Inspired by Matthew Palmer's writings (1, 2) on his experiences about the Australian judicial system, I decided to write a series of essays on the Finnish legal system, mostly to contrast it with the universally familiar United State system (even if that universal familiarity is a little skewed by generally having been obtained from dramatizations and not actual court practice). I will concentrate on criminal cases. I will write based on my personal experience as a part of the judicial system, and I will be supplementing the experience with my personal research into law. I am not legally trained, but I have read a fair bit of law and related literature. I am a lay judge in the Jyv skyl District court. I will explain the significance of that later, but I hope it suffices to say, here, that I have sat on the bench, as part of four-judge panels, since March this year, in ten sessions each a day long, and each containing at least two, usually four or five criminal cases. Some highlights:

• There are no plea bargains. With some minor exceptions, every criminal case is tried in a full court session.
• There is no jury. Criminal cases are tried as a rule by a panel of four judges, of which one is legally trained and three are lay judges, each having an equal vote.

Later essays in this series:

• The main hearing in a Finnish criminal trial (November 16, 2005)

See more ...

Another very full weekend in what's shaping up to be quite a series of get-out-and-do-something weekends. At first the plan was to get to play with a real live bulldozer and help Anna put in a ford in the creek at her new place, but when the bulldozer sadly didn't show I ended up going back to Anna's and spending a nice evening there. Then, back home and thinking I was done this afternoon, I found myself up helping Ken and Janese unload a huge truckload of appliances at their new house up the hill and then had a nice after party on the deck. And I still have a bulldozer to look forward to next weekend..

As I've mentioned before, I'm trying to write a 50K-word first draft of a novel during November. Writers, published and unpublished alike, tend to look for useful-esque procrastination activities, called cat-vacuuming because ... erm, if you vacuum your cat now, it won't shed later, or something. I did say useful-esque, did I not? By the way, the term originated in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition, I think in the late 1990's. Honest. I was there, lurking. Anyway, for this Sunday afternoon, my cat-vacuuming took the form of programming in Haskell. Specifically, I wrote a sample answer to an exercise in the course I'm currently giving at the university. The exercise asked for drawing a particular fractal. I did that and found the result less aesthetically pleasing than I had thought when I drafted the exercise. So I fiddled with my program and ended up with this: Of course, the new program does not solve the exercise as specified, so I had to back out the change (I did leave a note about it in the comments). The program remains private until the exercise sessions next week.

Cleaning my apartment is a bit like going on an archeological dig: A dried spaghetti noodle... when did I have spaghetti for dinner? Oh, yeah, three weeks ago.

(Tall Dark and Mysterious: See You in Ten Days)

Jonathon, maybe if you wrote a song about your thoughts, you wouldn’t forget them as easily? Why is it all the sites that I visit when looking for lyrics and tab are 90% (flash and other annoying) ads?

Tomorrow I leave Montr al, Qu bec and Canada and will move down to the US, on my way to New York City. This part of my stay in North America is a bit (others would rather say "totally") improvised, and the plans are not too accurate even now, 8 hours before our departure. The first idea for this was to travel on a night bus from Montr al to Boston, meet mako and mika and then move to New York City during the weekend. The unavailability of any buses that did this route in less than thirteen hours made me look for alternatives. Chatting with mdz, I found out he was flying with Mark and Jane to NYC very early on Friday night, on the private jet. Sounded like a plan. Only it had a big flaw: non commercial flights entering the US require visas for everyone aboard, apparently. If you don't have it, the reports say you're really, really fucked up. So, having no visa as I don't need it in normal conditions, this was discarded too. Finally I learned that jblack was driving down to Pennsylvania after the conference. I asked him if it was possible to go with him on his way South, and he said yes. He could drop me in the nearest point to Boston, or drive me straight to NYC. As NYC is the easiest for me and jblack and Clint has no problem with hosting me one extra day, that's what we're going to do. (After having everything more or less clear, Paul Sladen came along and proposed yet another plan involving a bicycle and hitch-hiking. I was able to say no, though.) Here starts this crazy road trip. Wish me luck, and see you in NYC!

