About books:

• The book I think I’ve liked most, ever, is Los dominios del lobo, by Javier Mar as. I don’t think I’ve read any other novel twice.

• Between 1998 and 2003, I read a lot, but then I severely slowed down.

• 84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff, is a little wonder that everybody should read.

• Most of what I read is fiction, but none of it sci-fi.

• I find it amusing that I loved Co os, by Juan Manuel de Prada.

• On perspective, what it seemed like a lot of books, are truly very few.

• Steve Langasek may or may not dislike Carlota Fainberg, by Antonio Mu oz Molina.

• After the current Planet Debian meme/whatever (one abd zero, btw), I’ve resolved to take on reading again, but will most likely fail.

• I wish I would have been able to finish Las ideas puras, by Pablo d’Ors, and Un mundo exasperado, by J.A. Gonz lez Sainz.

• Strangely (?), I have a very strong preference for Spanish literature. The way e.g. Juan Manuel de Prada (El silencio del patinador, La tempestad) and Francisco Umbral (Las ninfas) make use of my mother tongue is obscenely close to perfection.

• Let’s mention one non-Spanish writer: Thomas Mann.

• Like with films, but unlike with music, I don’t like to make my list of read books publicly available.

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 ...

Here's the deal: I'm terribly bad at screaming, really. Yet, I often find I want to scream at somebody, and all I can do is raise my voice a little. A few minutes ago, on #debian-devel@OFTC, a rethorical question was put out:

<Yoe> Whee
<Yoe> Don't you just *love* C++

And that got me thinking: "Would I get screamed at, loudly, if I said yes?" I could record that, and replay them when I feel like screaming. Nothing beats the angry scream of a roomful of debian developers, I'd imagine. Unfortunately, a beating was all people could promise me. That doesn't worth the trouble, though. However, as it was said shortly after, it would be a nice project for some developer gathering. And from there things followed... and now, I have a plan set out! It's quite certain that I can't attend FOSDEM (or any other conference, unless it's held in hungary on a weekend); I'd like to record some screaming; I have worked with video software before... so, the conclusion reached on #debian-devel: I should get a setup together, where I can anger the audience from my own room, at a safe distance, and record the screaming I get in return. All this using and demoing free software. Sweet, ain't it? Now I just have to find some time to do the setup and test it. Looking forward to christmas, when I plan to have a few days off of work. The relevant parts of the IRC log are, of course, available.

Elvish

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong? Darn... I want to be a hobbit!

Yesterday was a very, very intense day, and I had lots of fun. Clint, sladen and I headed to Chinatown walking, with a few detours to be able to checkout Manhattan's skyline. The view from the other shore is awesome, even with the two towers missing. When I compare the current view with how it was four years ago, I understand how much the city has changed without them. They were so impressively big that I just can't picture them too well in my mind.

The skyline of South Manhattan We walked over the Brooklyn bridge, giving me other very cool views of Manhattan, while I hammered Clint with questions about this and that. I saw that since 9/11, you can't go past the Town Hall. "Security reasons", of course. I was very surprised to see police cars in every single street. It's like a Police State, and if you ask me, it didn't make me feel safer. After some walk, we finally got in Chinatown, which is the craziest place ever. People sell stuff on the sidewalks, and many streets are packed with people. We had to meet with mikah, biella, dilinger and his cat at some Chinese place for breakfast/lunch. The place, as Chinatown itself, was crazy. As soon as we sat down a few waitresses landed a few plates on the table, without asking or anything. A few minutes later I could see that the way they serve you is going around with carts with lost of food, and you either want it or not. We left dilinger at the metro station, and moved on to the SoHo. I wanted to go to the SoHo Apple Store to see if they knew about replacement Spanish keyboards for my Powerbook. My powerbook was bought in the US last year, so it has a US keyboard. This is mostly ok, but only mostly as it's missing a key. After SoHo, we went back to Chinatown to pick up bubbles. It was nice to see her after Debconf, and she made the effort to come just for a few hours even if she was ill and had lots to do in Philly. We headed to South Street Port, where I had a long chat about Cuba with micah while we sat on a bench looking at Brooklyn bridge. And then, we gathered all our braveness and headed to the heart of the beast, to the kernel of the system. We walked into the Financial District, and soon enough I was walking in Wall Street no less. If I breathed hard, I could smell the money. The road was paved in gold, and there were skyscrapers everywhere. I discovered the rulers of this world had opened a "public space" in JP Morgan's building. To their despair, probably, it had been taken over by the poor. I wonder what Bloomberg will do about it. As I walked up the street, a strange feeling in my heart grew and grew, until, behind a corner, I saw it. The source of all evil was ahead of me, guarded by George Washington himself.

