Following the first phase, the second and final phase of the Penny and Martin adventure ended last Friday at Wellington airport. I am now 11 500 metres high on my way from Bangkok to Zurich, looking back at seven days on the New Zealand South Island, another in Wellington, and a night in Melbourne. Here s the summary of the 2200km we travelled, with selected photos inline. Penny has more pictures in her Flickr album.

• Thursday: ferry from Wellington to Picton and on to Amberley, where we stayed with Penny s sister Janey.
• Friday: via Christchurch to Lake Tekapo for a lovely swim in turquoise water, before we set up the tent at Lake Pukaki with Mount Cook in the distance. Camping with a car isn t all bad.
• Saturday: via Wanaka en route to Haast Pass with a stopover at the Gates of Haast for some rock hopping and full body immersion in the icy water (yes, Penny went in all the way, too). From Haast, we took the beautiful road to Jackson Bay and back, before heading into Cascade Valley for another night of camping, this time with millions of sandflies forcing us to dress appropriately. NB: please, no new offers for fashion modeling contracts, I am already fully booked. Penny might appreciate them though, especially if she gets to wear white socks.
• Sunday: fled the valley as if running for life (think final scene of Hitchcock s Birds) to prevent further sandfly attacks and headed north to the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers, where we got soaked in heavy rain. Reached Greymouth in time for the tour of the local Monteith brewery and spent the night recovering from the camping in the Charles Court Motel. Monteith s Munich-style Golden lager beer is actually quite reminiscent of Munich-style lager! I also got to take three girls to the men s toilet to see the world s coolest urinal.
• Monday: the bad weather followed us up the west coast to Punakaiki but didn t deter us from taking a short hike to the pancake rocks, nor from visiting the seal colony at Cape Foulwind later in the day. I found out how much Penny loves Nikau trees. From there, headed west for Lewis Pass and passed up on camping due to the heavy rainfall. Instead, we booked into the Maruia Springs Resort Hotel and indulged in hot springs recreation and camping-stove-cooked pasta in the room.
• Tuesday: the weather in Kaikoura, which we reached around noon the next day, wasn t any better, which foiled our diving plans, so we continued on to Picton and decided to cut our road trip short by one day to give us more time tying up loose ends in Wellington.
• Wednesday: got up early to rent diving equipment for two dives at Karaka point, where we inspected (and swam through) an old ship s wreck. We also collected around 20 scallops, which we brought to Penny s parents and enjoyed them cooked in ginger and garlic for a late lunch. The ferry took us back to Wellington that night, where I got to see Eagle vs. Shark, a Kiwi movie starring Jemaine Clement from the Flight of the Conchords and music composed by local bands, foremost of which The Phoenix Foundation. I have to side with Penny: it s an enjoyable flick but probably not worth watching multiple times.
• Thursday: following breakfast at the Olive cafe, we went on shopping sprees (I found a store selling Icebreaker gear at 50% ), chilled in the afternoon, fetched excellent Sushi at the Wasabi Sushi Train, and finally saw The Phoenix Foundation play a free concert at Frank Kitts Park.

My New Zealand beer top-ten, in reverse order: Monteith s Original, Monteith s Black, Mac s Great White, Monteith s Golden, Monteith s Celtic, Monteith s Pilsener, Emerson s Pilsener, Mac s Hop Rocker, Emerson s 1812 India Pale Ale, and (drum-roll): Mac s Sassy Red. Yum! The Emerson beers get no links because the brewery website uses Flash. Thanks, Penny, for a fabulous two weeks! NP: The Flower Kings: Back in the World of Adventures

Julien Goodwin asks whether an insecure platform can perform secure computation [1]. My immediate reaction was to recall Charles Babbage’s quote On two occasions I have been asked, ”Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” […] I am not able rightly to comprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question [2]. However on careful reading of Julien’s post it seems that he is most interested in the integrity of the computations rather than the secrecy. He suggests the possibility of performing the computation twice and comparing the results. Of course the issue to consider is whether both computations could be subverted. It seems most likely that if you are using someone else’s computation cluster for the calculations then performing the same calculation on two nodes of that cluster will give the same result both times (whether it’s right or wrong). If there was a computation that would get a result that can be verified with little computation then it would be an easy problem to solve. For example if I wanted to brute-force a passphrase for a GPG key then I could try all combinations that were known to be possible, if one was flagged as correct then in a millisecond I could verify it. If none of the possibilities were listed as correct then I could assume that the process was broken in some way. The problem with this is that such a passphrase can have arbitrary length (I know someone who uses more than 50 characters). So if I used a brute-force attack on passwords of up to 9 characters that doesn’t exclude a 10 character password. Probably the best potential use for insecure systems is for analysing large data sets. There have been several projects to harness unused computation resources to perform various large calculations (protein folding and SETI are two examples). Most such projects use closed-source programs because the people who run the contests are afraid of cheats who modify their programs to merely say “no” repeatedly and quickly. Of course this wouldn’t be a problem if they didn’t have a high-score table, and disassembling the program to hack the protocol can’t be that difficult (consider the work invested in reverse engineering protocols such as SMB which are much more complex). It would probably be reasonably to randomly send batches of work to two machines in different regions for such large-scale public computation projects. Finally if you want to perform calculations on secret data on someone else’s hardware then you may have lost before you even start.

