Older blog entries for lkcl (starting at number 183)

oo, scary-scary. i bought an acer tablet c100 to replace my worn-out but functional sony vaio.

hammered the keyboard so hard it was stripped of lettering.

am following some of the things recommended by the two reports on tuxmobile.org and having a hard time dealing with the things that aren't mentioned.

subtle hacking of debian linux packages and the like (installing wireless-tools after patching the Makefile to report "version 14")

avoiding the use of grub because it fails miserably.

it's fascinating and very scary.

i believe the machine actually has _two_ pcmcia chips, one for "real" cards and one specifically for an internal pcmcia card - the wireless card. if that's the case, the pcmcia-cs guys are going to LOVE it.

i have bluetooth, it works, although the docs are very obtuse.

by reading about four separate documents from different people, the correct procedure "clicked" into my tepid brain and it worked thereafter.

i was slightly ahead of the game in that i had previously submitted a successfully-implemented bug-report to ppp-config which now allows blank username and blank password to work with pppd files, and have been using a pl2303 usb->serial converter for several months.

fun fun fun in the sun sun sun...

In article 681, i finally believe i have some sensible closure from playing devil's advocate.

the responses from two successful project forks were well-written, relevant and thought-provoking.

in fact, i have to say (and this may just be me, because i have a personal interest in project forks succeeding) that the two responses were more insightful than the original lead of the article.

there was a recent article on slashdot about a successful project experience, i recall that the third thing in it said "be financially independent" if you want to be a project leader.

without full-time project leadership, a project cannot realistically be expected to survive.

excessive saving of money forced me to buy four books on saturday. all first edition hardbacks (i collect them): i was delighted to find one of them is signed by the author, peter f. hamilton.

you know, i used to think that political idealists, particularly the famous ones, were dangerous. that the communist ideals of marx would only cause trouble wherever they fell into practice.

then i came across a quote somewhere by mahatama ghandi or someone equally famous, the basics of which i will attempt to repeat:

"i like your christ. i dislike you christians. you christians are not like your christ."

substitute any word or ideal there: democracy/democrats. communism/communists. and you have the basis for kicking any idiots in the pants.

ideals meet humanity

wherever you get humans, you get a massive disparity between the ideal and the reality; you get greed, apathy and instability caused by an imbalance between over-powerful, power-crazed individuals on the one hand, and everyone else on the other.

i read sci-fi books because they tend to combine "now" with "what-if", where the scale of "what-if" goes one or more degrees into the future.

olaf stapledon's "last and first men" takes us to the utmost extreme of those scales, such that all other sci-fi books can only be shadows of his vision, to fill in the missing gaps.

misspent youth

this book, by peter f hamilton, takes us 50 years into the future. GM crops have already cross-pollinated with common / garden weeds and plants, causing over-sized, pesticide-resistant and hardy plants that make "day of the triffids" look like a walk in the park.

and this is just a throw-away, two-para explanation as background: it's not even part of the story.

what _is_ more of the story-line is the extrapolation of the effects of the european union "superstate" on its member states. the politicians in the book are talking about having to raise "national insurance" up to 17 percent, and that's excluding income tax already being at 53% across the board.

and there's nothing that can be done about it because the majority of europeans (50%) are already at retirement age, and they expect their state pensions, whatever the cost.

any politician that told 50% of the population that they had to work harder, for longer, and get less, would soon be ousted from power!

which brings us _right_ back to the greedy, apathy and the over-powerful trying to tell the greedy, apathetic and collectively over-powerful what to do...

my favourite line of the book is the throw-away "..you know, this riot is expected to be much worse than the ones in paris, brussells and berlin..."

overall, i am totally disheartened by the future as outlined by peter f. hamilton, and i hope to god it doesn't happen.

p.s. the book's supposed to be about the first human to be totally genetically re-engineered: an 80-year-old in a 20-year-old body, but that's just an excuse for the (more important) background material to be portrayed to the reader.

regarding option processing: you may be interested to know that there is a [highly criticised] scientific basis for such coincidences of discovery.

when lagrange's theorem (a subgroup divides a group) is applied to information and intelligence, out pops from the maths the simple but startling conclusion that any discovery must be made simultaneously by several individuals.

so you're not alone :)

additional comments

read it more carefully: i state that when lagrange's theorem is APPLIED to information and intelligence and discoveries, where "the group" is "all knowledge", then it logically follows that "all knowledge" must be divisible by a "subgroup" - "some knowledge".

consequently, we can conclude that "knowledge" cannot be "discovered" by only ONE person, it must be "discovered" by MORE than one person, or that it isn't actually a discovery at all.

wireless cards

prism2 rocks. p.s. don't buy usb wireless devices.

discrimination

lkcl: To quote the DFSG: 6. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

Your software would thus be 'non-free', according to Debian.

bugger. oh well: i'll think of something. thanks for pointing this out, daniels.

positive action by omission

sab39, thanks for recommending a less political, more subversive and much more positive approach.

i very much appreciate it when people such as yourself make comments that bring me back down to earth.

i should point out that my anger - even after three years have passed - is directed quite specifically, and not at "open source" in general. it's very interesting to note someone else's recent diary entry on here about commercial exploitation of open source leads them to encourage others to rethink their relationship and attitude to open source.

perhaps my experiences - which are at the extreme end of "bad" - will encourage people to, i dunno, set up a guild of open source programmers; a trade union; a charter which outlines the expected relationship between programmers and potential employees; even a freemason's lodge - heck, i don't give a monkey's as long as it makes sure people don't end up going through the same shit that i did.

