Older blog entries for Acapnotic (starting at number 28)

The world is gaining on us. Or we're starting to get to the world, I can't tell which. There's an article today, on the front page of the "Living" section of the newspaper, which contains the following:

This system works because of a well-defined standard for electronic mail messages. All e-mail software, if it has any hope of working properly, needs to stick to this standard for handling incoming messages and sending outgoing messages.

If only the same kind of standard existed for electronic calendars.

Then we'd be able to easily exchange appointments [...]

Unfortunately, we're stuck with a system in which [...] these programs refuse to talk with one another.

That was John Moran, of the LA Times - Washington Post Service. I wonder if he's looked at Helix's Evolution preview yet.

Saw this on freshmeat today:

LiveJournal Client is a Perl/Tk program to edit diary entries on LiveJournal.com.

And on Saturday, I heard this guy on Whad'Ya Know, who must have been at least 0.7 centuries old, who spent around 4 hours a day working on his diary (on paper, not LiveJournal), which included everything he did. Including his time spent on the can.

I knew there was a reason I left Ohio.

I also think that Adrian has stumbled onto a powerfull untapped psychological force.

Hmm. Less time with Advogato lately. In fact, some of the links to your diaries have even reverted from their "recently-visited" color.

Posting this with M15 and the Aphrodite chrome. It's getting there... And M15 certainly makes the Advogato colors look better at 8 bpp than they do in Netscape 4's color cube. But it's spending far too much time in swap for me to use full-time.

Julian: Read the NASA press release again. They did not learn anything about dark matter. All they did was find (indirectly) some more of the "normal" matter that they thought must be around here someplace. Not that finding 5% of the matter in the universe is something to be scoffed at, but it's far from finding the 90% allegedly claimed by dark matter.

recidivist: To post, you must be certified. But seeing as how you provide no references about your involvement in the free software community, people have nothing to base a certification of you on, unless they already know you by name or reputation.

Of course, if you are planning on contributing to the certification discussion, you are probably already familiar with that. See also dria's ponderings on the state of the discussion. I will be delighted to read her thoughts, or anyone else's, on the subject of trust metrics -- after they've done their homework.

Today's props go to Dennis McMahan for making the spreadsheet that made master gnumeric hacker jody say "whoever created this is either a sick bastard or a genius."

...and no one told me ILOVEYOU.

Hmm. With the arrival of Max we may have to whip up an alternate storyline to cover for Advogato...

Finished Fermat's Enigma. Most of the book I knew, from class discussions, the Nova special, etc. But there were many interesting historical tidbits along the way. Here's one I wasn't aware of:

In the years after the war Turing had been under surveillance from British Intelligence, who were aware that we has a practicing homosexual. They were concerned that the man who knew more about Britain's security codes than anyone else was vulnerable to blackmail and decided to monitor his every move. Turing had largely come to terms with being constantly shadowed, but in 1952 he was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes. This humiliation made life intolerable for Turing [...]

The inquest, on 10 June 1954, established that it was suicide.

Started The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (Samuel C. Florman, 1976). While reading the preface, realization struck: "I am an engineer." That was important to hear because "I am" statements are rather hard to come by in the midst of identity crises. Although upon further examination, that may be more precisely stated as "I have long held the assumption that I am an engineer," as I don't know if I can qualatatively demonstrate my engineer-being.

and perhaps it's just because my last sleep cycle was from 6 AM - 12 AM, but this one is going in the cookie file:

"I'm often convinced that my brain has a mind of its own and some sort of long-standing grudge against me."
-- Deb Richardson, 4/24/2000

Much tidying of Adaptive Contrast Enhancement. Most notably, the PDB interface actually works, so I can tell people who want to add goofy things to the code to go away and write scripts instead. Thought that made it worthwhile putting out a new release (v0.5.1)...

Updated README and NEWS and the like. Updated registry.gimp.org. Uploaded to SourceForge. Updated page on SourceForge. Changed old page to point to SourceForge. Am I forgetting anything?

Also added the libgimp manual to Plug-ins@SourceForge. GIMP 1.2pre is out now, you know (1.1.20). This means that it's getting to be time for me to actually overhaul "Writing a GIMP Plug-In".

