Search Results: "garden"

4 September 2006

Daniel Baumann: I am missing you

My father was not a typical family father. While we were children, he did not much of the things from the father stereotype, like playing in the garden every saturday afternoon. Instead, he did show us in an indirect but even more effective way what he considered some of the most important values of live: Constantly aiming for perfection, selflessly offering help to whoever needs it, and being humble. These three key values did determine his acting thoroughly, but they also determine what I am, what I will be and hopefully also what I will have been when I am not anymore. Today, my father decided to leave this world by his own will. I am already missing him, although I never missed him before...

29 August 2006

Jonathan McDowell: Bank Holiday weekend

The weekend started off with a visit from Simon - we'd begun to get more and more grumpy with each other which is usually a sign we actually need to meet up. A trip to the Fat Cat and laughing at VH1's "Top 100 Dance floor fillers" seemed to put us in a better mood. We then headed off on Saturday to Cambridge for Steve's annual Debian UK related BBQ. I took some photos though Dave took many more. There were loads of people this year - it's amazing how many people Steve's house/garden can fit! As we've come to expect it was a fine weekend with plenty of food, drink and chat. Thanks Steve! Monday was mostly spent invading Dave and Becca for the purposes of constructing wedding invitations. They look fab! Just a few little bits to finish before getting round to sending them out. And now today's been a virtual Monday and I think it's almost time to stop...

Steve McIntyre: What day is it again?

Another year, another party bigger than last year's. By my count, we had 56 people (and a dog) in my house and garden at the peak on Saturday evening. It was excellent to see people from all over: .fi, .nl, .no, .be, .it, .ch. And .uk, of course. Even the gods of weather were kind to us and held off on the rain that was forecast for Saturday. As far as I could tell, everybody enjoyed themselves; I know I definitely did! Same time, same place next year I guess... :-)

26 August 2006

Evan Prodromou: 9 Fructidor CCXIV

We're still in wt:Copenhagen today, but we head out this afternoon for our tour of the Baltic Sea. We've had a great time in the city so far, mostly due to staying with longtime Wikitraveller wt:User:Elgaard, who generously offered us the extra room in his apartment for the time we're here. There's something about staying in an actual human being's home while you're travelling to really recharge the batteries. After a week in hotels and restaurants, a little time in a real house can make you feel a lot more human. We took our time getting to Copenhagen from wt:Odense at the end of the Wikisym conference, mostly because I was really hung over. I'd spent the last night of the event drinking at the Irish pub in the pedestrian area, and I probably had 1-5 pints too many. Paul Yount calls Irish pubs "the first Open Source franchise", and it's true: you can expect certain things at a pub no matter where it is in the world. Although we started out with about 30 people, the crowd thinned through the night. I had a good time talking with Brion Vibber and Chuck Smith about the state of Esperanto-language wikis on the Web -- in a mish-mash of English and Esperanto, of course. (In case you were wondering: the state is "fine".) I also chatted Wikimedia Foundation politics with Angela Beesley; we both think Erik Moeller is going to make a good addition to the WMF board. After the pub shut down, I headed to the deathly silent casino in the sub-basement of the Radisson of Odense. The bar was eerily silent, and the gaming tables were intense and serious; I don't think people could have been more somber if they were organ harvesters gambling for body parts. The last hangers-on were Andrea Forte of Georgia Tech, Alex Schroeder of CommunityWiki, Sunir Shah of MeatballWiki, and Eugene Eric Kim, of Blue Oxen and HyperCore. In other words, some of the smartest people in the wiki world today -- we talked wiki politics and theory until the wee hours of the morning. They all switched to mineral water while I was still slugging down pints of Carlsberg Special, which is probably where I went wrong. Wikisym, for me, was one of the best conferences I've been to this year, and I've been to a lot. It capped off a long summer of conference-going, and this fall should be relatively tranquil. Which is great: I have a lot of work to do, based on the ideas I've picked up this season. tags:

sterbro All of which is to say that I was feeling pretty crufty the next morning as we got on the train. Kindly Maj got us a late checkout and let me sleep in late, which helped a lot; a falafel sandwich around 11AM also cleared my head a bit. The train ride from Odense to Copenhagen was great, and by the time we got to Niels Elgaard Larsen's house in sterbro (a neighborhood of Copenhagen) I was pretty refreshed. Niels took us out to an early dinner at a restaurant called Pixie in a square by his house. Copenhagen has some pretty strict traffic laws, and the number of cars on the street is possibly the least I've ever seen for a major metropolis, leaving a lot of room for sidewalks, bike paths, and open parks and plazas. We got to chat with Niels over a fresh pasta dinner, and thence home to his house for beers and more talk. One great thing about visiting Wikitravellers is that they tend to be a) very smart, b) well-travelled, and c) interested in Free Software and Free Culture. Niels is no exception; he's active in the Danish and European Free Software and information freedom communities, and he's extremely interesting to talk to on the subject. We shared travel stories and talked about Open Source and Open Content later than I would have thought, based on my earlier-morning hangover. Probably the high point of the evening, for me, was when Niels shared a brilliant idea for a way to distribute Wikitravel guides in digital form for a very wide array of users. We've had a hard time settling on a mobile document format for Wikitravel guides, since mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones support standards so poorly. It's one of the most requested features for Wikitravel, but it's going to take a huge amount of work to cover even a fraction of the mobile device owner community. Except Niels had a genius idea for how to distribute guides in a simple, standard format that works on a mobile digital device many if not most travellers carry with them every time they travel. The idea: make guides that are downloadable JPEG images which can be copied to a SD card or Compact Flash or Memory stick or whatever, then stuck into a digital camera. If the camera supports zooming on images, and has a decent screen for review, the guides might be useful and readable. I'm going to try to do some experiments with the idea -- I think it could be a real winner. Adding 30-40 images to a camera today is pretty cheap, and if they're just text I think some aggressive compression can work well. tag:

