I keep wondering why people keep writing HUB, WEB and SPAM, where the correct technical terms are Hub, Web and Spam. Neither of the three expressions is an acronym. Well, SPAM is, but Spiced Pork and Ham is a Trademark of Hormel Industries, and they ask people not to use their trademark to talk about Unsolicited Commercial/Bulk E-Mail on the Internet. They do, however, allow the expression Spam to be used for UCE/UBE. Any idea why people keep treating Hub and Web as an acronym? It disturbes my reading tremendously.

While computers mostly handle the Daylight Savings Time changeover automatically, sometimes work is required. In our case at ICHEC, arranging for some jobs to run at set times, means changing the scheduler at the changeover. We use PBS and Maui to schedule what jobs run when on our cluster. Mostly jobs get run according to priorities: the scheduler (software) decides which what the priority jobs are and when; it collects free nodes until it has sufficient free CPUs to run the jobs at hand. It can do backfilling: when it's e.g. trying to run a large 128 node job but has only 10 nodes free, it will reserve nodes as they become free until it has all the resources needed to run the job. If by looking at the remaining time left on running jobs it realises that it won't get nodes free for the large job for say 2 hours, it can run small jobs with runtimes of less than two hours on the nodes it had reserved. Clever. The fun issue comes when you need to set reservations: say you need to run a job at 2am every day on 32 nodes, as we do: the scheduler needs to plan accordingly. The scheduler needs to really have 32 nodes free at that time. Thats 2am local time, of course: but next Sunday, at 2am, the clock changes... So, working out the consequences, and preparing for the change, I sympathise with our American friends who've moved three weeks early to save energy. Thus causing lots of midnight oil to be burned around the world by sysadmins and programmers updating software. Hmmm. Note to Self: When Posting a blog entry asking for help on getting blog comments to work with openid, try leaving the comments setup on the blog working, so people can leave replies. Fixed now.

Rule #1: don't do "svn commit" in a working directory of my blog when there are some unfinished and ill-worded blog posts still in that directory. Or, in other words, my previous post shouldn't have gone out yet, it wasn't ready; it was way too convoluted and thus failed to bring across the intended message. Revisiting this post before posting it, is something that's been on my list of things to do for a fair while, but it just never happened. I guess the cat's out of the bag now, so I might as well clarify it here and now. Let me make clear that I did not mean to say that people should just be Cc'ing everyone, whether or not they're on the list, in violation of the stated list policy. Instead, what I meant to say is that I do not believe that a policy on whether or not you should send Cc's to people is the right solution to this kind of thing. Instead, I think we should have our mail clients support this kind of thing by themselves. There are really two types of "reply" in a mail client: one is a "public" reply, where everyone who read the original mail can also read any follow-ups, and the other is a "private" reply, where you only send your reply to the person who sent the mail you're replying to in the first place. There should not be a difference on the UI level between "reply to the list" or "reply to each and every email address that's in the 'To', 'Cc' and 'From' headers"; MUA software should be smart enough to notice when you're mailing to a mailinglist, and pick the right option out of the latter two all by itself. And if someone really wants a private copy of the mail, adding a header to do that is already possible today. With that in place, there shouldn't be a need for a code of conduct to state that you should not randomly Cc people. QED. Then again, obviously mailinglists suck and usenet is much better. But that's another discussion for another time.

I've talked a lot lately about different VCSs.

I got some interesting comments in reply to my most recent post. One person took issue with my complaint that nobody really understood how to specify a revision to git format-patch, and proceeded to issue an incorrect suggestion. And a couple of people complained about my comments about bzr, which generally came down to the released version of bzr didn't have anything compelling and also didn't support tags.

So I went into #bzr, asked them what bzr has that git, Mercurial, and darcs don't. And gave bzr the benefit of the doubt that 0.15 will be out soon and will be stable. What I got back were these general items:

1. Renaming of directories (not in hg, git)
2. 2-way sync with Subversion (not in hg, darcs)
3. Checkouts (not in any others by default)
4. No server-side push requirement

Let's look at these in more detail.

1. Renaming of directories

All of them can rename files and (excepting git) completely accurately track back the file's history. But consider this: if person A commits a change to branch A that adds a file, and person B then renames the directory that the file is in on his branch, will a merge cause person A's file to appear in the new directory name? In darcs and bzr, yes. In Mercurial and git, no.

