..or he's not telling us something. If the multi-year exclusive agreement is true, then the goals are probably unachievable. In the keynote yesterday, Jobs put out there that almost a billion phones are sold each year to consumers. Granted, most of these are regular phones without the whiz-bang and special features of the iPhone -- and are usually free to the consumer, subsidized by the contract agreements. Still, he set what most would consider a modest goal, of getting 1% of the cell phone sales - 10 million phones, by the end of 2008.

However, lets do some napkin math. A very small percentage of phones out there today are smart phones. C Net says that 37.4 million smart phones out there. This is probably a pretty conservative estimate by now -- the Gartner study was released in October. Let's give the smart phone people the benefit of the doubt and say that usage triples by the end of 2008. That makes about 100 million smart phones out there. 10 million is ten percent of that market.

Let's look at the math another way. Cingular has 58 million subscribers. Assuming that they gain 20% per year, they will have 68 million at the end of 2008. If Apple is aiming at 10 million phones, that is one out of every seven Cingular customers. Next time you walk down the street, notice count 7 people that you can notice have a phone. If Apple makes its goal, one of those 7 people will own a iPhone, and will have shelled out at least half a grand on it.

These are amazingly high goals for a company that is new in the market. Granted, the iPhone is pretty revolutionary, but I don't think Steve is that crazy. I'm betting that he has something up his sleeve that will help him meet or beat this 10 million goal.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's new book Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is now available in stores, as well as for download on his website. To quote O'Reilly:

Written by a leading developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel, Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is a comprehensive overview of kernel configuration and building, a critical task for Linux users and administrators. No distribution can provide a Linux kernel that meets all users' needs. Computers big and small have special requirements that require reconfiguring and rebuilding the kernel. Whether you are trying to get sound, wireless support, and power management working on a laptop or incorporating enterprise features such as logical volume management on a large server, you can benefit from the insights in this book. Linux Kernel in a Nutshell covers the entire range of kernel tasks, starting with downloading the source and making sure that the kernel is in sync with the versions of the tools you need. In addition to configuration and installation steps, the book offers reference material and discussions of related topics such as control of kernel options at runtime. A key benefit of the book is a chapter on determining exactly what drivers are needed for your hardware. Also included are recipes that list what you need to do to accomplish a wide range of popular tasks.

It's yet another great book licensed under a Creative Commons license. It's good to see that more and more books are now being freely licensed...

Richard MacManus: “Instead of using the entire product suite of a Google or an MSN or a Yahoo, you [should be able to] use the particular apps you like most from not only big players - but small startups too.” I agree wholeheartedly. I’m a big believer in the componentization of the web, as I’ve written about before. Without a way to write independent apps that integrate with each other regardless of where they’re hosted, the future starts to look more and more like the mainframe era (albeit with better graphics). The world needs only five computers (shaping up to be Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, Windows Live and Yahoo!). However, we need to ensure that these five computers operate more as computing utilities where a thousand flowers can bloom than as centralized monoliths where the only way to integrate is to be assimilated.

Long-ago San Francisco Cacophony Society leader and early Burning Man organizer John Law is calling for the release of the Burning Man trademark into the public domain. An interesting story and some interesting questions about process. Burning Man is an event and a culture dear to my heart; I wonder how this is going to work out. Thanks to Scott Beale for his story on the subject; he knows the principals much better than I do. tags: burning man john law trademark public domain

Dear Lazyweb So, I was trying to read some documentation on my little Toshiba Port g and also lie down on the couch and also drink a beer, and these three activities weren't mutually compatible and I spilled some beer on my keyboard (and lap). Doh. I dried it off as best I could, and turned it upside-down like a teepee to dry overnight so the booze and moisture and sugar would go out of the computer instead of further in. Which seems to have paid off: the computer's running fine now. Except that the 'R' and 'G' keys don't work. They're not particularly sticky, they just don't register any key events when pressed. So, my question: what's my next step? Is there some trick I can do? Or am I just going to have to get good at lipograms? Drop me a line at evan@prodromou.name if you have any ideas. tags: lazyweb r g toshiba laptop beer keyboard

