Older blog entries for pphaneuf (starting at number 198)

29 Sep 2004 (updated 29 Sep 2004 at 16:08 UTC) »
Feeling Incendiary

Don't know what's up, I'm absolutely dripping with acid today, being totally incendiary about everything and anything. Not that they don't deserve it (I follow my rules about whining), but I've got a quick draw and a short temper today.

Why isn't there a server-side Bayesian spam filter for IMAP servers, using the \Junk tag that MUAs like Mozilla use? Since I did not leave Mozilla running on my home machine, today I get no filtering (I don't think that the learning is done properly between two Mozilla instances, so I leave it off at the office).

Why can't I edit the Sieve rules of my Cyrus IMAP (which is otherwise generally great) from within Mozilla?

Why does the "Sharing" tab of the folder properties in Mozilla mail/news tell me just the status and the current permissions and doesn't let me change them? How am I supposed to do it exactly? Use that command-line "cyradm" tool or whatever it's called now? Set up some sort of web interface to do it? Eek!

Why isn't there a server-side RSS aggregator that dumps the feed items in IMAP mailboxes, as HTML? Hmm, there probably is one, but if there's one thing I can rely upon, it's that's probably crappy anyway. Why not use something like Sage or the other RSS features of Mozilla? Because it doesn't work well when running it on more than one computer simultaneously (have to keep feed lists and other state in sync).

I'm not asking for the moon here. There are no NP-complete problems in what I listed. This is all easy stuff that no one ever did, quite simply. Possibly because they were too busy thinking about some NP-complete problem...

XPLC

Had Jeff spontaneously come to me and interrupt me while I was in the process of being an idiot (it's more involved than you think being a proper idiot) to ask me about XPLC, more or less out of the blue. This was so surprising that I actually tought he was kidding initially, but no, he seemed rather interested even.

I guess I really have to prepare that talk seriously and present it at NITI soon!

Life

I feel a bit like poop right now, but I think I'll manage to get through it. Still a bit anxious about the apartment (found out I wasn't paying a loan "properly" even though I ended up repaying it quicker than I was supposed to!) and other stuff.

Life

In the last few weeks, I resumed the apartment search, visited a few (including a pair of ridiculously nice ones, but unfortunately too far from the metro to be practical), found one to my liking and applied for it. They're doing the credit and reference checks, I think it'll be all right, but I'm still a bit anxious over it.

It's a nice 4 1/2 in the Pointe-St-Charles neighborhood, right by the Charlevoix metro station. It's at ground level and has a yard, but the yard is a total disaster area right now (some weeds are almost my height!). It's being almost completely renovated right now and should be pretty nice, and I told that if they'd fix up the yard, I could take care of it (or, more realistically, have it taken care of!).

Photography

I found myself wishing really hard for a 20D yesterday at the Mad Hatter (hello and thanks to nancyrihakova!), as I was struggling to make half-decent pictures with denizsarikaya's camera. It's quite the decent camera, but the situation was just too demanding, and I found myself in this same situation I was in recently, where I had a really strong artistic vision, but couldn't execute it fully. At least, I could give it a try, so that's better than that other time. I did take a photo that I like.

Unfortunately, I feel that the 20D might take a little while, as I might have any number of expenses related to the new apartment. Einstürzende Neubauten's invitational concert in Berlin in november sounds awfully tempting, but is also quite costly. I thought it was going to be next spring though, now that I see that is is not even two months from now, I might give up on it, which would make the 20D quicker to arrive.

I see four rolls that have yet to be developed on the table by the door, I really should get them to the lab. I'm starting to be really tired of film... It has a certain romantic charm when doing the actual picture taking, but when it comes down to results, I find digital to be quite an improvement, if only in the higher amount of information I can get, the more neutral rendition (no more "is this a situation for Velvia 100F, Sensia 100 or Reala?") and the adaptability (I swap rolls, but it is a pain).

Photography

When I do take my camera around, I often end up not using it at all, but sometimes, I leave it home and boy, do I regret it!

Montréal on a rainy night, the air is clean, the pavement is shiny and neon lights illuminate the streets. The tip of the skyscrapers are shrouded in clouds, and I'm walking through a park. The path I'm walking on is spotted with puddles all over, peacefully reflecting the skyline back at me. Walking in front of the old Windsor train station, it appears that a ball is just finishing and the attendees are exiting, gentlemen in tuxedos and ladies in beautiful gowns...

