Older blog entries for rillian (starting at number 54)

childish countries

chakie, I suppose I meant that the typical connotation of 'terrorist' (as least in the US) is not someone who might reasonably be accused of war crimes, but someone who uses a particular brand of violence to attack the established local order, to attack an 'us' that explicitly excludes most people. Thus it's not 'terrorism' when the state employs the same tactics against a group or organization outside one's sphere of concern. That's some of where the resistance to the ICC is coming from, since it would enforce the same rules on both sides.

Now I certainly agree this is an immature perspective, and anti-intellectual as well. But the hypocracy you point to is more a symptom of a deeper cause than an inconsistency with which to challenge those in power.

London

Our stuff arrived from Vancouver last week after 133 days in transit. (well, mostly in a warehouse waiting for a container to fill.) It's great to have utensils and books, cds and dvds, bedding and more clothes. And of course a desktop computer and printer again. snow is back online. Everything seems to have survived just fine; no damage at all aside from some of the jets on my old inkjet cartridge being blocked/dried out.

I guess that makes our household complete in a sense. We were holding off on buying some things like bedding and kitchenware because we'd shipped some (dimly remembered in detail) so now we either have it or can go get it. And I'm very comforted to have some books around to refer to, even though I have most of my important references as PDFs.

build tools

I thought I'd add to the build tool thread that's been happening here off and on. I don't have any real design ideas, but I would like to relate my biggest complaint about the GNU autotools. tromey has alluded to this in his requirements gathering, and maybe it's obvious to those thinking about this, but it's not something I commonly hear articulated.

Most people complain about the arcane syntax and learning curve (bad 'code shui'?) but that's never really bothered me so much. The tools do work, after all, even if you can't always use the naively obvious solution.

The part I'd really like to see done differently is better language support for decision-making. When I'm writing configure scripts, I often feel I'm trying to write an expert system in sh and it's not a good fit. :)

As a really simple example, jbig2dec has optional support for png output iff libpng is available. But libpng depends on zlib, which we don't otherwise use. Now the easy thing is to call AC_CHECK_LIB() for zlib and then for libpng, and let the user sort out dependency issues. However, I'd like to do better. I don't want to add zlib to the link line if we don't have libpng or vice versa. Worse, because many distributions package headers separately, it would be nice to print a warning if the headers aren't available (and the libs are) but still disable png support, just to help with that common bit of user confusion. The actual actions to take are very simple: if the dependencies are available, define HAVE_LIBPNG, add -lpng -lz to LIBS, and add a file to the LIBOBJs. But to invoke those three steps when I want to I have to do a bunch of conditionals and temporary variables. And that's just a 'trivial' chained dependency.

So, it would be really nice if that were automated and one could just specify (optional) goals and dependencies and have the tool work out the best possible config just like make finds the minimum set of build steps to update a target. Simple, direct, no hacks. fwiw

13 Aug 2002 (updated 13 Aug 2002 at 00:46 UTC) »

jbig2dec

The 0.1 release of jbig2dec is now available. I didn't get in the user interface cleanups I'd planned, but the main idea was to get a non-cvs version up so we could get wider testing. ghostgum was kind enough to build a win32 binary as well.

Unfortunately, I've not had a peep of feedback. Of course, there's only a couple of people on the mailing list, so perhaps a wider announcement is in order. Seems a bit premature for a freshmeat entry (especially since we're on the first google page for jbig2). So if you have any jbig2 files laying around, please give it a try!

GNU Ghostscript

Looks like we may not be maintaining Ghostscript as a GNU project after the current version. It will remain available under the GPL, of course, but RMS has made increasingly clear that he sees GNU as more than just a collection of GPL (or copyleft) software. Recent changes to the coding guidelines mean that we have to pretend the AFPL and commercial releases of Ghostscript don't exist, and (worse) likewise for the development codebase and process. Maintaining that much of a fork is more work than we're willing to do ourselves.

So the current plan is to do a GNU 7.06 release with all the references to cvs, bts, ghostscript.com &c. stripped, and then when we do a GPL 8.x release to not conform to the GNU guidelines in those respects. It's sad, since Ghostscript has been a GNU project for quite a long time. Don't know if the FSF (or someone else) will attempt to maintain a GNU fork (port?) of the code; they're certainly thinking about it. It happened before of course, which gnu ghostscript was looking unmaintained.

London

S has had a friend in town for the past week. It's been good to do more tourist things. Partly we we bogged down with getting the household set up and work, but also I think we've been a bit lazy about getting out of the house. We went to Leeds Castle on friday, which has a really excellent hedge maze, and to Kew Gardens today. They were both quite interesting, and in particular I think we'll be going back to Kew quite a lot they're very well maintained and a good deal more interesting than other botanical gardens I'd been to. Felt sorry for some of the fish, and the rose garden had blight, but otherwise things seemed very healthy and well labelled. It was also just a nice relaxing space. If it weren't also on the flight path to Heathrow, we might be looking for apartments!

We also went for a stroll in Epping Forest on sunday, which was nice. Still looked like parkland to me, but one can't really complain. Next time we'll take a map though. :)

Must actually visit some museums at some point. S keeps telling me that's what winter's for...

anonymous sources

jfleck said:

A journalist using a named source, or citing a public document that others can obtain and independently review, is doing this same thing, and the competitive crucible of journalism is generally swift and sure. But an anonymous source offers no such opportunity, leading us into an epistomological swamp with no way out, no way to tell how we really know the thing being alleged, no way to check it out.