The New York Stock exchange and it's black evil aura of Capitalism I was standing ahead of this building where so many people behave like bastards everyday, pushing millions to povery for a bit more profit margin. The doors were closed and surrounded by security officers, which despite being asked politely, didn't let us in for "security reasons". Next to it was the Church of Capitalism, at the end of the street. It's curious that such an old church still stands where it was build near the harbour probably a century ago, now surrounded by some of the most modern and tallest buildings in the planet. And then, we visited the bull, which I didn't know is the "friendly" symbol of how Capitalism works.

I had Capitalism by the balls We moved down to Battery Square, past the old US Customs building with the four statues representing the four continents. We saw the damaged sculpture which lived in the WTC, and sat down at the pier to watch a beautiful sunset over the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty seen from South Manhattan At that point, biella and micah had to meet some friends at one cinema to see the Wal-Mart documentary. We went to a funky place to have some tea, decided to go see Times Square and then walk to Central Park. At the time, mako was arriving to NYC on the Chinatown bus, so we agreed to meet in a restaurant to have lunch. Paul Sladen finally managed to get lost, after many tries during the day, and wasn't seen until we got back home. Mako and Mika waited for us at the door of an... ethiopian restaurant in the SoHo, despite Mako knows I can't stand spicy food. But in the end it wasn't so bad, I just needed a few more glasses of water than average. And I finally got to know mika, after lots of time of chatting over IRC. Greg, SPI's lawyer, also appeared, and was a nice addition to the group. Mako knew where to take us after that. The Belgian bar was packed, but there was a private party in one of the spaces and we took over some of that space. After a few rounds, we were ready to leave the pub and go for Falafel and some tea. I was terribly falling asleep though, so instead of tea we took a cap back to Brooklyn, where we found Paul waiting at the door. After an hour of inflating a mattress, we were ready for sleep, at 4AM. It didn't look like the morning after would be very productive...

Went to see 'Billy and me' on Friday at the CSO. A celebration of Billy Holiday, directed by Terri Lyne Carrington and performed by five fine vocalists: Rita Coolidge, Niki Haris, Joan Osborne, Dianne Reeves and Rokia Traore. A little multimedia-ish with a few short readings, photos and film segments. This part didn't flow all that well as the 'acting MC', Rita Coolidge, completely bombed that part. On the other hand, the vocal performances were all outstanding. We went as we wanted to see Dianne Reeves another time after a truly breathtaking last concert a few years ago, and she did not disappoint. However, the others vocalists were very fine too, and I should check out some of their recordings. Musical arrangements, and performances, were really good. Some pieces were a little 'funked up', in particular I'll be seeing you in a world-music alike flavour with really nice horns (Rob Smith, tp and ts; Tineke Postma, ts and ss) and rhythm section (Paul Bollenback, g; Mitchel Forman, kb; James Genus, b; Munyungo Jacksone, pc) and everything driven by Terri Lyne Carrington at the drums. All in all a very nice concert.

So, I’ve recently switched to Mutt for mail-reading purposes, and aside from it taking a motherload of all time to get all the necessary parts setup and configured properly having never done it before, I am so far extremely happy. It looks like it’s going to be a huge timesaver overall once I have everything tweaked to my liking. Yay for Erinn giving me her super muttrc file which was incredibly helpful and neato. (Though I’m still tweaking the display colours in it: I agree, helix, I don’t like yours. :-p) All I need to do now is get my spam filtering setup in both procmail and the necessary hooks in Mutt, and add a few macros of my own. (And finish fleshing out my aliases.) Oh, and I need to fix some of my procmail rules, probably to sort by List-Id instead of ^TO, because I believe many of these lists are using bcc or something which breaks my list filtering. I haven’t looked at it too much yet. One of my friends gave me lots of digital pictures from various things: Home-brewed Halloween fun: I was traumatized that I forgot my cross at home. I also apologize for any trauma caused by this picture. (Yes, all three of us are indeed girls.) Edit: added in proper image thumbnail to not be evil.

