I was reading xkcd by clicking on the random link when I noticed that the same cartoons were coming up again and again. I was wondering if this was Confirmation bias on my part or a duff random number generator on the server's part. Randall Munroe is a science geek, and I figured what he would do is test this idea... One python script and 12,000 (approx) requests later, I had a file full of numbers and started trying to remember some statisics. I threw together a quick bit of python to work out the mean and standard deviation (its here). The mean value is 97.4155602788 and the standard deviation is 171.040683155. If they are uniformly distributed from 1 to 361, the expected mean would be 104.211323761 and the standard deviation would be 181.0. So I was lost in thought for a while. However, the following quick check threw some light on the difference.

>>> data = [int(x) for x in open('numbers.data')]
>>> for x in xrange(0, 361):
...   if x not in data:
...     print x
... 
0
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360

So comics numbered about 338 don't appear. And recomputing the mean and standard deviation for 1 to 337 gives a mean of 97.2830920561 and a standard deviation of 169.0, which is about the mean and standard deviation the data gives. I'm now waiting for someone who actually knows stats correcting me in where I went wrong. The conclusion? I suffer from confirmation bias :-(. For those who like pretty pictures, here is one, courtesy of the Google charts API and pygooglechart: code here

For those who aren t clinically dead, you may have heard of the BBC . The BBC are the state-ish-funded TV network in the UK, and the country s biggest broadcaster, alongside three other major terrestrial broadcasters who make their content widely available without payment ITV, Channel 4, and Five. These broadcasters also make some or all of their programming available for streaming over the Internets usually their home-grown programming only, not licensed stuff from America. Now, once upon a time, the online functionality was mostly offered via a proprietary P2P-and-DRM-based system called Kontiki. Kontiki was unpopular for various reasons for example, it was Windows-only, and banned by several Internet providers due to the use of P2P (e.g. I know such technology is still banned on the University of Oxford network). As a result, this lead to the introduction and eventual replacement of browser-based streaming solutions, starting with the changes made to BBC s iPlayer. iPlayer is nowadays a combination of an Adobe Flash service for web surfers, an unencrypted MP4 streaming service for users of mobile devices such as iPhones, and as of a couple of weeks ago, has streaming support built directly into the PlayStation 3 s user interface too. Oh, and on the PC, it supports DRM-based downloading courtesy of the Adobe Air platform, on Windows, Mac, and Air-capable (x86) Linux. Channel 4 s service 4od, and Five s Demand Five, are also based on Adobe Flash, and streaming-only. They re basic and functional. The final interesting one here is ITV s ITV Player. ITV Player was, until about a week ago, the only non-Flash service, instead making use of Microsoft Silverlight. They have now changed to be Flash-based, like their peers, meaning the entire market mandates use of the Adobe Flash plugin or, at a push, command-line utilities or browser plugins which grab the raw video files from the broadcasters servers, in violation of their licenses. Why is this interesting? Well, when ITV Player used Silverlight, we could watch TV using Free Software: Novell Moonlight 2.0 Beta 1.1 and above worked fine with it, on i386 and AMD64 (and other architectures with a recompile). Now that it s using Flash rather than Silverlight, where do we stand for watching streaming TV legitimately with Free Software? Let s take a peek! Firstly, some preamble. I m running Ubuntu Jaunty, and I hand-compiled a SVN (I think SVN? Maybe Bzr) snapshot of Gnash revision 11485 to ensure I had an up-to-date view of proceedings. It definitely seems to be working, as I m introduced to the world of Flash advertising via Gnash, and Youtube.com also works, more or less. And I m not discussing Adobe s Flash plugin here, for various reasons:

• It s proprietary. Boo.
• It s i386-only in several instances a beta of an AMD64 plugin exists, but your browser will crash on BBC iPlayer sites if you have the iPlayer Adobe Air app installed, as Air is i386-only. And the packages in Ubuntu install the i386 plugin alongside the abominable and crashy nsPluginWrapper.
• Did I mention it was proprietary? If the only way to surf the web on a Free OS is with proprietary software, then we re not doing very well.

