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

Three things which I do with my free time which will have some impact or change this week: Gaming, Sleeping, Watching TV.
In gaming, I discovered a list of games which are available on computer and have AI opponents. This will probably kill some productivity as it means I discovered San Juan, a card game which I simply must buy a real life copy of. The game dynamics are perfect and it's in the "learn once, play forever" category. Hope to play this at the next board gaming night. In sleep, I am attempting to change my sleeping patterns so that I am an early riser. Generally I'm a late sleeper and late riser, but as I get older, I am finding that it is better to wake up early and get things done in the morning. I feel much more productive at the end of the day. To this end I am now sleeping at 10-11pm. ceilingsarecool also appreciates the new schedule because it lines up with hers much better. In TV, I have concocted a plan to lessen the amount of TV that I watch per week. I have dubbed it the TiVo TV diet, and details are after the fold.
Continue reading "On the Varied Use of Free Time"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How not to prompt for passwords in your code:

skx@desktop:/tmp/retchmail-1.0$ grep system\( *.cc
retchmail.cc:           system("stty -echo 2>/dev/null");
retchmail.cc:           system("stty echo 2>/dev/null");

(Since anybody can trojan PATH.) Still otherwise the code looks good

I’ve been pretty much unable to pursue any of my hobby projects for a couple of months now. One of the reasons was my move (1, 2), which thankfully is now done! I lived in student housing for almost nine years, from September 1997 until June 2006. The first three years I lived in a three-person shared apartment, and in May 2000 I moved to a two-person apartment. All this time my flatmates were assigned by the housing foundation without consulting me. Most of them were pretty decent, and none of them was really bad, but at the end I just couldn’t take it any more. When I got my last flatmate last September, I got so stressed about it that I started getting home-phobia. It was time to start thinking about moving out. In May, I found a rather nice place. It is a studio apartment with 31 square meters of living space, and includes a full bath, a small kitchen and an alcove, with a very nice view of forest and cutting. It is located less than 200 meters from my old place, and a little higher up the hill, with a much nicer view. The rent is very nice, and in general there is little to complain about the place. Did I mention the view yet? On June 1, I got my keys and brought in my spring mattress. The old place was not packed up yet, so I spent a lot of time there, but also shopped around for stuff for the new place, including a beautiful lamp. You’ve seen this picture already, but just to remind people, this is where I slept the first three weeks: My father visited me for a few days in the middle of June, and between the two of us we managed to pack up most of the old place. Father also disassembled my furniture, and we moved most of the pieces over. My mother then visited me on the Juhannus weekend. Neither of us have a car, so we moved a lot of stuff by sheer muscle power. She also installed the curtains that she had brought for me from her storage, and reassembled most of the furniture. The last week of June I spent moving stuff by muscle power, but it wasn’t enough, so Mother came back on June 30, helping cleaning up the old place, and Father visited again with a car and helped move the rest of my stuff. Mother also installed more curtains: in the following picture, she is sowing the curtains to make them be of the correct length: So, thanks to my parents’ immense help, I now have a hugely nice studio apartment:

Gar! It looks like life's not so rosy after all with this blog. YULblog, the Montreal blog aggregator, apparently uses TrackBack for updating the aggregator. So I'm going to have to build some kind of trackback system into WiLiKi. At some point I should probably collect my customizations for WiLiKi into a nice WikiBlog? add-on -- but there's still a lot Todo before that'd be ready. On the same subject, it seems that I'm getting more and more frequent WikiSpam on the About This Site page. I'm going to have to start instituting some anti-spam measures. Using regexps to refuse submissions with blacklisted URLs works very well for Wikitravel (see wt:Wikitravel:Spam filter), so I'm tempted to try it here. tag: wiliki trackback yulblog aggregator wikispam wikitravel spam filter

