Older blog entries for ncm (starting at number 77)

I've tracked down the origin of the couplet,

When will it be done?
Sooner if you help.

as applied to Free Software release schedules. The earliest use I have found is by Jim Winstead, in 1992, referring to the Linux 1.0 release. Most people credit RMS, but he is not on record saying it until 1999. I wrote to Jim, and he doesn't recall whether he got it from somebody else, so he gets credit until somebody finds an earlier reference.

amars: I think the quote you want is, "Couldn't you at least act like a legitimate government, instead of a pack of thieves?" (cf. "Long Shot for Rosinante", by Alexis Gilliland, the second (small) volume of the trilogy that starts with "Revolution from Rosinante". Recommended! I also encountered there the original expression, "can't fart and chew gum at the same time", which had been sanitized, for popular consumption, into "can't walk and chew gum at the same time" for use on President Ford. Anybody remember him?)

Paolo Carlini has been and gone. Now he is back in Italy and working for Suse, getting paid to do what he's been doing so well all along, but now raising Suse's stature in the Gcc/C++ world. Sometimes justice happens.

Shortly before he left, I ran into Ian "Intent to Package" on the train, wearing his Ximian monkey shirt. Paolo and I didn't get a chance to go out with the Ximian folks before he had to leave. (Not that C++ work gets the respect it deserves at Ximian... evolution would certainly crash less if it were written (well) in C++.) If you ever need advice about a movie, ask Paolo -- he's seen all the good ones.

forrest: It's good to be getting away from Perl, but don't bother with Java for your HTTP coding. Use libcurl.

I can't take the Evolution icon off my Gnome panel just yet. My copy of 1.4.4 just crashed twice within ten minutes.

Finally saw Matrix Reloaded, in IMAX format. It made me wonder about the significance of bad skin -- even Monica Belluci had a rash -- and of what the Oracle is really feeding to Neo -- a cookie (!) last meeting, candy this time. Maybe the bad skin is just meant to remind us that detailed texture doesn't really imply reality. The plot significance of food treats is crudely but definitively demonstrated by the Merovingian's trick. Imprinting with food is common in mythology, e.g. Persephone in Hades, and in pop culture, e.g. Scooby-snacks. Um.

Also saw Spirited Away, on tape. I liked that dragons give paper cuts.

diablod3 and chipx86: Persistently rude users are easily handled: "Please send a patch." Users of free software are not worse than people at large; you now have more contact with the people at large. You are learning about humanity, or anyway westerners. The rude ones are not representative, though. They self-select: polite or otherwise engaged people only write if they have something to say, or to offer.

Often what people say, anyway, isn't what they think they're saying, and what they're really saying is more useful. "Your program can't do X" might mean "It's not very clear how to get your program to do X". Telling them how, or telling them to zark off, misses the point. Fixing the real problem helps a lot more polite people (whom you don't know) than rude people. Some of former wrote the software you depend on every day. They deserve far more than you or I will ever achieve by our little efforts. E.g. ...

The redoubtable Paolo Carlini is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for nine more days. He will be doing free-software work for Suse starting next month. Anybody willing to get together, or offer advice on what he should take in? He favors Guinness and seafood.

I posted a screed on security & bug fixes, in response to the Postfix hole, on LWN. It's the first-posted (:-) comment.

Saw "Dirty Pretty Things" last night with Paolo. Recommended. Audrey Tautou has a much harder role than in Amelie, and carries it off well.

I just added an icon for Ximian Evolution to my gnome panel. I had to do that because the version I'm running, 1.4.3, crashes a lot more often than the previous ones I used. I see that 1.4.4 is out. I have hope that I will be able to remove its icon from my too-cluttered panel, and just leave it running for weeks on end, like the old one.

Sorry, rcaden, the Coolness Board has ruled almost unanimously that nothing done in Java can be called cool. Sorry, not even Sodaworks. (One delegate wasn't sure.)

Paolo Carlini will be visiting the Boston area mid-August. Are there any Gcc/C++ Software Libre people around here for him to meet? He's also done fractal compression and real-time control. Meanwhile, my wife and kids will be out of town around the same time, which means I might be able to get out myself.

About political discussion on Advogato... This is a hacker's board. If you have a hackish take on events, reveal it. That applies equally to comments historical, relational, commercial, and biological. For example, if your daughter was just born, have you constructed a frame to control the shape her head will grow into? That would be hackish. Steve Oualline just got $200 plus court costs for the copy of MSWinXP that came with his computer. That's legally hackish.

Moved. Nightmarish, but it's good to be away from the rats. (I'm ever so glad that rats don't lay eggs.) Same phone number, transferred the same day, but Covad took a week to set up DSL again. (The 802.11 hub I detect in easy proximity won't talk to me.)

