Older blog entries for cmacd (starting at number 28)

P. E.Trudeau

It is amazing to see a funeral draw both Jimmy Carter and Fidiel Castro

Mega City of Ottawa

I am amused by skud's view of Ottawa. Interestingly, when my wife visted Cairns and said she wanted to go back and revisit the giant clam she met diving off the barrier reef. Would be interesting if you ended up in Canada, the place needs more diversity.

I will say if someone from my airline said I have to go from Ottawa to Sweden via the South Pacific, I would ask to see the results from their latest drug test.

Postal Spam

peat: If that junk mail was bulk rate, it may not be returned to the sender, but instead get quietly sent to the dead letter office to be shredded and recycled. They would pay the first class rate to get the mailer back, if they marked it "return postage guranteed", they will get a form with an updated address for slightly less than the first class rate if they ask for "address correction" The thing to do is to use their postage paid envelope to ask them to take you off their list.

New use for Google

If you search on a word that you are unsure of the spelling, it will prompt you if you are way out with a Did you mean: xxxx

Went to a meeting of Luck which is the Linux users group in Kanata. They don't seem to have a web pages but they do have a mailing list. Funny thing was that WinDoze came up even more that Linux in the discusions at the meeting.

P. E. Trudeau passed on yesterday. Tis sad to see a former Prime Minister who had Vison leave the scene even if I did not agree with everything he did. Folks with Vison are so rare.

This morning I put another part of Karens sound project up on the web for her. This lets one use a TMS320C3x DSP in much the same way that one might use the Windows MM system. I still have to put it up on Freshmeat.. The Page is Here

Ottawa Linux Symposium

I have also finaly got my pictures of the OLS up in my Webspace. Some of them look a little funny, because I was using my batteryless camera, and there was not enough light for 400 film and an 2.8 lens. Amazing how well modern film works at 3 stops underexposed. I actually like one of the underexposed ones, its just called alan-cox.jpg and it shows both Alan and Telsa whle waiting for the registration to open up.

This page was also the first time I have used the shell script that the former editor of LinuxToday posted for automaticaly making thumbnails on a web page. Thus I once again had a chance to have a silly grin on my face as the linux machine at home did something in a few blinks of the hard disk light, that would have taken all day in winders. I will say that the thumbnails are a bit too big, but that can be changed the next time I use the technique.

Projector

The projector I bought is leading me on to searches of the strange parts of the web. As I mentioned before, it is a 1960 version thus it avoided using World War II Tubes in favor of newer designs, that as it turned out were only produced for a few years. If I had the 1957 model, I would have had enough salvaged tubes to keep it running for a couple of decades. I have been meeting all sorts of strange sites in trying to find some spares. The thing is that it seems that some folks are so interested in the roots of sound that they avoid anything designed before 1939. Thus we have folks in eastern europe hand crafting fresh 2A3 triodes, and selling them for a price that is probaly higher than the designer made as a months if not a years salary.

I also get a laugh that the older ST shape bulbs are prefered to the stright sided bulbs of the 60's. When I was a kid, the opposite was true, an ST shaped tube was "Old" and a straight sided one was "New and Improved"

Plus ca Change

Still have not found a stash of 6973's that are not hyperinflated however. The darn Projector uses Three of them.

Darkroom

I put some waterprofing stuff on the basement walls in the area of the planned darkroom on the weekend, and inhaled all too much Varsol® or the generic equivelent. ...And I have to paint the floor this weekend!

I was so sleepy last night that I fell asleep on the couch, so I have no news, but I do have some comments on some of the other entries:

rillian:

That article has generated a lot of controversy. Even the Citizen disagreed with the rant about lack of history..see This Editorial although they quietly missed the point about the level of cultural intergration that is happening lately.

I personaly believe that Candians can feel somewhat justified that our values have been at a higher plane than the values practiced in other places. I too am concerned that the current political climate has pushed the agenda to import US political models in place of Canadian models that I personaly find to be better.

dhd:

My wife frequently quotes a saying from one of the Karate Kid movies...
Balanace- Ression for Whole Life

I think that is the main point that maddog was trying to make at the OLS.

maddog said that he is disturbed by young folks with their nose to a monitor 16 hours a day, and told everyone to go outside and do whatever they enjoy doing. Your entries indicate that you enjoy bicycling in the country, well the Trans Canada Trail is almost open. The relay is supposed to reach Stittsville today. Why not plan a tour?

You like music, so go for it! You would be doing a disservice to your boss if you worked till you drop. It will be tricky to change to allow yourself more balance, but the alternative is VERY bad for your health.

skvidal:

Lucky YOU..

Cori is probaly the exact same mix as my dog. Mine has a white patch on her back and a white flash on her nose.