Father-Daughter Night Maj started French classes at the fantastico Montreal YMCA Language School. (I'm taking classes in German at the Montreal Goethe Institute starting next week; we came up with the idea of taking language classes independently.) Since Mama was out of the house from 5PM to 9PM, I got to do most of the evening prep for the night. Which was fun. I made Amita June and myself some ravioli and ros sauce, and we put a bowl in the fridge for Maj, too. Then we watched about 20 minutes of Babe, which had lots of cows and ducks and chickens and stuff she likes watching, but I was too worried that someone was going to get killed and eaten to enjoy watching it with her. So we did a bath -- she figured out how to make her rubber duck squirt water into the air, and that was worth about 20 minutes of giggles right there. Then we read some books, and by that point she was really ready for bed, and fell right asleep. We've been doing really good this week with going to sleep. I mentioned before that she's weaning from night nursing, so I'm doing most of the putting-to-bed and keeping-asleep work around here. It's been fun and rewarding; sleeping babies are great. tags: amitajune ymca babe maj french language lessons

Snow! It snowed today in Montreal! Just a little bit, but still. Hooray for us. tags: montreal winter snow

Googie I also stumbled across the word Googie architecture this evening. Interesting term and comfort food for the California native's soul. tags: googie architecture california

yulblog Tomorrow night (20 Niv se or 10 January for those of you who still use that oppressive Gregorian calendar) we've got the misnomered First Wednesday Get-Together for yulblog. The date was moved back from the very first Wednesday of the month to the second Wednesday to give some space around New Year's Day. I think the novelty has got people interesting in attending; I've talked to more than one person who's going to go. So, I'm going too. At the Quincaillerie at 980 Rachel, 8PM. tags: yulblog first wednesday quincaillerie

Effin' MyBlogLog So, I signed up for that MyBlogLog a while ago (see Journal/29 Frimaire CCXV), just to see how it worked. But I disconnected it from my own site since I thought the click-tracking was a little invasive. But I must have some cookies still left around, because I keep looking at sites like Read/WriteWeb, which has a nice article about OpenID, and I'm reading along and then there's a picture of me right on the page. Inserted from the MyBlogLog script, but it scares the crap out of me when it happens. Effin' MyBlogLog! tags: mybloglog readwriteweb

The race had 3 finalists:
- HP nx6235 (in Romanian) - incredible low price, fully works (with some patches and except the fingerprint reader) (thanks Marc)
- Dell Inspiron 6400 (aka E1505)
- ASUS F3T-AP008

I have decided against the 64bits AMDs and in favour of long life batteries and Centrino Core 2 Duo architecture.

HP nx6235 failed to meet my criteria of design, reliability (I have heard that local HP service has problems with HP products; waranty is 1 year). The shared video memory was a concern regarding overall system performance.

Dell, well... Dell 32 bit arch... I would have been nice to jump into the 64bit wagon, but I guess that will have to wait for now. Design is nice, the hard disk is bigger by 20GB (we all know disk storage is never enough ;-), Centrino tehnology (Intel seems to be OS friendly and drivers seem to exist for all the components), battery time (I can wait to test the real battery time), has some video memory of its own (HyperMemory - some kind of video cache)

ASUS - the selling points over the Dell were the AMD Turion 64 x2 processor(s), the design (looks nicer than Dell, IMHO), the nVidia video card (which was also a concern due to the proprietary driver and its security holes - sorry, no link), and the not yet working built-in webcam. There was also an bonus: a bag and a mouse, but that almost never works for me. And I had to wait for at least a week for it.

The winner is the Dell Inspirion, they also have it on stock, I already placed the order and I will pick it up after I finnish this entry ;-) .

I can't wait to fire up Debian Installer on this baby.

Update: when I said I'll skip he 64 bit wagon I was thinking (for some reason) that the amd64 bit port does not perform well on the Intel Core 2 Duo processors and I would be forced to use the i386 arch. Thanks for correcting me.
Update: it seems eMag was using false information in their advertising regarding Dell, the system is NOT using Centrino technology since it has a Broadcom wireless lan.

