It is nice to read the New York Times and get some good news. Nadia Abu El-Haj was granted tenure after a bitter public battle opposing her appointment. As someone who has taken graduate courses with her in Chicago and who was advised by her, I know Columbia and Barnard made the right choice.

Two nights ago I was having dinner with a colleague who recounted a truly horrible experience he had with the modern-day American health care “system.” While in Montana over the summer, he got bit by a bat and well, as a result, he and his entire family had to get rabies shots. These shots are hard to get and priceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey. The final bill was $ 20,000 and his NYU based health insurance, United Health Care is claiming they are not responsible!### Like getting bit by a bat and the possibility of rabies are not bad enough. Isn’t the point of health insurance to take care of the unexpected?? Someone also pointed me to The Daily Kos’ wrangle with BCBS of California and well, they picked the wrong guy to mess with given there are so many many many many eyeballs tuned to his blog, everyday (just check out the number of comments). I wonder if the public relations director will contact him as they did with me after I blogged about my trials and tribulations. I certainly don’t have the audience and readers he does, so I am always surprised they ever contacted me in the first place. The Daily Kos also provided a link for a site that I was thinking of creating if my problems with BCBS were not solved (glad to see someone else has) called Sick of Blue Cross. I personally like the name I came up with a little better Blue Cross No Shield but the important thing is that a site like that exists and it is very good site, design and content wise. There should be a site created for every health insurance company and they should federate and pool resources to gain more visiblity. While I am not hopeful that the health insurance industry will change within, I think mounting and steady consumer pressure can do a lot to force the industry to change their awful ways. And while I think the bad publicity is a key part to putting pressure on the health insurance to change, I actually think that the power of the consumers also can come from elsewhere, and this elsewhere is overwhelming the administrative channels within and outside of the health insurance. The gist is if they send us a lot of (useless) paperwork, send them A LOT of paperwork back. On the Daily Kos, a lot of people noted that things got moving when they complained to the Department of Banking and Insurance. While my own complaint to that department did not produce any immediate fruit, it did get the ball moving for the appeal process, which eventually panned out for me. That is, I learned a lot and started to get decent customer service. Doors opened. Now, it took me weeks to find out that I could complain to the Department of Banking and Insurance and I am sure many find themselves in that situation of walking in a no man’s land of confusion and frustration. If more and more people know that you can file a complaint to these Departments (and why are doctor’s offices not relaying this information??!!), they and the health insurance companies will get inundated with that which they love to inflict on us, paperwork. This may slow things down for you but at a certain point, state governments will get the message that something is deeply wrong. So, people MUST use these channels and overwhelm these agencies with complaints, faxes, emails as this is a powerful and very material message that something is deeply wrong and broken and must be fixed. Also, send faxes and letters to various departments in your health insurance company (appeals, customer service, medical director’s office, public relations office…) get people’s email’s and send them emails. Inundate them with a barrage of administrative paperwork. If they are not being helpful, send a fax or two a day concerning your case until you get clear answers. While individual faxes won’t make much of a difference, imagine if there are 300 a day coming in or 3000…. This can work with the numbers are there and I have a feeling that the numbers Are There. So spread the word for housebreaking your health insurance and push the paperwork back on them.

John Goerzen blogs about his experience of using vim for about 8 months. Having been an emacs user a few years back, I understand both editors on a basic level, and can relate to some of the things he says. I have to disagree with one particular bit, though:

It starts faster. I'm not sure if that really was true even when I switched, but it certainly isn't true on any of my machines today. Both Vim and Emacs have had major version upgrades (v7 and v22, respectively) since I started using Vim. People seem to say that Emacs 22 feels faster, though I don't know if that's true. The startup times of the two, if they're different, are imperceptible.

Sorry, but that just isn't true. Using my very non-scientific method of measuring startup times ("click on the icon, watch the clock, and start counting until the editor is ready to use"), I can tell that gvim on my hardware takes less than a second to start, whereas emacs requires approximately 5 seconds to do the same. For reference, this is on my laptop, a 1.3Ghz PowerPC G4. In any case, I'm not a fan of either editor. There are things that vi does well, and there are things that emacs does well. On emacs' end, I like M-x gdb, I slightly prefer its M-x compile over vim's :make, and I just love psgml. I've also occasionally used gnus for news reading (never for mail, though). On vim's end, I find regex search & replace easier (as you mention in your blog post), and I prefer its syntax highlighting (I've seen emacs get confused because the first line in the output window started in the middle of a string. Such things will never happen to vim: if it gets confused once on a given file, it will always be confused on the same file. While annoying, at least you know it's there). All in all, I don't think it matters much. I've seen people who use an editor as an operating system, both in the vim and in the emacs camp, by having a ~/.vimrc or ~/.emacs that's larger than my collection of pictures[1]. I'm not one of them; to me, an editor that doesn't properly work in its defaults shouldn't exist. [1] okay, that's an exaggeration. Still.