• [1] http://laptop006.livejournal.com/39799.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_In,_Garbage_Out

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The web site www.CheatNeutral.com offers cheaters the possibility of paying single or monogamous people to offset their cheating. It’s an interesting spin on the carbon trading schemes that are on offer. www.greenmaven.com - a Google search site for Green related information. www.greenerbuildings.com - information on designing buildings to be “Green”. Binary adding machine using marbles and wood-work [1]. I’ve just been reading Accelerando by Charles Stross [2], in that book he describes the Pentagon using Babbage machines to avoid the potential of electronic surveillance. Alan Robertson has just started a blog [3]. He is a lead developer in the Linux-HA (Heartbeat) [4] project (which incidentally lists SGI as a friend due to the work that Anibal and I did [5]). Here is an interesting article about light pollution [6]. It covers the issues of observing the stars, saving energy, and reducing crime through effective lighting.

• [1] http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/index.html


• [2] http://www.accelerando.org/


• [3] http://techthoughts.typepad.com/


• [4] http://www.linux-ha.org/


• [5] http://www.linux-ha.org/ProjectFriends


• [6] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen

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Colin Charles, writing about how "Linux isn't ready for the laptop" (no link -- I don't link through FeedBurner's shite):

However, I should caution all these companies from even going near Linux with a ten-foot pole. Quite simply, this is because Linux doesn't work. If their product doesn't work as advertised, what are the chances of a customer possibly suing them, for a product that isn't fit for purpose?

Puhlease. As Microsoft has convincingly demonstrated over the years, the chances of a consumer suing over non-functional software is zero, even after being shit on from a great height for nearly two decades.

Yesterday I landed in Subversion a branch of Tasks I've been working on to remove all confirmation dialogs and replace them with infinite undo/redo. I'm really pleased with the end result, there are no more dialogs getting in the way and every action is undoable. To implement this I adapted MarlinUndoManager from Marlin by the most excellent Iain Holmes. The basic design is that the application has a global undo context. When an operation which should be undoable occurs, you start the context, add as many undoables as required, and then end the context. Allowing a single undoable action to consist of multiple undoables lets the application reuse fine-grained logic to build coarse user-level actions (in Tasks this is used to build the Remove Completed action from multiple Delete Task actions). To make integrating this into applications even easier, I wrote a GtkAction which reflects the state of an undo context, so it is trivial to add redo/undo to the interface. There is one remaining task left before this is ready to be released: undo support in the edit dialog entries. Once this is done, the next release of Tasks will be announced. I also plan to work with Iain on cleaning up this code and submitting it for inclusion into GTK+. NP: Money Jungle, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Max Roach

According to The Irish Times Weekend Supplement, todays recommended viewing includes We Love the Sky at Night, BBC1, 4.45pm

A celebration of the 50-year old astrology program, presented by the peerlesss star-gazer Patrick Moore, and featuring contributions from Jon Culshaw, Richard Branson, Myleene Klass, Charles Kennedy, Brian Blessed, Alex James, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Tim Rice and Arthur C Clarke.