I'm keeping my homepage in a SVN repository; I'm using the $Date$ variable to automatically track the last modification date (though it will also change on minor modifications). For the HTML "Date" meta tag, the W3C recommends using ISO8601 date format. This is the (non-XSLT-2, so no regexp) hack I use for conversion:

<xsl:value-of select="concat(substring($string,8,4),'-',substring($string,13,2),'-',substring($string,16,2),'T',substring($string,19,8),substring($string,28,5))" />

Did I mention I hate XSLT? It's lacking so many standard functions, like date-time processing, regular expressions, exceptions, ... - granted, a lot of stuff was added for XSLT2, but it still sucks badly. Especially the syntax. Here's how to format the date according to RFC 2616, as used in the last-modified meta tag and HTTP/NNTP/SMTP headers:

<xsl:variable name="day" select="concat(substring($string,8,4),'-',substring($string,13,2),'-',substring($string,16,2))" />
<xsl:variable name="time" select="substring($string,19,8)" />
<xsl:variable name="timezone" select="substring($string,28,5)" />
<xsl:value-of select="date:day-abbreviation($day)" />
<xsl:text>, </xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="date:day-in-month($day)" />
<xsl:text> </xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="date:month-abbreviation($day)" />
<xsl:text> </xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="date:year($day)" />
<xsl:text> </xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="date:time($time)" />
<xsl:text> </xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="$timezone" />

Note that this does not include any error handling and is not very robust. You also need an XSLT processor with some of the ">">">http://exslt.org/dates-and-times extensions such as xsltproc. (Which unfortunately doesn't do XSLT2 yet and doesn't have a regexp extension). [Update: Joel Wreed pointed me to his libxslt plugins, a regexp and a exsl.org/dates-and-times plugin. These would help a lot, though IIRC the date-parse exsl.org spec doesn't support the date format I'd need. (So I can't just say date-format(date-parse(...),...)). Also he said that they basically are unmaintained right now. It would be nice if they could be merged into libxslt, though...]

Our brunch yesterday went super-well. We had about 15 people over, which was far too many for our supposedly mellow evening. But it was great -- we got to catch up with a lot of folks I've been missing over the holidays and haven't gotten to see. I hadn't seen Lucinda Catchlove much for a few months, and Heather Kelley and Damian DiFede made an appearance, too. We got to see John Usher, who's off to do weird things to people's ears at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Niko came with friend Johanie, who made some great black-bean brownies; DJ Ghostbeard was still feeling ill from NYE; and Meg showed off her deep purple hockey bruises. It was also nice to have some new friends come, too. I've been wanting to hang out with MC Turgeon, one of the most experienced bloggers in Quebec, founder of me dia and toiles-du-Web, since we met last year at South by Southwest. She and her partner Chris came over with a nice bottle of wine and got to know everyone there. Actually, she knew a lot of the people already -- she and Anne-Marie had met at Mutek, for example. When Patti came in, she said, "Oh, yeah, I know M-C. We do a lot of panels together." Ah, the panel circuit. Altogether a really good time. Probably the only downside is that our oven was really dirty, and while I was making quiches and roasted potatoes I smoked up the entire house. But it cleared pretty quickly, and with the nice weather we're having, I could even have the kitchen door open to clear the smoke. Unheard of! tags: bruncher mcturgeon montreal cooking

Making a point Speaking of unseasonably warm weather, the Green Party of Canada held a picnic and ice cream social on Mount Royal last Saturday, which would have a couple of feet of snow on it in a regular year. The subject of discussion? Climate change, of course. I dunno -- clever move, but do they have to rub it in? tags: green party picnic climate change

Shameless plugs My friend Allegra has started a great new blog, Sucking-stones. She's got a really good voice and it's now in circulation as one of the blogs I read each morning. Also, my friend Anne-Marie Bergeron has her first travel TV show on 33mag tomorrow. She's got a four-part series on her trip to Iceland which they're going to show. It's in French, but her husband Jeff only cusses in English, so that's probably what you'll hear when they're climbing glaciers and lava floes. Did that get everyone? I hope so. You know what they say: You can plug your friends, and you can plug your ears, but you can't plug your friends' ears. Or something. tags: allegra sucking-stones annemarie jeff 33mag

Chix I was just reading Angela Beesley's end-of-year blog post and realized that I'd missed the establishment of WikiChix. It's a new organization for female wiki participants, in the great tradition *Chix tradition of Linux Chix or Debian Women. All the more galling is that two other blogs I regularly read also covered the new group. Joseph Reagle made a note about gendered spaces and the role they play in any movement (like Open Content and wikis). Biella blogged about his bloggage and put some social-science twist that was a little hard for me to follow. In any event, good luck to WikiChix. I find clubs extremely fun and useful and by nature exclusionary, and nothing to get worked up about. Of course, as one of the two founding members of the Maldekstrulaj Vegeteranaj Esperantistaj Linuxamantoj (Left-handed Vegetarian Esperantist Linux-users Club), I'd probably be pretty hypocritical calling anyone else exclusionary. tags: wikichix wiki angela beesley joseph reagle biella coleman clubs