(wow, three blog posts — albeit short ones — in one day) Some people appear to believe that having a letter in the Granuiad is sad and I should be shamed or something. Honestly, I thought the email was going to be in some online forum thingy, not actually printed, but can I help it if even my brief flippant replies are insightful? Anyway, you can't shame me with newspaper clippings, I've had a like-cures-like homeopathic treatment against that.

Yesterday's post about switching back to Emacs saw quite a few comments from people (most of them useful, even). I learned a few things.

My biggest gripe about Vim was that for the file types I worked with most, its indentation and syntax highlighting was inferior to that of Emacs. I'd like to illustrate that with an example.

Let's consider one of those file types: XML containing DocBook markup.

Vim has a DocBook mode. It doesn't autodetect DocBook files, so I have this at the top of each one:

<!-- vim: set filetype=docbkxml shiftwidth=2 autoindent expandtab tw=77 : -->

Now, why should Vim need a separate DocBook mode? DocBook is just XML or SGML, and these things have a well-formed nature. Well, part of the reason is that /usr/share/vim/vim71/syntax/docbk.vim has a ton of lines like this:

syn keyword docbkKeyword chapter citation citerefentry citetitle city contained

Yes, they are hard-coding all the DocBook element names into the editing mode. It's probably used for completion, highlighting, maybe indentation. I'm not sure, really. I remember that editing these files without the DocBook mode was much more painful anyway, but that was 8 months ago and I can't quite remember why.

Now, what about Emacs? I don't know if Emacs even has a DocBook mode, mainly because I don't have to care. The Emacs psgml mode actually parses the DTD for your XML or SGML files. It knows exactly what the valid tags are from doing so. This means it has full functionality not just for DocBook, but for any XML or SGML file with a DTD.

Not only that, but it knows more about the files than Vim does. For instance, both Emacs and Vim can do completion of various things. Vim </ C-x C-o (ooo, sounds like Emacs!) can complete my closing tags. But it can't autocomplete my opening tags, and it certainly isn't aware

Not only can Emacs autocomplete opening and closing tags, but it knows exactly what tags are valid at a given place in the document (thanks to the DTD) and will only consider those tags for completion. Moreover, depending on how you have configured it, it could also insert spots for you to add any required attributes. So, for instance, if you're editing XHTML and autocompletion gives you an <img> tag, it would add src="" in it for you, as a reminder that src is required.

There are a host of other smart things that Emacs can do with XML or SGML documents. For instance, you can get a list of all tags valid at the current point with C-c C-t or Shift-RightClick -- useful if you've forgotten the name of a tag for a moment.

The difference isn't as great with everything. But it sure is noticable as I work with XML and Haskell files.

I was quoted in a recent Needham Times article regarding my complaints with the T:

But Adam Rosi-Kessel, a Roslindale resident who takes the Needham Line to his job in the financial district, said 15- to 20-minute delays have kept him from getting to work before 9 a.m. since May. Now Rosi-Kessel, a lawyer who biked to work when he lived in Jamaica Plain, is thinking about trading in his Charlie Card again. It used to be, living here in Roslindale, the train was always the fastest way to get in, he said. Now, it s slowed down to the point where it s starting to get competitive with biking again.

I’m glad they got my biking quote. Here’s the part I don’t understand (emphasis added):

Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority spokeswoman Lydia Rivera said Needham Line delays have been caused by construction work and speed restrictions on tracks that don t go anywhere near Needham. In order to maximize train use, the T often transfers trains between tracks, rather than leaving underused trains empty in the MBTA yard. The method helps the T get trains where they re needed most, but it also means a delay on one track can slow service on a seemingly unrelated track. It s a Catch-22, Rivera said.