Tags astronomy, spelling

A couple of months ago I was sitting in a north Sydney pub cradling a beer with the ineluctable jdub, the decidedly unparsimonious rusty and (if I’m accurately remembering who’d left and who hadn’t by this point) the irremediable mrd. As you might imagine, these sort of conditions are a perfect breeding ground for a particular type of discussion, and with Jeff’s departure from Canonical not that long beforehand accompanied by the then ongoing DPL elections, talk turned to the future of Debian, and in particular Jeff’s views on that future. Obviously more than a few weeks have passed since then, so please imagine this as a dream sequence with a stylish TV fade-in accompanied by appropriate fine print caveats about paraphrasing and the perfidy of memory. I think it’s fair to sum Jeff’s main point about the future of distros as one of “disintermediation” – that is removing, or at least minimising, the barriers between the authors and users of a piece of software, and in general getting closer and quicker collaboration between everyone involved and interested in developing and maintaining that software. Which means things like trying to remove the line between the Debian bug tracker and upstream bug trackers entirely, so that Debian users end up talking directly with the upstream maintainers, rather than having a Debian maintainer relaying information between the two. It also means making the path for updated packages to get to users quicker and smoother – so that as soon as a developer commits a new version of the software to version control, the next time users of that software “apt-get update” they see it, download it, and start using it. Or at least, they do if they’ve chosen to follow the bleeding edge. Jeff had a bunch more ideas in that vein – like not bothering with a central archive, but having users collect the packages they’re interested in from upstream sites all over the place, standardising, reducing or removing the “control” information for packages so that creating the correct packages for 80% of free software (that uses ./configure in the usual way, eg) was a complete no-brainer, and perhaps viewing distributions not so much as the gatekeepers and central players of the open source world, but perhaps more as systems of providing resources, assistance and opportunities to software authors who deal with their users directly – and in so doing have more of an opportunity for their users to actively participate in the project’s development, and have more feedback (and control) of how their project is perceived by its users. I’m not sure if I’m doing it justice – it’s a pretty radical notion, and as an upstream-type hacker, Rusty was pretty enthralled by it. As a distro-type hacker, on the other hand, I’d have to say I was daunted: getting rid of the middleman here means getting rid of Debian, which I must admit I have something of an attachment for… and yet, in principle at least, I can’t see anything but good sense in the idea – getting users and developers interacting more closely is important to improving the free software community, and while distros have historically been a force for making free software more accessible to people, it’s entirely possible we can now make it even more accessible now by, in some sense, doing away with distros. And if that’s the case, then we definitely should, because it’ll benefit both users and developers of free software, which is what we’re all about. On the other hand, distributions (at least currently) aren’t just about collecting and compiling software which could be automated; it’s also about integrating it, standardising interactions between software, and in some cases acting as a buffer between users who want to use a bit of software and developers who for one reason or another don’t actually want to deal with those users (perhaps due to lack of a shared language or political or philosophical disagreements). I think it’s also pretty interesting to view Gentoo through this light; that is, not so much as a distro that makes you compile everything from source, but rather as a distro that gives its users a system based on exactly what the developers produce, with the addition of only a comparably tiny amount of Gentoo-derived content. Maybe it’s just me, but Gentoo sounds a lot more interesting to me in that light. So is that a foretaste of the future of binary free software distributions too? There’s a lot of things that would stand in the way of Debian managing that, but so far all I can think of is a thousand problems that should probably be solved anyway, and not even one that can’t. I think, btw, that jdub had been reading Accelerando (also available as a Creative Commons licensed ebook) somewhat concurrently with thinking about this stuff, so perhaps it should be called “Distributions 2.0” or something. Accelerando’s a crazy-awesome near-future/singularity book by Charles Stross, who happens to live in the city that will host the forthcoming DebConf 7…

