Older blog entries for ncm (starting at number 80)

3 Oct 2003 (updated 3 Oct 2003 at 19:40 UTC) »
Bram: Why start by turning all this great high-grade energy into heat? Photons are about as clean an energy source as ever there was, albeit oscillating three or four orders of magnitude faster than we can quite manage to rectify efficiently yet. Lightning is already electricity! You need extreme temperatures to get any respectable efficiency from a heat engine, and all a heat engine does is turn dirty heat into clean motion. The problem with lightning is that it releases an extreme energy burst (1.21 gW? :-) in a millisecond, but you usually need smaller amounts of power over a longer period. Therefore, what you need is really a storage system that can absorb a huge amount of energy in an instant, and then feed it (all of it!) back slowly. Run the lightning through a coil to generate a magnetic field, and use the field to loft a heavy object that releases gravitational potential energy as it descends.

mrd: I can't imagine you neglected to put a "$" at the end of your regular expression to anchor it to the end of the file name...

Evolution 1.4.5 crashed, twice. Back it goes onto my GNOME panel, even though it's quite a lot better, crashwise, (maybe 5x) than 1.4.4. Crashiness seems to be triggered by searching, FWIW.

I've been running Evolution 1.4.5 for over 24 hours, and it hasn't crashed yet. I'm removing its icon from my GNOME panel now, in hopes that I won't be needing to restart it any more.

Does anybody know why jimw's diary entries are being filtered out? This is they guy I mentioned last week as originator, in 1992, of the expression "Sooner if you help" as applied to Free Software releases. I had no idea he was here. If you can do anything to raise his diary rating, please do.

Congratulations to Ximian on release of Evolution 1.4.5! I'm running it now. Here's hoping I can afford to remove the startup button from my GNOME panel, after I verify that it won't crash every day, any more. So far so good!

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.

11 Jul 2003 (updated 11 Jul 2003 at 05:17 UTC) »
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.

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