Went to the CSO on Friday night to see the annual concert of Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. This year's concert featured one set with four pieces from the new Vitoria Suite album---see here for a raving review. Those pieces were indeed very nice and I may to grab the disc to hear the full suite. Thhis was followed by a number of pieces composed or arranged by different band members. All in all a great concert. Hard not to love when you twelve-man strong brass section featuring four trumpets, three trombones, five saxophones supported by a nice rhythm section of three. Recommended.

I'm working on designing a microformat that can be used to indicate the location of VCS (git, svn, etc) repositories related to a web page. I'd appreciate some web standards-savvy eyes on my rel-vcs microformat rfc. If it looks good, next steps will be making things like gitweb, viewvc, ikiwiki, etc, support it. I've already written a preliminary webcheckout tool that will download an url, parse the microformat, and run the appropriate VCS program(s). (Followed by, with any luck, github, ohloh, etc using the microformat in both the pages they publish, and perhaps, in their data importers.) Why? Well,

1. A similar approach worked great for Debian source packages with the XS-VCS-* fields.
2. Pasting git urls from download pages of software projects gets old.
3. I'm tired of having to do serious digging to find where to clone the source to websites like Keith Packard's blog, or cariographics.org, or St Hugh of Lincoln Primary School. Sites that I know live in a git repo, somewhere.
4. With the downturn, hosting sites are going down left and right, and users who trusted their data to these sites are losing it. Examples include AOL Hometown and Ficlets, Google lively, Journalspace, podango, etc etc. Even livejournal's future is looking shakey. Various people are trying to archive some of this data before it vanishes for good. I'm more interested in establishing best practices that make it easy and attractive to let all the data on your website be cloned/forked/preserved. Things that people bitten by these closures just might demand in the future. This will be one small step in that direction.

Cute meme du jour:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Well, OK. Page 56, fifth sentence:

“The functions of other software interrupt service routines are quite variable; The I/O postprocessing interrupt service routine has a specific function to perform but is data-driven by the I/O request packets (IRPs) in its work queue.”

I know at least one of the slightly more than one people (I count too, right?) who read my blog (Hi, Ian!) might well realize what book this came from: VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures, by Ruth Goldenberg and Lawrence Kenah. Yes, the book really was the closest to me - I have an overdesk shelf, and it was the furthest out. The book, by the way, is a fascinating read; I don’t know of any other book that lays out the design of an entire OS kernel in the really quite elegant way that this book does. I got mine signed by Ruth, too, which is pretty damn cool. One highlight of this book are the quotes at the beginning of each chapter - sometimes funny, sometimes profound, frequently both. I decided to list those from the first part here, for the enjoyment of both my readers.

For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into a hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“By indirections find directions out.”

- Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2, i

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

And now I see with eye serene

The very pulse of the machine.

William Wordsworth, She Was A Phantom Of Delight

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

What you want, what you’re hanging around in the world

waiting for, is for something to occur to you.

Robert Frost

“Time,” said George, “why I can give you a definition of time. It’s what keeps everything from happening at once.”

Ray Cummings, The Man Who Mastered Time

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Abraham Lincoln, Letter to A. G. Hodges, April 4, 1864

‘Tis in my memory lock’d

And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1, iii

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

John Donne, The Sun Rising

It is equally bad when one speeds on the guest unwilling to go, and when he holds back one who is hastening. Rather one should befriend the guest who is there, but speed him when he wishes.

Homer, The Oddysey

I was alone and unable to comunicate with anyone. I did not know the names of anything. I did not even know things had names. Then one day, after she had tried a number of approaches, my teacher held my hand under the water pump on our farm. As the cool water ran over my hand and arm, she spelled the word water in my other hand. She spelled it over and over, and suddenly I knew there was a name for things and that I would never be completely alone again.

Helen Keller

People often talk about "memorable moments" -- times where pretty much everybody in the country remembers where they were at that exact time.

There are probably only two of those moments I can remember: the 1989 earthquake during the World Series and the time 9/11 happened. My car was in for service that day, and I was sitting in the lobby of the mechanics watching it on TV.