Quadmachine is a virtual instruction set architecture, designed mainly as a target for simple educational compilers. It has the following noteworthy features:

• RISC design
• word size 64 bits
• address size 64 bits (theoretical maximum memory size 16 exabytes)
• all memory access is in word units
• 65534 general-purpose 64-bit registers
• 2 additional special-purpose 64-bit registers
• a variant of the “register windows” technique with automatic spilling

All of these, except for the preposterously large register file, are more or less realistic for a 64-bit RISC design. The size of the register file is intended to trivialize register allocation in compilers. This is the second Quadmachine design. Main differences from the previous design are a move to a load-store RISC architecture and the upgrade of the word size to 64 bits. There is a software realization of the Quadmachine architecture, with a graphical debug console. It is written in Java for portability; speed was not an implementation concern. Read more

Amita June is reaching a point in her life where it's time for us to start weaning her from breastfeeding. Most parents do this much earlier, if they breastfeed at all, but we've been devotees of attachment parenting for a while, and we wanted to give her as much time nursing as possible. But at 15 months, she's ready to start doing things like sleep through the night on her own, drink only cow's milk, and be a little more independent. So, this month we're starting to do some night weaning. What does this mean? First of all, Maj is no longer nursing the baby to bed. She now is doing the main pre-sleep prep work (a bath), does a short nursing period, and then hands the baby off to me for some reading, songs, and walking down to sleep. This will gradually move into fewer, shorter nursings before sleep, and ultimately to none. Once that connection has been broken, I think the main point of nursing will be occasional comfort nursing during the day. Gradually, that will fade out. And then there will be none. It's kind of exciting to be the Primary Sleep Guy for the baby. We're re-connecting in a way that we haven't in a while -- I was only putting her to bed occasionally for a quite a while. It's also been pretty successful so far, which has been good. tags: amitajune weaning sleep parenting babies

Souper Bruncher When Maj and I first moved to Montreal, we had help from some friends who we'd known from before. After we moved into our apartment, we invited them all over for dinner to say thanks. In order to get to know people in our new hometown, we also asked each person to bring someone we didn't know, so we could make new friends. The event was so successful, and we met so many new people, that we made it a regular occasion. For almost three years, every Tuesday night we invited friends over to our home for dinner (or souper in Quebecois French), with an open invitation to meet new friends and interesting people. It was a great way to meet interesting folks in Montreal, and most of our best friends here we met through these dinners. We were even profiled in Elle Quebec as a model for how to make new friends. But when the baby was born, we just couldn't manage to organize dinners any more every week. Cooking for 20+ people isn't that expensive, especially since we're pescevegetarians and that kind of food just isn't that costly. But it does take a lot of time and energy, and with a newborn baby we just didn't have either. Now, with Amita a little more than a year old, we're trying to start up our regular home parties on a more manageable scale. We're doing brunch at our house on Sunday afternoons around 3PM, with a much smaller list of invitees, requests for RSVPs, and a clear indication that the event only goes until bedtime. (Our Tuesday night dinners would occasionally stretch until dawn.) It seems to be working pretty well; we've had a lot of fun at the last couple of brunches we've had. And brunch is a much more laid-back meal than a dinner party, anyways. (Although John Usher asks incredulously, "By what stretch of the imagination is 3PM between breakfast and lunch?") I'm looking forward to our next brunch (tomorrow) a lot, and I hope to get many more friends over to our home in the next few months of Sundays. tags: brunch montreal making friends souper bruncher

I have been asked for advice about long-term storage of documents. I decided to blog about it because my thoughts may be useful to others, and because if I get something wrong then surely people will correct me. ;)

Many organizations are looking at using computers for storing all documents. This gives savings on the costs of storing paper - the promise of the paperless office is being fulfilled. There are some potential issues about whether a signature in a PDF file that's scanned from paper is valid - but I guess it's the same as a signature on a FAX and everyone seems to accept FAXed contracts.

