• PGF (some examples): A TeX macro package for generating pretty graphics, from the same brilliant author who freed me from PowerPoint and Impress. The user-oriented PGF frontend called TikZ is at least as enjoyable as the more traditional PSTricks and it plays together with both PostScript and PDF!
• Impressive: An OpenGL-based PDF viewer formerly known as keyjnote. Some of its features even make sense, the others are at least nice to watch.
• rlwrap: Readline instead of ^[[D.
• Byte.fm: A professional web radio station all around music. The presenters make this a definite recommendation for German-speaking people.

Michael blogs about Critical Mass.
What is Critical Mass in case you are too lazy to go to Michael's or to the Wikipedia? A cyclist-awareness movement, showing how bikers are safer (i.e. more visible) when there are more of them. The (dis)organizational nature of this movement (at least according to Wikipedia's information) seems quite fun and interesting.
However, I have to oppose what Michael says is a strong point of CM in Austria - At least, given my country's culture.
People who don't bike often say we have the least bike-aware culture, and that this city must be like hell to cyclists. It is not - Mexicans tend to believe this is the worst place possible on many accounts, and I'm happy to prove the contrary. I do feel that bringing people out to the streets, as our local government's Mu vete en bici program pushes, is completely right: It shows people how fast they can move in real streets in the city, taking away the fear of being run over by a bus, and people will gradually understand we can all excercise the right to use the streets without polluting, and gives us a better idea on how to behave with traffic (even if the traffic is made of fellow bikers) around us. I know this program works - At least, because it worked on me. Whenever possible, I go everywhere in this (not small or friendly by any measure) city by bike.
Anyway - What criticism do I have for Michael's post? That he states they:

Bicycling ludicrously slowly for a good hour, we managed to claim some fairly busy streets while many people tried to get home by car.

IMHO, what we should be doing is to demand the drivers to respect us, not to make them want to run us over. They should not be driven into hating bikers because of the chaos they generate - It is terrible to sit in a car for two hours when you usually take 30 minutes. There is simply no justification for that.
When I took part of the World Naked Bike Ride, some people wanted to take all four lanes of Reforma. Fortunately, reason prevailed, and we took only the lane we were assigned. And we should keep that in mind! Whenever possible, we should protest and make ourselves heard, but without interfering, without damaging, other people's lives!
Oh, by the way: If anybody in Mexico wants to have some nice hours of healthy fun: I am still pondering whether to join, as it is a huge effort, but I am very inclined to do so. Next week, November 9, we will go by bike from Mexico City's Z calo to Pachuca. We face 95Km and close to four hours. The road to Pachuca is basically flat, and going in a large group is a great experience. Hope to see you there!

Wikipedia says:

Critical Mass is a bicycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world.

My home town of Innsbruck has been one of these cities since 29th August. I joined the movement for the third protest ride (de_AT) today to avoid the Hallowe en fuss, to have some fun, to get to know people, and out of personal conviction. Bicycling ludicrously slowly for a good hour, we managed to claim some fairly busy streets while many people tried to get home by car. A few of them attempted to get us out of their way by honking, but they gave up when they realized that our constant ringing and the music coming from the Soundcycle was louder than them. The hardest part was to get attention by pedestrians and drivers without interfering with buses and trams, but it worked most of the time. What s so great about Critical Mass is that it makes the participants experience just what they want to deliver: When there are more cyclists on the streets, every single one feels much safer, and motorists drive more carefully. I would usually avoid S dring at 5 p. m., but with an estimated fifty people around me, it is an entirely different matter. I also basically like the overall non-organisation of the trips: Whoever is at the top of the convoy can decide where it goes. Sadly, this spontaneity has its drawbacks: It briefly got us into the absurd situation of unlawfully using the street even though a cycle lane was available, which made our protest pointless for a few minutes. But a little room for improvement won t prevent me from taking part once more before the winter break.

