My stay in Madrid has come to an end and I'm currently sitting at Ralf Treinen's place in Paris. I had a pretty good time in Madrid. Basically, I just did the usual stuff (i.e., too much Debian, too little work for my research) but there are a number of nice guys in the group I was working in and we had lots of fun. Earlier this week, we went to Teo's place who has this massive swimming pool. He recently organized a BBQ, which was good as well, with lots of Sangria... A few weeks ago, Diego (at whose place I stayed), Alvaro and his cute girlfried Yaiza went bowling. It was really good fun and it turned out that Diego is a real master, scoring several strikes after each other! Now that summer is coming, a number of people are leaving for other places. Israel went to Canada for three months a few weeks ago, Gregorio left for the UK a few days ago and my stay is over too. Overall I had a pretty good time, even though I'm not particularly happen that I didn't manage to go to the beach once even though I was in Spain for three months... The last time I was here at Ralf's place in Paris was just before DebConf1 in Bordeaux in 2001, which feels like eons ago. Anyway, I'm heading out to take a look at Notre Dame.

For most of the past winter I've been trying my best to get back into a somewhat regular schedule of training. I have failed miserably. At most, I've managed to go swimming at 7AM once or twice a week with my teammate Rafa, but I've been quite irregular. I also tried getting some running done, which revealed my condition is the worse in the last 7 years, probably. The first days I went running I felt I couldn't go faster than 4.5 mins/km without having my legs warn me about what I was doing. It was horrible. And when I started to get into the habit, I had to stop. I started getting some pain in both knees whenever I ran more than 45/50 minutes, and I associated it to my weird knee crack I get after a while of cycling. So, in March or so, I decided to stop, frightened of the pain being a serious injury or something. I wanted to visit a physiotherapist as soon as possible, but that only happened a few months later. I visited my teammate Jordi Reig in Alcoi, and after exploration, he deducted my knee problems probably come from the massive contractures in both quadriceps. I was meant to start running again, adding minutes to the sessions progressively until reaching the problematic 50 minutes of pain. I've been so busy though, that I haven't been able to do anything in the last months, so I can't say how bad my quadriceps are now. Two weeks ago, during the WarmUp Weekend in Vilanova, I got a bad kick on my calf during the semifinals game, and the day after even walking was painful. I had already signed up for the B tera triathlon, so I thought I may not be able to finish it. I signed up as I did with other competitions last year, with the goal of finishing and nothing more. This time, all my cycling training was a 40km stage I did back in December. B tera is a sprint with swimming done in a 50m pool, 27kms of cycling in an irregular circuit and a bit more of 5kms of running around the town. It is organised by our team mate Jordi Jord , and this year was the second edition. I already attended last year. On Sunday, I had to wake up at 6:10AM after going to bed at 3 or so, had some chaotic breakfast and drove up to B tera. This year I haven't got a triathlon licence, so I was in the teamless and veteran people leg. The judges made us wait in the water for nearly half an hour, apparently because one team was missing and was about to arrive. They could have warned and I wouldn't have frozen in there. The people in my lane tried to organise the start of the race, in order of what people said they swam. As the older people claimed they swam in 14m or so, and I had no idea of how much I would do, I offered to go last. Ok, that was a fuckup. It seems the 4 guys immediately before me weren't exactly van den Hoogenband or Phelps. After the first 100 metres I got tired of swimming at half speed and decidedd to overcome a few of them. I managed to get rid of two on the 350, but when I tried with the third, he didn't seem too cooperate too much, so when there were just 200 metres left I decided to not waste more energy on that. My swimming time wasn't spectacular, but at least I got out without being tired at all. Cycling made me remember my biggest problem when there's some climbing in the circuit. I climb very well, but everything you climb you'll have to descend eventually. So the three laps were the same: I passed many people on the way up, but on our way down they would go past me again like rockets, due to my minimal body weight. That sucks. At this point, I thought I would have abandoned the race due to my calf injury, but as I was feeling more or less ok, I decided to give it a try. The first lap of two wasn't so good, I felt my legs weren't used to the transitions, but after they warmed up a bit I started running faster. Until, 1.5kms away from the end, the quadriceps started warning me; I had to slow down again until I crossed the finish line.

I would look more like an athlete if I shaved... The rest of the team did pretty well on their leg, specially Rub n who came in third after having raced on Friday night. A few hours and many children races later, we received the team award for the Komando's second place.

Everyone loves the Komando. Go Komando! It always feels good to do races like B tera. I plan doing a few more races this summer: Val ncia, Pinedo, maybe Antella, maybe Cuenca...