So, Gnash it is. Firstly, it s a PITA to compile, as upstream seem to have misunderstood how AutoFoo works i.e. it detects that you don t have headers installed for certain features, and tells you so, yet still enables those features at configure-time (and obviously fails when building). Hey guys, if I don t have qapplication.h, take the hint and disable KDE support for me like every other bloody app does. With that out of the way, let s get to it! BBC iPlayer Well, what does the landing look like? Looks fine to me! Let s try playing a show! Oh. Um Never mind, then. Seems iPlayer s JavaScript to detect Flash presence doesn t pick up on Gnash, and it bails out. Score so far: 0/1 Demand Five Another former Kontiki partner, how do these guys fare? Hey, that looks pretty good to me! Perhaps we re onto a winner this time? Poot. Gnash is definitely being invoked see the context menu there but it sure isn t doing anything useful. Score: 0/2 Channel 4 4od How do those hip cats at Channel 4 fare? Hm Gotta confess, not feeling too hopeful about this one Oh, well, even worse than iPlayer. What you folks might not recognise is the missing Play buttons which are supposed to be to the right of the program descriptions in that list of episodes. Presumably more Javascript/Flash interop failure. 0/3 ITV Player Last, but not least, how does the newest entrant into Microsoft-free streaming fare? Now, now, in fairness, it s always been this bad, even when they used Silverlight weirdos that they are, ITV have always used Flash for their navigation, even when they used Silverlight for playback. The Flash-based navigation you (don t) see here is barely any better even with the proprietary Flash plugin. What the proprietary plugin does NOT do, however, is consume the 750 or so meg of RAM that Gnash did when sat idle on this screen. I mean, that s not a problem, that s why I have 6 gig in here, but still, not wise on Wifey s netbook. Oh. Well then. 0/4 it is. So? What annoys me here isn t so much that nothing works. I m used to there being temporary gaps in Free Software functionality, that s pretty normal. But I m greatly vexed that one of these four used to work on a Free platform, and now it doesn t and that places like UbuntuForums are filled with people celebrating that fact. Celebrating that ITV have stopped using the evil nasty Microsoft system which happened to have a functional Free replacement and that they ve now moved to a non-Microsoft system which mandates a proprietary plugin. It s not the first time either Major League Baseball in the USA used to use Silverlight for their HD streaming, and now they use a combination of Flash and a proprietary Windows-only extension to Flash to make it load WMV files this is considered a victory. It really isn t. We should NEVER be forced to use Proprietary software in order to surf the web yet now we ve gone from having access to 25% of the UK s streaming TV services via Free Software to 0% of them, and people are happy about it. So, I want you to think long and hard about this question, one which seems to get the oddball answer far too often: What is more important promoting Free Software, or demoting Microsoft Corp?

Umh, is today the quote your neighbour day? No? Thought so... Still, for the second time in a couple of minutes, I'm quoting/translating here. This time, I'm quoting a short text posted by fellow Mexican Debian guy Rodrigo Gallardo: Deceptions (hmm... Not in the let you down sense, but in the deceiving sense. Sometimes it is hard to translate a single word without twisting it around). My translation is far from perfect - Read it in Spanish, you will enjoy it more. Rodrigo says:

Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we desire to be deceived? Joseph Butler

I was in Colima, sitting on a slide in a city park, that day I understood why somebody might want to be drunk. Several years later, this time in Tlalpan, I understood why somebody would want to believe in a god. And sometimes I am truly sorry not to be able to embrace neither of both longings. The idea of letting go the facts, to believe they have an inner order, although covered in mistery, or they are just far away, blurry. But where others see destiny, I see things falling naturally in their place. Where others see beauty in the mistery, I see a challenge. And even more beauty in an elegant explanation, in understanding. Motivation, not in the promise of future welfare but in the certainty of this limited but tangible present welfare. Freedom in the absence of a purpose, and inmortality in the little pebble I am in the great human building. I suppose that if Revernd Butler knew his phrase inspired this divagation, it would not make him precisely happy. But, things are what they are, and his argument says what it says.

When I was in Chandigarh, I visited the Nek Chand rock garden. The place has a lot of art (mostly sculpture) built out of a large amount of household and other waste. The park has sections of arrays of similar sculptures of all kind. This rock garden was the pet project of one Mr. Nek Chand which city authorities discovered a few years after he starting it.

