Since I never really found a nice overview of which CPU flags (see /proc/cpuinfo) mean what, so I gathered some information using the web, with the most notable sources being the BOINC FAQ entry on CPU Register Acronyms at [1] and the output of the nice little (though seemingly mostly unmaintained) cpuid utility. See my results at [2]. Any suggestions for enhancements and completions are highly welcome, just leave a comment to this post. [1]: href=”http://boincfaq.mundayweb.com/index.php?language=1&view=176
[2]: http://blog.incase.de/index.php/cpu-feature-flags-and-their-meanings/

A few days ago, I wrote about my recent purchase of an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter built in 1944. Terah and I were at an antique store, and it was $25 and sorta an impulse buy.

Since then, something unexpected has happened: I'm getting interested in using manual typewriters.

I've been busily tracking down ribbons (Nukote BW277 doesn't work on it, even though their website says it does), typing paper (business-supplies.com has it at a decent price with free overnight shipping on most orders over $50), and various tidbits of knowledge (such as: what does the lever numbered 0 to 6 beneath the right ribbon spool do?)

Today I went to a local office supply store. Not OfficeMax or OfficeDepot -- they do carry ribbons for typewriters of this era, but not the right ones for my particular machine. But the store that has been owned by the same family since it opened in 1899 on Main Street, where it remains.

And, surprise, they had the ribbon I need!

It seems that typewriters are experiencing a certain resurgence in popularity. People that have computers -- and perhaps never knew a world without them -- are buying typewriters. Because of interest, novelty, or even usefulness. There are quite a few typewriter repair shops that still exist, most of them happy to work on typewriters up to a century old.

So why am I excited about it?

Part of it is the fun of making a really old piece of technology work.

Perhaps part of it is knowing that I'll be typing at a machine that was built the same year as D-Day, the year when the first German city fell in World War II. Part of it is knowing that this 40-pound machine was built to last, in an era before planned obsolescence. And, to a certain extent, it has outlasted its manufacturer.

Part of it is curiosity: will I write differently on a typewriter than a computer? It seems that most people that have tried both say that their writing is different on a typewriter, and often better. Perhaps it is the difficulty of editing that forces more rigorous thought up front.

Christopher Watkins wrote:

[Manual typewriters] just plain shame me into working. As with any fine instrument, they're made to be used, their very design bespeaks this, and there's been many a night I've caught one of my typewriters glaring sternly at me from the shadows, implicating me in a grand failure to honor their structural destinies. Chagrined and challenged, I dutifully sit down to see what I can do to contribute to the machine-age legacy I've been called on to uphold. . .

When you sit down to write a song at the piano, you're going to write differently than if you have a banjo in your lap. And if one instrument isn't bringing the magic and the muse, maybe another will. Typewriters are the same; they make me write in a different fashion, and also provide an alternate trigger for inspiration. And as an electric guitar is different from an acoustic steel-string guitar is different from a nylon-string classical guitar is different from a national steel resonator guitar; so does each individual typewriter differ. My Underwood is different from my Royal is different from my Remington is different from my Corona is different from my Hermes. And if one isn't giving me the juice, another might.

Brian Drake added (emphasis mine):

Or you print out the document again because someone misplaced it. Misplaced it! When we were on typewriters, let me tell you, no one misplaced a hundred-page contract! That meant another two days of typing, and tying up at least two secretaries to get it done then. . .

Gore Vidal said he could tell when a book had been written on a word processor. I can, too. Sometimes I can see the cut-and-paste.

I've worked as a professional proofreader and copyeditor, and I can attest that the computer has not led to better writing. What it has led to is more writing, acres and acres of it. Books have grown fatter and fatter while their content grows slimmer and slimmer.

These seem to resonate well. More typewriter essays here.

And perhaps a typewritten blog post or two, once I try out my new ribbon.