At the end of every month, I check the catch-all mailbox for the domain of my class homepage to remove half a million of spam messages and see whether there are webmasterism-related mails in there (some people skip the Imprint section which spells out my true address). This time, I found a gem whose content can best be described as unsolicited commercial e-mail. It received some bonus points for not qualifying as bulk, so I decided to read it. In an early 2008 blog entry by a classmate of mine, he explains why he is fed up with how class photography was handled last school year. Someone at an Austrian company has apparently read the rant which they, as pointed out at the beginning of their mail, found hilarious. They happily join in bashing the company criticised in the post, then submit an offer. They pick some random student who has coincidentally written about the topic of class photography, and submit an offer. They didn t even bother to find out which school the student they thought they were writing to actually attends, let alone trying to contact the people in charge. Needless to say, the message is text/html. It is addressed to my classmate s Jabber ID. They misspelt it.

Tomorrow, a long bus ride to the capital of the Czech Republic will set off the last trip together with my high school classmates before the final exams in spring. We are to leave half an hour past 6am local time; I m surprised to find that my alarm watch can be configured to get on my nerves at five o clock in the morning. Until Friday, instead of connectivity I will have medieval buildings and woozy-for-some-reason teenagers all around me, so please don t expect me to reply to mails before Saturday. I ve been really looking forward to these holidays for weeks (hint: the school year started a fortnight ago). So glad they re finally here! PS: I m going to miss the party, so allow me to pre-congratulate 500000-submitter and the prospective winner of the contest. Cheers!

Jumping on a leaving bandwagon: How about krabbe, kaviar, safran, hummer, schnecke, wachtelei Readers who get this are most likely Austrians.

In today s episode of Tatort, a German-language TV series Martin blogged about some time ago, I had to laugh at this line:

You are a computer scientist, aren t you? What we ve got here is an equation with two variables. You certainly know that this easy to solve.

Interestingly, the same mistake can be found in an older episode of another German TV series called Der Bulle von T lz. A part of a dialogue between a detective and a teacher went like this:

Detective: Was she a good student?
Teacher: Not at all. She even cannot solve a simple equation with two variables.

Dear screenwriters, when in doubt, please stay away from maths. And while we re at it, there is no need for fingerprint matching software to show every fingerprint from the database on the screen and emit lots of short beeps while doing that. Your programmes are more enjoyable without this stuff. Update: As this post has triggered responses: First, I do not deny the overall quality of Tatort it is a great series. Second, of course there are systems of equations with more variables than equations which can be solved. But these aren t straightforward and certainly not what the people I m talking about had in mind

Do not

• listen to great (the ah, here comes my favourite passage kind of great) music,
• follow an interesting discussion on IRC,
• think about an important mail and
• try to code

at the same time, half an hour past midnight.

pid = os.fork()
pin, pout = os.pipe()

It just took me five minutes to figure out why these processes don t talk to each other. I m going to bed now.

Thanks to Anton Zinoviev, http://planet.debian.org/ is subscribed to my feed for months already, but I ve never gotten around to actually post something. So let s start in accordance with tradition! My name is Michael Schutte and I m yet another Debianist from Innsbruck, Austria. I have been around since about February, and I currently maintain kbd, python-odtwriter, and libgit-ruby. Then, I participate in the Debian/Ruby Extras team. I also contribute some QA work when time allows I even managed to fix an ugly security bug in an orphaned package once. I ll try to write down things here every once in a while (without breaking Planet too often).

Several stories on NPR today have featured interviews with Democratic voters in Florida and Michigan. Many of them were mad about the situation, but mad at their state democratic parties. Many of them did not vote because they were told their vote would not count, so now they are upset at these efforts to count the vote from these states.

Meanwhile, there is a very interesting post about how Hillary may want these delegates to remain unavailable to her, as a way to continue pressing her case all the way to the convention. Sigh.

This morning was the 2008 edition of Quarryman Challenge, a 5km and 10mile race in Lemont, which is southwest of Chicago along the Illinois-Michigan Canal. Three of us ran the 10 mile race, which was nicely organised. But is it ever friggin' hilly there: the race course takes three turns from the lower levels near the canal up towards those hills. As the elevation chart (that I cut out of this pdf file with the course map) shows, it is not so much the total elevation but rather how steep the incline is. That said, I did okay: even though the legs were really tired throughout from those inclines, I finished in 1:12:08 for a pace of 7:13. And given the reasonably small field, that yielded 34th place overall and third in my age group.

