Tue, 21 Dec 2004
In his epic battle with Adrian over exceptions, Ben mentioned:
Save your work? That’s for sissys. Use a journalling file-saving model. Save everything the user does immediately. You can support the traditional file save/load facility using checkpoints or other niceties but I fail to see why any application in this modern age of fast hard drives should ever lose data the user has entered more than a few hundred milliseconds ago.
That’s really very true. Certainly there are caching issues – memory is much faster than disk, and you don’t want to store intermediate state all the time, and likewise you probably want to keep some history, but certainly don’t want to keep all of it. But generally, disk is fast enough (compared to user interaction and network speeds) that there really isn’t any excuse for losing data.
If my battery and power shorted out right now, I’d lose: (a) this entry; (b) the fact I’ve got Planet Humbug open to read Ben’s blog and my Back-button history; (c) the fact I’ve got three terminals open, and their history (both scrollback and command invocations); (d) what email I’m currently reading.
Saving this blog entry takes at most half a second, mostly because to do so I have to hit some keys and a menu gets highlighted. Saving all my scrollback from scratch seems to take under 5 seconds, mostly because I have to cut and paste it into another application first. And the other two items are fairly trivial annotation issues.
This isn’t even that hard an issue to solve: it’s only relevant for long-running apps with user interfaces – so xterm and bash, but not sed or ls. It requires somewhere for apps to dump their status ($TMPDIR or a dotfile in $HOME). And it requires some code to do recovery, possibly with a user interface in order to choose which point in history you want to recover. And given those issues, for many apps, there’s no reason not to then just automatically recover after a crash, at least as long as you give the user an easy way of avoiding getting into a “recover to a point where you always crash; always recover when you crash” loop (or at least an easy way of getting out of it).
Sat, 18 Dec 2004
…and you can’t beat that.
Or, at least, I think that was some primary school slogan we had at some point. But Google knows nothing about it, so maybe I imagined it all. Surely, there isn’t still more in the universe than’s dreamt of in Google’s eight billion web pages… I think it might’ve had something to do with aboriginals; it rhymes after all.
Anyway, I occasionally get confused at the way both lefties and right-wingers claim exclusive ownership of particular concepts. Well, not so much that, but when both manage to do it over the same concept, and actually show evidence that they’re right.
One of those concepts is individuality. The lefty concept looks something like “I’m an individual, standing up against the crowd, bravely dissenting from the accepted wisdom in the knowledge that time shall prove me right”, while the right-wing one is perhaps akin to “I can look after myself. Anything that my family wants, that my town wants, that my church wants, we can build ourselves, and we will.” The right looks at things like communism, big government, and tariffs and wonders how anyone who claims to be an “individual” can either be so incapable of looking after themselves to want that stuff, while the lefty looks at the disciples gathered in church all reading from the same page of the same book, or the ministers and executives who toe the party line religiously, and wonder how anyone who doesn’t haven’t an opinion of their own could possibly count as an individual.
I don’t actually wonder either of those things. What I do wonder is why we’ve got such adverse definitions for individuality. Why should you have to imagine yourself surrounded by people who unthinkingly disagree with you, or alone on a prairie, with no one to turn to and no hope of help, just in order to think of yourself as an individual?
Clearly, right and left need to come together and turn to the world of fashion to establish a new conceptualisation of the crucially important issue of how we shall comport ourselves as individuals.
Thu, 16 Dec 2004
Decided to wander into NextByte to see about getting some more ram for my nice new iBook today. I’ve been tossing up whether to go for an extra 512MB (for 768MB total) or an extra GB (for 1280MB total) – I really wanted as much as possible, since OS X is a memory hog and I want to run virtual hosts on it too; but I couldn’t justify paying three times as much for twice as much memory. In particular, when I rang a few weeks ago, I was quoted something like $600 for memory, and $500 for a copy of VirtualPC with a copy of Windows XP Pro I didn’t want. Yick.
So anyway, I finally got fed up with 256MB, and decided it was time to, well, decide. So as I wandered past the shelves, I noticed the pretty boxes Microsoft has for VirtualPC, and in particular noticed they had Windows 2000 and Windows XP Home variants. They also had a “standalone” variant, that doesn’t include a Windows license! Woot! Also woot-worthy is that the price of a GB had tumbled to only around twice the cost of 512MB. So I said “yay, gimme, gimme”, and got the RAM installed there and then, and got told that the (shrinkwrapped) VirtualPC box was display only (ie, completely empty) and they’d order it in. So, soon I shall have some active Debian and Ubuntu development installs again. Sweet.
Mon, 13 Dec 2004
Evidently Energex noticed the twenty minute thunderstorm we had after lunch today, and decided to switch to their summer policy. Hence we’ve had two prolonged blackouts this evening, so far; the current one’s stopping me from watching both the Rebel Billionaire and the West Wing. Not impressed. And why they’re happening well after the storm, I’ve no idea. On the upside, at least my laptop has a working battery now…
I suppose hoping that heads will roll at the electricity utility would be in bad taste, considering the past year’s events…
Sat, 11 Dec 2004
One of the harder aspects of version control is dealing with merging issues. Normal development is straightforward – all you’re essentially doing is providing an annotated “undo” feature. darcs manages that, IMO, perfectly. And to be honest, that’s probably 80% of what I want form a version control system. But dealing with merging different lines of development is important too – it’s probably 80% of the remaining 20% :)
darcs doesn’t actually do too badly there – when you’re working on separate parts of the code, darcs will do a merge for you automatically quite happily. Where it falls apart is when the changes affect the same bit of code, and can’t be resolved automatically; I find myself really disliking darcs’ behaviour there, even independent of the performance issues.
One of the central ideas in Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface is that the “zooming” interface – rather than 2d windows that you shift around and overlay on each other, you have a huge canvas that you can zoom into and out of, as well as move around on. Obviously your screen only displays a small portion of that canvas at any one time. A further implication is that you have a “document centric” model, and thus that your data is always visible, and you just start editing it rather than starting an app to view/modify it.
That has pretty heavy implications, and renders most existing software simply unsuitable for a “ZUI”. So while there’s a couple of attempts at implementing them, they’re nowhere near being generally usable. Still, they’re a cool idea.
The thing I like most about them (in theory) is that you can get a broad, 2d overview of everything you’re doing, then zoom in on a bit and work on that. I hate trying to work out how to organise myself in the file system, because I always leave crap lying around where it ends up getting in the way later.
But if you’re willing to compromise a bit, it’s probably possible to fake this. If you consider the “project view” to be whatever you can see on the screen (after using Exposé to get rid of overlapping windows maybe), then a ZUI is just a matter of being able to see many project views at once, possibly scaled, move amongst them, and zoom into one and make it functional. There no great need for zoomed out projects to be functional – you can’t see what you’re typing anyway.
That’s not impossible. If you have two modes: “zoomed out” for navigation, and “zoomed fully in” for manipulation, then the latter is obviously implemented by just having running apps, and the former can be implemented by: (a) taking a snapshot of the apps; (b) closing them; (c) embedding the snapshot in a larger canvas, along with other snapshots; (d) allowing you to navigate around the canvas; (e) when a snapshot is selected, restarting all the apps in the same state as when they were closed. (a), (c) and (d) are just graphics manipulation, and are trivial. (b) alone is trivial; (b) and (e) combined are something KDE and Gnome at least have been doing with session management for ages.
A real ZUI would let you drag components from one section of the canvas to another, too. And let you scale running apps so you can get an overall idea of what they’re displaying but not worry about them taking up much screen space. And a zillion other things too.
Wed, 08 Dec 2004
Cripes. This was meant to be a quick followup note about some more quick darcs hacks. So much for that – I’ve had to write an outline for this post for heaven’s sake.
(Side note: if someone wants a new title for their blog, the above’s free of charge!)
