Several weeks ago, Wolfgang asked after a rename command for Hecl. Pretty simple to do in terms of the Hashtable that maps strings to commands, so I added it. However, there was a problem: in order to save space, I'd been grouping commands together in one class, and dispatching on "argv[0]". A nearly empty class in Java compiles to something like 500 bytes, so mapping one command to one class is not an acceptable practice when you are working, in some cases, with an upper limit of 64K. Dispatching on argv[0] meant treating it as a string, and doing a compare against the command name, which meant hard coding the command names into the classes implementing commands. Try renaming one of those commands and...oops! I struggled for a bit trying to find an answer I was happy with, and after talking it over on the mailing list, arrived at doing things like this: A big class that implements a number of commands, with a dispatch method:

static void dispatch(int cmd, Interp interp, Thing[] argv) throws HeclException  

That method then does a plain old 'switch' on the cmd int to go to the correct block of code. The code that calls this is simple, and it has to be, because one gets instantiated for every command, and so it's imperitive that it doesn't take up much memory:

class MathCmdFacade implements Command  
    private int cmdtype;
    public MathCmdFacade(int cmd)  
        cmdtype = cmd;
     
    public void cmdCode(Interp interp, Thing[] argv) throws HeclException  
        MathCmds.dispatch(cmdtype, interp, argv);
     
 

So far, I'm pretty happy with the results. By making the 'facade' (I'm not sure it's really the facade pattern, but... oh well, the name works for me) small, I don't waste memory. Plopping all the code in the switch statements is probably loathsome to purists, but it makes the code smaller, something that's never far from mind when working on Hecl. Things are also a bit faster, because we don't do the string comparisons to dispatch commands either. All things considered, the code isn't illegible by any means, either. Furthermore, because the new 'facade' commands still just implement the regular old Command interface, which means that Proc still works, and that you can still associate a class implementing Command with a string, so that it remains very easy to implement new Hecl commands in Java, and the interface hasn't changed. Faster, smaller, backwards compatible, and 'rename' works too... life is good!

A new release of Quantian is now available! Release 0.7.9.2, available as a iso file of 2.7 gb, contains almost 7.6 gb of quantitative, numerical or scientific software. This release is the second one based on Knoppix 4.0.2 and features:

• Kernel 2.6.12, KDE 3.5 / 3.4, OpenOffice 2.0, ... and more from Knoppix 4.0.2
• a backport of the openMosix-enabled 2.4.27 kernel and openMosix tools from the last clusterKnoppix release,
• very comprehensive support for GNU R with over 870 packages from CRAN and BioConductor, plus ESS, Ggobi, Rpad, RKward, RSPerl, JGR, ...
• addition of the Java 1.5.0 SDK enabling us to add ImageJ, Weka, JGR, Mondrian;
• plus a number of other new packages (inkscape, orsa, praat, wxmaxima, some more Debian documentation...)
• and still loads more of math, bio, engineering, LaTeX, ... software

Downloads are available via the Quantian site at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and at from Greg Warnes' machine at Yale. European mirrors should be in sync within a day or two, Bittorrent support via the Linux Mirror Project should also be available soon. Note that http transfers seem to be problematic due to the file size of over 2gb; rsync and bittorrent are probably a better approach. More information is as always available at the Quantian pages.

Anthony: if that happened to me, I’d have left too. Normally I try to be a nice person, etc., etc., but I don’t like it when it’s imposed on me. If I’m in a channel where there’s such a charter, and some channel regulars make hostile comments towards me, I’d leave immediately as I can’t respond effectively, lest the Long Arm of the Charter descends upon me, as I know I can’t win. Moreover, when you remind somebody about the existence of the Charter, that’s a threat: “hey, remember there’s a Charter and there are consequences for not following it”. If that happened to me, I’d leave immediately, too. In fewer words: the existence of a charter makes the environment almost as hostile as I can bear. Add something (some loud words, a “reminder”, etc.) that increases my anxiety and I’ll leave, for I can’t win. That’s what I think happened to “anon” and “foo”.