I've been on the road quite a bit lately. During my manic travel, I have been rather lax about blogging many of my recent talks. After a talk at CHI in Florence on the 7th and a talk at LUG Radio Live USA last Sunday, I'm in Troy, Michigan for Penguicon. It's an incredible combination of a science fiction and a free software/open source conference and it's a huge amount of fun. This morning I gave my Laptop Liberation talk and tonight I'll be helping judge the Open Source-ry Masquerade costume contest -- the very contest were Tron Guy premiered his now famous costume! Tomorrow I'll be giving my Revealing Errors talk which I premiered last Sunday at the LUG Radio event and which I'm really excited about. If you're around and at the event please find me and introduce yourself! If you're in the area, I may have some free time tomorrow night. Don't hesitate to get in contact.

Martin, sorry for calling you Madduck on the debian.ch-mailinglist. Luckily I didn’t use that name during our meeting in Zurich last week. *pfuh* To take part in the pdo-game with my own name (being Michael Prokop ;-)): as many of you might know I’m known as Mika in the community. The name was invented for me around 1999 (IIRC) by a greek flat collegue who liked to call me “Mika” - refering to Mika H kkinen (for whatever reason). From that on several people started to call me that way. I’m signing mails “to the community” with that nick since many years as well as using it in usenet and on freenode (IRC); on OFTC (another IRC network) I’ve to use mikap instead because mika was registered by another user already. Outside “the community” I’m usually known as Michael, good friends also use Michi and the family of my girlfriend uses Michl when the sister of my girlfriend (named Michaela and known as Michi as well) is present. Oh, and during grammar school I was AKA Proke.</secret> So calling me Mika is perfectly fine because it’s a kind of uniqueness for me. There might be just too many Michaels around and at least in Austria my nickname is everything but common. Quoting the marketing department: Great trademark! Oh and my speech parser knows to handle Michael, Michi and Michl as well - though it strongly depends on the situation, place, environment,…. Oh but using Proke is like talking to /dev/null - you’ve never heard of that name, ok?

Anatomy of a Murder. David Denby put it best:

Otto Preminger s Anatomy of a Murder, from 1959, is still the best courtroom drama ever made in this country, and, in its occasional forays out of the court, among the finest evocations of place an Upper Peninsula Michigan resort area in the off-season, leafless, underpopulated, alcoholic, and forlorn. James Stewart, in one of his wonderful melancholy late performances, plays a former county prosecutor named Biegler, a lifelong bachelor who now spends his time with a non-practicing lawyer (Arthur O Connell) and an unpaid secretary (Eve Arden), who sticks around for the wisecracks. The movie is leisurely, detailed, realistic, intensely companionable; you get a sense of how people exist at the margins of a profession without losing their dignity.

Although there are some distinctions between a murder defense in the 1950’s in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and modern-day patent litigation, the essence of trial technique is really not all that different. Highly recommended.

Prosecutor: Lieutenant Manion, wasn’t your action against Barney Quill much the same thing as your action against Miller or the Lieutenant you slapped at the cocktail party — all done in the heat of anger, with a willful, conscious desire to hurt or kill?

Defendant: I don’t remember my action against Quill.

Prosecutor: How long had you known your wife was stepping out with Quill?

Defendant: I never knew anything like that. I trust my wife.

Prosecutor: You just occasionally beat her up for the fun of it, I suppose?

Defense Counsel: There has been nothing established to permit a question like that. He keeps trying to insinuate without ever coming to the point. Let him ask the Lieutenant, did he ever beat his wife.

Judge: I will sustain the objection. Do you want to re-phrase your question, Mr. Dancer?

Prosecutor: No thank you, Your Honor. I’ve finished.