Andrew: to work out the fourth Thursday of the month, use this instead:

function nth_day($instance, $dow, $month, $year)

  $first_dom = date("w", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 1, $year));
  return 1 + ((7 + $dow - $first_dom) % 7) + 7 * ($instance - 1);


Or, using Zeller s rule and avoiding function calls:

function nth_day($instance, $dow, $month, $year)

  if($month < 3) $year--; $D = $year % 100; $C = (int)($year / 100); $m = 1 + (($month + 9) % 12);
  $f = 1 + (int)((13 * $m - 1) / 5) + $D + (int)($D / 4) + (int)($C / 4) - 2 * $C;
  $first_dom = $f % 7;
  return 1 + ((7 + $dow - $first_dom) % 7) + 7 * ($instance - 1);


Update: thanks to Andrew for spotting the error in the second version. Due to my misunderstanding of a hack in Zeller s rule, I had forgotten to decrease the year when the month was January or February. Also, PHP was not doing proper integer divisions and I had to cast results back to int despite all operands being ints.

I've reached the one-fifth mark in my quest to write a novel in a month. I'm five thoudand words behind of the linear pace, though.

I’m not sure I have to be proud of the fact that my name has a meaning in klingon.

As I wrote earlier, I am trying to learn the Klingon language. Today, I caught up on Planet Debian postings and saw one of my fellow developer's name in a completely new light: Hommey is interpretable as Klingon. Hom means 'a bone', and -mey is the general pluralizer. Normally Hom would be pluralized by -Du', because it's a body part, but when -mey is used, it implies that the bones are used not as parts of a body but in some other usage (as weapons or something like that). In a poetic context, Hommey can also mean bones scattered all about.

I have survived on this planet for 28 years as of today. I intend to continue. :)

board games Bought myself the European version of "Ticket to ride" in preparation for the winter to come. Also, some Carcassonne updates ("The dragon and the princess" and "The count") since i believe i have all the rest. Maybe i should also get "The city", but it is a standalone game, so i need to read some reports. dspam Dspam is back. We have a coordinated effort to get it out in less than a week. I had a package more or less ready, but since two non-developers are working on it, too, i stepped out and right now i am more an observer than an active packager, while i clean (read janitor) some things from time to time. Also, too much work is keeping me from doing other Debian stuff, including coordination of DC6. music I have recently discovered beatport.com. I have refused to access it before, due to its Flash (yep, chilling effect) interface. It is crack for the following reasons:

• One cannot set bookmarks. I would like to set a flag on some artists, or just have a "duh, this one i have to recheck". Forget about it.
• One cannot open multiple windows/tabs. While I am surfing the interface, i would like to open some labels/artists in another tab for inmediate review. CAN NOT DO.
• Shit, man, one cannot even send a URL to a friend for him to buy a song, since there is no such concept in the interface.
• Also, one cannot go back, since the flash buttons (RW, FF) are b0rk3n.

So, please, beatport, if you are out there and listen to your users, do something about it. However, the music selection they have rocks (even if it is crappy electronic music).

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

I've just packaged a newer version of python-django, if anyone is using these beware that the admin section has undergone a non backwards compatible change since the last package, details can be found from the django backwards incompatible changes page on the django wiki. sources.list lines are: deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ (sid sarge) django deb-src http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ (sid sarge) django and are available for i386 and amd64. The package still needs some work (various bits of config really shouldn't be where they are), but I expect to do that sometime before the release (we still haven't got an official django release). I should be working my way through the xmms-scrobbler bugs at some point this weekend, I hope... the tag reading is still quite bad, and does still segfault on badly formatted tags which is what really needs fixing. Anyways - back to it.