So, when last we met, darcs-repo had just come into the world, and we were still choking on the cigar smoke. Following that there were a couple of discussion threads. Interesting mails include this one, so that you just ask for a repository rather than a “branch” of a “project”, and the program works out how that’s stored, or this one (and its followups) about naming a collection of related repositories an “archive”, and changing the name from darcs-repo to darcshive. This one (and followups from December) includes some (applied!) patches to darcs itself to let me get rid of the horrific ssh/scp hacks.
Where does that leave us? Pretty much at the point of moving from a prototype/proof-of-concept darcs-repo to a functional darcshive. It’s been essentially self-hosting from the beginning, but a more challenging task is hosting darcs itself – since it’s likely that darcs excercises most of the interesting features of the darcs repository format.
Sat, 04 Dec 2004
From this week’s LWN:
Unless the Debian Project changes its social contract to allow the exclusion of packages on moral grounds, tools like hot-babe will find a home there.
Well, gosh, I’m glad that’s settled.
Fri, 03 Dec 2004
F—, yeah!
Thu, 25 Nov 2004
But in letters to US President Geroge Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Mr Allawi, Mr Annan warned that a large-scale attack on Fallujah could undermine efforts to promote stability.
…and contrast
Mosques in Fallujah: 100
Mosques used as Fighting Positions / Weapons Caches: 60
Hospitals Used as Defensive Positions: 3
Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Factories: 11
Slaughter House/Torture Chambers: 3
Number of Major Weapons Storage Areas in the City: 203
Evidence of Foreign Fighter involvement: 2
Jason counters. I tried rebutting in detail by email, but Thunderbird hung. Oh well. In brief: 14k civilians certainly weren't killed in Fallujah alone, nor was the assault on Fallujah about WMDs. There might not have been any pre-invasion links to Al Qaeda, but there were certainly Al Qaeda links to the Fallujah "insurgents". Likewise, while the Fallujah assault was certainly expensive, in blood as well as treasure, it certainly didn't cost $105 billion USD. Oh, and 62 journalists weren't killed in Fallujah alone either.
So for the relevant numbers, here's some context:
Number of people displaced prior to attack: 300,000
Number of people displaced from Iraq when the US invade and occupy: under 600k of 20M
Number of people displaced from Fallujah when "insurgents" occupy it: around 300k of 300k.
Number of people killed in Fallujah offensive: 2,000
Number of insurgents killed: over 1,200
Number of Iraqi/coalition troops killed: under 100
Number of unarmed insurgents killed on videotape: 1
Number of surrendering insurgents on that videotape: 1
Number of surrendering insurgents killed on that videotape: 0
Number of unvideotaped incidents of insurgents faking death, then opening fire on marines: 1
I'll also go with:
Number of journalists killed in Iraq: 62
Number of journalists killed in Iraq according to CPJ: 36
Number of journalists killed by US forces: 9
Number of journalists killed by "insurgents": 19
Number of journalists killed in Algeria in 1995: 24
I'm not sure what the point of saying "links to Al Qaeda: 0" is, when Saddam's payment to Palestinian suicide bombers wasn't even a nominal secret, nor what the point of focussing on the "no WMDs" point is given both WMD programs ready to be restarted, and failing sanctions. Or what the point of complaining about missing explosives is, if you're then going to imply a lack of existing WMDs made Iraq effectively harmless.
For some perspective on the dollar figure, annual US aid to Egypt of on the order of $2B USD, almost 2/3rds of which is military aid, and that's been going on since 1975, amounting to $50B USD up to now. These compare to Israel receiving around $2.7B USD in aid annually, a little of 3/4ths being military aid. Apparently that's amounted to $84B USD since 1949. The purpose of both payments is to try to stabilise the Middle East somewhat, by ensuring Israel can defend itself, and by bribing Egypt not to attack Israel (Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, and began receiving $1.3B USD in military aid from the US in 1979). cf the 1973 Yom Kippur war (in which 23k people died, apparently).
Whether $100B spent in a few years trying to reform Iraq is better than $134B spent over half a century trying to preserve an armed detente will be interesting to see.
I'll leave playing with body counts to others. I can't say I'm spectacularly shocked by 14k civilian deaths in a war where one side isn't willing to follow the Geneva conventions though. (And from what I can tell, Iraqbodycount includes both political assassinations, and civilian deaths due to terrorist activity)
Okay, maybe that wasn't so brief.
Mon, 22 Nov 2004
Hiccups suck.
Fri, 19 Nov 2004
Wow, Google Scholar is awesome. ifupdown even rates a mention.
Thu, 18 Nov 2004
Curse the memory of Frank Sinatra
Here’s a fascinating article tying Hussein’s Iraq to the September 11 attacks. Fortunately there’s no need to read it, since all these issues are already completely settled.
Mon, 15 Nov 2004
I can’t say I’m surprised to find most of the alternative MUAs to Apple’s Mail.app are shareware. What I am surprised is to find that they’re not terribly functional – and some aren’t even pretty! Mail.app’s threading support is pretty basic: it’ll collect related messages together, highlight related messages, and let you collapse a thread into a single line. Fine, fair enough, it’s free and came with the OS. But apparently that’s actually some of the better support for threading available in the Mac world! And meanwhile, other clients don’t even support IMAP. Geez, I’d say join the 21st century already, but it’s not like you could even write programs for Mac OS X prior to that. What are these things? Is there going to be some apocalyptic global war with spambots that will decimate MacOS X mail readers, leaving barely a few survivors, scarred, crippled and lame, to be sent back in time to try to save the future?
I’m not impressed. And I’m quite sure that porting mutt to Quartz isn’t an option.
Oh well, let’s try *gulp* downloading Thunderbird and reading my email in a web browser.
(Addendum: Thunderbird’s great. Only feature I miss is automatic underlining of misspelt words. It does threading, GPG signing and verifying, it’s pretty, and it supports IMAP reasonably well. It doesn’t even seem too unpleasantly web-based, at least once you actually uncheck the option to say you want to send HTML email. Its handling of word wrapping still isn’t perfect, but it’s better than Mail.app’s.)
Sat, 13 Nov 2004
Unlike some I’m a bit ambivalent about movie reviews – I tend to have a pretty low bar for finding them entertaining (Starsky and Hutch? AvP? Independence Day? Hollywood Homicide? Sure! Liked ‘em all!), and a pretty high bar for finding them great. Which generally stops me from panning or lauding them, and if you’re not going to do one or the other (or both!) where’s the fun in doing a review?
Anyway, I’m not going to be as harsh as Kirk Honeycutt, but I can easily see where he’s coming from. The Final Cut ain’t no Eternal Sunshine, and it’s not even a Paycheck, but it’s not a bad way to kill an hour and a half.
Hrm. Spoilers below the fold.
Wed, 10 Nov 2004
Admittedly, I get a bad impression of Windows software because the only time I ever touch it is when it’s already causing problems for someone. But gag.
The latest wonderful bit of nonsense is thanks to Symantec, in particular their “Norton Internet Security” product. Its wonderful new activation feature is broken on Windows XP, so naturally, when you buy a copy of Internet Security, it automatically disables itself, and tells you to phone someone who calls you a pirate and, in a fit of self-righteous indignation, then refuses to help you at all. Heck, even the web pages do it:
customer support [sic]
We cannot provide further information about this product.
You may have been the victim of software piracy and could be in possession of counterfeit software. If you believe that this is possible, please send an email to piracy@symantec.com and let us know which product you purchased, your activation/product key, and how and where you bought the product. Any contact information you provide will be kept confidential.
If you would like to purchase a new copy of the product, click here.
Thanks a bundle, Suck-antic.
Tue, 09 Nov 2004
Continuing my transition to Mac OS X as desktop of choice, I’ve been trying to get my email to work. Getting GPG working was happily easy – just a matter of downloading some stuff, and having AppleMail suddenly support signing email. It seems reasonable functional.
