| Seacoast Safari tomorrow |
[18 Jul 2008|10:58pm] |
FIOS install today went okay, although it took waaayyyy too long for the cable cards with the Tivo. For some reason, they weren't getting signal at all at first. But eventually got things straightened out. The process was a lot like that of a cable install, but just a bit more involved and with more steps. Installer was nice, though. And thus far, connection speed and the like seems reasonable.
Tomorrow is the Seacoast Safari. And it looks like tomorrow is going to be a scorcher. Temperatures in the mid-90s, heat index of around 100. So the key will be to drink a lot of water and stay hydrated. Luckily, the ride starts nice and early so that we beat some of the traffic. Unfortunately, it leaves nice and early and I still need to finish packing. So now, to go do that :-)
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[18 Jul 2008|09:01am] |
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mood |
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 bouncy |
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Thanks for everyone who came to my birthday party, last Friday! Yeah, I know, taking my sweet time, but better late than never... I got some gifts, but even though I'm grateful for those, I was very touched by how some people really worked hard to make it, in spite of distances, insane schedules and massive crowds, and that, wow, I'm quite flattered. Even some people that I don't see quite often and that I've often neglected in my being somewhat of an hermit did came. Thanks!
I'm now in Mountain View, about to head out for a day at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, where I'm told the water might actually a bit too cold for going in, but that I'm sure I'll manage to have a good time. Again, the sheer insanity of actually being paid for this is mind-boggling. On the other hand, I am in Mountain View now. But not to worry, tonight I'll be paying San Francisco a visit, going to a show tonight (I've never heard of them! woohoo!) and to the Tour de Fat.
In other bits of random knowledge, did you know that Norwegian actually has two written forms? Argh.
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| Another busy day |
[18 Jul 2008|12:48am] |
Another busy day today. Started out with Systems Engineering in the morning and Professor Dan Frey talking about the Design of Experiments. Another session where I can easily see where in a physical engineering field, it would have a lot of relevance and could be easily applied. Software, still, not so much. Maybe if you're doing human factors/user interface you could take advantage of some pieces of it but I'm not entirely convinced. And if you're doing things at a lower-level, then almost certainly not. When you're designing a software system at that level, you don't really have knobs and levers to adjust and then see how they change some sort of outcome -- instead, your design is focused on functional requirements and just meeting those requirements. And then adjusting as the requirements inevitably change.
Later in the day, I had my final-for-now FESCo meeting. As some may have noticed, I have decided not to run for FESCo this time around. There are a variety of reasons why this is the case and it's really not worth going into all of them. One thing that will be nice will be having one less meeting a week to need to attend. Although I'll probably still chime in frequently enough from the cheap seats.
After that, it was off for a trip to the dentist. Biked there, got there right on time and then got to wait half an hour for the dentist. *sigh* Eventually got things taken care of and was on my way, if a bit later than I had intended.
Then, this evening, we had another SDM Connect event. I tried to organize it more in the fashion that Alyson had started things off in last year -- very informal and low-key. And so I asked the inimitable Yoav Shapira to come and talk about his startup/entrepreneur experience and what helped (and didn't help) from his time at SDM. As usual, he gave lots of good information and insight and it was good to see him again. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and I think that the format kind of "clicked" with people to some extent. Or so I'm hoping. A few people had some ideas about future speakers and I told them to let me know and hopefully we can get SDM Connect to happen again on a more regular basis.
Then, home and now it's time to head to bed. Tomorrow, I'm getting FIOS installed... hopefully they've figured out cable cards (as I'm still quite happy with the Series3 Tivo) by this point and it'll be painless. But, I'm going into it expecting basically the worst given that it's a telecom company. We'll see how it goes.
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| Facebook is spyware |
[17 Jul 2008|06:19pm] |
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Steve Earle :::: Copperhead Road :::: Snake Oil [ddj] |
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| в интернете кто-то не прав! |
[17 Jul 2008|08:34pm] |
Забавно. Случилась тут у меня в чужом ЖЖ дискуссия, быстро переросшая в бан меня. Свою интерпретацию того, что случилось, я напишу сейчас в первом комменте к этому посту, а вас я тоже прошу (1) прочитать ту дискуссию и (2) высказать мне своё мнение. Я понимаю, что в моём журнале вы будете в основном меня хвалить и со мною соглашаться, но всё же, скажите мне, пожалуйста -- я был некорректен?
