Bluepoof
posted Thu 29 Jan 2004 in /motorbikes | link
Drinking Problem?
The ZX-12R is a gorgeous bike — perhaps the best two-up sports bike. But it has a gluttonous appetite for high-grade petrol and rubber. I seem to get through rear D208 tyres every 4000km or so, and I don't abuse them.
posted Thu 29 Jan 2004 in /motorbikes/zx12r | link
Intel to Remove Xeon's Advantages to Push Itanium
Intel to Remove Xeon's Advantages to Push Itanium:
After nearly a decade of 64-bit processing in the RISC server market, it might be reasonable to accept that 64-bit computing for Intel X86 processors was a foregone conclusion. Since 1996, Intel has been making the case publicly for its 64-bit Itanium and its EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing) instruction set. It has not been an easy run for Intel, but the company has a plan to make Itanium take off: Remove the advantages that 32-bit Xeons have on Itaniums, and stress the advantages the Itanium architecture brings.
Whenever a discussion of Xeon versus Itanium begins, it inevitably ends with a discussion of a 64-bit variant of the Pentium 4 core. So let's get this out of the way right now. Itanium is a radically new core that Intel and HP designed for the long haul, and they expected a very long ramp up. One of the things that was not on the public roadmaps that executives in Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group was presenting yesterday in a meeting with press and analysts was the co-called "Yamhill" 64-bit version of the Pentium 4 processor that people have been talking about for several years.
It is no secret that some of the server vendors--especially those who are not enthusiastic about the jump from the P4 to Itanium instruction sets and/or who have their own RISC/Unix markets to protect--would love to see Itanium go the way of all flesh and to see Intel bring out an Opteron-like processor that supports 32-bit and 64-bit modes on the same P4 core. No server maker admits this publicly, but privately they sure do.
posted Tue 27 Jan 2004 in /computers/ia64 | link
benighted
Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and the world's wealthiest man, is to receive an honorary knighthood for “services to global enterprise”.
Big donors to political parties get peerages not for “services to industry” or “services to culture” but for services to keeping the prime minister's or the opposition leader's flunkeys in a job.
posted Mon 26 Jan 2004 in /issues/microsoft | link
Goatse guy found dead in his apartment
It's the death of a cultural icon of the Internet. (If you have no idea who the Goatse guy is check out the section on shock sites and shock content on Wikipedia).
This poster on the Christmas Island NIC forum sums it up well:
You should be PROUD to have goatse.cx as your flagship domain. The novelty of showing it around to horrified newbies wore off a long, long time ago; instead, it has become a beacon for the lost ideal of free speech on the internet. So few sites these days are able or willing to stand for this concept so proudly and vividly. They all shy away from it in the fear that, god forbid, someone should be offended.
I'm sure we'll all miss him, even if you weren't a fan of his work there's no denying his contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
I have only one thing to add:
/*
--------------
/ \
/ REST \
/ IN \
/ PEACE \
/ \
| Bob Q Goatse |
| |
| |
| 21 January |
| |
| 2001 |
*| * * * | *
_________)/\\_//(\/(/\)/\//\/\///|_)_______
*/
posted Mon 26 Jan 2004 in /random | link
iaea?
Referer fields would have you believe that the International Atomic Energy Agency is linking to my humble blog, but I don't believe it.
Reminds me of the idea that Debian is a good place to look for dueling banjos sheet music.
Blogs are the web dreaming.
posted Mon 26 Jan 2004 in /meta | link
Stay Upright
I did an advanced road course with Stay Upright. It was great. I heartily recommend it.
Our course was at the Driver Training centre near Queanbeyan. This is a bit different to your average race track, because it's meant to simulate a typical road. It's much tighter and more vertical, so there are a lot of blind corners and rises, and changes of surface. It's a pretty good simulation of the kind of country roads we get around here.
The Stay Upright teaching technique is superb: one instructor demonstrates while the other gives a narrative.
I learnt a few interesting tecniques: in particular to blip the engine before moving rather than after to get a smoother shift, and to hold the shifter while letting the clutch out to guard against false shifts. The second is going to take a bit of practice.
I did most of the day with Steph on the back, which made things a bit harder and more tiring but it was a better approximation of how I often ride. In particular it's pretty good to do a flat-out emergency stoppie from 120 with some extra weight on.
The ZX-12R is not constitutionally suited to low-speed manuevers. Anything below about 25km/h requires slipping the clutch. You don't want to do your U-turn test on it. It is such a perfect two-person sportsbike though.