I was honoured to be on the ETech 07 programme committee. Alas, I can't get there this year due to the very enjoyable reason of recent parenthood. Nevertheless, here are some of the talks I'd earmarked to attend.
Creating Addictive User Experiences (Kathy Sierra)Is it possible to say too many good things about Kathy Sierra? Any project or product built with attention to her advice about empowering users gets a huge head start to popularity and success. I was fortunate enough to spend a day with Kathy last year on a training course, and it was great to see the passion and commitment from her writing runs through her as a person, even behind the scenes.Applied Web Heresies (Avi Bryant)I'd go to this one out of insatiable curiosity. I believe that web conventions enable rapid application design (c.f. REST in Rails) but here's an argument that not following them also reaps rewards. Attend this talk prepared for involvement. I've never met a Squeaker without attitude.
Making Offline Web Applications a Reality (Zimbra)A short product talk, but taking web apps offline is an area to watch. Even if you don't think offline is that important to you, many of the same principles apply to application mobility. Take that key app data off onto your phone, watch or memory stick.Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control (Charles Armstrong)More user-facing stuff. How do you give a user of a large nondeterministic piece of social software the idea that they're in control? This is an important topic to me: note how many pieces of social software fall by the wayside right away. For some, it's lack of utility, but that's influenced too by the degree of engagement and control a user feels.
No Program Left Behind: Liberating TV from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral (Tom Loosemore)There is no good reason not to listen to Tom Loosemore. Especially when he feels strongly about something. The idea of this talk is a "vision of a cheap consumer device sitting under your TV that will capture, store, and share all TV, forever." The TV industry sure needs its visionaries.
Patterns: From Fabrics to Fabrication (Dale Dougherty)Dale was responsible for getting my XML career off the ground, and you can find him at work behind some of the smartest things O'Reilly's done over the years. Make magazine was one of those, and now he's moving on to Craft. Design patterns for, er, real designs.RFID Guardian: A Personal Platform for RFID Privacy Management (Melanie Rieback)
Jamming bad RFIDs. Having just taken delivery of an RFID-enabled passport, this is starting to come home to me.Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers (Marc Hedlund)Despite the cute title, lots of good stuff here. Expectnation is going to end up with a truck load of user registrations, and their privacy is important to me. I imagine there'll be some good debate in the Q&A session for this talk.JavaScript: It's Happening All Over Again! (James A. Duncan)I've recently got the JS bug, thanks to JQuery. It's actually a fun and malleable language to work in. I'd go to this talk looking for fellow travellers and hints, though I'm a bit skeptical about Zimki itself.

• ETech 2007 registration
  

I’ve written twice before about Charles “Cully” Stimson, the Pentagon official who urged corporate clients to boycott law firms representing Guant namo detainees pro bono. The latest, via the legal tabloid abovethelaw.com, is that Cully has resigned over his remarks, a fitting end to the episode.

Last week I decried a senior Pentagon official’s attack on lawyers providing pro bono representation to Guantánamo detainees. I suggested that villifying the partners of some of the largest firms in the country was probably not the wisest political move, and was likely to backfire. As it turns out, it appears I was right. See the editorial in this week’s Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly:

…Headlines in print and online were unanimous: “Why Cully Stimson Is Wrong.” “The rightwing assault on the legal system.” “Cully Stimson Should Pick Up His Medal of Freedom and Go Home.” “Law deans respond to unethical Bush lawyer.” And perhaps the most eloquent rebuke of all came from Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried. In an op-ed that ran in the Wall Street Journal, Fried declared that “Stimson showed ignorance and malice in deploring the pro bono representation of Guantanamo detainees by lawyers in some of the nation’s leading law firms.” The former Supreme Judicial Court justice continued: “It is no surprise that firms … on Mr. Stimson’s hit list are among the most sought-after by law school graduates, and retain the loyalty and enthusiasm of their partners. They offer their lawyers the profession at its best, and help assure that the rule of law is not just a slogan but a satisfying way of life.” …What could have been a disaster for the bar turned into an all-out celebration of what lawyers do.

Today, I began seeking for a good and cheap flight for me to go to Debconf in Edinburgh. That may sound easy (Paris to Scotland, not that a big deal), but the real jungle that are now european flights makes it more complicated than it appears. First of all, no choice to leave from Paris-Orly, which is much more closer to my place (30km without going through Paris) than Charles de Gaulle (80km). Then, the choice is mostly between:

• Ryan Air, departing from the Paris Beauvais Tille so called "international" airport, which is indeed 100km away from Paris, with a bus shuttle departing from Paris, therefore forcing me to first go to the town before getting the bus. The Ryan Air flight lands at Glasgow Prestwick, which enforces another "long" bus transfer, which quite unpractical schedule to Edinburgh. Costs:
  • 12.5 euros for a return train ticket from my place to Paris
  • 26 euros for Paris-Beauvais return ticket
  • 77 euros for Beauvais-Glasgow Prestwick
  • 30 euros (24 pounds in local currency) for Prestwick-Edinburgh
  • Total: 145.5 euros
• EasyJet, departing from Charles de Gaulle and flying to Edinburgh with a connection in London Luton. Costs:
  • 26.7 euros for a return train ticket from my place to CDG
  • 95 euros for a London-Edinburgh return ticket
  • 76 euros for a London-Edinburgh return ticket
  • 7 euros for a return bus ticket from Edinburgh airport to center town
  • Total: 204.7 euros
• British Airways, departing from CDG, without direct flight (connection in Heathrow). Costs:
  • 26.7 euros for a return train ticket from my place to CDG
  • 217 euros for a Paris-Edinburgh return ticket
  • 7 euros for a return bus ticket from Edinburgh airport to center town
  • Total: 250.7 euros
• Air France, a local small company, flying from CDG, with a direct flight. Costs:
  • 26.7 euros for a return train ticket from my place to CDG
  • 195 euros for a Paris-Edinburgh return ticket
  • 7 euros for a return bus ticket from Edinburgh airport to center town
  • Total: 228.7 euros

