Scientific papers always have a “related works” section, where the authors describe how the work they are presenting compares with what others did. In the Free Software world, this is nearly non-existent: in a way, it seems that many of us are thinking of their projects as competing products, fighting for market share. On a project web page, I would love to read something like:

This project is particularly well suited if you want XX. But if YY is more important to you, you might want to have a look at ZZ.

Or simply links to similar projects for other environments, etc. All in all, I think that the goal is to improve the global satisfaction. Not to win a few users, who won’t be totally happy, because the project doesn’t really suit their needs. While some projects cooperate and share ideas, like I think desktop environments do inside freedesktop.org, most just ignore each other. I am both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer, and I’m sometimes amazed that Ubuntu discusses technical choices that were discussed (and solved) a few weeks earlier in Debian. And it’s even worse with the other big distros out there. Couldn’t we try to improve this ? We could just create a mailing list, where developers from various distributions could present the way they do things. This would allow to discuss future developments (”We are planning to improve this, what are you doing about that ?“) or simply to improve people’s knowledge of the various distributions. Of course, this could easily turn into flamefests, but they are technical ways to avoid that, like moderating posts from trollers… Does something like that already exist ? Do you think that it would be interesting ? Would you like to contribute to such a forum ? Some examples of things that could be discussed:

• How many packages do you have, and how do you support them ? Do you have several “classes” of packages ?
• How do you manage your releases ? Goal-based ? Time-based ? Bug-count-based ?
• Which kind of quality assurance do you do ?
• How many contributors do you have ? Are they split into different “classes” ? Who has “commit rights” ? Can you give out “commit rights” restricted to subsets of your packages ? A organized sponsorship system for people who don’t have commit rights ?
• etc, etc, etc.

Argh... I know it seems like I've given up on blogging entirely, but that's not the case. I've just been spending a lot of time working on Evan Prodromou instead of on evan.prodromou.name, which has been a whole different kind of world. I'm mostly poking my head up to point to an article in the Montreal Gazette about my new project, Vinismo. Montreal entrepreneur uncorks Wikipedia of wine, says the headline. I guess that "Montreal entrepreneur" is little ol' me. Go figure! The article is nice and balanced -- it covers the obvious fact that one month after launch Vinismo is not the definitive end-all be-all of wine information... yet. Roberto Rocha, the article's author, is doing a great job covering local entrepreneurs and the startup Internet scene, and I'm glad that our site got his vote of approval. And check out the photo they took of me and Niko at the excellent Pullman Wine Bar. How sophisticated. Glad to be getting some press about the site, and good news for Vinismo. tags: wine vinismo montreal gazette me press

BarCampCanada1 I managed to convoke the very busy trio of Sylvain Carle, Simon Law and Fred Ngo yesterday afternoon at La ka to nail down some plans for this fall. (We were lucky enough to get the funny and insightful Madame Woo to help out, too.) The cement's not dry yet, but it looks like we're going to have BarCampCanada1 here in Montreal the 9-10 of Novemeber. That gives us about 8 weeks to plan out what we hope will be the biggest BarCamp ever in Canada. tags: barcamp barcampcanada1 barcampmontreal

From time to time we have the problem that a mail posted to a list triggers an autoresponse (vacation, bounce, tdma) from an unexpected source. Sometimes it isn't possible to identify the subscriber who is causing this. One example for this was 'petsupermarket'.

So i wrote a small tool, which takes Mailadresses as input and resolves the domains until it reaches IP-level, so it is possible to identify 'related' addresses to such an incident.

