I had the most wonderful dentist appointment this morning. bbollenbach was so excited over this dentist http://www.smilemontreal.com/ - but it seemed mostly because they use lasers to do any fillings or whatnot.

I started off by going to their website to get the phone number, and found a web form there. I filled in information asking for an appointment. I got an email back on a Sunday night from the dentist saying that someone would contact me during the week. They were nice enough to call during the evening (which was funny, since I'd given them my work number assuming they'd call during the day, but I was here anyway that day) and booking the appointment was easy.

I got an email saying that they'd booked the appointment and a link I could click to get an iCal appointment. This didn't work in the Google Apps for Your Domain setup, but might if I were using local mail.

A day before hand I got an email asking me to confirm that I would make the appointment by clicking a link.

The place is a little further away from M tro Vend me than I'd thought - it's beside the Westmount Public Library. I walked in to find a nice spacious waiting room. The office manager / receptionist was very friendly, and this continued through to dealing with the hygienist and the dentist himself. I usually *hate* hygienists - most of the ones I'd met before hand had been dentists from overseas whose accreditation's hadn't been accepted here. So understandably bitter and annoyed. My only other good hygienist had been at the clinic in Toronto, but that was also the dentist who tried to convince me that there were no risks with using mercury fillings, and that she was exposed to it much more anyway, so why was I so insistent on white fillings anyway? (Worth noting that my plan *covered* white fillings, so it wasn't an issue of price or anything.)

The dentist was also a really calming presence, and answered my questions with a smile. I need to go back, so I'll know more about what he's like then. But so far I suspect I've found a keeper.

I've been holding off blogging a number of things because I've got a list of time-sensitive tasks as long as my arm to do in my capacity as a volunteer sysadmin for Linux Australia. The immediate pressing one is to swap mirror.linux.org.au over to new hardware with more disk capacity. I've been trying to do this whilst globetrotting to Australia for a holiday, Spain for a Debian QA meeting, and Las Vegas for Christmas. So work on it's been a bit fragmented. Tonight was going to be the night of the cutover. I've had the new machine on a different address while I synced configs (and content), and tonight I swapped IP addresses around so that the old machine would have the IP address that the new machine had, and the new machine would have mirror.linux.org.au's IP address. I rebooted both machines, and... Neither one has come back. Sigh. And of course, it's late afternoon on a Friday in Australia, I'll bet Steve isn't even working this week, so he can't take a look at it. I can't think what I've bollocksed up, but any ARP conflict on the upstream router should have sorted itself out by now. Damn.

1) I'm not attractive (OK - so less learned, more reaffirmed) 2) Not all hills lead back to the flat 3) See 2. (OK - so I left $club which I can't remember thinking "tired, home time", wished people good byes, and looked for a hill, usually any going up are back to the flat... wandered up the hill, carried on wandering, discovered pizza shop that I normally order from, said "Oh bollocks" and started heading in the right direction, down the hill, across the road, back up the other hill. Sucks to be on the wrong side of London Road.) 4) Sleep is good. That's what I'm just about to do.So, what have I learned today? EDIT: OK - writing an entry in vim at nearly 3am when you've been to a club results in the unfortunate side effect of somehow managing to put several copies of the post in the entry - BAH!

This is kinda a mix between my list of bookmarks and some things I've been thinking about and following lately. astronomy I've been reading a lot of astronomy stuff lately, a lot more than my usual low-level interest in it. I'm kind of feeling the need for a refresher course, so I can get a better handle on stuff that's happened since I studied this stuff in school. It's hard to get my head around things like dark matter and really grok the evidence. While black holes and relativity and such seem so obviously a natural part of this universe. Does this mean I'm getting old? The chance to bounce questions and ideas off someone would probably help in getting a real grip on this stuff. So would a lot more physics than I know.. (Hurrah for Eris BTW. The name almost makes all that sillyness over a mere definition worthwhile.) Favorite sites: Universe Today and Wikipedia.

