Blog: Archive for April, 2002

Feeling pretty ill today. Read Structures. Slept. Spent some time this afternoon and again this evening dealing with some of the licensing stuff. RMS is involved now.

Still slogging away on the licensing stuff, but I was able to put together a status report. I've also been talking with Thomas Esser (the “te” in “teTeX”), and it turns out that RMS thinks that the LPPL is a free license, which is good enough for me.

More on Steve Mann.
Via Slashdot.

The Guardian on Philip Pullman winning the Whitbread for The Amber Spyglass.
Via Locus.

Even better! The “Left Alone” series. (The real thing is a major seller here, which is a pretty serious sign that this is a Bad Place.™)

I'm hobnobbing with the greats now. ;-) Yet another mention in DWN...

Best guarantee ever:

The Meta-CVS Guarantee

If you are not fully satisfied with Meta-CVS for any reason, simply change to your installation directory and type “rm mcvs*”. Your disk space will be promptly refunded. No questions asked (unless you use rm -i, of course).

(Meta-CVS actually looks interesting. I've been wondering if I want to tinker with Subversion, but Meta-CVS offers some of Subversion's advantages without having to learn a dramatically different way of doing things. I'll probably just stick with CVS, though.)

Spent the morning upgrading a Virtual PC Debian install to woody, in part to check the upgrade path for the tetex-* packages, and in part because I wanted a VPC woody image.

I spent most of this afternoon playing with Illustrator, trying out various possibilities for a personal letterhead. The next step is to make it work in LaTeX.

Spent all day fighting with the Bourne shell to try to find a workaround for an annoying release-critical teTeX bug. Basically, the FHS says that (1) you can't mess with /usr/local/, beyond creating directories under some major directories there, and (2) you can't write anything to /usr/. (1) wasn't really a problem, as we only create directories under major directories, which is okay by the FHS and Debian Policy. But (2) turned out to be more complicated.

Every night, a cron job runs to rebuild the ls-R files that the kpathsea stuff uses to find files quickly. As it was, the tetex-bin cron job just ran mktexlsr, a Bourne shell script that generates an ls-R file for each directory in the TEXMF path. On Debian systems, that usually means /usr/share/texmf/, /var/spool/texmf/, and /usr/local/{lib,share}/texmf/. I spent some time trying to hack the mktexlsr script before giving up. Later, when I talked to M about it, she asked whether I could just modify the cron job, which I had thought of, but forgotten about in my initial rush of enthusiasm about tinkering with mktexlsr. So that's what I did. Future releases of Debian's teTeX packages will no longer attempt to create an ls-R file for any directory under /usr/local/ unless the systems administrator edits the /etc/cron.daily/tetex-bin file to allow it to do so.

That was my unfun Friday.

We bought another switch/gateway router device, this one with wireless support. We didn't really need one of these, but given the general flakiness of Apple's Airport (which, you may recall, crashes the USB speakers if we happen to be playing music with iTunes and using the wireless network), it seemed like a good idea to not be dependent on the Airport card in the G4. Plus we thought we'd end up with several additional switch ports, which doesn't seem to be working out as well as we'd hoped.

Alas, the manufacturers of these little SOHO units don't seem to have taken into account the idea that you might want to hook two of them together, and switch off their firewall/gateway software on one of them. So I think we've only picked up one port.

Also annoying was the fact that we bought the thing from CompUSA. I always forget how much I hate that place (where they often want to search customers to be sure they haven't stolen anything). Much to my annoyance, they asked me for ID, and when I asked why, they fed me the line about how it was “for [my] protection”. Which, of course, it isn't. If someone steals my card, it will cost me—at most—$50. I would gladly trade $50 for not having various businesses tell me that they think I might be a criminal.

Finally got a chance to work on the letterhead thing again, which was kind of fun. After much tinkering, I ended up with a pretty close approximation of what I'd put together in Illustrator.

Fighting with Earthlink most of the morning. Their authentication machines and DNS servers have been really flaky for the last couple of weeks, leading to our longest downtime since the first day. Annoying, but if you're reading this entry, things must have started working again, at least for a little while....

Hmm. Up long enough to download some mail, but gone again before I could update my blog (or send any mail)....