I wrote the following item a few months ago and didn't post it to my blog because I thought it was too ranty, too scaremongering, too frothy, and I was trying to reduce the amount of that sort of stuff I posted. Now I see the top story in the latest NO2ID newsletter and it looks like it wasn't ranty enough. A few years ago, the Blair government introduced Higher Education student-paid fees despite quite a large opposition movement. Part of the success was by introducing them for new students only [...] Forward to 2006. ID Cards are controversial and apply to the whole population, but there's widespread opposition to compulsary registraion. Could the same tactic be used? Compulsary registration for "new people" only? [... cont with links...]

Cristiano Ronaldo is up for auction on the web. Shipping: anywhere but Manchester. [cont with link to el reg]

<rant>
In my last post, I linked to the Wikipedia article on "kitsch". I generally use this to describe art that's in egregiously bad taste -- plaster sculptures of women with exaggerated breasts holding beer bottles, animal-shaped clocks whose eyes wobble with the pendulum, etc. I want to make this clear, because the Kitsch entry in Wikipedia suffers from a case of advanced artistic pinheadism. In short, their definition of Kitsch reduces to

It's pretty and people buy it.

For instance, Thomas Kinkade (the self-styled "painter of light") is disposed of with the offhand comment that his pictures are

scenes of stone cottages, lighthouses, cobble stone streets, rustic villages, and other vistas, with emphasis on the glittery ornamentation in the play of light and natural foliage. His work is meant to be sentimental, patriotic, quaint, spiritual, and inspirational.

While I'm a bit put-off by Mr. Kinkade's aggressive marketing, the quote above could only be considered a serious insult by people who describe the origins of the scourge of kitsch as follows:

Kitsch appealed to the crass tastes of the newly moneyed Munich bourgeoisie who, like most nouveau riche, thought they could achieve the status they envied in the traditional class of cultural elites by aping, however clumsily, the most apparent features of their cultural habits. ...

... in being too beautiful and democratic it made art look easy, non-involving and superficial. ...

In some sense the goals of democratization succeeded, and the society was flooded with Academic art, the public lining up to see art exhibitions as they do to see movies today. Literacy in art became widespread, as did the practice of art making, and there was a blurring between high and low culture. ...

The subjects and images presented in academic art, though original in their first expression, were disseminated to the public in the form of prints and postcards.

In short, "wasn't art great back when the only folks who could have it were rich aristocrats, back before those grubby ungewisserei [0] got their grubby hands on it and grubbied it up?"

I am reminded once more why I never took a single art course in college, and took only one English course (and that to fulfill a degree requirement). The worlds of "serious" art and literature seem to be about standing around in a circle telling all the other people in the circle how cultured and sophisticated you are, and how intellectually impoverished and shallow all the people outside the circle are.

Why are you sophisticated? Because you said so, and you ought to know. And be forwarned: any attempt to invoke logic will be refuted with an assertion that our thought systems are inherently socially constructed and there is no absolute truth anyway, except that we are far more intellectual and sophisticated than you.

This has gotten a bit long -- but in short, anyone who looks down on another human being because they would rather have this hanging on their wall than this has frankly given up any right to be offended by the term "self-important pinhead".


[0] This may not be proper German, but as I am apparently an inferior man-child for not seeing instantly how awful kitsch is, how can I possibly be expected to get any language but my own right anyway?
</rant>

We hit Movies 4 Mommies again this morning, although some horrible construction project on Av Papineau around Jean Talon made us about 20 minutes late. They say that there are two seasons in Quebec: winter, and construction. I think they say that about a lot of places, though. Today's movie was The Devil Wears Prada, which reads much better in French on the posters at the theater: Le Diable s'habille en Prada. It's the story of a girl who wants to be a journalist and takes a job as the assistant to a powerful fashion publisher. It stars Anne Hathaway of The Princess Diaries as the earnest young striver and Meryl Streep as the Andy Warhol-like cruel and judgemental boss-lady. The girl learns about love, life, and being true to yourself. In other words, it was sappy dreck. But it was watchable dreck, unlike the horrible Click we saw last week. I didn't feel stupid for sitting through this movie, which is pretty low praise but for the Mommy Matinee there's only so much you can do. The only bummer is that Streep's character spoke in a ferocious, disdainful whisper, which was hard to hear over the crying babies. tags: movies movies 4 mommies devil wears prada crying quebec late