Technorati Tags: Otto Preminger, Anatomy of a Murder, David Denby

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I'm going to be traveling and giving talks quite a bit this spring. Here's what my schedule looks like now. I don't think much will be added to it:

• February 29-March 1 - Houston, Texas - Matt Lee's Wedding
• March 12 - Amherst, Massachusetts - Hampshire College
• March 15-16 - Cambridge, Massachusetts - FSF Members Meeting
• March 27-28 - New York City, New York - Fordham IP Conference
• April 7 - Florence, Italy - Renaissance Panel: The Roles of Creative Synthesis in Innovation at CHI
• April 11-13 - San Fransisco, California - Lugradio Live USA
• April 17-20 - Detroit, Michigan - Penguicon
• April 25-27 - Cambridge, Massachusetts - ROFLCon
• May 5 - San Fransisco, California - Sun's Community One

I'll be giving at least one talk at the FSF Members Meeting, the Renaissance Panel, Lugradio Live, Penguicon, and Community One. Matt's wedding is private. To join the FSF members meeting you must become an FSF Associate Member if you are not already. All of the other conferences require some sort of registration. Penguicon, Lugradio Live, and ROFLCon are each cheap and each promises to be a lot of fun. The talk at Hampshire should be free and open to the public. I'll be posting more about each of these as things get closer including details about what is that I'll be talking about. If you'd like me to talk to another group or at another event while I'm town for any of the events above, now would be a good time to ask. If you just want to meet up for a beverage of your choice, that's good too. In either case, get in contact.

Last Sunday, the 30th Chicago Marathon took place. This was meant to be the year to make this marathon even bigger: the field had increased substantially to 45,000 registrations yet it still sold out way earlier than in previous years. As it turns out, the weather did have its own surprises in store. Earlier in the preceding week, the forecast changed from overcast and rainy to sunny. And sunny it was. While we had a bit of cloud cover at the start at 8:00am, temperatures were already in the 70s and keep increasing. This year's marathon is now on the books as the hottest ever: the clouds dissipated and it was a scorcher. Needless to say, it was a rather challenging race. I finished in 3:41:39, which is my slowest time by some margin for the by now seven marathons I've ran. It was not the day for running fast. Of course, I didn't quite grok that at the start and ran ten miles reasonably hard in a quick pace, but then paid for it, and then paid some more. That said, apparently around 10,000 registered entrants didn't even start, and another 10,000 did not make it to the finish. With the heat, several hundred were treated by the medical teams. Worse still, one 35-year old runner from Michigan died (though the autopsy claims he had a heart condition; other reports say that alone cannot have been lethal). The race itself was aborted, and those who had not reached the half-way point by 12:00am were diverted to the finish and urged to walk rather than run. According to the (by now fairly extensive) news coverage, this whole experience left quite a few people mad and bewildered. As of today, a good 48 hours after the race, the City seems to be in some sort of crisis management mode to prevent damage for the oh-so-important bid for the 2016 Olympics. For some flavour of the news coverage, see an early report, some stunning pictures and some suggestions to prevent another one like this, all from the Chicagoist blog.

An interesting article on Time today: Failing Our Geniuses about how the most talented students are being sidelined by current education policy. Some choice bits:

Since well before the Bush Administration began using the impossibly sunny term "no child left behind," those who write education policy in the U.S. have worried most about kids at the bottom, stragglers of impoverished means or IQs. But surprisingly, gifted students drop out at the same rates as nongifted kids--about 5% of both populations leave school early. Later in life, according to the scholarly Handbook of Gifted Education, up to one-fifth of dropouts test in the gifted range.

It can't make sense to spend 10 times as much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to nurture those with the greatest potential.

We take for granted that those with IQs at least three standard deviations below the mean (those who score 55 or lower on IQ tests) require "special" education. But students with IQs that are at least three standard deviations above the mean (145 or higher) often have just as much trouble interacting with average kids and learning at an average pace. Shouldn't we do something special for them as well?

In a no-child-left-behind conception of public education, lifting everyone up to a minimum level is more important than allowing students to excel to their limit. It has become more important for schools to identify deficiencies than to cultivate gifts. Odd though it seems for a law written and enacted during a Republican Administration, the social impulse behind No Child Left Behind is radically egalitarian. It has forced schools to deeply subsidize the education of the least gifted, and gifted programs have suffered. The year after the President signed the law in 2002, Illinois cut $16 million from gifted education; Michigan cut funding from $5 million to $500,000. Federal spending declined from $11.3 million in 2002 to $7.6 million this year.

Monday was the first day of the OSCon tutorials. The first question was: how to get there? OSCon is being held in the Oregon Convention Center, about half a mile from the conference "headquarters" hotel, the Portland DoubleTree at Lloyd Center.

