Older blog entries for louie (starting at number 157)

I think basically the reason I continue paying as much as I do to live where I do is that on a beautiful day, I can walk from here to Darwin's and then to the river, enjoying a great sandwich on beautiful grass (and on Sundays in the summer, without even the noise of cars.) Read Absolution Gap for nearly three hours in the sunlight today, which was great. Warwalked a little bit after that, but with no luck- plenty of APs around Harvard Square, but none that were both open and with functional DHCP, as far as I could tell. So came home by way of Herrell's Ice Cream. Tough day.

I finished The Bug very late last night- pretty depressing picture of programming, really, all the more so because of the basic accuracy in a lot of ways. Certainly a vivid evocation of programming, but frankly as a work of fiction I don't think it was that good- if you're looking for a story of someone who is frustrated by their job and descending into madness, go read Death of a Salesman.

By the way, several people have asked 'where is the netapplet'; we're not hoarding it, but it is pretty suse-specific code-wise at this point, so we haven't released it yet because it wouldn't be of much value/interest to anyone not running suse. It'll be out soon enough anyway ;)

Currently watching Tarkovsky's 'Solaris'. It is... patience-requiring :) But good. Does at points feel like the Soviet Union said 'our bloc has science fiction writers, just like the West! Clearly we should publicize that by doing another trippy scifi movie, just like the West!'

This week will be interesting- lots of people from all over Novell, including the Nuremberg office ;), coming to Boston to talk about using bugzilla within Novell.

The first details of the Rio Karma's replacement are finally leaking. Having been burned once... ugh, I'll probably go get burned again. This time with a better warranty ;) (And a 16-bit color screen?) Then again, the release date is now looking like Spring 2005. Not sure if I can wait that long, even if it does have ogg support and I don't want to rerip all my CDs :)

My plans to stay away from the computer were thwarted by our lousy weather today, but I did get out long enough to get the final Revelation Space novel. We'll see if it can keep me engrossed. I've also gotten several chapters into The Bug, which is about exactly what it sounds like- a software engineer and a QA person tracking down a bug. It is so far pretty terrifying, as it describes the field pretty perfectly, and apparently the programmer involved goes insane by the end. Which is too close to home :/

Oh, and I played with a bit of code last night- looked at the yast perl bindings and gnome setup tools. Sort of scary; neither are incredibly well documented. But I think I have at least some grasp of the gst bits, so if I can figure out how to actually do things via the yast perl bindings getting it running might not be quite as brutal as it seems. This is purely a spare-time project, sadly; YaST frontends are the One True Way for Novell/SUSE for the foreseeable future.

James Boyle, of the law school at my fine Alma Mater, had a fun Financial Times article on the iPod/Real thing last week. My favorite line:

If I want to use Real's service to download music to my own device, where's the breaking and entering?... So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, Platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.)

Good summary of really the whole API/interop problem for non-techies- it's the same thing MS wants to do with patenting the Office file format stuff, and very similar to the CD-DRM problem, so it's a lot more important than 'just' Real v. Apple.

The ever-brilliant Ben Hyde has a brief discussion of one community's attempts to avoid DOS-by-newbie. Interesting. I doubt we could do a FAQ trial-by-fire, but still interesting to ponder the problem. (Not that we've been DOS'd by newbies lately, but I can see parallels in the volume of in/outflux in bugzilla.) Ben also has a link to an attempt to standardize CalDAV, which is roughly like what it sounds like- iCal+WebDAV. Hopefully that spreads- open-standard calendaring would be cool.

As some of you may know, I'm a sportsaholic; I'll watch virtually any athletic competition that has reasonably objective rules. For obvious reasons, this has been a good weekend for that- Krissa and I ended up watching nearly 15 TV-hours of sports yesterday (with long pauses for dinner and such, then skipping through ads with replayTV, so 'only' probably 12 or so hours in front of the TV). And something similar today. I know this makes me a terrible, terrible couch potato, but... it has been fun- lots of volleyball (both types and sexes), men's gymnastics, soccer, basketball (Argentina v. Serbia/Montenegro was great!), handball, sailing (worst commentators), rowing, and lots of swimming. Fun, fun, fun.

Aside from that, while watching, I snuck in a productive weekend- have ripped a zillion more CDs, done laundry, lots of dishes, and even snuck in some bugzilla cleanup. And I'm rebuilding HEAD gnome and other toys; generally looks solid, though the mime changes make me nervous- they look fine here, I just hope they are getting testing- anything that big and that important obviously has to Just Work. The new printing bits look nice, and I'm hoping this time I can actually get Vino to work. We'll see, I guess :)

After Robert posted that unflattering image, I'd like to link to a much sexier picture of myself. Thanks, phlog, for helping out at the LWE booth and posting the pic.

Just gave Garrett my old stereo and old VA Research box, clearing out a lot of floor space and helping Julia find a job here in Boston. Nice to see so much new space on the floor- hopefully I'll get more when I finish ripping and can hide the CDs and server tower in a closet, exposing only the speakers. A few months into the experiment, VNC + XFCE + muine have proven a very lightweight, easy-for-Krissa interface for all of that- as long as the box stays up, it is a really nice solution.

Good to see that someone read my spelling post ;) For what it is worth, I mostly agree with Federico- compared to English grammar, English spelling is not much of a problem for English-as-second-language people I know.

Sigh. I had this idea ages ago. Should have tried to patent it then. :) Apple will again get credit for taking a basically obvious idea and then implementing it very, very well (which admittedly I was not prepared to do- would have been easy enough to do once Windows started selling their incredibly expensive tablet PCs :)

I'm fascinated by change in large groups which are deeply committed to something or another, and spelling changes in a large language are a pretty great example of that. Apparently such a thing is happening in Germany, with mixed reactions. Interesting read.

(Link from the almost-always-interesting Crooked Timber, which also has some interesting commentary on the article.)

I just got spam from newoemsoft.biz for ... linux software. Truly, we have arrived.

Elijah: awesome.