So yes, this is a nice thing. But I have never actually had this situation crop up in practice, and even if it did, could be trivially remedied. I would say that for me, I don't really care.

[Update: Current stable releases of Mercurial can do this too. I'm not quite sure how, but it does work. So git is the only one that can't do that.]

2. 2-way sync with Subversion

This is a really nice feature and is present in both git and bzr. I haven't tested it either place, but if it works as advertised -- and properly supports tracking multiple related svn branches and merges -- would be slick. That was enough to make me consider using git, but in retrospect, I so rarely interact with people using svn that it is not that big a deal to me.

Still, for those that have to work with svn users, this feature in bzr and git could be a big one.

Better yet would be to get all those svn holdouts over to DVCS.

3. Checkouts

A bzr checkout is basically a way to make local commits be pushed to the remote repo immediately, as with svn. This is of no utility to me, though I can see some may have a use for it. But it can be done with hg hooks and probably approximated with scripting in others.

4. No server-side process necessary for pushing repos

bzr has built-in support to push to a server that has sftp only, and doesn't require a copy of itself on the server. While I believe that none of the other three have that, it is possible to rsync (and probably ftp) darcs and Mercurial repos to a server in a safe fashion by moving repo files in a defined order. Probably also possible with git. All four can pull repos using nothing but regular HTTP.

What bzr still doesn't have

Integrated patch emailing. The big thing is that it has no built-in emailing of patches support. darcs is extremely strong in this area, followed by hg, and git is probably third. "darcs send" is all it takes to have darcs look at the remote repo, figure out what you have that they don't, and e-mail a bundle of changesets to them. I posted an extension and later a patchset that does all this for Mercurial except for automatically figuring out what default email address to do (that'll come in a few days, I think). One feature Mercurial has had for awhile that Darcs hasn't is sending multiple textual diffs as a thread, with one message per changeset. bzr doesn't have any support for emailing patches yet, which is disappointing. Because of the strong support for this in darcs and Mercurial, people running those systems feel less of a need to publish their repos.

[Update: There is a plugin for bzr that seems to address some of this. I haven't tested it, and it's not in bzr core (so doesn't quite meet my very friendly for a newbie requirement), but this does exist, though apparently not as advanced as Mercurial]

Performance. Supposedly 0.15 is supposed to be better on this, but even if bzr achieves the claimed doubling of performance, most benchmarks I have seen would rate it as still being significantly behind git and Mercurial, though it may overtake darcs in some tests.

Extensive documentation. I would say that bzr's docs are better in some ways than git's (its tutorials especially), but lack depth. If you want to know some detail about how the repository works on-disk, it's not really documented. Darcs still has David's excellent manual, and Mercurial has the hg book which is still great as well.

Merging not as advanced. darcs is pretty obviously way on top here, but of the others, Mercurial does a pretty good job with its automatic handling of renames and automatic resolving of different branches that commit the same change (even if that same change is a rename, or an add of the same content). bzr can't resolve as much automatically.

Summary

Well, I'll say that bzr still doesn't look compelling enough for my use cases to use, and the lack of an easy-for-a-newbie-to-use automated email submission feature is a pretty big disappointment. Though I did appreciate the time those on #bzr spent with me, and if I needed to sync with svn users frequently, I'd probably choose bzr over git.

For now, I'm happy with sticking with darcs for my code and hg for my Debian work.

But all four communities are aggressively working on their weaknesses, and this landscape may look very different in a year.

Adrian von Bidder made an interesting post in response to my post about Spanish wind power. He correctly points out that power sources that have seasonal variations and which may vary during the course of a day can not be used as the sole power source.

The ideal design would be to have wind power stations that are designed to have a peak power that is greater than the expected use for the country. Then when wind power is slightly below peak the entire use for the country could still be satisfied.

There are a number of power sources that can quickly ramp up, this includes hydro-electric and gas-fired power stations. Such forms of power generation could be used as backup for when wind and solar power are limited. Incidentally one thing to note about Solar power is that it is most effective during the day in summer - which is when there is the highest demand for electricity to run cooling systems. There is also an option for having the sun heat up rocks which can be used for generating electricity at night or at periods of peak demand. So eventually we could have all our energy needs supplied by solar and wind power.