So now I have a third: watching Barack Obama win the presidency.

We were installing some new blinds in the kitchen while listening to the coverage on NPR, periodically going over to the office to watch the TV coverage on the computer. (Our TV is upstairs right now, so that was more convenient.)

A few minutes before the election was called, I remember Brian Williams saying something like "We're going to go to local stations now, but you better not walk away. We'll have some amazing news at the top of the hour."

We watched that announcement, then saw McCain's speech, and finally Obama's speech (missed the first minute or two of it actually). What an amazing evening.

Then seeing the stories of people celebrating all around the country and around the world: the impromptu party in front of the White House Tuesday night, the small gathering at the Lincoln Memorial Wednesday morning, the Obama parties all around the world. And we watched it on TV in our house while Jacob slept. I feel like I missed out somehow.

Until very recently I thought that it would be almost impossible to get someone worse than George W Bush as the leader of any significant country. Unfortunately it seems that I was wrong and John McCain and Sarah Palin promise more of the economic, regulatory, and military disasters that are the trademarks of the US Republican party (or at least the dominant Neo-Con branch). Here are some links about John McCain: Here’s a good summary of the racial issues in the current US presidential campaign (This is Your Nation on White Privilege) [1]. The Obama campaign is highlighting the connection between John McCain and Charles Keating [2]. McCain was one of the senators helping Keating while his bank (the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association) was going under. In the end 20,000 people lost their savings and the US taxpayers ended up losing $120,000,000,000. Frank Rich has written an article for the New York Times about the racist attacks on Barack Obama [5]. The current actions of the McCain campaign only barely stop short of calling for an assassination. The South Florida Times has an interesting article about the McCain family’s history of slave ownership [7]. Now John McCain is not responsible for the actions of his great-great-grandfather in owning slaves, and there’s nothing wrong with having black relatives who are the descendants of some of those slaves (even though there is doubt about whether the female slaves were legally adults or even consented to the sex acts in question). But he should be honest about it. Denying having non-white relatives in the face of the facts seems to be strong evidence of racism. It is however understandable that John doesn’t want to discuss the fact that some of his relatives have announced plans to vote against him. Rolling Stone magazine published an interesting article about John McCain’s history as a spoiled brat in the navy [10]. It seems that if your father is an admiral you can ignore orders, crash planes, and basically do whatever you like. It also reveals that John was broken by the Viet Cong torturers and provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid. I’m not going to criticise John for breaking under torture - I think that the assessment of wing commander John Dramesi (who was tortured by the same Viet Cong torturers but didn’t break) should be accepted. John Dramesi says that McCain “wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” while in captivity. However McCain’s use of his former POW status in propaganda is quite dishonest. John McCain is also documented as having described his wife as a “cunt” and a “trollop“. Here are some links about Sarah Palin: Former US Army Brigadier General (retired) Janis L. Karpinski writes about Sarah Palin [3], it’s interesting to hear what an intelligent female soldier has to say about her. One thing that I found noteworthy was the repeated references to “murdering” wild animals, shooting at a defenseless animal is of course quite different from shooting at a person who can shoot back (and different again from commanding an army). Janis also makes reference to Sarah setting the feminist cause back decades - I think that is what Sarah desires though. Also Janis points out the emotional problems for which pit bull terriers are known. There are many claims that Sarah is a “Maverick” and has a record of opposing corruption. This article in the Village Voice documents some of her corrupt activities - including having her home built for free in exchange for assigning the contract to build the Wasilia ice-hocky rink [4]. Thomas L. Friedman has written an article about Palin’s Kind of Patriotism [6]. According to Sarah it’s not patriotic to pay taxes, it seems to me that encouraging citizens to disobey the law should disqualify her from being elected without all the other issues. Thomas notes that Sarah is promoting the interests of Saudi Arabia by prolonging the US dependence on oil imports. The Huffington Post has an interesting article about Sarah Palin’s church [8]. It’s strange how little notice has been taken of Sarah’s former pastor who stated that people who didn’t vote for Bush were likely to go to hell. The Times has an article about “Troopergate”, some of Sarah Palin’s other corrupt practices, and the role of her husband as a shadow governor [9]. Update: Corrected URL [6].