Gofernet.net 466395 (or is it gofernet.co.uk? They seemed confused about that - maybe it's Jekyll and Hyde, one spammy, one not?) of Sutton Coldfield spammed an associate on 5 Oct 2007. The spam claimed it was sent to their client list. That associate is not and has never been a client of gofernet. The spam claimed to be "in full compliance with the Privacy and Electronic Commerce Statutory Instrument 2003, No 2426". I think they mean the the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, which usually forbids

"unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing by means of electronic mail unless the recipient of the electronic mail has previously notified the sender that he consents for the time being to such communications being sent by, or at the instigation of, the sender."

Gofernet don't have consent and none of the exceptions apply AFAICS. So it's spam, even by their standards.

I just read a nutty post claiming that Neo-Conservatism is good for the environment [1]. The first bogus claim is that Saddam had WMD and war was required because he was a despot. The fact is that the Iraqi government was always repressive, there are many factions in Iraq that don’t like each other and a repressive government is the only way to keep such groups in a united country. The current civil war in Iraq and the effective secession of Kurdistan (which currently seems to be involved in an undeclared border war with Turkey) demonstrates this. Saddam was always a despot, but he did improve the living conditions of most Iraqis - the best way to avoid a revolution is to convince the majority of the population that things will get worse if there is change. I suggest reading the Wikipedia page about Saddam Hussein [2]. The best information on Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) seems to be on the conservative military analysis site Defense and the National Interest [7]. It covers all the issues related to invading other countries from a conservative point of view. Note that Neo-Conservatives are not Conservatives, the real Conservatives hate the Neo-Cons more than anyone else does. The amusing statement is made that “apologists claim it was one of the most advanced Arab nations” and then a link is provided to information on Saudi Arabian censorship. It’s worth reading the wikipedia page about the history of Saudi Arabia [3], among other interesting facts “the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the country’s television and broadcast facilities and oversaw the development of its defense industry” (does the US army share responsibility for the censorship?). It’s widely regarded that if the US military support was removed then the Saudi government would be overthrown. Referring to Saudi Arabia hardly seems like something you want to do if trying to justify occupying other middle-eastern states. An unsubstantiated claim is made that under-developed countries produce excess pollution due to inefficient technology. Unlike some people I try to get some facts before posting so I looked up the wikipedia page on CO2 emissions per capita [4]. It seems that the highest ranking first-world country is Luxembourg at #4, the next is the US at #10. The countries on the list that rank higher than the US have a combined population of about 11,000,000 while the US population is 302,000,000 - some quite mental arithmetic suggests that the US produces about 20 times more CO2 than the top 9 countries on the list combined! It doesn’t seem that having the highest technology is helping the US protect the environment, I guess that they just use it to build bigger cars. The next thing I noticed is the countries that are at the bottom of the list - they are the world’s poorest countries. It seems that countries without much money just can’t afford to burn lots of oil, while countries with lots of money can. No real surprises there. The lowest ranking on the list for a country that is unlikely to be regarded as being in abject poverty is India at position #133. The next lowest is Turkey at position #98 followed by China at #91. As a final point of reference Switzerland is at position #69 a produces just under 27% the CO2 that the US does (on a per-capita basis). According to the CIA World Fact Book Switzerland has an infant mortality rate of 4.28/1000 and a life expectancy of 80.62 [5], while the US has an infant mortality rate of 6.37/1000 and a life expectancy of 78 [6]. I believe that the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy are the two factors that are most representative of quality of life as they are the easiest factors for measuring the overall health of the population. Being healthy is one of the most important factors in quality of life. It seems to me that by all objective measures the Swiss are doing better than the people of the US, yet they produce less pollution and never invade other countries. Probably the most ridiculous statement in the post is “see rapidly dwindling resources wasted on jihad and revolution“. A revolution (locals using force to create a new government) takes little resources and most actions that a more simple-minded analysis might call “jihad” takes almost none. Sending an invasion force to the other side of the world and supporting an occupying army for years does however use significant resources, consider that the Hummvee is the least fuel-efficient vehicle on American roads in terms of work done (trucks and buses use more fuel but carry large amounts of cargo or many people), but it’s also the most fuel-efficient vehicle used by the US army in Iraq. There is the possibility that Jaldhar was attempting satire. If so then I suggest that satire be kept separate from serious web content to avoid confusion about where the satire ends. But if you want some satire about oil then I suggest consulting theonion.com. Before someone accuses me of being impolite, over a year ago the best estimate for the death toll from the occupation of Iraq was 655,000 [8]. Current extrapolations from the previous medical research suggest that the death toll has now exceeded 1,000,000. Regardless of whether the original post was intended as satire or not, I’m not laughing and I don’t feel the need to be polite to someone who makes excuses for such loss of life. Finally as a positive suggestion towards the environment (and any other issue that you may want to discuss), I suggest analysing the issues before writing about them and not blindly trusting other people. When you write a post make objective claims with references to back them up. When you read a post consider the points that are made and the references that are cited. Do the references support the claims? Are there other interpretations of the evidence? Are the reference sites reputable?