Piknik missed We were going to head to Piknic Electronik yesterday -- we had a great time a few weeks ago, and Piknik is such a harbinger of Montreal summer -- but Amita June is going through some freaky personal schedule issues, and she wouldn't take an afternoon nap. By the time to leave for the Parc, she was wiggin' out from sleep deprivation, and we couldn't really force her to go out to the island and dance to big fun beats. Which was kind of a bummer, since our friends Meg and Patti were out there, and it would have been good to see them. They came by on Friday night for Pizza Night Chez les Bads, and we talked about Ignition 2006 (yes, Montreal Burners, it is going to happen... I think) and kids and dancing and weddings and fun. Amita June and Meg get along like gang-busters; they have a lot of fun together. So instead of going out to the Island Amita June and I went across the street to Parc La Fontaine and played in the baby pools right next to the playground. How is that for lucky? We have two huge pools, about 18 inches deep, right across the street, next to the baby playground. Oh, and there's a good bar a block and a half away. This is the greatest apartment ever. We moved in this time last year, and I feel so at home here now. So many important things have happened to us in the last year -- Amita June, Wikitravel -- and this apartment has been a part of it. We're going to look for a house to buy in the fall, but right now this feels like home. tag: 1481 rue rachel parc la fontaine amitajune pizza night meg patti piknik electronik parc jean drapeau montreal home

Two months I almost forgot that it's my two-month blogiversary. Yes, I just made that word up. And it's months in the French Revolutionary Calendar, not, like, real months. But close. tag: french revolutionary calendar blogs

My mom For those of you who asked: yes, my Mom's doing great. She was bit by a rattlesnake last week (!), but now she's back on her feet, the swelling is down, and she's doing all the stuff she did before. Good for her; she's pretty resilient. tag: mom rattlesnake recovery bite

Microburst I now officially have a new phobia, since a Quebec woman was recently killed in her trailer by a microburst. Apparently a wp:microburst is a localized gust of wind that can reach speeds of 100 kph, kind of like a tornado. Unlike a tornado, a microburst doesn't spin around -- it goes straight down. It's usually accompanied by rain, and can be devastating. These freak winds happen several times a year in Quebec. Great. tags: quebec microburst death trailer wind

OpenID My current work project is enabling single-signon for all the language versions of Wikitravel. My preferred method for this is OpenID, since it will allow sign-on not only to Wikitravel language versions, but in the future other sites as well. So I'm writing an extension for MediaWiki to allow logging in to MediaWiki with an OpenID URL, and for making MW an authentication server for other sites. I realize this is a little roundabout for Wikitravel's needs, but for interfacing with new partner World66, as well as other MW sites like Wikipedia or Wikia servers, it'd be fantastic. I'm using the great OpenID Enabled libraries from JanRain. They're working out pretty well, although they're a little flaky around the Yadis edges. Given that I don't really care about Yadis -- sorry, LID and inames -- having to deal with those errors is pretty annoying. Even so, I managed to get a working consumer-side system going today. It was pretty exciting logging into my development machine for the first time with an OpenID, and having it work. Hooray for OpenID! tags: openid mediawiki php lid openid enabled inames yadis wikitravel

Mark Pilgrim from Dive Into Mark lists emacs-snapshot in the 2006 edition of his essential software list. Unfortunately for him, Dapper has a very old snapshot from January.

Now that the right people have been told, I can make it public: as of January, I’ll be a full-time developer for the Free Standards Group, producers of the LSB. This is, perhaps, one of the most difficult job decisions I’ve had to make. In every other case where I’ve changed jobs so far, I’ve done so only when it becomes clear that the old job isn’t going anywhere: either by going under, getting radically reorganized, treating me poorly, or otherwise being a dead end. None of that is true here. I still believe in what Progeny is doing. The co-workers are superb (yes, even that one), and management has always treated me well, even in difficult circumstances. But sometimes, opportunities are too good to pass up. I think that the next year or two will be pivotal to the future of free standards, and I’ll be in a unique position to influence the direction those standards go. Plus, I’ll be able to work with another group of brilliant and talented people, with the hope that some of that brilliance and talent will rub off. I’m also positive about working primarily from home. So, you can expect more blogging (he says, a month after his last post!), especially about standards in the free software world. I’ve created a new category for that topic, in case you’re interested in following just that conversation.