The choice is pretty easily made. Ryan Air would make me save 73 euros but would make a very unpractical trip (the bus shuttle to Beauvais leaves more than 3 hours before the flight and, similarly the bus shuttle to/from Prestwick seems quite unpractical. EasyJet is pretty not much cheaper than traditional companies and includes an unguaranteed connection in London Luton. British Airways is more expensive and includes a (guaranteed) connection. So, I'll very probably fly Air France..:-)...cocorico! For the french fellows reading this: in case you guys want to share the flight...or avoid sharing it....I'll probably fly Paris-Edinburgh on June 15th, leaving at 16:15 (AF 5052) and come back on June 24th, leaving at 18:15 (AF 5053). The flight back could be AF 5051 at 09:05 but that one is more expensive by 26 euros.

I'm pretty happy to note that I've been invited to speak at South by Southwest Interactive in March on the subject of wikis and commercialization. I'm pretty psyched about the subject, as I think a rich and varied ecosphere of wikis -- from personal to informal clusters to formalized non-profits to formalized commercial ventures -- is a necessary step to the development of a read-write Web. OK, so, it wasn't like they invited me out of the blue -- I submitted an idea for a wiki panel a few months ago, and it got morphed into a one-person presentation instead. Which will be fun, since I'll be able to pontificate at length on this interesting subject. Maj booked us our hotel rooms in November -- I wanted to stay at the Austin Motel, but they have some kind of one-time callin system for the week of SxSW, and their rooms sell-out in an hour or so. We missed the callin time, which was no big deal. tags: austin wiki sxsw austin motel sxsw2007

Recidivista Bad Vista is a clumsy and confusing name. Who's running the Wordplay Department over at the FSF nowadays? I hope it's some wily Germans, and that "Bad Vista" is some sort of elaborate spa joke. But for some reason I doubt it. Offer to the FSF: I just registered recidivista.org today. It's an awesome name. It is yours for free if you promise to use it well and be funny instead of shrill. Deal? tags: fsf bad vista vista recidivista

Maptastic I'm pretty happy to note that I got around to developing a new MediaWiki plug-in that uses the Mapstraction library to switch between well-known-but-proprietary mapping services like Google Maps and unknown-but-open-and-cool services like OpenStreetMap. Each page on Wikitravel that's had some geo-data RDF magic added to it gets a link to the Mapstraction page, which will focus on that destination. Eventually it will have icons for each museum, restaurant, bar, hotel, or other feature of the city, and you could move them around or even edit their information through the map interface. But, for now, I'm starting small. More map-centrism will come with time. You can check out Montreal for an example of a mapped-up page right now. tags: mapstraction geohacking wikitravel RDF wiki maps

C-List So, I like this Are you an A-list Bloglebrity? tool on kineda.com. A simple re-packaging of some publicly-available data from Technorati, ranking blogs into lists by authority. Excellent hit-mongering. I'm sad to say that I'm still in the C-list on the blogging front, but that's really just dependent on longevity. I've only been doing this since last May -- errr, Flor al -- which is just 7 months (that's 49 months in blog years). If the A-list gets the Lear jets and the red-carpets, I don't know what kind of perks come along with the C-list. Free refills on your orange soda? tags: blogs c-list technorati

Parenthood One of the things that parents often notice is that they have a hard time relating to their non-parent friends. And, of course, single non-parents have a hard time relating to their friends who've bred. Why is it so hard for these two kinds of people to connect with each other? I think there are some superficial reasons, like having different schedules, different imperatives, different needs. But I also think there's something more fundamental about the split. Organisms who've survived long enough to successfully reproduce have realised one goal in life -- if you listen to Charles Darwin, the only goal in life. If you have children, you have found a purpose for yourself -- an answer to all those questions about who you are and what you're supposed to do with your time on earth. If you survive to breed, you have won the game. Now, it's not the only way of winning, and it's not really the most interesting game in town. But I know at least for myself, and for other parents I've talked to, there is an existential satisfaction in finding yourself almost accidentally filling this purpose. Having never felt before that I had a definite purpose, it's been a strange sensation. Non-parents don't get the same sensation -- or, at least, they don't get it in the same way. So they're still looking, thinking, questing, trying to find some answers. And that gives them a vibrant edge that fulfillment dulls. I doubt there are many non-parents who would be satisfied with the Darwinian answer to their questions -- spawning like crayfish isn't a very lofty goal in life. Or at least it doesn't seem so from the outside. I'm not sure how to tell my friends how my life's changed since we had a daughter -- how when I'm reflecting and summing up my life, I don't feel the same panic as I did before. It's a good feeling, though. tags: parents parenthood survival reproduction crayfish