I feel like I could have walked around all night, burning film. I love this place, it's so surreal at time!

My own planet

I set up a "planet" RSS aggregator at a private address to use with Plucker on my Palm. Seems like a decent enough alternative to using a desktop RSS aggregator, given the lack of good ones I can get to work.

Einstürzende Neubauten

I went on a rampage and bought "Silence is sexy", "Faustmusik" and the first two "Strategies Against Architecture".

"Faustmusik" is pretty damn weird, and is described by some as an oratorio. Lots of spoken word in german, minimalist music, etc. While I can feel the Neubauten touch, I am in no position to appreciate it fully.

I also started to listen to "Silence is sexy", and it reminds me a lot of "Perpetuum Mobile", which didn't interest me much at first, but grew on me until I was listening to it all the time.

Putting some soul in the machine

This has been on my mind for a little while now...

And if I get one more person that comes to me and says: `Computer music has got no soul in it'. I hate it so much, I'll be so mad if someone says that to me. Of course if there is no soul in computer music it means nobody put it there, you know, and computers aren't supposed to put soul into music, not more than a guitar, you can't just look at a guitar and ask him to write a song for you, it's a tool, it's like knife and fork, and if people who make music with computers want to have soul in it, they've got to put it there themselves you know. And if they don't want to have soul in it they don't put soul in it, you know. -- Björk

I agree so much with this, for music and a lot of other things, like code. So many people approach programming without soul, doling out code like industrial wall painters splatters on the off-white paint. It goes the other way too, as the only way to let what's in your heart pour out that doesn't involve the intellect at all involves slashing your wrists, and we all know how messy that can be...

Just like painters need to know their brushes, canvas and paints, and like photographers need to know about apertures, shutter speeds and focal lengths, you need to do so, but it is all meaningless without it coming from your soul.

Rice and pop-corn with your tea?

Mélanie got herself some genmaïcha tea. This is a japanese green tea with some puffed brown rice and what seems to be also puffed corn bits in it! It has a very interesting taste, the rice puffs seeming to cut off the bitterness to a very nice level. And it's dirt cheap, to boot!

A new chapter of hub's adventures in Canada

First off, before you read this, know that he's doing okay and that everything is under control. So...

hub had an itchy throat last week, and went to a pharmacist friday morning to get something for that. The pharmascist gave him some antiseptic tablets and told him that if he didn't feel better by the evening to go see a doctor.

He waited it out a bit, and finally went sunday morning. It was early, and since the clinic opened later and the hospital was closer anyway, he opted for the hospital, which turned out to be a good idea.

He got himself a weird bacterial infection in his throat that for some reason is only found in North America. Since his immune system never saw anything like it, he's getting the full-on symptoms, which involve not being able to eat at all and at the limit, not being able to breathe (it's the valve that routes food and air to the appropriate places that's infected and swollen).

So they decided to keep him. He's in the intensive care unit now, having a pretty sucky time (including a camera shoved up his nose! he says it's not as bad as the one they shove up your arse). Tomorrow, they'll decide if he's doing better, and if so, send him to a normal unit for two or three days, to make sure he's all right. The doctor said it was a good prognostic, and hub historically has a good constitution, by his own account, so it should go well.

Get well soon, hub!

Palm Hacking

Hardware hacking, actually. I went to see Jean saturday and let him play some Dremel on my Tungsten E's hard case to make a hole for the headphones plug. The case is now perfect, IMHO. Thanks a lot, Jean!

28 Aug 2004 (updated 29 Aug 2004 at 00:32 UTC) »
Happy Birthday!

Yesterday was Mich's birthday, who's not only an old fart, but an old farter too!

Co-ops Roundabout

Most co-op students left yesterday. This is both sad and joyful: a bunch of people I have grown to appreciate a lot are leaving, some to come back in another 4 months, others with much other school to deal with. But others from previous terms whom I have missed are coming back, and there are also the new people who often provided for enjoyable surprises...

Collateral

Excellent movie, excellent photography in its own style (large aperture, high speed film, good use of perspective and shallow DOF, etc). The rhythm was very well paced, the acting was excellent, very good dialogs, the directing was first-rate, it's a must-see for film noir amateurs.

Soundtrack to my life

Montreal is a cool city. It is weird, getting to know the character of a city you thought you knew for so long. And here I am, going down the long mechanical stairs at Bonaventure metro station, just past midnight, listening to Einstürzende Neubauten's Perpetuum Mobile...

