[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Hace 4 años
Hace 4 años decidí mudarme a vivir a Santiago. Necesitaba ver a mi hermana, que ya hacia tiempo estaba viviendo allá, pero además necesitaba salir de una duda, arriesgarme como un quinceañero y lanzarme a la vida antes que las neuronas retomaran su trono. Pasar tiempo con alguien que por esas tincadas irracionales, me parecía que llegaría a ser alguien importante en mi vida.
Así fue, ese alguien era Andrea y hoy cumplimos 4 años. Qué felices 4 años!
Esta es la primera de muchas fotografías que nos tomaríamos.
May 11
War was a bit more cerebral than I was expecting, and I certainly didn't see the twist coming. Pretty good movie, though.Sansa v2 baby steps taken
Dave Chapman just told us that he’s managed to upgrade his SanDisk Sansa Clip to run a customized firmware, which proves that we know the file format good enough. His proof of concept simply did a 5 second delay, but now we should be a pretty big step forwards on the way towards getting Rockbox to the Sansa v2 models.
A week of Xbox fun
While my MediaServer implementation is still in it's very infancy, I was already asked by more than two people if it will work with Xbox. I didn't have a clue since I don't have an Xbox so I asked Naba if i can visit him on some weekend to find some clues but he was kind enough to lend it for a week instead. For the past one week I had been having lots of fun with it. This nice page by Frank Scholz gave me headstart and I was able to get Xbox see my MediaServer rather sooner. The only other achievement I had in the whole week is that Xbox is able to see the videos but can't play it (most probably because I don't give it all the metadata it requests).Syndicated 2008-05-11 20:48:00 (Updated 2008-05-11 21:00:00) from zeenix
Metrics Provide An Inner Product
Another post for the Poincaré Project.
We've already seen that a one-form is a linear function from a vector to a (for our purposes) real number. On a manifold, one-forms correspond to stack-type vectors being applied to arrow-type vectors by counting how many "stacks" the arrow passes through.
In the previous post Metrics As Mappings Between Arrows and Stacks, we saw that a metric is an extra bit of structure that describes how to map between arrow-type vectors and stack-type vectors.
So, in summary:
These two facts can be combined to let you take two arrow-type vectors and get a real number out of them.
This has parallels with currying in functional programming.
Recall that if a function "add" takes two integers and returns an integer, it can be viewed as a function that takes one integer and returns a function that takes one integer and returns an integer.
add :: Int -> Int -> Int
Now, a one-form is a function that takes a vector and returns a real. In other words:
Vector -> Real
So it is easy to see that if you curry a real-valued function that takes two vectors you get:
Vector -> Vector -> Real
In other words, a function taking two vectors to a real is equivalent to a function from a vector to a one-form.
So if you have a metric that can convert between vectors and one-forms (or, in the context of a manifold, between arrows and stacks) then you also have a function from two vectors to a real.
Such a function is called an inner product or dot product. Often the notion of an inner product is defined first, before one-forms are introduced (if at all). In fact, some texts will define a metric to be an inner product. It is best for our purposes, though, to think of the metric's fundamental purpose as being converting between arrows and stacks (and back again) and the inner product as being an extra concept we get for free.
Syndicated 2008-05-11 14:55:12 (Updated 2008-05-11 14:55:14) from James Tauber
As Always, Always Follow the Incentives...
Remember the story of the Yugoslavian socialist worker-managed firm? If you add another worker to the firm, that worker gets a pro-rata share of the firm's value added. The firm's value added has a component attributable to the firm's capital stock, a component attributable to the ideas embedded in the firm, a component attributable to the firm's market position, and a component attributable to the workers. Hire another worker, and only the last of these goes up: the first three do not, and so average compensation falls. This means that a worker-managed firm is likely to shrink whenever it gets good news that makes it more productive--the larger is the value added due to ideas, capital, or market position, the more expensive does it become for the existing workers to replace workers who leave, let alone hire enough workers to expand. While a competitive market capitalist firm responds to good news about its productivity and value to society by increasing employment, a Yugoslavian-model market socialist firm responds to good news about its productivity and value to society by shrinking.
Kubuntu issues - follow-up
I'm just following up on my last post - thanks to everyone commenting!Miro AKA DemocracyPlayer
www.ted.com is a premier partner for the Miro player [1]. This is a free player for free online content, the site www.getmiro.com has the player for download, it has binaries for Mac OS/X, Windows, and Ubuntu as well as the source (GPL licensed), it is in Debian/Unstable. It supports downloading in a number of ways (including bittorrent) and can keep the files online indefinitely. A Debian machine connected to the net could be a cheap implementation of my watching while waiting idea for showing interesting and educational TV in waiting areas for hospitals etc [2]. When I first checked out the getmiro.com site it only seemed to have binaries for Mac OS/X and Windows. But now I realise that it’s been in Debian since 11 Sep 2007 under the name Miro and since 12 Jun 2006 under the name Democracyplayer. I have only briefly played with Miro (just checked the channel list) and it seems quite neat so far. I wish I had tried this years ago. Good work Uwe Hermann!
I hope that the Miro player will allow me to more easily search the TED archives. Currently I find the TED site painful to use, a large part of this is slow Javascript which makes each page take an unreasonable delay before it allows me to do anything. I am not planning to upgrade my laptop to a dual-core 64bit machine just to allow Firefox to render badly written web pages.
Biella recently wrote about the Miro player and gave a link to a documentary about Monsanto [3].
One thing I really like about this trend towards publishing documentaries on the net is that they can be cited as references in blog posts. I’ve seen many blog posts that reference documentaries that I can’t reasonably watch (they were shown on TV stations in other countries and even starting to try tracking them down was more trouble than it was worth). Also when writing my own posts I try and restrict myself to using primary sources that are easy to verify, this means only the most popular documentaries.
Motorbike Nightmare
<object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0laMqXuO41E&hl=en&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0laMqXuO41E&hl=en&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>What I imagine it would be like if everyone gave up their cars and started riding motorcycles. I'd be more scared than I am already.