Harder is dealing with the couple of hundred megs of “personal” mail I’ve saved over the past decade or so, filed in a few thousand different mailboxes; and the stupid number of lists I’m subscribed to. Currently I’m using mutt, and a couple of different directories to manage it all: “inbox” is a Maildir for personal mail, “lists/” contains a different Maildir for each list I’m subscribed to, and “links/” contains a different Maildir for everyone I’ve corresponded with. When I hit “s” to save a message, it’ll look at the From: and choose a Maildir to save to; when I send a message to someone, it looks at the To: and copies the outgoing mail to the same directory. Which isn’t perfect, but is okay.
Doing the same with AppleMail would suck – while it at least uses mbox format for its storage, it surrounds it with a bunch of random cache files. So that seems to mean using a local IMAP server to manage my email. It’s been more of a struggle than I expected to get an IMAP server; fink doesn’t have any precompiled debs for Panther, and doesn’t have the server I wanted anyway (namely Courier IMAPD which supports Maildir format), and then that didn’t compile out of the box (gcc seems to think “extern struct foo bar; struct foo bar;” doesn’t define the structure, but is quite happy with “extern struct foo bar; struct foo bar = {0};”), and didn’t configure out of the box either (since PAM on Mac OS X is somewhat different to whatever it expected).
And then, once I’d gotten that far and started poking at my mail, I get a kernel panic. Lovely. Sending my first email resulted in a reasonable success, albeit with some bodgy word wrapping. At least there was too much word wrapping rather than too little. And at least it actually ended up as plain text!
So things are looking okay so far. Yet to try importing all my archived mail or deal with my mailing lists yet. Or setup the funky BSMTP stuff I use to get mail from there to here and back.
Erk, when you're editing AppleMail wraps at the window size, which is 80 characters by default when you switch to the default fixed width font; but then switches to wrapping at 72 characters when you actually send the mail. And that's a hard wrap if you've got an 80 character "word", it gets broken after 72 characters. Eww. And it looks like it's not something you can change at all. It's also not something that only affects the text you type -- it affects the entire message, including .sig and quoted text. Yay.
Mon, 08 Nov 2004
Following the brilliant weekend at Mt Buller last year, we went back again in August this year to see if history wouldn’t mind repeating; this time bringing along my step-borther and his kids. Happily, things turned out even better: similar amounts of snow, even nicer accommodation, and way better weather.
We tried rearranging our trip to get the most skiing time in: we flew to Melbourne in the afternoon, then drove to Bonnydoon, where we enjoyed a cold, but nevertheless tranquil, evening in little motel resort place. Next morning we headed on to the mountain and checked in – the aim was to get a full day skiing in when we arrived, but we only actually managed to get our skis and lift passes organised by a little after lunch. Oh well, worth a shot.
There were enough people at the mountain over the weekend that when we arrived on Sunday, we had to park on the side of the road rather than at one of the resort carparks; then we got one of the 4WD snow taxis to cart us and our luggage up the resort. We got dropped off behind the lodge, and it took a bit to actually work out where we were meant to be, so naturally a snowball fight developed.
When we eventually worked out where we were meant to be, one of the owners/staff of the lodge was showing us where our unit was and how to get back out onto the slopes, and helping with our luggage. As was the cute little girl you can see in the photo to the left, with Alisa Camplin, underneath the signed racing vest. There was another jersey signed by Zali Steggall and Jacqui Cooper. How goddamn classy is that?
* aj continues waiting impatiently for his ibook
* Rukh continues waiting impatiently for Bush to be booted out
<blender> rukh: a week to go
<aj> Rukh: true, i suppose i could be happy that my wait will be a lot shorter than others’
<Rukh> heheh
<Rukh> aj: so you’re getting your ibook in a lot less than one weeks time? :)
As it turns out, I did get my iBook in less than a week’s time – it arrived midday last Monday. We’ll refrain from reflecting too heavily on how much shorter a wait that was than Rukh’s continues to be…
Anyway, like I suggested, it looks like I’m going to stick with running MacOS X on it instead of just installing Debian (or Ubuntu) like I did on my last. The ability to reliably suspend and use the inbuilt modem and wireless aren’t things I’m willing to give up, and it’s nice to have the little extras like having Expose just work, being able to play with iTunes, iMovie, and Command & Conquer, having QuickTime work natively, and generally just having a desktop that doesn’t treat me like some genius hacker for which nothing is too hard, is a pleasant change too. Shark, Apple’s profiler, sounds pretty nice too, so hopefully there are more things to look forward to.
The real irritation switching from Debian to MacOS is the crazy complications involved in installing third party software. Apple’s software updates with an “updater”; Unixy software gets installed with fink, either by apt-get, or using the “fink” tool, or the “darwin ports” system. Third party software gets installed by downloading a disk image, opening whatever the vendor wants – the installer for my printer driver from HP insisted on closing all my open programs, including my terminals, eg. Nice. I’ve had to google and separately install, hrm, Camino, Blapp, GnuPG, GPGKeys, GPG-AppleMail, SubEthaEdit, RealPlayer, X11, XCode, and my aforementioned printer driver. And so far I still haven’t gotten to the point where I can collect my mail or code comfortably.
On the upside, I’ve got something like 4GB of freshly ripped music, and made up a fun little ski movie.
But I hate to think of the security implications; there are just too many different sources of software that can all have problems, and for which I’m never going to hear about updates. Oh well; here’s to defense in depth.
But hey, if you ignore that detail, what you get is pretty cool. The slot loading DVD/CDRW drive is much snazzier than trays, and the hardware is generally really nice – even the keyboard is quite a step up from my previous iBook. Specs are heaps better (11Mbps to 54Mbps, 20GB to 80GB, 128MB to 256MB, 500MHz G3 to 1.2GHz G4, USB1 to USB2), and the software’s pretty pleasant overall. I’m not even sure I’m bothered by the lack of focus-follows-mouse.
Fri, 05 Nov 2004
But Professor Utonium Accidentally Added an Extra Ingredient to the Concoction...
I was amused when Steve Langasek invoked the Powerpuff Girls in response to the US election, with a beautifully crafted reference to episode 1.10. But my amusement soon turned to something deeper when David found this rather profound analysis via OpinionJournal’s Best of the Web:
Mojo Jojo speaks English with a Japanese accent. He has a bad habit of repeating, reiterating, and re-phrasing the same sentences over and over, continuously. He gets this speech pattern from a humorous interpretation of dialogue that is dubbed, probably from Japanese into English. It takes a longer time to say certain things in Japanese than in English. When dubbing, one wants to keep the English speaker’s mouth moving for as long as the Japanese actor’s mouth is moving. This can most easily be done by repeating phrases, again and again, and again. Thus a character in a Japanese movie seems to be repeating himself when listened to by English-speaking audiences.
David adds:
Personally, I think the comparison is a little weak but, hey, the Bush twins may be a functional substitute for the Powerpuff Girls…
Now, two datapoints might just be a coincidence, but three certainly means something. In confusing times like these, I think there’s something we could all learn from the Powerpuff girls cast list.
Thu, 28 Oct 2004
Another note for future reference on the Iraq situation. Today’s big ABC news story is Commit troops or delay Iraq election, Govt warned:
The Federal Government is being warned against promoting a January election in Iraq unless it is willing to commit more troops.
Australian National University Professor William Maley, who has just returned from overseeing the election in Afghanistan, says an Iraqi poll early next year could lead to a “bloodbath”.
“One shouldn’t underestimate the risk of that,” he said.
Indeed. One shouldn’t overestimate it either, though. Here’s his recommendation:
Professor Maley says Governments, including Australia’s, should step back from the current plan and delay the election by some months.