I now ran this tool for all 38656 domainparts mailadresses that are currently subscribed to some list at our listservers:

Unresolveable Domains                             :   443
Grounded Domains                                  :     3
Domains with A                                    :  1058
Domains with CNAME, A                             :    59
Domains with CNAME, CNAME, A                      :     3
Domains with MX, A                                : 36202
Domains with MX, CNAME, A                         :  1199
Domains with MX, CNAME, CNAME, A                  :    22
Domains with MX, CNAME, CNAME, CNAME, A           :     5
Domains with MX, PTR                              :    36
Domains with unresolvable Hosts                   :   361

(You may have noticed that those lines doesn't sum up to 38656. It is possible to have more than one MX-Host, and it is also possible to have more than one IP in an A-Record. If one of those combinations falls into another category it is counted twice)

so we have 36528 domains that are completely configured correctly according to RfC 2821 with a MX-Record pointing to an A-Record, or without a MX-Record and an A-Record. These are 94.5% of all domains.

but we have 443 domains in our list, that didn't resolve at the moment i ran my script, those have to be investigated.

We also have 3 domains that are configured with 'IN MX 0 .' as decribed in this expired Draft, those also have to be investigated, and thrown out.

We have 1288 domains, which use CNAMEs (or CNAMEs pointing to CNAMEs) in their MX or directly on their domainname. RFC1034 says:

Domain names in RRs which point at another name should always point at the primary name and not the alias. This avoids extra indirections in accessing information.

then there are 36 domains which point their MX directly to an IP-Number. RFC 1035 says:

3.3.9. MX RDATA format

    +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
                       PREFERENCE                    
    +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
    /                   EXCHANGE                    /
    /                                               /
    +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+

where:

PREFERENCE      A 16 bit integer which specifies the preference given to
                this RR among others at the same owner.  Lower values
                are preferred.

EXCHANGE        A <domain-name> which specifies a host willing to act as
                a mail exchange for the owner name.

MX records cause type A additional section processing for the host
specified by EXCHANGE.

So according to that an MX has to point explicitely to a Full Qualified Domain Name, and it has to be an A-Record it points to.

However: Most MTAs (including ours) these days forgive this, and figure out the right thing.

At last: we have 361 Domains which MX and/or CNAME-Records point to Hostnames that are currently unresolvable. A quick check shows that often the problems only appear on one MX-Record, while another is correct, so the service is functional.

So maybe now it is a good idea and check your own DNS-Setup and the Mail-related Data.

If you know of an occasional passerby who takes the time to extract the contents of Debian source packages to see whether the RFCs are here or not, please let us know. We are always looking for new potential contributors.

— Josselin Mouette

Fair use is a small oasis in copyright law that allows you to quote, copy and engage with small bits of copyrighted information usually in the service of education, learning and critique. Despite what I think of as an oasis that is far too small, the economic impact is far reaching, at least according to this report, the first of its kind.

I think I'm about ready to start running my SMTP proxy/filter for people now. I've got two users setup and it seems to be holding up just fine. I've managed to remove the need to manually create things, so I'm capable of adding new domains on the fly. For my personal mail handling yesterday was the first day I've received over 10,000 messages. These are the stats from yesterday showing what happens at SMTP-time:

Total Mails    : 13302
Total SPAM     : 12620 (bounced back)
Total Accepted : 682
Spam Percentage: 94.87%

So I've dropped 95% of incoming mail at SMTP time, which is a big win. Of the mail which was actually delivered I'd guess that pyzor, razor, and spambayes marked a further 50% of it as spam. So my proxy needs to do better ... but it's pretty impressive. TODO: Find people to run as guinea pigs, register a domain, profit.

There is this guy whose blog I found about a week ago. He does some really nice and funny sketches mostly with issues regarding Bucharest and things he finds out/encounters.

The fact that he is smart to see some of the rudeness happening in Bucharest doesn't help him notice he is manipulated by the press (and himself) and writes:

"La 6 ani de la 11 septembrie 2001, Osama bin Laden a scos capu' din vagauna cu o noua inregistrare video in care da lumii intregi 2 alternative: convertirea la Islam sau moartea!"

Which translates approximately to:

"Six years after September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden shows his face out from his hiding place and makes a new video in which gives the whole wolrd 2 alternatives: converting to Islam or death!"

