Search Results: "ema"

3 December 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Upgrade Testing with QEMU

I have been really busy until two weeks ago [Shameless plug: If you need a (technical) project manager and/or hands-on Basis person to get your SAP R/3 system upgraded to ECC6, get in touch.]. Which means I've been a bit slack - so slack in fact that Andreas Barth had to resolve an RC bug in one of my packages - mea culpa.

Ridden by guilt I decided to finally do what I've been wanting to for some time: Putting the steps together to do a Debian test upgrade using QEMU. I chose QEMU because it is free and readily comes with Debian. It is slower than VMware, at least without the non-free kernel module, but still usable on somewhat reasonable hardware. The actual upgrade steps given below are independent of the virtualisation technology used, so they will apply to VMware as well.

Without further ado, here goes:
All in all, things seem to work ok. However, this is far from hitting the friendly green upgrade button and it just happens. So, I thought I try the next best thing to the friendly green upgrade button which is synaptic. Doing an upgrade with synaptic does actually work quite smoothly. It needs to be restarted a few times, leaves some cruft in terms of obsolete and orphan packages and the reboot doesn't really work from within Gnome, but other than that it is ok. Most notably, it didn't leave me with an unusable system in the middle of it all.

Robert Collins made some interesting remarks about the challenges of upgrades last week when we had dinner with Martin Krafft and a number of other great people. It looks like the Ubuntu folks are working on improving update-manager but also the underlying infrastructure to smooth out the upgrade process. Maybe there could be an opportunity to work together on this and achieve a situation where upgrades become as smooth as installs are now due to the fantastic work of the d-i people.

2 December 2006

Ben Armstrong: Video hub: Why stream at all?

In response to Home video hub on a shoestring, Justin asked, “Why not just stream the media over cifs/nfs/sshfs?” Why indeed? Well, as my fellow amateur Internet broadcaster Justin Zeigler (coincidentally of the same first name) observed, “some people mistake the unix way as doing things the oldest way possible.” There are niceties streaming video solutions provide that are much better suited to solving my particular problem. Streaming puts the burden of handling different codecs and providing material at a bitrate the client systems can handle on the server. Remember, I said my client system is underpowered and the network I’m delivering across is wireless B. These constraints make streaming video the ideal solution. Now, if I only wanted to stream the music videos and other material designed to deliver over the Internet, I’d be fine with a remote filesystem. But DVDs and mythtv recordings are too demanding on my little laptop’s resources to work at all. But, just to make sure, I tried both sshfs and nfs today. Sure enough, I could stream a Quicktime music video from sshfs just fine. However, neither sshfs nor nfs could deliver the material from a mythtv recording fast enough for the client to keep up. I tried both vlc and mplayer, and both were so stuttery they were unplayable. I gave mplayer a larger buffer (32K) which cleaned up the first few seconds of play while the player read from the buffer, but after that, it started stuttering again. And this was with only one floor of separation between the WAP and the laptop, to make sure I had a solid connection. Clearly, Videolan’s ability to transcode on the fly and stream over the network is a great convenience to me. I suppose I could do a file-to-file transcode and then read the resulting file from sshfs, but I don’t find that nearly as handy as the streaming solution. So I’m sticking with Videolan, as I find it the easiest to use, most elegant solution to delivering a broad range of video material from our powerful hub system to our less powerful client system.

1 December 2006

Biella Coleman: 10 signs to identify the hacking spirit in your son

Who knew that youtube could be so darn educational!… that is, you can learn how to identify if your son is a computer hacker.

Julien Danjou: DeFuBu contest #5

Bug Welcome to this 5th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers How the vote has been done Four Debian related people voted for these bugs, Philipp Kern, Julien Louis, Cyril Brulebois and David Pashley. Full ranking Bugs Challengers The winners Congratulations to Joey Hess, two victories in a row :-) Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number. About DeFuBu

Andreas Barth: What maintaining means

During my cruise through release critical bugs, one sometimes wonder how often "team" should be translated with "toll, ein anderer macht's" (great, someone else will do it). Looking at bugs like e.g. #399589 - asterisk-oh323: Asterisk OH-323 crashes latest asterisk package, it doesn't seem to demanding to expect also in a team-maintained environment that any of the maintainers recheck (or at least send mail) to the person reporting the bug within a week. However, the bug was reported on November 20th (that's a Monday), and nothing happend up to now from their side - means: Nothing within 11 days. Unfortunatly, there are more so buggy packages from the VoIP-Team - most can just be moved out from Etch, but it is always unsatisfactory to remove packages.