If wind power was designed to exceed the demand at windy times there are a number of ways that it could be used. The first thing to do is to implement billing systems that vary the cost according to the supply. This information could be provided to customers via X10 (or a similar technology). Home appliances could take note of this information and perform power-hungry operations when it's cheap. Your freezer could cool itself to -30C when electricity is cheap and allow the temperature to rise to -5C when it's expensive. You could program your washing machine to start when electricity becomes cheap - usually a few hours delay before starting the washing is no inconvenience.

Ideally home power generation from solar and wind sources would be used. There is significant loss in the power lines that lead from power plants to the consumer, so there are efficiency benefits in generating power locally. A wind turbine for a home will give highly variable amounts of power, and the electricity use of a home also varies a lot. So batteries to store the power are required. When you have local battery storage you could use your batteries to power your home when electricity is expensive and use mains power when it's cheap. Also if it was possible to feed power back to the main grid then home battery systems could be used to help power the main grid at expensive times (if the electricity company reimburses you for putting power back in the grid then you want such reimbursement to be done at the highest rate).

Adrian also mentioned turning devices off when leaving home. It is common practice in hotels that when entering your room you will insert your key in a holder by the door which acts as a master switch for all lights and some other electrical devices (such as the TV).

This same idea could be adopted for home use, not based on key storage (although this would be an option) but instead on a switch near the front door. Push a button and all lights turn off as do human-focussed appliances such as the TV and DVD player turn off (not the VCR), etc. There could also be a night option which would turn off the TV, DVD player, and most lights. Obviously at night you want bedroom and bathroom lights to still work but many things can be turned off.

This is all possible with today's technology, small changes to usage patterns, and spending a little more money on technology. Currently you can get a basic solar power system for your house for about $10,000. That isn't much when you spend $300,000 or more buying the house!

OK, Having agreed that Openid is a good idea to solve the multiple-login-issue, i've been looking at enabling it on the python-based projects I work with. Harder than it looks, for no apparent reason. Firstly, I've succeeded in enabling an Openid Server in my Pyblosxom blog. Just google to pyblosxom+openid+server and install. It works. Now I can log into openid sites with my blog address http://blog.scealnetworks.com. Alternatively, I can openid-enable the comments login on the blog by installing the openid comments plugin. Unfortunately this seems to conflict with the server above, and both seem to conflict with Debians python-openid. All three seem to have a common original codebase that has diverged, but I haven't had time to do any software genealogy and figure out which codebase is out of date. Any ideas anybody ? (other than emailing everyone involved). Secondly, I'd like to share the logins with my MoinMoin wiki. Again, a patch has been written for this, but to share the logins between pyblosxom and MoinMoin will need co-ordination. My current plan is to try and get all related openid sites to share /srv/www/openid-store on the server to share identities. This'll need patches, and probably justify making Debian packages out of the plugins. Finally, I'm working on a Plone website for IFAS, for observation tracking and co-ordination (see aop.irishastronomy.org and aop-test.irishastronomy.org if you're interested). Here, all the users already have logins on a related system in PHPBB on a different host. It would be nice to integrate them : query the SQL database on the PHPBB site? give them openid identities from the PHPBB machine?

In the last weeks I've focused more on doing things than writing about them. I've (for the most part) managed to become an early riser, getting up at 5 o'clock each morning, and gotten a number of things sorted in the two hours between breakfast and going to work. The time for this got taken away from the part of the evening where I'm too tired to do anything meaningful and so end up reading emails. This, of course, means that I will have less time for reading mail, and so I've changed my mail setup so that list mail no longer goes into my inbox. This was long overdue, and it is a good thing that the blue "message" LED now only lights up for mail addressed to me (and spam, but I'm going to deal with that later).

I've been writing a lot about this lately, I know, but it's an interesting landscape.

I had previously discarded git, but in light of git-cvsserver (which provides a plausible way for Windows people to participate), I gave it a try.

The first thing I noticed is that git documentation, in general, is really poor. Some tutorials that claim to cover git actually cover cogito. Still others use commands that are much more complex than those in the current git -- and these just the ones linked to from the git homepage.

git's manpages aren't much better. There are quite a few git commands (such as log) that take arguments that other git commands accept. Sometimes this fact is documented with a pointer to these other commands, but often not; a person is left guessing what the full range of accepted arguments are.