Copenhagen on foot Yesterday we did a big tour of the city on our own. In the morning, we had some breakfast at the Laundromat Cafe right next door to Niels's house, and I took the opportunity to clean a week's worth of dirty laundry. Nothing like a stack of clean clothes to make you feel more like a decent citizen. I was down to a bathing suit and the ICANNWiki t-shirt Ray King gave me at Wikisym. Then we headed out on the town to do some sight-seeing. First we hit the Kastellet, a fortress in northeast Copenhagen that's the oldest operational military base in Europe. It's got the distinctive star-shaped outline typical of old fortifications, and is surrounded by a lovely park with ducks and swans. We had lunch at a nearby caf , with large beers. (Gee, I'm getting worried about the pattern here.) After lunch we made an unscheduled stop at den lille havfrue -- the famous Litle Mermaid statue in the harbour. It was miniscule and surrounded by perhaps 100 onlookers, crammed into a tiny swatch of sidewalk. We stopped about half a mile away, took some pictures of the crowd, and moved on. We then hoofed it down through the harbour and across Nyhavn and a bridge to Christianhavn and Christiania. We'd both heard about the city-within-a-city run on anarchist principles -- kind of like a giant squat -- but neither of us had been there before. It was an interesting place -- packed with people, lots of food cooking a beer-drinking, caf s and restaurants all over the place, interspersed with art installations and little gardens. But it had the unkempt scumminess of a big squat, too -- especially on the main drag -- and there were a few too many pitbulls and gutterpunks for my tastes. Overall a good experience but I don't know if I'll go back. After our long walk we took the metro back to Niels's, where we napped until he and wife Chiquita got home. Chiquita is an investment banker from wt:Toronto who does a lot of business in Europe, where she met Niels a few years ago. They were married last year and have had a long-distance relationship -- visiting each other a week or so out of each month -- for the whole time. She's moving here this year, which I think will be nice for both of them. We had a good dinner at a place called Thomas's -- a buffet, which seems to be very popular here -- and then back home for a nightcap and bed. Amita June was overtired by the time we got her to bed, and she let us know that we'd pushed her too hard with a quarter-hour of heavy crying. But we all got to sleep pretty well afterwards, and at least the parents know that we should take it easy in the future. tags:

23 August 2006

Evan Prodromou: 6 Fructidor CCXIV

Argh... trying to get caught up on this journal in the wee hours of the morning here in wt:Odense. I've had pretty bad jet lag this trip -- I've never been particularly good with time changes, and the North-America-to-Europe switcheroo really throws me off. So by 2PM I'm falling down on my feet, but at 4AM I'm rarin' to go. Odense has been a particularly nice place to visit. We got into wt:Copenhagen a few days ago, and crashed at the Airport Hilton there. It's actually attached to the airport -- you can just walk right in. Maj got a good deal on a room, and we figured it would make sense to sleep with the baby right there, rather than fight the train system to find another hotel in the city centre. After a free brunch including many different kinds of pickled fish, and a looong nap, we took the train into the Central Station in Copenhagen, right by Tivoli Gardens. There were lines around the block for the amusement park, but we skirted them and headed into the pedestrian area near City Hall. Based on a recommendation in Wikitravel, we went to the line of caf s and restaurants off of Nyhavn, a sliver of water poking into the heart of the town. It was a great walk, and we had a casual sidewalk dinner at a place called Carl's Corner. The canal was lined with boats that had been converted to restaurants -- we may try one when we go back to Copenhagen this week. tags:

Wikisym The next morning I got up at dawn and got on a train to Odense for Wikisym. I missed my connection at the Central Station, and all the trains were running late, so I got real confused about where to go. The fact that I was carrying all of our luggage didn't help matters. But a few false starts later, I managed to get myself oriented and on my way. The train ride was beautiful -- wt:Denmark is a very pretty country, with rolling grassy hills and clusters of small, peak-rooved houses by the tracks. The trip from Copenhagen to Odense takes you from wt:Zealand to wt:Funen, across a long rail bridge. Very impressive. Once I'd landed in Odense and got myself organized, I slipped into the back of the room for Wikisym to catch the last few minutes of Angela Beesley's keynote address. Angela might be the hardest-working person in Wikidom -- she's a tireless community organizer not only for the Wikimedia Foundation sites like Wikipedia but also for Wikia's sites. After her talk, we did an wp:Open Space session, which continued throughout the day, interlaced with the academic presentations. I'm getting to be a big fan of Open Space; it was really effective for RecentChangesCamp, and I think it works well for organizing a conference. Ted Ernst led the sessions, with the help of Gerard Muller of the Danish Open Space Institute. Probably the most productive Open Space session for me was the one about non-text wikis -- using wiki techniques for video, audio, image and visual language editing. I'm fascinated by this stuff, and it's great to hear that some people are working with SVG and SMIL to do in-browser multimedia editing. The consensus is that the technologies Aren't There Yet but are around the corner. The other major thing I think I picked up from this session was Eugene Eric Kim's discussion of Wiki Ohana. Ohana is the Hawaiian word for family; the Wiki Ohana is a project to develop some interoperability and a transmission of our Wiki principles to new members of the family. I think it's a great idea and I'm going to try to get involved further. tags:

Odense We had a great walk around Odense's core pedestrian area. It's not exceptional for Northern European towns -- it reminds me of the Netherlands, and Maj of Switzerland -- but the car-free cobble-stone walking areas are a real relief after years in North America. We have some pedestrian areas in Montreal, of course, but not in the same way. Odense is the childhood home of wp:Hans Christian Anderson, and the city is decorated with statues of HCA, and of characters from his stories (the Tin Soldier, Thumbelina, etc.) It gives a kind of fairy-tale air to the town. I'm not sure they should feel so proud of being Anderson's childhood home, though -- from everything I've read, his childhood was nightmarishly cruel, and his abysmally poor family was harshly treated by the society here. But, of course, that's in the past. Now, we had a real nice time walking around. Amita June likes tottering along on the cobblestones, and shouting really loud in the small streets to hear the echos. We ended up having dinner in a place called the Cuckoo Caf -- great food under a spreading tree in a little square. This morning -- no, yesterday morning -- Maj got up and took the first sessions, and Amita June and I slept in. We went off into town again to find a bakery, and shared a chunk of brunsviger, a sugary pastry that will probably rot out her tiny teeth. I had a cup of tea, which was less than satisfying. I've been trying to cut caffeine out of my life, so we've been having decaf at home, but they don't seem to serve it in caf s here. I'm a creature of habit, and I like the taste of coffee even if it doesn't have the caffeine oomph. tags:

CAPS LOCK SUCKS In response to Lars's defense of CAPS LOCK: Lars, you ignorant slut. Caps lock has been the bane of online culture since the invention of mixed case in the late 1960s. It is a hallmark of clueless newbie-ism for people who are too analphabetic to remember the exceedingly simple English capitalization rules. The only legitimate purpose for CAPS LOCK is for doing C macros and defines, but hey, who writes in C any more? Anyways, that's just lazy programming. A real programmer would write a macro to capitalize the names of other macros where used. That's just good programming practice. Another important point is that CAPS LOCK is Eurocentric and imperialistic. What value does CAPS LOCK have for someone writing in Eritrean, Malayalam or Ojibwa? None at all. Yet dead white males like Lars Wirzenius want to force their CAPS LOCK cultural hegemony on an increasingly global culture. For shame. The worst thing about CAPS LOCK is that it squats in the middle of the most important letters on the keyboard, like a rat trap waiting to spring. Big and ugly, it always catches your left pinky when you're reaching for Ctl or Shift or Tab or A or whatever. Key-chording is here to stay, and CAPS LOCK not only ignores this important UI development but actively interferes with it. Modal interfaces are rightfully extinct, and CAPS LOCK needs to go the way of the dinosaur. It's time to eliminate this obsolete key once and for all. (This message brought to you by The Taxpayers Against Caps Lock Coalition. I, Evan Prodromou, endorse this message.) tags:

15 August 2006

Evan Prodromou: 27 Thermidor CCXIV

I went up today to visit Kasper Souren, AKA Guaka, who's visiting wt:Montreal for a few weeks. Kasper and I have been in touch for several years -- he's been involved with Wikitravel almost as long as anyone -- but we just met in person a couple of weeks ago at Wikimania. He's just returned from South America, and will soon depart for the West Coast of North America and then off to Mexico. He's quite a traveller. Guaka's here to help out with the CouchSurfing Project, an excellent wt:hospitality exchange program that lots of people say good things about. There are apparently bunches of CouchSurfers in Montreal right now helping out with technical issues, content, support, and other great Website-errific stuff. Of course, the local CS community is practicing the ethic and sharing their homes with visitors. I'm not 100% sure how it works, CouchSurfing runs on a very collective model, and a lot of people are devoting their time to this get-together. I went to visit this afternoon, partly to catch up with Guaka, and partly to visit the collective. We talked a lot about the difference between Wikitravel and hospitality exchange -- how anonymous the sharing is for an information-oriented project like a wiki, versus the very intimate person-to-person nature of home sharing. I also talked for a while with Casey Fenton, the founder of CouchSurfing and a very nice guy. We all discussed how to let CouchSurfers copy and distribute Wikitravel guides, possibly customizing them for CS needs, and also for linking back to WT to update and improve the data on our guides. I'm pretty jammed on the whole CS thing -- I'm going to sign up quite soon. Should be fun. tags:

DekiWiki I'm interested to see how this OpenGarden thing works out for MindTouch. I saw a story about their Wiki product on Port 25, which I have to admit I read pretty regularly. Every once in a while there's something I should probably know. OpenGarden is MindTouch's Open Source initiative, including a wiki engine called DekiWiki, built on the .NET technology, and a wp:REST-based Web app framework called Dream. Apparently the whole thing runs fine on top of Mono, which means theoretically I could install it. But I haven't really done a lot of Mono web stuff before -- no idea how well it works. Also, have you noticed how people involved with Mono say "MOH-NOH", like the actual original Spanish pronunciation? Unlike everyone else, who calls it "MAH-NOH", like mononucleosis? That's a weird thing. OpenGarden has a MediaWiki conversion tool, which is almost a necessity for any wiki engine trying to compete in 2006. They might want to try lobbying those guys at the Mono Project... who appear to be using MW as their main site engine! Anyways, I'm going to give this DekiWiki a try. Who knows? It could be fun. I don't know about their overreaching claims for the GPL, but it can't hurt for a local install, right? I seem to remember there was a Scheme language plugin for .NET somewhere, too... By the way, I'm still bullish on JAMWiki, the MediaWiki-workalike using Java Web Services. But I like to experiment with new software, too. tags:

SocialText Speaking of commercial Open Source Wiki software, I was really glad to see that SocialText has released a FLOSS version of their flagship product. SocialText has been such a good corporate citizen in the wiki and FLOSS world. Not only were they instrumental in the launch of BarCamp, but ST employs some of the smartest wiki minds in the world today (like Seb and Sunir). And, of course, Ross Mayfield's blog is a great clearinghouse for wiki business info. ST has made a business model in training companies in the WikiWay. I think that makes a lot of sense, and they show a lot of commitment to the idea by demonstrations like this. tags:

Fired from Technorati for my UFO beliefs So, I was having some random and unpleasant 500 Server Error errors with this blog recently, and apparently Technorati has given up on my site in frustration. No matter how often I do an update, and then ping, it still doesn't refresh my recent articles. I'll have to figure out some tricks to get back in Technorati's good graces. I like the service a lot. tags:

6 August 2006

Ross Burton: Cornish Bliss (part 1)

Let's start this with a cliché: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian: £8
Best Of by Nina Simone: £14
One week in a rather swish house just outside St. Ives: about £200
No email. No Jabber. No Subversion. No Bugzilla: priceless For the last week Vicky and myself were in Cornwall, staying in a house just outside St. Ives with her family. The house was much nicer than we expected, very tastefully decorated and well equipped, with a DVD player, hi-fi, coffee machine, and so on. Settling In The house was in Carbis Bay, about a twenty minute walk from St. Ives along the costal path that was directly off the bottom of the garden. The path towards St. Ives is also the nicest stretch of costal path I've been on: it is surfaced and wide enougth to drive on, unlike the paths we've been on previously which are often no more than a foot wide cutting in the earth, next to a sheer cliff. St. Ives The Sea Our first impression of Cornwall was one of chill: when the taxi dropped me off at the train station to start the journey down the thermometer said 38°C, but at the same time the next day it was only 23°C. Brrrr. The traditional Cornish summer proceeded to roll in a few days later, with heavy rain, gusty wind and general grimness for a day. Yay for DVD players! Typical Cornish Summer St. Ives is a lovely town. Unlike Newquay which was got far too popular for it's own good (the two-carriage train had both a Stag and Hen party on board en route to Newquay, trying not that subtly to pull each other), St. Ives is busy but not crammed. There is no demographic that dominates the tourists, a mix of families young and old, surfers, twenty-somethings and pensioners means it doesn't feel like a tourist hotspot, and it manages to cater for everyone. The habour front has lounge bars, traditional pubs, restaurants and cornish pasty shops, catering for everyone. The town has become quite a focal point for artists recently (since 1928, Wikipedia tells me), and there seems to be more independent art galleries than pasty shops (!), including the Cornwish outpost of the Tate. Tate St. Ives is pretty small for anyone who has been to Tate Modern, but it's damn good: due to the size it is very focused (there are just two galleries) and the building itself is a wonderful modern piece of art deco architecture. We went with the intention of getting some more pictures for the house and did quite well: a print of Horizontal Stripes by Patrick Heron, and a limited run print (427/600) by a local artist. I'm too lazy to remember the name of the picture or the artist, but I'll take a photo of it later. Our Grand Plan of having more individual art in the house is going well, we've an original oil-on-canvas abstract to collect from the framers that we bought in Paris too. To be continued...

4 July 2006

Evan Prodromou: 16 Messidor CCXIV

We hit Movies 4 Mommies again this morning, although some horrible construction project on Av Papineau around Jean Talon made us about 20 minutes late. They say that there are two seasons in Quebec: winter, and construction. I think they say that about a lot of places, though. Today's movie was The Devil Wears Prada, which reads much better in French on the posters at the theater: Le Diable s'habille en Prada. It's the story of a girl who wants to be a journalist and takes a job as the assistant to a powerful fashion publisher. It stars Anne Hathaway of The Princess Diaries as the earnest young striver and Meryl Streep as the Andy Warhol-like cruel and judgemental boss-lady. The girl learns about love, life, and being true to yourself. In other words, it was sappy dreck. But it was watchable dreck, unlike the horrible Click we saw last week. I didn't feel stupid for sitting through this movie, which is pretty low praise but for the Mommy Matinee there's only so much you can do. The only bummer is that Streep's character spoke in a ferocious, disdainful whisper, which was hard to hear over the crying babies. tags:

Lawn After the movie we stopped by the Canada Tire in March Central for some garden supplies. I'd promised Maj for a Mother's Day gift that I'd convert the 10'x10' square of weeds and trash outside the front door of our apartment into a nice lawn for sitting on and drinking white wine, but it was raining on Mother's Day and one thing or another got in the way of me actually doing what I said I was going to do. Until now. I had weeded the lawn on Sunday, which was pretty damn hard -- the weeds were waist-high and full of barbs and fluff and procrastination and other defense mechanisms. But I managed to rip out almost everything with a leafspan greater than half a centimeter, which left most of the area bare of plants. We spread out some grass seed given to us by friends Tara and Chris, but I wanted to give it a little more care. So I got one of those pushy lawn mowers at Canada Tire, and a big rake, and some grass seed with fertilizer mixed in since I'm apparently too lazy to mix it together myself. I assembled the mower when we got home, then mowed what was left of the grass down to a low buzzcut. I raked the little square like the dickens to get out the old leaves and dead grass and rocks and sticks and cigarette butts and wrappers, which had the side benefit of turning over the soil, too. Then I threw big handfuls of grass-seed with fertilizer pellets all over the resulting mulched up soil. Some water, some cleanup, and voila: I have what looks like a patch of dirt with seeds in it. Hopefully this will become a lush lawn sometime in the near future, because we also bought some beautiful fold-up wt:Muskoka chairs to put on the front lawn. I think these are just about the same as wp:Adirondack chairs, but I'm sure some expert in patio furniture could explain the difference. They are, however, my favorite kind of chair, and I'm looking forward to sitting out there with some white wine in a few weeks once the lawn grows in. Like, I dunno... maybe Labo[u]r Day. tags:

Hey, Baby Speaking of national (international?) holidays, in the aristo calendar it's the 4th of July. Happy Independence Day, everyone. My favorite 4th of July media item is the great song "4th of July" by X from their album See How We Are. X has an X the Band myspace thingy, which seems to play 4th of July when you navigate to it today. Which, like, hooray for them. Go, X. Amita June and I danced around the house this morning singing the "America -- Fuck Yeah!" song from Team America: World Police. Sometimes I wonder how Amita June is going to feel about her "dual heritage" when she grows up. She's got a Canadian passport and an American one; I hope for her that she'll be better able to appreciate the world by having that dual perspective. I've heard that there are parts of the world where Americans living abroad get together on the 4th of July and have hot dogs and toss the ol' pigskin around and stuff. I don't know if there's an Americans get-together in Montreal, and I kind of don't care. It's not like we're stationed in Siberia here, and we need to congregate once a year to remember what "home" was like. Quebec isn't so far from the US that I feel homesick for American culture -- just homesick for the people. I think the US Embassy in wt:Ottawa has a big party, but the Montreal US Consulate doesn't seem to. Which is probably just as well -- it's at the top floor of a 30-story building, which would make barbecuing hard, and playing tag football on the roof would probably be dangerous ("Go long!"). tags:

.de vs. .it Of course, there aren't any Stars and Stripes flying in Montreal today -- all the houses we passed today were flying the Italian flag, for the World Cup semifinals. Montreal has a vibrant Little Italy, and the residents and other Italians in Quebec are going nuts for the Cup games. I can't imagine what's going to happen tonight if Italy wins. I saw one car driving around with a German flag on the roof today... I hope they guy makes it home in one piece, is all I can say. I like the name "Little Italy" -- it makes me think of a cross between wt:Palermo and wp:Munchkinland. Like, 1-meter-tall Italians drinking espresso and playing tarantellas and dancing and cheering with those tiny squeaky speeded-up Alvin-and-the-Chipmunk voices. Teensy-weensy Italy! Itty-bitty Italy! It's so cute! tags:

Grilling After reading the Meathenge slapdown for once-a-year barbecuers, I'm once again happy that I'm a vegetarian (more or less). I just can't compete in that league, and my little propane BBQ with veggie burgers, portabellos and an occasional trout is enough for me, thanks. tags:

Wikitravel 10K Party I just announced on wt:Wikitravel:4 July 2006 that Maj and I are going to throw a little Wikitravel 10K Party during Wikimania 2006. I'm going to be presenting about Wikitravel and travel guide wikis, so it's going to be an exciting event for us. On a side note, it looks like we'll be in wt:Odense for Wikisym. Lots of people we like there, and Maj has always wanted to be in wt:Saint Petersburg for her birthday, so this will probably be close enough. tags:

El Destino One of the great minds of the Internet goes incognito as El Destino on Pigdog Journal. He may be one of the best media commentators I've ever read, and I'm proud to say that I know him well. Or, well, used to. He's written two articles for Pigdog Journal lately after a 3-4 year hiatus (I think... something like that). His article on the Devo + Disney combination is really funny and good. I hope I hear his voice more often; sometimes I wonder what he thinks of the Web in 2006. tags:

Stephen Hawking and the Long View Dr. Stephen Hawking asked Yahoo! Answers, " How can the human race survive the next hundred years?". tags:

30 June 2006

Eric Dorland: Asian Delights

Last night I went to Sakura Gardens to celebrate the end of our class. The food was good, I don't think they do the best sushi, but the other food is excellent. I also successfully avoided any karaoke singing.

Also, Fantasia 2006 is starting next week. So I'll soon be spending way to much time sitting in a movie theater. Summer in Montr al is great.

18 June 2006

David Pashley: New Delivery

For the last few weeks, we've had a couple of pigeons nesting in one corner of the small triangular piece of glass I delude myself into calling a garden. Yesterday the egg they've been incubating hatched and we now have a small yellow ball of fluff my girlfriend has named Armstrong. Armstrong and Mother/Father

17 June 2006

Steve Kemp: If i m careful I won t hate you

Good News My parents were in town for the day and I got to meet them for lunch. After that we went shopping to a garden center, since they happened to mention they needed some trays for holding plants. I bought a couple of new plants for my house - including a nice looking Dragon Plant: Dracaena bicolor Bad News *plonk* I’m suprised Mutt doesn’t have integrated killfile support, but managed to add it via a couple of additions to my ~/.procmailrc file - one for senders, and one for message references to catch threads of disinterest.

15 June 2006

Gunnar Wolf: Objects and signals

So far, Ruby is the only language I have actually liked that imposes a mindset on you. I love Perl's approach of letting you do things your way, whatever you define by that - Ruby forces you to extensively use OOP. But, actually, it is so well implemented that it even makes sense. It is even fun! Of course, that paired to an excellent introspection ability leaves enough room to make the cleverest (and, yes, most obfuscated) code you can think of.
Well... But there are limits to everything, and I think I found a spot where all the nice separation and cleanness ends abruptely: When interacting to the always nasty outside world.
It might also, of course, have some relation to the fact that I'm too new also for writing GUIs - this is the first nontrivial one I do. And it shows, as it took me some time to properly understand the pairing between the nice Glade elements, how to make a decently modular system, how to properly handle UI (and internal) events... But I've been progressing quite nicely, and I hope to be able to show off my little app to a wider audience soon. At the very least, I hope to be able to show it to my boss by next week, as he is getting impatient ;-)
Ok, but where does it all break, according to me? One of the things I must monitor with this app is that a couple of processes spawned by it work happily in the background while I only show a nice interface to my users. Now, how is the best way to do this? Why, by trapping the SIGCHLD signal, of course! Whenever any of the processes in the pipeline die, the parent (controlling) process gets a nice CHLD signal. I trap it, restart the processes, and no harm done. And in Ruby, it looks quite natural:
Signal.trap(:CHLD) do
  @processes.each { p p.stop if p.active?; sleep 1; p.start}
done
How nice, how neat... How buggy :-/
It took me quite a few hours to get this right. And it should be obvious, of course... No matter where you declare a signal handler, there is no reason for you to believe it is tied to a particular instance, or for that matter, to a class. A signal handler breaks and jumps in the execution in the ugliest old-school way. Yes, if your signal handler consists of:
Signal.trap(:CHLD) do { puts self.class }
you will note that your good friend self is nothing but an Object.
Once I realized that, yes, things became reworkable, and I now think I am actually better off even OOP-aly than some hours ago - Some of the classes badly needed to adhere to the Singleton pattern and now work with less worries and ugliness. But, hey, it took me quite a while.
Anyway, lets see which new challenges Ruby+Glade2 still have for me. I am sure there will be plenty. And I haven't even started playing with GStreamer!

