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John Coulthart writes about Fantômas, a turn-of-the(-previous-)century French pulp villain (or perhaps antihero)—master criminal, mass murderer, master of disguise—and inspiration for many Surrealist artists.

Coulthart links to an article discussing the Fantômas legacy and impact on the work of Surrealists. Despite the character's origins in a series of books by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, and, later, films meant mostly as a means of making money, and written and directed by conservative bourgeois individuals, the dream-like elements of the stories, in particular Fantômas's ability to shift identities from one individual to another, made even more complex by parallel shifts in the guise of his main adversary, a policeman named Juve, appealed to the Surrealists' attraction to dreams, uncertainty, and doubt.

As it happens, I recently picked up a copy of the first Fantômas novel. I first learned about Fantômas from an article in the Wikipedia while reading about Dr. Mabuse, a similarly evil individual created by Norbert Jacques and immortalized in several films directed by Fritz Lang.

Long time, no write.

Apparently there are 200 million blogs that are no longer updated. I'm ashamed to admit that mine has been one of them.

It's not that I haven't had things to say—I've had all sorts of adventures, positive and negative. But somehow spending all day diddling with computers at work doesn't tranlate well into wanting to spend more time diddling with them at home.

I have been doing a lot of reading, both fiction and non. This year we managed to get to the V&A at the start of the summer for their fantastic exhibit on modernism and to New York for MOMA's exhibit on Dada.

I'm grateful that the Democrats were able to take back some seats in Congress, and that Bush seems to have gotten at least some of the message the election results were meant to send. But we're far from feeling sanguine about the overall state of the country and the world, with two years left in his reign, and the Democrats being, well, Democrats.

M has tenure now, subject to the rubber stamp of the trustees. Meanwhile, we have a new president at the college, who is a cool person and with whom I've had more opportunity to be involved with various aspects of the running of the college—in particular, I was invited (okay, dragged kicking and screaming) to participate in the planning process for the first strategic-planning session, and took a significant role in writing up the results of the workshop. I'm also keeping my hand in as the process moves forward—as with many similar projects I've been involved in, I have some worries about whether we'll actually get to implement anything that came up in the discussions, and, if we do, whether the final result will look anything like what we'd imagined. I'll do what I can.

What with tenure and all, it looks like we're likely to be in SoCal for the indefinite future. While I never would have chosen to come here on my own, we are gradually beginning to find aspects of the area that make it more attractive than we would have imagined when we arrived.

In particular, M has gotten quite enthusiastic about hiking, and there are lots of places around to explore. I'm less excited by the idea of poking around in nature these days, despite my teen experiences, but there are enough elements of industrialization (massive flood-prevention and water-retention structures; old power plants; etc.) to keep me at least a bit interested, and I certainly can't complain about the exercise, however much I'd prefer to be hiking across the hills in San Francisco, from one bookstore to another.

As the tentacles of Los Angeles slither through the suburbs and spawn more sprawl, we are beginning to see the benefits, with some shops that used to require a trip to Pasadena appearing in our immediate area, as well as changes to downtown Claremont that include plans for an “arthouse theater” showing films that would have required trips to Pasadena, downtown L.A., or even further afield. I'm not holding my breath in hopes of a cool bookstore, though you never know.

In anticipation of the great televisual wasteland that is Christmas, as well as being spurred by the desire to do some minimal good to a site I sometimes check for news, I picked up the entirety of Babylon 5 on DVD.

Somewhere along the way we ended up seeing most of B5, but I had never really seen all the episodes, and it's been long enough since I last saw any episode that I had forgotten how truly, wonderfully, awesome the character of Susan Ivanova is. The others are good, but Ivanova gets the best lines by far, has an attitude problem much like my own, and is generally endearing. (I was inspired to write about her by a scene in “The Long Dark” in which she's alone in a ship that contained two cryogenic containers. The power's off, and Ivanova tries to get it on by flipping various switches, to no avail. She looks over her shoulder to make sure no one's watching, then slaps the control panel. The lights come on.)

It's the end of the semester, so things have been pretty busy at work, with students working on final reports and projects, trying to get those last results in, and my having to print a whole slew (around a dozen) posters on the department's DesignJet 1055cm.

What better time, you might ask, to update one's machine? Indeed. Partly in anticipation of Tiger, and the need for having an external drive to do backups before updating, and partly out of a feeling that my workstation should be a bit more stable than it is, and partly out of sheer perversity, I decided to update my machine from CentOS 3.4 (plus a large agglomeration of miscellaneous software) to CentOS 4.0.

When I say update, here, of course, I mean “backup to another disk, put a third drive in, and then install from scratch”. I'm not a complete idiot.