While most of the park is very interesting and beautiful, it looks like the authorities also expanded the original creations with quite a few things that Mr. Nek Chand certainly did not build himself. A few pictures:

The problem On a couple of Debian Etch systems we have a plone-site that is published using a backport of the nginx web server. The Zope instance is running on the standard port and serves the Plone contents under the /plone path. Initially we were publishing the site to the external world using an https site served by nginx using the following entry on the configuration:

  location /plone/  
    proxy_pass http://plone:9673;
    include    /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
   

The proxy.conf contents are quite standard:

  # proxy.conf
  proxy_redirect                  off;
  proxy_set_header                Host $host;
  proxy_set_header                X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header                X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  client_max_body_size            0;
  client_body_buffer_size         128k;
  proxy_connect_timeout           90;
  proxy_send_timeout              90;
  proxy_read_timeout              90;
  proxy_buffer_size               4k;
  proxy_buffers                   4 32k;
  proxy_busy_buffers_size         64k;
  proxy_temp_file_write_size      64k;

With this settings we see the /plone contents using the same path that is used by the Zope instance, but after testing we have decided to change the /plone path and server the contents under the /web path. The Wrong Solution The fist option I though about was quite simple, rename the Zope's plone object to web. Seems reasonable and simple for someone without Zope experience (I don't administer the internals of the Zope/Plone site), but now I know that it is a very big mistake, because renaming objects in Zope in not cheap, as it implies that the server has to modify all the contents of the renamed object and the operation can take a very long time. With my ignorance I tried to rename the plone object using the Zope administrative interface and after a minute or so I cancelled the page loading that was running on my browser, thinking that I had cancelled the rename operation. To make a long story short I'll tell you that the operation was still running and after several hours the folder was renamed (in fact I noticed when the good solution broke, as I had already solved the problem using the next method), but something went wrong and part of the site functionality was broken... the final solution to the debacle has been to recover a backup of the Zope instance older than the rename operation and continue from that copy. The Right Solution (TM) It seems that Zope has a couple of systems to do Virtual Hosting and the best option is the use of the product called Virtual Host Monster, a weird and confusing system (IMHO, of course), that does the job once the right configuration settings are in place. The best solution to our problem was to modify the requests done by the reverse proxy without touching anything on the Plone site (the original one already had a Virtual Host Monster object installed and that was the only thing that we needed to add). The nginx configuration for the new /web path is the following:

  location /web/  
    proxy_pass http://plone:9673/plone/VirtualHostRoot/_vh_web/;
    include    /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
   

With this change, when the user asks for anything under the /web/ path the Zope server gets the contents traversing the /plone object and adding to it the elements that appear after the VirtualHostRoot component, ignoring components that start with the _vh_ prefix (the protocol and host name of the requests are not modified, as we did not touched that). Once the object is found, the server rewrites the URLs included on the HTML files using the path components that appear after the VirtualHostRoot one, including the suffix of the components that start with the prefix _vh_. For example, when the Zope server receives a request for an URL like:

  http://plone:9673/plone/VirtualHostRoot/_vh_web/home

it publishes the content found on:

  http://plone:9673/plone/home

but the HTML files returned assume that their base URL is:

  http://plone:9673/web/home

Note: red underlined links are clickable flickr photo page for this post

I'm not suffering from it myself at present, but over at that prince of productivity blogs, 43 Folders, Merlin Mann has a nice piece on "E-mail Bankruptcy. The idea is that if you ever get completely overloaded with unread / unresponded-to e-mail, you just "declare bankruptcy", delete all your unread e-mail, and let the world know that if it's important they should resend it. The best part of the article for me, though, was this description of e-mail overload:

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn't take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that's taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can't handle that one tiny thing. "What 'pile'? It's just a fucking pebble!"

The next time I get bothered that someone hasn't replied to my e-mail, I'm going to try to remember that they may have a lot of other pebbles in their pile.

Here it’s a top-10 list of really important things, created by M dicos Sin Fronteras in Spanish. directhex, from #debian-offtopic (thanks!), provided a grammar/spelling check on my original English translation.