The technical problem is how to reliably store data long-term. The problem is that all modern methods of storing data will degrade over time. Anything less than engraving a message in stone, gold, or platinum and burying it will have some data loss eventually.

If the documents that need to be archived have no special requirements and if you have a good backup system in place (testing backup media, off-site storage in case of disaster, multiple sets of hardware that can read the backup media in case of hardware failure, etc) then you might be able to just store the documents on a server and include them in the backup plan. The regular backups should cater for replacing media over the long term. If however there is a significant amount of data or the data has confidentiality requirements that preclude having it all online all the time then you need a separate infrastructure for such storage.

Regular backup systems have to deal with files being deleted from storage and files that have their contents changed. For a document archiving system no file will ever be changed once it has been created and no file will be deleted. This allows some simplifications to the backup strategy. For example if you have multiple terabytes of documents backed up by tape and stored off-site you could use CD-ROMs or other media for storing recent changes. It would be very easy for an employee to grab a couple of CDs before rushing out of a burning building, but grabbing a set of tapes (or the correct tape from a large set) may not be possible.

It would be possible to use a tape library system as the primary storage for documents. If a large organization was going to implement this a few years ago that might be a good option. Nowadays storage is getting increasingly large and cheap. Terabytes are available in desktop PCs and hundreds of terabytes are available for server storage. So having the primary document store on a server with a decent amount of space and then making tape backups for storage in secure locations seems viable.

One thing to note about such document storage is that having everything on a server allows a much larger amount of data to be accessed and copied more easily than on paper. Sorting through a billion paper documents and copying the thousand most useful ones would be a difficult task for someone who was involved in industrial espionage. Finding the most useful files when they are indexed on a server should be quite easy and copying a few thousand is also easy (one thousand scanned documents of medium size should fit on a USB memory stick - much smaller than a few reams of copied documents).

Finally documents have to be archived in publicly documented file formats that can be easily read in the future. The PDF specification is well known and there are multiple programs that can display data in such files, another good option for scanned documents is JPEG. Proprietary formats such as MS-Word should never be used, you never know whether you will be able to read them in four years, let alone the seven years for which many documents must be retained or the 20-30 years that some documents must be retained.

Marc Brockschmidt wrote the BTS is too crowded and Joey Hess objected that a too clean BTS can also be a bad sign.

I think both is true or to say better none of the ways makes sense without the other:

Bug reports are in my eyes one of the most valueable resources we have. Noone can test everything even in almost trivial packages. To archive quality we need the users input and a badly worded bug report is still better than no bug report at all. Our BTS is a very successfull tool in that as it lowers the barrier to report issues. No hassles to create (and wait for completion of) an account, no regrets by getting funny unparseable mails about some developer changing their e-mail addresses (did I already say I hate bugzilla?).

As those reports are valueable information, one should keep them as long as they can be usefull. Looking at the description of the wontfix tag shows that even a request that cannot be or should not be fixed in the current context is considered valueable. Most programs and designs change, and having a place to document workarounds and keep in memory what open problems exist.

On the other hand a crowded bug list is like a fridge you only put food into. Over time it will start to degrade into the most displeasing form of a compost heap. The same holds for bug reports:

Most bugs are easier when they are young: You most propably have the same version as the submitter somewhere, know what changed recently and when you can reproduce it you get some hints on what is happening and get add it. If you cannot reproduce it, the submitter might still be reachable for more information.

When the report is old, things get harder. Is the bug still present? Was it fixed in between by some upstream release? Is the submitter still reachable and does still remember what happened?

When I care enough of a problem to write a bug report and trying to supply a patch for it, I try to always take a look at the bug list and look for some other low hanging fruits to pick and submit some other patch, too. (After all, most of the time is spend trying to understand the package and the strange build system upstream choose instead of plain old autotools and not when fix the problem). But when it is hard to see the trees because of all the dead wood around it, and there is nothing to find with some way to reproduce it and one knows far too well that the most efficient steps would be a tedious search for old versions to see if that was a bug solved upstream many years ago, good intentions tend to melt like ice thrown in lava.

So, when I wrote both is true I meant that keeping real-world issues documented and aware is a good thing. But having bugs rot (and often they do), will pervert all the advantages. In the worst case, people will even stop submitting new reports as it takes to long to look at all the old ones to look for a dublicate.