My complaint that git is overly complex still exists. They've made progress, but still have a serious issue here. Part is because of the docuemtnation, and part is because of the interface. I wanted to export to diffs all patches on the current branch in a repo. I asked on #git, and someone suggested using the revision specifier ..HEAD. Nope, didn't work. A few other git experts chimed in, and none could come up with the correct recipe. I finally used -500, which worked but is hackish.

git's lack of even offering support for a human to indicate renames also bothers me, though trustworthy people have assured me that it doesn't generally cause a problem in practice.

git does have nicer intra-repo branching than Mercurial does, for the moment. But the Mercurial folks are working on that anyway, and branching to new directories still works fine for me.

But in general, git's philosophy is to make things easy for the upstream maintainer, and doesn't spend much effort making things easy for contributors (except to make it mildly easier to contribute to a large project like Linux). Most of my software doesn't have a large developer community, and I want to make it as easy as possible for new developers to join in and participate. git still utterly fails on that.

I tried bzr again. It seems that every time I try it, after just a few minutes, I am repulsed. This time, I stopped when I realized that bzr doesn't support tags and has no support for emailing changesets whatsoever. As someone that has really liked darcs send (and even used tags way back with CVS!), this is alarming. The tutorial on the bzr website referenced a command "bzr help topics", which does not work.

So I'll stick with my mercurial and darcs combination for now.

I announced the first version of a hg send extension yesterday as well. I think Mercurial is very close to having a working equivalent to darcs send.

There are times when you want to track the bleeding edge of a particular project, and having a new laptop is often one of those moments... I've recently bought an HP Compaq nx6320 and while most of it is working, one of the reasons I got it was because of Keith Packard's work on the RandR extensions for X. Well, I was definitely seeing this bug but with a small patch I can get the latest (experimental) packages for xserver-xorg-video-intel to work, and now with a few magic tweaks to my xorg.conf I can make my desktop expand to another monitor when I unsuspend at work, and contract back to just the laptop screen when I resume somewhere else. The Magic Expanding X Config First of all, when I got the driver to actually work, xrandr explained to me that my maximum resolution was 1400x1400:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1400 x 1050, maximum 1400 x 1400
VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right)
LVDS connected 1400x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 305mm x 228mm
   1400x1050      60.0*+
   1280x800       60.0  
   1280x768       60.0  
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3  
   640x480        59.9  
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right)

Using a few clues from Ross Burton I managed to get that "maximum 1400x1400" to increase. The trick is to add a "Virtual" setting for screen size into your "Screen" Section, like so:

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "Intel 945GM/GMS/940GML"
        Monitor         "Laptop Panel"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                Virtual         2680 1050
        EndSubSection
EndSection

The downside of this is that if you set the width greater than 2048 (as I have here) then DRI won't work, so you won't get 3d stuff. I guess I can manage without ice-cream, just so long as I get my cake! Once I have the "Virtual" setting, when I resume at the office I can:

xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024 --pos 1400x0

And then when I resume somewhere without the external monitor, I can:

xrandr --output VGA --off

Quibbles All of these features are kind of under development, but Xorg 7.3 will support this stuff, and then Gnome and suchlike will have to start thinking about how to deal with it. The dynamic screen changing is not something these environments are completely ready for. One example is that while I know that monitor is always on the RHS of my docking station, X wants it to be the primary monitor and Gnome moves both panels onto that screen. Perhaps that's not a choice that can be made automatically. Someone who had an external keyboard plugged into their docking station might want the opposite behaviour, and there is certainly no way the environment can magically know whether that monitor is left or right of my laptop screen. Eventually I expect that Gnome will recognise this monitor, and will make the panels and location automatically set the RandR environment to match the way I set it last time. It is also somewhat annoying that I have to actually choose the virtual size. No doubt this configuration will disappear in due course and it is not really surprising to see it for something which is admittedly quite bleeding edge! I noticed at LCA that Keith had his own screen set for a Virtual size of 2048x2048, and now I know why: that's the maximum size that is supported for DRI, so if I expand my desktop onto a 1280x1024 screen I'm going to have some overlap. In fact I could almost configure my external monitor to be above my normal screen and use it that way, but it would feel pretty weird I think. In the meantime I've gone back to "blank screen" for my screen saver which admittedly is currently the only application for 3d acceleration on my desktop. Remaining Problems with this Laptop The only outstanding issues for me with this laptop are:

• Suspend/Resume to RAM does not work (I use suspend to disk)
• Fingerprint Sensor does not work (AuthenTec say Linux support will be available later this year)

That's about the best Linux compatibility I have had for any of my last five laptops within a month of buying it. Most of them have had much more significant stuff less supported even after three years of use!