Israeli Independence Day Special: Enough with the Obsession With National Security! (English Transla
Note: this is an English translation of a previous entry which was written in Hebrew especially for the Israeli Independence Day.
Happy Independence Day Everybody! I decided to write this entry for the Israeli Independence Day, but it is probable some of you will be pleased by it. The entry is written in Hebrew, due to patriotic feelings, but I'll probably translate it into English later and post it as a separate entry.
The story went like this: I talked with Peteris Krumins on Freenode, and he told me that he is about to graduate with his Bachelor Degree in Physics. (Good Luck and Mazal Tov!) In any case, we discussed graduation ceremonies in Israel and Latvia (which is Peteris's home-land), and he referred me to a few photos of a graduation ceremony in Latvia.
The first picture that caught my eye was this picture of several girls who were apparently about to receive their diploma. As one can see they are incredibly cute, but I found their costumes very funny in comparison to what I am familiar with. Peteris told me that these are standard formal costumes of girls there, and he asked me if I could find him photos of Israeli females in formal dresses.
So I went to Flickr and searched for "israeli girls", and what do I find? Uniforms upon uniforms. My eyes became black from all the Khaki. High-quality photos of good-looking female soldiers, but that's it - only soldiers. Peteris told me that these photos were a hit on Digg, Reddit and the rest of the social bookmarking sites, which may be the reason why Flickr ranks them so highly.
OK, a female solider in uniform (or a male soldier in uniform) is not such an uncommon sight in Israel, given that most girls serve in the military for two years starting from the age 18, and some of them also choose to become officers or serve permanently. But most of the women we see in Israel are not wearing uniforms. So this search in Flickr gives a false and political impression.
The search "israeli woman" does not display only soldiers, but it too has a very political orientation.
Now here's the substance of my complaint: I think Israel is perceived as a hyper-political and hyper-security-obsessed country, both by the citizens of the world and by its own. I'll give a few examples:
When I studied civics in the 11th grade, the Civics teacher (whom I remember quite fondly) asked the class to which committee of the Knesseth, the prime minister was obliged to be summoned, and the students said "The Committee of External Affairs and National Security". But, the correct committee was "The Committee for the Critique of the State", and the teacher noted that it was an indication that we perceive the national security as too important (and she noted that beforehand as well).
In this essay Paul Graham proved "scientifically" that it would be a pointless mission to establish a "Silicon Valley" (i.e: a hub of startups) in Israel. He probably didn't hear of companies such as Mirabilis, Check Point, Zend and many other examples of numerous, high-quality former Israeli startups. Most of the companies I have worked for as a programmer in Israel have been startups. There isn't a shortage of them, and there were many like that even during the recession.
When I wrote the entry "A Brief History of Linux in Israel" on the Hackers-IL wiki, I originally wrote that Israel had many problems including "heavy taxation, irrational and abundant regulations, quite a lot of terrorist activity, etc.". Someone (who I think was an Israeli) deleted what I wrote and left only the "large amount of terrorist activity".
With all due respect, the terrorist activity is not the worst problem that hurts Israel. More Israelis have died from road accidents and from smoking than from terrorist activity. And, as I noted, the high tax liability harms Israel much worse than the terrorist activity, and Israel won't lose anything (and will even greatly benefit) the more it will lower it.
Thus, the editing was misleading.
Too many foreign people I have talked with from outside Israel in Internet chats have asked me if Israel was safe. Apparently, their impression is that there is shooting in the streets, missiles falling everywhere and that Israel is not safe. But the reality is that most Israeli residents feel perfectly safe.
Naturally, I, too, am not a Tallith that's entirely azure. My first serious story was based on the political situation on the Israeli-Lebanese border, although in my defense I must say that it has a much more universal message. I have also written some essays about politics as well as many political posts on my blog, albeit not all of them are about the political-defensive state of Israel.
But I think that as a people, we Israelis are too obsessed with the military and the national security of Israel. If you ask me, the main reason our security status is so terrible is the fact that Israel has constitutional discrimination. Until we completely eliminate it, it will beget institutionalized and private discrimination and racism, as well as non-supportive treatment from even amongst the most liberal of the Arabs and the rest of the world's citizenry. And I'm saying this as a Jewish Israeli. If I may contort what Yoda said: "Do or do not. But don't do for a Jew and don't do for a Gentile, or vice versa."
As Israelis in Independence Day, we should remember that the IDF and the National Security are a means, not an end. The end is that the citizens of Israel would be able to live good, peaceful, happy and prosperous lives. Happy Independence Day to all Israeli Residents!
where is sarah?
<content type="xhtml">today i checked my deserted blog, feeling a bit guilty after a friend had told me that i have effectively vanished behind the google cone of silence. and what do i see in the logs?
5 days, 9 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 5 days, 6 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 5 days, 3 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 5 days ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 4 days, 21 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 4 days, 18 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 4 days, 15 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 4 days, 12 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 4 days, 9 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 4 days, 6 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 4 days, 3 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 4 days ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 3 days, 21 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 3 days, 18 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 3 days, 15 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 3 days, 12 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 3 days, 9 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 3 days, 6 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 3 days ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 2 days, 21 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 2 days, 18 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 2 days, 15 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 2 days, 12 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 2 days, 9 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 2 days, 6 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 2 days, 3 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 2 days ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 1 day, 21 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 1 day, 18 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 1 day, 15 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 1 day, 12 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 1 day, 9 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 1 day, 6 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 1 day, 3 hours ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 1 day ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 21 hours, 46 minutes ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 18 hours, 46 minutes ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 15 hours, 45 minutes ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 12 hours, 45 minutes ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 9 hours, 45 minutes ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 6 hours, 45 minutes ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 3 hours, 45 minutes ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers' 45 minutes ago 209.85.238.3 Search: query for 'sarah m. byers'
someone* must be really interested in sarah's whereabouts! if you haven't heard, sarah is currently traveling in the stans for work. when internet connectivity allows, she is posting awesome pictures. here is a sampler:<style>div#setThumbs div.setThumbs-indv {float:left;} div#setThumbs span.pc_s {display:block;} div#setThumbs span.pc_s a.pc_link img {bottom:3px; float:left;} </style>
Syndicated 2008-05-11 23:54:20 (Updated 2008-05-12 00:23:39) from gregor
2008-05-11 GPL is not always the GNU General Public License
GPL is not always standing for the GNU General Public License… as this seen on a flower label. It's a company doing "plant novelty rights" called GPL international (http://www.gpl.dk/). They are clearly going into the opposite direction compared to the freedom defined in the well known free software license called GNU General Public License.