1. Central African Republic: Resurgence of the conflict. In 2006, its civilian population was a victim of violence again. During these months, confrontations have taken place between government troops and rebel groups. Civilians, suspected of supporting one or the other, have stuck in the biddle. Around 100,000 civilians have been forced to leave their homes. Several children, under 5 years old, have become ill of malaria, worms and serious respiratory infections.
2. Chechnya: Physical and psychologic scars. The consequences of a conflict that has lasted over 12 years so far are still present. Large numbers of Chechens that were displaced during the most serious phases of the crisis have already returned. However, the majority still lack housing and has to live in temporary shelters. Violence, kidnappings and abuses are still rampant. In the rural zones, medical infrastructure is almost nonexistent.
3. Sri Lanka: Civilians caught in the middle. Combat between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have intensified since the summer, causing displacements of tens of thousands of people. Other are still imprisoned and cannot flee.
4. Democratic Republic of Congo: Violence and permanent deficiencies. Deprivation and violence suffered by millons of Congolese is still happening unnoticed by the rest of the planet. Eastern Congo is a battleground for fights between several armed groups, included government forces that use force against civilian populace, leading to brutal living conditions.
5. Somalia: War and natural catastrophes. Even though its current situation has temporarily attraced media attention, the terrible living conditions of the Somali population are still largely forgotten. The country has one of the worst levels of sanitation in the world, and a quarter of the infant population dies before reaching 5 years old.
6. Colombia: Living with fear. Massacres, executions and fear are a daily life of thousands of Colombians. So far, almost three million have fled their homes because of a conflict marked by the drug trafficking that involves government forces, paramilitary groups and armed guerrillas.
7. Haiti: Extreme urban violence. The violence and insecurity is a daily breakfast in its capital city, Port-au-Prince, with confrontations between armed groups, the Haitian police and the UN Stabilization Mission on Haiti. Since December 2004, more than 3,000 people have been registered with bullet wounds, including more than a thousand women and children.
8. India: 25 years of conflict. Confrontations between Maoist insurgents, government forces and anti-Maoist military services have caused the displacement of 50,000 civilans in several areas of the country. The population still lives with fear and violence, with little or no access to sanitary conditions.
9. Tuberculosis: Obsolete and insufficient treatments. Against popular opinion in the West, tuberculosis is not an “obsolete problem”. Each year, it causes the deaths of two million people, around nine million people contract the disease, and new multiresistants variants are appearing.
10. Undernourishment: Thousands of avoidable deaths. Whilst in Spain the Ministry of Health tries to fight one of the major problems of the decade, obesity, millions of children die of hunger around the world and more than 60 million people show signs of acute undernourishment.

I guess not everything around is a top ten contest on popularity of who’s the hottest, who’s the prettiest, who has the longest penis or the biggest breasts, or whose farts smell better, geek, eh?

I was sorry to see the announcement by Danny O'Brien of among other things Need To Know that he's been doing poorly. Danny's a stand-up guy of the old school, and although we've never been hugging friends I consider him a pal of some sort. So it's bad to hear that he's Down and Out. I hope that he gets back Up and In, and returns to his m tier of stickin' it to the Man. tags: danny obrien poorly get well soon

Aubanerie Amita June and I took a walk up to the Aubanerie on Mont-Royal to get some winter accessories. Winter in a snowy country means that you have to have a large stock of the little bits of knitted cloth that keep the ambient air from freezing the skin off of your bones: hats, gloves, scarves, woolly socks, ear muffs, long underwear. Our first winter in Montreal, I had like 1 hat, 1 pair of gloves, 1 scarf, etc. I spent maybe 30 minutes a day wandering around the house looking for one or the other of them before going outside. Given that when it's -20C outside, you just can't leave the house without any of these accessories, it was kind of a big waste of time. So now we have a common pool of wintery clothes for the household. 5-6 toques, a few scarves, a vaguely sinister basket of gloves that look like severed hands, a ton of socks, etc. Sometimes I leave the house with two toques -- one in my pocket and one on my head -- Just In Case. The Aubanerie up the street is pretty great for buying cheap-o accessories. They have some stuff at Dollarama and other $1 stores, but they tend to be either really thin, really small, or sold in separate chunks so each item costs only a dollar. The Aub has OK stuff that doesn't look too ridiculous. Amita June is getting to be quite a walker -- we didn't bring the stroller for this trip. She just toddled up the street, and although we stopped and looked at a lot of sticks and pebbles and porches, we made pretty decent time for a 15-month-old and her papa. On the way home I wore a new toque and Amita June had a new pair of mittens linked with string, as if one were the astral projection of the other. Now she's asleep -- shopping is hard work -- and papa gets to work a little more on trying to make Wikiwyg work. tags: amitajune shopping montreal winter clothes aubanerie

Mon Qu bec While searching for info on the Aubanerie on Google, I stumbled across Wiki Mon Qu bec, a Russian-language wiki about Montreal and Quebec. Fantastic. tags: monquebec quebec russian wiki

One new technology for saving fuel in cars is the 6 stroke engine. This is an engine that has two power strokes for every intake of fuel. The first power stroke is from the fuel burning, the second is from water being injected into the cylinder and boiling rapidly using steam for power. A significant amount of the weight of a car or truck engine is the cooling system. With water being injected into the cylinder after every burn the engine will require no other cooling, this can mean a weight reduction of up to 500KG for a truck engine! It is claimed that this technique can "improve a typical engine s fuel consumption by 40 percent". Note that this technique could be combined with the technology in a Prius for even greater efficiency.