so, without going into too much detail - and answering your question directly at the risk of inciting wrath:

i put three, maybe four intense years of my life into samba, a major project that has won awards and attracted commercial sponsorship from several companies such as SGI, HP, IBM, VALinux, TurboLinux, Linuxcare;

during the dotcom boom, NOT ONE of the linux companies invited me to take part in their IPOs, whilst at the same time, one of those linux companies invited the brother of one of the samba developers to take part in its IPO;

the so-called samba team leaders were ALWAYs jealous and incapable of understanding how much work i did and how far i was pushing the boundaries of interoperability with NT, and they couldn't handle it; now they are running into design difficulties because they were incapable of listening to my advice;

psychological and financial pressures made it very _very_ difficult for me to communicate effectively and also to be able to negotiate properly, to the point where one of the samba team developers not only wouldn't look at any code i wrote but also would rubbish literally _any_ ideas that i had, even if they had successful usage and grounding in other well-known and well-established projects.

basically what happened was a massive failure in communications and relations that would, and i am not joking, have led many people in the same situation to a nervous breakdown.

to cap it all, my employment contract with linuxcare required that they own any intellectual property rights in code that i wrote and ideas that i had (so i made sure i didn't write any new code and i made sure i didn't explore any new ideas in samba) and yet the other samba team members were not bound by the same restrictions.

so i believe i am entitled to be pissed off with open source - or more explicitly, how open source - and myself - has been exploited and violated.

to the extent that if i do develop and release a major project in the future with the potential to be attractive and useful to thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, it will be under a license that is otherwise unrestricted except to ban certain companies, such as VA/Linux, HP, Redhat, Caldera etc. from using or distributing it.

such a license would pretty much leave Debian and other truly non-commercially-controlled distributions as the means of distribution.

having a great time doing python coding. the framework that started off over three years ago as very very simple functions to output HTML tables from mysqldb has rapidly evolved three legs and two heads.

there's a company that did a commercially similar venture to the ultimate approach that i want to take: they're locked into a one year exclusivity deal on the code they supplied to their customer; the company since has gone tits up and the new owner wants hundreds of thousands of dollars for its suppliers to be able to break out of the exclusivity deal. reeally smaart lawyers...

in a few months that code will be utterly utterly worthless to that company, and open source will get a _really_ radical python/sql/html framework for application development that will, in my opinion, stuff zope, by comparison, somewhere into the C19th.

there's also ian's colorstudy "sqlobject" now on sf.net which is one small part of the whole python/html/sql thing.

the framework that _i_ am developing is also around - in sf.net/projects/custom - of a sorts. it's raw, it's rough, it works, it's not pretty, it's compact, it helps _me_ do applications.

i'm on to my 7th python / sql / html project (custom was the 6th). i'm not in the slightest bit interested in releasing this new project as open source at this stage: i have absolutely zero incentive to do so. i'm very happy to be able to say both parts of that sentence. open source can go stuff itself up its own arse: it's made me absolutely zero significant amounts of money so far. time to play a different game: time to change the rules.

maybe later i'll change my mind. but right now, having had my good nature taken advantage of so many times i figure, like in the nursery story where the chicken asks for help and gets none until it's time to eat, open source can go fuck itself.

... except in the story the chicken didn't swear, it was a very _polite_ chicken. maybe it was a duck. hell, i don't care: it was 25 years ago. for god's sake! shoot the damn chicken, feed it to the fox!

2 inches of snow in an hour, out of the blue (literally) and it totalled traffic conditions in watford.

m25 jammed so all traffic started getting off junctions 17 through 20 directly into watford; traffic not aware of this attempts to _also_ go through watford to get _on_ the m25.

four hours later after waiting a couple of hours to go home: wide empty and icy road outside the industrial estate. i've never tried doing hand brake turns before. it's fun!

[kids! don't steal your parent's car to do hand brake turns, they might get a bit upset if you prang the family runabout]

the "Custom" project i'm working on auto-generates virtually all of its HTML.

i'm looking at a way to separate the HTML formatting from the code itself, and found that there's a python program to do exactly that - with templates (apt-get install python-htmltmpl).

so i naively thought it best to start by outputting some of the auto-generated html code from a couple of example pages, and to go from there.

unfortunately, the functions used to generate tables, forms etc. are vastly more compact than the squiggly looking html output they create.

i've gone sufficiently far down the function route - display_form(), display_table(), display_header(), display_footer() etc. that it's going to be impossible to do entire HTML pages.

so i'm going to do specific templates: a display_form.tmpl that display_form() uses; a display_table.tmpl that display_table uses, etc.

and hope like hell it all hangs together.

simd

if you like SIMD, take a look at aspex.net - theirs is a parallel processor on a chip with - get this: four thousand and ninety six processors.

those processors run at 250 Mhz, can do two-bit arithmetic that can be cascaded to emulate N-bit arithmetic of ANY length and i mean literally ANY length.

we're talking 4096 x 250 million bit-operations per second, here. that's one terabit-ops per second, out of a $USD 150 device.

... but it takes SIMD to the extreme: you REALLY have to think about your algorithm designs in a different light.

using the c++ template array classes really helps out there, as does making extensive use of python's functional programming operatives such as map and filter.

radical.

storms blow up around provocative articles. sometimes this is good - if handled carefully.

i had a quite lengthy and, for me, very informative, discussion with one of the people who responded quite vocally to the articles i wrote.

very interesting to see another article about open source - the title at least shows that i have made people think.

and for those people who are already willing to learn, well they don't need to read my articles, do they :)

and for those people who aren't willing to learn: if i made them shout out loud, stop or think, then that's more than i hoped for.

regarding the other article itself: chaos (evolution style) by numbers achieves more and is more self-protective than any other system. debian works in spite of its mailing lists...

Interesting to note that even Terry Pratchett realises that there are people out there who think that calm and stability are always a good thing...