Just put up a temporary placeholder page for M's new course.

Slashdot has yet another article about Star Wars, spurred this time by an article in Salon, a site I used to read quite often.

Among the comments was a pointer to a followup to an earlier Salon article by David Brin, wherein he took Lucas to task for his (in Brin's opinion) trumpeting of the power and glory of aristocracy.

I love bashing Lucas as much as anyone, and The Phantom Menace was one of the worst movies I've ever sat through (I started laughing hysterically when Obi-Wan's master was cut down in a scene that could almost have been shot from the original Star Wars script), but I have to admit to having been intrigued by the trailer we saw when we saw Blade II. (Yeah, yeah, I know, my credibility is gone now, right?)

Anyway, that trailer made the film actually look interesting—probably because, instead of just showing CG spaceships flashing by each other and Jedi Knights bumping lightsabers, it featured snatches of conversations—the Jedi council expressing concern about the developing political situation, a debate in the Senate, a heated discussion in a hallway—followed by CG spaceships and dueling Jedi. The implication was that this movie has a plot—things happen, and people care, and people try to influence them. Whether or not that aspect of things will actually seem significant in terms of the whole movie, of course, remains to be seen.

I just ordered the Savage Republic CDs I mentioned a while back (on February 16), and have been chatting with Ethan Port, who was the main guy in the band, and also runs mobilization.com. It turns out, to my disappointment, that the CD releases of Ceremonial were instrumental only. The vinyl copy I bought back in 1986, of course, has lyrics, and it was mainly the memory of one of those songs that made me decide to buy the CDs. Oh, well—caveat emptor, as they say in corporate offices.

Apprently Ethan's working on getting the other people from the band to approve a “bootleg” release of the version with lyrics, so maybe I'll have them again someday after all.

So, here's a dream for you...

Segue from a dream involving mutant children revolting against their government and gathering in a mall/underground tunnel complex, which ends with the children choosing between leaving on one last train or staying, with the sounds of gunfire beginning to echo through the tunnels into M and I contemplating a grave at the edge of a road. We exchange some South Park-style insults about which of us might be buried there someday, I make a comment about the tree growing out of the grave that's right on the edge of the road, and then we wander away from the road toward the white suburban house at the end of the driveway.

Our attention is drawn back to the road when a small white car driven by a woman with a man in the passenger seat has just stopped directly in front of an old, orangey-tan Jeep Cherokee, which squeals to a halt. The woman leans out of her window and asks whether the other driver is all right.

“I'd be better if I wasn't havin' to stand on my brakes, Darlin'!” the man calls. Behind him, I see a SouthWest Airlines passenger jet descending rapidly toward the mountains—it seems to be falling, then regains control, then begins tumbling again.

The man in the Cherokee glances at his wrist, shakes his arm, says, “Damn! Now my watch has stopped!” I look at my watch. It isn't working, either.

I curse, thinking of our computers running—or not—in the house behind us. I whisper, “EMP.”

M touches my arm, drawing my attention back to the sky. A small airplane is having trouble, too. I look higher, take her hand. Hundreds of planes of all sizes are beginning to appear, tumbling out of control.

“At least we'll die,” M says, and we lie down on the grass to watch the 'planes come closer and closer.

The radio comes on.

In other news, there's a new New Order single, “Here to Stay” out. Apparently this is the much rumored Chemical Brothers collaboration. You can find the video on the evil FHM site via a link from worldinmotion. (The video is also available from the Get Ready site, but only in Real and Windows Media Player formats. FHM has a (downloadable) QuickTime file.)
Thanks to Andrew, for drawing my attention to the fact that there is a new single.

The new Iain Banks book, Dead Air, is due out in the UK in September. It's a 384-page “thriller” from Little, Brown according to the sum total of information I could find out about it (basically, Amazon.co.uk), as all the Banks sites are dead.

Hey, cool. You can opt out of DoubleClick ad tracking by having their site install a “blank” cookie. Whether or not you actually trust them not to do something else evil, well, that's up to you.
Via Zeldman.

After looking at Rebecca's page, I noticed she had a link in her to-do list called “weblog monitor ping form”. What's that?, I wondered, and followed the link myself.