I don’t think the T spokesperson knows what a “Catch-22″ is. I refer those interested to the Wikipedia article on the subject, but it is nicely summarized there as “heads I win, tails you lose.” The T’s problem is not a logical paradox, but some combination of inadequate resources and poor organization. Can someone please help them out? Also on Boston local topics: I’ve received several unattributed mailings lately related to the city council election that do not facially promote any particular candidate. Today’s mailing attacked Stephen Murphy for repeatedly trying (and failing) to win some other office or get some other job than City Councilor. The return address was 31 Milk Street, which is the address of many different businesses. A few days ago, I received another unattributed mailing bemoaning how long it has been since an at-large city councilor came from the Parkway Area (my neighborhood), but not mentioning any candidate in particular. My guess is these mailings are all meant to support John Connolly, a West Roxbury resident, attorney, and ostensibly good guy. I was feeling pretty happy about the possibility of Connolly replacing Murphy on the Council (I have to admit some unfair prejudice in that the only house in our neighborhood I’ve ever seen prominently posting a sign in support of Bush also features a Murphy billboard). But these questionable campaign tactics are giving me pause. Does anyone know anything more about this? In any case, here are my endorsements for next week’s election, notwithstanding the concern outlined above: (1) Felix Arroyo, (2) John Connolly, and (3) Sam Yoon. I have no pick for a fourth candidate. I’ll also throw in a vote for Matt Geary. I really wouldn’t want the socialists running the City, but a broader spectrum of political opinion within the council wouldn’t hurt. Incidentally, it is remarkably hard to find any information summarizing all of the candidates’ positions and records. It’s almost as if the election isn’t even happening. (A commenter properly points me to Brighton Centered as a good resource.) 11/3/07 Update: More discussion here. Technorati Tags: Boston, City Council, Elections, Felix Arroyo, John Connolly, Sam Yoon, Stephen Murphy, Politics, MBTA, Transportation, Roslindale, Needham, Matt Geary

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I'd been using Emacs for quite awhile, and about 8 months ago I decided I would try using Vim. I'd only used vi for system emergency work, but knew a number of people that swore by it for regular work. So I decided I would learn Vim and use it for my regular work. I figure that with things like this, I don't get a real feel for how well they work unless I use them for all my work. So I haven't really opened Emacs at all in the past 8 months.

Yesterday I finally decided that Vim was not living up to my expectations and I'm in the process of switching back to Emacs. I thought I ought to write down why I'm doing that, for my own future reference... and since nobody has ever written about Emacs vs. Vim, I might as well post it where everyone can see it.

So here we are.

Original Reasons for Using Vim

It would lead to more comfortable typing. Lots of Vim users mention that you don't have to hold down keys while hitting other keys as much in Vim as in Emacs, and that the movement keys are all on the home row. That's true, but I didn't find it to be that big of an improvement, since Esc is a farther reach than anything in Emacs, and let me tell you, you're hitting Esc all the time in Vim. I found that removing the armrests from my chair made my hands happier than Vim ever did, and swapping Ctrl and CapsLock in Emacs will probably help there too.

It starts faster. I'm not sure if that really was true even when I switched, but it certainly isn't true on any of my machines today. Both Vim and Emacs have had major version upgrades (v7 and v22, respectively) since I started using Vim. People seem to say that Emacs 22 feels faster, though I don't know if that's true. The startup times of the two, if they're different, are imperceptible.

Vim would use less RAM. Frankly, these days, both Emacs and Vim are way down on the list of things that use up RAM. Heck, kmail has 141MB resident, and each of its two IMAP processes is using more than 30MB. Emacs in X right after start has 16MB resident, 10MB of which is shared, and 25MB VSS. gvim right after start has 8MB resident, 5MB of which is shared, and a 43MB VSS. Emacs tends to use fewer processes for things that vim. So they're not all that different, and Emacs could come out smaller in certain situations. But the difference is irrelevant on today's machines, and modern Gnome and KDE apps are many times larger than both of them.

It will make me more comfortable in rescue environments where I have only traditional vi available. Actually, the vi on AIX is so different from modern Vim that this didn't really help.

It would make me more productive. There are some editing commands that did, but as you'll see below, it was more than balanced out by other problems.

Things I Liked about Vim

The commands dt, dT, df, dF. Wonderful little things those. Emacs now has M-z (Zap), which is similar to df but can actually go to other lines (a nice addition). And there are easy ways to bind keys to the others as well, though that doesn't make it a pervasive convention like it is in Vim.

Antialiased fonts. It's crazy that Emacs doesn't have this yet. But not a showstopper; I still like good ole 10x20 just fine.

Regexp search-and-replace. Emacs actually has this now, and maybe it had it back then too. M-C-%. Apparently in Emacs22 the replacement expression can also have lisp code in it, which sounds really slick but I can't see myself using it regularly.

Annoying Things in Vim

Syntax highlighting. The syntax highlighting for most languages in Vim felt like it was about as smart as it was in Emacs about 10 years ago. Strings like "Hello!\"" (in languages where \" inserts a literal ") often confused it. Sometimes quotes within comments confused it. Sometimes it would be confused permanently. Other times, just until I scrolled around in the file or reloaded it.