Да, и ещё -- я вас попрошу в ту дискуссию не вступать, особенно если вы хотите поспорить с автором журнала. Я не для того написал этот пост, чтобы все побежали туда с криками -- я для того написал, чтобы услышать вашу (по возможности непредвзятую) точку зрения. А то вдруг я заблуждаюсь в своей оценке.
Дискуссия тут, сохранённая копия на всякий случай тут. Вроде всё.
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| Hope to see you at OLS/SELinux Summit next week. |
[17 Jul 2008|08:17am] |
I am heading up to Ottawa, Canada next week for OLS and the SELinux Summit. I will be giving some talks and participating in some panels. If you going stop by and say hi. I am willing to answer any questions.
http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2008/minisummits.php
http://selinuxproject.org/page/Developer_Summit_2008
James Morris informs me:
"The SELinux developer summit will be held at the nearby Novotel (it's next to Les Suites) in the "Albion B" conference room.
Coffee breaks and lunch will be provided, thanks to HP.
It's not clear yet whether people will need to register at the main OLS beforehand, but we will be starting at the Novotel at 8:30am sharp in any case."
At OLS I will be also presenting on "Confining the user with SELinux"
See ya.
Dan
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| Belated update on that terrorist watch list |
[17 Jul 2008|07:22am] |
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Lycia :::: The Burning Circle And Then Dust :::: Nine Hours Later [ddj] |
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![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) bruce_schneier posted an update on that watch list yesterday, but I, having worn myself out by pushing myself too far too early in recuperation, didn't update my own. Rather than repeat and introduce whisper-effect, I'm just going to point back to his updated post.
Capsule summary: The ACLU somewhat overstated matters. While there are over a million entries in the list, many are aliases or variant spellings, and the list actually represents some 400,000 individuals, only 5% of whom are US citizens or otherwise have a legal right to be in the US.
However, as Bruce also observes, a watch list of 400,000 "terrorist suspects" is still absurd. It's still the equivalent of one in every 750 people in the US being a terrorist.
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| Just Because... |
[17 Jul 2008|07:07am] |
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Mike Oldfield :::: Hergest Ridge :::: Hergest Ridge, Part Two [ddj] |
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... the subject of titles came up on a mailing list: Titles from some long-ago title generator meme. Plug in some stuff, it spewed a list of titles.
This was my list:
Horseradish Thanatos Tekiahyn the Just, Brother Railgun of Reason, Pasha of The Right Side of Atomic Fusion, Representative of Invincible Sand Castles, Marquis of Wee Ceramic Kittens, Sheriff of Random Acts of Violence, Führer of The Meritorious Order of Seal Clubbing, Colonel of The Ministry of Karaoke Bars, Pope of Cannibalistic Rituals to the Glory of Naked Chick Magazines, Director of Satanic Altars of Bone, Dragon of The Left Side of Poon Appreciation, Knight of The National Association for the Advancement of Procrastination, Bondman of Christopher Walken, Czar of Quantum Mechanics, Umpire of The Choctaw Nation, Offender of the Faith.
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| jaanix update |
[17 Jul 2008|01:11am] |
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Jaanix imports RSS from other sites, traffic more than doubled after adding reddit. What other feeds do you want to read through jaanix?
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| Quick update |
[16 Jul 2008|10:22pm] |
Lots of things to update on, so it's probably just easiest to do a list-style update ala my good friend SPAM
- System dynamics continues to be a great class. I can actually see myself using it some to try to justify my intuition on what the outcome of changes will be and then maybe have more effective arguments against (or for) various things. Also the Beer Game was a lot of fun last week. To be fair, some of it is supply chain-y, but that just seems like it's because it's the easy examples, not because of any inherent flaw in the modeling approach.