Wed, 27 Oct 2004
Hrmph. Since my laptop keeps dying on the other post I’m trying to make, I might blog about James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds instead. Here’s a section from p187 about small group dynamics:
Talkativeness may seem like a curious thing to worry about, but in fact talkativeness has a major impact on the kinds of decisions small groups reach. If you talk a lot in a group, people will tend to think of you as influential almost by default. Talkative people are not necessarily well liked by other members of the group, but they are listened to. And talkativeness feeds on itself. Studies of group dynamics almost always show that the more someone talks, the more they are talked to by others in the group. So people at the center of the group tend to become more important over the course of a discussion.
This might be okay if people only spoke when they had expertise in a particular matter. And in may cases, if someone’s talking a lot, it’s a good sign that they have something valuable to add. But the truth is that there is no clear correlation between talkativeness and expertise. In fact, as the military-flier studies suggest, people who imagine themselves as leaders will often overestimate their own knowledge and project an air of confidence and expertise that is unjustified. And since, as political scientists Brock Blomberg and Joseph Harrington suggest, extremists tend to be more rigid and more convinced of their own rightness than moderates, discussion tends to pull groups away from the middle. Of course, sometimes truth lies at the extreme. And if the people who spoke first and most often were consistently the people with the best information or the keenest analysis, then polarization might not be much of a problem. But it is.
And unlike other recent contributions it’s a serious enough endeavour that it actually proposes solutions to the problems it identifies, and looks at the problems those solutions create.
Top book, highly recommended.
Wow. At least to me, those excerpted paragraphs read completely differently on the web versus on paper. The paper version seems calm, collected, and to be building up a point in a measured, albeit anecdotal, way. The web version feels staccato and amateurish. Amazing the differences texture, brightness and font can make.
Mon, 25 Oct 2004
Perhaps the most beautiful facet of capitalism is the way even its nominal opponents are forced into enhancing its effectiveness. Following in the footsteps of Mike Moore’s schlocumentary producing corporate empire, it’s my pleasure to introduce the first issue of Blender’s Consumer Reports: Centrecom sucks. (And don’t forget to read issue two, Centrecom sucks: I really mean it and watch out for the forthcoming followups, with the working titles: You know what sucks? Centrecom, and Nothing sucks like an Electrolux? What about Centrecom?)
Sat, 23 Oct 2004
Unsurprisingly, Ubuntu’s release has generated some discussion in Debian. Odds on it won’t create much else. Anyway, Scott (a Canonical employee and dpkg hacker, among other things) writes:
Release, release, my kingdom for a release!
[…]
I think he’s missed something major there, and that something major is the reason I think Debian finds releasing difficult.
Testing.
Clearly, this requires a response.
Thu, 14 Oct 2004
I think it’s reasonable to consider two sorts of “repository” when dealing with darcs – public repositories that are used to reflect a particular line of development, and private working directories that are used to actually do development. Unfortunately there’s some overlap here, pretty much taking the form of “copying your working directory around”.
The difference between the two main classes are nice and clear: for working directories you want as much control over what happens as you can get; and for public repositories you want consistency and accessibility. Which means working directories need to be local, public repositories can be remote; public repositories need to be consistent and append-only, while working directories can be “unpulled”, “unrecorded” and “reverted” as often as you like.
Now, darcs already handles working directories fine; but it’s arguably a bit too flexible as far as public repositories are concerned. We’ll just ignore the “in between” case and, presuming that one or the other extreme will be good enough in practice, work on adding some better support for public repositories.
(As an aside, I’m writing this entry concurrently with designing the actual code, kind-of a weird amalgam of blogging and literate programming. I wonder how it’ll work out.)
Wed, 13 Oct 2004
It’s a cracker Carnival this week, with a Catallarchy post on the link between competing replicators and gay amateur gang rape porn, a Truck and Barter post on how government makes us sick, and a Layman’s Logic post on home made speed cameras, for sale online.
Mon, 11 Oct 2004
You know, that double-entendre just keeps getting better. Anyway, a couple of days before the election, lefty blogger Robert Corr noted a Crikey mailout claiming the Age was forced to take a pro-Howard line in its editorial by their Editor-in-chief, supposedly on the basis that “backing Latham wasnt in the commercial interests of the company.” Clearly then, the media aren’t liberal at all, right?
Many staffers at 250 Spencer Street are disgusted, and rightly so. Three years ago, Fairfax took the line that Howard was a liar and a xenophobe who was whipping the public into a fear frenzy over national security. Little has changed since then, (except our Editor-in-Chief), who - it is said - was alone in his decision to support the Coalition this time around.
Afghanistan Elections Marred By Peace
From Indian news site, NDTV: Boycott call dropped in Afghanistan
So it wasn’t bomb threats by the Taliban, but allegations of mass irregularities that threatened to derail the three-year march towards democracy.
Uh, moving your worries from “bomb threats” to “mass irregularities” is marching towards democracy. Is it really that unreasonable to expect the first democratic elections in Afghanistan to be portrayed as primarily a positive development? This is a country whose history for my life has entirely consisted of bloody coups, mass arrests, tortures, mass killings, Soviet invasions, secret police, human rights violations, puppet governments, civil war with 40,000 dead, guerilla warfare, the establishment of an Islamic state by a fundamentalist militia, the capital being reduced to rubble, oppression of women, more human rights violations, mass graves, thousands of civilians massacred, more torture and murder of civilians, destruction of historical statues and sites, and, oh, don’t forget UN sanctions.
Look, keep your goddamn bias – Latham and Kerry are fine chaps, vote for them, and support them all you like – but if you’re going to do a story entitled, say, Counting begins in Afghan election, how about showing a little courtesy by spending more than a sentence on the counting, and not just using at as an excuse to promote the posturing of the also-ran candidates?
At least FOX News has a story on the construction in Afghanistan without trying to make the improvements seem like a bad thing. On the other hand, their story on the elections themselves takes the same negative line as everywhere else, Associated Press reprint that it is. And what an utterly ridiculous way to conclude: Islamic poet Abdul Latif Padran, another minor candidate, said: “Today was a very black day. Today was the occupation of Afghanistan by America through elections.”
The Professor summarises the good news.
Gag. Via Tech Central Station:
KABUL - It was a regrettably typical comment from an American reporter in this part of the world. "At least it's news," he said of the Afghan election scuffle over the weekend. "Otherwise, this is just a success story."
Not long after I linked to the Yahoo story about confirmed bioweapons labs in Iraq last year, it disappeared. Let’s see if the same thing happens to this World Net Daily story that even includes pictures. These are almost certainly the trucks that the Duelfer report is talking about when it says:
[The Iraq Survey Group] thoroughly examined two trailers captured in 2003, suspected of being mobile [bioweapons] agent production units, and investigated the associated evidence. ISG judges that its Iraqi makers almost certainly designed and built the equipment exclusively for the generation of hydrogen. It is impractical to use the equipment for the production and weaponization of [bioweapons] agent. ISG judges that it cannot therefore be part of any [bioweapons] program.
The short summary of the Duelfer report is actually quite readable, and reasonably brief. It’s also a much more thorough and two-sided summary of the background than, eg, the Sydney Morning Herald’s take:
A report published last week by the CIA’s chief weapons investigator in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, concluded that Saddam Hussein destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s and never tried to rebuild them. But a little-noticed section of the 960-page report warns that the danger of a “devastating” attack with unconventional weapons has grown since the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq last year.
David writes, under the heading Supermodels for Kerry:
Sure, I’m superficial and shallow – but you know you’re tempted too.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d accept a bumper sticker from Rebecca Romijn too, but it’s not like being superficial and shallow is an either/or choice compared with being a right-wing death beast. As Australian-American Gabrielle Reilly says: Senator John Kerry, Don’t Burn Someone Else’s Limited Edition Bra!
Sun, 10 Oct 2004
First, the scores: Betting markets: +1; Pundits: 0; Polls: -1.
While geeking out on partial tallies, Michael noticed the extremely high informal count in his electorate, and noted that “we’re none too bright here in Rankin”. If you consider informal voting a measure of dumbness, it turns out Rankin’s the dumbest electorate in Queensland (at least as of close of counting on election night). Not the dumbest in the country though – there are eleven with an even higher informal count, all in NSW. Ha! Unfortunately for Queensland’s claims to be the smart state, Victoria has the top four electorates as far as voting formally goes.