Ocamlnet 2.2: test it by yourself from experimental A couple of days ago I finally managed to complete the packaging work of Ocamlnet 2.2. This upstream version is a (r)evolutionary release in which it aggregate in a single source package libraries who used to be distributed separately, namely: equeue, ocaml-rpc, netclient, and ocamlnet itself. I've been quite surprised to discover that upstream is explicitly nice with us packages and provides guidelines on how to split the various libraries in binary packages addressing both dependency and licensing problems (e.g. for nethttpd which is GPL and can't be shamelessly linked with other components which are MIT/X11-licensed). The packages are in experimental but need NEW-processing, as well as cryptgps (a pure-OCaml implementation of some symmetric crypto algorithms, which is a new build-dep of Ocamlnet). Hence to ease testing I set up an apt-gettable repo here:

deb http://people.debian.org/~zack unstable ocaml

Please try it and give feedback to debian-ocaml-maint@l.d.o. In all my tests the upgrade from ocamlnet pre-2.2 has been smooth: the (too many) transitional packages I had to create did their dirty job. The only "issue" non-addressed (and I don't know how to actually) is that the nethttpd library used to be distributed in libocamlnet-ocaml-dev and is now distributed in libnethttpd-ocaml-dev. Since the former package is entirely useful without the latter there is no dep among the two and it's possible that upon upgrades an user ends up without a working nethttpd library on the system. I added a Recommends in the hope it's enough, let's see how many complaints I will receive ...

Marc, I disagree. Solving every issue and whim that every user files against a popular package, while not letting the package degenerate into a mess, is hard. Taking some time to gather opinions and produce a well-designed fix that strikes to the core of an issue, rather than treating symptoms, is a good thing for many classes of bugs. (Other classes should instead be fixed immediately.) The existence of many open bugs against a package in Debian is not an indication that it's of lower quality than the corresponding package in Ubuntu -- which in fact probably has 99% of the same bugs anyway. As a user, I also regard a BTS as perhaps the best form of documentation there is about real-life problems that I might encounter while using the package, the general quality of the code in the package, etc. It's the first thing I look at when installing some new peice of software. It's also a good way to gauge how well the package is maintained -- not by counting bugs, but by reading how the maintainer responds to bugs. What I look for in a BTS is an indication that the maintainers care about a bug. The fact that bug #725 took ten years to get fixed doesn't mean that X's maintainers suck, it means that for ten years, we were able to document a minor problem to the few users who cared about it, and that we were able to keep track of it until someone finally figured out how to fix it. That's quite an accomplishment. Another example, to keep picking on X, the fact that bug #216933 is marked wontfix is not an indication that the bug is worthless; in fact the bug documents a quite subtle issue in the Crusoe's code morphing software, and has been an invaluable reference to a lot of Crusoe users. I'm much more concerned about all our users who don't know about the BTS and are unwilling to bother to file bugs than I am about the total number of unfixed bugs in the BTS. Getting 100% of our users to file good bugs on every issue they run into would do much more to increase the overall quality of Debian than fixing every > 1 year old bug in the BTS would.

Hardware evils

I've had quite the unfortunate week, hardware-wise, here. Nothing on my end is broken, but [lj user=ceilingsarecool]'s computer is screwed but good. It all started near the beginning of this week when I started to look into her machine. It had been loud for a while, and was being unreliable in regards to applications. Running memtest86+ on it via a handy System Rescue CD I always keep around discovered a couple of stuck bits on the memory that otherwise had been perfectly fine. However, I have had sticks die before, so I called Crucial and am having the memory replaced. (thank you Lifetime warranty). While I was taking the Memory out I noticed the couse of the loudness. Apparently there was ailing fan on the south bridge, which explained her issues with USB-connected devices. No problem - I'll just order a replacement motherboard. The old FIC AD11 was getting pretty bad anyway.

The new motherboard (a PCCHIPS M810LMR) arrived yesterday, so I went through the lengthy process of removing the old motherboard and moving the CPU from one to another. Just one problem: the new motherboard didn't start up. After checking that I had everything connected right, I thought the board was DOA. This would be my first DOA ever, but as usual the place I bought from has a DOA replacement policy so I thought I just wasted 2 hours and a bunch of time replacing. Unfortunately, this isn't even the end of this sad tale of brokenness. When I put the CPU back in the old motherboard, it didn't start either. So now I'm left with two motherboards for a processor that doesn't work, I assume. I don't really have another one that I can test it out on, and I can't test the motherboards with another CPU because I don't have one.