(I won't take into discussion the correct translation of the message from Osama, if the message is authentic, if Osama is payed by somebody interested in keeping the conflict open, if Osama's forces are actually active in Iraq, if Bush is Osama himself, if we're actually living in 1984 and Osama is already dead but the American manipulative government is using all sorts of recordings from him to keep people inside a cage and fed them propaganda, < insert your theory/idea here >....)

He links to this article, whose title might make one to think what the guy said is true (according to the article)...

But, if read carefully is clear that there are a few twists (in order of apparition):

• the alternatives were given to the American people ("urged the American people")
• the alternatives were for the ending of the war in Iraq ("there are two ways to end the war in Iraq")
• the first alternative is escalation of the conflict, not death; that would translate, IMHO, into "we will be fighting in Iraq and you can give up, but we will not", so I'd say surrender/retreat/keep fighting and probably die are all viable alternatives for the first one
• apparently he says converting to Islam is an alternative ("The second way, he continues, is to reject America's democratic system and convert to Islam.")
• but, if we read on we see that he actually says just to acknowledge that democracy is not at all a successful model, unless by success one thinks in terms of a system that achieves the interests of the corporations ("It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interest of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations")
• and more importantly, converting to Islam is not actually a condition, but there is an invitation to do that ("I invite you to embrace Islam,")

So, the conclusion is that it's really easy to fall into the trap of believing what the titles and headlines suggest, rather than what the articles actually say, especially if you keep your head open only to single stream of ideas (I guess you, my dear reader, are smart enough to see what I mean here).


Disclaimer, my analysis might be off, my English sucks, I might be Osama, I might be Bush, I didn't saw the recording, there's a cat on a freezer...

Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

(I have no attribution to give. Googling for it gives multiple, mutually inconsistent attributions.)