Apart from inter-state rivalry, there’s another correlation to be found too. See if you can spot it:
Reid, 11.41% informal: ALP with 62.3%
Greenway, 11.18% informal: ALP with 50.9%
Blaxland, 10.45% informal: ALP with 62.8%
Chifley, 10.32% informal: ALP with 62.9%
Prospect, 9.15% informal: ALP with 56.7%
Fowler, 9.13% informal: ALP with 71.5%
Watson, 9.04% informal: ALP with 65.6%
Werriwa, 8.07% informal: ALP with 59.4% (Mark Latham’s seat)
Parramatta, 8.02% informal: ALP with 50.4%
Kingsford Smith, 7.94% informal: ALP with 58.7% (Peter Garrett’s seat)
Lindsay, 7.68% informal: LIB with 54.0%
Rankin, 7.60% informal: ALP with 52.4%
Dobell, 7.48% informal: LIB with 55.6%
Banks, 7.33% informal: ALP with 51.2%
Port Adelaide, 7.23% informal: ALP with 62.4%
Oxley, 7.21% informal: ALP with 59.4%
Barton, 7.19% informal: ALP with 57.3%
Macarthur, 6.92% informal: LIB with 59.6%
Lowe, 6.89% informal: ALP with 53.4%
Fadden, 6.87% informal: LIB with 65.5%
Australia’s dumbest electorates overwhelmingly return Labor representatives. Coincidence?
(For reference, the 16 ALP seats above represent a little over a quarter of the seats the ALP are looking at winning, the Liberal seats make up about 5% of the coalition’s haul. For a little perspective, the PM’s seat of Bennelong had 6.20% informal, and went with 57.71%; Kim Beazley’s seat of Brand had 5.49% informal and went with 60.05%. Bendigo’s got the best informal rate so far on 2.83%, and is returning Steve Gibbons, the sitting Labor member.)
Sat, 09 Oct 2004
As the election day dawns, you can just feel the excitement in the air:
They seem genuinely excited. Almost everyone does. In the markets, people are actually talking about the vote. Some are driving around with pictures of candidates in their car windows. Posters of every hue cover the walls of central Kabul.
Meanwhile in Australia, it’s apathy central. You can only get so excited about keeping interest rates down, apparently.
On election day, stay in bed and vote [1] indolence!
(Staying in bed on election day may violate electoral laws; Indolence Log offers this advice with no faith whatsoever, and accepts no responsibility or liability for any actions taken in response to this advice or anything else anyone may or may not do, now or at any time in the past or future, in reality, fiction, fantasy, romance, thriller, or any other section of your local book or video store. Sections of music stores, hardware stores and supermarkets are excluded too.)
When I reinvented this segment of my blog, I said it was meant to cover economics as well as politics, but I haven’t really been following through on that too well. Since someone thinks I may perhaps have a spec in my eye labelled “not blogging enough”, I figured I’d mix two metaphors with one stone.
One of the pre-requisites for being an economic right-winger is having faith in the market, and if you don’t have it, you probably don’t know what such a thing even means. Fortunately, an example showed up on the ABC news today. It went something like this:
Fuel price prompts power rethink in outback
The owner of a remote fuel station in the Gulf country of the Northern Territory says people in remote areas should consider installing alternative sources of power to combat a hike in oil prices.
[…]
[Paul Zlozkowski] says he has replaced a diesel generator with a solar powered system on his cattle station and has significantly reduced fuel consumption.
“Well here at Murranji it’s about a litre a day I’m using now, even with a small plant here I would have been using at least a litre an hour so that’s an incredible saving.”
The principle’s pretty simple: a decrease in supply, or an increase in demand cause the price of something to go up, and people start looking seriously at alternatives. Once it goes up enough to make the alternatives cheaper, they switch to them.
In this case, the price went from probably around $19 a day (24 litres per day at 80c a litre), to around $38 (at $1.60 per litre). Dropping down to one litre a day at those prices is a saving of almost $39 per day, or around $13,500 per year. At the old prices, it’d be a saving of only $6700. A $20,000 solar generator, with running costs of $10 a day, that achieved those results would pay for itself in two years and sixteen days at fuel prices of $1.60 a litre; it’d take six and a half years at 80c per litre. Those numbers can get worse too, if you factor in the risk that the solar generator might need to be replaced within a few years, or that the running costs might blow out, or that it won’t actually be as effective as you expect.
(For reference, solazone seems to have an $18,000 system that’ll provide 100% of the power in a 3-4 bedroom “energy-efficient” home. Add back the $4,000 solar power rebate for $22,000, and subtract GST for the $20,000 above. The $10/day of maintenance costs were pulled out of my butt. YMMV.)
All of which is to say that price fluctuations are an effective way of encouraging people to use alternative technologies. Everyone knows this – that’s why there are hefty tariffs on cigarettes: to encourage people to relax by other methods.
The real trick is in working out what people should prefer, whatever that means. When should you prefer solar over oil, or vice-versa? Do they both produce enough energy? How much space and other resources do they take up? Can the energy be stored easily and without too much waste? How sustainable is the resource? How about pollution? Does it clutter up the scenery like a windfarm?
But magically, most of those things are already factored into the price. If it takes more equipment to produce the energy you need, it’ll cost more in parts and labour. If the energy isn’t naturally storable, you’ll have to generate more of it (more expensive) and have expensive batteries to store it instead of a 20 gallon tank (also more expensive). If the resource isn’t sustainable, people will start buying it and storing it so that they can charge a premium and make themselves even richer when you can’t pump it from the ground anymore, thus increasing demand, and again increasing the cost. Even the scenery gets counted, as people are generally, and increasingly, willing to pay a premium for aesthetics. (Pollution is trickier to manage, though it can be pretty easily forced into the calculations by adding a rebate or a levy, as has been done with solar power in .au)
As a big believer in decentralisation and emergent order, I really like that sort of system – having lots of people acting independently to produce valuable information without even knowing how they’re doing it is impressively cool – certainly much more so than having a bunch of folks try to tell everyone how things “should” be. And even better, markets seem to be more effective in practice as well as being cooler in theory. Whether in working out what direction a business should take, or predicting the outcome of an election they seem remarkably effective, both in being far more willing to make confident predictions on what will happen, and in reacting quickly to changes.
Mon, 04 Oct 2004
A Foreign Correspondent in Baghdad
I’ve got no idea what’s going on in Iraq; but my impression is that things will suddenly appear orders of magnitude better than they do now once the US and Iraqi elections are out of the way – the former’s a problem because people are inclined to emphasise the bad news to defeat Bush, and the latter’s a problem because the terrorists causing the problems want to avoid them happening. The real question is whether “orders of magnitude better” will actually equate to something good, or something bad. For future reference, here’s what people are saying now:
Sun, 03 Oct 2004
The Oz and American elections are getting pretty boring. At least Iran seems to be keeping things interesting (via Jonah Goldberg, via Instapundit).
Continuing the darcs theme, it does seem to be fairly pleasant
to actually use. Having darcs record go through and prompt
you for each change (which you can avoid by saying -a)
makes for interesting habits – I’m finding I’m much more inclined to
commit once per feature addition, and when I happen to fix a bug while
implementing a feature I’m actually feeling encouraged to commit the
two changes separately. For similar reasons it seems like a good match
for refactoring, which encourages you to make a sequence of small,
independent, and trivially correct as you hack.
The ability to just copy the _darcs/ directory to another
code tree is pleasant – it really does make it feel like the code
you’re working on and the repository you’re working against are separate,
independent things which seems sensible and appropriate; and the ability
to make an unpacked source tarball suddenly be version controlled,
whether it’s had additional modifications or not, is definitely a feature.