Anyway, CentOS 4 installed reasonably smoothly, and had some nice new features (particularly the newer version of GNOME). What it didn't have, of course, is any of those “extra” packages that I've built over the last couple of years. Oh, and it did also come with some wacky changes.

The most notable wacky change stopped me from opening X clients on remote machines on my workstation. Remote administration can get to be a real pain when you can't use the tools you prefer, especially if you're trying to edit or compare long files. I started by checking out the SSH configuration files, comparing them with my old files, and noticed that X11Forwarding was turned off by default in /etc/ssh/ssh_config. That change let me connect to the CentOS 3 machines, but I was still having problems opening windows from my workstation (doing things like, say, trying to edit the SSH configuration files with Emacs). Given that another change between CentOS 3 and 4 was a move from XFree86 to Xorg, I thought that might be where the issue was, and decided to let it lie for a bit while I dealt with more pressing work.

I limped along for a couple of days, but between needing to print the posters (easier on Mac) and doing some web graphics (easier on a Mac) and fiddling with some CSS stuff (you guessed it), I ended up just hooking my PowerBook to my nice monitor and keyboard and using it for the last week or so. I still couldn't open X clients from my main workstation (annoying!), but at least I could open them on other machines, so I could get some of the stuff done that I needed to do.

Of course that wasn't good enough, either, so I ended up pulling the LCD out of my rack so I could put it on my workstation to do a couple of things. But I've still been too busy to really look into the issue.

I was getting by with my Mac until this past week, when suddenly nothing could connect to the Mac, either! Including my home (Debian development) machine, which had worked. I had, of course, just upgraded to Tiger, so it seemed like the problem that was affecting the CentOS 4 machine might have been the same issue on Mac OS X.

Finally, though, I got a chance to look at the CentOS mailing list, and found that someone else had asked about the same problem, which generally looks like

The program 'foo' received an X Window System error. This probably reflects a bug in the program. The error was 'BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)'. (Details: serial 287 error_code 5 request_code 20 minor_code 0) (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

It turns out that another, badly documented, change was to SSH itself. In addition to setting ForwardX11 to yes (or using the -X flag on the ssh command line), you now also need to set the ForwardX11Trusted key to yes, or use the brand new -Y flag on the command line.

The OpenSSH FAQ addresses this issue, but it would have been nice if the distros including the new SSH had mentioned it, as well.

I'm struck by the fact that so many articles and books about free and open-source software waste several paragraphs or entire chapters on building the programs from source. Generally speaking, I'd say that if you can't figure out how to build a program from source, you shouldn't be building it—you should be installing a package from some reliable source (maybe even from upstream, as many upstream developers now provide packages or links to packages built by others).

Even if you grok the building-from-source thing, you should still probably be building a package rather than just compiling and installing, as packages are way easier to manage, and, perhaps more importantly, remove.

There are still a handful of things I build and install without packaging (for example, CVS GNU Emacs), but anything that I'm planning to use long-term, or deploying on more than one machine, I package.

I spent most of Sunday cleaning up my Debian development machine. Most of that time was spent going through the 45,000 (seriously) messages in my spam folder to make sure that there wasn't any real mail that had gotten swept up by the filters.

There was, of course, most of it probably due to my having accidentally blacklisted a message or two when I was looking through my inbox a couple of hours after I should have been asleep.

I was impressed by how well “real mail” stands out from spam, especially if you sort the mail by subject. In the end, I used pick to pull out the messages I could identify as having been sent to a list (about 10%), picked out all the good mail I could still find by hand, then went through the 4500 list messages to get rid of the spam there, cleaned the legit mail of its SpamAssassin labelling, and ran it all back through procmail to get it into the folders it should have ended up in.

Overall, I think that the blacklisting functionality isn't very useful—most of the spam I get is presumably from random machines using other people's addresses (that's certainly true for most of the spam I get that purports to be from other Debian developers). I haven't taken a look at the code in mh-e to see how it's implemented and see if it's possible to turn off the blacklisting. In the meantime, I just go and manually delete the blacklisted addresses from my configuration file.

Spam sucks. It's times like last night that I think that disembowling spammers is maybe just a little too humane.

NPR had a story about the release of the final volume of Christopher Alexander's Nature of Order. There's also an audio feed of the interview available.

The AMS published “Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor” (PDF) by Paul Renteln and Alan Dundes, collecting and analyizing a body of jokes and other folklore associated with the mathematics profession. Some of these are way, way beyond me (to be fair, some of them are beyond some of the mathematicians in the department, too—some of them are quite discipline specific), but many of them are flat out hilarious, especially the longer stories featuring mathematicians, physicists, and engineers, one of which I will excerpt for you here:

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were traveling through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the train.

“Aha,” says the engineer, “I see that Scottish sheep are black.”

“Hmm,” says the physicist, “You mean that some Scottish sheep are black.”