Recently, a proposal by Alejandro R os was made in debian-devel-spanish to provide a Debian planet in Spanish to syndicate blogs from developers, maintainers and contributors in that language. After working a bit (and after my trip to Cuba), we are able to show this to the public. I wish more people contributing with Debian writing blogs in Spanish, could ask their addition by writing to the mailing list; we are only 10 persons there so far. Join us! http://planeta.debian.net/

SF editor and publisher Jim Baen died yesterday after a two weeks long coma caused by a severe stroke. Jim’s friend, author David Drake wrote a touching obituary (reprinted at Jim Baen’s Universe).

I upgraded my CUPS to 1.2 today, and had a bit of trouble with getting the ML-2010 to work with it. Given my other issues with this printer, I thought I would expound on how I fixed yet another problem with this semi-supported printer.
The Samsung printing uses the linuxprint system, which uses a configuration file in an XML format which isn't specified. In the default install for the Samsung linux tool, it is installed in /usr/local/linuxprinter/linuxprint.cfg with a link from /etc/linuxprint.cfg to it. My file, after being setup, looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<linux root="/usr/local/linuxprinter" system="cups">
  <option name="ghostscript" value="/usr/bin/gs-esp"/>
  <option name="address" value="localhost"/>
  <option name="port" value="631"/>
  <option name="lpr" value="/usr/bin/lp"/>
  <option name="llpr-default-printer" value="lp"/>
  <printer ppd="ppd/C/ML-2010spl2.ppd" queue="lp">
    <option name="Resolution" value="600"/>
    <option name="PageSize" value="Letter"/>
    <option name="InputSlot" value="AUTO"/>
    <option name="MediaType" value="PRINTER"/>
    <option name="JCLJamrecovery" value="RWJOff"/>
    <option name="JCLEconomode" value="PRINTERDEFAULT"/>
  </printer>
</linux>
 

I discovered the hard way that if this file isn't there, the filter which is installed (ppmtospl2) doesn't work that well. In this case, the printer queue is lp. If this file is setup correctly, you can setup CUPS yourself, using the ppd file which is referenced in the linuxprint.cfg file. If you have lost your linuxprint.cfg, I suspect you can just modify the above with the correct ppd - the Samsung package has many of them for different printers. If you don't want to go that way, you can rerun the /usr/local/linuxprinter/bin/linux-config as before, but you will have to open your CUPS 1.2 server wide open while you are configuring it so that it can add the printer. Also, I had to have a printer existing in the CUPS 1.2 server in order to have the linux-config program work at all. I solved this by just adding a virtual pdf printer (using the package cups-pdf). Even when you get linux-config to add the printer, it will not add it correctly for CUPS 1.2 - the device is incorrect - so you will have to reconfigure it via the web interface and give it the ppd which is in the directory anyway.
At least I have my printer back again.

I missed blogging for two whole days this week, which I consider unconscionable. I'm sure my blog shares are plummeting through the basement right now. I'm concerned that my reputation as a digeratus has been seriously impinged on. Maj, Jani and I have been in wt:Southern California this week to work on some new ideas, which has meant a lot of writing and meetings and spreadsheets and such. So a) my time cruising the Internet has been limited, and b) the time I've been on the computer has been under crushing levels of pressure.

I have the pleasure to have a laser printer at home, which works great and is wonderful for printing everything from research papers to read to envelopes for sending. ceilingsarecool uses it for taking things for proofing and research. While it was a slight trouble to set up with my Linux server, but works great now. Unfortunately while it was cheap as hell after rebate, the starter cartridge that it came with only prints off about 1,000 pages. Recently it started printing very light and shaking the cartridge wasn't working anymore, so I started looking for new toner. I found out quickly that one new toner cartridge costs as much as the whole printer itself, but my searches also turned up another option: refilling the cartridge that I have already. I figured I would take the chance, because it cost around $20 compared to the $80-90 for a new cartridge.