Lawn After the movie we stopped by the Canada Tire in March Central for some garden supplies. I'd promised Maj for a Mother's Day gift that I'd convert the 10'x10' square of weeds and trash outside the front door of our apartment into a nice lawn for sitting on and drinking white wine, but it was raining on Mother's Day and one thing or another got in the way of me actually doing what I said I was going to do. Until now. I had weeded the lawn on Sunday, which was pretty damn hard -- the weeds were waist-high and full of barbs and fluff and procrastination and other defense mechanisms. But I managed to rip out almost everything with a leafspan greater than half a centimeter, which left most of the area bare of plants. We spread out some grass seed given to us by friends Tara and Chris, but I wanted to give it a little more care. So I got one of those pushy lawn mowers at Canada Tire, and a big rake, and some grass seed with fertilizer mixed in since I'm apparently too lazy to mix it together myself. I assembled the mower when we got home, then mowed what was left of the grass down to a low buzzcut. I raked the little square like the dickens to get out the old leaves and dead grass and rocks and sticks and cigarette butts and wrappers, which had the side benefit of turning over the soil, too. Then I threw big handfuls of grass-seed with fertilizer pellets all over the resulting mulched up soil. Some water, some cleanup, and voila: I have what looks like a patch of dirt with seeds in it. Hopefully this will become a lush lawn sometime in the near future, because we also bought some beautiful fold-up wt:Muskoka chairs to put on the front lawn. I think these are just about the same as wp:Adirondack chairs, but I'm sure some expert in patio furniture could explain the difference. They are, however, my favorite kind of chair, and I'm looking forward to sitting out there with some white wine in a few weeks once the lawn grows in. Like, I dunno... maybe Labo[u]r Day. tags: lawn canada tire mower grass muskoka chairs adirondack chairs

Hey, Baby Speaking of national (international?) holidays, in the aristo calendar it's the 4th of July. Happy Independence Day, everyone. My favorite 4th of July media item is the great song "4th of July" by X from their album See How We Are. X has an X the Band myspace thingy, which seems to play 4th of July when you navigate to it today. Which, like, hooray for them. Go, X. Amita June and I danced around the house this morning singing the "America -- Fuck Yeah!" song from Team America: World Police. Sometimes I wonder how Amita June is going to feel about her "dual heritage" when she grows up. She's got a Canadian passport and an American one; I hope for her that she'll be better able to appreciate the world by having that dual perspective. I've heard that there are parts of the world where Americans living abroad get together on the 4th of July and have hot dogs and toss the ol' pigskin around and stuff. I don't know if there's an Americans get-together in Montreal, and I kind of don't care. It's not like we're stationed in Siberia here, and we need to congregate once a year to remember what "home" was like. Quebec isn't so far from the US that I feel homesick for American culture -- just homesick for the people. I think the US Embassy in wt:Ottawa has a big party, but the Montreal US Consulate doesn't seem to. Which is probably just as well -- it's at the top floor of a 30-story building, which would make barbecuing hard, and playing tag football on the roof would probably be dangerous ("Go long!"). tags: 4th of july x canada usa consulate montreal

.de vs. .it Of course, there aren't any Stars and Stripes flying in Montreal today -- all the houses we passed today were flying the Italian flag, for the World Cup semifinals. Montreal has a vibrant Little Italy, and the residents and other Italians in Quebec are going nuts for the Cup games. I can't imagine what's going to happen tonight if Italy wins. I saw one car driving around with a German flag on the roof today... I hope they guy makes it home in one piece, is all I can say. I like the name "Little Italy" -- it makes me think of a cross between wt:Palermo and wp:Munchkinland. Like, 1-meter-tall Italians drinking espresso and playing tarantellas and dancing and cheering with those tiny squeaky speeded-up Alvin-and-the-Chipmunk voices. Teensy-weensy Italy! Itty-bitty Italy! It's so cute! tags: italy little italy montreal world cup quebec munchkins

Grilling After reading the Meathenge slapdown for once-a-year barbecuers, I'm once again happy that I'm a vegetarian (more or less). I just can't compete in that league, and my little propane BBQ with veggie burgers, portabellos and an occasional trout is enough for me, thanks. tags: bbq meat grilling meathenge

Wikitravel 10K Party I just announced on wt:Wikitravel:4 July 2006 that Maj and I are going to throw a little Wikitravel 10K Party during Wikimania 2006. I'm going to be presenting about Wikitravel and travel guide wikis, so it's going to be an exciting event for us. On a side note, it looks like we'll be in wt:Odense for Wikisym. Lots of people we like there, and Maj has always wanted to be in wt:Saint Petersburg for her birthday, so this will probably be close enough. tags: conferences wikitravel wiki wikimania wikisym 10k

El Destino One of the great minds of the Internet goes incognito as El Destino on Pigdog Journal. He may be one of the best media commentators I've ever read, and I'm proud to say that I know him well. Or, well, used to. He's written two articles for Pigdog Journal lately after a 3-4 year hiatus (I think... something like that). His article on the Devo + Disney combination is really funny and good. I hope I hear his voice more often; sometimes I wonder what he thinks of the Web in 2006. tags: el destino destiny pigdog journal devo disney

Stephen Hawking and the Long View Dr. Stephen Hawking asked Yahoo! Answers, " How can the human race survive the next hundred years?". tags: yahoo yahoo answers stephen hawking