30 November 2006

Neil McGovern: Another year gone.

Well, it's my birthday, and I am x years old, where x is:

29 November 2006

Biella Coleman: test

..

Adrian von Bidder: Triumph over emacs at last

I always thought that Triumph over emacs looked more like this: 
aptitude remove emacs

Clint Adams: Then he went home to play WoW

I was in a line on launch day and I didn't get one, he said. Did you camp out 64 days beforehand? I asked. Do I weigh 400 pounds and survive off grape soda? he demanded. No, I didn't camp out.

Pierre Habouzit: On C and strings APIs

C default str* functions have very poor semantics, and a whole lot of consistency problems. That's a fact, a well known one. For those who still don't know them, and only to cite a few: A good string API MUST treat any string as a buffer + its allocated size (not len, I said size, meaning including the terminating NUL). Moreover, it should return informations that avoid the stupid problem of strcat that has to compute the destination length again and again. There is one function of the usual C string API that has it right, if you forget about the int return type problem: snprintf[1]. Why ? because:
  1. it prevents most buffer overflows because you always pass the buffer size;
  2. unlike strncpy the resulting buffer contains a true NUL-terminated string;
  3. it returns the size the string could have had if there was enough space in the buffer, so that a correct reallocation can work with reduced programatical costs;
  4. if you support negative buffer sizes, you can chain as many of those calls, and be safe !
and if you want a proof that it makes code more concise, just go read that patch. EDIT: Here m_strcpy is a function that respects the 4 previous points: m_strcpy(dest, dlen, src) copies src into dest like its brother strcat, but in a buffer of size dlen, and returns in fact, src length, la snprintf. And if you do m_strcpy(dest, -1, src) it does not breaks, so that I can use it without needing to check if my virtual result length overflowed or not. With those functions it's just obvious how to build new ones with exactly the same semantics. For those who wonder, yes I've forked mutt the hard way, and am trying to deobfuscate its code (I was shocked to see how bad it was given how I like mutt as a MUA). And here what you see is that this string API semantics is very easy to use, is safe, and extendable. For example, in that patch, rfc822_write_address and rfc822_write_address_single that did had the bad property to truncate the result without any way for the caller to know that now use the usual snprintf semantics for no pain at all. with those API no need to care about the ending '\0', or about off-by-ones, you always speak of buffer sizes, and when your current virtual write position in the buffer is pos, you just need to call pos += your_strXXX(buf + pos, buflen - pos, ...) and you'll be safe. If you want to know if a realloc is needed, you just have to verify if pos >= buflen, the same as what you have to do for snprintf. I really wonder why such API are not common in the C world, I see way to much code using the usual C string functions that just are a PITA.
Notes [1] and not printf like I said in the first place...