MAX light rail is free in this area. It's about a block to the Lloyd Center station, and a block from the Convention Center station to the Convention Center. The trains run every few minutes and are very friendly to people that aren't from Portland. On-board announcements point out bus and rail connections in advance, and each station has a system map, city map, and digital display listing the time until the next arrival. Even bus and streetcar stations have that display.

In fact, everyone here is. The personnel at the Amtrak station were great. Our cab driver from the station to the hotel told us about all the things he loves about Portland and why he'll never move anywhere else. And the DoubleTree hotel has probably the friendliest hotel staff I've ever seen, even when we reported water dripping from the ceiling in our room. The concierge desk gladly showed Terah how to get to a nearby Safeway for groceries, and explained -- correctly -- to me how to use trains and buses to get to the Japenese Gardens in Washington Park.

Anyhow, back to OSCon. The first two days are tutorials. These are extended talks. You can go to 2 per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I attended Advanced Vim Scripting and Linux Performance Monitoring. Neither was quite as advanced as I'd like, but I got useful information out of them both -- especially out of Linux Performance Monitoring. I finally learned the exact difference between buffers and cache and what the IOwait state in top really means, among other things. I heard from others in IRC that Simon Peyton-Jones was a fantastic speaker and his tutorial on Haskell met rave reviews. I'm looking forward to his keynote and talk on Wednesday.

I also went to the keysigning BoF in the evening. Signed a ton of keys, and met some interesting people. I met a couple of folks from an independent telephone company in Michigan that were interested in my Asterisk experience, and spoke to an Earthlink employee from Georgia that was involved on the ISP side of things.

In all, a good first day. This is a great conference in a great city, with lots of variety in its programming and lots of opportunity to network (the old-fashioned way).

The venue is also very nice, and aside from not being right next to the venue, so it the hotel.

The day's main mystery: everybody has noticed, and nobody has figured out why, the hotel elevators all stop on the 2nd floor on the way down, even if nobody requested it.

I filed an RFA: for hesiod. The University of Michigan should be held accountable for my decreased motivation to maintain this package.

We spent last week at the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan. This was the second year of the festival as well as our second year attending. Unlike last year, there was no “Freedom Festival” organized by Michael Moore-haters this year. Perhaps they are still recovering their debts from last year, when they lost money and had to stop their showing of “Michael Moore Hates America” after discovering it had inappropriate language for the family audience they were targeting. We saw nine films in just five days — four in one day was our max. (Rachele saw one more — The Beauty Academy of Kabul — that I missed, unfortunately, and we gave our tickets to Jesus Camp to Rachele’s parents.) Our selections were:

• Flirting With Disaster
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Men at Work
• Winter Passing
• La Moustache
• Paradise Now
• Innocent Voices
• Viva Zapatero
• The Killing

The one that sticks most in my memory is La Moustache. The essence of the plot is revealed in the first minute of the movie: a man shaves off his mustache. His wife of fifteen years doesn’t notice. In fact, she doesn’t remember he ever had a mustache. While the film starts as vaguely comic, it quickly spirals into a psychic breakdown with a possibly unreliable narrator. It was quite nearly perfect. The beautifully restored virgin print of Monty Python’s Holy Grail was astonishing. The film was shown for free on a large outdoor screen by the lake, and the sound was crystal clear (now in stereo!) no matter where you sat. There are a bunch of scenes everyone always remembers in the Holy Grail. I realized after watching it again that the movie is composed entirely of these memorable scenes. (I had the same feeling watching the Wizard of Oz after a ten to fifteen year hiatus recently.) Finally, Stanley Kubrick’s first film, The Killing (1956) also merits the maximum rating, whatever that is (5.5 stars?). While it lacks the surreal/experimental feel of his later films, Kubrick was already beginning to play with narrative structure and sequencing. The film walks through the events leading to the climax several times, each time from a different character’s point of view. But really it’s just a great heist flick. Mani Haghigi, the Iranian director of Men at Work, had an interesting observation about the festival. Unlike most other film festivals, he, as a director, could just hang out and enjoy the films and the company and not worry about impressing executives and distributors. The festival’s motto is accurate — “Just Great Movies.”