• [1] http://www.braincells.com/debian/index.cgi/search/item=176


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_hussein


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Saudi_Arabia


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita


• [5] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sz.html


• [6] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html


• [7] http://www.d-n-i.net/


• [8] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6040054.stm

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Next semester I am teaching one (yay one) course and it is a graduate course on digital media. This is the description I have so far and I will post the tentative syllabus in the next few week.

Computers, especially in their networked dimension, have sparked a series of ethical, political, and social debates that often revolve around a series of stark and connected dualities: control and freedom; pleasure and exploitation; creativity and constraint. In this course we will approach topics in digital media via an historical angle that squarely addresses these dualities. To this end, we will often cross-cut readings on similar topics and material whose conclusion about the nature of computing will often vary considerably. The goal, however, is not to determine the correct or right side of these dualities but have students come away with a firm understanding of the following: 1) the history of computing and networking in light of the ways the authors as well as technologists/inventors construct or understand these dualities; 2) the various sources technological, social, and political that may shape or drive any of these elements; 3) unpack the political and social relationships, if any, between them and the stakes involved in how these authors represent the nature of computing and networking. The course primarily concentrates on computers and networks and is roughly chronological, starting with the first digital computers and ending with our digital present. Particular topics we address are: cybernetics and liberalism; networks and the cold war; personal computers and online communities; hackers, the free software movement and intellectual property; labor, development, and computers; peer-to-peer knowledge production; computer gaming; and counter-globalization and computer networking.

Jaldhar Vyas points to the rogues gallery of oil producing states and argues that Neoconservatism is good, well at least it gets rid of the dictators such as Saddam Hussein while it grabs the oil. As he ightly points out, we are researching new alternative energy sources, and just as importantly (or even more importantly) energy conservation. But we have been doing this for decades. Sooner or later we have to realize that the "Oil Crisis" isn't due to a shortage of energy sources: its due to deliberate politics to make us dependent on oil. Peak Oil is "only" a crisis for us consumers, dependent on oil to drive our cars, heat our houses, and supply our food. For oil companies, it means (1) they are shipping oil at a greater rate than ever before, (2) at higher demand than ever before, and (3) in circumstances where pesky politics like OPEC can't interfere and try and moderate the price down (I'm not arguing OPEC or cartels are good; its just that its long-term 'maximize the benefit for the oil producing nations' strategy interferes with oil companies shorter-term profit maximization). For the Oil Companies, its a good thing. In this context we have to see our current dependence on oil as the result of deliberate policy by the oil companies. The small filip that USanian governments have done towards alternative energy, such as funding Hydrogen fuel-cell research, nuclear power, etc. are so long-term, and so small in scale, that they have to be seen as deliberately not solving the problem. Thinking that research into alternative sources is good is gpoing to save us (disclaimer: as a scientist I think research is a good thing :-)) is missing the real problem. Its politics: the oil companies have simply been better at politics than the strugging alternatives; we need to recognize this, and fight for alternatives. When oil prices reach $100/barrel, and we struggle to pay rising food and energy bills, its because other have deliberately caused the crisis. Oil has often been called a Curse because of the effects 'Oil Wealth' have caused so many countries. They are not co-incidentally dictatorships; Saddam Hussein remained in power in Iraq for so long because it benefitted the West (see the weapons supplies to Iraq in the so-called "Iran-Contra" affair, for example). Ditto Saudi Arabia, remaining 'friends' of the USA despite its ties to 911. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein was about consolidating even more power in the Gulf than America had previously, not democracy. What was planned for Iraq was democracy in name only: all real power was already neutralised, with decisions to US benefit cemented in place before the parliament met: non-negotiable contracts already signed giving US companies control. This is straight imperialism, and cannot be considered democracy or a good thing. Tags environment, oil, politics