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weather I've been following this hurricane season, to make up for having paid so little attention to last year's disastrous one. I knew about the "New Orleans bowl" scenario well before Katrina, and the night before it hit I actually spent several hours tuning in far-away AM stations from down there and listening to the city not react in time. But despite all that I feel that I missed out on really seeing it happen, so I've been learning about tropical waves, and wind shear and ULL's, and dropsondes, and the satelite data that can be used to follow hurricanes. The nice thing is that instead of the old stereotype of someone watching the weather channel 24/7 with a map and thumbtacks, these days there's a nice mix of pre-processed info and analysis and raw data, easily followed in small amounts of time on Wunderground's blogs.

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spaceflight Half love and half hate. The recent shuttle mission has been a riot for a shuttle-hater and SF lover. It has all the elements of one of those SF novels where they go down to the cape, dig up an Apollo stack, and use it to save the world / travel to Mars / fight the alien invaders. Except here they're pulling an unused orbitor out of mothbolls. And putting it up on the launchpad with a hurricane bearing down, getting it struck by lightning, pulling it off the pad, changing their mind with the giant crawler half-way through that milti-day maneuver when the hurricane fizzles, putting it back, filling and refilling the tank as sensors fail and they rewrite their safty regs on the fly, barely making the launch window, and proceeding to triumphantly lose nuts and break wrenches .. In Space! Space opera, indeed. Then there's the genuinely interesting stuff. Intentional crashing of a French probe into the moon, probes firing projectiles at asteroids and trying (with great difficulty and many glitches) to return a sample. A mission on its way to Pluto. The rovers still going strong on Mars after all this time. Bigelow launching an inflatable prototype of his planned space hotel. A whole load of microsats tragically blowing up on launch. All the private aereospace stuff, which seems to close to turning into something real. Happily followed at Spaceflight Now.

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TV Over the past while and a half I've been very happy to discover The Wire and Deadwood, have been working my way through the Sopranos and Lost, been creepily fascinated by Big Love, got a kick out of the Canadian antics of Corner Gas, vegged out to Greys Anatomy, and have been very sad to reach the end of Six Feet Under. BSG, Doctor Who, House, and some other shows haven't held up as well past the first seasons for me. Happily, there's NetFlix, which makes it plausable that I did this legally despite not having HBO or even owning a TV.

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literature I've been reading Charles Stross, David Drake, John Twelve Hawks, Kelly Armstrong, Naomi Novik, Robert Charles Wilson, VC Andrews, and, loath though I am to admit it, John Ringo. I'm in the middle of books by Steph Swainston, Geoff Ryman, and Dave Duncan. I finally found a defintion of Science Fiction I like, but I lost the link. (It's the subjective "her world exploded" one.) Anyway, I'm afraid that I may have reached the point where to get much more out of reading SF, I'd have to start going to cons. Which I don't want to do. But I seem to be at a low ebb for it being interesting to me, or just need to finally tackle some other branch of literature. Actually, the most engaging reading I've been doing lately is in the achives (all of them!) of the Idle Words blog. It makes obscure details about Poland and China, and even interpretation of Russian classics seem pretty darn interesting, and has much better rants about the space shuttle. And it proves that blog entries should properly be good and long.