Simon Richter wrote an interesting response to my blog about clean energy. I'm guessing that the part of Germany he's from is similar in some ways to Amsterdam (where I used to live).

In Amsterdam tiny cars are used a lot more than they have been in most places. There is the Smart Car but there is also a tiny car that can only seat one person (I'll update this entry with a link if someone provides me one). The tiny car appears to weigh ~200Kg, has a maximum speed of 30Km/h, and is narrow enough to fit in bike lanes. Such cars will take little petrol and can be used for shopping. The short-distance car idea is being used by many people already in northern Europe.

Simon suggests having a standard baggage container that fits in all cars. I don't think that would work as there are many different design factors (parking space, cargo capacity, and aerodynamics) which force designers to choose different shapes.

I think that a better idea would be a standard baggage trailer that could be towed by any small car. It should not be difficult to design a trailer that can be safely towed at 30KM/h behind a tiny car. The supermarkets could rent such trailers to shoppers for a nominal fee. Then most shopping trips could use the cargo capacity of the tiny car, but when buying supplies for a party you could rent a trailer from the supermarket.

Another option is having shops deliver goods to you. I have observed an increasing number of people doing this at my local supermarket. Of course you would still need to take ice-cream home yourself and maybe milk and meat too.

Electric scooters are also a good option for travel. Unfortunately in Australia there are few good options for securing them at the moment. As an electric scooter is light enough to be carried it needs to be chained to something secure. In the Netherlands this wouldn't be a problem as the bicycle infrastructure includes plenty of bike racks to which you can chain your bike, scooter, etc. Of course the Netherlands is entirely flat so there's no need for an electric scooter. Melbourne has a lot more hills and most people aren't fit enough to ride a bike so scooters are needed to replace cars.

Regarding depersonalised cars. That would require a significant social change as currently cars are extremely personalised. One thing that I had been thinking about is the idea of sharing cars with neighbors. For example if you have an apartment building and there are a few people you trust then you could share a tiny car for going shopping. Sharing a car used for driving to work or for entertainment would not work well as the car would spend most of it's time in use (or at least parked somewhere away from home). Sharing a car that's used for small journeys would be much easier as such a vehicle would spend most of it's time at home.

In Australia most families have two cars. One is used a lot (spends maybe 70 hours a week away from home) and the other is used much less (maybe 10 hours a week). Instead of owning two cars it would be possible for families to own one car and share another.

Regarding the Pebble Bed Reactor, could the people who advocate it please read the Wikipedia article. The limiting factor is not thermal expansion (solids do not expand nearly enough) but the Doppler effect (fast neutrons are not as effective at triggering fission). But in spite of that issue, let's not consider an untested new reactor design to be the savior of nuclear energy. I think that most people who read my blog have a science or engineering background and know from experience that new technologies often don't work too well in the first version. When a new CPU has a bug it's usually not a big deal. When a new OS or application has many bugs it's often expected (expecially when the OS or application comes from a monopolist). But if a new design for a nuclear reactor turns out to have a bug then it will be a more serious issue.

I suddenly realised that I like receiving bug reports. In a recent bout of structured procrastination I fixed more or less all the bugs I could fix in my packages (except ppp. I don't feel like working on ppp right now, does anybody want to help me?) and now this is a quiet period. Obsessively checking the bugs mailbox for new messages is a clear withdrawal symptom. I am addicted to bugs for a very simple reason: they are a challenge. I stopped working on mutt because it was not interesting anymore to me and then I adopted ppp and packaged udev because I tough that maintaining them would require solving many interesting problems. It's too bad that solving some needs the collaboration of other developers, but this will be the topic of a different rant. But not all bugs are an interesting challenge. Some are just a total waste of my time, which usually is much more valuable than the time of the submitter. I will show some examples.