In the last few days, I have replaced the two 20 inch CRT monitors that I have hardly used the last years with two 20 inch TFT displays, and my company (finally) gave me a 19 inch TFT display to accompany my notebook display at work. Maybe I should take that as a hint that they want to see me in the office more frequently rather than in my home office which I generously use these days. At home, I built a “new” computer from mainly used parts to drive the two 20 inchers. I have learned a lot about X in the last days, but spent too much time with it. I have been running my Desktop with older X and two CRTs for quite some time, but I hardly ever used it due to the setup of my now ex-flat. Back then, I learned that the “two monitors, one display, one screen, one desktop” option of X was called Xinerama and statically configured: You write down your display layout in xorg.conf and it uses it. Configuration changes mean restarting the X server. KDE notices Xinerama automatically, designates one monitor the “main monitor” and displays its panel there. You can move windows from one monitor to the other one, but changing virtual desktops always changes what both monitors display. This is not really what I want, since I often have “static” contents (news reader, mail reader, chat windows, help screens etc) on one monitor while I do my normal work on the other monitor, which involves changing virtual desktops. So I was rather happy when I learned upon the arrival of the external TFT display for the notebook that you can work without Xinerama. In that case, the X server comes up with one display and two screens, which KDE uses to display two independent desktops which can be independently configured, but can both be accessed with one mouse and one keyboard. For me, this means that I finally can independently change virtual desktops on both monitors, but pay the price that I cannot display a certain virtual desktop on monitor 1 now, and on monitor 2 in five minutes, and that a window opened on monitor 1 is never going to be shown on monitor 2 without serious interference. This looked ok for me. Additionally, you can use different font sizes on the different monitors as defaults, which comes in handy if both monitors are blatantly different in size (which is the case with the notebook and its external monitor). However, with that setup, KDE seems to be challenged when it comes to saving the configuration. Some things (such as desktop background and panel config) seem to save fine, desktop independent, other things (such as open windows and their position) are lost when the session exitst. My daily visit to Kevin&Kell (which used to be in a browser window that was saved with my session) has badly suffered since then. Then, a few weeks ago, somebody talked me into trying the X server from experimental. Which is when my dual-desktop setup ceased working. The nice people on #debian-x told me that Xinerama is a thing of the past, and is currently in the process of being replaced by Xrandr 1.2. The removal of “my” two monitor, two screens, two desktop setup is collateral damage, and if I still want that behavior, the X.org upstream considers this an issue to be handled by the Window Manager / Desktop Environment now. Gee, thanks. That’s what I call a regression. After spending half a day cursing and ranting, and even considering to go back to lenny’s (or even etch’s) X.org, I finally settled on going with the “new” way as I was going to lose my independent desktops sooner or later anyway. Again, with the friendly help of the people on #debian-x, I found out about a lot of advantages of the latest X servers. In most basic cases, the latest X server does not need a configuration file any more. It autodetects your hardware and chooses whatever modes it finds optimal. It does a pretty decent job in doing so. If one wants to influence how the X system comes up, once can always write an Xorg.conf file - the configfileless server even writes the “virtual config file” it uses to the log as a starting point. Additionally, almost everything regarding screen layout can be reconfigured at run time using the xrandr binary from a command line. Even a hardware change (such a new monitor plugged into the powered on notebook) is correctly detected. Cute. This allows me to reconfigure my notebook depending on where it currently is and which external monitor (or projector) is connected. This can be perfected if I find out whether X offers a hook to plug a reconfiguration script into that is called when the X server starts or when the system is waking up from standby or hibernation with the X server running. A lot to do, and great potential for elegant stuff. However, while I am talking about hibernation, this is a downside of the new driver: When the system wakes up from hibernation, the X server sometimes confuses itself enough to become nearly unuseable: I had it become psychotic when plugging in the external monitor (which can do 1600x1200 points) after waking it up from hibernation at the office. The internal display can only do 1400x1050, and the box thought that the external monitor only had 1050 y axis pixels, displaying bit garbage in the lower part of the big monitor, and showing a useable, but unintelligible panel. When opening any browser or any other application with considerable text amounts in the window, all fonts become unreadable once one scrolls down. Restarting the X server helps and everyting is fine. But I do not use hibernation to force myself to log out of X after waking up. After going back to the “one monitor mode”, the X server now thinks that my virtual desktop is 1600x1200 and only shows 1400x1050, with dead space at the right and lower side of the virtual desktop. xrandr does not allow me to reisize the FB below 1600x1200. No idea what’s going on here. In most of the cases, calling xrandr --auto for each output will fix the issues at run time, but sometimes a session restart is needed. Code needs to stabilize quite a bit before becoming useable in production. There are a few disadvantages that will remain: Both monitors will change their contents when the virtual desktop is changed, and both displays will use the same default font size (which might be inappropriate if both displays are of different size). But I think, when the issues are cleared up, that I can live with these disadvantages. The “new” desktop system that I built has a Matrox G450 dual head graphics card, and unfortunately, the Xrandr 1.2 enabled X server from experiemental has shown to be unuseable: Upon some mode changes, the X server goes into an endless loop and proves itself to be unkillable short of SIGKILL. And if it dies, it sometimes pulls the entire system with it. There is a corresponding bug in the upstream BTS, but it hasn’t received any noticeable attention by the upstream developers. So I might find myself configuring one last Xinerama config before I can finally completly migrate to Xrandr 1.2 on the desktop as well. Then I’ll probably need to bug the KDE upstream people to implement a two-desktops-on-a-single-screen feature in one of their future versions so that I can get my independent-desktop-things back. But that’s a far far away future.