• [1] http://www.opednews.com/articles/This-is-Your-Nation-on-Whi-by-Tim-Wise-080916-307.html


• [2] http://www.keatingeconomics.com/


• [3] http://www.truthout.org/article/palin-can-launch-us-back-time


• [4] http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-10-08/news/the-book-of-sarah/


• [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?ex=1239681600&en=b38b2d4387d4e3c4&ei=5087&excamp=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1015-L1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1015-L1


• [6] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/opinion/08friedman.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=palin%20patriotism&st=cse&oref=slogin


• [7] http://www.sfltimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2024&Itemid=1


• [8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html


• [9] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4692408.ece


• [10] http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

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The downside of NYC is that it is pricey but the upside is that there are a lot of free events to balance out the equation. Last night, I went to one of such free events at Lincoln center to see one of my favorite Puerto Rican folk singers, Roy Brown who was opening for Arlo Guthrie During Roy Brown’s last song, he called out another folk singer who I had never heard of Tao Rodriguez-Seeger to join him and I think that was probably one of my favorite songs of the night. Tao who comes from a family of folk singer types, usually performs with The Mammals and less frequently with The Anarchist Orchestra. His voice, at least in Spanish, is resounding and overpowering yet at the same time sports a certain type of gentle softness. It is striking and beautiful. If you like folk music, in English or Spanish, I would check him out. Here is a clip of a song recorded with Tito Auger and Roy Brown and a link to their recent complilation CD.

For the fifth time in a row, I started yet another year with 5k race by participating in the 22th New Year's Day 5k at the lakefront. The race had decent conditions. Chicago is currently having unusually mild weather, which is an extra bonus. It was well over 50 degrees yesterday, but a little cooler around fourty this morning, and unfortunately overcast. And luckily fairly little wind as it can be unplesant at the lake. Following some mild training runs both Saturday and Sunday, I took it relatively easy and finished around 20:15 or 20:20 -- I forgot to stop the Garmin at the finish, and the official results are not yet published. Not a bad time given that I haven't really trained since the last marathon.

I've been sitting on this for a while, gradually adding more bits as I think of them. So it's a bit long and rambly, but if I don't post it now I'll never get round to it. First, the details, for anyone who cares. I got married to my partner of 11 years, Katherine, on 1st December. This was actually our 11 year anniversary. We had a civil ceremony in The Assembly House, Norwich with a wine reception afterwards, then moved on to Wolterton Hall for the main reception, with a magnificant feast provided by Brasteds. Afterwards there was a chocolate fountain courtesy of Digby's and Nero thanks to Milton. The wedding cars were provided by American Dream (we had the Excalibur Sedan and the Lincoln Town Car). The bus to/from the reception was from Dolphin Autos. Robin Phillips brought the band. Wonderful purple jacket + the other suits were from John Field Formal Hire. Next, some photos. Burly Dave Ganesh Paddy Steve Tim (Ceremony) Tim (Reception) Finally, some things I've learned. For guests (I wish someone had told me these - Katherine says I sound stroppy but I don't mean to):

• As soon as you know if you're going or not, let the couple know. Especially if you're not going. They will probably be constrained on numbers and there are very few people who can be invited at short notice if you only let them know you're not coming by the RSVP deadline.

• Don't leave buying your present until the last minute. The couple will have lots more important things on their minds in the final week or two than trying to make sure there's enough left on the gift list.

• People really do mean that they'd rather you turned up than gave a gift. I never fully appreciated this; I'd feel bad going to a wedding without having given a gift. However I know that it's not cheap to get to Norwich and (in most cases) have to spend at least one night in a hotel. I'd much rather people did that and I got to see them on the day than they sent a present.