Yesterday I got the toner in the mail - it comes in a very small bottle with a small diagram and a little topper funnel. The process was fairly easy and straightforward. All I needed for tools that didn't come in the package was a Phillips and flathead screwdriver. The steps which I had to take:

1. Setup the area - I put newspaper down all around the area I was planning to do the work. I didn't need that much space and I was very clean and didn't spill, but I still got toner on the paper I put down.


2. Remove the side of the cartridge - this was indicated to me on the diagram that came with the new toner. There was one little clip which I had to push in in order to get the side off, and I had to pry the side off slowly with a flathead.


3. Remove the toner plug - the toner plug was under the side panel I pried off in the last step, and also took a little coaxing with my small flathead. Starting at this step, I also put on a set of latex gloves so I wouldn't get toner all over my fingers.


4. Open the toner - Open the top of the cap (mine came in a little bottle) and remove the safety seal (like on pill bottles). This got a little messy on my fingers to get all of the safety seal off. I also screwed the plastic funnel thing on.


5. Pour the toner into the cartridge - If your cartridge is really empty it's not a problem to turn it over so you can put the bottle in at a 45 degree angle and then turn both the cartridge and toner bottle so that the toner is pouring out. I had to tap the bottle a little and shake them (while still together) to get the toner into the cartridge


6. Put the plug and side back on - replace the plug and screw the side of the cartridge back on.


7. Shake the cartridge to settle the toner - shake it about 3-4 times, while it's still over the paper. Some of the small dust-like particles came off for me when I shook the cartridge


8. Clean up - throw away the toner bottle and the newspaper

I was thrilled to put the cartridge back into my printer and find that it printed just as good as before. Unfortunately this doesn't work forever - eventually the fusing barrel will wear out and start producing some of those other laser printer problems like lines and repeating patterns. Everything that I have read suggests that one cartridge of mechanical parts will work for about 10,000 pages. That means that I have about 2 more refills before this one runs out. Saving $50-70 every couple of months will make a big difference in the long run. I suspect that some of the toner cartridges that you can buy on line are "re-manufactured" much like this one, or possibly slightly more complicated (replacing a drum that's broken) so they might not work for as many refills as a new one.

I definitely like being given enough rope to hang myself. Life wouldn’t be fun without the challenge of trying to hang myself increasingly less often over the years. And Bazaar-NG has shown me today some of the good rope it can give, and I’m happy. This is about the annoyance that is, at least for me, having to type bzr diff -r 12344:12345 to get the diff introduced in revision 12345, instead of just bzr diff -r 12345 or similar. This happens on other VCSs, like CVS, Subversion, and Bazaar (or so I hear). For Subversion (as an anecdote), five months ago (January) I found out on IRC (thanks, peterS) that a -c option had been added to svn diff which did precisely that (commited 3 months before, in October). An improvment that would be released in version 1.4, due in about a month or so now (but six when I first heard about it, and nine after being implemented). For Bazaar-NG, it’s been today the day I’ve got annoyed enough by this issue (while peeking here, btw) as to search if there had been any discussion on this issue, and I found this six-month old bug. It seemed a bit dead, so I gave my opinion about the issue, and discussion seems to have started again. The good part comes now, though. I’m sure the bzr developers will give a solution to this problem: maybe sooner, maybe later; maybe the one I liked most, maybe not. But, the important thing for me is that I have, within hours of having felt frustrated, a solution that works for me: a plugin that wraps the diff command and interprets “-r N” the way I want. It may make the bzr authors shake their head (or not :P), but I certainly feel grateful for them having given me the possibility of doing it, and of being my responsibility whether to continue to use it in the future. Oh, you can find the crak here. Surprisingly compact. (Update: well, not that much anymore after reimplementing it in a non-dumb way.) NP: Paolo Conte, Via con me

There are three reviews this week, because I neglected to review one which I watched earlier. I'm also trying to decide whether the links at the end are of any use, and whether it's useful to syndicate this to Planet Debian. Feedback is encouraged!