I am amazed that I had never read the article Caring for Your Introvert [1] before. One of the interesting points concerned acting like an extrovert (I can do it for the duration of a typical job interview). Another was the issue of recovery time after having to deal with people. When living in hotels (which I did for about 18 months straight in 1999 and 2000) I found that some days I would reach my quota for dealing with people before I had dinner, going to bed hungry seemed like a better option than going to a restaurant. One thing that occurred to me is the lack of apparent introversion among most delegates at computer conferences. It seems that the majority of people who are any good at coding are introverts and you might expect an environment with a majority of introverts to be somewhat quiet. An interview with the author of the article [2] published 3 years later explains this (among other things). Here is a quote:
But once an introvert gets on a subject that they know about or care about or that intrigues them intellectually, the opposite often takes hold. They get passionately engaged and turned on by the conversation. But it’s not socializing that’s going on there. It’s learning or teaching or analyzing, which involves, I’m convinced, a whole different part of the brain from the socializing part. Which describes a lot of the activity at conferences. It’s standard practice for people to walk up and join a conversation that covers an area of technology that interests them and then just walk away when the topic changes. I wonder if any of the social networking and dating sites have a section for Myers-Briggs [3] test results. Via Tim Connors blog [4].

• [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch


• [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200602u/introverts


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs


• [4] http://tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com/106749.html

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On Saturday I turned into Mr. Handy Man. Our CD collection is getting rather large (~270 CDs), and the current CD rack is filled to capacity, with a 3 foot tall tower of CDs next to it. I decided to build a new one myself, there being no decent and cheap CD racks designed for this many CDs. I measured and planned and drew, and eventually had a design for a rack nearly 6 feet high, and more than a foot wide [1]. My Dad and me went down the local timber yard, bought the pine (which they cut for us) for a mere £10, and set about building it. The building went very well. My Dad is pretty damn good at DIY so we had all of the tools we needed, and a few hours later we had our new CD rack, and Vicky had caught the sun [2]. We did have a few minor problems -- one shelf was sticking slightly out (five minutes with a chisel sorted that), and the MDF back was put on backwards, showing the huge price sticker to the world, but on the whole its a damn fine and solid CD rack, which holds a grand total of 350 CDs, for £15. We have two and bit shelves free, so have space for another 80 or so CDs... shouldn't take long to fill that. Of course, we then spend much of Sunday afternoon filling the damn thing... To celebrate we bought Solid Bronze, the Best of Beautiful South, and a Black Sunday by Cyprus Hill. [1] The exact measurements for anyone wanting to build their own: 1700mm x 370mm x 150mm, in 15mm pine.
[2] That's a polite phrase for having a pink nose and arms.