Yes, this is one of those postings I'd like to make in Spanish. However, a long time ago I decided my blog should be in English, as many of the people I write it for don't speak Spanish, so don't bug me with that ;-) Besides, I do think it is very important not to leave this information inside the country. International pressure has proven fundamental to stop some of our government's flaws.
So... What happened with our elections? Nothing yet. As many expected, and as we all hoped it would not happen, the results are too close to call a winner. Ugly and tiring trend, just as it happened in the USA six years ago, and more recently in Germany, in Per (twice in the same elections!)...
As it stands now, it seems the candidate I have been favoring and promoting for quite a long time will not make it. The first results from the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) show a ~1% advantage for the right-wing PAN candidate. That's a sad result for me and for those that think like me, yes... But what is even sadder is that there is evidence pointing out it might not be true after all. It is sad that we might end up winning. Or losing, for that matter. Why? Because it will show that we are not over the fraudulent electoral system that made my country famous for decades.
As a side comment: Blogs suck for interactivity. Either we read replies on the different planets that syndicate us (and come up with unfollowable threads) or we leave comments on people's blogs (and risk never being read, and never read an answer)... Damog [update No, it was not Damog, it was somebody else cowardly using his name :-/ ] left me a reply to my previous post that I think I should address: Regarding the FeCal website I launched with some friends a couple of weeks ago: A site meant to point out the lies on the campaign of the right wing candidate, Felipe Calder n. And, yes, the site is meant (now) to attack him. Dirty, yes. But definitively, it was the only way to answer, and it was the only way not to let his lies dig further into the collective mind of the people. And to a very good exent, we (not only FeCal, but the whole L pez Obrador camp) managed to turn the trend, pointing out Calder n's uncleanness and disrespect for the people and the law. And even if in th beginning we thought of making a site that would just make fun of the Feliz-pillo, we ended up writing or refering to articles we think are relevant. And after the elections are really over (the IFE will start doing the exhaustive official vote count only tomorrow, and it can take even until next Sunday), we will see how to transform this site (or at least this group of people, we will see what happens next) into an observatory, following the politicians' decisions and trying to avoid they are as obvious as they have always been.
Anyway, back on track: Hundreds of complaints have been reported already. A site that keeps track of many of them is El sendero del Peje al 2006 - There are many criticisms we can make to this site, and up to now I have avoided linking to it too much... But their work is very important today. There are many photos of the vote booths' sheets of results, compared with what is registered in the IFE's preliminary results program, and they show slight differences - Strangely, in the 1% margin. Strangely, small enough so most people will not complain. Strangely, just the exact amount needed to give the elections to the right-wing PAN party.
From the first minutes after the results were announced, L pez Obrador told the media that there are around 3 million missing votes. Today, the IFE president (and a polemic figure himself, obviously) Luis Carlos Ugalde admitted those 3 million votes exist, but their data shows irregularities. Lets see what happens. Lets hope the irregularities do not mean the results will be modified.
There are also reports about the data reported by the preliminary results being too perfect, following a linear trend that would be impossible to achieve in a real vote count. The results of both candidates have a constant distance, going up or down together, depending only on the third candidate (a distant third) going slightly up or down.
There are also reports of voting booths that were already captured and disappeared from the system, to reappear some time later - with very slight differences.
So... It is too early to call this a fraud. Yes, many of those things might happen because of real corrections, capture errors or such.
I want not to call fraud. I want to trust the authorities no matter what they decide.
They are just making it harder for me -and for a hundred million Mexicans- to do so. Lets see what comes in the next days.

