Angie spent ages trying to convince me that muscle pain was good - that the hurt that comes from actually exercising is a good thing.

I think it's taken me undergoing a live dissection to actually have a clue what she was talking about.

Some recent firsts:
* I've lifted Leif a couple of times to keep him from climbing up and over the child gate. I'm allowed to lift him in emergencies. I didn't need to crawl away and cuddle my Oxycodone after.

* I didn't take extra Tramadol in the morning this past weekend in order to cope with playing with him. This would've been a bright move had it been a 2 day weekend. As it was, I did wind up pulling a muscle near the end of the third day.

* I biked home today for the first time in 7 months.

I still haven't kicked the last pain killer in the evening. Every time I get brave enough to try it again, I up my activity level instead. So, keeping to a full dose this week. Maybe cutting to a half dose next week. There's travel coming up, and I want to make sure I don't screw myself for that.

Yay, www.gomeat.com! I especially like the gopher that pops up shortly after the rest of the table of meat appears. The fact that he's advertising sausage makes me think that we've truly reached The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

I'll still take the green salad, thanks.

Holy crap - You know one of those things where life is so surreal? My sister-in-law, Heather, is in a movie trailer with a speaking role!

The Day The Earth Stood Still

About a minute from the end, she passes a message to Kathy Bates.

So yeah, everyone go see the movie. =)

Wow, a pile of people seem to have friended me recently. I wish this thing sent me email when that happened.

Anyhow, I've friended those of you who:

1) I could figure out WTH you are; and
2) I don't mind you seeing the occasional either slightly personal rant, or information about where my travels.
3) From what I've seen on your journals, I won't gouge my eyes out reading them on my friends page.

I'll try to check there more often. And maybe I'll figure out who some of the rest of you are. =)