A few days after the Chicago Marathon in record-heat, I was wondering just how much more I had been slowing down, and exactly when during the course of the race this occurred. Bigger races like Chicago provide the so-called 'splits' for every five kilometer segment. Helpfully, they also keep these with the archived results which are all accessible via the web. So it was easy enough to collect a sequence of time such as '0:22:34', '0:45:30', ... and so on. And thanks to R, my data slicing and dicing and visualizing tool of choice, it was just a handful of lines to produce the chart below. The chart covers my four Chicago marathons (2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007) as well as Boston (2007) --- the infamous '27.2 mile marathon' seems to have dropped off the net, and the smaller Sunburst does not have 5k split times. The chart shows a few things quite nicely:

• The first marathon (dark blue squares) shows a marked slowdown after km 25.
• The following year (medium blue circles) a similar yet more moderate slowdown appeared 5 km later.
• The next year (blue triangles) the pace was remarkably stable without noticeable slowdowsn -- yielding the 'BQ' time.
• The Boston race (smaller green circles) was more prudent due to weather conditions, and a lingering cold, and I managed to finish much stronger than I ran the middle part.
• Chicago this year (orange circles) was a different story: too fast at the beginning, a cautious middle similar to the Boston race but two fairly significant slowdowns after 25 and 35 km, followed by some acceleration right before the finish.

While it was a tough race, I clearly ran a lot slower than previously, in particular between 25 km and 40 km. So there.

One of the common criticisms of the war in Iraq is that it was just an excuse to plunder that nations' oil. Of course that wasn't the reason however on Blog Action Day I urge environmentalists to think about why that might have actually been a better reason than the ones the politicians gave. The world supply of oil will probably run out in my lifetime. While alternative sources of energy are being researched, they have yet to be viable on a large enough scale to keep the world economy running at its present rate of progress. For the time being we must depend on oil and it is of vital importance that this precious resource is managed carefully. The problem is that it is not. Whereas civilized countries use energy for good purposes most of the oil is produced in countries which can only be described as evil. Take Saddams Iraq for instance; apologists claim it was one of the most advanced Arab nations, but that isn't setting a very high bar is it? Oil wealth was not used to better the lives of citizens but to prop up a savage and despotic regime. It is the poor and desperate deprived of the ability to take part in free markets who despoil the environment in a struggle to survive. Look at the other major oil producers and there too you will see a veritable rogues gallery. Some of these villains may be motivated by fundamentalism, some by socialism but the effect is the same. The common man in their countries does not get to enjoy the fruits of progress They are forced to muddle along with old, energy-inefficient, pollution-causing tech and their large numbers and vast geographical range undermine any modest environmental gains made by a few middle-class Westerners. How could anyone who cares about the fate of our mother Earth stand by and watch her bounty being squandered by dictators? See rapidly dwindling resources wasted on jihad and revolution? The next time there is talk of war, be environmentally responsible and ask your representatives to make securing oil and spreading capitalism priorities. You owe it to your planet.

