debian package because the Tango icons from FreeDesktop.org are licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 which we don’t consider DFSG-free. It’s a nice, clean theme for gpomme which you’ll probably prefer over the default one. Copy it to
/usr/share/gpomme/themes and run
gpomme -t Tango to use it.
If anybody knows where to find the SVG sources for the Crystal icon theme, I’m all ears.
Thanks to Eduardo Bellido Bellido for the spanish translation and the multiple head patch for gpomme. Thanks to Daniel G. Siegel for the Tango theme.
The race had 3 finalists:
-
HP nx6235 (in Romanian) - incredible low price, fully works (with some patches and except the fingerprint reader) (
thanks Marc)
-
Dell Inspiron 6400 (aka E1505)-
ASUS F3T-AP008I have decided against the 64bits AMDs and in favour of long life batteries and Centrino Core 2 Duo architecture.
HP nx6235 failed to meet my criteria of design, reliability (I have heard that local HP service has problems with HP products; waranty is 1 year). The shared video memory was a concern regarding overall system performance.
Dell, well... Dell 32 bit arch... I would have been nice to jump into the 64bit wagon, but I guess that will have to wait for now. Design is nice, the hard disk is bigger by 20GB (we all know disk storage is never enough ;-), Centrino tehnology (Intel seems to be OS friendly and drivers seem to exist for all the components), battery time (I can wait to test the real battery time), has some video memory of its own (
HyperMemory - some kind of video cache)
ASUS - the selling points over the Dell were the AMD Turion 64 x2 processor(s), the design (looks nicer than Dell, IMHO), the nVidia video card (which was also a concern due to the proprietary driver and its security holes - sorry, no link), and the
not yet working built-in webcam. There was also an bonus: a bag and a mouse, but that almost never works for me. And I had to wait for at least a week for it.
The winner is the Dell Inspirion, they also have it on stock, I already placed the order and I will pick it up after I finnish this entry ;-) .
I can't wait to fire up
Debian Installer on this baby.
Update: when I said I'll skip he 64 bit wagon I was thinking (for some reason) that the amd64 bit port does not perform well on the Intel Core 2 Duo processors and I would be forced to use the i386 arch. Thanks for
correcting me.
Update: it seems eMag was using false information in their advertising regarding Dell, the system is NOT using Centrino technology since it has a Broadcom wireless lan.