By the way, if those osteospermum flowers are not F1 hybrid we will be able to keep some good seeds and copy (doing multiplication) of the plant. It's the right to nature to reproduce itself. It's the first time I see a company trying to disallow the gardener (as described on their labels, check the photo below) the multiplication of the plant purchased.
Tags: freedom biology gpl gnu license nature gardening seeds biodiversity
Syndicated 2008-05-11 14:04:56 from AdulauWikiDiary: RecentChanges
oops
Really, really windy day. There was a tornado watch until 3, which I didn't think much about until I was up on a ridge overlooping Slagle Hollow at 3:30, in one of the strongest winds I've experienced, blowing small branches past me. And lost. That could have not turned out well, but I made the right guesses at the turns, and it gave me the incentive to power-hike for an hour to get down off the hill and back to Roosterfront.
Before that I found a beautiful long hollow full of mossy deadfalls and trilliums, atonishingly close to the well-traveled trails.
I, Robot
The 1950s must have been a great time to be a science fiction author. WW2 was finally over, and seemingly massively stupid ideas like mutually assured destruction, nuclear rifles so powerful that they were as much a danger to those firing them as those who were on the receiving end, and Brylcreem were all the rage. Into this atmosphere of run away idiocy comes Asimov's I, Robot, the book which defined the three laws of robotics, and some how managed to not suggest that humanity should nuke each other all into submission. This book is still an excellent read almost 60 years later, and I think still shows us some of the future. Its a little depressing to think how little we've achieved towards Asimov's proposed future world, given the time line laid out in this book.
) Isaac_Asimov()
2008-05-11: Engineers without Borders
<!-- start of entry 200805/11 --> Engineers without BordersI went to an Engineers Without Borders conference in Montreal a while ago, and I was very impressed; these people seem to have their goals straight. And little did I know that it was founded in 2000 by University of Waterloo students who were in school at the same time I was. Considering it now has 25000+ members, that's incredibly fast growth.
Anyway, as a sample of the sort of things they do, here's a report of a field study of how a proposed drought-resistant crop worked out in a heavy rainfall season. Summary: not so well. But that's not the point; the point is that they actually went to check, and then reported the results honestly, just like you'd expect engineers to do. I really respect that. <!-- end of entry 200805/11 -->
Syndicated 2008-05-08 18:57:02 from apenwarr - Business is Programming
Edwards attributes that to a lucky twist: The computer was running an ancient operating system, DOS, which does not scatter data all over drives as other approaches do.
διαγραμματική παράσταση του ελληνικού ιστού εμπιστοσύνης
Μετά τη συνάντηση της 23 Απριλίου στη Θεσσαλονίκη αποφάσισα να δημιουργήσω (και να συντηρώ) τη διαγραμματική παράσταση του ελληνικού ιστού εμπιστοσύνης. Προφανώς το εγχείρημα αυτό απαιτεί μεγάλο όγκο αρχικών δεδομένων και αυτοματοποίηση της διαδικασίας δημιουργίας του γράφου. Τη δεύτερη απαίτηση την ικανοποίησα με ένα απλό Perl πρόγραμμα μεγέθους μερικών δεκάδων γραμμών το οποίο κάνει χρήση του προγράμματος sig2dot.pl ως βιβλιοθήκη.
Για την
ικανοποίηση
της πρώτης
απαίτησης
μπορείτε
να
συνεισφέρετε
στέλνοντάς
μου
στη
διεύθυνση
argp at domain
cs.tcd.ie
το
αποτέλεσμα
της
εντολής
gpg --list-sigs > $USER.txt.
Κάποια πρώτα αποτελέσματα υπάρχουν παρακάτω. Η πρόσφατη συνάντηση στη Θεσσαλονίκη είναι εμφανής στο πάνω δεξιά μέρος του γράφου.
In other work, I'm managing to tame wxPython again and am producing a consistent and simple interface for importing data from different sources (databases, spreadsheets, text files). It could form the basis of a data manager, but it's all for the statistics program which is itself coming along.
The program has an interactive interpreter which is fun: it's all based on Python's 'code' module and I've organised it so that users can import data with awkward field names (like: 'Variable (1) & Variable (2) mixed'), and they can still be used on the command line, thus:
Variable (1) & Variable (2) mixed.mean
Not a big change, but it's one less thing to explain to demanding users. The work on the main GUI is still ongoing (choosing a test is the hardest thing) but we're getting there.
The thing will be released under the Affero GPL license so it's even relevant to this site.
In administration things, I managed to get some more marketing research done (all promising but lots of things to think about), and the company is getting closer to being officially founded. It's all very exciting stuff.
I have a questionnaire here if anyone feels like completing it: it should take about 5-10 minutes and concerns people who use computers to perform statistical analysis. I cannot offer any money in return (we have zero investment - any offers will be carefully considered!), but it would be extremely helpful in getting open source to the top.
The questionnaire is at Survey Monkey. TIA to anyone who completes it.
Wild Zebras
Christian at Design Desires posted some simple Javascript to make dynamic zebra-striped tables. He asked for comments to be mailed to him - in keeping with last month’s rant about open discussion, I’m posting my response here instead:
No sir, I don’t like it.
I don’t find it adds anything. I’m perfectly able to read across the lines of a plain old static table, so highlight one line doesn’t make it any faster to read that line. It also doesn’t help me pick out a line when scanning with the mouse, because I’m already looking at the line that gets highlighted - I put the mouse there myself!
