I have been in the beautifully dramatic city of San Francisco for a few days now to catch up with old friends, meet new ones, and present at the AAA meetings, probably the single largest gathering of anthropologists on Planet Earth. I love seeing the friends, I love going to (some) of the panels, but I (totally) loathe trying to say something of substance in 15 minutes. A lot of my work in mired in esoterica (legally, technically, and culturally) and I am giving my short talk on protests against Scientology, the Lulz, etc. etc. and well, if you are in the know, I think I can pull it off in 15 minutes. If you are not in the know, it may strike as completely odd, esoteric, opaque but at least I can say I did it for the Lulz

I have been in the beautifully dramatic city of San Francisco for a few days now to catch up with old friends, meet new ones, and present at the AAA meetings, probably the single largest gathering of anthropologists on Planet Earth. I love seeing the friends, I love going to (some) of the panels, but I (totally) loathe trying to say something of substance in 15 minutes. A lot of my work in mired in esoterica (legally, technically, and culturally) and I am giving my short talk on protests against Scientology, the Lulz, etc. etc. and well, if you are in the know, I think I can pull it off in 15 minutes. If you are not in the know, it may strike as completely odd, esoteric, opaque but at least I can say I did it for the Lulz

On turning forty, some buy a Ferrari: I got a Brompton bike. A bit more practical (have you seen Galway's roads?), but still fun. I've spent a fair bit abroad this year (ten weeks away on various conferences and working weeks, not including numerous visits to Dublin), lamenting the easy transport while i'm visiting some nice cities. So, the Brompton. I got the S2L model, the lighest 'standard' model, and the Brompton bag for carrying it aboard planes. I also got the lighter cover and saddle bag, but that has not been as useful as I thought it would be for travelling by train. The Brompton bag, at 2.4 Kg is recommended for planes; its 5 mm padded nylon, quite study (and you can pack socks, etc around the bike, allowing a little extra carrying).

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Tags cycling, travel, brompton

Last spring, I posted If Version Contol Systems Were Airlines, which I really enjoyed. Now, because I seem to have a desire to take a good joke way too far, it’s time for: IF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES WERE CHRISTMAS CAROLS I apologize in advance. (Feel free to add your own verses/carols in the comments.) Away in a Pointer (C) (to Away in a Manger) Away in a pointer, the bits in a row.
A little dereference to see where they go.
I look down upon thee, and what do I see?
A segfault and core dump, right there just for me. I saw thy init there, a reaping away
My process, from its address space, so sorry to say.
I thought I had saved thee, from void pointers all,
But maybe I missed one, and doomed you to fall. Be near me, debugger, I ask thee to stay
Close by my terminal, and help me, I pray;
To find all the bugs and the void pointers too,
And if my kernel oopses, help me reboot for you. Joy to the Wall (Perl) (to Joy to the World) Joy to the Wall, the Perl is come!
Let awk receive her King;
Let every grep prepare him room,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash, and bash, and sed shall sing. Joy to the keyboard, we’ll use it all!
Let men, shift keys, employ;
Implicit variables, and globals never fall.
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat, repeat, the line noise now. Perl rules the world with truth and ASCII,
And makes the doctors prove
The glories of carpal tunnel hands,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it, and we do it, more than one way. Hark! The Herald Coders Sing (Haskell) (to Hark! The Herald Angels Sing) Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive King;
Recursion and patterns wild,
Pure and IO — they’re reconciled!”
Joyful, all ye functions rise,
Join the typeclasses of the types,
With recursion, do proclaim,
“Laziness is born in this domain.” Refrain
Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive king!” Monads, by highest Heav’n adored;
Monads, their depths still unexplored;
Late in time, behold they’re good,
Never once were understood.
Veiled in functions, the Monads stay,
Used for IO, and more, each day,
With excitement, Monads say,
“Arrows are stranger, so with us stay.” (Refrain) Hail the glorious compiler of Glasgow!
Hail the threaded run-time system!
Join the beautiful Cabal of Hackage,
Upload there thy perfect package.
We know best, what we will Handle,
You’re safe with us: no pointers, no vandals.
Born to make your exceptions throw,
Unless you unsafePerformIO. (Refrain) Lispy the Paren (to Frosty the Snowman) Lispy the paren was a jolly happy soul,
With a lot of cars and a little cons
And two ends made out of curves.
Lispy the paren is a fairy tale, they say,
He was just common, but the children know
how he came to life one day.
There must have been some magic in that
Old Symbolics they found.
For when they placed him on its disk,
It recursed around and ’round. O, Lispy the paren,
Was recursive as can be.
And the coders say it would take a day
To put his parens away.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Look at Lispy go.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Consing on the car. Lispy the snowman knew
The keyboard was hot the day,
So he said, “Let’s cons and we’ll have some fun
now before they Scheme away.”
Down to the function,
With a list there in his RAM,
Running here and there,
all around the LAN, saying
“cdr me if you can.”
He led them down the streets of disk
Right to the traffic bus.
And only paused a moment when
He heard them holler (quit). Oh BASIC Night (to O Holy Night) Oh BASIC night, the LEDs are brightly glinting;
It is the night of the dear GOSUB’s birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error printing,
Till you appeared and the RAM felt its worth.
Shiver of fear, line numbers do inspire,
For yonder breaks a mostly harmless GOTO.
Fall on your bits, O hear the Visual voices!
O BASIC divine, O BASIC where GOTO was born!
O BASIC, O Holy BASIC, O BASIC, you’re mine! Some want to say, “GOTO is harmful always,”
But what of them, in their post-modern world.
We PRINT the truth, in the line-numbered goodness,
But Dijkstra appeared, and the faith, it was lost.
A thrill of hope, when .NET BASIC announces,
But Visual BASIC, what kind of thing are you?
Fall on your GUI, O see the old line numbers!
Behold BASICA, O BASIC when DOS was born!
O numbers, O lines, spaghetti divine! Guido We Have Heard on High (Python) (to Angels We Have Heard on High) Guido we have hard on high
Sweetly indenting o’re the code,
And the functions in reply
Their exceptions sweetly flowed. Refrain Indent….. in your whitespace careful!
Indent…… in your whitespace careful! Spaces, why this jubilee?
Why semicolons have you so wronged?
What backslashes must we use
If we want our lines so long? (Refrain) Come to Guido here to see
“One Right Way” is good, of course.
There’s no need for Perl, you know,
We have to be more verbose. (Refrain) Now the PEP will show the way
To the future, we shall see.
Banish lambda and the rest
Of the things we liked the best. (Refrain)

EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) by David Cope changed my mind on the state of computer music generation software. I had come across numerous "music generation" programs, but it would have been a long stretch to call their results "music". They would produce, at best, strange patterns of beeps. I had heard of a live "jazz improvisation gig partner" machine (probably this one), but EMI is on a completely different level just listen to the MP3 samples. Sure, in the end it is mostly splicing and rehashing of existing pieces, but Cope claims that in blind tests even experienced listeners would sometimes confuse an original piece by a composer and a composition by EMI. In other words, EMI passed the equivalent of a Turing test for music generation software. If that is not impressive, I do not know what is. Unfortunately David Cope's site is skimpy on the details of how EMI works, even though there is an extensive bibliography (note the time span: 20 years!). At least some information can be gathered from the webpages of his numerous books.

So I've bitten the bullet and ordered an ASUS Eee PC 901 W006 from Amazon. This has 1Gb of memory, 20Gb of solid-state storage, and is preloaded with Linux. All being well it will arrive tomorrow, and then I can try installing Lenny upon it. From the Debian Wiki it seems to be a painless process. I guess we'll see.. ObFilm: Twelve Monkeys

This might be a good message to write in Spanish... But then again, a long time ago I decided this is an English-posting site. So be it, I'll only have to give more background information.
This day marks the date when, 98 years ago, Francisco I. Madero started the Mexican Revolution - About a decade of unrest, civil war and ideologies. The revolution is what created the violent, uncivil image of the Mexican, which accompanied us for long years in many foreigners' minds. The revolution brought to an end 30 years of a single-man rule, the Porfiriato. But that's only the major symptom - The Revolution had many, many other consequences. About one million (out of a 10 million population) people died. There was a very significative rearrangement of the society, a rearrangement that took about half a century to settle. But I won't write more background - You can always ask the wikipedia about our Revolution.
The reason I am posting this is that, as it usually happens in this time of year, several so-called analysts in the media have started asking, was the Revolution really worth it? Did it change anything at all? Did the Revolution in the end win, or was it defeated from within? Should we still celebrate it?
And there are, yes, reasons to doubt it. Renato Leduc, at the same time a great journalist and a delicious poet, says it as many - while at the same time, as nobody else: Tiempos en que era Dios omnipotente / y el se or Don Porfirio presidente / Tiempos, ay! tan iguales al presente, or ya se est n muriendo todos / Jes s qu desilusi n...! / se est volviendo gobierno / Ay dios...! La revoluci n.
Anyway... Our media overlords insist on us forgetting the struggles and the real changes that came from them, on rewriting the history... Probably they will push us later on to have the cristeros as the real fathers of the Nation?
Even if so many bits of reality didn't change after Porfirio Diaz's regime fell in 1910, I find it insulting to think that even 70 years of PRI -with very sharp differences between periods, with huge differences between the PRI-born governments- are comparable to 30 years of a one-man rule; even with brutal repressions such as the dirty war against so many subversive movements in the 50s-80s (as officially There Was No Armed Struggle Anymore, just some pesky communist subversives), it cannot be compared to the Porfirian Peace (ask Cananea and R o Blanco). Today we might have a shameful concentration of money and power in very few hands (including the world's richest man), but it certainly does not reach the point of 1910 where most of the Mexican soil was owned by less than 30 families, with latifundios as big as many states...
Anyway - So far, nothing new - just bits I heard here and there, and my reactions to them. But this morning, around 8:25, I tuned in to Noticias IMER, the news program of one of the few public, non-gubernamental, independent radio stations. An interview was under way, but I could not get the interviewed person's name (I guess, a historian - will write to ask for his data). His comments were very interesting, and very worth echoing. I'll try not to distort him.
The Revolution started off very organized, and with a very simple goal: Get Porfirio Diaz out, and call for real federal elections. Sufragio efectivo, no reelecci n. Of course, the fight was very short, and Madero became the president, with an overwhelming majority. Of course, also, the reactionary sectors set up a coup and killed Madero. Victoriano Huerta seized the power - and that's where the real revolution really began. Groups all over the country (some of which were at unrest since Madero, as they were not seeing the changes they needed - changes that would bring an end to the huge class differences and disrespect to the native Mexican population) rose in arms, and forced Huerta into exile. Then, they battled each other for many more years. It became known as la bola - When somebody joined the revolutionary forces, people said he went to fight with the crowd. But, inside the crowd, there were very different points of view. No, Carranza, Villa and Zapata (the foremost leaders in the hardest part of the fight) were not power-hungry barbarians - much to the contrary. They had very full, very complex views of the problem and possible solutions. I won't delve much into them, also, as I'm not an expert...