Luckily, I have some old towers sitting here that were about to be dragged out to the dumpster. I rescued them. They're ancient, even more than the machine that was in use was. I had to burn a Maxtor MaxBlast4 CD just to get them past the 65GB barrier, and of course I need to do a "repair" install of Windows because all the hardware changed since I installed it.

Lesson of this tale: Almost-broken computers are a delicate ecosystem. Just buy a new computer - you'll have to do that in the longrun anyway. Currently I'm looking at replacing the mainboard and CPU with this combo from newegg. It's got mixed reviews, but is reasonably priced, and if DOA I am sure that newegg will replace it. I'm debating between doing this and just saving up to get a decent new motherboard and CPU (generally around $150-$250, $300 easily with new memory) later in the year. I feel pretty bad because every computer that I've given ceilingsarecool to use has had issues like this. She tells me that she doesn't really care that much, and she does have a laptop which works well when the desktop has issues like this, but it's still like a poison apple.

Windows XP Setup

It doesn't seem to matter what you are installing Windows XP on. It can be 500MHz or 1.2GHz or 3.0GHz, the first time estimate that you get for finishing the install is 39 minutes. When XP was first released, I never ever had a computer that would finish that fast - it consistently took an hour or more from that state, and then I jumped to fast computers that come under the mark most of the time (although not by much). At least the estimate is monotonic, not going up to an hour. I can at least assess the progress a little more. Installing a couple times in the last few weeks has got me wondering about the origin of that estimate, and if it was going to be so inaccurate as to just guess and be constant at the beginning of the install, why include a time estimate at all?

Michael Davies recently blogged that all developers should have big screens. This news has been around for a while, the most publicity for the idea came from Microsoft Research where they did a study showing that for certain tasks a 50% performance increase could be gained from a larger monitor.

If you consider that a good software developer will get paid about $100K and it's widely regarded that in a corporate environment the entire costs for a worker (including management, office space, etc) is double their base salary then you consider each developer to be worth $200K per annum. Therefore larger and more monitors could potentially give a benefit in excess of $100K per annum (we assume that the value provided by the developer is greater than their salary - apart from the dot-com boom that's usually the case).

It's quite obvious that you can get a really great monitor configuration for significantly less than $100K and that it will remain quite current for significantly more than a year (monitor technology advances comparatively slowly so a good monitor should last at least four years).

Some time ago I researched this matter for a client. I convinced all the managers in my area, I convinced a bunch of colleagues to buy bigger monitors for their homes (and bought one myself), but unfortunately senior management saw it as a waste of money. I was trying to convince them that people who were being paid >$100,000 should be each assigned a $400 monitor. Sadly they believed that spending the equivalent of less than a day's wages per employee was not justified.

If I was in a management position I would allocate an amount of money for each developer to spend on hardware or conferences at their own discretion. I would make that amont of money a percentage of the salary of each employee, and I would also allow them to assign some of their share to a colleague if they had a good reason for it (EG if a new hire needed something expensive that would exceed their budget for the first year). I think that people who are good programmers are in the best position to judge what can best be done to improve their own productivity, and that allowing them to make their own choices is good for morale.

On a more technical level I have a problem with getting a big monitor. I do most of my work on a laptop because I travel a lot. I don't travel as much as I did while living in Europe but still do a lot of coding in many strange places. I started writing my Postal benchmark in the hotel restaurant of a Bastion hotel in Utrecht during one of the worst recorded storms in Europe (the restaurant had huge windows and it was inspirational for coding). I wrote the first version of my ZCAV benchmark in Denver airport while waiting for a friend.

What I need is a good way of moving open windows from my laptop to a big external display and then back again. I don't want to logout before moving my machine. With a Macintosh this is quite possible (I'm using a OS/X machine while working for a client and the only thing that has impressed me is the monitor support). With Linux things aren't so easy, it's supposed to be possible but I haven't heard any unqualified success stories yet.

I guess I could try setting up XDMCP between my laptop and a desktop machine with some big displays and logout before moving.

Any suggestions?