28 November 2006

Daniel Jacobowitz: Triumph over emacs at last

I do about half my text editing in joe, and half of it in emacs. It's just what I've gotten used to; for a year or two I used primarily joe, and I gradually migrated until I did most of my programming in emacs instead, but I still do random text files in joe. I've been gradually trying to migrate to emacs; not least because upgrading joe has gotten to be such a pain. I use jpico rather than joe, you see. But I started using it a long time ago, probably around when joe 2.8 was current in Debian. And the jpico key bindings keep changing! Which is infuriating, so I keep having to rewrite my keybindings to stay mostly the way I like them. I like that emacs is such a smart editor. Especially since it defaults to all sorts of nice GNU-ish settings and most of my C is for GNU projects. But when I work on other things, I have to learn how to make it either disable smarts or use appropriate ones, so in self defence I keep learning new things about emacs... One things I've been annoyed at before is the binding for scroll-other-window. You can split a window into two (C-x 2). I often do that while writing a changelog up top of a patch file, whether I'm using joe or emacs at the moment. An advantage of emacs is that you can scroll the window that the cursor isn't in, paging down through the text you're describing while keeping the cursor where you're writing. But it's bound by default to C-M-v and C-S-M-v (control-meta and control-shift-meta). Hard to hit C-M-v, and impossible to enter C-S-M-v; you can not distinguish Control and Control-Shift in a vt100 terminal (like, say, inside of screen). Fortunately, you say, it's also bound to M-next and M-prior (meta-page down and meta-page up)? Well, yes... but... you can't type that either at a terminal. Normally. I can now though. Fixing it took two parts. First, I discovered that Meta-next sent the same sequence as plain next, in my xterms. I think I've convinced myself this is a bug in xterm. My keymap, which is a pretty standard pc(pc105)+us+altwin(meta_win), has Super_L and Hyper_L bound to modifier 4 along with Meta_L and Meta_R. xterm sees these strange keys and decides that mod4 must be some sort of "other" modifier, in code that looks like it's for handling num lock. Fortunately, I can work around this easily. I don't have a Super or Hyper key, so I deleted the bindings by adding this to my .xsession: 
  xmodmap -e 'remove mod4 = Super_L'
  xmodmap -e 'remove mod4 = Hyper_L'
UPDATE: This will be fixed in xterm #223, since Thomas Dickey agreed it was a bug. Next, I discovered that emacs didn't recognize the sequence produced after that fix. It didn't recognize C-next or A-next either. So I added this to my .emacs: 
  ; Key magic.  Emacs nor terminfo normally have bindings for these.
  ; The meta binding in particular takes a bit of X magic also; see
  ; the xmodmap call in /.xsession.
  (define-key function-key-map "\e[6;5~" '[C-next])
  (define-key function-key-map "\e[6;9~" '[M-next])
  (define-key function-key-map "\e[6;3~" '[A-next])
  (define-key function-key-map "\e[5;5~" '[C-prior])
  (define-key function-key-map "\e[5;9~" '[M-prior])
  (define-key function-key-map "\e[5;3~" '[A-prior])
That really should be conditionalized on the terminal type, but I didn't want to mess with it any more. And now it works. Woohoo!

Erich Schubert: Say NO to voting machines

Voting machines produce results not verifyable by independent people watching the election. This must not be allowed! So if you are a resident of germany, please sign this Petition an den Petitionsausschuss des Deutschen Bundestags (or the equivalent Ersatzpetition, since we are apparently overloading their system) Votes must remain verifyable by everybody, not only a handful computer experts!

Benjamin Mako Hill: Bring the Bling?

I'm been perplexed by the recent fracas around the possibility of Ubuntu shipping non-free drivers by default as part of the feisty release goal to bring the bling. The issue has been discussed by many people, most recently and eloquently in a blog post by Scott James Remnant. I have never been 100% comfortable with our (Ubuntu's) decision to ship proprietary drivers. The Ubuntu philosophy document -- which Mark Shuttleworth and I drafted originally -- says quite unambiguously:
Every computer user should have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees.
I believe this deeply. Consequently, I feel that binary drivers in Ubuntu are, and always have been, a failure to live up to our principles. If our philosophy document is still representative, most people in our community should be a little uncomfortable with them -- even if they think, as most of us do, that shipping them is the correct thing to do. Early on Ubuntu decided that binary firmware and hardware drivers would be distributed and quasi-supported in restricted. While not completely comfortable with the move, I could understand and defend it for three reasons:
  1. The drivers were easily removable and not enabled by default unless necessary to achieve functioning hardware.
  2. As part of this process, we promised to work with vendors to accelerate the freeing/open-sourcing of their drivers.
  3. Perhaps most importantly, I couldn't imagine not using them if it were the choice between non-free drivers or inoperable hardware.
The proposal to include proprietary nVidia driver in place of the existing free nVidia driver is important because it changes, or eliminates, the first and third justifications. Since the first issue has been discussed in depth, it seem appropriate to focus on the third and final point. The point is perhaps best introduced with an observation:
While I have met many people who research and buy hardware to avoid the need for non-free drivers, something I do myself, I have never met anyone who voluntarily chooses inoperable hardware on a computer they use over working hardware through a non-free driver.
While not airtight, this observation is precisely why the old policy of using non-free drivers only when no free drivers exist works so well. By effectively synonymizing use of the non-free driver with use of the hardware, the crisis created by non-free drivers is rendered paradoxical: anybody using a piece of hardware that only works with non-free drivers is, by definition, either using non-free drivers or not using the hardware. The only way to not use non-free drivers in situations where no free drivers exist is to not use hardware that requires them. If you use different hardware, you will not need to use non-free drivers. This important justification is completely inapplicable to the proposal to include non-free drivers in place of free (but not perfect) alternatives. Second, while shipping non-free drivers is wrong because we lose our freedom and violate our philosophy, the desire for basic hardware support is universal and important enough that it's defensible. One reason that the "binary by default for bling" situation alarms me is that I don't believe that the desire for desktop bling is as universal, or as strong, as the desire for working hardware. An analogy might be stealing food to feed your family and stealing a CD from the record store. Both are wrong because stealing is wrong, but I have a lot more sympathy for the hungry thief in the first example because CDs are not as necessary as food and because many people would rather go without a new CD than steal. We can ask: "Which is worse: selling your soul for a decent job or selling your soul for a PS3?" In an absolute sense, neither is worse; but it's easier to support the former than the latter. I'm very impressed with Beryl -- but I have trouble empathizing strongly with the need for a spinning desktop cube. New users may be impressed and attracted to an Ubuntu desktop powered by proprietary drivers. They might also be impressed by proprietary applications. However, it is self-defeating to attract new users to our free platform and principles by compromising our core values. Many users already make the decision to use non-free video drivers and Ubuntu makes it very easy to do so once they have made that choice. Installing binary drivers by default is choosing for the large number of users who will stick with any default. It may be a conservative stance but as long as we believe that a non-insignificant number of users would choose to live without bling before compromising Ubuntu's philosophy and goals, we should make the difficult decision to side with freedom by default. When discussing this issue, many people say, it's not my decision or it isn't my call. Regardless of whether anyone agrees with me and regardless of who the final decision is up to -- and it's not clear to me now -- I believe that the Ubuntu community has the power to inform and shape the development of their distribution. As the Ubuntu community, we can make our position heard. The best place to do that right now seems to be the Accelerated X specification comments page. One can also email the the Technical Board (for technical comments) and the Community Council (for principle or philosophy related issues).