Indentation. This is much more annoying than the syntax highlighting, really. In many languages -- and especially the two modes I've used most recently, XML and Haskell -- it really, really stinks. The indentation there isn't aware of syntax, or not very much. Sometimes it is smart enough to know that if an XML line starts with </ that it moves left and if it starts with an opening tag, that the next line moves right. But it's not smart enough to do this reliably. Not only that, but indentation is not handled with consistent configuration between languages. And even though Vim ships with a ton of language modes, the central docs only cover indentation for C.

I've asked Vim experts about this, and have tried all sorts of various tweaks, have read through Vim indentation mode source files, etc. There is just no way to get it anywhere near the intelligence of Emacs for most languages, short of writing my own mode, it appears. This is even worse because when using the backspace key in insert mode, for awhile it deletes individual spaces, and then all of a sudden deletes a big chunk of whitespace back to the beginning of the line. (And no, the insertion of Tab characters is disabled.) Indentation is my #1 complaint about Vim, and something that shows no progress towards being fixed any time soon.

And forget about anything like Emacs M-x reindent-region. This is a syntax-aware indenter. You can write out an entire source file with no indentation whatsoever, and it will indent the entire thing according to the indentation rules you've defined and the syntax of the language you're using. The best I've seen in Vim are commands that add or remove space at the beginning of every line in a region.

In short, Emacs seems to "understand" the file format on a much deeper level than Vim, and can automate things to a much better extent because of it.

Too many things disrupt the paste buffer. I can use Y or y to yank some text in Vim, and it's really, really easy to overwrite that buffer with other things. Yes, I know that I can yank it into a named buffer, but that's inconvenient and I don't usually know in advance that I'll have that need. In Emacs, only C-k and other "large area" commands disrupt it.

Vim doesn't like you having lots of files open at once. It's surprisingly convoluted to do this. If you use the basic documented command to edit another file, :e, it closes the file you're working on. The normal way to open multiple files at once is to use split windows. Well, I don't like split windows all that well, and often just want to make a quick change in one file -- in full screen -- and then go back to another. Even though I use set hidden in my ~/.vimrc, it still is annoying and more convoluted than it should be.

Vim can't create new top-level X windows. In Emacs, I can press C-x 5 2, and poof, I have a second Emacs window in X, and it's tied to the same editing session and Emacs process. Not a new process, with a different set of files, its own buffers, etc. The same process, same set of files. Just like a split window, but with a new top-level X window instead. gvim simply has no way to do that. This is also a large annoyance.

gqap stinks. This has burned me more than once. I'll be editing an XML document, and insert some text in the middle of a paragraph. Now I have a really wide line. So I type gqap to reformat the paragraph. My cursor is near the bottom of the screen, so I don't really see much past the current line. I then save the document and exit. Later I discover that vim considered the entire rest of the document part of the single paragraph, and removed all the different indentation levels at </para> and the like, so it's completely messed up. Emacs is smart enough to know what is a paragraph in XML mode, and M-q does the right thing. Oh, and Emacs reindent-region can fix the Vim gqap-induced mess.

Two years after writing about what I found out when I was looking why my HDDs kept breaking down, I started to receive emails about this post. It seems that it was mentioned in an Ubuntu bug report and this morning I noticed that exactly this bug report was mentioned on Slashdot, so I can consider my post to be slashdotted (indirectly). For the past week, I’m counting 15,000 hits and it is still rising fast. It’s a good thing that I use a static HTML journal, so that my journal-hosting-pentium-233MHz can handle this. It’s also a good thing that the issue finally gets some attention.

There is a debate raging in anthropological circles over the role of anthropologists in the military and the Iraq War Purse Lip Square Jaw has a nice round-up of of articles on the topic. I have only read bits and pieces here and there but this morning I finally gave my full attention to this intriguing article by David Price, which not only covers the vexing debate but discloses the rampant plagiarism in the The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

If you use a firefox-based browser, bookmark http://mid.gmane.org/%s then right-click it in your bookmarks menu, pick Properties and enter "message-id:" in the Keywords field. Then you can paste Message-Id lines from email headers (or some debian list posts) into your browser window and it will search gmane for it. Handy. (2007-10-31: 1 comment)

Even though Adrian von Bidder suggests that I'm starting a bit early with the DPL campaigning, I thought I could add a few more thoughts to the blagosphere.