On the downside, darcs and nvi don’t cooperate – apparently you have
to specifically tell nvi its IO is coming from /dev/tty for
it to not die. Oh well. vim, emacs and nano work; and the only reason to
use an editor at all is for long log messages, which I’ve only actually
wanted once so far – all my other changes have been granular enough
to be properly described with a single line. Interestingly, Martin’s
librsync darcs hacking seems to be similar, with only about 4%
of his changes having more than just the single line description.
I haven’t bothered with patch dependencies yet, which is arguably buggy on my behalf. Not sure how much I should care about that – presumably it’ll become obvious with more use.
Fri, 01 Oct 2004
After a little more looking at darcs, I think I’m willing to live with its flaws. I don’t think I mind the lack of a nice repository for long-term storage – I haven’t managed to grow to like any of the others I’ve seen (cvs, tla, subversion, aegis), anyway. Tarballs will do in the meantime, and not having to worry about a heavy-weight repository when I don’t want to is cool.
Not having support for metadata (timestamps, permissions, or ownership) does still concern me though, so I decided to have a poke at darcs’ internals to see if that can be fixed. That happens to mean I need to learn Haskell (which I’ve been meaning to do since 1997, admittedly), so maybe when Andrae continues his programming theory blogging I’ll actually be able to follow what he’s talking about. Scary.
Anyway, Haskell’s a nice language to express darcs in; pattern matching definitely pays off, and monads do seem to keep the code reasonably clear. It’s still pretty complicated: reading three thousand lines of code implementing something you don’t understand in a language you don’t know, with an extended form of a grammar you’ve mostly forgotten anyway doesn’t make for a walk in the park. In any case, I think I grok it enough to think a fix for the metadata issue is possible, and David Roundy (the darcs author) seems to largely agree. Cool. Going from possible to patched isn’t trivial though.
In the meantime, and given I’ve decided not to use darcs as a primary/permanent/public storage format (yay tarballs!), it seems like now’s a good time to check various things into darcs and see what happens. For regular programming it does seem like timestamps shouldn’t matter, and while not having execute bits might be annoying, I can certainly live without everything else.
Tue, 28 Sep 2004
I’ve been coming to realise that I’m not really as satisfied with arch as I’d like to be; in spite of being an ardent fanboy for a while now. My main requirement for software is that it be simple and stay out of my way; and while arch is fairly simple, it’s evidently proven not simple enough for me to actually use it regularly. A brief chat with Greg Black on the topic at HUMBUG over the weekend finally made me decide to look into this again; so inspired by Martin’s occassional raves, I decided to have a poke at darcs.
darcs is yet another reinvention of revision control. It’s key change is that it doesn’t bother with a repository per se at all – instead it’s a tool to manage a revision history for a single source tree. It doesn’t even do version numbering for you, let alone branching. What it does do is let you manipulate your history in the form of individual patches, and in particular lets you copy patches from one directory to another. Impressively, this turns out to be all you need.
The cool thing about this is it makes for really lightweight
version control – since there’s no external repository at all, you don’t
have to worry about any setup or how you might affect anyone or anything
else. You can just get a source tree (from darcs, from a tarball, or from
CVS), run darcs init; darcs add -r . and start working. If
you decide you were wasting your time, you can just rm -rf
the directory, and there’s nothing else to worry about cleaning up. That’s
pretty sweet. And since it ignores the issue of versions and branches, you
can set them up to work however you like – branches are just a matter of
making a new directory somewhere on the filesystem, and version numbers
are just a string you use when tagging a version.
There’s a few downsides too, of course. Obviously there’s no pre-made
“repository” that’ll store all your branches and handle permissions and
keep them safe from an accidental rm -rf for you. If you
want a version control system to stop your developers from screwing
up and losing stuff, that’s a big loss. Making a repository out of a
bunch of darcs working directories is possible, but not terribly space
efficient, and you have to control access to it yourself (though using
ssh and sudo is directly supported). darcs isn’t terribly fast, either,
if you’re dealing with lots of changesets, aiui. Also annoying is that
darcs doesn’t cope with preserving file metadata, as far as I can see –
so timestamps, permissions and ownerships aren’t in the revision control,
though they are kind-of preserved. On the other hand, the only annoying
filenaming is the _darcs directory where all the darcs
information goes – and it’s only one directory per project/branch which
is less annoying than CVS dirs everywhere, and an underscore’s nowhere
near as obnoxious as curly braces and leading plusses. I’m presuming
it’s an underscore instead of a dot for better Windows compatability.
Mon, 27 Sep 2004
The two top ABC news stories at the moment: Labor offers free day in $1.6b childcare package, and Labor slams ‘crazy John’s end of career clearance sale’. (The third “politics” one is Greens call for aerial spraying inquiry – amazing how all the stories are told from the perspective of left wing parties, even when they’re about the actions of the government)
Fri, 24 Sep 2004
Wow. The ABC headline: Latham accuses Coalition of school privatisation plan. My thought “Cool. Bold and unlikely, but cool if true.” What’s actually being proposed:
The Nationals’ Kay Hull says public schools should introduce fees for parents earning more than $100,000 a year.
She also wants poorer country schools to receive more government money and the establishment of a national benchmark for Australian schools
First time I’ve seen an ABC headline make a coalition MP’s proposal sound better than it is.
Tue, 21 Sep 2004
Kim’s angry. Meanwhile the cartels have started up their next scam. Here’s the Sunday Mail:
Terror by DVD
MARTIN WALLACE
19sep04AUSTRALIA is being flooded with pirate DVDs and the profits from them help fund global terrorism.
Here’s the Australian:
Illegal DVDs funding global terror
By Martin Wallace
September 16, 2004AUSTRALIA is being flooded with pirate DVDs - and the money is helping fund global terrorism.
The Advertiser and the Courier Mail have the same story, News Ltd papers that they are. Google News found what looks to be the press release they’re “based on” via DVD-Recordable.org. No clear indication who it’s from though. Presumably it’s AFACT.
Press Release: Australia is being flooded with pirate DVDs - and the money is helping fund global terrorism.
The number of pirate discs recovered by police and customs during the first quarter of this year has already matched the total for last year.
Yay for the in-depth scrutiny of the fourth estate. Here’s what Google says…
Interesting article on “True Separation of Powers” by Jonathan Wilde in response to (and quoting) an interesting article by Jim Henley.
The idea behind checks and balances under separation of powers is the restraint of mutual jealousy - each of the three branches will be so zealous of its prerogatives, and so wary of overreaching by the other branches, as to want to keep the other two in line. This has proven spectacularly ineffective in practice and in retrospect its not hard to see why.
…The real separation of powers the Founders achieved was in making the Federal government relatively small so that power would be distributed to the states, whose laws would differ from one state to the next. …
It ends up proposing the easy formation of competing, non-geographic governments and law enforcement as a private good. Very Vinge. Sure to terrify the anti-globos too, ironically.
Sweet! Via the Vinge page linked above, Spectrum Online includes Synthetic Serendipity, a tale from Fairmont High by Vinge. Like (the Hugo award winning) Fast Times at Fairmont High from his Collected Stories, it's awesome. Hopefully the promised novel will come out soon!
Thu, 16 Sep 2004
In a stunning triumph, and as a result of cunning diplomacy and an amazingly well-planned campaign that will surely be used as an example in academies for centuries to come, the mighty blender makes his return to the blogosphere!
Only one question remains: is there a plan to win the peace, or will this hard won victory be squandered through carelessness, and the remnants of, as the French say, le Blogue de Blender be left to fray and perish as the unforgiving winds blow the desert sands ever onward?
Tue, 14 Sep 2004
One of the more discombobulating issues of converting to a neo-con has been buying into the liberal media meme. It’s confusing because there’s no particular reason I can see why individual media biasses shouldn’t pretty much average out; but instead I keep finding publications I’d expect(ed) to be written by, for and about The Man to be slanted the other way instead. Martin pointed out this Economist article on Australia’s politics. Let’s have a look at that.