27 November 2006

Biella Coleman: Thomas Szasz

I just finished a pretty good article The Myth of Thomas Szasz, about the man who most famously attacked the psychiatric profession in part by claiming mental illness was manufactured, a myth. In a nutshell here is the point of the article:
“It is hard to doubt the reality of mental illness, especially when the suffering of affected individuals is so complete and the impairment so extreme, when psyche and identity are crippled almost beyond repair. But it is also remarkable how much of modern psychiatry is still theoretical rather than empirical, and how many of the supposed mental illnesses that appear (and multiply) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have no known biological underpinnings or explanations. Although Szasz s critique often became a caricature, his intuition about the limits and deformations of modern psychiatry cannot be ignored. Many sick people have surely benefited from psychiatric treatment, both talk therapy and pharmacotherapy. But psychiatry s long history of error from snake pits to ice baths to spinning chairs to electroshock to lobotomy should give us pause. Skepticism is not backwardness, even if Szasz often took his skepticism to rhetorical extreme”
The part I found most interesting (and now I must read it):
A piece in The New York Times Magazine[by Szasz] titled Mental Illness Is a Myth reportedly induced more reader response than any article in the magazine s history. If he had preached from the pulpit with The Myth of Mental Illness, he had now nailed his thesis to the church s front door.
I must must check out the reader response! For those who know little about what came to be known as anti-psychiatry, this article is worth reading. It is written well and presents the virtue of skepticism, even if extreme, which is what Thomas Szasz, was all about. My only complaint is that if you know nothing of anti-psychiatry or the visible and patient-led challenge to psychiatry that followed in the 1970s, you would think that Thomas Szasz was entirely in a class of his own. While he may be the most famous figure, and may have certainly led the charge in many resepcts, there were others (that is critical psychiatrists like him (and not just in the US) not to mention wide spread critique from various social quarters. But a great great article otherwise.