Jeff Bailey writes about the last 26 years of Microsoft [1]. He gives Microsoft credit for “saving us from the TRS 80″, however CP/M-86 was also an option for the OS on the IBM PC [2]. If MS hadn’t produced MS-DOS for a lower price then CP/M would have been used (in those days CP/M and MS-DOS had the same features and essentially the same design). He notes the use of the Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) [3] programs. As far as I recall the TSR operation was undocumented and was discovered by disassembling DOS (something that the modern MS EULAs forbid). Intel designed the 8086 and 80286 CPUs to permit code written for an 8086 to run unchanged in “protected mode” on an 80286 (as noted in the Wikipedia page about the 80286 [4]). Basically all that you needed to do to write a DOS program with the potential of being run directly in protected mode (or easily ported) was to allocate memory by requesting it from the OS (not just assuming that every address above your heap was available to write on) and by addressing memory only by the segment register returned from the OS when allocating memory (IE not assuming that incrementing a segment register is equivalent to adding 16 to the offset). There were some programs written in such a manner which could run on both DOS and text-mode OS/2 (both 1.x and 2.x), I believe that such programs were linked differently. The term Fat Binary [5] is often used to refer to an executable which has binary code for multiple CPUs (EG PPC and M68K CPUs on the Macintosh), I believe that a similar concept was used for DOS / OS/2 programs but the main code of the application was shared. Also compilers which produce object code which doesn’t do nasty things could have their object code linked to run in protected mode. Some people produced a set of libraries that allowed linking Borland Turbo Pascal code to run as OS/2 16bit text-mode applications. The fact that OS/2 (the protected-mode preemptively multi-tasking DOS) didn’t succeed in the market was largely due to MS. I never used Windows/386 (a version of Windows 2.x) but used Windows 3.0 a lot. Windows 3.0 ran in three modes, “Real Mode” (8086), “Standard Mode” (80286), and “Enhanced Mode” (80386). Real Mode was used for 8086 and 8088 CPUs, for 80286 systems if you needed to run one DOS program (there was no memory for running more than one), and for creating or adjusting the swap-file size for an 80386 system (if your 80386 system didn’t have enough swap you had to shut everything down, start Real Mode, adjust the swap file, and then start it again in Enhanced Mode). Standard Mode was the best mode for running Windows programs (apart from the badly written ones which only ran on Real Mode), but due to the bad practices implemented by almost everyone who wrote DOS programs MS didn’t even try to run DOS programs in 286 protected mode and thus Standard Mode didn’t support DOS programs. Enhanced Mode allowed multitasking DOS programs but as hardly anyone had an 80386 class system at that time it didn’t get much use. It was just before the release of Windows 3.1 that I decided to never again use Windows unless I was paid to do so. I was at a MS presentation about Windows 3.1 and after the marketing stuff they had a technical Q/A session. The questions were generally about how to work around bugs in MS software (mainly Windows 3.0) and the MS people had a very detailed list of work-arounds. Someone asked “why don’t you just fix those bugs” and we were told “it’s easier to teach you how to work around them than to fix them“. I left the presentation before it finished, went straight home and deleted Windows from my computer. I am not going to use software written by people with such a poor attitude if given a choice. After that I ran the DOS multi-tasker DesqView [6] until OS/2 2.0 was released. Desqview allowed multitasking well written DOS programs in real mode, Quarterdeck was the first company to discover that almost 64K of address space could be used above the 1MB boundary from real-mode on a 80286 (a significant benefit when you were limited to 640K of RAM), as well as multitasking less well behaved DOS programs with more memory use on an 80386 or better CPU. OS/2 [7] 2.x was described as “A Better DOS than DOS, a Better Windows than Windows”. That claim seemed accurate to me. I could run DOS VM86 sessions under OS/2 which could do things that even Desqview couldn’t manage (such as having a non-graphical DOS session with 716K of base memory in one window and a graphical DOS session in another). I could also run combinations of Windows programs that could not run under MS Windows (such as badly written windows programs that needed Real Mode as well as programs that needed the amount of memory that only Standard or Enhanced mode could provide). Back to Bill Gates, I recently read a blog post Eight Years of Wrongness [5] which described how Steve Ballmer has failed MS stockholders by his poor management. It seems that he paid more attention to fighting Linux, implementing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and generally trying to avoid compatibility with other software than to actually making money. While this could be seen as a tribute to Bill Gates (Steve Ballmer couldn’t do the job as well), I think that Bill would have made the same mistakes for the same reasons. MS has always had a history of treating it’s customers as the enemy. Jeff suggests that we should learn from MS that the freedom to tinker is important as is access to our data. These are good points but another important point is that we need to develop software that does what users want and acts primarily in the best interests of the users. Overall I think that free software is quite well written in regard to acting on behalf of the users. The issue we have is in determining who the “user” is, whether it’s a developer, sys-admin, or someone who wants to just play games and do some word-processing.

• [1] http://jbailey.livejournal.com/55585.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86


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


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80286


• [5] http://msftextrememakeover.blogspot.com/2008/06/eight-years-of-wrongness.html


• [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desqview


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

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It's interesting to think about Bill Gates retiring. When I think back to how much Microsoft has brought us over the years, both happiness and grief, it's a bit of a happy/sad end to an era for me.

Microsoft is what saved us from the TRS-80, and brought us into a world where clone hardware drove prices down to where everyone could afford them. MS-DOS may have been a bad rip off of CP/M and Unix, but to business operations brought us the ability to bring computing power right down to the desk and generally got out of the way. Dos had the neat ability to have TSRs that could deliver waiting applications at a keystroke (remember Sidekick?) Windows 386 and 3.0 brought us preemptive multitasking for DOS apps that weren't written for that in mind, and brought us the first environment the mass market had seen where any manufacturer could write drivers to a known programming interface and bring their hardware to the world. They brought us a world where hardware innovation was bringing crazy new things to us that had only been possible in Sci-Fi movies before. My first voice-recognition system on the computer was in 1990. =)

Windows 95 pushed that even further. No longer were drivers crazy TSRs, but actually loaded into the control panel with standard was of using them for established services such as Networking and Sound. For everything else, the model was extensible so that if you had a neat idea, you could bring it out to the world. I remember installing TwinBridge at work so that people could type in double-wide Chinese characters, despite the OS not being intended for that in the slightest.

Windows 98 brought us games that were better than we were seeing in DOS. DirectX and DirectSound were finally providing a good enough abstraction on top of the hardware that it was easier for authors to code to that than to code right to your Adlib card and whatever display adapter you had (were we using S3s yet, then?)