Mon, 13 Sep 2004
As Elvis sang,
I don’t need a lot of presents,
To make my Christmas bright.
I just need blender’s weblog,
Up on his website!
Oh, Santa: hear my plea!
Santa, bring that weblog back to me!
Thu, 09 Sep 2004
So, after downloading another yet another 25MB of mail to delete, I finally decided it was time to update my server-side spam handling. Boring nonsense. Greylisting seems to be a decent next stage in the escalation, though unfortunately it requires upgrading to exim4 and dealing with backports and the weird “Debian-exim” user and complicated packaging. Oh well, at least all the nifty acl features should be fun to play with.
Unfortunately the various debian.org addresses that
eventually make it to my MUA are still horrible spamtraps. Hopefully
just dropping mail to ajt@randomhost.debian.org
will be a good first step.
Yowza. In about twelve hours, greylisting and shunting debian.org mail aside managed to drop my spam count to about five; only one of which made it to my inbox. As opposed to a couple of hundred. Awesome -- email's actually useful again. I think debian.org's mostly to blame unfortunately.
“Brilliant! Hilarious and chilling!” - San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Coolheaded and incisive!” - San Francisco Chronicle
“Ambitious…Epic…Riveting!” - Los Angeles Times
Spot the pattern.
Tue, 24 Aug 2004
Well, there probably was never much chance of me voting Labor this election, but they appear to have taken my ski trip last week as their cue to go completely nutso. As well as raising their lances at windmills they seem to have decided to follow the lead of the Australian Democrats (or, as they apparently prefer to be known, “The Lie Detectors”), and are campaigning under the banner of “Truth Overboard”. They seem a bit out of sync, actually: they were fighting over the GST in the 2001 campaign, when it was a 1998 election issue; and now they’re fighting over the “children overboard” affair three years after that was an election issue.
Anyway, they’ve got an exciting web page up and a PDF listing all John Howard’s lies over the past eight or so years of being Prime Minister (“warning large file!” the site warns). There’s an obligatory rebuttal from the PM’s office. Some of the issues might be worth quibbling over, some of them seem quite interesting (“Lie 26: …; The Truth: In the first term of the Howard Government, 32,400 [public sector] jobs were lost” – awesome!), but most of them just rate a big “whatever” from me.
What does strike me as astounding, though, is that there’s only twenty-seven of them. Over eight years. Around nine per term. Not even four per annum. Under one every three months. From a politician.
Surely the real scandal here is that in an era when foreign policy is in an ascendency, we’ve got a PM who’s carelessly out of practice with the central tool for international diplomacy.
Sun, 22 Aug 2004
From the Australian last week:
ALL internet service providers would be forced to block hard-core pornography reaching home computers under a radical plan to protect children being pushed by federal Labor MPs.
Crazy freaks. (Hat tip: Jason Soon and Yobbo)
Tue, 10 Aug 2004
Rusty (who really needs to setup blosxom and get permalinks) has posted some wrap-up comments on the FTA, which begin:
So we lost the FTA battle. […]
Personally, I’m strongly convinced that we won the FTA battle; we got everything I was hoping for, at least. It’s amazing the difference a single assumption can make; in this case the assumption being “is the FTA defeatable?”
Mon, 09 Aug 2004
Apparently the latest in a long line of folks reinventing wheels
to make apt-get update more efficient is Steve
McIntyre. I’ve blogged previously on the topic. I don’t
really have much more to say than that; in comparison Steve’s proposal
requires fancy downloading, changes to apt-ftparchive
and changes to the Packages file format in order to handle
removed packages. By requiring you to download the entire stanza for every
updated package, it’ll also lose on efficiency in general, although it
should gain on efficiency for people who update very infrequently.
Given pdiffs are conceptually more straightforward, can be trivially added to the archive by writing a couple of scripts, and have been successfully implemented in the past, I don’t see the point in reinventing this particular wheel instead of just building it as specced.
Ugh. Why do I find my first real fisking is of a press release by Linux Australia and OSIA (Open Source Industry Australia) – organisations whose goals I actually support? Oh well. Honesty over solidarity, I guess.
(As a side note: it seems this has hit ZDNet, the Fairfax papers (the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age), Slashdot, and, weirdly, left-wing French site Collective Bellaciao. Remind me again what we’re supposed to think of news media that republish press releases almost verbatim, without analysis or even bothering to reference contradictory facts or alternate takes on the situation?)
Thu, 05 Aug 2004
So, the Labor senators also made some recommendations about temporary copies:
Recommendation 15
Labor Senators recommend that the Commonwealth Government implement Recommendations 15 and 16 of the Digital Agenda Review report prepared by Phillips Fox to ensure that temporary reproductions and caching are explicitly protected under Australian law.
I briefly mentioned recommendation 15 of the DAR report when it came out, but not in much depth, and the issue’s worth reviewing.
So the FTA Senate Committee’s final report is out now, and there are some more explicit recommendations from the Labor members. Here’s the cliff’s notes.
Wed, 04 Aug 2004
PoliPundit raves about Dubya’s acceptance speech for the Republican nomination in 2000. An interesting line from Cheney’s remarks:
You will never see him pointing the finger of blame for failure…you will only see him sharing the credit for success.
Ignoring the over-reaching generalisation, that comment is interesting in regard to how Bush has handled a number of pretty controversial appointments. George Tenet is the main one that comes to mind: if you’re thinking in terms of “ministerial responsibility” for departmental failures, you’d probably expect the CIA director to have been booted over the massive intelligence failure that was Sept 11. White Glenn certainly did. But if Bush is firmly against “pointing the finger of blame”, demanding resignations like that isn’t going to happen; and indeed it didn’t: Tenet remained as CIA director for almost two more years, ‘til resigning in June. While there’s speculation that “personal reasons” is just a face saving cover for being pushed, ttbomk it’s still nothing more than speculation.
Presumably it would be pretty easy to have fired Tenet, made him a scape goat for Sept 11, and brought in some new blood to try to fix the CIA’s problems. That would certainly have had some benefits; who knows, it could have shaken things up enough that someone would’ve gotten an accurate idea of what was going in Iraq. Putting the blame for S11 on Tenet, appointed during Clinton’s term, might’ve been a politically astute way of making it look like the Democrats’ fault, too. On the other hand, it’d probably have made Tenet’s life pretty unpleasant, might’ve gulled the country into thinking that the intelligence failures would be amenable to a quick fix, and might’ve been disruptive enough to the CIA so as to make it even less effective. There’s also the issue of whether putting too much focus on blame encourages more CYA activity than is desirable.
It’s probably reasonable to relate this to Bush’s handling of Colin Powell and the State Department.
It’s an interesting question whether avoiding casting blame even when it’s warranted is actually a good idea or not.
(For reference, a better generalisation than the one Cheney presents is probably “You will never see him pointing the finger of blame for failure at people he works with”. The converse implication is worth considering: just because you don’t see him pointing the finger of blame at a colleague, doesn’t necessarily mean he doesn’t think that guy isn’t a complete screwup and isn’t doing something about it.)
Tue, 03 Aug 2004
Huh, David’s mad perl skills are pulling all the hot lawyer chicks. Awesome! (His anewed attractiveness presumably has nothing to do with his acquisition of a mobile phone over the weekend)
Though if he’s going all Napster over it and hoping to start off a “dot-id-au boom”, here’s hoping he thought to get a patent for it while he still could – it’s been public for over a year now…
I’ve been thinking of getting an iPod for quite a while, but hadn’t quite managed to get over the “$500 for a fancy-shmancy walkman?? pfft!” mental hurdle. However things came to a head recently – I’ve joined the local gym to try to get a bit fitter for skiing in a couple of weeks (Mmmm. Skiing. Sorry, can’t help it), and having some nice music to distract myself from the sweat and pain seems useful. Last time I went I ended up having to make up a song to keep my rhythym up while running on the treadmill. Its lyrics were “one, two, three, four” repeated for ten minutes straight, in time to my steps (or fifteen minutes or twenty hours or something, whatever). Obviously something had to be done.
