levork.org

Picture from my new camera, a Canon EOS 40 DSLR. Especially with the image stabilizing lens, it’s a huge step up in low light quality from my old point and shoot digital; and so much more convenient than film. Especially after my roll of Leica-shot from London came out blank.

This is the first Christmas for us together at home! Our wonderful tree went up the day after Thanksgiving, complete with ornaments I grew up with that were sent down by my family. Happy Holidays!

Ala Very Short Stories, from Wired. My feeble attempts, which seem mostly like Philip K. Dick writing The Onion headlines.

Tomorrow isn’t the utopia we expected.
Righteous man framed. Evil clone blamed.
Sentient robot weeps before murdering creator.
FTL proven to cause mass psychosis.
Bumbling robot sidekick reprogrammed into tyrant.
Aliens ponder Earth genocide, AETP ^* protests.
Time traveller spoils story for everyone.
2006. Where are the flying cars?
Colonists versus hostile planet – spaceship wins.
Spores infect electoral college. Nobody notices.
Influenza wipes out humanity. Cause? Eugenics.
Doomsday clock found ten minutes fast.

^{* Aliens for the Ethical Treatment of People. I’m lame, I know.}

The first time I poked around in Wikipedia, which was back in September of 2001, I started the article on violas. It looked like this. It seemed to fit in just fine back then. I didn’t think much of Wikipedia as a reference work at the time and moved on to other things.

Lately though, I’ve been using Wikipedia quite a bit, even to the point of spending a few hours randomly clicking through articles. As an online source of nerdly trivia it is unrivalled. The standards have vastly improved to the extent that when I felt compelled to expand on a few articles it wasn’t sufficient to bang out a few sentences, I felt I like I could only do my bit by writing a detailed plot summary and character list, scanning the cover of a first edition book, or uploading pictures taken in Turkey.

Of course, there are parts of it that are like anything else you find online: narrow in focus to the point of uselessness or not even accurate. I leave it to today’s Onion to put the appropriate viewpoint on it.

“It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone.

My Cingular wireless contract was up and I decided to switch over to Sprint – somewhat ironic as Sprint Canada sent a debt collector after my mom many years ago after signing her up for long distance without her approval.

There was a snafu related to my being a moron and signing up for family service with two phones, but yesterday my new LG PM-325 showed up. I picked it primarily because it’s Sprint’s only Bluetooth capable phone, and I wanted something that could be used as a Bluetooth modem by my PDA (a Dell Axim v50v, also a recent aquisition). I was nervous since there seems to be a lot of complaints online about the lack of Bluetooth functionality, but after a Google search revealed the magic dialup number missing from Sprint’s web site (it’s #777), I was easily able to get the modem capability up and working. Definitely not a cell phone afficiando by any stretch, but it seems to be a pretty slick little package for my purposes. Having it able to play AC/DC for ringtones is a definite plus.

It also has a camera, which is something I didn’t have before. So I took a few photos of Seattle’s fall colors while doing yard work.

A week after returning from L.A. by way of Reno and Vegas (unplanned), I had to take a day off from work due to what seemed like stress induced illness. Fortuitously, that same weekend I was able to go skiing at Sierra-at-Tahoe with Susan. Stress symptoms gone! The very idea of skiing has some negative connotations in my mind, if only because it’s inextricably connected with awkward introductions with strangers, who believe that the entire population of the GVRD is issued a snowboard as soon as they leave the maternity ward.

“I grew up in Vancouver.”
“Wow, you must ski or snowboard!”
“No. I don’t.”
“Oh.”
(Awkward silence.)

Anyways, I took a few lessons as a kid, but haven’t touched skis in maybe fifteen years. So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself hitting the green runs without having to resort much to snow plowing, and with little difficulty, apart from a few minor tumbles.

This weekend friends and family invaded my home – spring break for educators. A dinner party for six erupted. I don’t know what people did for recipes before google – some prehistoric technology involving index cards, no doubt. A quick search found recipes for very tasty satay marinade and peanut sauce, meat on sticks was prepared on the grill despite rain, cucumbers and shallots were tossed in vinegar and sugar, a small vat of rice was cooked, and the result was an easy Thai themed dinner enjoyed by all.

David dragged me climbing at Vertical World Sunday, which was the first time I slapped stone after a long hiatus. I also purchased a set of Nike NDS irons and a Taylor Made Rossa Monza putter this month, so if I do manage to hit the golf courses in the next two weeks, I will complete an unprecedented trinity of sporting activities. Since I decided to blow through some more bonus money and upgraded to a proper theatre setup (at least, in terms of the audio components), a relapse to couch potatodom will doubtless soon follow.

However this evening I might end up accompanying an old acquaintance who is playing some Paganini violin concerto – this despite atrophication of fingers due to piano nonplaying. We shall see how the sight reading goes. It’s odd how all attempts at being a slacker this month have so far met with failure.