I’m a specialist when it comes to delete files I didn’t intend to. 3 years ago, I did an rm -rf that cost me most of my $ HOME , and I wrote some software (which i really should work on, BTW) which helped recover most of it (it’s tricky to get files back from ext3 once they are removed from the filesystem, since ext3 clears the block pointers from the inodes then). Today, I somehow managed to remove log files. Fortunately the log files were still in use by a process, so they were still in the filesystem. Unfortunately they were still in use by a process, filling and filling and filling… and in no way i wanted to lose all this data. Let’s consider, for the needs of the demonstration, the following case:
mh@namakemono:/mnt/test$ while true; do date; sleep 1; done > log That fills a 'log' file every second with the current date.
mh@namakemono:/mnt/test$ tail -2 log
2006 7 4 20:48:02 CEST
2006 7 4 20:48:03 CEST The file keeps growing and growing. Now, let’s remove it.
mh@namakemono:/mnt/test$ rm log The file is not in the directory any more, but remains in the filesystem. It is actually readable through /proc:
mh@namakemono:/mnt/test$ ls -l /proc/10724/fd
5
lrwx------ 1 mh users 64 2006-07-04 20:52 0 -> /dev/pts/1
l-wx------ 1 mh users 64 2006-07-04 20:52 1 -> /mnt/test/log (deleted)
lrwx------ 1 mh users 64 2006-07-04 20:52 10 -> /dev/pts/1
lrwx------ 1 mh users 64 2006-07-04 20:45 2 -> /dev/pts/1
lrwx------ 1 mh users 64 2006-07-04 20:52 255 -> /dev/pts/1
mh@namakemono:/mnt/test$ tail -2 /proc/10724/fd/1
2006 7 4 20:52:45 CEST
2006 7 4 20:52:46 CEST As you can see, it kept filling while deleted. The usual technique to recover such a file is to copy it from /proc. I happen to have done so some times before, it works pretty well for static files. But that doesn’t in our case: we’ll get a new copy of the file, frozen at some point in time. Here, we’d want to ‘re-link’ the file. Basically, that can be done with debugfs. The problem is that I didn’t find a clean way to get the inode number from the /proc/10724/fd/1 file. But that can be worked around. You need root access (what a surprise), and hope your filesystem was mostly clean before removing the file. namakemono:/mnt/test# e2fsck -n /dev/namakemono/tmp
e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Warning! /dev/namakemono/tmp is mounted.
Warning: skipping journal recovery because doing a read-only filesystem check.
/dev/namakemono/tmp contains a file system with errors, check forced.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Deleted inode 113570 has zero dtime. Fix? no
(…) Don’t worry, the -n option will make the filesystem opened read-only, so there’s no risk for your data.
The interesting part of the output is obvious: the number of the deleted inode. You now only need to link the inode:
namakemono:/mnt/test# debugfs -w /dev/namakemono/tmp
debugfs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
debugfs: cd test
debugfs: ln <113570> log
debugfs: q And see how it worked:
namakemono:/mnt/test# tail -2 log
2006 7 4 20:58:40 CEST
2006 7 4 20:58:41 CEST You can tail again, it will show you the file is being appended to. I guess you can do something along these lines to restore a file from ext2. I don’t know for other filesystems. If someone knows how to get the inode number without e2fsck, comments are opened :) Update: Well, it didn’t take long for me to actually find a better way:
namakemono:/mnt/test$ lsof -p 10724 -a -d 1
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
bash 10724 mh 1w REG 254,3 13552 113570 /mnt/test/toto (deleted)
Basically, when the file can be found in /proc/$pid/fd/$fd, run lsof -p $pid -a -d $fd.

Gar! It looks like life's not so rosy after all with this blog. YULblog, the Montreal blog aggregator, apparently uses TrackBack for updating the aggregator. So I'm going to have to build some kind of trackback system into WiLiKi. At some point I should probably collect my customizations for WiLiKi into a nice WikiBlog? add-on -- but there's still a lot Todo before that'd be ready. On the same subject, it seems that I'm getting more and more frequent WikiSpam on the About This Site page. I'm going to have to start instituting some anti-spam measures. Using regexps to refuse submissions with blacklisted URLs works very well for Wikitravel (see wt:Wikitravel:Spam filter), so I'm tempted to try it here. tag: wiliki trackback yulblog aggregator wikispam wikitravel spam filter

Piknik missed We were going to head to Piknic Electronik yesterday -- we had a great time a few weeks ago, and Piknik is such a harbinger of Montreal summer -- but Amita June is going through some freaky personal schedule issues, and she wouldn't take an afternoon nap. By the time to leave for the Parc, she was wiggin' out from sleep deprivation, and we couldn't really force her to go out to the island and dance to big fun beats. Which was kind of a bummer, since our friends Meg and Patti were out there, and it would have been good to see them. They came by on Friday night for Pizza Night Chez les Bads, and we talked about Ignition 2006 (yes, Montreal Burners, it is going to happen... I think) and kids and dancing and weddings and fun. Amita June and Meg get along like gang-busters; they have a lot of fun together. So instead of going out to the Island Amita June and I went across the street to Parc La Fontaine and played in the baby pools right next to the playground. How is that for lucky? We have two huge pools, about 18 inches deep, right across the street, next to the baby playground. Oh, and there's a good bar a block and a half away. This is the greatest apartment ever. We moved in this time last year, and I feel so at home here now. So many important things have happened to us in the last year -- Amita June, Wikitravel -- and this apartment has been a part of it. We're going to look for a house to buy in the fall, but right now this feels like home. tag: 1481 rue rachel parc la fontaine amitajune pizza night meg patti piknik electronik parc jean drapeau montreal home

Two months I almost forgot that it's my two-month blogiversary. Yes, I just made that word up. And it's months in the French Revolutionary Calendar, not, like, real months. But close. tag: french revolutionary calendar blogs

My mom For those of you who asked: yes, my Mom's doing great. She was bit by a rattlesnake last week (!), but now she's back on her feet, the swelling is down, and she's doing all the stuff she did before. Good for her; she's pretty resilient. tag: mom rattlesnake recovery bite

Microburst I now officially have a new phobia, since a Quebec woman was recently killed in her trailer by a microburst. Apparently a wp:microburst is a localized gust of wind that can reach speeds of 100 kph, kind of like a tornado. Unlike a tornado, a microburst doesn't spin around -- it goes straight down. It's usually accompanied by rain, and can be devastating. These freak winds happen several times a year in Quebec. Great. tags: quebec microburst death trailer wind