Villa and Zapata had the most compatible approaches, seeking an aggresive land redistribution, a communal property system (closest to most of the indigenous population's roots, what we would now call usos y costumbres). For the government, both favored going towards a Europe-like parliamentary system, where the parliament were the real force, and the president (or prime minister or whatever) would only be the designated person to implement the parliament's decision. Both Villa and Zapata feared the evil stemming from the unlimited power that the Presidential Chair symbolized (Fui soldado de Francisco Villa / de aquel hombre de fama mundial, / que aunque estuvo sentado en la silla / no envidiaba la presidencial). They met at the Aguascalientes convention, and were quite close to each other - but were defeated by the superior Venustiano Carranza (Constitucionalista) army.
Carranza, although vilified for his corruption (nowadays, carrancear is still a synonim for stealing), had an opposite view - also originating from a very deep analysis. Carranza saw that what brought down Madero was, in the end, the lack of power of the President to rule the country without support from the legislative power. So, he pushed a political program making the President the strongest man in Mexico. He and his people wrote and passed the 1917 Constitution, valid today. This constitution goes to great lengths pushing revolutionary ideals - Land and wealth redistribution, universal and free education, keeps a complete separation between state and church, ensures state control over strategic areas... The 1917 constitution is one of our history's greatest achievements.
But, of course, it is not perfect - it paved the way for a hegemonic party controlling the real power behind it all. PRI started as a very heterogeneous mixture of the whole revolutionary family, but slowly became a bureaucratic, stagnated monolith.
And in a somehow ironic twist of destiny, the forces that today push for deepest changes, and precisely in the same direction that Villa and Zapata wished, are... Ej rcito Zapatista de Liberaci n Nacional (EZLN) and Frente Popular Francisco Villa (FPFV). EZLN is far more successful and advanced in its social experiment. Again, I won't comment further in what I don't really understand.
As a last point, the commenter I'm quoting (and whose name I must get, to update this post!), said that practically in every country that has transited from any sort of dictatorship towards a more-or-less believable democracy (say, everywhere in South America, or Spain, or Eastern Europe, or...), one of the first steps has been to update or replace the constitution with a new one, preventing the mistakes overlooked by the previous one from being reinstated. In our country, we have long heard about the "Reforma del Estado", a very nice-sounding-term which nobody believes in. After the 2006 electoral mess (no matter who won in the end, everybody will agree it was a mess that should be prevented from happening again, we had high hopes of real changes being introduced. A parliamentary, or at least semi-presidentialist regime was strongly suggested as a way forward. Changing the electoral system towards having second-rounds if needed. _anything!_ But no, we were stuck with... The same as always.
So, did the Revolution win or lose? It is clear to me. It won, and it really shaped -for better- what would happen in the next 100 years. However, in a century, we have been able to twist the law to make it turn against itself. I have to agree with my EZLN-minded friends (I sympathize with EZLN's general goals, but don't think its way forward is the right way to go): Pushing the change from within the government is just wishful thinking, but a strong delusion. However, is there a way to push our country forward without repeating a violent cycle? I really hope so. Our current situation is simply pathetic.
I lack a good closing for this post... So I'll let good old Jefe Pluma Blanca, Renato Leduc, do it for me.
Tiempos de Pancho Villa
y de la guerra de mentadas y tiros en la sierra.
Tiempos de fe
no en Dios sino en la tierra Por el cerro de la Pila
fueron entrando a Torre n
mi general Pancho Villa
y atr s la revoluci n...
Ay jijos...! ya se nos hizo
cu nto diablo bigot n... Ya viene Toribio Ortega
subiendo y bajando cerros
y no te enredes ni enga es
que ah anda Pablito Se ez
haciendo ladrar los perros. Cu nto usurero barb n...!
Ay jijos... c mo les vuela
de la levita el fald n...!
Ay jijos... ya se nos hizo:
triunf la revoluci n...! Tenemos camino andado...
No hay que juntarse con rotos
siempre te juegan traici n
ya Madero est vengado
ya muri la usurpaci n. En su caballo retinto
lleg Emiliano Zapata
bonita su silla charra
y sus botones de plata
pero mucho m s bonito
su famoso Plan de Ayala... Este gallo es de navaja
y no es gallo de espol n
si quieres tierra trabaja
trabaja no seas huev n... Ya lleg don Venustiano
con sus anteojos oscuros
y Villa y Zapata gritan:
No s que tengo en los ojos...
porque ya en Pablo Gonz lez
se vislumbra la traici n
Ay reata no te revientes
que es el ltimo jal n...! ya se est n muriendo todos
Jes s qu desilusi n...!
se est volviendo gobierno
Ay dios...! La revoluci n.