I haven’t been blogging lately. I do have a running list of ideas and topics, but my blog is going through a bit of an identity crisis. When I was a law student, it was easy for this to be a ‘law student blog,’ but now that I’m practicing I haven’t figured out how to find a balance between the personal and professional (and, perhaps on a third axis, the technical). Also, since I had a daughter, my time has been pretty scarce and I’m not sure that blogging is the best use of it. I’ll probably pick up in frequency before too long, but in case anyone is wondering, I’m still here. In the meantime, my Webloyalty is a Scam entry continues to get more traffic than anything else on this blog—close to 31,000 hits at the time of this writing, and nearly 1,000 writebacks (plus nearly as many personal emails to me on the topic). See also this follow-up post. One guy has even started a blog dedicated solely to criticizing Reservation Rewards—but now the link seems to broken. When I write these consumer protection entries, I inevitably get comments from low-level company insiders defending their practices (see, e.g., U-Haul Responds). These writebacks are often a much better condemnation than I could ever come with. For example, the following was apparently written by a “WLI Call Center Rep.” The POST request came from the same area of Connecticut as where Webloyalty is located, and it seems pretty genuine:

I’m a rep in the call center at Webloyalty. I have no pity for any of you people. You’re all suckers, plain and simple. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that nothing is free? When all of you idiots made your purchases on whatever website you did business on at the end of your transaction there was an offer asking if you wanted to save $10, or get award miles, or whatever. When you clicked on that link you were not automatically signed up. What happens is that you’re brought to the Reservations Rewards website. On that website it tells you that you are on the website for Reservations Rewards. You see, you can tell that because the banner at the top of the site says “Reservations Rewards”. Unfortunately you were too stupid to notice or remember. It then gives you instructions on how to redeem your “reward”. At that point you are instructed to enter you email address in twice and click accept. Now you have to manually type in the email twice in those boxes. No cut and paste is allowed. Then it tells you to click accept. Now, if you had any fucking brains in your head you would have noticed that right above the box where you enter your email mail address its says, in regular sized type, in plain sight, right out in the open, that entering your email twice will act as an electronic signature and that by clicking accept you are accepting that the website you just made a purchase on can share the billing information with Reservation Rewards. Also in the big box next all of this it gives the exact details of what you are signing up for, again in regular sized print, in plain sight, right out in the open. If you are too stupid to take the time to notice all of that then you deserve what you got. which was a membership in a overpriced bullshit ptogram. Webloyalty depends on idiots like you to not notice this stuff. To be blinded by the idea that you are getting something for “free”. To not look at you credit card statement so charges go through every month. Its unbelievable the amount of dummies out there that fall for this stuff. Even if you do catch the charges eventually, and get a refund they still made money off of you by collecting interest on your money when they had possesion of it. Stay a member or cancel its win-win for webloyalty. So, anyway I hope all you dummies learned a valuable lesson and wont fall for this again. I’m sure many of you will, though. You’d be shocked at how many people are repeat members where they canceled the service a while back but fell for the scam again a few months later.

I have decided to add myself to the Uploaders field of amaya, after its maintainer, Anand Kumria, offered me to do so during the Xlibs-dev Transition.
The changelog is quite impressive, due to the excellent work of Regis Boudin, who provided patches for almost any bug on earth.

The Xlibs-dev Transition NMUs are going to be revisited during this weekend, to ensure that after a month, maintainers acknowledged the NMUs and that no new bugs were introduced.

Since the demand for blosxom anti-comment-spam solutions respective appropriate blosxom plugins seems to be really high, I’ve decided to polish up my apparently quite well working although still in beta state being anti-spam enhanced version of the comments plugin (ZIP) by putting the blacklist outside in an external file and writing some (still short) docs. I use it since 11th of January this year and got only two spam comments and many more normal comments since then, so it should work. Although: I also got a question if my trackback doesn’t work. Hmmm. So no warranties, just an offer for help fighting against comment spam. ;-) Another feature which is basically ported from the writeback notify plugin is notification of the blog owner about new comments by mail. Since on the server on which my blog runs the used Perl module Mail::Sendmail was not available, I used Mail::Send instead for my version. For installation you first need to download the ZIP file of the original comments plugin, install it’s templates and then install my anti-spam enhanced version of the plugin itself.