I don’t know if it’s just my browser, but highlighting the line causes a lot of flicker. (The “more extreme” example from Neil Roberts is even worse - it actually resizes things while I’m mousing over them, jerkily. That’s terrible!) So I’d really hesitate to use this until it’s been tested on a lot of browsers and setups to make sure it’s smooth everywhere.
The only advantage I could see is if I look away and come back later. There might be some value in highlighting the line after the mouse has stopped there for a few seconds, which wouldn’t cause flicker when scanning quickly. It still might be more annoying than useful, though.
OpenQabal 0.0.3 available
OpenQabal 0.0.3 has been released and is now available from the SVN repo. As with previous releases, there are not yet pre-built binary releases available... you will have to check the code out from SVN and build it. Thankfully this process is now *much* easier as a result of massive work on the build system and the addition of scripts to automate most of the tedious stuff. You can now essentially build and install OpenQabal with 4 commands.
Changes in this release include:
This release is a huge step in the direction of having a really usable system, but there is still a LOT of work to be done. Some things that had originally been planned for this release had to be deferred to 0.0.4, with OpenID support being the most notable such item. And of course there are still plenty of ideas on the roadmap that we haven't even gotten started on yet. But we're now in a lot better position to be able to start on some of the more interesting stuff, such as the "distributed conversation" support, tools for building a managing the "social graph," etc.
Look for a new post soon with more discussion of what the roadmap will look in the near future, as well as some discussion of some of the important changes that did make it into 0.0.3. And with any luck, the long-awaited "demo server" will be coming soon, as well as some screencasts and other ways of exploring OpenQabal.
Syndicated 2008-05-10 22:24:31 (Updated 2008-05-10 22:25:45) from openqabal
Smirking cat murdered
This is a weird story already, but that illustrative photo, and especially its caption, are just plain bizarre.Syndicated 2008-05-10 16:56:00 (Updated 2008-05-10 16:57:44) from John Levon
May 10
Oof, woke up with a head full of BEES. Or something. That'll teach me... or not.Yea, just look at all the passion on that wall.
There should be a website to coordinate cinema-dates.
I don't like going to the cinema alone and have, in the past, frequently missed viewing films rather than go alone.
This is a habit I'm growing out of, but I still think it is better to go with a friend or two.
In the near future I'm going to view the last Indianna Jones movie, and the Sex & The City film. I have partners for both of those.
But after that? There are a few films which I can't immediately think of who I'm going to lure away with me. I could either :
If there were a site that had list of upcoming films, and allowed you to express interest in going to see them that would be a fantastic idea. (Obviously location based).
I'd not even assume "dating", because I think in my life I've had a first-date at a cinema once. When I was about 14. Because it just doesn't work - you can't talk during, (and back then we couldn't go to the pub afterward to discuss the film. I think we did anyway ;)
For bonus points you could allow people to rate the films, or even each other. Hmm.
Somebody write it for me? I've got too much on my plate ..probably
ObQuote: Se7en
Walk of Shame
This is great....Syndicated 2008-05-10 23:43:15 (Updated 2008-05-11 19:17:38) from Brad Fitzpatrick
Introducing Pinax
In the post Reusable Django Apps and Introducing Tabula Rasa I mentioned my project to create an out-of-the-box Django-based website with everything but the domain-specific functionality.
At the time I was calling it Tabula Rasa but now I've settled on the Greek word Pinax, proposed by Orestis Markou.
So far it's just my new django-email-confirmation app tied together with password change and reset, login/logout, with the beginnings of a tab-style UI. There's a ton more I want to refactor out of my existing websites to put into it as well as adding support for OpenID and the stuff I'm starting to do for django-friends.
Even if one doesn't use Pinax as the starting point of a website, I'm hoping it will prove very useful for another goal, namely a "host" project to develop and tryout reusable apps.
The initial code is available at http://code.google.com/p/django-hotclub/ under /trunk/projects/pinax and there is a running instance for you to try out at:
http://pinax.hotcluboffrance.com
Syndicated 2008-05-10 15:22:38 (Updated 2008-05-10 15:22:40) from James Tauber
"High-Quality in Software" and "Star Trek: We, the Living Dead"
The first revision of a new essay, "What Makes Software High-Quality?" (with a focus on open-source software) was added to the essays section:
The Program is Available for Downloading or Buying
That may seem like a silly thing to say, but you'll be surprised how many times people get it wrong. How many times have you seen web-sites of software that claim that the new version of the software (or even the first) is currently under work, will change the world, but is not available yet? How many times have you heard of web-sites that are not live yet, and refuse to tell people exactly what they are about?
More text has been added to the screenplay "Star Trek, We the Living Dead":
Katie: Professor Shlomo Abramovich? You're King Solomo... Errr... I'm not talking with you again. [Goes to sit on the Swing, frustrated.]
Shlomo: Mosheh, remember I told you about Katie?
Mosheh: oh yeah! She looks cute when she's angry.
Katie: Moses, right?
Mosheh: that's right.
Katie: well, in case you've had any interest in me, I should note that I have a policy against getting involved with people who are 4 times my senior or more.
Mosheh: relax! I have married girls who were 15 times my junior or more and my own descendants, and retrospectively I can tell that many of them were more mature and rational than I was in most respects.
a new question and answer has been added to the FAQ about why I don't obscure my email address.
Added a note about the site's hosting provider, and a link to this page from the front page.
Added a "Slashdot this" badge to the bottom of the text of all the pages, next to the "Bookmark This" button.
I'd like to thank Alan Haggai (alanhaggai@gmail.com) for finding a problem in the site, which allowed me to correct it.
song archetypes: the list song
I often think about different kinds of song archetypes -- songs that either in form or content, get written and rewritten constantly. One of these days, I want to do an album of all song archetypes... I suppose one approach would be to make you try to figure out what archetype it is, and the other approach would be to make it incredibly obvious... I'm not sure which strategy I'll take on this nebulous idea (file it under "probably won't ever happen").