My tyre was nicely shagged at the end and so was I.
posted Mon 26 Jan 2004 in /motorbikes/courses | link
consuetudinary
n : a manual describing the customs of a particular group (especially the ceremonial practices of a monastic order) [syn: {consuetudinal}]
posted Sat 24 Jan 2004 in /words | link
The short story on Spews
Spews is a blacklist of IPs that can be used to filter spam. Most spam filtering solutions abide by the principle of "first, do no harm", but Spews does not.
In fact, just the opposite: the Spews administrators consider it a positive good to block as much non-spam email as possible from customers of ISPs that the anonymous Spews maintainers dislike. Essentially it is a boycott of ISPs that Spews consider to be soft on spam. The definition of who will be listed is pretty vague and elastic, and sometimes sites are added in error. I support their right to publish their opinion, even though I think it's silly.
So the short story on Spews is this: if you want to block legitimate email so as to participate in a boycott, use Spews. If you want to discard mail addressed to you from friends, family and colleagues, use Spews. If you don't, don't.
More on this from LaneChange.net.
posted Fri 23 Jan 2004 in /issues/spam/spews | link
Home town advantage?
Salt Lake City Weekly has a good long article on SCO. They make an admirable effort to give a fair hearing to SCO's incredible claims.
posted Fri 23 Jan 2004 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link
THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs
s writes
I definitely disagree with a lot of Bush's policies, but I love the side of him that comes out in this press transcript.
posted Fri 23 Jan 2004 in /random | link
Best description of Spews ever
From Slashdot:
SPEWS only gives advice, which anyone who runs a router is free to use or not use as they see fit.
If you think they list too many netblocks, try using another list, or no list at all.
Bullshit.
This argument only works if you're 10 years old, and start kicking, and blame anyone who walks into your foot for it.
posted Wed 21 Jan 2004 in /issues/spam/spews | link
TAoUP: The significance of patch
But something else happened in the year of the AT&T divestiture that would have more long-term importance for Unix. A programmer/linguist named Larry Wall quietly invented the patch(1) utility. The patch program, a simple tool that applies changebars generated by diff(1) to a base file, meant that Unix developers could cooperate by passing around patch sets — incremental changes to code— rather than entire code files. This was important not only because patches are less bulky than full files, but because patches would often apply cleanly even if much of the base file had changed since the patch-sender fetched his copy. With this tool, streams of development on a common source-code base could diverge, run in parallel, and re-converge. The patch program did more than any other single tool to enable collaborative development over the Internet — a method that would revitalize Unix after 1990.
posted Wed 21 Jan 2004 in /books/taoup | link
Warm Beds Are Good
From esr: Warm Beds Are Good: Sex and Libido in Tolkien's Writing
This is an extended and thorough consideration of sex and sexuality in Tolkien's works. Towards the end, the author makes the telling point that eroticizing various elements in Tolkien's mythos is one of the ways in which modern readers adapt it to their own fantasy needs. This makes sense; giving a luscious version of Arwen screen time and playing up her thing with Aragorn is not just a crude sell-it-with-sex maneuver, it's a way to make the mythos fundamentally more intelligible to a viewer in 2003 than the rather dessicated and repressed account of The romance of Aragorn and Arwen in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings would have been.
posted Wed 21 Jan 2004 in /books/lotr | link
more on arch
posted Wed 21 Jan 2004 in /software/vc/arch | link
"Skipping commercials is theft"
“Skipping commercials is theft”, according to a representative of content companies in a ReplayTV suit.
I wonder if the current anti-filesharing propaganda will develop into an attempt to persuade kids to sit attentively watching all commercials? If you use the bathroom during the ads, the terrorists win.
posted Wed 21 Jan 2004 in /issues/copyright | link
WotD: mythopœic
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Mythopoeic \Myth`o*p[oe]"ic\, a. [Gr. myqopoio`s making myths; my^qos myth + poiei^n to make.]
Making or producing myths; giving rise to mythical narratives.
The mythopœic fertility of the Greeks. --Grote.
posted Tue 20 Jan 2004 in /words | link
lca photos
GNOME
hackers: Malcolm, Glynn, JamesH, Havoc, Keithp, jdub
More photos are linked from the lca wiki: Photos.
posted Tue 20 Jan 2004 in /conf/lca2004 | link
havoc
Havoc Pennington did a good talk on the GNOME desktop.