OpenID My current work project is enabling single-signon for all the language versions of Wikitravel. My preferred method for this is OpenID, since it will allow sign-on not only to Wikitravel language versions, but in the future other sites as well. So I'm writing an extension for MediaWiki to allow logging in to MediaWiki with an OpenID URL, and for making MW an authentication server for other sites. I realize this is a little roundabout for Wikitravel's needs, but for interfacing with new partner World66, as well as other MW sites like Wikipedia or Wikia servers, it'd be fantastic. I'm using the great OpenID Enabled libraries from JanRain. They're working out pretty well, although they're a little flaky around the Yadis edges. Given that I don't really care about Yadis -- sorry, LID and inames -- having to deal with those errors is pretty annoying. Even so, I managed to get a working consumer-side system going today. It was pretty exciting logging into my development machine for the first time with an OpenID, and having it work. Hooray for OpenID! tags: openid mediawiki php lid openid enabled inames yadis wikitravel

On the same day that Nominet signs up to ICANN, it's announced that the US government is doing a full consultation on the future of ICANN, possibly fundimentally changing how ICANN operates.

• At 8:10, Nadezhda and I left home, to go cast our votes. Presidential candidate Andr s Manuel L pez Obrador, lives two blocks away, and he had arrived just before 8:00
• The booth was not yet ready. Among lots of media coverage, we stood and waited patiently.
• Around 9:00 AM, the booth was finally set up, and things started flowing - Andr s Manuel voted and left among lots of his supporters' chanting and shouting .
• Wonder how did I vote this time?
• Nadezhda also voted, my data was double-checked, my thumb was marked. By mistake, my brother's registration was checked instead of mine - Well, anyway, he is not in Mexico today :-/
• We left the booth, leaving a long queue still waiting.

From the ever-fabulous Lambda the Ultimate programming languages blog, I found an article on the recently published Revised Report on Scheme Status Report. Yes, it's a report on a report. Each new version of the programming language Scheme has an associated Revised Report on Scheme, where n = a monotonically increasing integer. The current version is usually called "R RS" Scheme, but a new version is in the works. The R RS Status report is the status report on this new version. And R RS Scheme looks like it's got some very fun parts to it. First and foremost, a plan for a library (= module) system, which has probably been the single most difficult issue for making portable Scheme code. Next, a standard system for error-handling and exceptions. Also, standard records (AKA structures), and finally Unicode implementations. I think this sounds like the finest kind of standardization process: working from the dozens of existing Scheme implementations and ad hoc community standardization efforts like the fabuloso SRFI (Scheme Request For Implementation) project. It's identifying a problem (differences between implementations) and supplying a solution. There are some incompatibilities introduced too; top-level definitions are gone, which is a little sad but understandable. (eval) is going to have to (evolve) to deal with the new library format. These are unfortunate incompatibilities that serve a greater good. It's strange to see some other ideas bandied about, though, like making pairs immutable (no set-car! and set-cdr! any more), and requiring the cdr of a pair always to be a list. That way lies top-down revisionist language design, which is madness for a language with the maturity of Scheme. Codifying standard interfaces and implementations for features that are different in all Scheme implementations is a Good Thing; they're what everybody wants. Messing with the basics of the language is a Bad Thing; I don't think there's a Scheme programmer in the world who wants that to happen. tags: scheme r6rs r rs status report programming lambda the ultimate

NonCommercial So, one thing that I find kind of sad is that some contributors to Open Source or Open Content projects make particularly emphatic anti-commercial statements. It comes up on Creative Commons mailing lists and even Wikimedia or Wikitravel talk pages. A typical comment is, ''I don't want anyone to profit from my works.'' It's strange that the worst possible thing people can think of happening with their work is that someone could make money from it. You rarely see, "I don't want anyone to use my work to twist minds, justify racism or break the human spirit," nor "I don't want anyone to use my work to hurt others or themselves." Why is the idea of generating value with a work the worst we can imagine, when so many more destructive purposes are served with pieces of information, art, and software every day? It would be an interesting intellectual exercise to design a piece of software or a work of art from which no one could profit in any way, financially or otherwise. It would have to be uninformative, unpleasurable, inutile as a doorstop or sample bitstream. Of course, intellectual exercise is itself a benefit, so that'd have to be gotten rid of, too. Here is my wish: I wish that my work on the Internet and elsewhere is of use to many, many people for many years in ways I cannot imagine today. I hope it makes people think, it guides them through difficult waters, and that it amuses and provokes. Good luck with that, whoever you are. tags: sharing noncommercial cc profit money