Blerg. Eat kitty.

<hr>

Had a dream the other night that I was on a shuttle to the moon with my friends from middle school. The pilot was some new woman, and those of us in the passenger compartment kept sliding up and down, bumping our heads on the ceiling and then feet hitting the floor. Eventually I fell out of the passenger compartment, and went to the people at the desk in order to get back in. They told me that they were sorry but the flight was full, and that they could get me a pass for the next one.

"No," I told them, "you don't understand. I don't need a pass for the next flight, I was on that one. I fell out. I just want to get back on."

They didn't grok.

"So I'm on Earth, and the shuttle is out there?" I asked, gesturing vaugely at the sky. They nodded. "Ok, whatever," I said, and walked off.

The airport on the moon has many vendors along its corridors, most of whom sell books. There are also security stations that make things disappear. Perhaps an art gallery as well, but the focus was definately on the books.

Better get back before it's time to leave...

</me casts a wary eye over Deb's "balanced lifestyle" plans>

This could be dangerous. If she manages to pull this off... the others might start getting ideas. If the secret gets out that someone can go from IRC twenty hours a day to eating good food and doing things they love for the sake of having fun... Well, who knows what might happen? If the terminally-terminal-dependant start leading "balanced lives", what will be my excuse for remaining here in the recesses of my cave?

Fortunately, like many of the terminal-dependant folks, I'm the intelligent type, and I've known (intellectually) that this was possible for a long time. And since knowledge and action are largely, if not completely, disparate things in my universe, this latest bit of information may not be capable of provoking any action at all. In which case I can safely continue not having fun, and neither cracking a book nor putting pen to a page any more than once a month or so.

Long live security!

Ok, that's the second time in three days I've heard the phrase "make new friends and influence people." Am I missing a reference?
 

Attempting to follow Deb's advice re: book reading. Currently working on [BUG: the "cite" tag should be accepted] Fermat's Enigma which I started for school last semester but, like most other things that term, never finished. QotD:

Later her colleague Edmund Landau was asked whether Emmy Noether was indeed a great woman mathematician, to which he replied: "I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear."

Hmm. I seem to be purple now. I'd feel more at ease if I knew why that was, but it remains a mystery for the time being.

Played a bit more with CritLink the other day. Intriguing, but kinda slow... so it might help to set up more servers. But it requires a certain critical mass of users to work well, I think. So you either figure out how to build a mesh of the things and share link/comment info between them, the answer to which is non-obvious, or you set them up around existing communities (e.g. Advogato). CritLink's aims seem to be very complementary to a news-discussion site, and if you routed the site's CritLink though a cache (e.g. squid), you could greatly reduce the penalizing bandwith effect of being "slashdotted".

After playing with CritLink, I had to go and find out what backlinks there are to my pages. In the process, I found a number of links to where my pages used to be two years ago...

Discovered a bad sector on one of my disks. It's on the DOS 6.2 partition, so it didn't get much noticed for a long while. Booted DOS to run WD's "dlgdiag" on it (when will disk vendors start open-sourcing their diagnostics?), it said it found "one or more errors" but couldn't repair them. I checked-- the warrantee for WDC drives is 3 years, and dlgdiag said the drive's build date was 20-MAR-97. Hah-hah, very funny. It also seems that neither reiserfs nor LVM have provisions for skipping over bad blocks like mkswap and mke2fs do, which will limit the number of interesting things I can do with the drive. Bummer.

Spent the evening bug-hunting. Spent a lot of time in "How did this code ever run?" mode -- still not sure of that in some places. Observed I should keep a closer eye on what other people check in to CVS, at least one of the smaller bugs I can confidantly say was Not My Fault. But other people have fixed many a bug for me, so I'm not complaining.

Turns out all hell can break loose in incredibly subtle ways if you do something like guint8 *foo=g_new(bar_t,baz); foo[-1] = quux; This is why people use languages with run-time array bounds checking instead of C. Took me positively forever to find, since the effects did't show up until long after... and when they did, it took odd forms like a gdk_beep() in the stacktrace (seth checked, and nothing even remotely GIMPish uses gdk_beep). efence with PROTECT_BELOW is what finally caught it.