"Open Source creates more opportunities for more people — users, businesses, developers."
posted Sat 17 Jan 2004 in /conf/lca2004 | link
Generating complete patches from Arch
One thing that would be good for arch is being able to generate complete diffs that can be sent upstream to maintainers who aren't using Arch. At the moment you can send a changeset as a tarball, which is both the native format and something that can reasonably easily be read by somebody else:
,patch-10/
|-- mod-dirs-index
|-- mod-files-index
|-- modified-only-dir-metadata
|-- new-files-archive
| |-- src
| | |-- lift-conn.h
| | `-- sftp-const.h
| `-- {arch}
| `-- superlifter
| `-- superlifter--mainline
| `-- superlifter--mainline--0.1
| `-- mbp@sourcefrog.net--2004-happy
| `-- patch-log
| `-- patch-10
|-- orig-dirs-index
|-- orig-files-index
|-- original-only-dir-metadata
|-- patches
| `-- src
| `-- lift.c.patch
`-- removed-files-archive
Pulling this apart is slightly too much work to ask of somebody who doesn't really care about using arch. If you post a tarball containing patches and newfiles to most development lists, you're likely to be knocked back and asked to just post plain diffs.
It would be nice if you could say tla show-changeset --diffs -N and get pseudo-diffs for added and removed files as well as changed files. Obviously this can't handle renamed files, but renaming files is not something that non-core developers do on this kind of project. (Actually I think, but I haven't checked, that arch would understand moved files in this case if the files had arch-tag unique IDs.) Adding new files is pretty common, so that really needs to be supported.
This would also make the submitter's patch log comments visible as files added under the {arch} directory. I'm not sure if that would be so popular with upstreams not using arch. Perhaps there needs to be an option to exclude them.
I think that if the generated patch was applied to an arch directory, it would correctly update everything including the patch log. This isn't as good, in a sense, as getting the changeset as a tarball -- you might not get permission changes, for example.
But I think being able to push around changes over email is a worthwhile model, and it's good if arch can support it. In particular many of the people currently doing loose distributed development are doing so by mailing patches. Those people are closest to using arch so it's good if the transition can be easier.
posted Sat 17 Jan 2004 in /software/vc/arch | link
advocacy
One of the best bits of lca has been Robert Collins explaining difficult bits of arch. I'm much more convinced that it's a cool thing.
posted Fri 16 Jan 2004 in /software/vc/arch | link
Offline Blosxom-style blogging
A strength of systems like Blosxom and PyBlosxom is that they record all your entries as a tree of unix files, stored on the server.
So how do you record or edit entries when you're offline? One way is to store little files on a laptop, and then remember to upload them later. But this is a bit gross.
A better way is to use Unison to keep a mirror of your Blosxom document tree on your laptop. You can edit either end. When you're connected, resynchronize and it will help you resolve changes made to either end.
posted Fri 16 Jan 2004 in /meta/blosxom | link
Bdale
Bdale did a good talk on the ideas of community.
“You haven't lived until you've seen four thousand passionate Brazillians jumping up and down on their chairs shouting ‘Software Libre!’.”
“You can't have a vision until you've established every one has a shared set of values.”
“You're all going to be using Debian eventually, so you might as well get it over with...”
posted Fri 16 Jan 2004 in /conf/lca2004 | link
I pity the fools...
The Motley Fool looks at the 'shakedown' of Linux providers: "with the entire computing world putting its money behind Linux, it appears that, for SCO, the apocalypse is now."
posted Fri 16 Jan 2004 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link
linux.conf.au started
I'm in Adelaide for the start of linux.conf.au.
This morning we had a great talk from Keith Packard from HP about his cairo graphics work. Robert Collins soothed my fears about arch. So pretty! I think spending 80% of CPU on repainting an analog clock is a perfectly reasonable. :-)
Many cool people are here; apparently over 500 altogether.
posted Wed 14 Jan 2004 in /conf/lca2004 | link
An idea
Sometimes in designing discussion spaces, we would like to restrict the amount of threading. This is because people responding to a previous post can get too focussed on rebutting the details of a previous post, and lose track of what the discussion was supposed to be about. Or in worse cases they can just start attacking each other.
One approach is the wiki-way of letting everybody edit a single text, trusting that they will behave well enough to integrate their ideas into a single document. Sometimes this works.
Another approach (which I am too lazy to reference) is to segment the discussion into "rounds" to restrict the destructive positive feedback of replying to the most recent opposing post.
I think another interesting approach would be to give every user exactly one editable text space, where they can make their point and link directly to other posters, but not directly thread with them. In this space, what every poster has to say needs to mostly stand on its own. If you want to write more, you're only taking up space on your own area.