The release plan for Xserver 1.5 and Xorg 7.4 was discussed during the X.org Developers' Summit in Cambridge (September 10-12th). This is what we expect to ship with Lenny, so here are some details about the upcoming. Timeline As usual, there will be a 6 months release cycle. So Xorg 7.4 is expected on March 1st, 2008. There won't probably be any new Xserver release before that since some changes (already merged) require all drivers to be updated anyway. So Xserver 1.5 is expected on the same date. Since there are already some known problems in Xserver, they also plan to release Xserver 1.4.1 on November 1st. PCI Rework The master branch of Xserver already contains the long-expected pci-rework which is supposed to fix all the PCI domains and other non-trivial PCI hierarchy support (important for ia64, but also for some powerpc and sparc users). RandR People having Intel, ATI or recent Nvidia boards learnt to love the RandR 1.2 extension which provides the ability to enable/disable, resize, rotate, move outputs within a single big virtual screen. More transformations should be possible with RandR 1.3. Hopefully, there will also be some standardization regarding output names in various drivers, or at least a way to retrieve the type of each output (LVDS, DVI, VGA, TV, ...). And the server should get an abstraction object to describe GPUs, which might make the support for multiple boards easier. Input On the input side, XKB 2 and XGE should be merged, which shouldn't be really visible to end-users but should make internals much better. Then MPX (Multi-Pointer X server) might be in Xserver 1.5 too (if all semantics issues get fixed first). It would mean support for multiple independent keyboard/mouse pairs or so. See the MPX page for details. Compositing Compositing still gets a lot of attention. Several distributions are actually thinking of enabling Compiz by default. EXA (the new acceleration architecture that has been designed for compositing) got improved a lot in Xserver 1.4. Several drivers including Intel and ATI r300 already work great with EXA (no need to use XAA + XAANoOffscreenPixmaps anymore) which means Compiz works very smoothly, even when resizing windows. XAA won't be removed soon though since lots of things needs to be fixed before that. There are also several videos available online, like this one. But one big piece is still missing for compositing: directed rendering to redirected windows. So far, if you start glxgears in Compiz, you will see that the gears completely ignore wobbli-ness of windows, other windows overriding them, cube rotation, ... they keep rendering of top of everything without any effect. Getting true support for compositing such windows requires lots of work in all parts of the DRI stack. Kristian H gsberg got it to work (and we even get a great demo). See Kristian's blog for details. Upstream devs are now working on integrating all modifications nicely in upstream Xserver, drivers, DRM module, Mesa, ... Once this works, you can get GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap for both direct and indirect rendering, and full support for GLX 1.4 in the server (only 1.2 is supported as of now). Also, redirected windows (let's say a wobbly window on a side of Compiz' cube) should get input events correctly thanks to input transformation in Xserver 1.5 (event coordinates will be converted into the redirected window coordinate space before being passed to the client application). Kernel-related reworks Compositing improvements actually require a large rework of the memory management in the server. Basically, we need a global management for both 2D and 3D object allocations, so that you can get both to work fine without having to change config options (things like XAANoOffscreenPixmaps or FbTexPercent). All this is related to the TTM (Translation Table Maps, see these slides for details) which has been under development for a while. It requires to change the interface with the kernel DRM modules, and it won't happen before 2.6.24. The Xserver part of the work is not big, so it might still be done before 1.5 is released. Fortunately, once all this is ready, people should stop complaining about memory allocation failures, Compiz being slow because one option is not enabled by default, ... Another hot topic in the X.org/kernel area is about moving modesetting in the kernel. When you get a kernel panic, you only actually see it if not running X (or if logging kernel messages through the network). So your machine freezes, you don't know why, you have no way to know, and you just reboot. Getting panic messages on X would be much better. To do so, the kernel needs to now which mode is currently in use on the monitor and then it will render the message on the framebuffer. This require lots of work, so it will unlikely be in Xserver 1.5 though. Miscellaneous Xserver 1.5 will also contain XACE (security framework), the cleanup of the ABI (explicit _X_EXPORT required), and possibly glucose (OpenGL acceleration for X, see Zack Rusin's blog). I asked whether there was actually some work on building the GLcore server module as a part of Mesa so that building Xserver does not require the whole Mesa source anymore. People seem to agree the current situation is a real pain for distributions and we should make this change happen. But the actual work has to be done in Mesa anyway, we'll see what happens.

Several months ago, I announced that I'd received a grant from mtvU and Cisco to work on a cool voting technology research project called Selectricity. A project in quotidian democracy, Selectricity attempts to apply some of the best voting technology and election methods research towards every-day decision-making. It takes research I did at the MIT Media Lab and packages it into a real, useful, application. I spent probably half of my time over the last several months managing a team of competent hackers and designers as we've built out the project. Last week, press releases and news stories went out as we launched our first production batch of features and a new design. You can check it out online at:

http://selectricity.org

There is a whole line-up of a groups and organizations, some high profile, that will be using the software in the coming months. There's also half a dozen killer new features that are built and waiting in the wings for a little polish and fanfare. We'll be testing and releasing those in the next couple months. No doubt, I'll be mentioning bits and pieces of my work on the project on my blog here. However, if you want to follow development, you should subscribe to the Selectricity News Blog where more full coverage will take place. You can leave feedback, suggestions, and bugs as comments on the blog or email it to team@selectricity.org. The election method code is already published and we'll be releasing the rest of the code under the AGPLv3 when the license is released by the FSF in the next few weeks.