Well John Howard said he wanted to start a nuclear debate in Australia. Seems it has already started on Planet Linux Australia. I figure I might as well have a meandering blog post about alternative energy and current world events, since I've just been immersing myself in the best news I can obtain with my crappy cable package in a country not renowned for its awareness of world affairs. Firstly, since there's been talk about nuclear power, I'd like to offer my thoughts on Iran, and how it's sounding like Iraq all over again. People are getting in a flap about Iran enriching uranium. Iran says that they don't want "the bomb", they only want nuclear power to meet their energy demands. Now if this is true, then surely should applaud a country that sits on a chunk of the Middle East's oil reserves looking to use something other than oil for its energy needs. I for one don't know if you need to "enrich" uranium to use it for a nuclear reactor, or whether it's good enough "as is". But let's just assume that Iran's intentions are as they have said, then it's going to be Iraq all over again. The US said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The US is saying Iran is enriching uranium for the purposes of making a bomb. So far the former claim hasn't been proven, so what's to say the latter is true either? Let's say the nuclear debate in Australia determines that it'd be a good a thing for Australia to go nuclear. How is Australia enriching uranium for electricity generation any different to Iran doing it? (Other than Australia is in the Coalition of the Willing, and Iran is in the Axis of Evil). Speaking of Iran being in the Axis of Evil, how is Iran supplying weapons to Hezbollah fundamentally any different to the US supplying weapons to Israel? Oh, and is anyone allowed to criticise Jewish people without being called anti-Semitic? Since when is invading a neighbouring country considered okay? I am so glad Australia is an island nation. These countries with land borders, sheesh... Anyway, back to alternative energy. I'm a greenie, (with a lowercase "g") so I'm open to nuclear power, but it does frighten the willies out of me, with things like Chernobyl. I'd never heard of a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor until Paul wrote of it. It certainly sounds safer than previous methods of nuclear reaction. But of alternatives. Wind, for example, doesn't need to be big and arguably ugly. These guys in the UK have made a very sexy and quiet wind turbine. I don't know how it stacks up in terms of cost or output to the traditional three-bladed wind turbines like what I've photographed in Southern California, but they're supposed to be quiet, which is apparently one of the (many) arguments that landowners like farmers have against wind generation in general. This Australian company has come up with a very small, but less sexy wind turbine, that I believe to be fairly cheap. Finally, in terms of generation, and I've written about this before, but I find the Tower of Power to be a fascinating concept in natural energy generation. Where am I going with this ramble? No idea. I do think rapidly developing countries like China should completely leapfrog over the era of oil and move to renewably generated electricity. Maybe they can get the manufacturing costs down of the equipment, and it'll be less of a big deal in terms of cost for the rest of the world to adopt it. Whew. What a ramble. Don't start me on flushing toilets with drinking water.

Raymond warned that Linux risks getting locked out of new hardware platforms for the next 30 years unless it proves it can work with iPods

Leaving aside the insanity of asking the fetchmail author about desktop Linux, has Eric been leaving under a rock? Ipods work with Linux. In fact, almost all MP3 players do. Sensibly. You plug them in, they appear on your desktop. You copy files to them. You copy files from them. Banshee supports all the nice playlist integration and stuff, and I expect that Amorak does as well.

While I'd obviously prefer Eric to just go very far away (yes, further than San Francisco), I'd settle if he'd stop jeopardizing the tripe by spouting bollocks in front of an audience who seem to think that he's somehow relevant and resulting in the mainstream media perpetuating the myth that desktop Linux is about as useful as Windows 3.1.

According to technorati, the top tags blogged about are: Israel, Lebanon, Herzbolla, Iraq, War, Bush, youtube, Sex. Says a lot about these stupid wars that they take up 6 of the top 8 spots. (Yes, I'm counting Bush as a war tag, otherwise he'd never beat Sex) As with youtube, I just wonder when they start running into some serious legal trouble, and how they can pay their traffic bills on the long run. Especially when people put the videos into their blogs, youtube doesn't get a single cent from advertisments. Or my filters are too good.