David Berlind: “[P]icture a world where, instead of carrying a notebook computer with you everywhere you go, and instead of having power-drinking desktops in every corner of your house, all you have is a USB key that you take from one dirt cheap thin client to another. On that key is not just all of your personal data (that is stored in the cloud but replicated to your USB key for offline usage), but perhaps a small Web server and some applications, both of which are thin-client friendly.” I’m in complete agreement that the thin client/web application computing model is the wave of the future, and that the days of the fat client as the primary mechanism for monetizing software are numbered. However, I don’t buy into the notion that software-as-a-service displaces the traditional fat client entirely, for one very simple reason: It’s going to be a while yet before we have truly ubiquitous network connectivity. Sure, perhaps if you live in the San Francisco Bay area or in a similarly technology centric place, it’s easy to buy into the notion that it won’t be long before we’ll all be connected all the time. However, we can’t lose sight of the fact that a vast majority of the population doesn’t live in a world where technology billboards dominate the morning commute. Heck, my cell phone doesn’t even work when I visit my grandfather in rural Indiana—the notion of an omnipresent wifi fabric built from community hotspots is a long way off there, to put it mildly. And even when we do get to the day when we have ubiquitous connectivity, we’ll still want caching for optimization and replication to eliminate the single point of failure problem, not to mention the ability to retain control over our own digital lives. So, I view the thin vs. fat client juxtaposition as being not so much about user experience—AJAX has shown us that remarkably good user interfaces can be built on the web. It’ll be more about caching and data replication, two very important considerations in any distributed system. I think most people are missing that. David, as usual, appears to get it. My prediction: Applications will increasingly move to the web, so you’ll be able to get to your data anytime, anywhere, and from any connected device. No surprise there. But the majority of the time, when you’re using “your” client device (whether it’s a PC in your home or office or a handheld device or something that lives on a USB key and securely attaches to the network via some device that’s outside of your administrative control), you’ll still primarily interact with the web through a fat client of some sort. To be sure, the fat clients of the future will look a lot different from the fat clients of today. Hint: “Fat client” doesn’t have to mean “self-administered”. Perhaps the fat clients of the future are delivered on demand or via independently developed components that integrate into some larger framework. Perhaps it’s as simple as running a web server locally. But the fat client in whatever form will still be the primary interface the vast majority of the time. That’s why I don’t buy for a minute that Web 2.0 is yet another death knell for Microsoft. They’ve obviously got a great fat client story, and in case you haven’t noticed, they’ve just woken up to what’s going on around them. By the way, this is the area where I think Linux on the desktop could have the biggest impact—it won’t be about who has the better desktop or who can replicate the popular fat client applications of today in open source. It’ll be about who can mold Linux into the fat client framework of the future, seamlessly integrated with applications and services delivered via the web but open. If I were Microsoft’s competitors in this space, namely Google and Yahoo, I’d be spending a lot of time thinking about this. In today’s fat client world, Microsoft is between them and their customers more often than not, and if the past is any indication, they’ll be able to use this position to tremendous advantage.

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.

Finally, I can drop freepascal. It turned out to be far more effective to rewrite things in c++ (like, do a module in a day, while I've been fighting freepascal for a week, before I worked around all quirks and bugs). Maybe life does not suck that much, after all...