12 June 2006

Ross Burton: Summertime!

Summer finally arrived in England last week, after a pretty miserable and wet spring. Annoyingly it arrived a few days late as we were hoping that it would be glorious whilst we were in Paris, but alas it was only good for the last two days. Of course summer means sitting outside with glasses of cold drinks and lazying around. We did a bit of that over the weekend but it was a little too sticky then, as today is much fresher I dug around the pit of doom that is our garden and built some of the (to be replaced very soon) garden furniture. My Office Lovely. However as the sun makes its way up the shadows to work in get smaller and smaller, we really need to get a sunshade. NP: Lounge stream, Digitally Imported Radio

1 June 2006

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Montreal Memorial Day 2006

Rachele and I went to Montreal for the day this past weekend. It was the longest time we’ve ever left our one year old daughter Esther—just over twelve hours with my parents. Remarkably, she survived, and didn’t even miss us. Every time I go to Montreal I’m reminded of just how much better Canada is. For example, Senzala, a Brazilian breakfast place in Mile End, served the most delicious gourmet poached eggs (pictured here with Rachele): We also had a great time visiting the Botanical Garden, a vast park that dwarfs anything Boston has to offer. Here are a few examples of the flora—click on the image to see the full size version.
Along with poached eggs, beautiful gardens, and socialized healthcare, what more could one ask for?

23 May 2006

Pierre Habouzit: The whole java/non-free affair

summary of the problem I've re-read most of the calm and useful posts (yes some exist if you look hard :D) in the java-tro^H^Hhread. Yes, the pro-java-in-non-free are right if we omit to mention all the difficulties it will imply if such a removal has to happen for a stable update[1] removing java from our mirrors do terminate the license solve most of the issues. Though, two major concerns remains:
  1. clause 2.f (you agree to defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages ... and so forth) is IMHO unacceptable, even for non-free, because debian isn't in a position where it can risk to see that clause exercised by Sun ;
  2. section 4 (and others of the same sort) makes the existence of java in non-free depending of Sun's mood: exercising clause 4 is trivial they just have to imagine a new kernel feature our kernel should support that we can't provide to terminate the license retro-actively. Many instances of that problem exists in the license.
The first problem in itself seems obvious, and none of the arguments of the pro-java-in-non-free have put me at rest. The second problem is a real concern because it means that our java support can be discontinued without possible clean upgrade path back to java-package. If Sun could not retire our right to redistribute one given version of java, then we could repackage the last version we can distribute with some debconf dialog to warn the user his java package won't be upgraded again, and that he must fall back to make-jpkg. But here, if Sun decides it, Sun can make the package simply disappear. And given the number of users that will concern, this is not a problem to be taken lightly.

I honnestly believe that putting java into non-free, whereas we already have java-package that allow a quite satisfying integration of Sun's JDK/JRE into a debian instance, implicitely means that we are confident that java will stay in here forever (or for a significant enough time). And I see nothing that can guarantee such a fact, and I see too many things that can prevent this with a probability significantely greater than 0. Yes there I know there is a FAQ about those issues, where Sun promise they won't use their power to hurt people. But if they don't itend to, why did they put those clauses in the license ? With all the good will I can provide, that does not makes sense to me. If you put landmines in your garden, well, that's for a purpose, not for the garnishment. debian issues And then, I've a couple of questions there, for which I've seen no real answer: and I'll skip the questions I don't want to ask, or more precisely I don't want/fear to read the answer to: Disclaimer Don't get me wrong. I've been really happy when I've seen that java entered non-free (even if I don't like the language but that's another story and is off topic here), because that meant that progress had been done in the good direction, and that's a thing I just have to praise. But then I've heard people complain about the damn license, and went read it. And then, I've been really disappointed, and I felt betrayed by those three people:
yes, I'm a DD, but I'm also a Debian User, and I trust my fellow developpers to bring to debian packages that don't have license issues, and will be supported enough[3]. As a user, I feel betrayed because nothing that I expect from a package that is in debian (even in non-free) can be guaranteed for the java package.
Notes [1] since there is a 3 month delay, it means the new stable has to be ready in that delay [2] no to mention the haste and prematurity of that action [3] yes, even for non-free. the sole non-free package I install is the nvidia driver, that qualifies to the durability and support in debian criterium.

13 May 2006

Scott James Remnant: Re: Gloomy outlook... not

Of course, the fact that he’s never let the fact that he’s not actually allowed into that lovely garden STOP HIM going into that garden is yet another matter altogether.