XPLC

C bindings for XPLC became a funded company project recently. At NITI, we already have these "non-directional" days, where you get to work on any project you like, and I was working mostly on XPLC already, but a bunch of company projects would go a lot better if they had C bindings through XPLC, so bugs have been filed, making it officially "work".

This is cool in a way, as it means more work done on XPLC. Actually, since I was already in the middle of other stuff, apenwarr got tired and decided to implement the IDL parser, generating C and C++ headers, and he also hacked up a way to have generic bindings for scripting languages. On the other hand, I hope this doesn't get me pressured to do things I do not want for XPLC. It's all right now, though!

We have to decide on a string type now. apenwarr is working on a proposal loosely based on WvString, but we'll see. Again, I would like to repeat my promise to various people that using XPLC in C should be not harder than using GObject.

Debrix

I didn't work on Debrix for a little while now, I should get back at it and get it built. I really need to learn GnuArch and use it better, since I already have a few patches left and right to make stuff compile on my SuSE box.

Biking

I'm a lazy bastard, that's what. Thinking about the big hill going to my place from the office tires me! Too bad, I'm going anyway today!

22 Aug 2004 (updated 22 Aug 2004 at 19:35 UTC) »
Life

Went to a party at Deniz yesterday, lots of interesting people. She seems to have a lot of friends on LiveJournal, and made me wonder how social dynamics and how people get to know each others. I'm all right with getting along with people, but "bootstrapping" is somewhat of a mystery to me, it just sort of happens.

Thanks for the party, Deniz!

Now, I'm walking around the apartment in my underwear, drinking some good Gyokuro japanese tea. It's all good.

Photography

Okay, with the 20D, Canon fixed all the problems I had with the EOS 10D, which I already thought had great performance caracteristics, but had a few problems, like the boot lag of 2 seconds, the lack of a joystick or directional buttons, it's large size and hefty weight, etc. They are also making the EFS mount available on more cameras and making new lenses for it, which I guess is a good thing, because it means affordable wide angle lenses for DSLR.

So that's the one I'll get, probably the kit with the 17-85mm/f4-5.6 IS USM. I hope it's not a micro-USM, but I'll probably have to deal with it anyway if it's not...

Palm

I finally got around to have my Palm repaired, but it turned out that for a broken LCD screen on a Tungsten E, you're better off getting a new one! I thought "hmm, I might upgrade to a T2", but no luck, they're all gone gone gone. So I bought another Tungsten E. They now bundle a hard case with it, which is a good thing, but the case isn't so well-done, I find. It makes accessing the power button, stylus, earphone/USB/power plugs rather annoying and difficult. They could have had a different shape, or have notches, something like that. Oh well, it was free.

Some people (hacker, hub) wanted a PalmOS 5 device for various hacking related to syncing, I might lend them my broken Palm, since it otherwise works okay (you can still sort of see some amount of the screen).

11 Aug 2004 (updated 11 Aug 2004 at 06:18 UTC) »
Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions)

While everyone is either gaping at the thunderstorm or fast asleep (Mélanie just fell over a third into the movie), I watched The Barbarian Invasions (in french, obviously!). It is very good, and of the casually leftist intellectual airs that I like once in a while.

Ohm, Sweet Ohm

We're going to stay put until the end of our lease (which, as per Québec tradition, is a year long and started on the 1st of July). This will (hopefully) allows me to save up some money and either have some good fun with it (to compensate for the extra fun this place would have been) or be able to get something really interesting next July.

The "almost everyone moves on the 1st of July" tradition is probably the reason why there was almost nothing for rent. There's stuff all year round, but the best selection is obviously in the 4 or 5 months before July, where renters have to notify their landlords if will be departing.

In any case, I'm pretty much settled on the area around the Lionel-Groulx metro station.

Bloody RSS Aggregators

Tried Forumzilla, which showed a lot of promise, but proved to be rather quirky (probably bugs, so I'm hoping they'll get fixed). Importing OPML didn't seem to work, adding feeds seemed to require closing the feed management window and reopen it for the change to take effect and it didn't produce legal RFC822 messages, and my anal IMAP server (Cyrus) whined about the lack of carriage returns and wouldn't take them.

I think that I'd like some server-side tool that would do exactly this, but reliably and independently of the client. That'd be neat.

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