I used to live in Norfolk, so Norwich Evening News: Was top cyclist killed by driver asleep at the wheel? (Updates: EDP: Death crash trial hears of "most viable explanation" and EDP: Driver guilty of causing cyclist's death ) and Norwich Evening News: Cyclist hit by bus on A47 are rather worrying. Weston super Mare Weston Mercury: Town centre havoc reports that Wales and West Utilities will be digging up Orchard Street followed by Alexandra Parade, Regent Street, Walliscote Road, High Street and Knightstone Road over 16 weeks from 8 January, and also

"Three months worth of work to remove the central reservation and add a filter lane to Herluin Way is also due to start on the same day [...] Uphill Road South in Uphill is closing on January 9 for six weeks as Wessex Water repairs the highway's sewer. [...] Winters Lane in Redhill is shutting for two months while a new sewer is put in."

Pipe works seldom seem to take up the full width of the road and the Herluin Way cycle track only crosses Herluin Way at a few points. Will these roads be kept open for cycling? They should be. All of these seem to be starting just before next week's Cycle Forum (7pm Wednesday 10 January at Worle Campus, press release ). Interesting new year present.

Suppposedly, card number five in the Tarot is the Hierophant, described as “someone who interprets secret knowledge” and representing concepts such as “conformity” and “group identification”. Not that any of that is related to this “five things you don’t know about me” meme, for which I’ve apparently been tagged by both Pia and Tony. And since I wouldn’t want to be accused of being either cool or vanity lacking here’s some from me.

• I used to be a regular bit-part actor in school plays and musicals; I was in the school choir for four years in high school too. I tried getting back into it once during uni, but didn’t really have the time or interest, so I’m just left with going to the occassional show and watching these days. Of course, when they’re as spectacular as Woman in White that’s not much of a problem…
• For quite a while, my favourite food was lamb’s brains, crumbed and fried with a white sauce. I’m quite fond of offal, also known as “variety meats” apparently, in general really – I’m not really persuaded by the “it’s morally wrong to eat animals” thing, but I figure if you’re going to anyway, it makes sense to not be wasteful about it. Kidneys are pretty awesome too; though liver seems to get boring before you’ve finished eating it. I’ve never tried haggis; but I suspect that’ll change before the next DebConf is over…
• Prior to getting an 486sx33 that eventually ran Linux, I used to be an Amiga geek. As an Aussie Amigoid, that meant reading the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (edited by Andy Farrell), and eventually when I became really elite, subscribing to Megadisc, a monthly magazine on floppy disk, which included useful programs, reviews, letters, and all sorts of interesting things. My first published C progream was included on one of the issues – it was a teensy little app for people with hard disks that would see if you had a Megadisc in the drive, then open up a dialog box so you could choose a directory to copy the disk too, and not have to worry about seek times and such. Unfortunately I was new enough at the whole “C” thing that I wasn’t sure how to make a new directory myself, and decided to just expect the user to use the “New Dir” button in the standard Amiga dialog box for that. Which would have been fine if I hadn’t also gone to the trouble of helpfully emptying the selected directory so the user wouldn’t end up with two Megadiscs in the same place. Put the two together, and evidently you end up with Megadisc’s editor, Tim Strachan, calling you at 9am the morning after publication and telling you how someone had tried it out and it had started deleting all the files on the hard drive. Ooops. With the Amiga dying out and the rise of the internet, it looks like Tim’s now more into alternative health products than computers.
• On the Friday before flying down to Canberra to be Rusty’s wingman for a meeting with the Attorney-General’s department I had my first motorbike accident – not making a turn on a wet road at night just near home, hitting the asphalt and the gutter. I came out of it with some torn jeans and a grazed knee, a banged hand that needed icing, a nice bruise on my side, and a bike that ended up taking aaaages to get fixed and ridable again. Happily it’s gotten another couple of thousand k’s on the odometer since then.
• In the couple of days before I head to Sydney for the 2007 edition of the fantabulous linux.conf.au I’ll be moving from my unit in Toowong to a house in Highgate Hill. Clinton and I will be sharing the upstairs, while the downstairs will be turned into a granny-flat for my parents for when they decide to stay in the city. The theory is it’ll be an investment over the longer term, with the idea being to try building some townhouses in the rather large backyard and sub-dividing. Should be fun!

Let’s see, I’ll tag: vocalist extraordinaire James, companionable carnivore Pat, sometime C hacker David, fellow motorcyclist Sez, and future housemate Clinton.