--3177-- VALGRIND INTERNAL ERROR: Valgrind received a signal 11 (SIGSEGV) - exiting
--3177-- si_code=80;  Faulting address: 0x0;  sp: 0x402A9FD40
valgrind: the 'impossible' happened:
   Killed by fatal signal
   ==3177==    at 0x3801FDEA: unlinkBlock (m_mallocfree.c:190)
   ==3177==    by 0x38020CAE: vgPlain_arena_malloc (m_mallocfree.c:1055)
   ==3177==    by 0x38035516: vgPlain_cli_malloc (replacemalloc_core.c:101)
   ==3177==    by 0x380022F5: vgMemCheck_malloc (mc_malloc_wrappers.c:182)
   ==3177==    by 0x38035BA7: do_client_request (scheduler.c:1158)
   ==3177==    by 0x380372B1: vgPlain_scheduler (scheduler.c:869)
   ==3177==    by 0x38051B59: run_a_thread_NORETURN (syswrap-linux.c:87)

This code has already killed one debugger (Intel DB) and sent strace into an infinite loop of segfaults. <Sigh />. Tags debugging, programming, impossible

Just as life was getting frantically busy, and as catdynamics predicted, Hubble is back open for business with a Supplemental Call for Observing Proposals. So an idea I bounced off my supervisor has rebounded with a deadline attached. Fun predicted. Tags astronomy, phd, hubble

Some time ago I spoke to Craig Keating about his plans for a new secondary school in the center of Melbourne. His plan was to focus on the core academic areas and cater to academically gifted students. He had some interesting ideas for his business, one of which was to pay teachers rates that are typical for private schools (higher rates than government schools) but not have any sport programs in the evenings or weekends (private schools typically require teachers to work every Saturday and one evening every week in coaching a sport). This would therefore give an hourly pay rate that was significantly higher than most private schools offered and would thus allow recruiting some of the most skilled teachers. One of his ideas was to intentionally keep the school small so that every teacher could know every student. One of the problems with most schools is that they take no feedback from the students. It seems that this serious deficiency would be largely addressed if the teachers knew the students and talked to them. He pointed out that in the history of our school system (which largely derived from the UK system) the private schools had a lot of sporting activities as a way of filling time for boarding students, given that few schools accept boarders (and those that do have only a small portion of the students boarding) the sports are just a distraction from study. This is not to say that sports are inherently bad or should be avoided. He encouraged parents to take their children to sporting activities that suit the interests of the child and the beliefs of the parents instead of having the child be drafted into a school sport and the parents being forced to take an unwilling child to sporting activities that they detest (which I believe is a common school experience). My own observation of school sport is that it is the epicentre of school bullying. There is an inherent risk of getting hurt when engaging in a sport. Some children get hurt every lesson, an intelligent person who ran a school with an intensive sports program might statistically analyse the injuries incurred and look for patterns. Children who are not good at sport are targeted for attack, for example when I was in year 7 (the first year of high school) one of my friends was assigned to the “cork bobbing” team in the swimming contest - this involved a contest to collect corks floating in the toddler pool for the students who were really bad at swimming. At that moment I knew that my friend would leave the school as the teachers had set him up for more intensive bullying than he could handle. Yet somehow the government still seems to believe that school sports are good! This is not to say that physical activity is bad, the PE 4 Life program [1] (which is given a positive review in the movie Supersize Me [2]) seems useful. It has a focus on fitness for everyone rather than pointless competition for the most skilled. I have just seen a sad announcement on the Keating College web site [3] that they will not be opening next year (and probably not opening at all). The Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VCRA) announced in November that the application to be registered as a school (which was submitted in March) was rejected. The first reason for the rejection was the lack of facilities for teaching woodwork and metalwork. As the VCRA apparently has no problems registering girls’ schools that don’t teach hard maths (a teacher at one such school told me that not enough girls wanted to study maths) it seems unreasonable to deny registration to a school that doesn’t teach some crafts subjects and caters to students who aren’t interested in those areas. The second reason was the lack of facilities for sport and PE. Given the number of gyms in the city area it seems most likely that if specific objections were provided eight months earlier then something could have been easily arranged to cover the health and fitness issues. When I spoke to Craig he had specific plans for using the city baths, gyms, and parks for sporting activities, I expect that most parents who aren’t sports fanatics would find that his plans for PE were quite acceptable. The third reason is the claim that 600 square meters of office space is only enough to teach one class of 24 students. That would mean that 25 square meters is needed for each student! I wonder if students are expected to bring their own binoculars to see the teacher or whether the school is expected to provide them. :-# The government has a list of schools that work with the Australian Institute of Sport [4]. These schools provide additional flexibility in studies for athletes and probably some other benefits that aren’t mentioned in the brief web page. I don’t object to such special facilities being made available for the small number of students who might end up representing Australia in the Olympics at some future time. But I think that a greater benefit could be provided to a greater number of students if there were a number of schools opened to focus on the needs of students who are academically gifted. This doesn’t require that the government spend any money (they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the AIS), merely that they not oppose schools that want to focus on teaching. Currently the government is trying to force Internet censorship upon us with the claim that it will “protect children” [5]. It seems obvious to me that encouraging the establishment of schools such as Keating College will protect children from bullying (which is a very real threat and is the direct cause of some suicides). While so far no-one has shown any evidence that censoring the net will protect any child.

• [1] http://www.pe4life.org/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2006/09/22/supersize-me/


• [3] http://www.keatingcollege.com.au/


• [4] https://secure.ausport.gov.au/asc_internet/ais/scholarships/ais_athlete_career_and_education/ais_ace_-_what_we_do/educational_guidance


• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/11/18/other-reasons-for-not-censoring/

Those infamous Somali pirates have hijacked an oil supertanker A Saudi oil supertanker at that. Carrying $100 million worth of oil, which I believe was headed for the US. They've also got the Ukrainian ship full of tanks and what-not, which apparently pissed off the Russians. I predict that real soon there's going to be serious action in that part of the world...

I have been using Serendipity on my blog for some time now. Overall, I’ve been pleased with it, but the conversion was a pain. Serendipity is a simple blog engine, and has a wonderful built-in plugin system. It can detect what plugins need upgrading, and install those upgrades, all from directly within the management interface. There’s no unzipping stuff in install directories as with WordPress.