Anyway, one archetype that, as a kid, I thought was absolutely hilarious and clever, was what I called the "list song", which basically just begged you to memorize it. Notable list songs: We Didn't Start the Fire, and It's the End of the World As We Know It. I think that American Pie is also one part list song -- it's also one part "mysterious lyrics" song, which is a different archetype I'll talk about some other time.
All three of those also have the distinction of being list songs about historical events... but I'm sure there are lots of these songs out there.
Stay tuned for more song archetypes.
Toll Avoidance, and Gain Conversions
Syndicated 2008-05-10 21:57:00 (Updated 2008-05-10 21:57:27) from Kelly Martin
interesting research on ‘conditional cooperation’
Interspecies cooperation by Barry Rogge. License: 
For those interested in some of my previous writings on intrinsic motivation, this survey paper by Simon Gächter may be of interest.
Key sentence:
[W]e find strong evidence that many people’s attitude toward voluntary cooperation is conditional on other people’s cooperation… Moreover, the fact that many people contribute more the more others contribute also speaks against pure altruism explanations, because they predict that people reduce their own contributions when informed that others already contribute to the public good.
Basically, the paper argues (and justifies through a survey of experimental evidence) that a majority of people are ‘conditional cooperators’ who cooperate in community projects (voting, paying taxes, charity work, etc.) if and only if other people cooperate. If they think others are ‘defecting’ (i.e., not cooperating) then they will stop cooperating as well.
The paper also has some more detailed observations that come out of the experimental work; among them that voluntary cooperation is fragile; group composition matters (i.e., groups with more conditional cooperators will be healthier); and that ‘belief management’ maters- i.e., if people think that they are in a group with more conditional cooperators, that group will be more robust. None of these will come as a huge surprise to anyone who has been involved with volunteer communities, but still interesting to see it experimentally confirmed.
I’ve always suspected that something like this is the case, and that it explains in part why the GPL is so successful, since it uses copyright to force cooperation and penalize defection, and (importantly) makes a clear public statement that that is the case, which serves a signaling function (everyone in the community knows these are the ground rules) and a filtering function (people who aren’t interested in collaborating don’t join as much as they join other groups.)
The paper is only 25 pages and fairly readable; if you’re interested in the dynamics of volunteerism I recommend it.
Those of you who aren’t into economists and their fancy ‘measurements’ may also want to look at this related early paper, which is somewhat dated (the concept of low and high authoritarians is sort of discredited at this point) but still possibly of interest in explaining some of the psychological mechanisms at work here.
(Came to this by way of this paper on tax evasion, which looks to have many other interesting citations that I should investigate once exams are done. Only Telecoms left…)
The Stainless Steel Rat Series
I am increasingly becoming obsessed with science fiction from 1950s and 1960s. Again stolen from Wikipedia, here is a list of all the Stainless Steel Rat books:| Year | Title | Notes |
| 1985 | A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born | I got this one from powell's |
| 1987 | The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted | |
| 1994 | The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues | |
| 1961 | The Stainless Steel Rat | |
| 1970 | The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge | |
| 1972 | The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World | |
| 1978 | The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You | I got this one from bookbuyers |
| 1982 | The Stainless Steel Rat for President | I got this one from bookbuyers |
| 1996 | The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell | I got this one from bookbuyers |
| 1999 | The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus | |
| 1993 | The Golden Years of the Stainless Steel Rat |
) Harry_Harrison()
As can be seen on our roadmap sample support is scheduled for 0.4. As this is the major feature, we started working on it. I have to say that building buzztard on top of GStreamer was definitely the right thing to do. We can now load whatever GStreamer can handle. FSM did a nice cairo-based waveform widget. Right now I am working on the code that allows plugins to access the wavetable. It will hopefully be ready real soon.
Besides that I've started to restructure the gst-buzztard package a bit further. I also plan to merge the buzz wrapper plugin into it. The aim is to reduce the number of packages that one needs to build.
Well, it’s taken a month and a half — and over 2000 lines of code — but I finally got a method out of Shark.
I made a chart showing which bytecodes are implemented, which I’ll keep updated as I progress. The estimated total coverage of 18% is slightly fanciful as it treats all bytecodes as equally complex, with nop having the same weight as new for example. Some codes are marked as complete but untested too. The way the compiler is structured means that in simple cases I can copy and paste whole blocks of bytecodes from the server compiler, so where I was doing one bytecode in a block I’ve copied the lot across. Most of them ought to be fine, but a couple are dubious. I’m still shuffling things around to try and make things less so.
Onwards…
Doing Nothing Better in Perl 5
Perl 6 has three code placeholder operators, known affectionately as the "yada, yada, yada" operator (see List Prefix Precedence in Synopsis 3). It's a matter of (very sarcastic) public record how much I love writing, maintaining, and patching parsers, so I've just sent a very preliminary five-line patch to p5p to add support for<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... to Perl 5.
--- perly.y~ 2008-05-09 17:47:35.000000000 -0700
+++ perly.y 2008-05-09 17:47:41.000000000 -0700
@@ -1227,6 +1227,11 @@
}
| WORD
| listop
+ | DOTDOT
+ {
+ $$ = newUNOP(OP_DIE, 0,
+ newSVOP(OP_CONST, 0, newSVpvs("Unimplemented")))
+ }
;
<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/* "my" declarations, with optional attributes */
Apply this to recentish bleadperl sources, run perl regen_perly.pl, rebuild, and now you can run programs such as:
sub foo {<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... }
foo();
And get an "Unimplemented at file line line." error message.
(Now everyone who complains that I don't code enough to match my talk, please punch yourself in the face.)
Wordpress quirks and edits
There’s no secret I’ve had my share of gripes with Wordpress and here comes two more:
I can’t upload images at the moment! I run the “plain” wordpress package in Debian testing and when I try to upload an image using the fancy new ajax way in 2.5, it just sits there for a while and it seems it receives the file but I don’t get the UI up that I believe I should get when the upload is completed… so I can’t confirm the upload etc so it instead it gets discarded!