8 May 2006

Ross Burton: Oxford University Press

OUP rock my world. Thanks to a fantastic deal, the public libraries in England have shared the cost of a two-year nation licence for a range of their online resources. I just go to Oxford Reference, enter my library card number, and bingo: access to the full text of the OED, and much more. NP: The Garden, Zero 7

28 April 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Rain

I passed the remainder of yesterday essentially doing nothing, not even reading (I am trying to make Murakami's book, my last one, last as long as possible -- it's really good and has me thoroughly in its grip). So instead, I roamed the streets and observed people, tried talking to one or the other, but unfortunately did not get very far. What makes it all a little different is that the Burmese always say "ja" and shake their head, whether they've understood or not; effectively, this means paying attention that e.g. the motorcycle driver is going the right direction and aborting the trip as soon as you sense a misunderstanding (despite the convincing and assertive "ja"). Following breakfast (Bamar-style Mohinga, a noodle soup with seafood and unidentifiable cracker-thingies I'll just call corn flakes for now, vegetables or whatever else the cook decided to put in -- I've developed a strong liking to this dish in the morning), I took a taxi to the airport to board my flight to Heho, from where I would continue to Inle Lake. I still travel on a budget, so you may be surprised that I am hopping around the country with planes, but the $22 I had to pay for this trip (incl. taxes) and the 10 hours I saved compared to the $8 bus ride were well worth it to me. After all, I only had a few days in this country and tried to maximise the exposure I experienced. One thing is for sure: I will come back. Pwin Oo Lwin was nice, but I did not manage to go further east; A day in Mandalay is surely not enough. Bagan didn't do much for me, so I don't think I'll return there, but Inle, as well as the countless regions I skipped, including the pictoresque and untouched beaches, really make me want to plan my next trip now already. Arriving in Inle, it was raining, and the rains intensified towards noon. I am here to stay for two days, and the weather is unlikely to change, so after confirming that I could not take the next flight a day earlier, I bit the bullet, put on my rain jacket and sandals, rented a bike, and went off to visit the cultural museum, also known as the "Museum of Shan Chiefs" -- which was kind of disappointing. Set in a beautiful house (the sight of which was worth most of the $2 entrance fee), the items on display were scarce and almost exclusively labeled in Burmese. None of the folks working there seemed to be inclined to show me around, so after 20 minutes I left into the pouring rain, stopped by at a kitchen for a Burmese-style beef curry with jack fruit soup, and eventually returned to my hotel. I am staying at the Aquarius Inn, a cute place with simple and clean rooms, a cozy porch, and a little garden out front. The staff, a girl maybe a little younger than me, is very attentive and speaks good English, studies geography at university, and took a particular liking to making me feel good for the two hours I decided to flip pages in Murakami's book on the front, bringing me tea, fruits, and little snacks on a continuous basis, always with a huge smile on her face, and eager to help organising whatever I would want to do during my stay in Inle. But with the rain coming down non-stop, I am somewhat puzzled as to what I should do. The compulsory thing here is at least a day on a boat out on the lake, visiting floating villages, as well as the peculiar rowing style the people from this area developed -- using one arm and one foot instead of two arms --, hoping from floating market to floating market, and enjoying the scenery of the Shan hills surrounding the river. The Lonely Planet describes the places as a mirage. But with clouds and fod and water from above, it loses all its charm, and that's not because I fear getting wet. Not that I am bored or afraid of being bored, I'll just have to make sure to find some alternative programme, which could include spending the morning watching the market, reading, and talking to some fellow travellers who are in a similar situation as myself, but readily indulge in elaborate discussions on scientific topics, it seems. This much as an update. Internet access here is even more difficult than in Bagan, so all the other thoughts I meant to push out to this blog have to wait until Yangon, Bangkok, or Zurich. Thanks for reading along. PS: I don't think I'll travel with Lonely Planet again, it's just too inaccurate, and I disagree with their approach to research (e.g. not reconfirming facts researched a year before printing before the book goes to print), and happened upon too many errors this time around. Plus, I have sent them elaborate updates on four previous trips and have never heard a single word from them, no acknowledgement, thanks, nothing. Maybe I am spoiled by Open Source development. I have been recommended the Rough Guides, so I'll give those a shot for the trip to Debconf in Mexico.