On the other hand, Serendipity has had some long-standing issues. #1 in the list is spam protection. I’ve been using the Captha system, but as some others have commented on here periodically, it can be a hassle for legitimate humans. The Serendipity implementation in particular, I mean. Another issue was with the plugins themselves. Because the software does updates itself, and plugins tend to write things in the install directory, your Serendipity install directory has to be writable by the webserver. Morever, it is difficult to keep track of local changes — forcing me to use git on the tree, and even then, it’s difficult. Finally, there has been some long-standing weirdness with the RSS feeds. I switched to WordPress over the weekend. It doesn’t solve everything, but it is a nice improvement. It has a ton of themes available, though many of them are not as high-quality as the themes in Serendipity, and it is hard to pick out the good ones quickly. WordPress has a larger development community and seems to be getting new features and improvements at a more rapid rate than Serendipity. I particularly like how it automatically saves drafts as I’m typing. That is a wonderful feature. I can’t tell how many draft posts I’ve lost by accidentally clicking on the wrong thing. Serendipity has a ton of plugins as well. I looked for Twitter plugins today. There are maybe a dozen of them. But there is no central tracking of them, so I have no idea which ones might be nicely peer-reviewed and which ones might rm -rf / on my server. Also, I don’t know which ones are going to be supported and upgraded over time. I’m happy with the way most WordPress themes work nicely with widgets. Though I am baffled that some WP themes hard-code in things like the calendar or archives when they could just let people insert a widget for it. The Conversion Process This was a real pain. I started with a Serendipity to WordPress converter. But alas, it only supports Serendipity databases in MySQL and mine’s in PostgreSQL. I used SQuirreL SQL with the DBCopy plugin to convert it. This worked… sorta. A few tables didn’t convert, but I didn’t need those. Some others had indexes that wouldn’t convert, and after re-trying it enough times, it went. Then I ran the converter. Alas it had some bugs and had to be fixed up with current table names and some things like that. Also I hacked it to preserve ID numbers. So eventually this migrated over the posts and categories. It did not preserve the category hierarchy. It also didn’t recognize when nl2br was disabled, and munge the post appropriately. And it didn’t migrate over tags, so I wrote a Haskell program to do that. Then it was a matter of crafting a bunch of RedirectPermanent and RewriteRule entries for Apache to try to redirect the old article pages and RSS feeds to their new locations as much as possible. Final Thoughts I’m glad I did it, and I don’t plan to do this again for a long time.

As reported elsewhere, a small victory against the spammers had some impact. Going from 1.5 to 0.5 emails received per minute on this little server. The impact on spam that made it through all the filters is not noticeable, but I don't do statistics on that number. (I assume McColo ranges were blocked by blacklists anyway, so the drop should be mostly for the unfiltered spamtrap accounts. Anybody has opinions about Knujon?)

I wrote last month about my failed first attempt to achieve a "level 3" high power rocketry certification. Last week, I learned that one of the commercial altimeters I flew for control of the ejection sequence has a firmware bug, which can cause premature ejection of the main parachute on flights above 10k feet! So it may in fact be the case that everything I did was perfect and I was simply the victim of a bug in software... how ironic! Yesterday, on my second certification attempt, I was successful! The rocket I flew this time was based on a Polecat Aerospace ten inch Goblin kit. I incorporated several modifications in my build, including additional fiberglass and carbon fiber reinforcement, and a payload bay in the nose cone. Once again, my wife Karen graced me with a parachute sewn from the Team Vatsaas design, this time a slightly larger one in burgundy and black rip-stop nylon. She incorporated several design tweaks based on her experiences sewing the first one which we'll try to write up at some point, that allowed her to sew this one in less time. The motor selected was again an Aerotech M1297W reload. The launch went perfectly, and the ascent was impressive. At apogee, the nose cone separated as planned and the drogue parachute deployed. Unfortunately, when the backup charge fired two seconds later, the main parachute also deployed. That wasn't intended... the main was supposed to deploy much lower, at 1300 feet. Luckily, the winds were light enough that the rocket touched down only about a mile downrange from the launch rail, well within the waiver distance, and was easily recovered without damage. There are three things I'll consider changing before flying this rocket again. First, the chute size calculator used to design the main parachute seems way off. The actual descent rate was around 32 feet per second, while our goal was 20. Other than that, the parachute performed admirably! Second, the premature deployment of the main at apogee could be cured by replacing the paper taped over that parachute bay with another piston capping the bay and held in with a pair of shear pins. Finally, the hard touch down snapped some of the nylon wire ties holding the batteries in place in the avionics bay. While no damage was done, and reducing the descent rate might prevent it happening again, improving the battery mounting would be an easy upgrade. For more information, see my project page for this rocket. James Russell took some pictures at the launch, including a great one of the rocket under boost just leaving the launch rail. And Jeff Lane captured video of the ascent and descent. It was a great flight and a great day, and represents a major milestone in our hobby rocket activities!

For various reasons I've recently been thinking about forums. Many technical users dislike forums, because they are things that are hard to follow. Even with RSS feeds & etc you need to keep a login and remember to return to see if your post(s) have been answered. However non-technical users love forums, and from a community-building perspective they're very cheap and easy. Particularly if you manage to appoint moderators from within the comunity. I currently find myself in a position where I'd kinda like to have a forum package. Something that I can integrate into existing site easily. Unfortunately most of the "best" forum packages are PHP-based, and have their own complex login, group, and admin facilities. That makes it hard to update them to authenticate against my existing MySQL table(s). (We'll leave my PHP-allergy in the background) So, once more, I've been contemplating the bad route; create my own forum software. I'm well aware that down that path lies badness madnesss. Let us recap. What is a forum?