I just released new version of Gammu. It just adds compatibility with some Motorola phones (but still not enough to fully support them) and fixes some bugs. Full list of changes:

• Fixed crash in wrong config handling (Debian bug #446781).
• Initial support for Motorola SMS implementation (bug #408).

I expect this to be last release before next stable one - 1.14.0, so please give it some testing so that we can have a good release.

What?! I mean... Think before you print!.

---

It's not very uncommon to see people who always print almost every single email they receive with information (and not just a notification), pdf's, and many other kind of documents.

I've never liked when people do that because they don't just print it, they sometimes even print the whole email conversation (usually gmail users). Some of them even dare to use non-recycled paper for printing some text and trashing it away after reading it!

Today is the Blog Action Day about the environment, so all I want to say is: reconsider, reuse and recycle (yes, in that specific order :D ). I know it's not the classic reduce, reuse, recycle message because I think people should better reconsider and not only reduce.

Here's a nice reminder you can, err, use on your computer's desktop (did you think I was going to say print??, I wasn't):


If you don't like that one, Google will point you to some others.

Two things I saw about today: Ubuntu's Power Consumption Tested, by Michael Larabel and HAPPENING NOW! 'Climate refugees' Locked-Up at the 'Oil Bank of Scotland' (So, please take action to tweak your power management and change your bank today!)

I’ve become addicted to two things on the intertron recently: the Cook (almost) Anything at Least Once Blog and The Guardian’s gallery of photos from the last 24 hours. Sadly there doesn’t appear to be a general link but there is a link on the front page for each day. There was one photo that really caught my attention today: Ouch. Update: See comments for the link that I failed to find.

Today is environment blog action day. I don't like memes or mass actions of this sort, but given a recent discussion on the effects of Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth and everyday/everyone environmental protection on a UL-internal discussion list called "opinions", I feel like sharing my views. The original poster suggested everyone to see the movie and was promptly smashed down by two people who responded along the lines of "the movie has no scientific basis," quoting fancy research on how global warming is not as bad as it's hyped to be, and that CO is not as guilty as everyone claims. None of this research is relevant to what I had to say to this, so I won't quote it, but if you're interested, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the place to start. One person went further and compared the CO -reduction hype to communism and criticised how we're expecting everyone to take action on the basis of false claims. I was partly disgusted by (all) those replies, not because they weren't accurate, but because they simply miss the point. And because the entire discussion was just another iteration of talk versus action. It may well be true that CO is not that bad, after all. But it's also true that any reasonable attempt to reduce its emission is not going to harm the environment (not to say that it might actually have a net-positive effect). Or as I put it in the thread:

I don't care for politics, I don't even care for research on this matter. I care for my environment, and I don't need to be a scientist to assume that plastic bags and car exhaust and lights left on when out to the pub are not making it any better. And yet, I am not a militant green. I prefer halogen light bulbs to the energy-saving ones and occasionally I'll be at the supermarket without a reusable bag; I don't condemn people using cars instead of a 15 minute walk to the office, and I still haven't managed to talk to a housemate of mine (no, not my Swiss flatmate), who notoriously leaves lights and appliances running when away. But at least I can say that I think of these issues, without scientific basis, but common sense. And I'll say that a thousand people aware of that will make more of a difference than any politician out there.