FastCGI So, I got Gauche-fastcgi installed on my server, as well as mod_fcgid. The builds were easy, and after a little bit of fiddling in the Apache configurations I had a sample wp:FastCGI script running on this server. With just a couple of lines of changes, I had my WiLiKi instance running FastCGI. Some httperf runs later, and I could see a 4-5x difference in speed between FastCGI and CGI. So, I couldn't resist: I've moved this whole site over to FastCGI. I've noticed a considerably peppier response time. I'm going to try to add some more WebSoftwareFriendly optimizations to the WiLiKi software soon, which should speed up the site even further. Hurrah for that! tags: fastcgi gauche-fastcgi fcgid wiliki httperf web performance

Long day Maj and I went to see the local Movies 4 Mommies matinee this morning at the Guzzo Cineplex in the March Central. Movies 4 Mommies are special showings for parents with babies less than 1 year old; the babies can cry or yell or whatever and nobody gets upset because everybody's got one. It was fun to go -- despite the name, I'd guess that 20-30% of the babies had daddies in tow, too -- and we met a few nice parents and cute bubbies. Unfortunately, the experience was ruined by the movie that was playing this morning: Click. I'm not an anti-wp:Adam Sandler snob; I'm fine with the fart jokes and the warbling voice. No sweat. But this movie was badly paced; the jokes were completely unfunny; the story was boring and the interactions were creepy and mean-spirited. It was our first day at Movies 4 Mommies, so that's probably the only reason we didn't walk out on this movie. It stunk really bad; the Rotten Tomatoes reviews of Click were pretty bad, too. Afterwards we felt dirtied by the experience, so we stopped by Santropol for some lunch with our friends Tara and Chris. We got hugantic sandwiches and salads and veggies and Amita June made a fantastic mess. For dinner tonight Niko stopped by; it was good to see him. He was in Paris while we were in California, so it was good to get back in touch. Maj made an excellent shrimp pasta and a big salad, which was good for this hot, humid weather we've been having. tags: click movies4mommies adam sandler babies movies rotten tomatoes santropol amitajune tara chris niko

ClaimID I just signed up for a new ClaimID account: http://claimid.com/evanprodromou . ClaimID is a service for accumulating links to your various profiles, clippings, and other media mentions. It means you're claiming an identity assembled on the Web. I think this is a pretty good idea, but I'm not 100% sure why it's significantly better than my Me Other Places page. I do have a lot of on-line accounts -- too many -- but I'm not sure ClaimID is a good way to organize them. I dunno. It's great, though, that they support OpenID, which I think is the coolest shared identity system out there. Hopefully identity aggregators like ClaimID will start bringing some logic to our online identity systems. However... I'd sure like to see some other identity players, like TypeKey, starting to move towards OpenID. tags: openid claimid identity typekey

People I like Flipping through the Internet Identity Gang site, I tripped over a post by Bob Blakley on his blog, Ceci n'est pas un Bob. Bob was one of the members of the SAML committee when I worked on it for Outlook Technologies and then Securant. I found him to be an excellent explainer; I learned more on that technical committee about being clear and concise in technical communications than I'd learned before or since. So it's great to see that he has a blog; I've bookmarked it for further reading. tags: blogs bob blakley

From 1st Jul, I joined with CodeFest 2006 Akihabara, a kind of events like Hackathon, Sprint, or something. It has been broadcasting via PeerCast, so if you want to see it, setting up PeerCast and play with the follow link: http://localhost:7144/pls/4345209C975F5665FA9308FDB163F249?tip=61.197.170.97:7144 . Unfurotunately, I couldn't setup Ogg/Vorbis, Theora, so it is using Windows Media Encoder 9. I regret it.

Honk honk honk! honk honk honk honk! I guess Portugal just won the quarterfinals against England for the wt:World Cup 2006. We have a huge Portuguese community in Montreal, and the team's victories this year at the Cup and in 2004 for the Euro cup have been a huge source of pride. I'm not a big soccer fan, but I do love the fact that Mtl's cultural communities literally fly the colors, packing the bars and cafes and driving around honking after a win (or even a big goal). Italy, Portugal, Brazil (mostly Portuguese again), France... I even saw some cars with Ukraine flags. It's a cool part of being in such a multiculti city. tags: world cup soccer portugal football fifa italy brazil ukraine