I’m suffering a bit from trackback spam so I installed a plugin named Trackback Validator to help me reduce the manual work of denying them. It seems to work rather well so far in that I now no longer have to mark very many comments (trackbacks appear as comments within Wordpress) at all, but the annoying part is that even thogh the validator unvalidates the trackbacks I still get information mails sent out to me about them! I’ve now also enabled the Akismet plugin so let’s see what happens. Of course simply disabling trackbacks is an option that I’ll use if this doesn’t work good enough.
A funny side-effect with installing and enabling Akismet was that all of a suddent I could access comments previously marked as spam, and thus I could undo the damages from my accidental mark-as-spam-hiccup the other day!
While playing around with plugins, I also installed a gravatar plugin that shows gravatar-images for users on comments, and I installed a plugin that will automatically set my timezone correctly even when DST changes - which Wordpress can’t do by itself!
Then all of a sudden when I poked around (too much) I managed to somehow ruin the background image I use a the top of all pages on my blog. Somewhat I got a gradient there instead, which indeed is what the theme supports (the theme I use is of course a standard one but I have done some minor edits of it). Took me a while to manage to get rid of the gradient and get back image back… I had to resort to editing the PHP file for the theme!
MediaBox 0.95 released
The new version 0.95 of the MediaBox Media Center is finally available. Thanks to all users who reported bugs and made suggestions for new features. Thanks to lot of feedback, many things have improved since the last release.
Syndicated 2008-05-09 19:06:00 (Updated 2008-05-09 19:15:03) from Martin Grimme
Elite Oolite
When I lived in Brunei in the mid-80s, a neighbour had a BBC Micro and I would go over there to play the space trading game Elite. The hidden-line wireframe graphics and massive procedurally-generated universe seemed amazing to me at the time and it was definitely the kind of software I aspired to one day write myself. At the time, I taught myself trigonometry to do 3D graphics but never got to hidden line removal :-)
I was aware of various Elite clones over the years, but the other day I stumbled across Oolite, an open-source Mac OS X version with modern OpenGL graphics. Simply amazing and just as addictive as I remember the original being. It also seems to be highly pluggable, with numerous extensions available to add both to the UI and gameplay.
Syndicated 2008-05-09 23:27:59 (Updated 2008-05-09 23:34:36) from James Tauber
Engessamento Conceitual
Toda pessoa tem suas preferências em relação a uma série de assuntos, tecnologias e opções. Nós, que trabalhamos com tecnologia, não somos exceção a isso. Muitas vezes discutimos apaixonadamente sobre nossas tecnologias preferidas. E muitas vezes, não deixamos de incorrer em alguns erros no processo.
Recentemente, no PlanetPython foi veiculado um texto de wjbyral, mostrando algumas razões porque ele não gostava de javascript. Entre as razões citadas estão o fato de javascript não ter namespace e o sistema de objetos de javascript. Javascript não é uma linguagem orientada a objetos clássica, como Java, Python, ou qualquer outra que você possa lembrar. Ela segue o conceito de protótipos. Existe um tipo de 'desejo coletivo' de que javascript se torne uma linguagem orientada a objetos mais convencional, com construtores e herança de forma mais tradicional. Aliás, isso já está sendo feito, com o ecmascript4.
Há um tempo atrás, eu dei uma olhada em como está ficando a especificação. Meu primeiro pensamento foi: 'estragaram a linguagem!'. O padrão adiciona toda o arcabouço comum da orientação a objetos tradicional: construtores, herança, etc. A linguagem passa a ser multi-paradigma: além dos protótipos, teremos agora a herança comum. Fora o fato de, em muitos sentidos, javascript ter um certo sabor de linguagem funcional. Uma maravilha não? Porém, o fato é que eu gosto da linguagem como é agora.
Trabalho com linguagens orientadas a objetos, mas isso não quer dizer que eu despreze outros paradigmas. Todos eles tem a sua beleza e a sua vez. Pra que esse sentimento uniformizador das coisas? Qualquer cristalização em torno de algum conceito fatalmente me aborrecerá. A orientação a objetos é boa? Com certeza é. Mas é necessariamente melhor que o paradigma funcional, por exemplo? Talvez seja para os casos x e y, mas não para o z.
Isso me lembra outro conceito, que trazemos do mundo da informática para outros lugares de forma equivocada. Esperamos que o último computador seja sempre melhor que o anterior. Mais memória, mais velocidade de processamento, um HD maior e, claro, sempre a um preço menor do que aquele que você comprou seis meses atrás. Mas nem todos os lugares isso é assim: um piano Fender Rhodes e uma Fender Stratocaster terão sempre o seu valor e não serão necessariamente piores que seus equivalente mais modernos.
Nem sempre a próxima linguagem ou a próxima moda será inerentemente melhor que as anteriores. Para cada caso e situação certamente haverá uma ferramenta melhor. E para o bem de todos, é bom que diferenças de pensamento sempre existam.
The Wombats
Who are The Wombats and why does Facebook think that I should get targetted ads about them since I list the Cure on my favourites list?Syndicated 2008-05-09 16:15:45 (Updated 2008-05-09 16:17:55) from Monument
LangPop.com - programming language popularity - update
These few days when Ilenia and Helen are still in the hospital are the eye of the storm for me. It's quiet at home and I actually have a few free hours when I'm not allowed to be in the hospital, or when they need to get some rest.
One of the things I managed to do recently was some Javascript hacking in order to create a timeline for LangPop.com: http://www.langpop.com/timeline.html. It was fun, because most of the "heavy lifting" is done by Timeplot, and I just had to push the data into place. Of course, there isn't much interesting there because the site is relatively new, but it should be interesting to see how languages fare over time.
I did some hacking on Timeplot to make it easier to host it on my own server, and to load a bit faster by stuffing it into one big ugly blob of Javascript. When I get a bit of time, I'll make my changes public, as I think they're fairly useful for anyone who wants to fiddle around with Timeplot some, and thus host it themselves.
The other thing I did with the site was switch the X and Y axis of the charts, because that works out better in terms of screen space for the labels, with so many languages to keep track of.