But that seems to have been the top point of their reign. At this point, as a user I was now so far from the guts of the machine, I no longer could easily tinker. I'd once coded in Z80 asm and 8086 asm to write little hacks, but Windows 98 was getting to the opinionated software stage: There were things you just couldn't do, for no reason other than the designers at Microsoft didn't think it was important.

I realise I'm not the usual mass-market type, but now the system that had been such a source of inspiration was now becoming a barrier to trying new ideas.

I had started playing with Linux in 1995, but 1998 had started to use it as my main machine at home. I had a roommate who had a dumb cheap machine that was slaved off of my main machine so that he could play Medievia all day and night. Setting up this networking, and the on-demand ISDN dialing was trivial to do under Linux, and nearly impossible under the Windows systems of the time.

The only thing one could say for FVWM95 at the time was that it was better than twm. We suffered through Enlightenment, said hello to wine, and joined an online community of people who'd all come together from various places in order to be free to play with the systems we had.

Microsoft became steadily less relevant to my day to day computing. My girlfriend (now wife) suffered through early incarnations of MS Word for windows 2.0 under Wine because it was still easier than teaching her emacs. And steadily, the system got better until we could honestly look at our family members and tell them that if they wanted to run Windows that was fine, but please don't call me about it.

We need to both say thank-you to Microsoft and learn from it. Microsoft made a business model of bringing us the technology we craved as geeks, and that society wanted to play with and integrated into our lives. Microsoft also taught us what it means to be the dominant player. For most of us, I suspect it was our only view into the world where a single player dominates and strives to cut down its competition. It's easy to romanticise the small business owner, and just as easy to forget that just about every small business owner wants to be a millionaire and a large business owner.

We need to remember that the pretty fancy interfaces can be as much about helping people do things as keeping them from doing things. We need to demand the freedom to tinker with our software and our devices, even if we choose to never do so. And after all that, we need to be able to take our data from a device, and take it to somewhere else. I think ultimately, this is what Microsoft has taught us. As we look for new companies to deliver us greater and shinier technology, this is a lesson we need to keep close at hand.

Joyeuse F te Nationale toutes et tous! Que le Qu bec me manque...

Part of the joy of spending 3 months stoned is that my Inbox had managed to fill up quite nicely with all sorts of crap. In a desperate attempt to prune things, I've taken everything from LiveJournal and Facebook and archived them.

The LJ things are often bits where people have wished me well about the surgery and the recovery. But at over 80 conversations (some of which were multiple people), I'll just *never* get to them. I love you all for the well wishes, and I hope that I've managed to connect with all of you after them at some point.

I've also done the same with Facebook emails on the theory that Wall posts are probably stale by now (or already replied to), and the Inbox there will tell me what I haven't replied to (something like 77 posts)

I started the evening at 1350 messages, I'm now down to 497. Hopefully I'll get it down to zero over the course of this week.

Bed time!

I was looking for a Python lexer and parser, and found out that antlr can emit Python code with only minor twiddles of the input grammar.

The antlr site has a "Hello World" type of grammar for testing it out in Java: http://www.antlr.org/article/cutpaste/index.html

What follows is that page ported to Python and Debian/Ubuntu. On a Debian-derived system:

$ sudo apt-get install antlr

Create a file called "t.g" with the following contents:

options  
	language=Python;
 
class P extends Parser;
startRule
    :   n:NAME
         print "Hi there, "+n.getText() 
    ;
class L extends Lexer;
// one-or-more letters followed by a newline
NAME:   ( 'a'..'z' 'A'..'Z' )+ NEWLINE
    ;
NEWLINE
    :   '\r' '\n'   // DOS
        '\n'        // UNIX
    ;

Because antlr isn't in the CLASSPATH by default, the maintainer has included a "runantlr" script, which handles this for you. So,

$ runantlr t.g

This will create L.py, P.py and PTokenTypes.txt.