Indeed it strikes me that this is a bit how blogs work now: the reader *can* click through and discover what it is the blogger is responding to, but they don't necessarily have to, and by default they don't.
posted Mon 12 Jan 2004 in /software/social | link
Holiday Restaurant list
I wish I was cool enough to prepare proper reviews, but I'm not. So here are some quick notes, brought to you by the letters <, D, L, and >.
- Breakfast Creek Wharf, Brisbane
- Unhappy staff, food only adequate. Sufficient nautical detritus hung on the walls to entertain a toddler for hours.
- Alegria, Sunshine Beach, Qld
- Superb. Funky location. Amusing tropical fruit cocktails, e.g. lychee martini. Duck and pumpkin pizza. Trust the waiters.
- Blue Lotus, Qld
- Must see. Who else can offer you a 6, 8 or 12-item icecream degustation menu? We had wattleseed, lilli pilli, turkish delight, black sesame, fat-free chocolate, and apple-and-calvados. I don't know why it's not packed.
- Canteen, Noosa, Qld
- Great coffee, good breakfasts. Internet access via a 166MHz 486 with 8-bit VGA, which gets bonus nostalgia points from me.
- Bill's, Darlinghurst NSW
- Wait of about 15 min for breakfast, just enough to whet your apetite without reaching San Francisco heights of ridiculousity. Well-executed but pricy classic breakfast items. Our table had a magazine about the high life on the southern highlands. Presumably people interested in spending $2M on a country cottage also like to drop $40 on breakfast. Great neighbourhood.
- Bel Mondo, The Rocks, NSW
- Advertises tapas outside the front door, but highly reluctant to actually provide it, despite a near-empty bar. Disappointing after the high reviews it's previously received. If the bar service is any indication, I'm glad I didn't pay for a full meal.
- Heritage Belgian Beer Cafe, The Rocks, NSW
- Wow. Superb architecture, enormous beer list. According to an yellow planning poster outside the door, about to convert more space from restaurant to bar, which should be an improvement seeing as the bar was full and the dining part about one-third full. The average liver would take perhaps seven visits to sample all their beers.
- Löwenbräu Keller, The Rocks, NSW
- Enormous plates, good litre beers, wenches. Obviously a kind of Disneyland Bavaria, but if you can get into that it's good. 25-element schnapps list the perfect end to a perfect day.
posted Mon 12 Jan 2004 in /food/restaurants | link
Crime Time
Interesting show Crime Time on Radio National tonight. Unfortunately no transcripts as yet.
posted Mon 12 Jan 2004 in /random | link
Priorities...
From The Register:
Intel CEO Craig Barrett said the annual US bill for agricultural subsidies — $30bn —represented an investment "in the industries of the 19th century". By contrast, the annual federal investment in science is just $5bn, he noted.
posted Mon 12 Jan 2004 in /issues/politics | link
Carly on DRM
Carly Fiorina spoke at CES about digital rights/restrictions management:
[..] We all know that the best system in the world won't mean much if the content you're receiving isn't rich, and exciting, and meaningful to you. From creation, to distribution, to consumption – we are working today to ensure that the music and the movies that will be part of your digital entertainment system are as rich and compelling as they can be.
Let's start with music. One of the ways to ensure that the digital entertainment landscape really takes off is to protect the artists and the creators of the content. And so today, we are very proud to appear on this stage and take a tough stand on digital piracy.
You've heard of Moore's Law. Digital piracy has brought us Kazaa's law. Kazaa's law states that our sense of right and wrong doesn't evolve as fast as our technology. Just because we can do something, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. Just because we can steal music, doesn't mean we should. Just because we can take someone's intellectual property for free, doesn't mean we should. Just because you can do it and not get caught, doesn't mean it's right. It's illegal, it's wrong, and there are things we can do as a technology company to help. And here is what HP intends to do.
Today, HP is stepping up its commitment to building, acquiring or licensing the best content protection technologies for our devices that will set secure copyrights without sacrificing great consumer experiences. In recent years, we’ve cancelled planned products because we weren't comfortable with the level of protection. We've been active through the Business Software Alliance to educate consumers and businesses that digital piracy is a threat to economic growth. We've worked in cross-industry efforts like the Secure Digital Music Initiative to develop a solution to digital piracy. And in partnership with Microsoft, our Media Center PC responds to a copy control flag embedded in current generation TV signals.
Starting this year, HP will strive to build every one of our consumer devices to respect digital rights. In fact, we are already implementing this commitment in products such as our DVD Movie Writer, which protects digital rights today. If a consumer for example, tries to copy protected VHS tapes, the DVD Movie Writer has HP-developed technology that won't copy it – instead, it displays a message that states, "The source content is copyrighted material. Copying is not permitted." And soon, that same kind of technology will be in every one of our products. HP will also work constructively with technology and content industries to implement Broadcast Flag into some of our products this year.