Iraqi taxi This blog post with a graphic illustration of the process for a build-your-own Iraqi taxi cracked me up. It was also nice for giving me a link to Wrecked Exotics. No, it's not about drunk strippers, nor orchids that went unfed; it's crashed cars. tags: iraq blog wikitravel wreckedexotics

Three prostitutes have been murdered near Ipswich and two more are missing. BBC News ( The World At One in particular) seem to be dwelling on the fact that Suffolk has no permanent investigation team. It's probably totally alien to London-based commentators and analysts that an area the size of Suffolk (roughly the middle third of the round bit north of London that sticks out into the North Sea - an area about two-and-a-half times the size of Greater London) has only about a dozen killings a year. What would the investigation team do for the rest of the year? It seems better to have police that know their service area, but sometimes call in help from neighbouring police to investigate murders. I wish the BBC would stop looking at East Anglia through the London Eye and treat it like the other regions. I lived there until recently and East Anglia may be next to London, but it's very different. Why does BBC even bother to point out that it was Norwich South MP Charles Clarke who proposed merging Suffolk Constabulary with two of its neighbours? London-born Clarke was infamous for doing as he was told by Islington Blair. Anyway, this is well outside my normal writing, but the BBC non-news really irritated. Now, fingers crossed that Suffolk Constabulary get to the bottom of the murders soon and the BBC stops criticising the police at this early stage.

… which I certainly am not …

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland “You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Inland North
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

One of my longstanding frustrations living in Boston is the lack of artisanale espresso sources. Starbucks is, of course, ubiquitous (I think there are four within a block of where I work), and at least espresso drinks there aren’t bad, but there is little-to-no artistry involved. They aren’t aiming for perfection, they’re aiming for absolute consistency, mass appeal, and caffeine. Ever since Starbucks started opening in strip malls and grocery stores like Safeway, I’ve doubted whether they even care about maintaining an image of serving an elite population. This article presents some good background on the art of espresso, but apparently the only place it’s happening in Greater Boston is on the other side of the Charles River, which might as well be Prince Edward Island. (See also this article about Murky Coffee, my and Steve’s favorite coffee place in DC). I’d love to support Emack and Bolio’s, my neighborhood coffee shop, but the coffee and espresso there are inconsistent at best. I don’t get the feeling that the baristas there get a lot of training. Or that they even consider themselves to be baristas (according to Wikipedia: “one who has acquired some level of expertise in the preparation of espresso-based coffee drinks,” or “a professional who is highly skilled in coffee preparation, with a comprehensive understanding of coffee, coffee blends, espresso, quality, coffee varieties, roast degree, espresso equipment, maintenance, latte art, etc.”). Hey, while I’m talking about Starbucks, I should mention that Google Maps is wrong. There is no Starbucks at 1510 Centre Street in Roslindale, Massachusetts. It’s nearly a mile away from the real Starbucks at 1810 Centre Street, that has the same phone number. Wouldn’t you think Google could have figured that out? Can someone tell them? Anyway, I recently discovered the Channel Cafe (deserving a PageRank boost), just a brisk 8 minute walk from my office down Summer Street across the Fort Point Channel, actually has quite respectable espresso and espresso drinks. I first went there for lunch several months ago and the place was mostly empty — more recently, there seems to be a line up the steps every day. (The cafe is in the basement of art gallery space and is owned by one of the Fort Point artists.) Aside from excellent espresso, they have a great menu, especially for vegetarians, with entrees such as baked tofu with pan steamed vegetables, peanut dipping sauce, jasmine rice, mandarin and oranges, and basil and ricotta ravioli with fresh tomatoes, zucchini, sweat pea and mint coulis, and parmesan cheese. All for under $10, which is a bargain in the greater financial district. I’m afraid the line up the stairs may soon be out the door… It’s a good sign for the burgeoning Seaport District, though.
(…more espresso art…)