Reading Jordi's blog, I cannot but agree with him (in most points): I plainly cannot understand Israel's actions in the last weeks. I can sadly understand how some people defend them, specially people not living in Israel - I was talking with a friend today, a friend who does not share a single political viewpoint with me, but still... The world seems to be completely polarized. Some have the impression that Israelis live under constant shelling, that life is unsustainable in that poor country, the last corner of civilization in that mess called the Middle East, and that the Arab countries (which are huge and petroleum-rich) just want to throw Jews to the sea or worse. The rest of the world think that Israelis are mass-murderers who decided to take a heavily populated bit of land and martyrize its originary population by any possible means, establishing an Apartheid.
Both views are false. But of course, both views hold their bits of truth.
I cannot claim to be neutral on this: Although I lived there in total for ~18 months, I am an Israeli by choice (I adopted the Israeli nationality in 1996 and wanted to live my life there - I came back to Mexico for personal reasons, and I later decided to stay here). I have not been to Israel since then - But I try to keep myself informed. And, living in a Jewish family, it's hard not to be somewhat informed - and of course, shocked at your relatives' opinions. Jews outside Israel tend to be right-wingers. I lived in a kibbutz, and I still sympathyze with Meretz, the most leftwing Zionist party.
I won't restate what Jordi eloquently said. I know not everybody who reads my blog reads Jordi's as well - Please do. If you missed it some lines above, here is the link. I insist: I agree with most of what he wrote. What could Israel do to protect itself from its enemies? The answer is simple: Don't give them a reason to hate you.
One year ago, I was optimistic because Israel was heading the right way. Of all people, Ariel Sharon (one of Israel's most hawkish, right-wing strongmen of all times) decided to withdraw from Gaza, and hinted that areas in the West Bank would follow. No, not the best way possible, not as his predecessor Menahem Begin did with Egypt leading to a strong and long lasting peace, and certainly not in the very notable way Itzhak Rabin did with Jordan, getting peace and even friendship. But at least, Sharon accepted the reality, and seemed he meant to let Palestinians build their state. When he organized a new party which reduced Likud to a shadow of its past, one of Israel's most prominent figures for the peace camp, Shimon Peres, joined. Amazing.
But still, there is too much hatred. Of course, life in Gaza is plainly not sustainable. You can walk the Gaza strip side to side in less than one hour, and North to South it's less than 50 Km long. Still, over 400,000 people live in there. The area is simply unsustainable.
Gaza depends for everything from Israel. Of course, according to the never-stable security status, the border between Gaza and Israel opens or closes every day. When I lived in Zikim, mostly every day there were five or six Arabs working with us... Except for the days when they weren't there. And, of course, Israel also depends on the Arabs for much of its hard labor jobs (as it's always the case when two economically disparate populations live together).
Anyway, back on track: Besides giving the Arabs their slice of land (which in a squeezed area as Israel is always hard; people have fought for such small spaces it's hard to believe), the only thing Israel can do is help them. It has worked before: Israeli Arabs (the Arabs living inside the internationally recognized borders of Israel) are full citizens. Yes, there is racism in the country towards them, and yes, they are not really equal with Jewish Israelis - But they have voting rights, they have the right to be elected, they can optionally join the army (it's not compulsory as it is with the Jewish population), and they get government aid. Arab towns are poorer than Jewish towns, yes, but they have their dignity.
The problem in Gaza and South Lebanon (somewhat less so in the West Bank, but also) is that it's plainly all made up of refugee camps. Refugees that were born there, and whose parents were born there as well. And, let me emphasize this, they are not Israel's fault. The refugees fled the newborn Israel because the Arab states said (in May 1948) they would enter Palestine and butcher everybody, inviting Arab civilians to flee and then get back home - of course, 700,000 (out of 1,300,000 who lived in Palestine by then) Arabs did so. And when the Arabs lost the war, the Palestinians were denied citizenship by all the Arab countries except for Jordan (not surprisingly, the most stable of them all, and with which Israel has the closest relation). They were given refugee camps to live, one over the other. When Egypt signed the peace with Israel, it demanded back every inch of the Sinai - But not an inch of Gaza. And not a single Palestinian refugee.
I agree here with Jordi as well: There is a huge military operation in Gaza, but it's more spectacular in Lebanon today. The media talks about Lebanon, but not about Gaza. And the crisis in Gaza is not easier. But how can it be solved in a permanent way? Israel does neither have land to spare to give to the Palestinians - and even if it did, most of Gaza is surrounded by the Negev, a desert where it would not be easy for them to get anything better than what they have inside Gaza. As desirable as it would be to have a completely independent Palestinian state, Gaza would just remain a concentration camp. There is too much hatred, and neither Arabs nor Israelis want to keep working together, not trusting each other. The only solution I can find to this is to have an agreement with Egypt, where Egypt opens its border with Gaza, gives either nationality or work permits to Gazan Palestinians, and Israel injects capital to develop Northern Sinai, to give some hope of survival to the almost half million people.
The same in Lebanon: Israel was widely applauded to withdraw from South Lebanon in 2000. The area is mostly peaceful - For $ DEITY 's sake, what is the kidnapping of two soldiers in a six year period compared to soldiers being killed in the occupation army every week or two? Israel did well to leave Lebanon. Lebanon was starting an incredible national rebuilding process, as Robert Fisk tells us (Spanish only. I could find only the first paragraphs of the original English version, which appears to require subscription) of the wonders of the rebuilding process, reduced to rubble again. Of course, Israeli and Syrian armies left Lebanon. The Lebanese government and army are plainly too weak to care for the country. Hezbollah (which, indoubtely, is a terrorist entity, no matter how many benefical aspects it does have) have poured tremendous amounts of money to rebuild its area of influence, South Lebanon. Of course, they rebuilt, healed and educated with a strong ideological inclination, and that's not good for Israel. What can Israel do to leasen the Islamist influence? Simple: Send aid. Don't just leave. Don't leave a void, don't invite bad people to loot, don't invite extremist people to recruite future bombers. Turn occupation into aid. Build hospitals. Build houses. Give money, give infrastructure. Do it behind your back, as you gave money to the South Lebanon Army for almost 20 years. But make the people see you don't want to kill and rob them - Make the Lebanese Arabs feel their neighbour as a friend, although different. Bring back the good border. What's that? That's the nickname for the Lebanese border between +- 1950 and 1970 - The only border that was stable, that was not filled with hatred, where Israeli doctors treated Lebanese patients across the fence. And still today, the border is just a simple fence.
How can you convince a people of not killing themselves to kill the invasor? Don't act as an invasor. Act in all your best self-interest - Save them from poverty and from indignity.