On a modern debian system (and other linuxes as well), the cron daemon is PAM-enabled, which is probably a good thing. One downside is that you get your /var/log/auth.log full of messages like:

Sep 11 11:15:01 otto CRON[8755]: pam_unix(cron:session): session opened for user jojo by (uid=0)
Sep 11 11:15:01 otto CRON[8755]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user jojo

I think these are pretty useless and make it harder to find real authentication related entries in auth.log, especially if you get them every five minutes. Luckily, the fix is pretty simple: Just edit /etc/pam.d/cron and comment out the line @include common-session, as that only calls pam_unix.so which in turn, for session management, does nothing but logging anyways.To further separate the cron logs, you can remove these entries to syslog:

Sep 11 07:17:01 quimby /USR/SBIN/CRON[7949]: (root) CMD (   run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly)

by configuring /etc/syslog.conf to move them to a logfile on its own:

*.*;auth,authpriv,cron.none     -/var/log/syslog
cron.*                          -/var/log/cron.log

With all the excitement of the Vuelta and the Tour of Britain (which I’m off to watch today), I’d missed that the Tour de Pologne also started on Sunday. TVP Polonia has coverage and broadcasts free-to-air to Europe at 19, 13 and 7 east. I think it may also be visible in Australia in a GlobeCast package (can you see it? Please tell me by leaving a comment.) Scheduled shows:-

Tue 11.09.2007 to Fri 14.09.2007

15:10-16:30 CET (live) and 20:00-20:05 CET (summary)

Sat 15.09.2007

13:25-15:05 CET (live, final stage) and 20:00-20:05 CET (summary)

I can’t actually watch this at 19 east except in perfect conditions at the moment because my dish is slightly mis-aligned. I don’t want to adjust it until after the Vuelta finishes, just in case I make a mistake and lose reception completely.

I’m looking for a website that can recommend appropriate movies for me to watch, both in the “you will most probably like this one based on your current taste” sense, and in the “it may be interesting for you to explore and give this one a try” one. I have a pretty strong opinion on how it should work: I feed it a long list (as complete as possible) of movies I’ve watched over the years, with timestamps if available, and the system gives me in return a subset of them for me to rate. That is, the system performs an analysis on the input, and determines what additional information it needs in order to form a picture of myself as a movie watcher. And by “rating” I don’t mean just assigning a single numeric score, but expressing opinion on various relevant aspects: how much did you enjoy it? How badly do you want to see similar films? Did you feel uneasy with the level of violence / nudity / other, or rather on the contrary? To name a few. I’m very disappointed that all movie recommendations sites I can find require for me to choose which movies to rate, and just give me a numeric scale to do so. Not only I’m finding it a daunting task deciding what to rate, but I also have the feeling it’ll result in a biased profile, and that a single numeric scale can’t be enough to reflect all the aspects in a person’s movie personality. So far, the most promising site I’ve found is MovieLens, which is developed by a research group at the University of Minnesota. From what I’ve seen it works, but I’m unconvinced that having me decide what to rate will give the best results. So, can somebody comment about the sanity of the model proposed here, and (ideally!) tell me it’s implemented somewhere?

Continuing my mission to put together a kick-ass team to develop the Ubuntu Desktop, the following position is now up on the website: Posting Date & ID: September 2007 UDD
Job Location: Your home with broadband. Some international travel will be required.
Job Summary: To adapt and develop the GNOME desktop to improve the Ubuntu user experience. Key responsibilities and accountabilities:

• Use open source development methods to create, select and adapt software to produce innovative user experiences and address the common problems of desktop computing
• Extend the desktop platform as necessary to support development
• Work with designers, artists and other developers to develop ideas and complete the project
• Involve the community of development projects, teams and Ubuntu supporters to incorporate a range of perspectives and ideas
• Take ownership of many aspects of the desktop user experience (“look and feel”) in Ubuntu
• Follow projects and trends in user interface design in the open source world, integrate the best technologies into Ubuntu and ensure their quality
• Analyse, triage and respond to bug reports

Requirements skills and experience:

• A keen and insightful eye for user interaction
• A passion for intuitive, usable and visually appealing interfaces
• A strong desire to produce distinctive ideas that stand Ubuntu out from the crowd
• Experience with the GNOME development platform and desktop environment and technologies such as GTK+
• Some experience with mainstream graphics technologies such as OpenGL and Cairo in the C programming language
• Ability to be productive in a globally distributed team through self-discipline and self-motivation, delivering according to a schedule
• Familiarity with open source development tools and methodology, especially those in common use for Ubuntu and Debian package maintenance

How to apply Please send a cover letter and CV with references to hr@canonical.com. Please indicate in your submission the role for which you are applying. We prefer to receive applications and CVs/Resumes in either PDF or plain text format.

Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a Espa a at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-

Mon 10.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Tue 11.09.2007

no show (rest day, but MTB coverage at 08:45)

Wed 12.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Thu 13.09.2007

01:00-01:30 (recap?) and 15:45-17:30 CET

Fri 14.09.2007 and Sat 15.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Sun 16.09.2007

18:00-19:00 CET (recorded?)

TVEi are broadcasting in Spanish at 13 and 19 east. You can also see the race on TVEI America, but I don’t know the reception details. Scheduled times:-

Mon 10.09.2007

16:30-18:00 CET

Tue 11.09.2007

no show (rest day)

Wed 12.09.2007 to Sun 16.09.2007

16:40-18:00 CET

I’ll post more times next week. It was good to see a strong Caisse d’Epargne showing, as I predicted, even if it didn’t last long…

This morning was this year's Chicago Half Marathon, the race I often refer to as 'my favourite' after having participated in 2006, 2005, 2004 and 2003. But this year I somehow managed to convince myself I had already registered, when I had not. Doh. But due to a friend's unlucky injury, I could re-use his registration and still race. Weather was once again gorgeous, but maybe a little on the hot side. I tried not to push myself too hard given the two big races coming up in the next seven weeks and ran a decent 7:12 min/mile pace for a chip time of 1:34:20.

Due to popular demand, there is now a new version of mISDN in experimental. The usual warning applies: it will break your system, it will not work out of the box and whatever you do to make it not Oops your kernel during boot will probably no longer work with the next upload. YMMV. HTH. HAND. You are demanding an explanation? Well, there are a few problems with this package that are not trivial to solve. The most visible of them is that it provides drivers for a bunch of ISDN cards that are also supported by the mainline kernel. The hotplug subsystem handles this situation totally gracefully and simply loads all of them. Now if that wasn't nasty enough by itself, mISDN also wants to set up the entire stack when a hardware driver is loaded. All the modules that aren't there at this point are replaced by NULL pointers. As there is no formal dependency on the modules providing layers 1-3, I invite you to guess the stability of your kernel at this point. Upstream has an init script that parses XML files.

xserver-xorg-core 2:1.4-1 entered experimental yesterday (and should arrive in unstable in the near future). This Xserver 1.4 brings some nice improvements (like input-hotplug and better EXA), but it also has a couple minor bugs that I guess you will quickly notice. So before I get dozens of bug reports about them, here's a list with links to existing bug reports:

• X crashes during exit, causing the VT console to not be restored properly. Not directly visible when using a display manager since it will restart X before you notice a problem. But very boring when starting X manually (for instance with startx) from a VT console. Reported at #440547, known upstream, patch available.
• The LEDs (caps-lock, ...) do not work anymore. Upstream is aware of the problem but there are no known fix as of now. Not reported yet, I'll update this blog entry when it'll be done.

Nothing really bad so far then. Upstream plans to release Xserver 1.4.1 on November 1st. It's far from here, but it means there will be fixes committed on the server-1.4-branch in the meantime, so it will be easy for us to upload intermediate releases if needed.