You can probaly teach her to sit up / shake a paw with VERY little effort. When Boots came she started chewing the walls out of boredom, so she has lots of toys, and gets for a long walk everyday. The comment on the web site about "wandering" would be consistant. We were surprised that she was happier at first when we kept her in the lanudry room than with the run of the house. Our yard is fenced, and on cool days, Boots will sit and watch the Birds (actually their shadows) for hours..

My advice (besides rubbing her tummy) is to arrange a safe place to let her run off energy. Boots a regular user of the part of The Transcanada Trial between Hazeldean and Stittsville. She can run at 12 KmH for a long time.

My dog is also VERY friendly, unfortunatly this means she likes to jump up on folks, which is a problem if she meets someone who is not fond of Dogs. On the other hand having a dog lay against your knee when you are watching televison can be a very good thing.

Oh, and Boots can jump 3 feet to play "jump through the hoop" so you can count on fences not being a barrier. We solved the problem of Boots wanting to stay by a regular ration of barbaqued Sirloin. Also one egg a week seems to keep up the shinny coat. ( and brushings deal with the amount of hair that that sort of dog naturaly produces.)

dhd wrote:

Okay, well I was planning to write an "extremely damaging" (or maybe that should be "damaged") diary entry but then I thought of the awesome power of the Internet and became very afraid. So you will not hear why I am depressed and why my life sucks and why I want to turn back the last few years and what I plan to do about it.

Contrary to usual practice, I will inform the web after the fact.

I always worry when I see comments like that, The weather in Ottawa was rainy most of the weekend, and lack of sunshine can help to get folks feeling down. Hay Fever season is also in full sneeze, and that can zap one's energy quickly. When you are down, it is probaly not a good time to take action without consulting with your friends. I hope he will tells us what he is planning so we can give him advice.

Three day weekend gave me some time to look at my Skating FAQ file. I have been holding e-mails since May, and I finaly started to make some changes, but have not put the new version up yet. My plan is that once I get rid of my backloged to-do stuff I will start to work exclusivly on the Linux machine. Some of the old stuff is on the old windows 3.1 486, and I am getting tired of seeing file dates like 04/09/;0.

I bought an internal Zip drive, and can borrow a printer port zip drive, so the plan is to move all my documents to the linux box. That itself will be a project as adding another IDE style device will mean that I will have to activate the second IDE port on the Linux box. At that point I will also pull in another 6.4Gig Fujitsu drive that is underused at the moment in a 486 box that will be my high-speed firewall if I ever get a high-speed connection.

The paper said that the CRTC is concerned about Wholesale rates for ISP service via Phone line and Cable. Seems that the phone folks were propsing to charge ISPs more for lines than they themselves charge retail customers for internet service. Hopefully the result will be a chance to have high-speed service at home from an ISP rather than a media giant.

On friday, Karen got a note from someone who had ported her 2d sound demo from Windows to X-11, but at first glance it looks like they decided to change the sample rate without also re-doing the DSP filters to match. She tells me that the effect would be that of a head 1/4 actual size. I did not build the X-11 based package yet to see if it runs otherwise. Looks like there will be another entry to put into the FAQ for the package.

Dacta presents a challenge, how to find a package to download when it is itself used as an aid to downloading packages. First thought was to search for WGET and RPM , second Wget and DEB, but it turns out the magic is to use wget AND homepage, sure enough, it is a fine GNU product and lives at www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html from that I can find a Canadian Mirror at ftp://ftp.cs.ubc.ca/mirror2/gnu/wget/ of course the RPM version from RPMfind may be more useful to you. See http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/redhat/6.2/i386/wget-1.5.3-6.i386.html

I got around to putting an anouncement in on Freshmeat for Karen's Spatialize project, and in the first day there are over 500 click throughs.

sh: I would suspect that the advogato entry for linus has little to do with the famous Linux developer by the same name.

We had some guests over last weekend, and so I went to the LCBO to stock up. While I was looking at the imported beer, I found that they are now stocking a Cuban Cerveza called Cristal, darn good for a foreign beer, but a bit pricey. I think I will stick to Dave's Ice.

gnuchris wrote:

Posted that article on the Advogato homepage about Linux in schools... it's something that has been on my mind for a while... Linux does belong in the Government at all levels. First time I posted an article, mostly because I can't decide if it is a place for discussions (like I used it as), or if it is for actual opinionated pieces... truth being, probably both.

I believe that having discusions can be very useful as a method of planning future steps for non-proprietary software.

After going right back to 6 Nov 1999, I see that besides your article 152 there was a previous discusion in article 111 that anounced something called the OFSET which is a project to create educational software like SEUL-EDU and OpenClassroom

SEUL-EDU seems to be the lead project from looking at the various websites, but that may not be a valid metric.

IMHO, having a good package that one can present to the educational community would be a Good Thing® for non-closed software, as former students tend to relate to the systems that they learn on in later life, and so a budding cartoonist who learned to draw with The Gimp is likely to want nothing less when they join the paid workforce.