Adrian suggested to make the discussion of our of "vision of Debian" a regular event on debconf - I think it's a nice idea, but that doesn't mean we should keep silent about that topic the rest of the year. I think one of the problems we see in Debian is that we are missing an aim to strive for. We are currently just moving from release to release, while more and more developers have actually lost interest in stable releases. The impression that a common ground like Debian 4.0 is irrelevant seems to prevail, because the people most vocal in our user base usually want to see the newest and shiniest software on their desktop. We have been spending more and more effort to cater to their wishes and have ignored the fact that a majority of Debian-based installations are not run by such people, but by system administrators who do mass roll-outs and neither want nor need the newest X.org with more *bling*.

Ubuntu, the biggest Debian-based distribution, has found its users by packing up new software behind a nice installer, adding some branding elements and then shipping it. Stability is an issue for Ubuntu, but they don't spend as much time as we do on eliminating the last seemingly important bug in some esoteric software package before actually releasing. That observation is the ground for one of my ideas: Our current metric to determine how far testing is away from a release is counting the number of rc bugs - it doesn't matter if the rc bug is X.org crashing for all people or if it is a policy violation in a package with 12 users. Perhaps we should start thinking about a new metric, keeping in mind that for a majority of users, some bugs matter a lot and some matter not at all. With the release of etch, the number of installations of popcon has risen a lot, so for the first time, we have actual usage data that could help us with such a metric. There are a few problems with that approach, though:

• Popcon data is inherently wrong, because single computer installations tend to have popcon, while large installations (like the one in Extremadura) don't.
• A majority of popcon users uses the last stable release, not the one currently in development.
• 3 bugs in packages seldomly used can be more annoying for our users than one central bug - you might be able to find a work around somewhere for something that happens to a lot of people, but a bug only hitting a few users will stay unfixed for a long time.

I don't have more time right now, so the rest of my ideas will follow in the next few days, so stay tuned or add me to your killfile.

I made a new release of YADA, the packaging helper different than others. New version of YADA supports Homepage field in debian/control file which appeared in dpkg last time. Wow. The YADA supported Home-Page field many years ago. YADA is very different that other Debian packaging helpers. Most important is that no Makefile have to be edited at all. This is the strongest and the weakest point of the YADA. People loves it or hate it. Some people even have a vendetta against YADA. Other people find the tool is very simple. Well, I think the YADA is some kind of prosthesis for native Debian packaging system, but even this prototype is much better than any Makefile-based aids just because I don't need to edit any Makefile. YADA had a black PR and much of bad FUD. There was opinion that it violates Debian policy, it is problematic for NMUs and security updates and maintaining of Debian patches is very difficult. This tool is very powerful and has some pitfalls but it doesn't mean it is evil by design. I really don't know how to make i.e. the iceape-l10n package without using YADA and its macro engine. It have to be more complicated and with much redundancy for metainformations. I think I could switch from YADA to another packaging tool, but please... Just create it! :)

Some people around Free Software tend to be too enthusiastic and very critical, both with themselves and with other people. Whenever Linux or Free Software appear in the media, people who wrote the articles are severely and merciless attacked, and the criticism is not always constructive. It might be hard to properly talk about these topics in a non-technical magazine or newspaper targeted towards the mainstream population, not only because they have to explain it in an understandable way for non-initiated people, but also because they’re usually very limited in space. Thus, many times the articles are inaccurate or incomplete, not always being a journalist’s fault, but also of the conditions in which the article has to be published, as well as the time they have to develop it. Someone, a journalist, told me this last weekend that she tries to avoid writing stuff about Linux herself due to the harsh attacks she’s subjected to from the Linux and Free Software activists as soon as she publishes anything on that topic. I kind of understand that. It might be the same than when you write a program and release it as Free Software, and then some people get too demanding and aggressive towards you for not having done a perfect program and submitting to their wishes, instead of thinking about the effort invested in what is done. I seriously think that we might be losing a lot of power and strength if we attack so much the media that support us than they fear us enough to avoid these topics. We’re on the same team, and it wouldn’t be so bad to be a little understanding and supporting of them, and rely on constructive and friendly criticism instead of treating them as if they were the enemy. They also have feelings, you know.