Yesterday we had another Tokyo Debian meeting. It is a monthly meeting held in Tokyo, Japan.approx. 23 people attended.Kobayashi, kashiwagi, kurasawa, Maeda, Sutou, Muto, Yamane, Nokubi, Komuro, Takasugi, Eto, Yoshida@Itabashi, mhatta, Kitahara, gotom, nakano, ysjj. Matsuyama, Kawachi, David Smith, Charles Plessy, et moi.Report follows:

I've been a fan of the Open Directory Project for a long time. I finally volunteered to become an editor about a month ago, and I just started editing my first category, wiki farms , today. I hope to get the category up to good shape in the next few days. I've now got an ODP profile, too. tags: odp dmoz directory editor wikifarms

Hudson Maj, Amita June and I went down to wt:Hudson (New York) over the weekend for the wedding reception of our friends Morgan and Kate. The trip down was fantastic -- the colors in the wt:Adirondacks were really amazing, just hitting their peak. Amita June had a good drive, too: she got to look around a lot, listened to some music, and had a nap of about an hour and a half. Hudson was a cute town, but not cutesy like other parts of the wt:Hudson Valley can be. The town is small -- 4-5 streets wide -- with big brick buildings lining the main street down to a promenade overlooking the Hudson River. There are a few gourmet restaurants and a disproportionate number of art galleries and antique stores, but it doesn't feel like the locals have been pushed out of their town... yet. We stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, as arranged by Kate's stepmom for most of the guests. It was functional and clean but otherwise unexceptional. There was a bar and a restaurant downstairs, and the hotel itself is just opposite a nice little park. Sunday morning we had breakfast at the Earth Kitchen organic market; I had a bowl of granola and fruit, Maj had a huge plate of huevos rancheros, and AJ ate whatever she could get off our plates. We walked around town and down to the waterfront, where we got a panoramic view for miles up and down the Hudson Valley. With the leaves nearing their height of color, it was an awe-inspiring view. We took a late lunch at Mexican Radio, a branch of a restaurant by the same name in Manhattan. It had good quality California-style Mexican food, with a few fusion dishes (like "Mexican spring rolls") that were probably overdoing it a bit. The margaritas were top-notch, and they have a tequila sampler option with three excellent tequilas for... $125! You won't normally lose that much money on three shots of tequila unless you pass out in the gutter in wt:Nuevo Laredo. The reception itself was at the Ca' Mea restaurant, right next to the historic Hudson Opera House. Kate and Morgan were in good form, playing goth-y music from their early days, and family and friends had a good time too. We all probably ate too much, and Maj and I both had hangovers the next morning. Amita June, however, had an excellent time running around the party and dancing with the bride. She was made for weddings. The drive home the next day was less than optimal. We did brunch in the St. Charles's restaurant, Bridges, and then stopped by the house of Kate's dad and stepmom for an afternoon get-together. They have a really nice Victorian house on a hill above town that overlooks the valley. We had to leave after only a few minutes, though, since we'd been lucky enough to get guest-listed for the Massive Attack show in Montreal that night. Trouble hit us as we were coming up the 87, though. First, the baby refused to sleep, getting more and more hysterical the longer she went awake. By 4:30PM, we'd had to stop so many times to soothe her that we were starting to get worried about the time. Then, we hit a detour on the interstate -- a huge accident had happened going through the mountains. We got into a sluggish line of cars wending its way along highway 9, and by the time we were back on the interstate we knew we were going to be late. We decided that luck was against our going to see MA, so we called and canceled our baby-sitter and sent email to our friend DJ Ghostbeard who'd asked us to come to the show (although we didn't get a call through... his voicemail box was full). We stopped at Geoffrey's Pub in wt:Plattsburgh for a late dinner of blackened salmon, broiled seafood and mashed potatoes, and then got back on the road. ...and straight into a 2-1/2-hour line at the Canadian border. This weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, and apparently a lot of people took the opportunity to dip down into the states for a last bit of outdoorsmanship before the winter frosts settled in. Amita June, already a little frantic from not sleeping, went completely ballistic, and although we managed to keep her mellow most of the time, 2 hours in a line of cars with a crying baby is a little bit much for anyone. We didn't get back to Montreal until nearly midnight. It was great to get home, finally, and as usual travel's made me appreciate staying in one place. The Gazette this morning says the Massive Attack show was excellent, but I'm glad we didn't try to make it -- coming in 4 hours late is just too much. We're off to wt:Halifax next weekend for our wedding anniversary, and hopefully we'll be back into travel mode by then. tags: hudson kate morgan amitajune hudson valley adirondacks plattsburgh massive attack