This is by far the most stressful long period I can remember in my life. I was quite in control of things approximately until around June. Since then, things have been falling over me in a quick and heavy sucession - First of all, being co-organizer at Debconf was quite hard. I had run conferences before, but nothing ever like this - And, I should add, I never had a German boss running the show. [friend="Stockholm"], as a project leader, you really rule... But whoever works with you should be warned: It is not easy.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 2: It's easier to be the coordinator (remember I was officially the Tyrant for three years at CONSOL? :) ) than to be in the immediately subordinate team.
Back home, I expected the regular post-vacation rush, so having a hard August -trying to make everything on time- was expectable and OK. I don't remember exactly what projects was I in during August/September (I remember some minor stuff, but I think adding it all together was the mistake). There is one thing I did, though: Accepting way too many invitations as a speaker, at least one every two weeks. And, as many of you know, you cannot just travel somewhere and keep working - When I am at a conference, I want to get to talk with the people there, I want to know what are they interested in (why they invited me in the first place), and make friends with them. But this time it was (as it happens every year - Why are most conferences stuck together September-November?) just way too much.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 2: Be careful on what you accept. It's easy saying "yes" to a conference. It's hard keeping sanity afterwards.
Ok... I have been going places. For example, two weeks ago I was to San Luis Potos . Instead of staying there for two days, I left my office at 7PM, took the metro to the bus station, got the bus at 9PM, arrived at 2AM, went to my hotel, woke up at 7:30AM, had breakfast, coded for ~1hr, went to the conference theater, delivered my talk at 11AM, went for a quick lunch (which became a takeaway order) at 1:15PM, got on my bus at 2PM, arrived back in Mexico City at 7PM, got to a (fucking long) meeting at 8PM, left the meeting at 12AM, and finally got back home at 1AM. Fun, huh?
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 3: Yes, it's fun to travel. It is much more fun to travel when you actually get to know the place!
...And pressure has not given way. As soon as I finish with one project, there is another one demanding my attention right away. October has been more than hectic. I had to cancel two invitations (on which I was to go to two cities each time) I was quite looking forward to, in Peru - I am very sorry, friends at Lima, Moquegua, Tacna and Arequipa... But I won't make it there this year. I am specially frustrated by not being able to make it to Concladeb in Arequipa - I really want to see DebianPeru/DebianArequipa's good work! And I am specially sorry on canceling today my trip to Moquegua, after they had already booked (and paid) for the tickets... It seems the money will not be lost after all, but I was such a pain in the ass for them, it is not fair I am cancelling... But anyway.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 4: Remember to learn from past experiences - It feels incredibly as a deja-vu from last year.
I hope I am not spoiling any surprises: Today, instead of blogging, I am supposed to be setting up the Comas server for Debconf6. Even with all of my worries, yes, I am still determined to be the man behind the show for Debconf. It will be in Oaxtepec, don't worry, and it will be a huge success. So let me finish this post quick, and it will be sooner you can register for it ;-) There are still too many points to work on Comas, though. I am setting up a tweaked version, against my will, but with the commitment to fix it transparently and soon. Oh... Yes, and I still have to coordinate with the locals here, as it's taking forever for us to open the fscking bank account so we can start receiving funds and paying money. Did I mention Debconf would be in Mexico? Ok, I will do my best not to make lateness the norm.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 5: Try not to bore your audience with too many details. Remember you have to work, and somebody might complain you lose too much time blogging!
But before I leave you alone: You might ask why do I mention the addiction in my post title... Well, because I have started treating my main addiction. It is really not easy, and I don't ever want to know what is it like to have a chemical addiction, like people who abuse drugs. If you have seen me face to face, it should be obvious: I have a very strong addiction to food. For one month already, I have been as conscious as I can every time I open my mouth - And, yes, it was not just three times a day. I have made some advances (sorry, I cannot really measure it, as home scales make it only to 120kg). Today is a big day for me: I was admitted in a pilot obesity control follow-up treatment at my University's sports health direction. I am very happy about this, as I do need mentoring and hand-holding. This is a seriously difficult process to follow, and I really hope to carry it thoroughly. Fortunately, my health has been perfect until now - But I cannot abuse myself forever.

All-Around Awesome You have: 77% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 77% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored well above average on emotional intuition and well above average on scientific intuition. (Weirdly, your emotional and scientific intuitions are equally strong.) Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you're good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences. Try my other test! The 3 Variable Funny Test It rules.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 80% on Scientific You scored higher than 82% on Interpersonal

Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Nice one, Mike! I would have liked to end up being more humane, though ;-)



  
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
  

Much More Scientific        You have: 77% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 47% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored about average on emotional intuition and well above average on scientific intuition.Keep in mind that very few people score high on both! In effect, you can compare your two intuition scores with each other to learn what kind of intuition you're best at. Your scientific intuition is stronger than your emotional intuition. Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you're good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences. Try my other test! The 3 Variable  Funny Test It rules.