Jawbreaker

The whole premise of Jawbreaker gets laid out right at the beginning - after a opening sequence in which we see the title candy being made, a couple of girls kill a friend by surprising her and using a jawbreaker as a gag. The movie then degenerates into a formulaic nerdy girl gets to be pretty storyline. Unfortunately Jawbreaker doesn't pull it off as well as Mean Girls does, and ends up falling pretty flat. One saving grace of this movie is that it is very short at just 87 minutes. One small treat is that Rose McGowan is playing a decent role, although I do have a much older vision whenever I see her from her work on Charmed. One thing which keeps bugging me is how the movie reminds me of But I'm a Cheerleader, even though the plots and premises are very different. The soundtrack is very well done with good placement of good songs. Jawbreaker is bittersweet at a 5. (imdb, amazon)

Real Genius

I have always heard good things about Real Genius, but never saw it all the way through. Supposedly this is a tragedy. Apparently ceilingsarecool saw it before, but didn't remember a bunch of the plot. A whiz kid enters college early and starts working for a professor. The premise is setup in the first 10 minutes or so, which is that Herr Professor is really corrupt and working to provide a laser weapon to the military. This leaves ample time for the comedy in the movie to play out, as Whiz Kid gets to experience all the wild antics of college with a high-IQ twist. Lasers are used fairly extensively in the movie (mostly as part of the plot) and get a nice chunk of credits in the end. The movie unfortunately doesn't really age well with time, unless you're a fan of 80's movies. There are no less than 2 montages with music, and the ultimate 80's end-of-movie song "Everybody wants to rule the world" by Tears for Fears is playing at the end. Real Genius still is smarter than many movies you'll see nowadays, so it burns in a 7. (imdb, amazon)

Primer

Small budget films are usually interesting to watch, because either they are simple masterpieces, or they try to be way more than they can be and end up being a trainwreck which you just can't stop watching. Primer is the rare gem which found a happy medium between complex and simple. At the start, a garage business is introduced with four tech friends making a bit of money selling to hobbyists. Apparently they have some sort of deal about who gets to pick the next thing they try, and one of them wants to try something related to physics. Two decide to attempt it on their own and they create a device which apparently lowers density, or gravity, or something. Then they discover it does much more than that - it can manipulate time. Fortunately there is still much of the movie left after this. The acting is not top notch by any means, and comes off as cardboardish, but it seems well-placed in this script because most techies that I know are not the best with social skills. It's important to note that the main focus doesn't lie on the device, but on the implications and ramifications. As the movie approaches it's end, the pace and convolution increases quickly. A rewatch is in order for Primer - and even then you still may be missing parts in the giant puzzle which is laid out before you. Shane Carruth directs, writes, and produces an amazing film, especially considering the sub-10k budget. Primer scores e^2.30258509. (imdb, amazon)

Programming, windows style
I'm now in the thick of a bunch of win32 programming at my Honeywell part-time job. I don't mind it that much, but I continue to be amazed that Microsoft's IDE is still the one used most often. The autocompletion is nice, but that's about the only good thing about it. I am continually annoyed that the IDE doesn't know which definition of a function I want to use, and only seems to pop up it's hints when it decides. Add this to the fact that most win32 libraries aren't apparently setup in a way so you can put their source in the repository, and I have a lot of admin work which I'm not particularly thrilled to do. 10% programming, 90% random crap. I'm beginning to understand why the average lines of code per day is so low. I can't really complain that much though, I knew the tools we'd be using when I accepted the job.

Programming, rails style
I have been working with Ruby on Rails lately, mostly to make some new web applications which aren't released yet. Things which are possibly in the works:

• MoneyDelta - credit card and savings balance tracker - figures out how much money you are making (or losing) each day based on how the interest is actually calculated. In the end it will probably have a little graph and possibly small things you can do in order to avoid interest and how much you would save in the long run.