Syndicated 2008-05-09 16:15:00 (Updated 2008-05-09 16:25:16) from David's Computer Stuff Journal
Kubuntu upgrade issues
I just used the Kubuntu upgrade tool to get the latest goodies from Hardy (wobbly windows here I come). However, this resulted in a strange looking system. I've found three symptoms:
Desktop menu
Window menugreenindex
taking a look at tim’s blog. I took the survey. My greenindex comes out to be 66.
On reading books.
I'm almost ashamed to admit that last year, I think I only read (as in completely, cover to cover) 3 or 4 books. This year doesn't seem to be going much better either. I'm still slowly making my way through my first of the year. The problem isn't that I'm a slow reader. My problem is one of choice. I buy a book, start reading it, and when I'm halfway through, for whatever reason, I'll end up with another new book, and start reading that one, and the cycle repeats. I'm great at starting books, awful at finishing them. I think I must have started reading about 20-30 books last year alone. I seem to only really get through books when I'm traveling. The fact that I don't have a bookcase full of options with me confines me to one or two choices. This is the reason that devices like the kindle, (or any other e-book reader for that matter) are a really bad idea for me. When overwhelmed with choice, my indecision consumes me. (Seriously, you should see me fail at choosing a lunch option when in a new city surrounded by restaurants. Even the infamous google cafeteria was total overload for me. I think if I worked there, my indecision would actually lead to me starving to death before I made a lunch choice).Syndicated 2008-05-09 19:21:19 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.
The GPL is like a green envelope
German court tells Skype to obey the GPL:
“If a publisher wants to publish a book of an author that wants his book only to be published in a green envelope, then that might seem odd to you, but still you will have to do it as long as you want to publish the book and have no other agreement in place.”
OpenSolaris update
Well, it seems OpenSolaris.com fixed most of the issues I was bitching about. So, it now takes 2 clicks to get an OpenSolaris iso. I haven’t used it for too long but I figure I’d post this before someone inevitably points out how behind the times I am. These here tubes move fast! Other than that it seems an old version of X is being used as I experience nasty refresh shake at work. There was/is also an issue with the installation which would kick one back to a Grub prompt. This turns out to be faulty media from Lead Data Inc at least in this case. A freebsd iso worked fine, but I dumped the rest of the cd’s as Google juice reported other people having problems with said manufacturer. When I get sometime i’ll play around with OpenSolaris a bit more, seems like a solid effort was made to put together something usable.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series
I'm getting really into reading second hand science fiction from the 1950s onwards. I read a few (but nowhere near all) of the Foundation series as a child, and I remember liking them a lot. Stolen from Wikipedia, here is a list of the books in The Foundation series in Asimov's suggested reading order:| C | Year | Title | Notes |
| 1950 | I, Robot | Robot short stories. First collection, which were all included in The Complete Robot, though it also contains binding text (Mind and Iron), no longer in The Complete Robot. Bookbuyer's | |
| 1 | 1982 | The Complete Robot | Robot short stories. Collection of Asimov stories written between 1940 and 1976. |
| 1986 | Robot Dreams | Robot short stories. Anthologised in a book with the same title. | |
| 1990 | Robot Visions | Robot short stories. Anthologised in a book with the same title. | |
| 1992 | The Positronic Man | Robot novel based on Asimov's short story The Bicentennial Man, co-written by Robert Silverberg | |
| 2 | 1954 | The Caves of Steel | Robot novel. Leigh's Favorite Books |
| 3 | 1957 | The Naked Sun | Robot novel. |
| 4 | 1983 | The Robots of Dawn | Robot novel. Leigh's Favorite Books |
| 5 | 1985 | Robots and Empire | Robot novel. Bookbuyer's |
| 1993 | Isaac Asimov's Caliban | Caliban trilogy by Roger MacBride Allen. | |
| 1994 | Isaac Asimov's Inferno | Caliban trilogy by Roger MacBride Allen. | |
| 1996 | Isaac Asimov's Utopia | Caliban trilogy by Roger MacBride Allen. | |
| 6 | 1951 | The Stars, Like Dust | Galactic Empire series. |
| 7 | 1952 | The Currents of Space | Galactic Empire series. |
| 8 | 1950 | Pebble in the Sky | Galactic Empire series. |
| 9 | 1988 | Prelude to Foundation | Foundation novel. |
| 10 | 1993 | Forward the Foundation | Foundation novel. |
| 11 | 1951 | Foundation | Foundation trilogy. |
| 12 | 1952 | Foundation and Empire | Foundation trilogy. |
| 13 | 1953 | Second Foundation | Foundation trilogy. |
| 1997 | Foundation's Fear | Second Foundation trilogy by Gregory Benford. | |
| 1998 | Foundation and Chaos | Second Foundation trilogy by Greg Bear. | |
| 1999 | Foundation's Triumph | Second Foundation trilogy by David Brin. | |
| 14 | 1982 | Foundation's Edge | Final chronological Foundation books. |
| 15 | 1986 | Foundation and Earth | Final chronological Foundation books. |
) Isaac_Asimov()
I was reading "The Problem with Threads" by Prof. Ed Lee, and noticed the following claim right on the first page:
Many technologists predict that the end of Moore’s Law will be answered with increasingly parallel computer architectures (multicore or chip [multiprocessors], CMPs) [15].
This quote confuses me, because, to the best of my knowledge, Moore's Law has not ended, and the industry's move to multicore/manycore processors is not directly related to the imminent demise of Moore's Law. Moore's Law is the claim that transistor density in integrated circuits approximately doubles every two years. As far as I know, that remains basically true for the time being, and current speculation is that it will continue to hold for at least 10 years.
What is driving the move to multicore designs is that we can no longer effectively use those extra transistors to increase the speed of a single sequential instruction stream. Ramping up clock speed increases heat dissipation, and doesn't improve performance very much if memory latency doesn't significantly change. Techniques like caching, pipelining, and superscalar execution help, but only to an extent. Hence the move to multicore designs and chip-level parallelism.