- SDM business trip is next week. Will be good to see folks again. Will likely be a busy week though. I should actually look at what is planned
- Kara's sister's wedding was on Saturday so we went down for that. Was nice although I was tired by the end of the evening.
- Then on Sunday, Kara and I stood in line for iPhones. Line wasn't too bad but we then had extra time due to the first phone they opened for me had a bad screen. And they were good about just taking care of right away, no questions asked.
Yes, by getting an iPhone, I'm somewhat of a sellout. But it's a pretty nice phone. Although i've crashed Safari a couple of times. But having a web browser that's actually sane for, say, browsing the web is good and HSDPA is the upgrade I had hoped over edge. And realistically, it's not like the Blackberry is more open, or Symbian (although it may someday be) and Android is a farce of openness at present. I'll save my Android rant for another day, though.
- Took last week easy on the bike to let my injuries recover. But everything's feeling pretty good and the healing seems to be coming along pretty well. This weekend is the Seacoast Safari
- Need to figure out a good vacation for the break between summer classes and the fall semester
- Err, I had more to say, but I've forgotten it now. Suffice it to say that I'm sure it was interesting and would have been incredibly enlightening.
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| When Jurassic Park meets City Hall |
[16 Jul 2008|06:45pm] |
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Electric Light Orchestra :::: Time :::: Hold On Tight [ddj] |
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Remember the annoying, slimy hacker in Jurassic Park? Seems the City of San Francisco has a very similar problem.
Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city's new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates' bookings are stored.
Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn't work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.
Unfortunately, it's probably too much to hope for that this one will get eaten by spitting dinosaurs (or any other kind, for that matter).
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| Your tax dollars at work |
[16 Jul 2008|05:17pm] |
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Lycia :::: The Burning Circle And Then Dust :::: The Return of Nothing [ddj] |
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| Michael DeHaan, you are bigger than peaches |
[16 Jul 2008|03:14pm] |
What do you think of when you think of "cobbler"?
Do you think of a yummy dessert concoction that's half pie, half casserole, all fruity goodness?
Do you think of someone who makes or repairs shoes?
Well, Google thinks that Cobbler is "Provisioning Made Simple".
Boo yah! How do you like us now, apples, peaches and cherries?
In an unfortunate oversight, there appears to be no wikipedia entry for "Cobber_(software)". Mr. Dehaan, you may want to fix that.
But then again, since the wikipedia entry for "Cobbler_(tasty_dessert)" is two spots below yours on Google, maybe you don't care.
Congrats to everyone in Cobbler-land for being so amazingly awesome, and for taking complete Google ownership of their very own noun.
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| OpenID posts |
[16 Jul 2008|08:18pm] |
А я вот где-то недавно видел, что, вроде бы, OpenID пользователи теперь могут постить в журналы, где анонимный постинг запрещён. Видеть-то видел, а сейчас поискал -- нигде такого не вижу. Нашёл только обещания, что, мол, сделаем.
Проясните, кто в курсе.
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| спам бот эпидемия |
[16 Jul 2008|07:48pm] |
Похоже, какая-то эпидемия ботов сегодня в ЖеЖе. Мне поназасылали комментов всяких спамных -- причём все юзернеймы разные, а комменты представляют из себя осмысленные куски текста, и иногда даже близко к теме.
Всё поудалял, всех забанил, но боюсь, что на этом дело не закончится. Похоже, кто-то поломал жежешную капчу. Мне кажется, в таком случае надо на несколько часов приостанавливать заведение новых юзеров (карантин), ну или заводить, но не давать постить комменты -- и быстро-быстро переделывать капчу.
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| Being tough |
[16 Jul 2008|11:16am] |
Next time I whine about some stupid thing, remind me to have a look at my friend Eileen's blog and take a deep breath.
For those who participated in Red Hat High, Eileen was one of the linchpins that made that happen.
Hope the surgery goes well, girl. Do us all a favor and go kick cancer in the cojones, please.