Turns out that what she was talking about was modifying whatever tool she uses to maintain her blog to let Dave Winer's weblogs.com know when she'd updated. Hmm, I thought. I could do that, too....

So I have. Now, anyone who cares about such things can see when I've updated my site by monitoring http://www.weblogs.com/. No doubt there are various keen features that people can use to have that information appear on their own sites, or in their browsers—that's up to you.

Since I was writing a Perl script anyway, I generalized it to replace all of the various Bourne shell scripts I have to publish the several sites I maintain. It now reads from a single configuration hash of hashes, fills in various variables, and renders, fixes permissions, and publishes changed pages to the appropriate remote site. The next step is to put the configuration data into its own file, and then to implement some command-line options to specify the site to publish and be able to specify or override some settings.

Fun, fun, fun!

To be honest, most of the work was getting the rendering and publishing stuff working—I was able to adapt some code from an example file included with the SOAP::Lite Perl module (packaged for Debian GNU/Linux as libsoap-lite-perl).

Weblogs.com has some other implementations, as well, including one using LWP, and one using its own Perl module. (The last site also has a JavaScript bookmarklet for your browser.)

We saw Panic Room today. The best part of the film was the titles—names and positions floating against the New York skyline, aligned with the surface of buildings, reflected in their windows.

The rest, however, was only okay while the movie lasted. Post-theatre discussion with your partner, friends, or perfect strangers makes the film's flaws exceedingly obvious. I can't say anything really nasty without spoiling the film, and while I generally don't care about that (my take on things is that they shouldn't depend on a shocking twist that makes it impossible to discuss the work without ruining it for someone who hasn't read or seen it), I'm not even sure it's worth it.

I was stuck by the way that it seemed to have been made for television, complete with fades to black at convenient places. I'm not even sure it would work all that well on television, though, because what little suspense does build would be dissipated by the time you got back from the bathroom or kitchen.

Oh, and the audience was lame, too. It's amazing how many incredibly slow people feel they need to announce their discoveries to the whole crowd (well after everyone else has figured out what was happening, of course).

Do yourself a favor—skip this one, and rent The Game or Fight Club. You won't be sorry.

Today we saw an infinitely superior film, Frailty. Real suspense, real emotion, real acting. Powerful stuff.

What if God sent an angel to you who told you that God needed you to destroy some demons for Him? Demons that looked like ordinary people. And that you'd have to get your children involved?

No nonsense from this audience. A couple of people walked out fairly early on, the rest were stunned into silence.

The film plays out slowly and deliberately. There's plenty of time for you to think about what's being said and what you're seeing. Time to feel scared for the kids. Time to feel scared for the victims.

And lots to think (and talk) about after the film, as well.

Recommended.

Finally got my letterhead working. Woo-hoo!

Infrequently Asked Questions.

The Covers Project tracks chains of cover versions. I added a few obscurities, though I'd probably be able to find more if I dug out my records. Fun stuff!
Via Andrew.

In order to apply for a job, I spent most of the day going over my résumé, updating and reformatting it. Shiny new versions are now available, if you're interested.

In a bit of a slump, here. Sorry.

I started rereading “Stephen Bury's” The Cobweb. Sometimes, when you're depressed, familiar fiction is a great escape. Sometimes familiar fiction you've forgotten most of is even better.

Anyway, The Cobweb seems, sadly, apropos yet again. It's a conspiracy potboiler in which the Iraqis attempt to cook up some biological death for America right in America's heartland.

Ex-site-ment: I changed the background color (icier, I think, reflecting my mood), and also spent a little while tinkering with the code that generates the calendars on the archive pages. (You had noticed those, right?)

I think they look better now, and are a bit more informative, as well.

Graham has redesigned again, and it's pretty sexy.

Oldies but goodies—xyWrite. I remember people using this “text processor” back when I worked in the safety department. Scary stuff at the time—vi meets Emacs meets WordPerfect.

My birthday is rapidly approaching. Yeck.

Eblen Mogen (FSF's attorney) on Enforcing the GPL.
Via Slashdot.

Salon explains Mulholland Drive.
Via Andrew.