• DeadSimpleCMS - CMS built mostly for Diana's use. It lets you specify layouts (not done yet) and content which goes into the layouts. In a very very early stage of development, but it is actually live on a site right now. As the name would imply, the point is to be very simple.


• Gathr - scholarly conference management software. Accepts papers, assigns reviewers based on degrees of connection to avoid conflicts of interest, generally tries to make the whole conference thing easier.

I also have a couple of smaller applications which won't really go anywhere, and an internal application upgrade from php. I really enjoy building web applications in the Rails framework, and I have honed my skills at Ruby enough that I actually use it for small scripts when I get frustrated with bash. I tend to do my Ruby Coding in TextMate and with Locomotive on the iBook, although I may do some on the Debian machine soon.

One of my packages, the Linux kernel's userland support tools for the Network Block Device was chosen by Ubuntu developers to be part of their 'main'. For those not very comfortable with Ubuntu: the "main" part is their idea of "this is what we support". Everything in main is free software and supported; things that are still free software but are not supported yet, are moved to their "universe" instead. Most Debian packages live in Ubuntu's "universe"; only the desktop environments that they support and their dependencies are part of Ubuntu's "main" section. Occasionally, I was told that the nbd source packages were moved to main because ltsp declares a Depends: relationship on them, and it was decided that the ltsp packages should be part of main. Personally, I don't use Ubuntu (though I've installed it a few times in the past, being the curious software geek that I am). As such, I don't really follow their development very closely, being more focused on Debian unstable instead. This would normally not be a problem, except that I do care that my packages are in a good state when they are released by someone, whether that someone is Debian, Ubuntu, or anyone else. What triggers this post is the fact that Ubuntu has shipped Dapper with nbd 1:2.8.3-1, with a context of this changelog entry:

nbd (1:2.8.3-2) unstable; urgency=low
  * Steal patch from CVS for nbd-server.c to make children exit when they
    finish serving, rather than having them loop over "Help, I can't accept()
    anymore!". Closes: #350357.
 
 -- Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>  Tue, 31 Jan 2006 11:17:25 +0100

#350357 is a bug of severity important, and rightly so. From the bug report:

Jan 28 14:42:58 caradoc last message repeated 1190456 times
Jan 28 14:43:59 caradoc last message repeated 2478818 times

An infinite loop producing an error message, a bug which triggers when a client disconnects. Have two clients connect, then disconnect, and you have a syslog being filled up with spurious error messages, filling your entire disk in a few hours or days. It may be too late to update dapper now; however, had I been asked after #350357 was filed whether it would be a good idea to ship with this specific version of nbd, I would have said "no", and this horribly buggy version of nbd wouldn't be in a released version of Ubuntu. And since #350357 was filed a few days before the above log entry, in January, I cannot believe that it would've been too late. Of course, if anyone from Ubuntu is reading this and can tell me that yes, it is still possible to update nbd in Dapper, then by all means, please do so. Oh, and don't forget to update edgy while you're at it :-) That being said, I'm hoping something can be done to avoid this kind of SNAFUs from occurring again. Ubuntu could talk to me for those packages they care about, which (according to their policy and the status of nbd in their distribution) includes nbd. As it is, Ubuntu is just a large institution that happens to redistribute parts of Debian. I'm getting more feedback from the guy doin the 'nbd-server' port in FreeBSD than I'm getting from Ubuntu—and that FreeBSD guy only once or twice sent me an email...

Wow, a semi-regular posting.