Ben Armstrong: Home video hub on a shoestring

In our family, we have centralized all our best entertainment technology in a single system, a white box amd64 with PVR, 3D graphics, 1G, a 21” monitor, DVD burner and VCR. A number of older, far less capable systems have always surrounded this “hub”. A K6-2/400 with a less-than wonderful ATI Rage IIc graphics card presently serves as my wife’s system, and my PII/300 laptop roams the house on wireless B. This has always been the model for our home network, dating back to the late 90’s when the hub in our cramped apartment was a P/100 delivering sound through a $30 pawn-shop stereo to two main rooms, and the satellite node in the family room was a DEC VT-420 on a long serial cable. So, house-wide delivery of sound has always been possible. But doing the same for video remained unsolved until just this weekend. Kudos to the Videolan team for making it possible. A number of years ago, I recognized their vlc player was ideal for playing DVDs on my K6-2, handling the job with less CPU and less frame drop than other alternatives at the time. Not too long afterwards, though, we upgraded our hardware so saving CPU cycles was no longer an issue, and switched to other players to take advantage of features they offered over vlc. But a recent email from a friend brought me back. This friend asked if I had seen a certain Linux documentary video he had found. I hadn’t, and was intrigued. But since the hub was tied up by the kids at that moment, I figured I’d try watching on the old PII laptop. I didn’t really think it would work, but remembering how well vlc did on my other old hardware, I gave it a try. It worked! No frame drop at all. Buoyed by that victory, I recalled that I had downloaded the Debconf 6 DVD ISOs some days ago, but had not yet been able to watch them. You probably can guess why … yup, the single hub system, the only one really capable of doing a good job displaying video, was pretty much always tied up by various other family members. Now, I knew there was no way I could get those DVDs onto the laptop, as it has no drive and only a 4G hdd. Nor was I willing to go to the bother of ripping individual tracks to transcode and send over one at a time. But I then recalled that vlc, as well as being an excellent standalone player, is primarily the client for a streaming video system. So I set out to learn how to stream video. Back when I was first introduced to Videolan, I knew there was a server program, vls. I had a quick look at that and was overwhelmed by the wide variety of possible MRLs and codecs, and a bit mystified as to which magic spells were needed to make it stream to the laptop. It then occurred to me I had probably plunged in too quickly, and should back off and go look for more docs than just the man pages. Sure enough, they have plenty of excellent docs, leading to the discovery that the vlc gui itself has easy to use Wizard and Open dialogs to set up streaming. With that sorted out, I was streaming in no time. At this point, I was delighted to discover that I could successfully stream a 1024 kbps mp4 stream across wireless B form the basement to any other room of our two-story semi. And ever since then, I’ve been having great fun with the family, trying a wide variety of other video sources lying around: music videos, home videos made by friends, TV shows recorded from the PVR, DVDs direct from disc, and yes, finally, those Debconf 6 ISOs. I tell you, it’s like Christmas come early! Thanks, Videolan. You’ve made my week.

26 November 2006

MJ Ray: Fonts

Are they a type of program or an artwork and does it matter? Yes, yes and not really. One recent cause for concern is the increasing number of fonts under the so-called "Open Font License", including ttf-gentium and various others. The last released version of OFL does not follow the Debian Free Software Guidelines, partly because it uses copyright restrictions to enforce a sort of "super-trademark" for the font name in ways which, frankly, are a pain for making ready-to-eat font packages from OFL'd fonts. This is similar to some problems in old LaTeX licences which have been resolved in recent years. For further explanations, see this debian-legal thread from January. OFL's lead developer still claims it follows DFSG, despite various debian developers explaining how it does not. There's a new draft of the OFL out, which I've yet to review (it's nuts here just now). Hopefully, the new version of the OFL will make it clear that you can mention the Reserved Font Name for compatibility and configuration, as long as one does not claim that a modified font is that named font.

Julien Blache: Debian AMD64 on the Core2 Duo 15 MacBook Pro

So I’ve got my shiny new laptop which should complement my 5 years old PowerBook G4 500 MHz and had a bit of fun installing Debian AMD64 on it. I did it the hard way, not using debian-installer as it was a given for me that both the kernel and debian-installer itself were unable to deal with the machine. Installation method: Note that you do not need to install BootCamp on Mac OS X. On the Core2 Duo machines, the firmware already includes the SMBIOS stuff, so you’d only install a useless Mac OS X GUI which you can’t use because you’ve repartitioned before running BootCamp Assistant :-) Current status: most of what should work with Linux sort of works (that is, to say, everything but the WiFi). Things that do not work: Everything else works, and works fine. Wrote a small daemon to handle the special keys for LCD backlight, sound, keyboard backlight and CD ejection. Still needs a bit of polishing, after what I’ll release and package it. rEFIt isn’t available in Debian AMD64 yet, so gptsync isn’t available and must be run from an i386 system for the time being (plus gptsync is buggy on 64bit architectures). Patches ready, waiting for GNU-EFI on amd64 (#383801). Suspend to RAM and suspend to disk both work, use s2ram -f -p -m until the machine makes it into the built-in whitelist. The machine is pretty nice, though I’d appreciate it if the fans weren’t running at 5500 rpm when I have the laptop on my laps. Might be related to both the applesmc and power consumption issues. WiFi remains the biggest issue, battery life comes second ex-aequo with DVI-I output and sound is third. I’m quite unhappy with having to taint my kernel by using the fglrx (and madwifi in the future) proprietary crap, and even more when it doesn’t work as good as it should. Maybe RMS was right about ATI.