Neither of them can win this war. It will only cause more hatred. Killing civilians has always and will always be a bad idea. So please stop this stupid war. The only way of winning by military means would be genocide. Or more likely, geocide, since you'd need to get rid of all relatives and friends of your opponents around the world... Not really an option, is it? The thing which bothers me is that the Israelis should know better. They've been trying this for years and it didn't help. Now why are they doing such a large military operation again? I mean, what is the true reason? Read a statement by UNICEF and the WHO.

The psychological impact is serious, as people, including children have witnessed the death or injury of loved ones and destruction of their homes and communities.

Guess what, these will probably devote their life now to attacking Israel. So no peace for Israel and the middle east for the next 20 years either... Apparently both the U.S. and Israel like to use the excuse of fighting "terrorists, and not countries" to not follow international humanitarian laws. Which doesn't make any sense; if you want to fight terrorism, you must go way beyond what humanitarian laws enforce.

Just reading another painfully funny The Daily WTF[1] entry. Instead of a code snippet, this was a resume snippet instead. Apart from listing skills in such heavyweight corporate tools as Emule, Kazza, Paint, WordPad, Acrobat Reader, and Winzip, the candidate also listed "Average" knowledge in a very, very wide variety of skills. The important question is, over what collection of the population is this average taken? Considering the usual demonstration of these "Average" skills, I think that the average is taken over the entire mammalian population, including all of those dolphins who (thankfully) have never even heard of "Micro Soft Visuals: Basics", and that dog at puppy training this morning that spent most of the time licking it's own genitals. Self assessments are always bollocks. Nobody's seriously going to rate themselves "half-assed" at every programming language they know. I've seen one interesting way to describe your language proficiency, though -- group languages into "used in the last 6 months", "1 year", "3 years", and "dim, dark distant past". It gives a reasonable idea of what languages you might be useful in, either through current knowledge, a past knowledge that can be polished, or perhaps knowing a language similar to the one that the company needs skills in that you can be cross-trained into.

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1. A site dedicated to archiving, for posterity, the worst of the code that controls the world. Scary and hilarious all at once.

I'm not usually a grand fan of the latest and greatest fads'' in programming. The only C# I know is the black key next to D#, and I loathe coffee. An IDE in the hands of a poor programmer will still result in crap code. While I do think that agile methods (such as XP) can do well in certain development environments, I certainly don't subscribe to the notion that XP can solve all the world's software production ills. And so on. I do know quite a number of programming languages, and tend to pick up new ones out of intellectual curiousity (although Ada did put a severe dent in that habit) or because a bit of research tells me that the language might be particularly suitable for a particular task (although I've since learned that the actual purpose of PHP isn't dynamic websites so much as bringing the security levels of Linux boxes in line with Windows-led industry standards). I also learn languages because I want to hack on projects written in them, which is motivational, but not a particularly good way to get a deep understanding of a language. Why all of this introspection in a blog? So you have the background to understand how everything about Ruby is different for me, including how I'm getting started using it. I have no interest in hacking on a Ruby-implemented project, and -- although Rails proponents give me an impression similar to that of a horny teenager with a shiny new unlimited broadband account -- I don't have any particular use for Ruby at the moment (I want to write less webapps, FFS, not more!). So, why the hell did I fork out $90 hard-earned South Pacific pesos for a copy of "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide"? A couple of reasons:

• I'll admit it, Ruby caught my attention because of the hype surrounding it. What made this hype different was that it was coming from people who I knew as being (a) intelligent, and (b) usually immune to the typical hype machines. This suggested to me that the hype about Ruby might be, at the very least, a different sort of marketing bollocks, if not evidence of actual utility. Worth a look, at any rate.
• I had previously read a fantastic book on the general concepts of programming, entitled "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master", by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt. I had enjoyed the style of the book, and respected their ideas, and so when they were advocating Ruby as "the language that made programming fun again", and they had a complete tutorial and reference book out on the topic at hand, it seemed natural that I would look at their Ruby book as my "book of first refusal", as it were.

I'm glad I got "Programming Ruby". The book is superbly organised, reads very easily, and gives you all of the love as and when you need it. Surprisingly for me and a technical book, I read the first section of the book "cover to cover". By the end of it, I came away with a real (if naturally superficial) understanding of the language, and a feeling that I was ready to tackle the world in Ruby. It is a sad state of affairs when the first piece of new programming you can sink your teeth into is some four days after finishing your initial studies into a language, but this afternoon I wrote my first Ruby program in anger. It's quite simple -- just take stdin and rewrite it all on stdout with the lines in a random order. But I wrote it in a new programming language, in about 3 minutes, with nothing more than ri (Ruby's answer to firing up python and typing help(xyzzy), more or less) and "Programming Ruby". I think I also produced a suitably reasonable result:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
lines = []
while line = gets() do
	lines << line
end
	
while ! lines.empty? do
	idx = rand(lines.length)
	puts lines[idx]
	lines.delete_at(idx)
end

(Any Ruby afficionados out there, feel free to e-mail me and tell me what egregious sins I've committed). I think it looks reasonably neat and clean, it's certainly simple, and the use of real Object Orientation makes for a certain readability (I think the method call lines.empty? is particularly cute, although I did initially consider the use of a question mark in a method name to be a crime against humanity). So, will I be using Ruby more in the future? I think so. There are some features in Ruby which I'm hoping to get a lot more cosy with -- the idea of "blocks" looks particularly interesting, and I don't think the utility of languages that have been designed, top-to-bottom, to really live the OO ideal has been explored enough (you SmallTalk bigots can stop glaring at me now -- really, I mean it -- stop it!). It's far too early to tell whether Ruby will become my "go to" language for random development tasks, but anything that stops the nightmares (where I start thinking about using PHP as a general scripting language) cannot be all bad. And, if I continue to make new webapps, Rails will probably come in handy. Update: HTML <pre> tags don't like having < inside them unescaped. Also, Philipp Kern pointed out that the Ruby documentation browser is called ri (not ir as I originally wrote). Philipp was also kind enough to provide a much shorter version of my original script, which shows the power of Ruby so much better:

 lines = []
 STDIN.each_line    line  lines << line  
 lines.sort_by   rand  .each    line  puts line  

Now tell me that isn't a language worth using!

Went to see 'Billy and me' on Friday at the CSO. A celebration of Billy Holiday, directed by Terri Lyne Carrington and performed by five fine vocalists: Rita Coolidge, Niki Haris, Joan Osborne, Dianne Reeves and Rokia Traore. A little multimedia-ish with a few short readings, photos and film segments. This part didn't flow all that well as the 'acting MC', Rita Coolidge, completely bombed that part. On the other hand, the vocal performances were all outstanding. We went as we wanted to see Dianne Reeves another time after a truly breathtaking last concert a few years ago, and she did not disappoint. However, the others vocalists were very fine too, and I should check out some of their recordings. Musical arrangements, and performances, were really good. Some pieces were a little 'funked up', in particular I'll be seeing you in a world-music alike flavour with really nice horns (Rob Smith, tp and ts; Tineke Postma, ts and ss) and rhythm section (Paul Bollenback, g; Mitchel Forman, kb; James Genus, b; Munyungo Jacksone, pc) and everything driven by Terri Lyne Carrington at the drums. All in all a very nice concert.