For couples getting married:

• It costs more than you think. Really. I'd always assumed hotels dug their arm in for weddings and upped all the prices, but actually the hotels we looked at were the cheap options, both in terms of the actual cost and also the fact they'd throw extras like a honeymoon suite in for free.

• Make sure everyone in the wedding party knows the way to the ceremony venue. Really. Don't rely on them to ask you, or assume that they'll have looked at the directions you've prepared.

• People are far too generous. We received many completely unexpected gifts from relatives or friends who we hadn't invited to the wedding, or those who couldn't make it. (As well as many of the people who came to the wedding buying us far too much.) If you gave us a gift, you will get a thank you card - these are already in progress but it probably won't be until after the New Year before they're all sorted and sent.

• Don't leave booking a honeymoon until after the wedding. We had issues regarding not being sure about Katherine's holidays and we ended up not sorting anything until a couple of weeks later. This reduced our options somewhat.

• So far it doesn't seem to have changed anything much. Katherine and I have already been living together for some time which we consider a bigger step. And we haven't seen a whole lot of each other since the wedding, though we have spent the past week together. But really, we don't feel a lot different yet.

07 Dec 2006, at the Open Source Developers Conference in Melbourne, at a lightning talk session, quoting Why there s few women in IT, at Richard Jones blog:

The conference last week was educational for the committee in a way that was completely unexpected:

Observation 1: During one of the lightning talks a presenter put some porn up on the big screen. He was peripherally discussing a Perl module called Acme::Playmate (which basically looks up Playmate info on the playboy playmate directory).

We (the committee) had never thought it would be necessary to have to explicitly say that it s not OK to put up porn. Or that we d have to actively discourage discussing a module that would clearly offend members of the audience.

Observation 2: I was amazed that Acme::Playmate exists in (and is blessed by) CPAN.

I spoke before the keynote the next day apologising to the attendees and our sponsors for what had happened.

Observation 3: Some attendees thought that we had overreacted by even saying anything.

At least one woman walked out the conference. The next morning, the organisers apologised to the attendees and their sponsors for the images.

You can read more, including the guy s name at Mary Gardiner's blog entry. Quoting:

I gave a 5 minute lightning talk at OSDC entitled Women in FOSS groups [...]. It was mostly an attempt to jam Adam Kennedy s lightning talk about Acme::Playmate, which featured lingerie shots of women (and maybe topless shots, I didn t want to watch it [...]). So mine featured pictures of women, fully clothed, with labels like Linux user and AI researcher.

I still wonder where the slides from the Debian ftp-masters s talk at Debconf 3 are available from, because of the technical content of the slides was good, only the way it was presented made this ftp-master team like a boys-only club where no women would ever belong. Because it made me want to walkout, but instead I stayed there and almost cried. Update: I found the slides.

Of course, this was 2003, it is all forgotten and forgiven, and Debian, including the speakers that gave this talk, has really changed since The Debian Women Project was started in Brazil, 2004. And I mean really changed. Even the ftp-masters scripts named after Elmo s Angels were renamed in the latest Dak release (look for What does each script do at The DebianEdu ftpmaster-Howto for the cuties names). I am no longer bitter about this. I am even happy it happened because it indeed motivated me to start the whole flamewar, as it even came up on Debian Weekly News - March 9th, 2004.

<peterS> Amaya: as Lincoln once said to Harriet Beecher Stowe: so you re the little woman who started this big war   (/me refers to the now famous -vote thread)

While I sometimes think Debian Women died from success, stories like this remind me why Debian Women is still needed and useful.