• A forum is an online site.
• With a coarse list of topics.
• Inside each topic is a list of threads.
• Each thread is comprised of a number of (threaded) messages.

Sound familiar? It should if you use email:

• ~/Maildir contains storage for a collection of mailboxes.
• Each mailbox is a course list of topic-specific discussion.
• Each topic is comprised of a number of (threaded) messages.

So, the unthinkable, could we convert (bi/uni-directinally?) from a Maildir hierarchy to an online forum? Would that make sense? On the face of it. Yes. There are implementation details - the forum index would be essentially a list of Maildir folders (perhaps "~/Maildir/topic1/.title" would be require to give it a pretty name). Each thread topic would be a rendered display of the messages in the folder. So, what are the drawbacks? Well reading Maildir folders gives us threading, and subjects, bodies, etc. But it does mean a fair bit of overhead parsing messages. (Times like this I remember Hughe. Every time we've gotten together for beer & geekery the topic of an extensible perl-based IMAP server comes up. I'm sure it should be written ..) I'll wrap this up now. I'm sure I've made the point. There are some details which have impact - Should the forum accept new posts online? Or only via gated email-delivery? Will it work? Should it be Maildir, or IMAP based? Still at least filtering your SPAM would be easy ;) More questions. Some questions have no answers. Some answers we ignore because we don't like. I need to sleep. ObFilm: 007: Quantum of Solace Bad film. Don't waste your pennies.

One often requested feature for suspend support on Linux is hybrid suspend, or "suspend to both". This is where the system suspends to disk, but then puts the machine in S3 rather than powering down. If the user resumes without power having been removed they get the benefit of the fast S3 resume. If not, the system resumes from disk and no data is lost.

This is, clearly, the way suspend should work. We're not planning on adding it by default in Fedora, though, for a couple of reasons. The main reason right now is that the in-kernel suspend to disk is still slow. Triggering a suspend to disk on a machine with gigabytes of RAM (which is a basic laptop configuration these days) will leave you sitting there for an extended period of time when all you actually want to do is pick your machine up and leave. Fixing this properly is less than trivial. TuxOnIce improves the speed somewhat, at the expense of being a >500k patch against upstream that touches all sorts of interesting bits of the kernel such as the vm system. We're not supporting that for fairly obvious reasons. But even then, the suspend to disk process involves discarding some pages. Those need to be pulled in from disk again on resume. With the current implementation, suspend to both is fundamentally slower than suspend to RAM for both the suspend and resume paths.

So, what other approaches are there? One is to resume from RAM some period of time after suspending and then if the battery is low suspend to disk. Many recent machines will automatically resume when the battery level becomes critical. If the hardware doesn't support that, we can wake up after a set period and measure the battery consumption, set a new alarm and go to sleep again. The downside of this approach is that your system wakes up and does stuff without you being aware of it, which may be bad if it's inside a neoprane cover at the time. Cooking laptops is generally considered unhelpful.

Using the kexec approach to hibernation provides a more straightforward way of handling the problem. The fundamental problem with the existing approach is that it ties suspend into the vm system and involves making atomic copies of RAM into other bits of RAM. kexec would allow us to pre-allocate enough space on disk to save RAM as-is, and then simply kexec into a new kernel and dump RAM to disk without any of the tedious shrinking required first. Resuming from S3 would kexec back into the old kernel, whereas losing power would just fall back to reading off disk. The extra time taken on the S3 path would be minimal.

In an ideal world we'd adopt the Vista approach where "off" is synonymous with suspend. There's still more work to be done on enhancing reliability before that can be achieved, though.

One month with Emacs and counting - Part 2 A while ago I've blogged about my switch from Vim to Emacs, promising a blog post series, quite a mouthful nevertheless, it's time to continue the series. The first part was about why I think that nowadays Emacs is ready to be switching to. This second part is about flawed Vim design choices which substantially contributed to my choice. (Of course all this post is under a IMO-/rant-disclaimer, it can't be otherwise, so take it cum grano salis) Flawed Vim design choices Vim started as a wonderful editor, following the path of Vi, which in turn has got right a good deal of design choices. One is the often debated modality. In spite of being a HCI PITA in general, modality is not a problem at all for software you are using every single day (and the editor is the 2nd program I use the most, with the terminal being the 1st), because you learn it as a habit. In the case of Vim, modality is good because it let you use powerful yet simple motions in command mode, which can be easily combined with operator-pending commands. This can be considered yet another incarnation of the UNIX philosophy, casted inside the editor itself. ... which brings us to the good old joke which describes Emacs as a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor. In fact, Vim is no longer the nice Unix philosophy player which it used to be, and Emacs plays much more nicely with external tools than Vim. As arguments, let's consider a few (not so) recent Vim evolutions:

• Spell checking. Starting with version 7, Vim has got support for on-the-fly spell-checking of text buffers. It is a super-nice feature, which I've advertised in the past, because spell checking is needed in many tasks we daily do with editors (mail/doc writing, code commenting), and having a single interface to do it comes handy. Unfortunately, how that is implemented in Vim is definitely not along the lines of the UNIX philosophy. We have countless different FOOspell implementations whereas Vim implemented yet another one, without relying on any pre-existing implementation. Even more so, the file format of spell files is basically ad-hoc, and not sharable with other tools. This is already a PITA for packaging (let's add to Debian another 20 binary packages vim-spellfiles-FOO), but is even worst than that: the spell files must be generated in ad-hoc ways which are seriously prone to failures (guess why in Debian we don't have yet the vim-spellfiles-FOO packages which used to exist in experimental a long time ago?). What would have been the UNIX-friendly way of achieving the same result? Well, obviously spawning FOOspell and interact with its process from the editor. Keep that in mind.
• Internal grep. A feature of Vim I've always loved is :grep (yet another instance of quick-fixing, which is also used for jumping to compile-time errors). In its original incarnation it was as simple as invoking grep and parse its output. KISS. Then, Vim started to have a problem: grep -r can take ages and in the meantime the editor was stuck. Hence, starting with Vim 7, vimgrep has born: an internal re-implementation of grep. OK, it is more portable (but how many of us do care? on how many system you use you are missing grep? damn, I used to install it also on Windoze!), and the editor retain control. Control that is exploited just to show a nice progress bar of what is being scanned ..., while the editor is still stuck. Well, to me it looks like the problem would have been solved much more nicely by adding the ability to interact with an external process (deja vu?). That process can then be grep -r. Full stop.
• Lack of debugging support (on purpose). Long standing missing feature of Vim: you can not "easily" drive a debugger from Vim, because a firm choice in Vim is to ... (OK, I confess, I'm starting to beat a dead horse) ... not have support for interaction with external processes. I found such a choice quite dumb: to me it is evident that it induces a trade-off between being feature-complete wrt programmer needs (as available external tools get available to face those needs) and not "re-implementing the wheel" inside the editor. Going back to the lack of debugging support in Vim, that has spawned projects like GdbVim, Clewn, Bram's Agide, and my own tiny teeny incarnation specific to ocamldebug called WOWcamldebug. Every single project of that list acts as an intermediary between Vim and an external process (a debugger of some sort), whereas that could have been implemented by an editor plugin, provided that the editor offer, guess what, support for interaction with external processes.
• Top-level. Similar to the debugging support issue, there is the interpreter issue, namely how to evaluate "phrases" of your interpreted language of choice directly from the editor. Nowadays a lot of languages have the so called top-levels which evaluate language phrases interactively (Python, Ruby, OCaml, many Lisps, ...) and show evaluation results. That ability can speed up testing considerably, but can become cumbersome to use for large code snippets without editor support (good luck with copy and paste). Yes, Vim has support for that, but the implementation choice is close to be ridicolous: only if you have linked Vim together the interpreted for a given language, then you will be able to interactive evaluate phrases of that language. What if you program in Python, Ruby, and Perl? Well, you need to link all of them. What if you also program in OCaml? Then you're screwed, because Vim currently does not support linking with it. (Yes, I know that there are other reasons for doing that linking, they are discussed below.) Do I need to tell you which feature will be enough to address top-level support? interaction with extern.. OK, I'll drop it, you know that already.

Well, I acknowledge that Emacs got this choice right, and that it's an important one: Emacs supports interaction with external processes, and plugin authors have been happy to exploit it to create really cool stuff (sticking to the UNIX philosophy). Please welcome: Flyspell, M-x grep (shameless smartass plug: same number of keystroke of :grep), Grand Unified Debugger, a sampling of language-specific major modes with top-level support. (But I recommend having a look at least once at the coolness of other stuff built-on top of external process support, like Flymake, mentioned by dancer not a long ago.)

• Its own scripting language. I've bored you enough with the external process topic, hence here is the second one: the saga of Vim and its scripting language, i.e., the programming language using which you can customize the editor. Note that the choice of scripting language impacts on 2 different targets: final users in need of fire and forget automations (when they start to get to complex to be implemented on top of, say, macros), and developer of editor extensions such as addons. The impact of scripting language on extension developer is crucial for the evolution of an editor aiming at being powerful. If the scripting language and the API towards the editor is flexible enough, then a lot of cool extensions and features will be developed by third party authors, otherwise the burden stays on editor upstream author.
  1. In its phase 1 (my term, Vim < 7.0) Vim pretended that it needed only a minimal scripting language (Vim script) and that everything else can be developed using external programming languages, linked in the editor. As a consequence Vim script was just a tiny teeny procedural language with editor interfacing capabilities, most notably lacking any "decent" data structures (no lists, no dictionaries, ...). In that phase, if you were a user it was fair enough. You just had to chose your external programming language (at compile time ...), and you were able to write your quick hacks with it. But if you were willing to develop an extension you were screwed, because you had either to impose your external programming language to the final user (that is what gave born to absurdities like vim-full, look at the deps!) or to enjoy a good deal of masochism to explode your 30 lines of Python extension into 200 lines of Vim script to make your Vim extension more "portable".
  2. In its phase 2 (Vim >= 7.0) it has been realized that something were wrong in the initial choices about Vim script, and data structures (lists, dictionaries, function references!) have been added to it, relieving a bit the pain of programming portable extensions. Nevertheless, and probably due to how it started, Vim script is far from being a programming language one can enjoy programming in. Consider for example the standard library of the language. It started as a random collection of unrelated functions being added on a "as-needed" basis, ... and continued along that path! Now the API reference lists together totally unrelated functions, organized inconsistently, and making really painful finding what you need (assuming it exists).