“No,” says the mathematician, “All we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one sheep is black!”

I'm currently reading Henry Petroski's The Pencil, so I”ve had pencils on my mind lately.

I also recently bought myself a really cool Faber-Castell circular slide rule, so I've had Faber-Castell on my mind.

The two come together in an amusing page on Faber-Castell's site describing a “new” wordprocessing technology.

Among the merits of this technology are

• Handles symbols and international character sets
• Simple integration of graphics into text
• Encryption (so-called “Write-only-Code”, for example for doctors' prescriptions)

Even cooler, though, was one of the technology's limitations: “Still too difficult to integrate animation and multimedia components in documents. No direct interface to TeX or HTML documents possible”. TeX!

Home sick, and I stumbled across a talk on C-SPAN by David Weinberger, who was Howard Dean's senior Internet advisor, and is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

His talk is about weblogs and the arrangement of information on the Internet.

It turns out to be part of a series sponsored by the Library of Congress's John W. Kluge Center on “The Digital Future”. Future speakers include Brewster Kahle, Brian Cantwell Smith, David W. Levy, Larry Lessig, Edward L. Ayres, and Neil Gershenfeld.

C-SPAN's page; LoC's page.

Very interesting stuff, at least from my point of view.

The topic strikes a chord with me, at least in part, because I'm eagerly awaiting enough pieces falling into place to start dealing with and organizing my own physical book collection. In addition to the many books I brought back to California in 2001, as well as the many books I've acquired since, I received 23 boxes of books, notes, and other miscellany from my parents' house after visiting at the beginning of the summer and making plans to get that material shipped to me.

So, for the first time, ever, my entire library is in one place at one time (in addition to the books left behind in New York from 1993 'til 2004, while I was in Canada a large chunk of my possessions stayed behind in storage in California, and later moved north to my brother's basement in Seattle). There are quite a few.

Delicious Library is a start, and I have the barcode reader coming, but as it stands Library is missing a lot of fields that I would like to have, in particular the ability to import information from the Library of Congress, which would help me impose some more rigid organizational framework on, at least, the nonfiction.

Well, fuck.

Our dryer was delivered today. I never thought I'd enjoy doing laundry, but the washer and dryer we bought are really fun to play with (and use!).

Not only do they have lots of buttons and lights (always a good thing), but they play little tunes when you turn them on and when they're done with a cycle. I'm sure they could get very annoying after a while, but for right now, they're really sweet.

We are housed!

After signing a huge stack of pages (every single page...), getting a check for the largest amount of money I've ever handled, and turning it all in, we have a house (and a hefty debt to repay).

Not only that, but arranging for our move was—dare I say—trivial. I expected major waits, estimates, and last-minute hijinks, but it turns out that the company that arranged our move from Canada can move us across town for a flat hourly rate. Given that neither M nor I are capable of getting our refrigerator downstairs, and that moving the dozen or so boxes of books is equally out of our league, paying someone else to do it is clearly the way to go.

Meanwhile, it's the end of the school year, and everyone is bustling about getting the last of their work done. At least in theory, I've been kind of sick, and when I have been in, very few people have been around. It's a bit like a ghost town....

M got me a new trade paper copy of Tim Powers's The Drawing of the Dark, one of his first books, and one of my favorites. In celebration, I reread it this weekend. I'm amazed at how many things I consider to be so eminently Powersesque first appear in this book.

I've decided to take the plunge and implement procmail for sorting my mail and spamassassin for dumping spam. At home, that is; I've had these working at work for months now, so I suppose that I can believe they're reliable enough to handle my personal mail.

In other news, M and I are buying a house!
Well, technically we've been buying the thing for a while now—we're busy signing our lives away on innumerable forms, all of which are written in impressive legalese and are mostly meaningless and almost impossible to read. (My strong suspicion is that a close reading would reveal that you've signed away your children, rights to your entire income from now until death, and, of course, your immortal soul.)

We've been lucky in finding a really good real estate agent (through a coworker) who was patient enough to walk us through a few dozen houses, most of which were too big, too ugly, or too near the 210 freeway to make us happy. In the end, we found the house we're buying, which M fell in love with, and I liked, so there we go.

Assuming I get my act together again and start posting more regularly, you'll probably be hearing lots more about the house in the future. We're currently looking at a mid-May move in, which will, I'm sure, be far, far too exciting.

While poking around online and reading about various 2000 AD comics (inspired by a review of the new Judge Dredd game), I looked around for information about “Halo Jones”, which I read in its original form way back when, and had found in collected form on one of our trips to the U.K.

Alas, there don't appear to be any cool Halo Jones figures, which would make nice additions to my office, but I was reminded that Halo's creator was Alan Moore, which got me poking around looking for more information about Moore's current work, and reminded me of Promethea, which I'd heard about and thought sounded interesting, but had never really followed up on.