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| On appropriate pigmentation for the bikeshed |
[16 Jul 2008|07:56am] |
A lot of projects have been switching to date-based numbering these days. It's a beautiful system with well defined numbers that doesn't produce constraints on developers to break things or fix things by certain times or really do much of anything.
Which, to me, seems problematic.
When's the last time you saw a project with a date-based versioning number system innovate? Gentoo seems to have gone amazingly incremental since the introduction of it's date-based numbering system, don't get me started on ubuntu.
While date based numbering makes a lot of sense from some perspectives, version numbers serve a purpose: They let you know when to start throwing code away.
This actually ends tying into another larger observation that all projects should always be created with a date in the future in which the project should be thrown away. But that's another blog entry.
Short story long: I think the proposal to change the version numbering scheme to better solidify the current kernel development process is perhaps more dangerous than it seems. The current development methodology reflects a local optimum that's working very well for producing a stable and well-running code base while offering opportunities for incremental improvements via merge windows.
It does not however, seem to allow downright dangerous, crazy and insane pieces of code to quickly get into the kernel. Having a period where such madness can actually enter the kernel source without a multiyear project to maintain patches ready for merge to other git repositories has always been an asset to Linux.
Maybe the underlying SCM allows us to do this type of thing still. Git certainly is a good tool for this type of thing. Perhaps version numbers was an artificial mechanism that is proving to be unnecessary.
Or perhaps it's Davix time.
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| Data points |
[16 Jul 2008|10:07am] |
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Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band :::: Greatest Hits :::: In Your Time [ddj] |
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From bruce_schneier: The official US terrorist watch list has now hit one million names. Yup, that's right — the US Government now considers one in every 304 Americans to be a suspected terrorist. Statistically speaking, assuming for the sake of argument that the distribution is uniform and random, that means Congress and the White House staff together should contain about two terrorists (nominations, anyone?), and about one in every ten school classes contains a terrorist. Reports indicate the terrorist watch list is growing by 20,000 names a month.
And from ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) danjite, the UK has the highest per-capita income in Europe, yet has the lowest standard of living. The high cost of energy in the UK is a major factor — Britons pay among the highest prices in Europe for electricity, gas, gasoline and diesel fuel, ranging from 5% above the European average for electricity to 49% above average for gas.
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| FOSS Conference Observations |
[16 Jul 2008|10:35am] |
Andrew Morton's slides from the LF Japan Symposium are now here (PDF), along with the rest of the presentations (scroll down). No video as yet, it seems.
I microblogged this at the time, but it's worth mentioning here that 15% of kernel contributions are now coming from Japan, as also noted at the LF blog. (I'm not sure if the media has picked up on this yet, but it was also announced at the Symposium that the 2009 Kernel Summit will be held in Tokyo).
Recently, Michael Chen from Red Hat was quoted in an interview that India is the third largest contributor to Fedora. That's "following North America and Europe", so I don't know what the per-country rankings are, but India may be doing even better in that respect.
It's probably impossible to say precisely what's driving these increasing global levels of FOSS contributions, but my impressions are that in these cases, at least, that conferences such as FOSS.IN and the LF symposia are having very significant effects.
It was also most likely similarly the case in Australia in 1999 with the introduction of CALU (which evolved into LCA), that local FOSS efforts were greatly stimulated by holding a technical conference which attracted a combination of leading international and local contributors. It was certainly a major factor in my own subsequent involvement in kernel hacking (which was at the time very sporadic, but became vastly more focused after meeting & seeing the likes of Dave Miller, Rusty and Tridge).
It's interesting to compare how this works differently in different regions. India and Australia developed their own grassroots conferences, while Japan (and recently China) have developed conferences based around industry consortia. Whether this is cultural or a sign of the times is unclear, but it seems the ultimate effect is basically the same. More people contributing—not just code—to the community process.
A comment made by Toshiharu Harada during his genuinely entertaining TOMOYO talk was particularly interesting:
Merging TOMOYO Linux started as our mission, but now they are our personal goals.
While FOSS has become increasingly mainstream, it seems that the underlying dynamics of the community also remain the same, in terms of people fulfilling personal goals (technical, social, economic), as well as those of their employers.
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