Moving Day One of the things that's crazy about being in Montreal in the summer is that there's just too much to do. On any given day, there are just a billion jillion activities and things to do. Around May, the vegetation here just explodes into frenetic growth -- trying to get a full cycle of life in in our small sub-arctic growing season. Quebec's forests are as dense and overgrown as any Amazonian jungle. I think humans' social schedule during the summer is like that, too: trying to get a full year of fun into 4-5 months. Take today, for example. It may be 13 Messidor to us citoyens, but for the people of the North today is 1 July, officially wp:Canada Day. The national holiday of Canada, it's celebrated from Coast to Coast by lots of people who love Canada and want to celebrate their Canadianness. And then there's Quebec. Sure, Montreal has some nice Canada Day events, but there's something furtive about them. Even though somewhere north of 45% of Quebec's population wants to remain in the union, it's still rare to see overt Canada Day celebrations, outside the sponsored events. But for most Quebecois, July 1 is wp:Moving Day -- the day when everyone's lease is up, by government mandate, and those people who are going to move this year go to their new homes. There are moving vans in the street and people queued up at the rental places -- typical time to rent is 2-4 hours. We moved on Moving Day last year to our new, great apartment, and it's nice to be here. This may be the first Moving Day we've been here that no one's asked for help moving. That might say something about the stage of life we're in -- people are buying their own homes and settling down -- and it may say something about our reliability as friends since we had a baby. In any event, here's one Moving Day when any moving I do is on my own. tags: canada canada day quebec moving day montreal

Jazz There was a Canada Day parade this morning on the other side of town (where the anglophones and federalists live...), but we were too tired to go. So we instead skipped down to Place des Arts to visit the free outdoor parts of the Montreal Jazz Fest. Case in point with Montreal festivals in the summer: it was big, with tons to do, and we were totally unable to deal with doing it. We had some Molson Dry, saw some music playing and Amita June clapped along (she's a great clapper!), then we had quiche and a salmon wrap and some Molson Dry, then Amita June went and played in the kids' area, then we saw some more music, then some samba, then klesmer, then off to home. Good time, but tiring. I feel obliged to enjoy Montreal summers, but sometimes it's just too much. tags: montreal jazz fest montreal jazz festival amitajune klesmer samba

France Honk honk! Honk honk honk honk honk!! So I guess France just beat Brazil to get into the semi-finals. Is it actually allowed to have a World Cup without Brazil in the semi-finals? I thought it was a rule. Niko, my French Friend, was complaining last week that the French fans were just loitering around the bars on St. Laurent rather than being boisterous like other fans did when their teams won. Not today: on our way back from Jazz Fest, we saw a huge tow truck with a gigantic tricolor draped from the back trolling up and down Mont Royal. Kind of a bummer for the Brazilians -- and the rest of us who enjoy Brazil fans' antics. But I guess that's the way it goes sometimes. tags: brazil france world cup fans

Fancruft I don't remember what I was looking up on Wikipedia, but there was some fancruft on the page and I ended up wasting half an hour reading Simpsons articles. I want my half hour back, Wikipedia! tags: wikipedia simpsons fancruft

Marilynne Robinson When I was a freshman in college, one of my favorite instructors, Michael Near, assigned "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson as an English 1B assignment. I found the story haunting and beautiful and altogether excellent. I tried digging up more of her work at the UC Berkeley main library, and all I could get was "Mother Country" -- her indictment of stratified society and nuclear energy. In it, she promised never to write fiction again. So I was stunned to read a quote by Robinson in Shannon's Livejournal. Wow. Apparently wp:Marilynne Robinson has written a book of essays in 1998 and a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel in 2005. Incredible. Why was I not informed? I've got some reading to do. tags: marilynne robinson gilead novel

Full-text feed So I've got a full-text feed now. Hopefully it works for those folks with Planet aggregators or whatever, and especially for Joey Hess, who hates the stuff below the fold. Some corrections that I made to older posts seem to have fudged up some planets, notably Planet Debian, for which I'm kind of bummed. But I think I've fixed the problem, and this should be the only time it happens. Unfortunately, since I write a lot, it means a lot of scrolling. tags: rss full text feed joey hess below the fold planet planet debian

Well, it’s been over a month since the last entry. So much for posting more often! Today, I’ve updated the blog to WordPress 2.0.3, and installed a new theme. I wasn’t too happy with the old Steam theme, but it was a variable-width theme, and I can’t stand fixed-width themes. (Why buy a better monitor if all the Web pages are forced to 600 pixels?) But with the new and improved theme support in 2.0, there are some nice themes that use your whole browser window. (Posted to all known aggregators, too; I hope Planet doesn’t decide all my posts are new now.) UPDATE: Well, that was fun; the nice-looking theme happens to be completely invalid. Expect theme changes over the next short while. UPDATE: Wow, that’s depressing; the state of valid XHTML in WordPress themes is, uh, underwhelming. So I switched back to the nice theme, and edited it to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and valid CSS. I’ve set up a Bazaar-NG repository for my changes.

A busy night results in the 0.1 release of mod_ifier, it allows matching and rejection on arbitary incoming HTTP request headers, with helpers for User-Agent and Referer headers. ie. DropReferer is now a synonym for “DropHeader Referer …“, and DropAgent is similarly processed as “DropHeader User-Agent ..” There is a Debian x86 package for Sarge, and matching source package, along with brief instructions. It seems stable and reliable. Next I need to look at URI matching, POST payload analysis, and the use of regular expressions instead of literal matches.