Not only do I think about these issues, I also act accordingly. But to be able to do that, I had to become aware of them. In as such, I'll stand by the claim in the discussion: awareness is what we ought to strive for, rather than talking about possible ways to start considering how we could potentially one day make leaps towards the solution of the world's problems, of which the environment is one. Awareness and little steps, which everyone can take: turn off lights and appliances, turn down the heater, use reusable shopping bags, prefer local produce to imported products, avoid fancy packaging, and so on In the thread, I asked "What have you done today to help lessen the burden we place on our environment?" I got no replies. I hope that's because people couldn't be bothered to show off their little contributions to the environment. If that were the case, then we are on the right path. NP: Gazpacho: Night

Joe Reagle, who happens to be a PhD student I am happily advising, wrote a response to my blog entry on the Chronicle of Higher Education article lamenting and lambasting advising graduate students. I am quoting it here in its entirety because it is a very thoughtful response:

Difficult issue. I certainly feel sympathy with the anonymous faculty member with respect to her amorous and litigious students. Also, I often wonder how I would deal with students who don’t share my sensibilities or workstyle if I were advising them under such circumstances. However, I also find much of her disappointment is related to disappointment of what her students do next, and in this I feel she may be a little unfair. She rightly recognizes that graduate school is a time of flux, no student can really guarantee what’s going to happen next. (One of my favorite religious jokes is: “How do you make God laugh?… Tell her your plans.”) If she is disappointed that a student she tried to help achieve a position at a tier 1 research institute accommodates themselves to something less than that, I’m sure at the student worked just as hard and was even more disappointed. The heart of the issue is that academia is so ridiculously competitive. It is never good enough to make a contribution or to be helpful, one always needs to be the best. It’s an exemplar for “The Winner Takes All.” I often think of this in relation to my technical work. One of the most rewarding professional relationships I had was when a more experienced programmer co-authored a Python software library with me. I don’t think he did it with any expectation that he was somehow seeding the discipline with followers, or even that I would someday be able to reciprocate in a similar manner. He was a good guy, we enjoyed our collaboration, I think he was learning by helping me, and in the end we made something useful, even if neither of us ever became Python gods. This is one of the things I like about open content communities, yes the people at the top get a fair amount of attention, but even if you spellcheck Wikipedia articles or write a Python library for canonicalising XML, that work is still appreciated.

...and, really, we nearly never thought that Argentina could win tonight. South Africa was really too strong for them. The only domain where Argentinians dominated were scrums but this was much compensated by their great weakness on line-outs, losing something like 5 or 6 of them. South Africa thus logical won very easily...and Bryan Habana is now the best try scorer all along RWCs, along with Jonah Lomu. He is a really great player, indeed. Much much impressive South Africa: they'll be by far the favourites of the final against England, which they beated already during that World Cup. I said several times that I'm not a deep fan of RSA's play, but I could become one. Their game improved all along the World Cup and today, they probably played their best match. Two remakes next week-end: France-Argentina for the 3rd place and South Africa-England as final. That will be good matches, no doubt...and I hope that Bernard Laporte will change the French team to play against Argentina.

When it comes to puns about digestion, Dafydd Harries and I make up for in quantity what we lack in quality. Apologies to Daf if he is embarassed by my public acknowledgement of his contributions in this endeavor.

Since the conclusion of the Google Summer of Code, the DebTorrent project has been without a sponsor. I was going to email debian-mentors to see if anyone was interested, but I decided to first post to my blog to see if there are any Debian Developers reading this who have the time and are especially interested in sponsoring it. Here are some of the details of the package:

• Package name: debtorrent
• Current version: 0.1.4.1
• Author: Cameron Dale camrdale@gmail.com
• URL: http://debtorrent.alioth.debian.org/
• License: MIT
• Section: net
• Priority: optional
• Language: python
• VCS: subversion http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debtorrent/debtorrent/trunk/

It is currently maintained using an svn-buildpackage subversion repository, but I might be interested in switching to git if a sponsor is interested.