Motion
That the Committee recommend that the Senate agree to the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement Implementation Bill.
For: Senators Cook, Conroy, O’Brien, Brandis, Ferris, Boswell
Against: Senators Ridgeway, Harris
Summary of Senate inquiry into the FTA
Told you so.
me, right here, right now
Fri, 16 Jul 2004
One of my friends (whose heart’s still in San Francisco, and whose politics follow directly from that) recently asked if I actually hang with anyone who shares my conservative (right-wing? free-market? Austrian school?) political views. To some point I do, but aside from a backlink from the Gnu Hunter, pretty much all the folks I have anything to do with have a decidedly liberal bent. Which is fair enough, since, heck, I don’t score all that far right on most political tests anyway.
So, like I said, I need a new section for political rants, and this is it; it’s for polemics about politics and economics, hence poli-mics. Well, my mum thinks I’m funny anyway.
Let’s start how we’d like to finish, with some good ol’ Latham lovin’.
Fri, 25 Jun 2004
I’m inclined to think that I’ve worn out the “newly conservative” explanation for blogging under the “neo-con” tag, but I haven’t come upon a replacement yet, and I can’t resist commenting on this. The Senate Select Committee on the Free Trade Agreement has an interesting membership. It’s designed, depending on your level of cynicism, either to more accurately represent the membership in the senate, or to give the Labor MPs an excuse for doing what they want, independent of what the JSCT committee says (which is whatever the government says, as it has a simple majority from the coalition parties).
There are thus two Liberal senators, a National senator (ie, three government senators), three Labor senators, a Democrat senator, and… a One Nation senator.
From the conclusions to the JSCT FTA report:
18.6 The evidence received by the Committee can be divided into three groups: There were those who supported the Agreement and proposed that Australia ratify the AUSFTA; There were those who opposed the Agreement and proposed that Australia not ratify and then there was a third group who highlighted potential problems with particular Chapters without expressing an opinion on whether Australia should ratify.
18.7 Having determined that ratification is in Australia’s national interest, the approach the Committee has taken to address the concerns of this third group has been to make a number of recommendations which it believes are consistent with the spirit and text of the Agreement.
In other news, the two page “Dissenting Report” (which seconds all the recommendations of the main report except actual ratification, which it considers to still be premature) was only signed by the Labor party committee members; Senator Bartlett doesn’t seem to have taken the opportunity to explain or even note the Australian Democrats’ opposition. Odd.
On the upside: bipartisan political support for fair use and opposition to region coding!
Thu, 24 Jun 2004
At least the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties managed to spell my name right, unlike some. From their report on the Au/US FTA:
16.39 The arguments presented to the Committee centred around the balance between users and owners in the Copyright Act 1968, and the change in balance under the obligations in the AUSFTA. One submission noted
The primary balance provided by the United States to its citizens against strong IP rights is a broad exemption for ‘fair use’ of works…It has the benefit of coping far more flexibly with new technologies…42
So Australians will hopefully soon get the right to legally tape shows for later viewing and to make mp3s of CDs they’ve bought. Who says bad treaties can’t be useful?
They also make a recommendation that at least partially defangs the anti-circumvention provisions; though it’s not entirely clear to what extent. As always, Kim Weatherall has more. There’s also an interim report from the Senate committee – which is really two reports one on why the FTA sucks, and another from the government senators rebutting that, and the initial round of implementing legislation (which has lots of IP stuff, but not the really interesting IP stuff).
The JSCT report notes that as far as IP is concerned, the agreement was drafted the way it has been “to ensure consistency with the US template approach to its free trade agreements.” So heads up to anyone who wants to avoid the DMCA and has a government that might consider negotiating with the US over better trade deals; you’re going to be going through the exact same stuff pretty soon. (Open source trade negotiations: don’t start from scratch, instead take our successes and build on them, and take our failures and fix them)
Thanks to Greg Black for prompting me to check up on what’s been happening on all this.
I haven’t been blogging much lately; and for some reason I feel obliged to note that for a change that this is neither a forthright demonstration of languid apathy, nor even an expected consequence of a surfeit of other things to do. Oh well, what we can’t manage in frequency or regularity, will presumably be made up for in quantity sooner or later.
This post is in honour of the Infinite Cat Project. Its lineage is me reading a post by Martin, who read a post by Seth, who read a post by Matthew Skala.
Matthew’s post basically attempts to provide a way of thinking about copyright violations, and more particularly about why computer scientists often don’t think much of copyright. He basically postulates that there’s an invisible “colour” associated with bits, and that where computer scientists get into trouble is trying to ignore that colour.
Wed, 26 May 2004
I made my first post to this blog a year ago yesterday. I think it’s pretty appropriate to have commemorated such a momentous anniversary by not blogging at all yesterday.
Sat, 22 May 2004
Pick the prominant third-way thinker who said this:
America rejects the ethic of sink or swim. America rejects social Darwinism, because strength is not the same as worth. Our greatest failures as a nation have come when we lost sight of our compassionate ideals – in slavery, in segregation, and in every wrong that has denied the value and dignity of life. Our greatest strength as a nation is that we bravely face our flaws and do our best to make things right. Our greatest successes as a nation have come when we broadened the circle of protection and inclusion. And this work is not finished. We will press on until every person shares in the promise of our country.
Thu, 13 May 2004
Martin points to an Economist review of a anti-corporate film that tries to make the case that corporations are “pyschopathic” by their very nature. It’s presented as “asking the question”, but I can’t see how you’d get a different film if you’d started off with the answer.
Wed, 12 May 2004
I’ve been using the SeeMore plugin mostly for moving my travelblog pictures to separate pages, because even on broadband they’re a nuisance to download and scroll through all the time. But now that my blog’s “syndicated” I feel kind-of obliged not to fill up the planet with long essays, which means splitting longish techy essays after the first paragraph; but that isn’t really what I want my blog to look like.
I could make RSS feeds always be short, but that doesn’t really seem like the right solution either; in fact for the non-aggregated case it might be better for RSS feeds to always be long, even for the travelblog case. Which gives me four scenarios: RSS feeds which should show everything; normal web viewing which should show essays, but not photoessays; seemore web viewing which should show everything; and aggregator feeds which should only show the first paragraph or two.
I think MovableType automatically only includes the first paragraph (or few sentences even) in RSS feeds. I wonder if there’s a good way of doing something similar in blosxom.
Heh. The Gnu Hunter scoffed at my attempt to draw a distinction between the price and cost of email delivery; so I’m pleased to find I’m in good company on that issue: here’s Thomas Sowell doing a similar job on the costs of medical care. Also of interest is Brookes News, which has some interesting economics articles (among other things).
Tue, 11 May 2004
Internet Security, Monocultures, and Economic Manifest Destiny
Lots of security experts like talking about the risks of software monocultures which basically says that if there are a whole lot of similar machines on the Internet – all running Windows XP Home, say – then it’s generally fairly easy (well, as these things go) to find a security hole that lets you gain control of all of them, and worse because it’s so common lots of people are trying to do it. So less-popular systems often end have a security advantage – Apple’s OS X isn’t that secure, yet it receives far, far less than its fair share of worms, viruses and other attacks compared to Windows systems.
Okay. That’s point one.
Wed, 05 May 2004
John Ray, who writes Dissecting Leftism, an interesting blog decrying various inane comments from left-wing types, recently noted:
Statistical expert John Lott Jr. sets out why California’s virtual ban on electonic voting is just ignorant technophobia. Australia has paper voting only so I have no personal knowledge of alternatives but his claim that electronic voting is in fact more secure than paper voting seems reasonable to me. Voting security in Australia is a joke – leading to Al Capone’