Using Sun Java 1.5.0_11:

final SimpleDateFormat almostXsDateTime=new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ");
System.out.println("One: "+almostXsDateTime.format(c));
c.set(GregorianCalendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, copy.get(GregorianCalendar.HOUR_OF_DAY));
System.out.println("Two: "+almostXsDateTime.format(c));

IMHO, the get/set combo shouldn't be changing the date... but:

One: 2007-05-17T00:00:00.000+0200
Two: 2007-05-17T02:00:00.000+0200

(I'm not yet sure under which exact cirumstances this happens; it doesn't happen always...) P.S. the format is called "almost XSDateTime", because it's just almost XML Schemas DateTime format. Unfortunately, the Java date parsing and writing classes can't handle XML Schema DateTime (or ISO 8601) because of a tiny little detail: they use a colon in their timezone offset. How annoying is that, that java can just almost handle this ISO date format? P.P.S. so apparently Java is adding the ZONE_OFFSET to the date in this situation; it likely is related to locales and timezones.

I received quite a few answers on my request for help yesterday. Thanks to you guys and gals, Reportbug-NG now also supports Opera, KMail, Pine and GoogleMail (yes I know, that’s crazy).

Microsofts view of Linux users, and how to convince them of Windows. I don't like linking to Microsoft stuff, and especially not to Microsoft FUD (the flash presentation of theirs will in turn try to bring you to their "get the facts" wrong site...) However, for Linux evangelists it's a good opportunity to see Microsofts strategy at attacking Linux, and where we should improve to counter their claims (e.g. with respect to mangeability). It's also nice to see that they actually feel oblieged to counter SAMBA and other Linux technology, and that especially in the networking part they have little to claim to be superior. And also for Samba all they claim is "higher value because of better integration and manageability". And I definitely have to agree that management of a larger Linux network isn't easy, and we could do with some better tools. (And especially tools to do tools for network management; we have different requirements, and there are good tools, but they are either hard to roll out and customize - cfengine -, or too primitive to be of use to many - webmin etc.) Still the average Linux administrator does manage a significantly higher number of servers than a Windows admin, so their claim actually is incorrect. And it's totally absurd they claim to be better in security with Exchange. Maybe better than their older crap, but I still would never ever trust a Microsoft system for Email... just remember all those bad email vacation notices etc. Microsoft delivers... So: know your "enemy"s tactics.

Uwe and Gunnar have been talking about using flash aka. solid state disks. So far, every USB memory stick I had has died after a fairly low number of write cycles... sometimes doing a low level format helped, but the errors resurfaced again later on. Interestingly enough, I never had such problems with digial camera media, just with USB thumb drives. The wikipedia article on Flash RAM is also rather vague:

Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors.

And where do they store the write count without doing extra writes? :-) (Note: you can do some simple counting with programming cycles only, i.e. by doing only NOR/NAND operations and no resets) Note that there are also filesystems designed for flash, e.g. JFFS2, that have built-in wear leveling at the filesystem level. It might also make sense to not use a media with wear leveling, but instead do it yourself in software. However you most likely won't have a choice here unless you build your own hardware and want to skip the extra controller. You should however try to keep the number of writes low, so e.g. disable atime for ext2/3 (I guess JFFS2 doesn't support atime by design), reduce the frequency of flushing buffers to disk ('laptop mode') and use RAM filesystems where possible (e.g. /tmp). Anyway, go and read above Wikipedia article, it has some good information on it. And in half a year, many laptops will sell with hybrid drives, because of Microsoft pushing that technology. (I remember having read that in fall, having a hybrid drive will be a requirement for Vista gold compability or so?) It would be interesting to work out how Linux can benefit most from such a hybrid system. I can imagine using a USB thumb drive with my laptop both as access key and for rapid boot (my harddisk is encrypted anyway, and it would make sense to not have an unencrypted bootloader on the disk, but only on the flash drive. The flash drive would not contain the key, but the kernel, decryption software, i.e. cryptsetup etc., and maybe some services to be loaded on boot for fast startup)...