I'm at the Wikimania hacking days today. We drove down from wt:Montreal through wt:Vermont and wt:New Hampshire on Monday, stopping overnight in the beautiful town of wt:Lincoln (New Hampshire) in the White Mountains. Amita June had a crappy ride on Monday -- she was unhappy and uncomfortable and let us know it at every possible opportunity. We stopped in wt:Saint Johnsbury, VT for dinner, and she got some time to walk around and play, but beside that she was crabby. Tuesday morning was much better -- she had a big bagel from the Comfort Inn's breakfast buffet, and her Sleepy Bear teddy bear, and she was happy. Sleepy Bear is winning the war for hearts and minds in our house -- it's the bear that she's starting to sleep with more and more, and she makes a happy squeal when she sees it. This could be good or bad news. Anyways, we made it down to wt:Cambridge (Massachusetts) aaaalmost in time for the beginning of Hacking Days. HD is the technical pre-conference for the more sociological and content-oriented Wikimania. I thought it was going to be mostly MW committers and Wikimedia sysadmins, but it's turned out to be huge. I think there are about 40-50 people here -- a just gigantic group. Anyways, I was sitting in the One Laptop Per Child office meeting room with about 30 hackers yesterday morning. I was about 20 minutes late, but I managed to find a seat anyways. Everyone was giving introductions, and up stand David Recordon, Jonathan Daugherty, and David Strauss, all of whom say they're there to help me with the OpenID MediaWiki extension. As everyone's talking, I realize wp:Ward Cunningham is sitting right in front of me. The guy sitting next to me stands up to introduce himself, and says, "I'm Dan Bricklin, who many of you may know as the inventor of the spreadsheet..." Jeez. Anyways, the talk has been fast and furious. Yesterday was a long discussion about the state of Wikimedia servers, the upshot of which, for me, was: Holy Shit, Wikimedia is a big project. I managed to talk to a ton of people, including Travis Derouin of wikiHow, Jason from Wikia, all the OpenID folks, etc. etc. Jonathan Daugherty and I actually got some hacking done, which was great. tags: wikimedia wikimania wiki ward cunningham dan bricklin wikipedia hacking days

The future of MediaWiki This morning Brion Vibber and Tim Starling gave a discussion about the future of MediaWiki. The story? More cool features, I think. The OpenID will be part of it; incorporating a WYSIWYG editor like WikiWyg or FCKEditor into the software. Also, more [[wp:AJAX]-y features, which are coming up through the codebase right now. I think in a large way MW's future is going to be outside of Wikipedia proper. Some of the cooler developments using the MW as a platform include WiktionaryZ and Semantic MediaWiki, both of which provide a structured data substrate to wiki pages. They're not compatible, which I think is something that needs to happen at some point in the future, but they're very promising for future projects. Another big class of projects is bots -- like PyWikipediabot or some of the "vandal fighting" bots and interfaces, e.g. Tawkerbot. I think that MediaWiki is drifting from being a monolithic browser app more into a Web-based service, which will be really productive from a content-production and -maintenance point of view, but which is extremely challenging from the social point of view. Finally, I think the great explosion in the world of customized MW extensions and skins is meaning a real marketplace for expanding the software is happening. I think this is pretty fabu, also. Some people have been discussing formalizing this ecology into a CPAN or JabberStudio-style site for hosting and organizing MW extensions. We'll see what happens with that, but if it comes around, I hope that it's named $wgForge. Maj and Amita June are running around Boston today... very slowly and carefully. They've got a brutal heat wave on here, and people are fainting and collapsing like wilting flowers. I think they're going to go places that have air conditioning, like museums and so forth. tags: mediawiki future $wgForge boston heat wave bots wysiwyg

Excellent latte at Metropolis Coffee Company near Loyola University. Hypothetical for any law students reading this: could this design be protected by copyright? Lincoln Park Zoo. Click the image to advance. Watch out for the tiger, he’s a little scary. Chinatown. Click the image to advance.

For the fourth time in a row now, and thanks for some friendly prodding by a local runner and friend via a 8:30am phone call, I started the new year with a race at the New Year's Day 5k in Lincoln Park. Nice conditions, temperature in 30s and little wind. Just like last year, I went out rather fast and was not maintaining the initial pace. However, the final time of 20:3968 is quite allright and almost a minute faster than last year.

Today is the first day of the Lincoln Christmas Market. With over 300 stalls and many other attractions around the uphill quarter of Lincoln, it's probably the biggest in England and one of the biggest in Europe. If you're within a few hours of it, try a visit. Finishes Sunday (4 December).