That said, I'm definitely not a hardware guy, and doubtless Prof. Lee has forgotten more about processor design than I am ever likely to know. And when Moore's Law ends, that may well encourage the multicore trend even more—but my understanding is that the eventual demise of Moore's Law and the current move to multicore architectures are not directly related. I'm curious to know if I'm mistaken.
(As an aside, text quoted above cites "Multicore CPUs for the Masses" in ACM Queue as support for the claim that the industry is moving toward multicore designs. While that is true, the article makes no mention of Moore's Law.)
pygr gets some summer love
(pygr is a neat bioinformatics framework in Python.)
After some commenters on my last post seemed happy to hear that pygr was the focus of some summer work, I realized I had only discussed the pygr summer work in a post to the biology-in-python list.
Whoops.
So, here's the scoop: not only is pygr the focus of Rachel McCreary's Google Summer of Code project, but Jenny Qian will be using pygr to build an ENSEMBL interface, also as part of the Google Summer of Code.
That's not all!
In addition to Rachel and Jenny (under the sterling mentorship of Chris Lee, Robert Kirkpatrick, Namshin Kim, and myself) I have two MSU students working with me over the summer, Alex Nolley and Marie Buckner. They'll both be working with pygr-related things, although like Jenny their efforts may end up being more on ways to use pygr than on pygr's code itself.
I also have a grad student or two that may drop in on pygr, if only to use it for something research-y.
So all in all, pygr will get a lot of love this summer. Hopefully we can polish the code and documentation and tutorials to the point where the learning curve is as minimal as it can get, and this fabulous package will become readily available to many others...
Why am I personally putting so much effort into pygr? Well, I've been using it more and more over the last few months, and (somewhat like scipy) it's transformed my work by turning annoyingly difficult data organization problems into trivial Python transformations. I can literally throw together a custom genome browser in a matter of hours -- I've implemented two or three already, for different projects -- and it has enabled several new research program. pygr seems to be one of those rare packages (kind of like Python itself) that is not only functional and effective but presents a unified and coherent intellectual interface. pygr is the only good middleware layer I've seen for sequence intertwingling in bioinformatics. It's not that mature yet, but it has serious promise, and I'm hoping to get in on the ground floor, so to speak :).
cheers,
--titus
--Chang Yu
2008-05-09: Great moments in probability
<!-- start of entry 200805/09 --> Great moments in probabilityYears ago (around 1999) when dcoombs and I were debugging the first versions of our "weaver" Linux-based server appliances from our apartment in Waterloo, we used to test on the cheapest hardware we could obtain for cheap.
One of these boxes absolutely refused to boot weaver, but the symptoms were strange. We had three ways of booting: boot from a CD, install an image on the hard drive and boot that, or load Etherboot from a floppy and use that to network-boot the kernel over tftp.
The symptoms were as follows:
The obvious conclusion here was that our weaver kernel image was broken, because you could boot the Debian kernel from either CD or hard disk without a problem. Right?
Well... as it turned out, no. The actual problem was a horribly broken network card that would randomly corrupt bits. About 9 out of 10 packets would be corrupted. You'd think that would be obvious, right?
Well, no. In fact, TCP/IP is specially designed to deal with the occasional corrupted packet. TCP and UDP have a 16-bit checksum on every packet, and if it doesn't match, the receiver simply throws the packet away; the sender is supposed to resend (and it does!).
I had noticed the FTP transfers were surprisingly slow, but not *that* slow, and back in those days, you could never quite remember if your network card was 10 MBit or 100 MBit. This happened to be a 100 MBit card, but 9/10 packets were getting thrown away, so we got around 10 MBit performance from ftp.
But here's what killed us: a 16-bit checksum can only detect 65535 out of 65536 possible errors. A 9/10 error rate means you're sending 10x as much data as you think you are, so a 12MB kernel+rootdisk package is actually about 120MB of packets; that is, about 80000 packets at 1500 bytes each. Thus, virtually every transfer was destined to have a tiny number of incorrect bytes! Ha!
Of course TFTP is extra dumb and doesn't deal well at all with packet loss, so it would just time out. But I remain very impressed at how well TCP managed to paper over a 90% broken network. That's the power of the Internet for you, right there.
(Thanks to jwz for having a hopefully-unrelated problem that reminded me of this.) <!-- end of entry 200805/09 -->
Syndicated 2008-05-07 18:22:52 from apenwarr - Business is Programming
gnome-terminal titles
This finally annoyed me enough to find a solution.Syndicated 2008-05-09 00:58:00 (Updated 2008-05-09 01:01:21) from John Levon
Perl 6 Design Minutes for 07 May 2008
<summary type="xhtml">The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 07 May 2008. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, Jerry, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended.
Allison:
c:
Allison:
c:
Patrick:
c:
Jesse:
Larry:
nofat rulePatrick:
Jerry:
Patrick:
Jerry:
c:
Nicholas:
state implementation of any languageJesse:
Patrick:
Jesse:
Nicholas:
Jesse:
Will:
Jerry:
Patrick:
Nicholas:
Jerry:
Jesse:
Nicholas:
Allison:
Jesse:
Allison:
Will:
Patrick:
Allison:
Will:
Allison:
Jerry:
Patrick:
Will:
Patrick:
Jerry:
Patrick:
Larry:
Patrick:
Larry:
c:
Will:
Jesse:
More fresh Rockbox targets
I’ve not mentioned anything about developments on new Rockbox targets lately, so I thought I’d do a little run-down of the targets that seem to have momentum right now:
Toshiba Gigabeat S - quite similar to the Zune hw-wise but not entirely. This already runs Rockbox pretty good and even has music playback. Still not offered for download and treated as “supported” since there’s currently no user-friendly installer method, especially on Windows. Freescale i.MX31L equipped.
Philips GoGear SA9200 - PortalPlayer based thing with the same SoC as the Sansa e200 v1 series and uses mi4 like many other PP targets.
Creative Zen Vision:M - Still a rough install method that requires you to rip out the harddrive, insert it into another computer, wipe the FS and replace it with FAT and then it still has no music playback… but there’s a video showing how it looks!