Recently I was reading a website (can’t remember which) that listed right brain v. left brain characteristics. Well I never saw a list that I so identified with, ever. The problem was I only could see myself in the “right-brain” side (with a few exception) and I was left wondering if my left brain was non-existent, or if still there, shriveled up like a pea. Now I am looking for exercises to strengthen the left side of my brain and have found a few of them but they all cost money so I am still looking around for some freebies. In the process of searching I also found this list Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better which really has some great, great tips in there for general learning and lots of good links to tool that can help you out.

As I am not a DD yet, I don’t have vote rights. That means I cannot vote in the DPL election. The only way I can influence the decision is to influence other people and try to make them vote the right way (or alternatively, just vote what I would have done) Is there a vote sponsorship page anywhere? <big smiley> If anyone got a spare vote, you are most welcome to send in my ballot:
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
e0acebd2-71f1-4df8-ae4d-50355ad7aa81
[2] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[7] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[2] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[1] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[5] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[6] Choice 6: Raphael Hertzog
[8] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[4] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[3] Choice 9: None Of The Above
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
And yes, jcristau, Myon, Q_ and others - I need to get back to my application.

Awhile back, one of my favorite bloggers, Philip Dawdy of Furious Seasons, deviated from his usual posts that place a big fat critical magnifying glass under the marketing (and other shady) tactics of Big Pharma and wrote a very thoughtful, (also furious) account of Web 2.0 claiming:

this whole Web 2.0, social networking, virtual community business is essentially a pornography of the self a projected, fictionalized self that is then worshipped by the slightly less-perfect self.

It is a little off the top at times but makes some really good points that I agree with (and generated a really interesting discussion). It merits reading alongside Danah Boyd’s recent rumination on the very same topic, fame, narcissism and MySpace, where she seeks to address narcissism but she deflects blame the suite of technologies and places it instead on the broader set of cultural practices that sustain this accentuated inward focus:

My view is that we have trained our children to be narcissistic and that this is having all sorts of terrifying repercussions; to deal with this, we’re blaming the manifestations instead of addressing the root causes and the mythmaking that we do to maintain social hierarchies. Let’s unpack that for a moment.

These two read nicely with an older piece in Harpers Attack of the superzeroes: why Washington, Einstein, and Madonna can t compete with you . The author, Thomas de Zengotita claims “Being famous isn’t what it used to be” because new technologies of mediation and reflexivity (and by new, he means a lot more than web 2.0, it includes reality shows, focus groups, karaoke, the hyper-representation of the real stars, alongside the usual suspects) and concludes that we life as if we were always on stage, concluding somewhat disparagingly “We are all method actors now.” Of course, this is an important part of the story but not the whole story. There are times, for example, these social technologies help to patch up what is arguably as common in North America as is this narcissistic self, which is the fragmented self, that comes into being, for example because many of us, migrate here and the, for example, for work. So a social networking site like Facebook, provides somewhat of a stable point of reference, where there are individuals collected, in the same place, even though the people are no longer really in the same place. It is at least a recognition of certain relationships whose “local” face has now passed but instead of completely completely fading into the realm of memory, the past lives on, albeit in transformed ways, within a virtual space. This facet of social networking is not particularly narcissistic, but is building new technologies of memory that I think works somewhat against the conditions that fragment the self. And while the patching up of the person may make an individual “whole” and “individuated” it seems it is a form that is much more mundane than the “pornography” or “narcissism,” explored above, though of course, they do abound–but karaoke, that is always pornography of the self. But… porn can be fun.