I recently attended the Play! concert in Oslo, with a friend who was visiting Oslo from Bergen. The concert took place in an expo hall just outside Oslo, which was being used for the Electroworld electronics exposition. Wow, has that ever changed! I was there the first time, three-odd years ago, when it was arranged in Oslo Spektrum, and I was bitterly disappointed! It was nothing but a slightly larger Expert Electronics store. I was angry that I had actually been conned into paying for this. This year, it was completely different. They had a gigantic venue, with lots of interesting booths. Yamaha showed off some truly gorgeous digital pianos, and electronic drum sets, NRK was there, to show off their beautiful HD-1 HDTV production bus, and all kinds of interesting things. Even so, it was very clear that Expert was trying to get you to buy stuff. Something just doesn’t sit right with me about paying money to enter a store which is marketed as an expo. My previous experience with Electroworld meant I was not at all interested in repeating it. I wanted to catch the concert which was being held there. But they wouldn’t let me in unless I bought a ticket for the expo. Having already paid 70 EUR for a concert ticket, I was not enthusiastic about paying 15 more EUR to be allowed to enter the venue. But I relented, and was duly fleeced. I only got around 30 minutes of time before the concert started, so I didn’t get all that much time to look around. The first part of the concert started. The orchestra was the wonderful KORK (AKA Kringkastingsorkesteret, AKA “The Norwegian Radio Orchestra”). They started off with a beautiful fanfare by Nobuo Uematsu. However, their choice of music frustrates me deeply. They played some of the obvious classics, like Mario, Sonic The Hedgehog, some Zelda, but most of the time was wasted on some really lame music. It seems that their repertoire was not chosen based on the musical merit of the games, but on the current popularity. Why else would they be devoting time to some dull, insipid incidental music from WoW, Halo, and Silent Hill, without even an identifiable motif, as opposed to more of Koji Kondo’s wonderful Mario or Zelda tunes, or - damnit - Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy music? This is the thing that has left me the most disappointed. They practically ignored the elephant in the room of game music, Nobuo Uematsu. His compositions are absolutely beautiful, and they really shine when performed by a classical orchestra. You can practically tell that they’re meant to be performed by them, rather than some dinky Super Nintendo synthesizer chip. The Final Fantasy VI Opera, most of the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack… They then proceed to play One by Metallica. …WTF, you ask? WTF, indeed. Their justification was that it’s in the soundtrack from Guitar Hero. That’s absurd. And it wasn’t even a very good performance. It was still pretty funny that this very serious-looking classically trained vocalist slowly walked up on stage and gave a really good performance - he really did sound like the Metallica vocalist. Almost as an afterthought, at the very last, they play One-Winged Angel, one of the most dramatic and beautiful pieces from Final Fantasy VII. The audience breaks into absolutely wild applause. But - what - they bring in a METAL BAND on stage. A GODDAMNED METAL BAND! And they proceed to absolutely slaughter the whole piece! The choir and orchestra are drowned out by loud electric guitars with riffs that don’t make sense, and a drummer that can’t even keep the damned beat - the bass drum was all over the place! Seemingly not content with simply omitting his music, they have to absolutely demolish the performance of it. I actually have to say that this is by far the most disappointing concert I have ever gone to. Granted, my expectations were high, but just to witness a live performance by this wonderful orchestra of the Prelude, Anxious Heart, Tifa’s Theme, Eyes On Me, Fighting!, Still More Fighting! or Aerith’s Theme would’ve made the 85 EUR worth it. Judging from the audience’s applause when he first mentioned the Final Fantasy series, I think they agreed with me.

My daughters are perhaps among the first who will grow up seeing much more YouTube than POTV (my newly coined acronym, “Plain Old TV.”) Esther, now 2 , has still never seen anything on a television (recorded, broadcast, or cable). (Havi, a week old today, may not have seen anything at all at this point.) In addition to frequently watching videos from her own blog, Esther loves YouTube. Her most requested videos are embedded below, thanks to the excellent recently-installed Viper’s Video Quicktags. Thus Esther may never know anything but on-demand and user-generated culture. At least those will be her basic assumptions about how it’s supposed to work. It’s possible that this next generation will spell the end of network-scheduled and traditional advertising-interrupted media. I can never understand why anyone would bother to arrange their schedule to watch a show on TV and sit through commercials when they can rent it from Netflix or buy it from Amazon or iTunes and watch it when and how they want — and I grew up, to some extent, with the old TV model. Esther can barely wait for whichever video she wants now. I can’t see her putting up with content on someone else’s schedule as she grows up. Now the videos, as promised (both strong indicators that Esther adheres to the Long Tail theory): Actually, it turns out I didn’t coin POTV. It’s already defined here. Technorati Tags: Culture, Kids, YouTube, UGC