I've been a Star Trek fan for a long time, and I have been fascinated with Klingons (especially as portrayed in the movies and afterward) and especially their language. I have known for a long time that there is a real (constructed) Klingon language. I've even known a student of the Klingon language for a few years now, but it only recently came to me: I'll start studying it for real. So I bought Marc Okrand's books The Klingon Dictionary and Klingon for the Galactic Traveler and have been studying them since early this week. I already am able to construct simple sentences, and if I look up every word, I am able to understand written Klingon (the Okrand kind of writing, not the funny symbols). The sentence in the title means "I am a Debian maintainer". The word Debya' is not canon, but it'll have to do. I make no warranties that my tlhIngan Hol (Klingon language) is correct, though :) QIn vIvan – end of message

So this week’s project was working on dak, in particular getting the tiffani implemention included. What’s tiffani, you ask? It lets you just download the changes to Sources.gz and Packages.gz files, instead of the whole damn thing – if you have main, contrib, and non-free for unstable in your sources.list, this means your apt-get update only needs to download 27.5 KiB instead of 2.85 MiB (for bz2) or 3.75 MiB (for gz). Two orders of magnitude saving’s not bad. I’ve mentioned this previously a few times if you want to see the history, in January I noted some quick hacks which have now been obsoleted by Michael Vogt’s integration into apt (which is in a personal repository, not uploaded to unstable yet…), back in August last year I did a little promotion of the concept, referring back to my post in December 2003 that summarised the analysis done previously, which takes us back to March and April 2002. The server-side implementation, tiffani, is thus a little python script that groks through the list of suites and components dak knows abouts, looks for Packages, Sources and Contents files, and creates a directory names something like Packages.diff which in turn contains an Index file and a number of gzipped patches, named after the time they were created. The process for updating an existing Packages file is to look for the matching SHA1-History entry in the Index file, download the corresponding patch, apply that patch to your existing Packages file, and repeat until your Packages file matches the one you were looking for (which you can determine by looking at the checksum in either the Release or Index file). Anyway, tiffani’s been co-developed with Andreas Barth (aka Andi) after the following exchange back in November 2003 on the RM channel:

<aba> elmo: If I find some time to take a look at katies TODO-file, what would be most appreciated? Deleting udebs with melanie? “Right” handling of orig.tar.gz when jumping out of NEW / changing of the archive section? Something else?
<elmo> aba: the TODO list is a bit of a mess to be honest
<aba> elmo: So, what should I do if I want to help the ftp-masters with katie?
<elmo> aba: I wouldn’t necessarily do anything based off that unless it’s obviously correct/wanted. none of the really urgent stuff is even on there (e.g. testing-security changes)
<aba> elmo: If you tell me something urgent, I can put some time into it.
<aj> hrm, surely i have some wishlists
<aba> urgent wishlist? :)
<aj> actually, you could critique something for me if you’ve got half an hour free now?
<aba> “critique” means?
<elmo> tell him how crap his ideas are. as brutually as possible
<elmo> ;) … <aj> ooo!
<aj> aba: around?
<aj> aba: one useful thing you could work on that’s kinda katie related is implementing pdiffs into katie/apt-ftparchive/apt/whatever
<Kamion> aj: mvo’s been working on that over the last couple of days, see #128818 logs
<aj> apt side or katie side?
<Kamion> apt side
<aj> cool
<aj> aba: hacking up a katie-side implementation for that would probably be interesting, worthwhile and straightforward

(aj = me, aba = Andi, elmo = James Troup, Kamion = Colin Watson) That ended up with me finding an old script I made up called update.py (from Dec 2003 apparently) that did the core patch and Index generation, Andi updating that to some more sane pythonic style and making it work on an actual archive, then both of us cleaning it up so it would actually work sensibly without handholding. (For those playing along at home, the idea needing critiquing was trying to fix up dak’s idea of what should happen if a new version of a package is uploaded to stable or testing, when it hasn’t changed in unstable. At the time, dak would REJECT it, because it violated the requirement that you can’t downgrade packages between stable and testing or testing and unstable. That’s still somewhat broken, unfortunately) TTBOMK, Tiffani’s named after Tiffani Amber Thiessen, apparently of Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210 fame. I’m not sure who of aba or elmo is more to blame for that one, though I guess it is at least a little more distinctive than update…