Now playing: Rockapella — Come on Eileen

This past couple of weeks saw a lot of Debian and Ubuntu work from me in (hopefully) equal measure. For Debian, I whipped up new versions of robotour, xshisen, libmemcache, and gtklp; robotour finally installs in /usr/games as it should be; xshisen acks NMUs and finally has a sane source package (well, a little bit tipsy still, but at least it’s now fixes the NMU source b0rkage;) libmemcache’s -dev now installs its headers to the right location; and gtklp bumps to a new upstream, with touch-fu replacing AM_MAINTAINER_MODE for seamless build. Thanks a lot to my wonderful sponsors Margarita Manterola, Sylvain Le Gall, and Andreas Metzler for the uploads! On the other hand, opendchub has migrated to testing, and its initscript failed (not to mention missing a manpage) I’ve fixed the latter, but I still have to figure out how to fix the former; I’ll probably have to consult the reference and add an unprivileged opendchub system user and configure the daemon to use that, or fix the source and allow flexible redefinition of opendchub’s working/configuration directories (currently hardcoded to $HOME/.opendchub). Either way, I have to touch the source and make patches; and I would appreciate it very much if my dearest readers can help out On the lighter (or heavier, depending on your POV) side, I noticed that Steve McIntyre posted an RFH for cvs, and I’ve decided to help out a bit. Seeing the source, I was pleasantly surprised as the age (and design) of this package, and it would be a blast for me to study this (and fix bugs, prepare patches, and release new versions while at it. It would also prepare me better for NM as well. As for my Ubuntu work, I’ve upgraded my Breezy Badger desktop to Dapper Drake last Monday (just in time for Flight 4,) and I’m quite amazed at the new features of this release. Like many folks I just loved xchat-gnome’s notification feature (especially when you’re moving in between workspaces very often) and was very much pleased with the speed of Gnome 2.13.91 (so much so that I’ve departed from my normal Ion3 desktop without regretting it. But of course, since Dapper Drake is the latest development branch, there were some snags that I got to encounter. One particular bug was with masqmail, because the 0.2.21-1ubuntu1 version created a /var/run/masqmail directory, but since /var/run is mounted as a tmpfs in Dapper, masqmail will complain the next time it restarts. Another (probably cosmetic) bug(?) was with tuxpaint, since it placed a couple of launchers in the Gnome Applications menu, one on Education and the other on Graphics. I’ve yet to see if tuxpaint’s is a genuine bug or just a design decision, but I’ve fixed masqmail’s, and 0.2.21-1ubuntu2 should be on Dapper now, thanks to Daniel Holbach. So far I’m loving the new Ubuntu release, and with FeatureFreeze finally here that means I’ll have to drag my desktop box again to the local internet cafe to do yet another aptitude dist-upgrade. Gaah, I need a laptop!

Before:
$ time sudo gconf-schemas --register battstat.schemas charpick.schemas cpufreq-applet.schemas drivemount.schemas geyes.schemas gswitchit.schemas gtik.schemas gweather.schemas mini-commander-global.schemas mini-commander.schemas mixer.schemas multiload.schemas stickynotes.schemas
real 0m52.526s

After :
$ time sudo gconf-schemas --register battstat.schemas charpick.schemas cpufreq-applet.schemas drivemount.schemas geyes.schemas gswitchit.schemas gtik.schemas gweather.schemas mini-commander-global.schemas mini-commander.schemas mixer.schemas multiload.schemas stickynotes.schemas
real 0m4.335s

So much for the overly long libgnome, gnome-applets, gnome-games, etc. upgrades.

During the last two months, the Debian Catalan localisation team has seen two of their major milestones completed, after some tough work. The group managed to release Sarge with a completely translated installer, but failed to provide a translation of the Install Manual, which was a regression for us, as it had been available in Woody. We didn't give up, and thanks to the stubborness of Miguel Gea and braindmg we slowly started translating the Sarge manual months after the release, so it could at least appear in the website. But progress was too slow, so we planned an online meeting for the beginnings of the year to try to complete the translation doing a whole lot of translations during a weekend. Soon after we learned that joeyh, fjp and the d-i team wanted to terminate Sarge d-i manual support in svn RSN, as they would start to make changes to the docs to reflect etch changes, but fortunately Frans agreed to give us a slightly extended deadline, if we agreed to finish the job by January 14th:

20:37 < CIA-7> debian-installer: fjp d-i * r33721
               /sarge/installer/doc/manual/ca/: Add Catalan translation as
               translators would like to finish it for Sarge and have promised
               to do so 14 Januari 2006 at the latest

I really didn't think we would be able to make 100% in just 10 days, but the team, assisted by a large number of minionsnew contributors that volunteered on #debian-catalan, managed to do it I believe a few days before the deadline. Guillem announced it on our list. Releasing etch with an up to date Catalan manual will be a lot easier, if we try to maintain it up to date as etch development carries on. The second milestone was yesterday's completion of the Catalan translation for all five levels of the etch debian-installer, after a year of no translation activity on that front, and months of braindmg bugging me to do my chunk of work. Although it's now showing a shiny 100%, there's a lot of review work to do, and polishing it should be our focus for the next release. I seem to have recovered some of my interest in translations. That's good, because GNOME 2.14 is around the corner, and it wouldn't be fair for Josep if he ends up doing all the job. :) Also, I've been quietly working with a group of people at Softcatal in a project that will probably have lots of press in our community. It's not public yet though, but I hope that it'll be announced in the next few weeks.

About a week ago, we spent some time calling, e-mailing, and visiting family and friends. Here are some of the things we heard from various people:

"Really? Good." "Oh! Congratulations!" "Happy Congratulations!" *uncertain nervous silence* "I'm happy for both of you." "HOLY COW!" "Wow!" (Then some excited laughter) "I wondered. How are you feeling?" "That's sweet. Thank you [for calling]. You'll be great parents." "That's very exciting." ... "We'll have to get out the grandparent mugs!" "Oh, I'm just so thrilled! My first great grandchild!" "WOW! IS LIFE EVER EXCITING! Blessings to all three of you!" "Did I hear you right? Everyone -- TERAH'S PREGNANT!"

Yes, you did hear right! Terah is pregnant! She's due in October. This will be our first child. We're pretty excited! And also a little nervous. And trying to figure out how to arrange our house -- its floorplan isn't the most convenient for young children. 2006 is certainly going to be an exciting year!