• Obscure bugs which I cannot debug and need repeated interactions with the upstream developers trying to debug them. OK, you submitted the bug and I am sorry that I cannot help more than this, but I told you where you can find somebody who cares. Now please do not expect me to forward emails back and forth from the BTS and upstream developers. This is not only very inefficient for you and for the people who are trying to help you, but also wastes my precious time.
• Features to be forwarded to the upstream maintainer. I am a Debian developer, not your personal assistant. Forwarding your feature request, which probably will never be implement because it is crazy, useless or just needs more work than it is available wastes my precious time. And then I will waste even more every time I will be distracted by seeing it in the BTS, and curse you for continuing to waste my time.
• Trivial upstream bugs like spelling errors. It is highly improbable that I will consider them important enough to be worth fixing with a patch in the Debian packaging, so what about you do not waste my precious time and just report them to the upstream maintainers?
• Requests for useless changes to the packaging. If it is useless and you do not even care enough to implement it, what makes you believe that I will? (Yes, I will decide what is useful.)
• Multiple reports about the package being totally broken. If an important package is obviously broken (often broken as in "the system will not boot") then probably somebody else will have already submitted a bug report. It is your duty to check for open bugs before reporting a new one, and merging or closing duplicate bugs wastes my precious time.
• Bogus reports showing that you did not RTFM.
• Bogus reports showing that you have no grasp of how the package works. Especially if I explained the issue in the README.Debian file.
• Unreproducible reports where every clue points to a PEBKAC and the reporter still does not promptly follow my instructions for trying to confirm the bug.

So, if you can follow these simple rules I will probably not flame you to ashes the next time you will report a bug on one of my packages.

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.

I had been an Enlightenment user for a long time—halfway the Summer of 2000 up to the early fall of 2004—before someone finally decided to pick up the pieces where they were left somewhere around 2000 and restart its development. Unfortunately, that also meant causing #219925, which was irritating me more and more each day. Eventually, in the early fall of 2004 (almost a year after I filed that bug), I gave up and started looking for something else. The problem, of course, was that I'd grown so accustomed to using Enlightenment and its way of doing things that I felt at a loss. I wanted to be able to move windows above the upper edge of my screen again. I needed focus-follows-mouse. I was having a hard time without edge-flipping. Eventually I found that there was functionality for all of the above, but it wasn't flawless. Especially not the edge flipping—GNOME implements that in a truly horrible way¹. Not to mention the fact that brightside, the application which implements edge-flipping for GNOME, segfaulted on me an annoyingly high number of times, sometimes even taking away my entire session with it. Even Enlightenment never did that; it would just misbehave instead. Apart from that, of course GNOME also had some extra annoyances that I didn't get rid of. The fact that it insists on mucking with my keyboard settings, to name just one example. Even so, I used it for about nine months. Then, slightly after DebConf5 in Helsinki, I realized what the true horror of GNOME is: not the fact that they hide away features or try to make the desktop void of superfluous options; the fact that they remove features that are critical to some of its users. I know I was horrified to find out that something I really used a lot had been removed in that new release. I kept using it for three more months before I threw in the towel and tried something totally different. Ion3. After coming from the mostly mouse-oriented interfaces that GNOME and Enlightenment were, ion3 was truly different. I liked it at first; it was a welcome change from what I'd previously been doing. Eventually, though, I found that the ion way of doing things just wasn't my way. The fact that, by default, it puts new windows right in front of the window you're working on was rather offputting. Any serious attempt at configuring the thing involves learning lua which, though supposedly not hard to do, is not something I ever found the time for. In the end, I discovered that I disliked working with ion, as I often felt that it gave me a fragmented and tunneled view on the world, and that it was working with me instead of the other way around. In short, it was getting the fun out of computing for me. Which wasn't good, at all. So that's when I started looking for something else again. When I'd made the decision to move way from ion3, I didn't want to keep using that "until I'd found something else"; instead, I quickly installed IceWM instead—which I still knew from back when I had a Yopy YP3000—and used that until I had found something better. Little did I know the beaty of IceWM. I've decided, by now, that it does all I need, and more: By default, it tries the best it can to put a window on your screen so that it overlaps with as little other windows as possible. I can have it not focus a new window by default. I does focus-follows-mouse, if enabled. It even does edge-flipping. Of course it's not perfect—the edge-flipping, though not as horrible as the GNOME implementation, can still use some improvement. As if to prove my point, I accidentally closed the window in which I was writing this very post before it had been written to disk, the cause of which could be described as an interface problem in IceWM (though it's more likely an example of PEBMAC (Problem Exists Between Mouse And Chair). But, all in all, using IceWM feels like finally coming home. Thanks, Marko and Mathias, for a truly wonderful piece of software. ¹ I know that there are a lot of people who dislike edge-flipping. I am 99% sure that this is because they've never seen it implemented right. Edge-flipping is great, if done right; it's nightmare if done wrong. GNOME does it horribly wrong. IceWM does it better, though not perfect. The implementation in Enlightenment is perfect. I'll discuss the details in another post.