Uwe asks about fast, reliable, not noisy storage mechanisms - And yes, of course, he talks about Flash memory's well known limitation: The relatively low number of write cycles each area of the memory is known to be able to withstand. I recently told this same argument to a friend who was enthusiastically telling me about his dream project of setting up a computer based exclusively on solid-state storage. Of course, he didn't like the limitation.
But after reading a bit (sorry, I don't have the URLs at hand - but Google is a good friend), it seems that many (most? all?) controllers work around this limitation by rearranging the most used blocks around, so that the Flash gets as evenly used as possible. Quoting from Wikipedia's article on Flash memory:

Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors. This technique is called wear levelling. Another mechanism is to perform write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure, which is named bad block management (BBM).

So, Uwe, just check the media you get supports wear levelling technology, and you should be safe.

In this crazy world all is possible.

Some time ago a fellow Debianer wrote an email to me... because he had just found out about me, and... His name is Rodrigo, his last name Amaya! He lives on the opposite half of the world, somewhere down there, he was not specific enough. He must be my alter ego. How crazy can that be?! I was on the verge of tears when I read the email he sent me... If he became a DD the fun would be endless! And I thought getting amaya s (the browser) related email was crazy and weird enough. Crazy but fun! Just imagine adding to the confusion like this... Unbeatable

/me jumps around!

N.P. Loco En El Coco (Insane in the Brain) - Cypress Hill - Los Grandes Exitos En Espa ol

I saw my first Sun workstation about 15 years ago, in 1992. I was a business student at Purdue University, and a childhood love for computers had just been reawakened. I was spending countless hours in the basement of the Math building, basking in the green phosphorescent glow of a Z29 and happily exploring every nook and cranny of the Sequent Symmetry upstairs. It didn’t take too long to discover, though, just a short walk away in the computer science building, several labs full of Sun workstations. Suddenly, the Z29 didn’t have quite the same allure. A few months later, I walked over to the registrar’s office and changed my major to computer science. (OK, advanced tax accounting had something to do with it too.) Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers; I even had my own for a while, after I joined the University of Arizona computer science department in 1997. But within a year, the Suns were starting to disappear, replaced by Pentiums running Red Hat Linux. More and more people coming through university computer science programs were cutting their teeth on Linux, much as I had on Sun. Pretty soon, Sun was increasingly seen by this new generation as the vendor who didn’t “get it”, and Sun’s rivals did a masterful job running with that and painting the company literally built on open standards as “closed”. To those of us who knew better, it was a sad thing to watch. The last several years have been hard for Sun, but the corner has been turned. As an outsider, I’ve watched as Sun has successfully embraced x86, pioneered energy efficiency as an essential computing feature, open sourced its software portfolio to maximize the network effects, championed transparency in corporate communications, and so many other great things. Now, I’m going to be a part of it. And, so, I’m excited to announce that, as of today, I’m joining Sun to head up operating system platform strategy. I’m not saying much about what I’ll be doing yet, but you can probably guess from my background and earlier writings that I’ll be advocating that Solaris needs to close the usability gap with Linux to be competitive; that while as I believe Solaris needs to change in some ways, I also believe deeply in the importance of backward compatibility; and that even with Solaris front and center, I’m pretty strongly of the opinion that Linux needs to play a clearer role in the platform strategy. It is with regrets that I leave the Linux Foundation, but if you haven’t figured out already, Sun is a company I’ve always loved, and being a part of it was an opportunity I simply could not pass up. I think the world of the people at the LF, particularly my former FSG colleagues with whom I worked so closely over the past year and a half: Jim Zemlin, Amanda McPherson, Jeff Licquia, and Dan Kohn. And I still very much believe in the core LF mission, to prevent the fragmentation of the Linux platform. Indeed, I’m remaining in my role as chair of the LSB—and Sun, of course, is a member of the Linux Foundation. Anyway. Watch this space. This is going to be fun!

An email forwarded to me by a neighbour about the Rubbish Or Resource consultation says:

"Did you know that the Councils in the area that used to be Avon want to know what you think about how they should spend our money to deal with our rubbish? They've got together and produced a plan for the West of England and want your views by Friday March 23rd. North Somerset Friends of the Earth think this consultation is rubbish because it's been badly publicised (did you know about it?) and it seems the Councils have already made up their minds. Their plan accepts that the only way to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill is to dispose of it by burning it or digesting it biologically rather then by promoting the "3Rs", Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Their plan describes seven types of treatment facility and then prioritises them with pyrolysis/gasification and burning (sorry "Energy from Waste") as their favourites. Call that choice??!!"

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