The Iron Giant

Small town america in the late 50s doesn't know what hit it. Science fiction is in it's hayday and the nation is on a hairpin trigger when a big robot falls from the sky and is discovered by a small boy. I had heard much about this movie and everyone I knew who saw it liked it. I have to tell you: the hype is well deserved. The story is compelling and heartening, good for children and adults alike, and the humor throughout is well done. Characters are voiced well. The story obviously revolves around the giant. Most of the story is centered around keeping the monstrosity hidden, which doesn't succeed for long. The government eventually figures it out and starts shooting, and then things really get interesting. The ending was just as fun to watch as the beginning, although I think they copped out on the very end, leaving it with a light note. It would have been really nice to see it end in a bitter-sweet tone. The Giant gets a 9. (imdb)

Brazil

One of the things I remember hearing about Brazil is that it was "Terry Gilliam's Directorial Masterpiece". It certainly is at that. In the 20th century somewhere, a clerical error causes a great movie plot. A futuristic society is thrown into disarray by a simple error in typing, starting with the death of an innocent man, and then the coverup of the century. The protaganist is in a dead-end job, but seems to be perfectly fine with it, until the girl of his dreams literally walks into his life. Gilliam and his cinematographer create a beautifully blocky and dull grey industrial wasteland set in stark contrast with the beautiful dreamland. The subplots don't obscure the main line which is compelling and kept me wanting more even though it clocks in at over 2 hours. The ending was unexpected and well done at the same time, and I couldn't see it done any other way. The directors cut is the only way to go with this one, and I haven't even seen the studio cut.
Brazil is berriffic, and scores a 12. (imdb)

Originally posted as a comment in Finland for Thought. A system of health care paid by insurance (of whatever form) and provided by private hospitals looks attractive on the surface but isn t really a good system. Look at the economic dynamic of the system. The insurance (if comprehensive) will essentially pay for any operation that the physician at the scene deems necessary. Is it in the physician s interest to use that tab as efficiently as possible? No, in fact, it is the opposite: it is in their best interest to find as many reasons to bill as much as they can. This is a road to disaster. Of course, you can balance this system by introducing insurance investigators who examine bills and determine if they are legit. To do the job properly, they need to be qualified physicians, and they need to have access to all the data that the physician at the scene had. Essentially, these investigators would be doing the job all over again, except never seeing the patient. Result: the money you save from preventing fraudulent billing is spent in maintaining a paraller physician workforce. Why not let the investigators be the healers, and cut the private hospital out of it altogether? These physicians would have budgetary responsibility on what they spend, and thus they only do what they need to do. Oops. Looks like we just transformed the market-based health care system into a state-operated, socialized system.

The gift which I bought Di last week came this Thursday - a iRobot Roomba Sage. So far we have ran it about 4 times - the first three times it's bin filled up completely, today when it was finished it wasn't even half full. The robot is really maddening to watch, because the pseudo-random walk that it uses doesn't seem like it is covering the floor that well. The roboticist in me knows better though, and the proof is in the particle-free floor which our apartment is now sporting.

It's not to say that there is no setup before turning the Roomba on - you need to clean up the floors just as you would for any low-powered vacuum, picking up pieces of deitrius which will not be picked up. The Roomba doesn't deal well with the type of rugs which we have in apartment either, so those need to be picked up and placed somewhere while it's running. After these steps, it's just turning it on and waiting basically. It easily gets to the 3 rooms which we have it vacuuming in (living room w/attached kitchen, bedroom, bathroom) multiple times in one cleaning cycle, but our apartment is not that large. After it's done you need to empty the bin and clean the brushes of hair and other debris, which takes about 2 minutes. All told I would say that using it takes about 10 minutes total interactive time.

Other than that, this week has been pretty dull actually, work and more work. Completed some code for Marsupial Player/Stage but it doesn't quite work the way I want yet. Monday went out with Di to look at couches and found a great table for the dining area. You can see pictures of it on my flickr page.

I need to install a backup system which works on Windows, OS X and Linux on the server machine, and figure out a network file system which works with all of them as well. I'm fairly sure that I am going to use Samba as the file serving capabilities. The machine has been rock-solid stable since the removal of the DWL-G520 which was providing network for it before the upgrade to a wireless bridge. I suspect that the madwifi drivers were not playing well with the amd64 architecture.