Bruce Sterling's CFP speech, in which he disses the Mouse, that Dell dope, Microsoft, and corporate copyright creeps.

Not that this is likely to be a big surprise for anyone, but a Deep Space Nine movie is “unlikely”, according to Ira Steven Behr, one of the producers.

Excerpts from an interview with Tim Powers that appeared in the February, 2002, issue of Locus.

Some people (and institutions) are astoundingly stupid. Suppose you have some services that you offer to a group of people. Suppose that—in order to “save money” and “allocate resources to your `primary community'—you offer a more limited set of services to spouses of members of the first group. If you're an idiot, you can kid yourself that you are somehow preventing the members of the second group from taking advantage of the full range of services available to the first group. But only if you're an idiot.

Sobe does Yoo-Hoo: Love Bus Brew. (It's actually pretty good, and you can't get Yoo-Hoo in this benighted land.)

</modesty>

I have been the bug-fix goddess over the last couple of days, combing over the bugs open against Debian's tetex-* packages and closing old ones, forwarding ones that needed to be forwarded, asking for more information where necessary, and just generally working the BTS for all it's worth.

Not only that, but I fixed three bugs in CVS, and uploaded new versions of two of my own packages.

To quote Lester Burnham, “I rule!”

<modesty>

Somewhere down the road, after we buy a house, we'll probably be buying a washing machine. M will, no doubt, be glad to see this thread, in which people enthuse about European front-loading washing machines. (I got to see one in action when we stayed with her parents—slower, but the clothes were very clean, and the machine was very, very quiet.)
Via Rebecca's Pocket.

Also from Rebecca, it turns out that they never stopped making Space Food Sticks in Australia, and someone's selling them! I don't know, though, $17.95 for 24 or $10 for a dozen still seems like a lot of money. Although I might grab them if I saw them in a store, so....

Spent the entire day rewriting the rules file for the tetex-base source package. It should be much cleaner and easier to understand than the old one, which will, I hope, make it easier for us to adjust which files end up in which packages.

I met with Biella Coleman today, an anthropology grad student at the University of Chicago who's doing her dissertation on the free software movement. She's travelling around and interviewing Debian developers, hoping to end up with between forty and fifty by the time she's ready to sit down and start writing.

The interview was a lot of fun, not least because I got a chance to rant about all sorts of things that M and my immediate family are tired of hearing about (free software and Debian, of course, but also the degenerative state of the culture today, intellectual property rights and nastiness, evil corporations, architecture, and more).

Claremont was looking particularly fine, as the sun was shining brightly but it was just a bit cool and breezy. Sadly, this weather won't last much longer.

Apple announced some new toys today, although not really anything I'd be terribly interested in.

While the TiBook is sexy, everything I've heard about it makes me leery about actually owning one. The new feature the new machines have that makes them a bit more attractive is the ability to hook them up to one of Apple's LCD monitors.

I think I'll wait for something as tough as the iBook with the same features as the current TiBook. Meanwhile, the desktop machine is just fine.

Apparently your chance to sign the Deep Space Nine movie/miniseries petition ends tomorrow, as they're planning to send it on May 1. Go and sign it!

A fantastic news piece on John Kristensen, letterpress printer, and his Firefly Press. Amazingly cool.
Via Lines & Splines.

Our technology today is impenetrable. Almost everything is done in software, controlling minute bursts of electricity that often only manifest themselves in a brief burst of output, itself rendered by bursts of electricity guided by magnetic fields to make a glass screen glow.

Even when a machine is mechanical, its workings are usually hidden—sheathed inside steel, aluminum, or plastic, or tucked away in a factory.

Our artifacts are all about smoothness. Aerodynamic fairings covering the messy reality. “Excess” decoration has been stripped away. Buildings are sheer glass walls with little connection to the people who use or build them. Interior surfaces are manufactured sheetrock—paper-covered gypsum—installed to be as smooth as possible. Ornamentation is rare, and often crude.

We've lost something. Maybe something important. Maybe not. But if things continue, we may never be able to get it back. Much like masons puzzling over the formulation of Roman concrete during the middle ages, exactly how many forms of craftwork was done has been lost.