John Goerzen: Society's Views of Dads

Back before Jacob was born, I was reading The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for Dads-to-Be, 2nd ed. by Armin A. Brott and Jennifer Ash. It was a good book and I recommend it.

Towards the end, there was a section that the author clearly was passionate about, and it made me mad too.

He was talking about society's attitudes towards dads. He started by looking at messages that are sent out in commercials. One study of commercials said that "100% of jerks singled out in male-female relationships were male. There were no exceptions. . ." That study also said that 100% of the ignorant and incompetant people in commercials were male as well.

He went on to cite some examples. Tons of slogans like "kid tested, mother approved", "choosy moms choose Jif", Robitussin's "recommended by Dr. Mom", etc. And one for Post Raisin Bran in which a father and daughter are impressed by their cereal. Dad says, "somebody must really love us. Who do you think it is?" The daughter answers, "Mommy!"

Of course, these were just some examples from commercials, but they seem to reflect a message that dads are, at best, incompetant. Brott mentions studies that show that men display the same decision-making skill and affection as parents as women do.

Brott went on to talk about some of his experiences. One time, while he was in a park playing with his children, a little girl started to fall off the top of a slide. He was right there and was able to catch her as she fell -- probably saving her from, at best, a broken bone. The girl's mother rushed over, ignored Brott, and said to the girl, "did he hurt you?"

I started to see this sort of thing all over the place even before Jacob was born. In stores, there would be tons of infant shirts, bibs, etc. saying things like "I love mommy," rarely even one thing that mentioned daddy. Similar patterns were there for greeting cards and pretty much everything else baby-related.

I've noticed this even more since Jacob was born. There have been times when Terah and I are somewhere together, standing right beside each other, and someone will ask Terah all about Jacob, and totally ignore me. Even if I'm the one holding him. I'm sure people are well-intentioned; some of them that have done this are people we know well and I know they mean well. Somtimes, I don't even notice when this is going on (though Terah does and when she mentions it later, I remember it).

Do they just expect that men don't care? Or do they think that since Terah is working part time, and I'm working full time, that we must be "traditional" enough that I don't care to be involved in Jacob's life? (Though I'm not sure that the "detached & uninvolved dad" stereotype ever was true, at least from the examples I can think of) It's hard to miss out on so many moments of Jacob's life during the day that Terah gets to be there for. But that doesn't mean that I'm an uninvolved or clueless dad.

Now, despite this little rant, there are quite a few people out there that have no problem including me in discussions about Jacob -- relatives, friends, people at church, co-workers, etc. In fact, probably more people include me than don't. I really appreciate that, and especially the extra effort some of them go to in order to include me. (I know how much effort it took to find baby clothes that mention dad, for instance) Terah is best at all this, making sure that I get to be part of Jacob's life as much as I possibly can be, and I really appreciate that.

But to Wyeth (makers of Robitussin): Don't think I haven't noticed that Walgreens sells "Wal-Tussin", same active ingredients as your product, and at a lower price. Dr. Dad knows how to buy generic.

Evan Prodromou: 4 Frimaire CCXV

It was a pretty day in Montreal today, and since I was taking care of Amita today I knew I wasn't going to get any computer stuff done. So I decided to take care of some tasks that needed doing around the house -- cleaning up our storage room, changing some light bulbs, fixing some furniture and putting plastic on the windows for winter. This is one of my least favorite jobs for preparing for winter. Probably the biggest sink of heat for an apartment is the windows and doors, so we do our best to insulate them. Doors get insulated foam around the cracks, and windows get covered in a thin film of clear plastic, which forms a pocket of air and provides an extra insulating barrier from the outside. It sounds crazy, but it's remarkably effective -- it really makes the difference between a cold house and a cozy home. It's extremely labor-intensive, though: it involves putting up lots of double-sided tape, cutting just-right rectangles of gossamer micron-thin plastic sheeting, climbing up and down ladders, hanging, measuring, moving. Probably the silliest part is that you blow on the plastic with a hot hair drier to make it contract tightly over the window so it's easier to see out. That takes like 10 minutes to do. Last year I waited until mid-January to do the job, and we were all walking around the house shivering and wheezing. This year I'm getting it done before winter's really upon us, but that doesn't mean I like it any better. I guess I'll just be happy when it's done. tags:

My JavaScript workbench So, I've been working on making a Wikiwyg plugin for PmWiki. Wikiwyg is an ingenious Javascript library for doing WYSIWYG editing in the browser, but keeping all communications with the server in wiki syntax. Every wiki engine should be using it, but for some reason it's not well-implemented. I think it's mostly a community-marketing problem, but that's a separate subject. I want to eventually get it working on Wikitravel, which runs MediaWiki, but I wanted to give it a try on an little more deterministic wiki syntax. So I started an extension for PmWiki. I've learned a lot so far; I'm far from done, but if you use darcs you can see my work so far by running: 
darcs get http://evan.prodromou.name/darcs/pmwikiwyg/
Since the code's mostly in Javascript, I've been getting my JS workbench back into shape. By "workbench", of course, I mean "loose collection of tools for documentation, debugging, and editing". For documentation, I've been using the excellent JavaScript and DOM docs from Mozilla Developer Center -- itself a wiki. The docs are (almost) complete, well-written, and well organized. And, of course, Free -- it's all under the CC attribution-sharealike. For debugging, I've been using the Venkman JavaScript debugger for Firefox. It's been a while since I've worked with a half-decent debugger, so it's been a pleasure to use. And for editing, I'm sticking to my favorite programmer's editor, JED. I first started using JED because it had the same name as the founder of Spock Mountain Research Labs, but eventually I've grown to like it on its own merits. I was a longtime Emacs addict, and JED has been my editorial methadone. It's got all of Emacs's advantages -- same keyset, different but valuable extensibility -- without the long load times and heavy weight on system resources. I'm at the point where JED is my only editor. One nice thing about JED is that writing language modes is pretty easy, so there are a lot of them out there. I found a half-decent one for JavaScript floating around on the Internet a few years ago, and it seems to still be the best there is. As mentioned above, I've pretty much transitioned fully to Darcs as my version control system for whatever projects I can help it. It's a great piece of software -- all the strengths of GNU arch without the idiosyncratic naming conventions. And that's my workbench. It's no Eclipse, but I'm having fun working with these tools. tags:

25 November 2006

Biella Coleman: NYTimes article on kids and psych drug

It is good to see the New York Times critically report on the (ab)use of cocktail psychiatric drugs used for treating children (and see this older New Yorker article The Pediatric Gap on the general lack of saftey testing for drugs given to kids). What is a shame, however, is that the total lack of critical interrogation that there may be actual environmental causes for some of these problems and this, despite the publication of new studies from leading medical journals (such as Lancet) that finally are addressing the possibility that over 200 chemicals are causing havoc on brains, behavior, and thus life… (kinda a no brainer at some level even if we do need more specific studies…) As the article on the chemicals reports, critics of they study say they Lancent authors are verging on scare-mongering, because there is no proof of a pandemic.. Well, we do need more proof but does that mean we should not study what is so understudied (and hard to study because how does one measure the effects of the synergistic combination of x number of chemicals over x many years??) But as the NYTimes piece shows there does seem to be a pandemic in prescribing people and kids psychiatric medications. So possibly there is some connection to be made here?? And what I can’t understand is why it is that those within the medical establishment who are confronting kids with so called behavioral and those that are critics of overprescription are not asking what may be behind some of these problems… While I agree that a percentage of the kids being put on drugs are totally fine and just being kids, I am sure there are many others who are suffering. And while some of these psych drugs may be an acceptable and necessary short term solution, this NY Times article should make us pause, and seriously pause, about the viability of these drugs as a realistic solution, given the horrible side effects they cause (just read the article). Even if some so think these are necessary, these are crude therapies. I think we need another “Silent Spring” with an eye toward possible behavioral effects to shake people not out of an apathy, but from a myopia that seems satisifed with engaging only with symptoms and surfaces. .

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