Saw the Corel Balloon today on the drive in to work, it was over the Parlament Buildings. I would guess that from the side of downtown where LinuXcare has their office, the whole downtown looked looked like a Corel Draw Box.

Looked at the old projector I got last weekend. it was built at just the wrong time. That particular model was introduced in 1960. So instead of using WWII tubes like Type 25L6GT that are relativly plentiful, it uses Type 6973 tubes that are getting rare.

The scary thing is that on some of the old tube sales sites I have been looking at, there are folks that are convinced that a change in the brand of a 5U4GB rectifier can make a difference in the sound that audio equipment makes. As long as it is pumping out the right amount of DC, the Filter Cap should smother any diference caused by the design of the 5U4. Of course, a bad Filter Cap. really could change the sound.

Famous Folks

Discovered by accident today that the new guy running Corel actualy lives in my neighbourhood.

Advogato Folks

andrewmuck: Going Under is not somthing to trifle with.. are you planning

• to have the sub at water pressure, or
• at surface pressure.
• What will you use for ballast.
• what is your reserve breathing supply?
• Do you have SCUBA certification
• can you read dive tables?

TheCorruptor: You should be aware that some places insist on the staff using Netscape as a company standard. (and manage to delete or a least hide IE from windows) It is one reason to not try for web pages that are two fancy.

dancer: Yes MS has killed the DOS shell in Win ME and in Win2000.

It did not really exist AFAIK in 2000 in the first place. I understand that new intel BIOS updates actually require Windows rather than dos, so you can't use something like freeDOS to update any more.

I wonder if they will have to come out with a Linux version of their updates?

lgerbarg: For what its worth, Darwin the scientist made his discoveries on a ship called the Beagle.

Advogato must be really busy this (Monday) morning....(AH afternoon, I will try now.) The diary page only half loaded the first time, and on a reload I am getting 34% of 74K at 19 Bytes per second) At this rate it may be Tuesday before I get to paste this entry in.

Birthday

well, let me put it this way, I was born on Aug 13th in 1953... You do the math

OLS

Still have not got my Film from OLS back. That is the one problem with chemical imaging, the need to post-process the image. Process C-41 in this case.

Code Reuse

At Last Years 1999 OLS, Mr. Alan Cox gave a speech where he one of his Points was that open/free software projects tend to have simple interfaces because in order to attract developers, a potential contributor must be able to grock the interface in a resonable amout of time/effort.

He considered this A Good Thing (TM) as having simple interfaces tends to avoid a place where bugs can hide. ( for example the fun you have when your project has some memory from maloc and some from new.)

Thus if you want to have reusable software you probaly need to be very modular and have some exceptional documentation. The alternative is for your potential (RE)user to just take the idea and write their own module- perhaps using the odd line from the original.

Reuse can be a simple as using traditional Unix "components" (like sed) or as potentialy complex as Bonobo. To get leverage the interface must be easy to grock. That may be more work to create than the underling working code

Software and Career

I am still of the mind that I need to have some sort of paperwork to be able to jump from my present job and launch into the world of software.

The old problem remains that I am too burned out at the end of the day to turn around and do something different well enough to be impressive to a Potential employer.

Local Outfit is advertising all sorts of Career moving courses. So I send them some e-mail and ask some pointed questions about their Linux courses.

Guy calls me back today sugesting I might be better to go into their "e-commerce course" They say "how to develop Internet applications: page development (HTML, Front Page, Cold Fusion), JavaScript, Perl, CGI, Introductory OOP-Java, Database Design, and SQL."

Now to me things like Cold Fusion are tools for folks trying to be hip. I prefer web sites that have a high content to eye-candy level myself.

Perhaps I am just too old.

The World Famous Stittsville Fleamarket

On sunday I took the dog for a walk, we went through the flea maket. Boots did not buy any fleas, but I bought a very old movie Projector that I probaly don't really need. (but IT WAS my Birthday)

The Nighbourhood

I am always noticing strange things in my neighbourhood. On Saturday, garbage day, Someone was throwing out a Mac Classic..It was hard to resist the temptation to dumpster dive, but I like being married.

One of the folks on the next street has a Licence Plate of DRROCKET on their minivan, There is a Buick further down the street with a licence plate of DROID, I saw a car the other day one block over with an Ontario Plate that says SD USMC - the windshild had a "US Department of Defence" parking permit on it.. Have we been invaded without knowing.

In the last few years I have seen a 60s Mustang, a 65 Fairlane, two 67 Camaros, and a 73 AMX tooling around along with the normal PT crusers, MB SUV's and Lincoln Navagators that you expect to see in a community that has a lot of tech workers.

Other stuff

skvidal : A border collie is one of the nicest doggies you could ever meet, but you should be aware that they need lots of attention. (or they will climb the walls.) Plan on hour long walks, off leash if it is permited in your area. Well worth it!