Destinyland Dave Cassel has an excellent list of the 100 Greatest Internet Moments. A great compendium of Stuff What Happened over the last 10 years in cyberland. I think Dave's one of the best Internet culture observers out there. I'm glad to see he's got a new podcast, Destinyland, in which he tears apart the weird media culture we live in. Example: the crazy spiral of Dana Plato. Example: Schoolhouse Rock: Behind the music. Example: Dark side of the Hampster Dance. Good stuff. tags: destiny destinyland podcast dave cassel

This is kinda a mix between my list of bookmarks and some things I've been thinking about and following lately. astronomy I've been reading a lot of astronomy stuff lately, a lot more than my usual low-level interest in it. I'm kind of feeling the need for a refresher course, so I can get a better handle on stuff that's happened since I studied this stuff in school. It's hard to get my head around things like dark matter and really grok the evidence. While black holes and relativity and such seem so obviously a natural part of this universe. Does this mean I'm getting old? The chance to bounce questions and ideas off someone would probably help in getting a real grip on this stuff. So would a lot more physics than I know.. (Hurrah for Eris BTW. The name almost makes all that sillyness over a mere definition worthwhile.) Favorite sites: Universe Today and Wikipedia.

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weather I've been following this hurricane season, to make up for having paid so little attention to last year's disastrous one. I knew about the "New Orleans bowl" scenario well before Katrina, and the night before it hit I actually spent several hours tuning in far-away AM stations from down there and listening to the city not react in time. But despite all that I feel that I missed out on really seeing it happen, so I've been learning about tropical waves, and wind shear and ULL's, and dropsondes, and the satelite data that can be used to follow hurricanes. The nice thing is that instead of the old stereotype of someone watching the weather channel 24/7 with a map and thumbtacks, these days there's a nice mix of pre-processed info and analysis and raw data, easily followed in small amounts of time on Wunderground's blogs.

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spaceflight Half love and half hate. The recent shuttle mission has been a riot for a shuttle-hater and SF lover. It has all the elements of one of those SF novels where they go down to the cape, dig up an Apollo stack, and use it to save the world / travel to Mars / fight the alien invaders. Except here they're pulling an unused orbitor out of mothbolls. And putting it up on the launchpad with a hurricane bearing down, getting it struck by lightning, pulling it off the pad, changing their mind with the giant crawler half-way through that milti-day maneuver when the hurricane fizzles, putting it back, filling and refilling the tank as sensors fail and they rewrite their safty regs on the fly, barely making the launch window, and proceeding to triumphantly lose nuts and break wrenches .. In Space! Space opera, indeed. Then there's the genuinely interesting stuff. Intentional crashing of a French probe into the moon, probes firing projectiles at asteroids and trying (with great difficulty and many glitches) to return a sample. A mission on its way to Pluto. The rovers still going strong on Mars after all this time. Bigelow launching an inflatable prototype of his planned space hotel. A whole load of microsats tragically blowing up on launch. All the private aereospace stuff, which seems to close to turning into something real. Happily followed at Spaceflight Now.

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TV Over the past while and a half I've been very happy to discover The Wire and Deadwood, have been working my way through the Sopranos and Lost, been creepily fascinated by Big Love, got a kick out of the Canadian antics of Corner Gas, vegged out to Greys Anatomy, and have been very sad to reach the end of Six Feet Under. BSG, Doctor Who, House, and some other shows haven't held up as well past the first seasons for me. Happily, there's NetFlix, which makes it plausable that I did this legally despite not having HBO or even owning a TV.

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literature I've been reading Charles Stross, David Drake, John Twelve Hawks, Kelly Armstrong, Naomi Novik, Robert Charles Wilson, VC Andrews, and, loath though I am to admit it, John Ringo. I'm in the middle of books by Steph Swainston, Geoff Ryman, and Dave Duncan. I finally found a defintion of Science Fiction I like, but I lost the link. (It's the subjective "her world exploded" one.) Anyway, I'm afraid that I may have reached the point where to get much more out of reading SF, I'd have to start going to cons. Which I don't want to do. But I seem to be at a low ebb for it being interesting to me, or just need to finally tackle some other branch of literature. Actually, the most engaging reading I've been doing lately is in the achives (all of them!) of the Idle Words blog. It makes obscure details about Poland and China, and even interpretation of Russian classics seem pretty darn interesting, and has much better rants about the space shuttle. And it proves that blog entries should properly be good and long.