Random media commentary of the day: Rosalind suckered me into Tivo’ing House simply by pointing out that the lead actor, Hugh Laurie, was prominent in Blackadder, one of my favorite BBC comedy series ever. That’s right, Mad “thick as a whale omelette” Prince George from Blackadder III is Dr. Gregory House. I don’t know how I missed that.

George: “I’ve just had another brilliant idea!”
Edmund: “Another one?”
George: “Yes, you remember the one I had about wearing underpants on the outside to save on laundry bills?”

MidSouthRaves.org has transformed my fridge into a rallying icon for spring cleaning.

California was warm.

Harvie Krumpet was strange. Nibbles was just very bad.

Todd Bertuzzi is a goon. Unfortunately, he’s our goon.

I’m trying to be insouciant, but it’s hard.

I was going to blog about my failed hard drive, but that’s sort of a nonstory, except that Murphy’s Law was in effect as much as possible when it came to backups and the failure itself. It’s surprising that I lost as little data as I did.

So instead I’ll ramble about why I hate Linux.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been using Linux since the summer of 1994, when my lab partner in a hardware course pointed me at it (I think this was related to running a MIPS simulator on UNIX). Back then, the Slackware distribution came on many floppy disks (this was a time when CD burners were rare) and version 1.0 of the kernel had just been released. I loved mucking about with Linux then – I was a gung ho nerd ready to deal with thirty floppies copied from the lab (two of which always were bad), compiling my own source distributions, etc. Note this was also the time when I mucked about with CONFIG.SYS on MS-DOS just to squeeze out the extra few bytes necessary to get Wing Commander to run correctly; so masochism was not foreign nature.

Fast forward ten years: I’m old, and I’m lazy. I expect things to just work. I really can’t be bothered to deal with compiling, especially that now I get paid to type make a lot. I don’t want to build other people’s code just to get my damn hardware to work.

Case in point: I bought a FireWire USB/2.0 enclosure for a spare hard drive that was sitting around (which wasn’t actually spare, it was a backup for the hard drive that failed – Murphy’s Law in action). The enclosure is a great device – open it up, connect a hard drive or CD-ROM to the standard IDE cable and power supply inside it, power it up (standard power cable), and plug it in (FireWire 400/800 and USB 2.0). After getting the hard drive formatted on an XP box, here’s how it fared with the three machines I have sitting on my desk:

Windows XP: worked with either FireWire or USB 2.0 cable. No driver installation needed, drive came up automatically as E:. To remove: right click on the little green arrow at the bottom of the screen, select “Remove hardware.”

Mac OSX: plug in FireWire cable. No drive installation needed. The drive is automatically mounted under /Volumes (note that this is an NTFS formatted filesystem!). To remove: drag icon on Desktop to Trash.

Linux (RedHat 9.0): plug in FireWire cable. Nothing. Look at dmesg. Hmm, no mention of a file system. After much googling I find out that the related kernel module is called sbp2 – and that there is no hot plug support, so the module sometimes needs to be unloaded to get the drive to be recognized. Even after that, the drive masquerades as a SCSI device. Totally intuitive, huh? So I end up having to type:

rmmod sbp2
modprobe sbp2
mount /dev/sda0 /mnt/removable -t ntfs

Hmm, that failed. Yep: no default NTFS support in Linux. Nuts. Googled to the Linux-NTFS Project, figured out which kernel I have, downloaded and installed the right RPM, and finally it’s working – except there’s no write support, so I can just read my music off the drive, and nothing else. Sigh.

Don’t get me started on Linux programming topics. Why oh why is getrusage() so incomplete? Why are shared libraries so badly implemented? Whose brilliant idea is it to make C++ binary compatibility such a fucking nightmare to deal with?

I feel like I can make many unfounded and inflammatory comments which will get zealots riled up, but I’ll just make one: noone really wants to deal with ugly grunge work unless they get paid to deal with it. And that’s the problem in open source: noone gets paid to do it, and it’s that kind of grunge that is often absolutely necessary even if it’s not glamorous. Polishing the user experience for hot plugging FireWire drives is grunge. getrusage(MAX_RSS, ...) is grunge. What unpaid programmer really wants to go implement that sort of thing? I certainly don’t.

End nerdiness.

Late evening, while lugging the cello through an otherwise deserted residential street in the Greenwood neighbourhood, through a light Seattle drizzle: a young man in a hoodie, walking in a dog in the other direction, in passing, holds out a card and a pen, and asks me: “Hey, want to sign a get well card for Frank?”

“Uh, sorry, I don’t know Frank,” I stammer.

“Yeah well, noone else does either,” he mutters, and walks off.

Poor Frank.

Only two hours to translate the latest missive from Mom, at which rate it’ll only take me a few decades to plow through the Tao Te Ching. I find it ironic that I also happen to be reading Simon Singh’s The Code Book at the moment, which has a great chapter about deciphering ancient languages. Been reading a bunch of crytography books lately – I’ve discovered an interest in it after having to deal with software security issues at work, something I’ll rant about later.