I woke up on Friday morning and wondered what breakfast would be. Then I remembered that I was staying at the W and decided to forage for food elsewhere. I took a taxicab with spider88, enochsmiles, maradydd. It was a strange hybrid SUV cab that was painted all yellow, I would later learn that Yellow Cab drivers were scary and that I should avoid them. We got to StudioZ and discovered that we didn't know how to get inside. We figured that out eventually and took stock of the situation. I started moving tables about and setting up chairs, because I abhor standing about with my hands in my pockets. Then I helped hang banners from the rafters. After I did that, I tried to see if I could do anything else. Since CodeCon is run on the cheap so that anybody can attend, drinks like coffee are not included in the conference fee. And since the conference was being held in a night club, there was a convenient bar that would be a good place to setup a concessions stand. So I put things in order and stood behind the counter. I got to see people walk in the door and after registering with wealhtheow or Spider, they'd stand in bewilderment in front of my bar. It was a lot of fun to watch all sorts of people come through. And then I'd smile at them and offer to get them something to drink. We started Lance's talk a little late in order to let everyone settle in their seats. I met him the night before where he talked about his Apache module that has heuristics for detecting when a phisher is trying to clone your website. Or when your website has been cloned and the phisher is passing login requests through to you. This kind of thing is totally what financial institutions have to start doing. We got coffee from this place called Cafe Organica, which seems to have some mixed online reviews. Or rather, Jonathan did, in a big messenger bag filled with carafes. Since Jonathan doesn't actually drink coffee, it was left to me to decide whether it was any good. It seemed to be drip coffee that was thick, dark and strong. Very decent for something that was brewed hours ago. The customers didn't seem to mind, as we ran out of coffee every day. The next presentation was SiteAdvisor which takes an interesting tack on safely surfing the web. Instead of building security features into your browser, there's a central server that stores information about sites that you're visiting. But what was really interesting was how they got this information. They had an automated tool that went in pretending to be a real person, signed up for some e-mails, downloaded some programs, and examined what happened afterward. I missed the majority of the VidTorrent presentation, because I was busy chatting with people and offering them refreshments. Also, their demo didn't work because the wireless setup at the conference kept on going down. People were abusing the free Wireless network that Cliff was trying to keep up and running. Which is sad, because Cliff had basically volunteered to set that up on his own time. Tom came up after that to present Localhost, which is a unimaginatively named piece of software, but is interesting because it lets you browse a world-wide filesystem of torrents. What's interesting about his filesystem is that it uses a distributed hash table, so that even if there are files with the same name, you'll be able to distinguish the distinct copies. Which is useful if you want to tell whether you're downloading a legitimate and popular file, or some malicious file that someone's injected. The last talk of the day was Truman, which not only demonstrated an interesting piece of technology, but also quite educational. The tool itself is a specialised Linux distribution that can capture what happens inside itself and simulate a public connexion to the Internet. This is advantages, Joe tells us, because modern pieces of malware are smart enough to disable themselves when they detect sandboxed environments. After people filed out, we packed away everything into storage as StudioZ is a nightclub, so it was setting up for its nightclub crowd. Everyone else went next door to Loft11 where a party was being held, sponsored by bramcohen's awesome company I went inside and bumped into Graydon and we tried to go about finding fellow Canadians. This was not so successful on the crowded downstairs floor, so we went upstairs to chat and catch up. I met some people who were at the speaker's reception and successfully remembered their names. Then I met a guy who was at the night club just waiting for his buddy, and I explained CodeCon to him. He thought it was a great idea. Len Sassaman and Bram got up to give a little speech, which I tried to take photographs of. But failed. Instead, I noticed that they were on this awesome glass ceiling which made me want to dance. I didn't do that though, because my feet hurt from standing all day. I poked my head into a room upstairs that was all white, which was very cool. Some people were playing a game of Werewolf which finished with the villagers winning. I hung out with some people like Eric, Pete, and Kelsey who told the story of her pink Barbie backpack. I also met Chloe and her husband, whose name I have forgotten. But Chloe is awesome because she is now independently wealthy so that she can pursue her dream of studying the nitrogen cycle in soil using post-doc maths. Impressive! I also met akashayi who is not a professional computer programmer at all. She teaches martial arts by day, and slings code by night. She drove all the way from Los Angeles to attend CodeCon and was having the time of her life. I wistfully remember when I was that excited about computing, so just hanging out with her was awesome. She promised me a Kempo lesson if I ever made my way to L.A., which is an offer I intend to collect. I found Spider downstairs, sitting on a couch with Daniel. The night was getting long and we were totally exhausted, so we took a taxicab to the W. There, we went up to Enoch's room party where he treated us to $17 cheeseburgers. Now, I didn't think that cheeseburgers that expensive were worth it, but boy oh boy were those good. Spider and I took a cab to kineticphoenix and riseorbleed's place sometime past midnight and we dragged our luggage into their guest room. Which was really more of an awesome guest apartment. Hurray for knowing people in foreign cities! I don't remember much after that. I think I turned on a space heater before passing out.

There have been a couple of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 reviews. They all have one thing in common - they are pretty much dismissive. A couple of insightful postings:

• I(E7) coulda been a contender ... (Kurt Cagle)
• Stop Stop Stop Hurting The Internet (Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch)
• More people underwhelmed by RSS Support in IE7 (Dare Obasanjo)

Some memorable quotes:

Is it just me, or does this look like a GUI widget test demo? 3 different styles of buttons, in various colors, in seemingly random arrangement. Tabs squished in between other semi-related buttons. - Leslie Michael Orchard

my god, they've made XP's Fisher Price look good

Apparently, IE7 still has only limited support for the current web standards such as RSS (yes, it can display the headlines, but it's totally useless as RSS aggregator), XHTML (you know, this six year old HTML standard which plays nicely with XML) or the SVG vector graphics format you can use with Firefox or an Adobe Plugin to IE6 (which was recently required to see the graphs at Google Webstats, and will likely be used in new versions of Google Maps to further improve speed and display quality - on browsers that support it only, of course). The UI seems to be a test run for the next office generation - they've remove the menu... Oh, and it seems rather unlikely that IE will see such a big community with tons of extensions (you name it, someone already did it) like Firefox and Thunderbird do. Still it likely is an improvement of the current IE versions, which fail to adhere to pretty much any standard. But it won't be the big selling point for users to switch to Vista.