Even in this respect, I acknowledge that Emacs got this right. It has chosen a single, now full-fledged, programming language (Elisp), which is offered both to the final user (fact: the average Emacs user knows much better how to program her own editor than the average Vim user) and to extensions developer. The standard library of the language is organized with a consistent naming (even though not always intuitive) and documented in an organized manner. You might not like the language, but at least is has been taken seriously and managed as such. Finally, being a Lisp dialect, you might need what you learn with Elisp elsewhere. Vim script is too committing: it is useful only inside Vim. I believe that contributed significantly in its scarce diffusion among Vim users. The fact that Elisp was born together with Emacs and that it is also used internally for the editor implementation is not relevant here: I do care about what is offered to me as an user and as an extension developer. What I see on the Emacs side in this respect is much better that what I see on the Vim side. Moreover, from the point of view of the users, is the difference between what is inside the editor and what is outside (i.e., the extensions) that relevant? I think it is not, and that brings me to the final Vim choice which I consider flawed and which has the potential of seriously limit its future evolutions:

• Editor as a distribution. Emacs is managed as a intermediate software distribution layer, similarly to what happens in other softwares where many third party authors cooperates (e.g., TeXLive). The distribution architecture has advantages and contributes to the longevity and potentialities of a software project. What does this mean concretely in the Vim vs Emacs dispute? For example it means that Emacs get more feature-complete each passing release, still preserving uniformity in documentation and keybindings. On the contrary Vim sports many addons, which are very likely to step on each other feet when enabled simultaneously. Actually, that is one of the reason which brought me to the creation of vim-addons: you cannot enable all the content of vim-scripts together due to various kind of conflicts. As we know well in Debian, distributions have a fundamental role in blending together lightly-coupled software components, that's role is missing in Vim evolutionary path and I find that worrisome.

Where to from here in this blog post series? For sure some tips on how to migrate for hard-core Vim users, then we'll see ... If you did enjoy the read please let me know commenting in the discussion page (as you did in the last post, thanks!).

I am trying to contact an owner of a Nokia E71 who is able to input Romanian diacritics on this type of phone. This person shouldn't worry, there is nothing destructive/dangerous involving his/her phone, should he/she contact me.

(Skip up to the "second approach" paragraph, if you don't care for the technical details or my story.)


Some time ago, during my latest blog silence period, I bought a white Nokia E71 phone from a Cosmote dealer.

I am really satisfied with it, except for two or three small issues[0], but the most annoying is that my phone was not made for the Romanian market, so I can't type Romanian diacritics[1].


Why does this matter? Because since I bought this phone I managed to do some translation work on the E71, on the daily commute to work. Still, the lack of diacritics forces me to go through another hop to add diacritics to my .po files when I get home.


So I was thinking on ways to fix this issue. After some google-ing I came up with the following possible fixes:

• change the product code with a code for the Romanian version and upgrade to the next firmware version, when that arrives
• hack the phone and use ROMPatcher to patch the Romanian layout into the phone

Since my phone was made for Singapore and I want to change to a Romanian product code, I have to wait for an update to be visible for Romania. Although the firmware update arrived for Singapore products, for phones made for Romania the firmware update is unavailable, so I am stuck on the first front.



Enter the second approach and my request for help.

I have looked into the files of my phone and I think I have found the files which define the keyboard layouts available on my phone. I haven't made out the details of the files, but, as a first step, I thought that I should try to replace one of those layout files I don't need with a Romanian layout file.

The problem is that I don't have a copy of such a file, but on a phone that works this file should be present and should be easily accessible. For short, I would need a copy of the firmware that is running on the phone, so I can try to replace on my phone the relevant files.



If you own a Nokia E71 and you're able to input Romanian diacritics on it, please contact me via a comment on my blog, or an email at eddy.petrisor+e71@gmail.com. Thanks in advance!


[0] the phone is really close to perfection on my scoreboard
[1] the correct "s comma" and "t comma" are not visible in any font present in the phone, but as long as they are correctly encoded I am fine with that. Surely with a proper font and an external editor I can fix that problem.

Maybe, like me, you’ve noticed that you’ve had less junk email this week and you’ve been wondering why. News sites are reporting that a large spammer-friendly hosting service in California has been disconnected by its service providers after they were sent evidence about its activities. (Check out the “Next” links on the report to see how the story develops.) For the technically-minded, Changes in Spam Levels this week Posted by simonw illustrates the level of disruption and may grow an interesting discussion from server managers - it seems the reduction is less than the 75% reported in some news services, but still significant. This is great news for all good internet users. It’s disappointing if the spam hosting service won’t have to pay any of the costs they’ve inflicted on other computer users in some way. The only practical negative that I’ve noticed so far is that much of the stopped spam was pretty easy to identify and filter out, so the reduction in spam reaching my “unsure” mailbox hasn’t been anything like 50%. Still, less spam hitting the filters means less computer power used, which means less electricity and network data transfer used, which means lower costs for us. Yippee! And finally, I smiled at this comment over on the WebmasterWorld discussion:-

“Our spam email has dropped so much in the past 2 days that I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with our email accounts.”

My goal is to collect all the import statements in a Python code tree to identify what modules are needed to run that piece of code. So let's start from the lower level: parse one file for its import.

One simple solution could be to grep (or re.compile) something like "import (.*) from (.*) import .*" but what for import statement like:

from  import (
ABC,
DEF,
GHI)

or multiple import on one line?

So, if I had to rewrite the Python interpreter parser, why not use that exact parser?

I started with the parser module, but its output is not so parsable :) even if you can recall the structure (i.e. import statements are at nodes with id = 282, with imported module at id = 287 and so on). It's really powerful, but too low level for this task.

But there is another interesting module: compiler (it's deprecated in 2.6 and removed in 3.0, but I'm working with 2.5, so it's fine). Using parseFile and some objects from compiler.ast, I wrote a simple script that parses a file given in input and prints out the modules imported with "import mod" or with "from mod import xxx".

Suggestions are always welcome :)

UPDATE: please note that conditional imports are included in the list and the calls to __import__ are ignored.