Now create main.py:

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import L
import P
l = L.Lexer(sys.stdin)
p = P.Parser(l)
p.startRule()

And run the resulting file:

$ python main.py
Jeff
Hi there, Jeff
$

This past week has been a really good ride on the medical front. As of yesterday, I've dropped the 1g of Tylenol I was taking first thing in the morning. Pills-wise, that leaves me with one Ultrum (Tramadol) at night before bed. Sleeping on my surgery site without pills still causes me to wake up in the middle of the night. Next week's goal is to drop the prescription drugs completely, except for an occasional one on the weekend when I'm doing a lot with Leif. As far as I know, it's okay to take Tylenol and have an occasional glass of wine - I'm going to check with the pharmacist - but there's a winery tour that I'm signed up for late next week...

I'm also back to Physical Therapy and have appointments booked for twice a week over the next few months. My PT doesn't seem to think that I'll need to stay that long, which would be awesome, but my hopes aren't high on that. We keep discovering new things like "Hey, if you had triceps, you could do this exercise that I want you to. But you don't, so do tricep pull downs for now." From not doing a whole lot, I find I have to ask other people to do things like open jars, or open heavy doors still. We'll see how it goes. My lifting/bending/twisting restrictions won't be lifted until August and then the use-more-than-4kg-weights exercises can finally start.

I'm biking around the campus at work a lot now. I'm getting braver with going out on the streets, and think that I'll probably be ready to try taking my road bike for a trip between home and work early next week. I'd originally hoped for this week, but I'm just not there yet.

In other news, I'm hoping that someone can point me to a freer replacement for this: I've wanted Angie to see the movie Wargames for a bit, so I plugged the Windows laptop into the TV and the stereo, rented it off of iTunes, made it full screen and we enjoyed the movie. I'm quite fussy about DRM when it comes to music or movies that I've purchased, but I'm less fussy where I've contracted to watch something for a day. Netflix has an on-demand movie service like iTunes as well, but neither of them seem to run under Linux or Wine. I suspect I'll need to find the person who was hacking wine to work with iTunes and see if (s)he likes occasional shipments of beer. =)

Dear CNN,

The US presidential election race between senators McCain and Obama is not a "battleground". Battlegrounds are where people get killed. Using the same words for what passes as democracy in this country as for the military massacres in foreign countries is incredibly sad and disgusting.

That, and it's only vaguely less stupid than Toronto's "War on Fire".

Dear recruiters #2: There are now *two* standards to follow: not only can you not send me posts from a noreply address, you should also try to convince me that your founders are insane ;)

I seem to have quite accidentally set a new standard in what it takes to hire me. According to Slashdot, Google co-founder Sergey Brin is planning to go to the ISS. The founder of Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth did the same.

" You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?"

Actually, looking back at almost all the jobs I've ever had, the founders or key management folks were almost *always* insane. I remember a fun conversation with Jane, the COO of Canonical about how I wanted the senior management of any place I work to have such a big vision and to drive relentlessly towards it.

I think she thought *I* was insane. Probably still does ;)

Thinking of which, I'm so happy to be back at work. I'd forgotten what the pace here was like, or maybe it's just coming off of heavy drugs and spinning up to this pace. I feel a bit like a Smart Car on the New Jersey Turnpike. I'll make freeway speeds, but I need a few more days. =)

I reduced the drugs quite rapidly in the last week, and am now down to one Ultram per day, with extra-strength Tylenol supplementing. I also got my second HIV test results back, and it's non-reactive. So it's 99% probable that the blood transfusions were clean. Yay!

Jeff Bailey asked:

"Heya Brits! Any of you still driving cars at ~ 1.15 according to the Daily Mail"