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First the good thing: I updated wordpress to 2.3. Now the bad thing: I updated wordpress to 2.3. With 2.3 there where many infrastructure changes. For a complete list, see the Release Announcement. The most extensions breaking change was the implementation of native tag support. Referencing to Not working Plugin List Ultimate Tag Warrior and Extended Live Archives are problematic. Both caused troubles on update, but there is a fix for ELA and one for UTW. By reviewing the informations for writing this articel, I noticed that I’m running fine with the Ultimate Tag Warrior Bugfix Release provided by Christine from the Internet.
My theme K2 was needing also an update, which caused the style to be broken. So waiting for a fix did take little longer, but when reviewing it, I noticed that only a css class name did need an update.
This all teaches me, when using a project with much depencies, it will be a mess when updating, as long as isn’t all provided by one source. It’s some kind of using a project “still in development”.
Update: While we are at “still in development” .. I updated to 2.3.1-RC1 some seconds ago. :)

What a week. Most notably, I am still in a state of partial disbelief that my case with Blue Cross Blue Shield is now on a path toward resolution and I don t have do battle with them, or at least in the same vigorous, soul-crushing way I have been engaged in since May (they still have not paid all the bills but at least part of them are resolved). But the very same day that I received the good news about BCBS, I received not so good news from my dermatologist about the black-blue mole that lies right under my left eye. He wants it gone, removed. So my whole fight with BCBS concerned claims over pre-existing conditions related to my moles. My claim was that I never had a problem with them until I had BCBS insurance and that is indeed the case. Soon after I first started having problems, I went on mole patrol and found a suspicious mole on my sister, which turned out to be melanoma. Now whenever I see a dermatologist, they all say, given my family history, given I grew up in the tropics, and given the odd size and very dark color of my mole, that it has to go. In fact the last dermatologist said with the firmest of tones: there is no doubt in my mind that it must be removed. The words stung because, well, I am pretty attached to the mole. I have lived with it for my whole life and it is fundamentally, even if somewhat mysteriously, linked to my sense of self. If it goes, I would feel like a very important part of me would also vanish. On more prosaic grounds, I can t help think that part of the drive to remove such a spot is just part of somewhat unhealthy social trend toward measuring most everything in finer and finder gradations of risk. Given that this mole is on my face and I see my face at least 2x a day in the mirror, I would probably catch anything if it started to change but given our risk society it is unsurprising that every American dermatologist keeps saying it is time to bid adieu to it. Given my background in medical anthropology I can t help conceptualize all this advice within these much larger social trends and then I go back and forth endlessly in my head as to whether I should remove it because it is safe and right and sound or whether I am caving in to somewhat irrational trend toward the risk management of everything. Finally I fear my insurance company again. Though I have a good job and decent insurance, I may not have good enough insurance for what this procedure entails.
Because of the size and location of the mole (large and close to my eye), if removed it must be done by a plastic surgeon. And plastic surgery in the US and plastic surgery in NYC costs a very pretty penny. While I would plan on getting pre-approval for the surgery, I somehow have the feeling that they will not pay the full cost and I am going to be left with another bill. And I am trying to stop the unnecessary onslaught of bills. So should it stay or should it go? I bet that I will lean toward the latter but not without a lot more thoughts, internal cries of resistance, and sense that even if I decide it is the best thing, I will lose a small piece of myself once removed

Been a bit busy for the last week or so. Apologies to those who were waiting for other things but I've been dedicating my time to Emdebian in preparation for CELF in Linz, Austria which is now less than a week away.
I spent three days as a guest of Wookey and his employer, TobyChurchill, in Cambridge. TCL are sponsoring Emdebian at CELF and also assisted with this work session so that Wookey and I could work together to fix the root filesystem. I'm very grateful to TCL for donating a balloon3 board that I can use to test all the new packages I'm cross building for Emdebian. Various bugs in emdebian-tools have been fixed, allowing the rootfs scripts to be tested and improved.
Other improvements include outline support for machine-specific customisations of the rootfs from within the tools. Support includes per machine-type and per machine-variant combinations and at three points in the rootfs generation process: package selection, post first_stage_install and post_second_stage_install. I hope to create some extra documentation for those who want to go the whole hog and write a new debootstrap suite-script.
The rootfs uses busybox, dpkg, apt and includes support for ntpdate and cdebconf. Current tarballs are about 14Mb to download, installing to about 25Mb. Two main reasons: Emdebian doesn't recognise "Essential:" and Emdebian doesn't install perl.
I have some more testing to do tomorrow but the current Emdebian target repository does have packages sufficient for a usable root filesystem within a chroot. The remaining stage is combining the kernel modules into the rootfs to make a bootable system.
Support for these new features will be in emdebian-tools 0.4.3, due for upload to Emdebian tomorrow, hopefully. All Debian users of emdebian-tools have access to the emdebian repository so the upgrade will be available immediately after the upload.
Watch the debian-embedded list for full details of the new features (as well as the expanded manpages).