Later this year, we’ll also introduce a new protection technology that encrypts recorded content. Going forward, we will actively promote the interoperability of content protection technologies to ensure that content protection becomes the enabler it was intended to be – not the obstacle to compelling content that many fear. And we will also step up our efforts to work with anti-piracy industry advocates and consumer advocates.
The Register disagrees.
posted Mon 12 Jan 2004 in /issues/copyright | link
Compaq W200 wireless card
My Compaq N410c laptop has a W200 wireless card, which is connected via a special USB port. I just got it working using the Orinoco-USB drivers on 2.4.24.
posted Sun 11 Jan 2004 in /computers/hardware/N410c | link
M3 vs Mini Cooper S
posted Fri 9 Jan 2004 in /cars | link
Measuring Total Delight
The 2003 Total Delight Index, from Strategic Vision, Inc:
San Diego – Determining that satisfaction among new vehicle owners was not enough, Strategic Vision today announces its new Total Delight Index™ (TDI) study winners. “This more sensitive measure shows the emergence of Japanese truck strengths in 2003,” states Dr. Darrel Edwards, President of Strategic Vision, a marketing research and consulting company. The new metric is intended to help product planners develop delightful vehicles that will beat the competition in a highly competitive marketplace.
With a top score of 1000, these latest scores demonstrate that there is enormous room for improvement on product delight in all vehicle segments. Arriving at this new metric has been a long process. In 1995, Strategic Vision introduced its Total Quality Index™ measure to the automotive industry. This more complete measurement of quality considered the whole vehicle ownership experience including the customers’ emotional response. “We found that we had “stretched” satisfaction while enhancing the measurement of quality at the same time. However, my new measure goes further,” says Dr. Edwards Strategic Vision Founder, President and Father of the Total Delight concept.
“A Delight rating requires a more positive, complete response than simply ‘excellent’ or ‘completely satisfied’,” asserts Dr. Edwards. “Important to understanding delight was uncovering that ‘satisfaction’, and even ‘completely satisfied’ meant the manufacturer had fulfilled the basic contract with the customer. You can even create an ‘Excellent’ vehicle without delighting your customer. When you delight your customer, you create stronger bonds of emotional commitment to the product, the brand and the manufacturer.”
posted Fri 9 Jan 2004 in /issues/quality | link
Microsoft ships GPL'd software
I've just seen what may be the first case of Microsoft publicly distributing GPL'd software. Their Computational Clustering Technical Preview Toolkit includes the PLAPACK Parallel Linear Algebra Package, which is released under the GPL.
Microsoft also ship some GPL'd GNU utilities in their Services for Unix package.
There's nothing wrong with this; in fact it's great to see Microsoft finally becoming part of the free software community. (Welcome to the 90s.) I suppose if they're giving it to their customers it means they think it's a good thing, and the GPL is not a "cancer", "virus", "communism", "intellectual-property destroying", mean to kittens, etc.
(Does anyone have an archive of stupid/embarassing things Microsoft have said about free software?)
I have a little image of the Berlin Wall falling...
posted Thu 8 Jan 2004 in /issues/microsoft | link
Open Source Under the Microscope
What are some of the differences you've found, apart from the obvious ones? For example, in software engineering, there's a widespread view that it's necessary to elicit and capture the requirement specifications of the system to be developed so that once implemented, it's possible to pose questions as to what was implemented, compared with what was specified.
We do not see or observe or find in open-source projects any online documents that software engineers would identify as a software requirements specification. That poses the question: What problem are they solving, if they haven't written down the problem? While it's true that there's no requirements specification, what there is instead is what we've identified as a variety of software informalisms.
What do you mean by "informalism"?
That word is chosen to help compare to the practice advocated in software engineering, in which one creates a formal systems specification or design that might be delivered to the customer. Informalisms are such things as information posted on a Web page, a threaded e-mail discussion or a set of comments in source code in a project repository. It may be a set of how-tos or FAQs on how to get things accomplished. Each is a carrier of fragments of what the requirements for the system are going to be.
If they're put together in such a haphazard way, can they really be considered requirements? Yes and no. Clearly, they're distributed, but in order for people to contribute to the project, those people need to understand where those requirements are and how they relate to each other and how to pull them together. Part of how the community works is that each of the participants discusses what the system should do in whatever informalism they feel is the most appropriate to them.
posted Wed 7 Jan 2004 in /software/management | link
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