Today was the day we had tickets for *the* match of the day between South Africa and Samoa (59-7). Of course, the Springboks won this game after the Samoan players were exhausted of their battle after 60th minute. However, we really enjoyed a great game during 1st half (21-7) with solid play by RSA (without great vista, as usual, but, well, I'm not a Springboks fan) and ultra-solid defense by Samoa. And, well, as long as the Samoans have the ball in their hands, everything can happen, especially with Henry Tuilagi, impressive number 8, which has been acclaimed by the Parc des Princes public when finally quitting the game on 60th minute. Three great moments in the game:

• The Samoan try by Gavin Williams who made the whole Parc stand up and shout
• The Samoan team spending 10 terrible minutes in RSA camp, unfortunately without scoring but being pushed by 43000 people in the stadium (ie the 44000 attendants minus about 1000 South-Africans...), yelling out "Samoa" even though probably 99% of us aren't able to even point Samoa on a world map.
• The standing ovation of the public to the Samoan players at the end of the game when they came back and thanked us for the support

South-Africa is however much more organized, of course, and their attacks were terribly devastating sometimes, with Bryan Habana scoring 4 tries. They're however a little bit hesitating with the ball in hands and their defense wasn't *that* impressive. While writing this, I'm watching Scotland-Portugal (56-10) as we came back from the Parc des Princes. This game happens in St-Etienne, my home town. I imagine the noise and feast in town, where we still remember a famous Scotland-Morocco during Soccer WC 1998. Apparently, the Scots like St-Etienne. Apparently, Portugal resisted during about one half and they even scored a try and sometimes endangered Scotland. Good game by the Scots who can hope to qualify for 1/4th finals. Tonight, Ireland-Namibia. If we aren't too much rugbyfied, I'll watch even if the result is quite predictable. Both teams are in France's pool, so watching team will be interesting. And even now, 2h before the game, there are 25.000 Irish people in Bordeaux. Probably interesting noise over there. Another match today, which I didn't watch because we were on our way to the stadium: Wales-Canada (42-17). Canada was leading 12-7 on half-time and even 17-7 on 45th minute. So, well, not very brilliant for the Welsh. Finally, their most experienced players came back (S. Jones, Gareth Tholas and Collin Charvis) and they easily came back and overscored Canada...who never resigned and were very close to score again at the end of the game. Brilliant day and, believe us, watching rugby *in* the stadium is really a great experience (we don't do this often enough...).

I spent much of my early childhood at the video arcade. I was fortunate enough to have a best friend who 1) Lived in the old quarters of San Juan where you could walk everywhere 2) Had three older teenage sisters who would take us when we were still quite young to the arcade, which also doubled as a fantastic ice-cream parlor. My favorite game there was galaga, and I played it incessantly (and had to use a foot stool too!!) As a result of all that childhood gaming, I am still pretty half decent at it. For example, I more often than not beat my partner (except under less than auspicious conditions, like being sleep deprived), which is pretty unbelievable as he is much more of a video game wizard than I and otherwise beats me in everything.
Back in my first year in grad school, a cohort of us would play Galaga after our large theory class, and I would also always win (and by a lot and then get crushed at foosball). So of course when I heard that there was a documentary on the very genre of arcade games that consumed so much of my early childhood, King of Kong and a movie that was rumored to leave you at the edge of your seat (which seemed like an impossibility to me), I decided to fork over the cash and check it out in the movie theatre last night. And it was well worth every penny. The movie somehow managed to capture a story and set of subjective experiences that I think are incredibly hard to portray via film: the individual and social intimacy that comes with machine interaction. The story lines revolves around two very different characters who are masters at conquering one of the hardest video games in the world, Donkey Kong and are trying to clinch the world record. The tale of rivalry between them is really good in and of itself and probably without this drama, the movie would have not worked. But what I also found amazing was how the movie conveyed the persistence of the (older) game. They live on in the lives of individuals and collectives, despite the rise of a whole, new class of games that are much more popular today. I am not sure how much longer they will live on, or if the movie was also inadvertently portraying the rise and slow decline of an era that will, in another 50 years, become part of the archive of dead history. Whatever the case, if you had a loving relationship with these games (or your friends or parents did), check out the movie. It really has some incredible footage and moments and will make you want to run to that old arcade, once again.