apt-xapian-index: suggesting new terms for improving the query I've recently posted an introduction of apt-xapian-index, an example of how to query it and a way to add simple result filters to the query. Today I'll show how to use a very interesting feature of Xapian: computing a list of the best terms to use to improve the query. I'll expand apt-query-pkgtype.py to write, after the results, the suggested terms. If you feel like reimplementing my examples in another language, let me know and I'll include it to the post. Let's start with a few definitions taken from the Xapian glossary:

RSet (Relevance Set) The Relevance Set (RSet) is the set of documents which have been marked by the user as relevant. They can be used to suggest terms that the user may want to add to the query (these terms form an ESet), and also to adjust term weights to reorder query results. ESet (Expand Set) The Expand Set (ESet) is a ranked list of terms that could be used to expand the original query. These terms are those which are statistically good differentiators between relevant and non-relevant documents.

What I'm doing now is: after printing the normal result, I build an rset with all the results. For better results one can ask the user to pick the results they like (make a GUI with that: it should rock!), but starting with the top results in the RSet is a good enough default: Then I use the RSet to compute the ESet, and display the results to the user: You can also abuse this feature to show what are the tags that are most related to the search results. This allows you to turn a search based on keywords to a search based on semantic attributes, which would be an absolutely stunning feature in a GUI. We can do it thanks to Xapian allowing to specify a filter for the output of get_eset. This filter filters out all the keywords that are not tags, or that were in the list of query terms: I just rerun get_eset like above, but adding the filter, to show only a suggestion of tags: This is it. You can use the wsvn interface to get to the full source code and the module it uses. Try running it as:

axi-query-expand.py --type=gui image editor
axi-query-expand.py --type=cmdline image editor
axi-query-expand.py --type=game image editor

you will see that as the results change, the suggestions change as well. I'm happy to see that Xapian often suggests tags: this means that tags are useful discriminators in search results, and that all the work done on Debtags has been a good work. Notice that the suggestions change as you change any of the terms, the custom filter, and the tags you put in the search. Try to imagine how such a thing could improve Synaptic. What if I told you that Xapian is fast enough that all of this can happen live while you type? Next in the series: searching for similar packages.

A short program I wrote has searched the web and revealed many names for frailty:

• Frailty, thy name is Abbey.
• Frailty, thy name is Astronaut
• Frailty, thy name is a Tag Cloud.
• Frailty, thy name is Bingles
• Frailty, thy name is Blog.
• Frailty, thy name is Brand Loyalty
• Frailty, thy name is Browser.
• Frailty, thy name is Carelessness.
• Frailty, thy name is Carl.
• Frailty, thy name is Doctor.
• Frailty, thy name is Eleanor
• Frailty, thy name is Emo.
• Frailty, thy name is English.
• Frailty, thy name is Facebook.
• Frailty, thy name is Falco.
• Frailty, thy name is Female.
• Frailty, thy name is Fide.
• Frailty, thy name is Filmmaker
• Frailty, thy name is Francine.
• Frailty, thy name is the Gaming Press.
• Frailty, thy name is Gates.
• Frailty, thy name is Genius.
• Frailty, thy name is the Global Laser Tag League Council.
• Frailty, thy name is Hamlet.
• Frailty, thy name is Harry.
• Frailty, thy name is Horse.
• Frailty, thy name is Human.
• Frailty, thy name is iPod.
• Frailty, thy name is the Love of Ready-Made Congregations, and Ready Built Churches.
• Frailty, thy name is Machine.
• Frailty, thy name is Man.
• Frailty, thy name is Mankind.
• Frailty, thy name is Marriage.
• Frailty, thy name is a Misnomer.
• Frailty, thy name is Old Age.
• Frailty, thy name is Outsourcing.
• Frailty, thy name is Phrailty.
• Frailty, thy name is Pigeon.
• Frailty, thy name is Ryan.
• Frailty, thy name is Sceptre.
• Frailty, thy name is Sci-Fi.
• Frailty, thy name is Solana.
• Frailty, thy name is Tehran.
• Frailty, thy name is This.
• Frailty, thy name is Typepad.
• Frailty, thy name is US.
• Frailty, thy name is Weakness.
• Frailty, thy name is Whining.
• Frailty, thy name is Woe.
• Frailty, thy name is Worm.

It eliminated a few as well:

• Frailty, thy name is certainly not SIRO.
• Frailty, thy name is not Jane.
• Frailty, thy name is not Me.
• Frailty, thy name is not necessarily Viola.
• Frailty, thy name is not Woman.