Zero-copy C++ iostreams, soon? Maybe in a gcc-3.4.x. But only on NetBSD and OpenBSD, at first, 'cause only they have UVM, so far. (Linux might get it, in 2.8, in a couple of years.) Libstdc++ already has (probably in gcc-3.4) cycle-for-cycle speed parity between streambufs and glibc stdio. (All hail Paolo Carlini!) Native, default large-file support in the iostream interface is more urgent than zero-copy (which doesn't affect the ABI), and ought to appear in gcc-3.4, even if not universally implemented underneath, at first. The gcc-3.4.x series libstdc++ will start impressive and get better from there, and thousands of existing programs will magically get faster.

32-bit CRCs, still? Why do people still use 32-bit CRCs in new protocols? There's a very nice CRC-64 implementation in PostgreSQL, free for the taking.

robocoder: Trust me, you don't want to use C++ Xalan/Xerces. It's irresponsible for Apache to continue distributing them. Gnome's libxml2/libxslt work ever so much better, and are licensed compatibly. (Thanks, DV!)

Apt-get installed Dasher on my laptop tonight. mjg59 rocks.

I/ENTP: Me too. It's pretty common among programmers. The Js tend to become scientists instead, because they tend to jump to conclusions too early to be good software architects. A good programmer has to be comfortable with not knowing until the right time.

What do you do when the Christian metal band Styrofoam rolls into town in its pearl-white, 40-foot stretch-limo low-rider pickup truck? I don't know about you, but I wake up, relieved.

You can find a very good puzzle at the ITA Software "careers" page. It's stood much longer than any of the earlier ones. Solve it elegantly and you will likely be invited to work on much harder puzzles.

There's nothing very hackish about musings on capitalism vs. socialism, or their minor variants (respectively) fascism and communism. A more hackish take on capitalism (as expressed in the U.S. and Europe) would be to note that a corporation is, ideally, a robot programmed to exploit differences in perceptions of value by place (trade) or time (investment). The program is the charter, the machine is the financial/legal system, the hardware is employees, equipment, and police, and the environment is the economy. Robot War isn't just a game, it's a simulation of the Real World.

Key observations... The values of the employees are of only minor significance. If they differ from those expressed in the charter and the laws of corporate governance enough to keep the corresponding employees from acting fully in tune with those terms, those employees can be replaced, and indeed, by law, must be. Worse, nothing in the law or the typical charter prevents the corporation applying its full power toward acting to change the law or its application to enforcing the charter. This is a scary fact when the strongest influence on modern voters' behavior is exerted by the enormous multimedia corporations. We see its application in the DMCA and related nefariousness, and indeed in the charge to war in Mesopotamia.

It's not for nothing that science fiction writers have been writing stories about humanity enslaved by the machines we build. Too late, it's already happened.

On a cheerier note, I bought one of those replacement laptop disks that comes with a PCMCIA IDE adapter, and replaced my failing 12G Hitachi disk with a 20G Toshiba, with no problems. This is the fourth drive I've had in this laptop; each has lasted about a year, and has given plenty of warning of impending failure. Since the old drive didn't actually fail, I have a backup. (A policy of annual backups doesn't inspire much confidence.)

Even better, a patch I sent in to the Gcc libstdc++ project that I expected would speed up multi-threaded string operations turned out to make a 30x (!) improvement on certain single-thread benchmarks, on P4s. I really have to start actually measuring my optimizations. :-) Meanwhile, Paolo's work is coming along famously. There's a very good chance that iostreams in gcc-3.4 will be something to be proud of, not an embarrassment as in releases <= 3.3.

I've taken advantage of Bittorrent (thanks Bram) and tvtorrents.com to get to see episodes of "The Tick" for the first time. This involves using things like mplayer or gnome-xine. Isn't it odd that no movie player on Linux allows frame-by-frame stepping, or slow-motion, or fast-forward? You wouldn't buy a VHS or DVD player that lacked those features. They ought to be trivial to implement, but would have been already if that were true. I suspect the underlying libraries' APIs are not flexible enough to do that, a consequence perhaps of the inadequate modeling of time and sequential processes in current languages. Does gstreamer's API allow it? (The Debian packaging of gstreamer is broken right at the moment, making it just a little too much trouble to find out for myself.)

I see that U.S. White House Director of Communications Ari Fleischer is retiring from his post: "There's this tremendous opening right now in Iraq," he gushed, "I have to jump on it before somebody else gets it. They're big shoes to fill, but I'm sure I can do the job."

The Debian Mentors page has a wonderful quote: "Ignoring this [advice] may cause panic attacks, rage and finally insight." I wonder if advice on good security practices would be better heeded if it was accompanied by promises of "in-depth education in your spare time" instead of just break-ins.