Yes, I am. I drove on Monday (at 1.18/l) because it was the least bad option for the journey. I try to avoid it and I felt bad afterwards (literally - it was too damn hot and each part of the journey was too short for the cab to cool down), but the car was available and the other choices involved not attending some events. On Sunday, I used my bike instead, but I was I wondering if the world is full of Sunday drivers today or whether I was really riding that badly. You name a junction on my route and I seemed to get into a conflict with a car at it. Today's bike trip went much better, even getting thanks from a coach for pulling aside halfway up an incline, but I had to take avoiding action as I re-entered the village because of a police car. I'm pretty damn sure that wasn't my fault, but I do wonder when it's the police. I'm still riding without a helmet, without ill effects. Gunnar Wolf was getting a breeze through a different kind of helmet but I think it's telling that cyclists "feel naked" rather than actually being naked (usually, at least). Have we got too used to being cocooned in metal boxes while out on the roads? I've always ridden and walked a lot - is this why I don't miss the hat much? I must remember to drink more in summer without it, though. I share Criag Sanders's scepticism about the protests and Chrisitan Perrier's enthusiasm for bike-pools. I don't agree with many of Russel Coker's views on oil prices but they are interesting reading, even so. I'm taking part in JamBustingJune for the West of England region and BikeWeek 14-21 June 2008

Dear Recruiters,

While I appreciate being contacted with interesting opportunities (at the moment I'm not looking. It's a lovely cross between being happy in my current job and hoping for a particularly uneventful 12 months on the home front), emailing me from noreply@saic.com is just going to make me mock you. It's at moments like these that I with I could channel Matthew Garrett. When I try, I just sound like Overfiend from the good old days ;)

The family went up to the City today with some friends of ours and I had the most amazing thing: I walked into an Apple store, and the greater at the front solved my iPhone problem. The phone decided a week or so ago that there was always a headset plugged in. The greeter pulled up a clever tool that looks like an 1/8th inch to 1/4inch adapter with tiny holes milled in it for blowing air in. Seems they have this problem often. Being with 3 kids and two families, I couldn't reliably book a time to see someone at the Genius Bar, but he just blasted it out and it worked wonderfully.

Of course, I came home to plug it in and have discovered that the cord to connect to the charger appears to have corroded and won't charge the phone now. So, AppleEmployees++, AppleHardware--. I now will make the distinction.

Next technology FixIt: Convince my Bluetooth headset and Bluetooth stereo to go into pairing mode again. Both seem to have decided they won't do this anymore.

So apparently we hit $138/barrel on oil futures on Friday. Reading a CBC Post on the subject I think there are a couple interesting quotes:

Matt Simmons, chairman of an energy financing company in Houston, believes oil prices are still too low. He told CBC News there are "very strong signs" that the global supply of crude oil has leveled out and is probably now in a gentle decline.

Simmons said he finds it interesting that so many people blame speculators and a weak U.S. dollar for rising prices. "These same lame excuses have been going on for the last nine years, since [the price of oil] has gone up 13-fold," he said

I commented earlier that I'm looking forward to $10/litre (The CBC article shows petrol in Montr al at $1.40). A number of commenters brought up economic accessibility - which is a real concern. So, dear lazyweb: I remember seeing once that there were orgs doing carbon offsets by going into low-income areas and doing volunteer work on houses to fix up insulation, replace aging furnaces and major appliances. I haven't been able to find a reference to it again, though. Given that $10/litre seems inevitable (Heya Brits! Any of you still driving cars at ~ 1.15 according to the Daily Mail), what do we do to prepare for it? We got Angie's bike up and running yesterday, and she went to her day's visits that way. I'm finally cleared to ride a bike, but am not yet up to tackling Rengstorff. I'm practicing by biking around the campus at work and getting used to the changes in my body. The biggest disappointment in going back to Vancouver is just the apathy about smog and fuel consumption there. We saw a total of 2 Prius' (Prii?) on the road across the entire 12 days versus a half-dozen Hummers. I remember in the early 90's being downtown and everyone being shocked when there was a bit of brown haze in the air around the Sears Tower (Sorry, I can never remember WTH it's called now). Now the city is not only permanently like that, but people just expect it to get worse without any real feeling that they could do anything about it. I find myself starting to think again about hacking and what differences I can make. It's unexpected but logical that efficiency results in greater consumption: You can afford to do more, and have time to do more. Is the trick, then, to develop something efficient that takes up time? (Should I work on a text adventure?) Or perhaps the answer is to get away from computers for entertainment. Jim Morrison (Phython) and I have been talking about taking up bagpipes as a fun pre-work activity in the field by the office. But now he's moved to the San Francisco office. Anyone else at in Mountain View interested? =)

Yay, we're home. It was nice to be back in Vancouver saying hi to folks, but it's tiring being in different places and seeing everyone in a crammed packed visit. It was the longest I've been back there since our wedding ~6 years ago. There were only a few people on my list that I didn't wind up seeing, which is actually pretty good for a trip.