One of the sites I found was Eroom Nala's site, which is basically a set of comprehensive annotations for the entire series. It turns out that Moore is seriously into ritual magic, and has incorporated much of his knowledge into the Promethea stories, with entire issues exploring the Kabbalah, demons out of Götia, appearances by Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, and fellow magicians, and more, more, more! Very trippy, especially for someone who was attracted to these ideas as a teen, but has pretty well grown out of believing them.

The books are attractive for other reasons, as well, with the art being inspired by many different artists and artistic styles, and incorporating pencil and ink drawings, pastels, oil paintings, and photography.

Wow—content on Slashdot: a review of Chris Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures. Very probably the best book review I've ever seen on Slashdot, and with some of the best comments, as well. I guess functional programming scares away the usual suspects.

(Chris was one of M's thesis advisors. He was also a Mudder.)

Various people are starting to point at Ian Murdock's “Toward a new kind of `Linux distribution'”, which I found myself last week. and have been exploring this week.

The most important component is Progeny's Componentized Linux Platform, an LSB-compliant distribution. At the moment it's basically Debian sarge with a port of Red Hat's Anaconda installer, plus some other bits. As Debian's main drawback from my perspective is its installer (although the new installer is lots better for individual installs, it still doesn't support multiple installs well), and Anaconda and Kickstart are so good in that role, CL may well be the answer I was looking for at work.

Unfortunately, UserLinux, led by Bruce Perens, hasn't been impressing me. The mailing lists seem to be populated by people who think that Red Hat is too hard to use, and that UserLinux should be producing a distro for Grandma. And here I thought it was about producing a solid corporate desktop, where you'd expect to have professionals doing infrastructural support to make it all work for the end user.

Similarly, Fedora seems to be making big, big jumps along the bleeding edge, which makes it look like a lot of fun to run from my perspective, but not much fun at all to try to whip into shape for widescale deployment.

Fedora Legacy, on the other hand, is suffering from being too far outside of the mainstream security community. Thus they find out about security issues the same time that the average Joe does—when the big distros release new packages. That automatically puts them behind by days to weeks, especially since they still need to do some testing before unleashing new packages on the world. And right now they're mostly still able to take advantage of the close relationship between the packages they're supporting and those in Red Hat's supported products (RHL 9, Enterprise Linux 2.1 and 3). As Fedora Core skips further and further ahead, I'm not sure I believe that they'll be able to keep up with security issues.

Meanwhile, it's election day again. As the Democrats seem to have learned absolutely nothing from the last couple of major elections, I was forced to vote for Dennis Kucinich the only candidate left who seems to say anything that even comes close to approaching my views on the issues.

Kerry, of course, is pretty much as bad as Bush. Take a look at his website. Some of his positions on defense and “homeland security” are positively draconian.

And what's with this John Edwards creep? Where did he even come from? One minute he wasn't there; the next, he's neck-and-neck for the lead. He's also big on the draconian security measures, and, apparently, not all that fond of queer folk, either (at least based on how easy it is to find information about the topic on his website).

In any case, it's looking pretty clear that Kerry will be the Democratic Party's choice, which means that I won't be voting Democrat for President yet again. I'm tired of rolling up my sleeve and diving into the muck. If the Democrats won't learn that they need to listen to the people who vote for them, then they need to just pack they bags and go away, and make room for someone new.

It sounds like I might be voting for Ralph this year. Back in 2000, I was pretty down on the guy, but a couple of my friends called me on it, and, after much thought, I agree with them. Gore lost the election with the help of his party, by moving so far toward the middle that they were crowding George Bush even further toward the right than he'd have been on his own. Screw 'em.

Groklaw has been doing a great job covering the whole SCO vs. sanity story for quite a while now. Recently, however, they took a break and posted a transcript of a talk that Eben Moglen gave at Harvard for the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology. JOLT also has video (Real Media) and audio (Speex) of the talk.

Moglen is a very impressive speaker. He believes in free software as much as Richard Stallman, and he does a fantastic job of elucidating why free software is important and why it's only part of a larger picture. Well worth reading, watching, or listening to.

Okay, that was a cheap shot at Eric Raymond. Yes, CUPS is a pain in the neck, especially if you fall for Red Hat's enticingly simple appearing print configuration tools on RHL 9 and Fedora Core, which I, myself, learned weren't remotely compatible with using CUPS in a networked environment the hard way. But I knew enough about how CUPS worked to be able to find information about the problems and work around them without having a major hissy-fit on the 'Net.

Still, if he can get the CUPS folks to get their acts together, it's all good.

Guh. Woo-hoo. Kerry for President. Bush must be shaking. At least Edwards seems to be out of the running.