  

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 80% on Scientific You scored higher than 7% on Interpersonal

Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Very Well-Rounded You have: 62% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 62% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored above average on emotional intuition and above average on scientific intuition. (Weirdly, your emotional and scientific intuitions are equally strong.) Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you’re good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences. Try my other test! The 3 Variable Funny Test It rules.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 30% on Scientific You scored higher than 36% on Interpersonal

Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Yesterday evening, as I took the train home from work (during peak hours, for a change), someone (by the books he was carrying and the clothing he was wearing, obviously a student) came to sit next to me. I was hacking on NBD at that time, trying to add config file support (the first item in the roadmap for 2.9; more on that probably "soon"). As he moves to sit down, I notice the cover of one of his books. Which is that of the best computer-related book ever. No, really. I have the third edition of that book, really need to buy the fourth some day. Anyway. As I see that cover, I ask that guy whether it's the fourth, and make a remark about how truly good the book is. To which he answers with "yeah, and that's a truly good laptop, too". Turns out he actually meant the operating system, rather than the hardware (which I thought at first). Well, I didn't see that one coming :-)

Life sucks. That's all. On a side note, I think I will close this weblog of mine, among other things.

I finally found some time to devote to hacking on the DG834G. Given that it seems the bootloader checksums almost the entire flash on each boot a writeable flash file system doesn't seem to be an easy option. This rules out vanilla OpenWRT unfortunately, which is a shame given the AR7Port. However as I'm familiar with OpenEmbedded (which seems to be non working at present, but is behind OpenZaurus which I run on my C3000) I decided to have a look at getting that going. So now I have an image that boots, creates a ramfs for /, pivotroots the flash round to /media/realroot, creates a bunch of symlinks and should give me a basic filesystem to play with. Except it's not very happy, producing INIT: PANIC: segmentation violation! sleeping for 30 seconds. messages. Booting to just /bin/sh works fine, but various things won't run. I'm currently blaming this on the fact I haven't changed the default Netgear kernel from 2.4.17, so the next course of action is probably to use an OpenWRT based kernel and see how that goes.

Science magazine (by way of Boing Boing) reports that "20 percent of human genes have been patented in the United States". As the Boing Boing article's title says, "20% of your genes are belong to them". So, it seems to me, that there are two reasonable courses of action:

1. Attempt to get the USPTO to accept a claim of prior art, since you've been doing this gene thing for quite a bit longer than whoever filed the patent. This is probably doomed to failure, since the USPTO appears to be collectively sticking it's fingers in it's ears and singing "Mary had a little (cloned) lamb" any time anyone mentions such inconveniences as "prior art", "obviousness", or any of those other pesky impediments to granting a patent.
2. Apply for a licence from the rightful (hah!) holder of the patent, to duplicate, use, and distribute (well, for some of us) the patented "technology". To be helpful, when you send your letter requesting a patent licence, you should also include a list of the names, addresses, and home telephone numbers of people in your local area who you honestly believe to also be infringing on the patent.

I wonder what the effect of a patent holder not responding to your request for a patent licence would be? In a fair world, I would expect the patent holder's ability to later enforce the patent (at least against you) would be diminished -- but in a fair world, this particular blog post wouldn't be written. So, what happens if the patent holder denies you a licence to use their patent? Well, I would imagine you must cease and desist from any use, reproduction, or distribution of the patented technology. I can see the headlines now: "$PHARMECEUTICAL_COMPANY demanded that I kill myself". Maybe a few people who would prefer the eternal sleep could do it, just to make the point. But even without that, the effect of a few thousand licence requests (received with local phone books attached) should be appropriately entertaining to watch. This whole "patenting the human genome" thing almost makes me want the whole "Intelligent Design" thing to come out in favour of the Christian Fundies. If courts were to rule that there is a reasonable belief that God (or some other convenient Deity) did in fact design us noisy bipeds, then that would, surely, count as a fairly obvious prior art claim. For that matter, what if these drug companies are infringing on a celestial patent on the human genome? An omnipotent being capable of changing the heavens and the earth isn't someone whose patents I'd want to infringe.