I had originally said that I was going to keep my pain killers where they were for a few weeks, but I realised that I'd managed a couple of times to forget to take some and lasted 5-6 hours, so I dropped one anyone. It means that the flight home was a little creakier than I'd like, but my "hard" gnome-sudoku time has also dropped from ~45 minutes to ~15 minutes. =)

We got our visa renewed successfully, so no there isn't any stress of whether we're suddenly going to have to move, find new jobs, etc. So here's to the start of a boring (life-wise) 12 months starting now!

I'm back in the office tomorrow. We'll see if my stamina really will hold out for the whole day =)

While a funeral isn't my favourite reason to visit the family, we all took the opportunity today to get together to celebrate Leif's birthday together, as well as everyone getting together to be there for Henry.

Now I'm at Angie's dad and step-mom's place, about to finally settle into some homework.

We're going to do an open-house for Leif next Sunday at my sister's place. If you'd like to come along to it, email me: jbailey@raspberryginger.com and I'll give you directions.

(And hey, sib. When are you meeting at your place?)

Sorry folks if I haven't gotten ahold of you for getting together. The family plans are trumping everything right now.

We just came back from my three-month visit with the surgeon. Everything is pretty much going well: The x-rays looks good - the hardware hasn't shifted, screws haven't come loose (They need a CT scan to tell how well the bone fusion is happening. Too much hardware in the way in the meantime). The biggest concern he has is that because I spent 2 weeks throwing up and lost something like 15kg, most of my movement restrictions haven't changed, nor has the diet emphasis. So still no lifting, twisting or bending. I can, however, now reach out with both hands. So I can help chop veggies for dinner and such.

I also got some clarification on the photo.
(Warning, 1.7megs. (c) 2008 Dr. P Mummaneni, All Rights Reserved, posted with permission. Lots of blood and meat, you've been warned!)

It's the same one as before, but now I've actually gotten a chance to ask questions about it. I was pleased to know that most of my guesses had been right. =) I'll try to answer the questions people had:

I'm face down in the picture, my head is to the left. The yellow around the incision really is my skin, covered with iodine and such to minimize infection. The black bits are cauterised to minimize blood loss and such. The thick white cord down the middle is the spinal cord itself. The white covering is the dura.

To do this operation, they take away the bone on top, then take out the surrounding tissue, then take out the bone on the bottom. As someone guessed in the comments, the spinal cord sits in front of the titanium cage.

The medal bits on the bottom of the picture are the places where the second rod got bolted in.

Neat the leftmost metal thing, you can see a nerve coming out of the cord. In the middle of the picture there isn't any, which is why I have some sensation loss through my armpits and such.

Dr. Mummaneni said that he'll try to put the rest of the pictures onto a CD for me, so I'll probably get them at my next appointment in 3 months. In the meantime, I'm cleared to fly, and I'm cleared to return to work at the beginning of next month. Yay!

Oh, and it turns out that I might set off modern metal detectors. So I now have a doctor's note to travel with. I'll find out later this week. =)

In other news, Leif is doing much better. So far it looks like the inhaler was needed just to him over this cold. I'll post more on that another time. This post is getting long.

About 3 hours after my step grandmother in law died, a friend of mine gave birth to her first child. Congrats to Hande (formerly of Canonical if it seems familiar to you) and Mehmet on the birth of their daughter Layla.

This was meant to echo Jeff Bailey s Out and about!, where Jeff wrote about blood transfusion. Every country has its own values, rules, and methods for blood donation (be it about anonymity, retribution, etc.), but please consider getting informed, and donate. According to the tablissement Fran ais du Sang (roughly translated to: French Blood Institute), the key point is to donate again, possibly on a regular basis. Various possibilities in France: donate full blood (2 months delay between each, takes about 10 minutes), or selectively (plasma or platelets, 2 to 4 weeks delay between each, takes about a full hour). You can save lives. Will you do it? Many thanks to Helen for reminding me to write a note about important things.