24 April 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Back to Mandalay

I have returned to Mandalay after an exciting weekend in Pyin Oo Lwin. Sunday morning, I woke to meet Adam at 6:00 o'clock for a stroll through the botanical garden, and we engaged in interesting discussions for the 1.5 hours before we returned to a cup of coffee and being picked up by Eddy, his friend. He took us for a breakfast of excellent strawberry yoghurt -- the area is famous for its strawberries -- and afterwards helped me arrange for my own motorcycle, with which I went touring about the town. First, I visited the Chinese temple, followed by two Pagodas before fleeing the midday heat to the Be waterfall, where I first tried to get some food. Thankfully I have the Lonely Planet Burmese Phrasebook on me or else I would have had no chance, but eventually I ended up with some vegetables and rice, which at least did the deed. Following lunch, I went for a swim (which you are not supposed to do) in the waterfall pond, joining several dozens of Burmese cooling down. My attempts to dry and read where thwarted several times by excited folks doing almost everything in their power to get me back into the cold water. So I did. Eventually, the heat lowered and I decided to head back to the city to find an Internet cafe, and meet Adam and Eddy for a visit to a remote village, but the first half of those plans were changed when by the side of the road, I saw an old monk carrying two heavy bags and offered him a lift. He gladly accepted and I took him about 10 miles off the main road, uphill on a dirt track until we reached his village where we were greeted by the other surprised monks, who subsequently invited me for tea. I enjoyed the time, although only the monk to whom I had offered the ride spoke English and did not deviate from his topic how much he hated the Japanese -- he had fought in the war against the Japanese 60 years ago. On the way back I got lost several times but eventually managed to return the motorbike and make it to the lodge for a shower, before we drove off to the remote village. On the way I learnt that Burma is actually much richer than Laos or Cambodia, that noone in this country has to starve because of the vast amount of natural resources, but that poverty still exists all over the place, even though I found it to be not as extreme as back in Laos when I decided to come back with clothing for the children. But seeing (and being told) that the people in the village we visited were definitely among the poorest in the country, I decided to distribute the clothing I took along, which was well received and even documented on video by Eddy. Still, in the end, I was not completely satisfied because these village people were rich (albeit living in beaten huts and wearing torn clothing) as opposed to the ones who hosted my cousin and I 15 months ago in Laos. However, given that Pyin Oo Lwin gets very cold in the winter and the clothing I took was mostly warm clothing (like fleece sweaters and cord trousers), it was probably a lot better to leave it here rather than to take it to other (warmer) parts of the country. So now I am carrying an empty backpack with me, and the temptation to fill it with the many handicrafts and goods on sale here is almost unbearably high. That night, Eddy's wife invited us to a traditional Burmese dinner at their house. Unfortunately, Adam felt a little sick and couldn't join, so I went alone for some excellent food and had to drink the bottle of Australian Sauvignon Blanc all by myself. I doubt thought that it was due to the elevated alcohol level of my blood that I thoroughly enjoyed the screening of some videos of traditional Myanmar martial arts, as well as videos from the water festival celebrated in the country at the same time as in Thailand. While Songkhran in Thailand was almost excessive, the Burmese put more value on tradition, and intersperse the soaking with traditional dances, which looked absolutely wonderful. I am sure to return, even though April really is not the month to come here -- it's boiling hot outside. Now, back in Mandalay, I first embarked on a little expedition to the MICT, which is a computer centre with a bunch of schools in town, to distribute some of the Ubuntu CDs I had brought. It was good to know that most of the folks I talked to had heard of Linux, but that they never tried it because it's impossible to obtain. Now, almost a dozen CDs are with managing directors of various stores and schools, and they all know that they can freely copy them as many times as they like. If it turns out to be popular, maybe Canonical can arrange for a larger shipment to companies in this country, probably via Bangkok. I am leaving Mandalay tomorrow for Bagan, taking an express ferry at 6:00 o'clock, which should get me there within 9 hours. I am unsure what's next, but after 2-3 days in Bagan, I will either fly to Hohe and visit Inle Lake, then to Yangon, or just make my way on land to Yangon immediately. Flights come in at about $50 each, so while cheap, I am not sure I brought enough cash with me to afford them. You cannot use credit cards or traveller cheques in Burma. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading along.

23 April 2006

Martin F. Krafft: It's cool in Pyin Oo Lwin

While the heat in Mandalay was stifling, here in Pyin Oo Lwin it's quite bearable, at about 1000 metres elevation. I accepted Adam's offer to accompany him and his friends, and on Friday morning, after I climbed the Mandalay hill and visited some of the caves at its foot, we were off to drive the two hours into the Shan hills. The car ride was exhausting, so when we finally arrived, I blew off my initial plans to go to walk the botanical garden (which Adam calls the most beautiful in the world) and instead stayed in started to read my new book, "From the land of green ghosts" by Pascal Khoo Thwe, a Burmese fugitive's memoirs about his travels from this most remarkable country to Cambridge, where he went to university. We went to eat Chinese that evening and I tried to chat up some locals afterwards, but without much success, so after everything had closed at around 9:30, I headed back to the hotel. The lodge is a beautiful British colonial house with great teak-floor rooms and most helpful staff, set in a very nice setting overlooking the lake up here. At $30 per night, it's actually above my budget, but given that so far I didn't pay anything for transport or food -- Adam and his friends have taken me around -- I am still within the bounds of the expected. And for sure, those $30 are worth it, I slept great, but woke for an hour to witness a giant storm followed by a downpour of really cold rain. Saturday morning, we visited the local market and I made a reservation for my return flight from Yangon to Bangkok on 4 May. Then, following a recommendation by Adam's friend Eddy, I took a motorbike taxi to a nearby Bhuddist cave and some waterfalls. The cave was great and very unlike the ones we had seen in Laos. It extends several hundreds of metres into the mountain with a river running through it, but stairs and planks have been built everywhere, and there was plenty of light from bulbs hanging everywhere to illuminate the Bhudda statues. Actually, being very close to the Shan state, which hosts the only people with a catholic religion, I was able to witness some statues of Jesus, and also some icons of Bhuddist images with clearly Christian tendencies, such as the halo, giving it all a very weird touch, or at least I cannot place it yet. I returned for a longer chat with Adam and then set off to meet James, a former employee of the British government, who runs a computer school and was able to help me out with his satellite dish to at least allow me to send an email to a friend, who will hopefully publish my blog entries for me. Burma is really cut off, many websites are blocked, SSH seems impossible, as does HTTPS, so the sshd I had bound to port 443 is of no use to me. Also, my cellphone has no reception -- only local cellphones that cannot make international calls are allowed -- and telephone calls from the public booths are very unreliable (I tried a couple of times at least to reach my mother to say I am still alive), and a call to Germany comes in at $6 per minute and seldomly work. My time online is short as I don't want to be a burden to James, and I also want some of his time to talk about Linux and computers in Burma in general. I left eight Ubuntu CDs with him and hopefully he can put them to good use. He seemed interested at least. My further itinerary is beginning to solidify: I shall leave for Mandalay on Monday and head to Bagan on Tuesday, by boat, which a friend from college recommended to me when he read about my expedition. From there, I am considering to fly to Inle Lake and then take local transportation down to Yangon, where I want to spend four or five days. That's it for now, thanks for reading along. I will write more about my impressions of Burma when I have more time, at the latest when I get back home.

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