To be fair, it's not that black and white. Another journalist can actually go look for sources to confirm or deny anonymous quotes. As you imply it slows things down, but to call the situation a 'swamp with no way out' makes sense only if you do all your research on the internet.

On the other side, named sources can be just as useless. I don't think actual trojans (source names faked by the journalist) are common in serious media, but one does see some indirection in terms of one group indirectly funding another to create an impression of independent support. q.v. the related practice of astroturfing.

Of course, your counterexample is just awesome.

childish countries

chakie, you're right to be critical of the US refusal to participate in the ICC, but the hypocrisy you point to isn't very deep. 'terrorists' doesn't mean what you think it means.

feeling dumb

I was inspired by jbuck's comment on the account retiring article to take another look at raph's trust metric work. This has been a great frustration for me. What raph's trying to do is so interesting and useful, and he's so passionate both for the work itself and for wanting it to have a life outside his interest that I'd really like to be part of spreading and adapting the ideas. That's a role I enjoy playing in projects of many sorts.

The comment in question is clearly not sophisticated, and (perhaps) exactly the sort of misunderstanding raph has lamented here. My own whine is that I've never been able to understand the ideas well enough to (for example) rebut jbuck. Of course I get the general picture in a hand-wavy sense, and the algorithm itself is adequitely documented, but I've never really grokked the why of it.

Many people have found reading raph's thesis helpful. Ideally, yes, but not having a computer science background, I've found it hard to follow the parts that are still sketches. As a physicist with a fair about of native skill with computers I tend to be confident I can understand this sort of thing, but much of what I need are the definitions and background--often the last part one writes down. Also, from a academic point of view, I suspect raph may not understand it well enough himself yet to explain it to someone from a different field.

So what can I do? Learn more computer science is about all I've come up with. I've been aware of the gaps in my knowledge for some time, and it can make 'translating everything into physics' quite slow. Working through some of the classic text books and/or auditing some classes would probably help. Talking to folks helps too of course. I'm open to further suggestions.

GNU Ghostscript

raph, I'm glad you wrote more about the gag order in the GNU Coding standards. From your previous entry it sounded like you'd drunk a little too much kool-aid. :)

I've been in theory working on resolving this, albeit at a very low priority. It's interesting that it's been bothering rms so much. He's been pinging me about it the last couple of weeks, and I was surprised he took the time to talk to you personally about it. My strategy has been to try and deal with one of the gnu.org web staff instead, and that seems to be working; we'll see.

We'd previously decided we weren't going to remove mentions of the other ghostscripts on our side, and that they were free to do so one the gnu.org pages, and I'm still going with that. If you really want to scrub the documentation as well...ugh. I guess I don't feel all that strongly about it as an issue. I think the restriction against recommending non-free software makes sense as a guideline, but interpreting it to mean we must pretend the ghostscript development process doesn't exist is...anti-intellectual.

I also admire rms for his vision and principled stand, but I think your point about him being out of touch (and less effective for it) is spot on.

The irony here is that I do think the AFPL is an inferior license. The problem comes down to the slippery definition of 'commercial distribution'. You say Debian-style distributions would have a wider role, but that's only if you always download everything. Or should they get special permission to sell cds 'not for profit'? And why do packagers not also deserve compensation? I don't buy it. Direct grants to developers seems like a better approach to me.

travel

Still not really over my gastro-intestinal problems from last week. Managed to be out of bed monday and tuesday, but other than a little email I didn't get anything done. Yucky, yucky, yucky.

Advogato DNS update

I've just propagated the ip address change to the .net and .com dns records, so if you're used to used to using one of those domains instead, they should be working again.

Travel

Went to Bruges, in Belgium last week. Our first expedition to the continent. Was very cute, and had lovely shopping. But we got food poisoning the second day there, and I was pretty much out for the week with it. Not bunny.

jbig2dec

As raph mentioned, jbig2dec is now at a minimally useful stage. I'll looking forward to doing an 0.1 release, but want to cleanup the ui a bit first.

I'm also writing a tool to rip jbig2 bitstreams out pdf files since we expect that's how most of the net-published jbig2 documents will be packaged. It will be based on the parser code in the Fitz prototype, which is exciting in a participating-in-the-hype sort of way.

N 51°31'53.3" W 0°02'09.6" (63m) 20020607 10:19 UTC

The journey ends. I arrived in London a little over a month ago, and have pretty much settled in. Took the above reading from the window of our flat which has a really nice view of the sky.

Flew Virgin Atlantic, but was disappointed in the individual-screen thing. It was nice enough, but the image quality wasn't was I was used to from lcd screens (analog feed) and both the you-are-here live map display and my game controller were broken, which was about all I was interested in.

Haven't had too much chance to play tourist. We've been doing about one day a week, with the rest spent on work and getting the household established. So far we've seen St. Paul's Cathedral, the South Bank, bits of the British Museum, the new British Library, Greenwich Observatory, Camden Market, a couple of bridges and a fair bit of general wandering around looking at architecture.

Tomorrow we're off to Cambridge, my first trip out of town. The agenda is pretty much worshipping at the altar of Cambridge University Press.

Code

Been spending a lot of time on ghostscript, making up for all the moving time. Lately I've been concentrating on jbig2dec, which has been a lot of fun. We've just gotten it to the point where it's decoding other people's files so one can claim it's marginally useful now. Fortunately the current crop of encoders don't seem to be very aggressive.

Also adding native macos font enumeration and loading, which is less fun but an oft-requested feature. I need to spend some time on the mac port in general. The build system hasn't kept up with revs in the metrowerks compiler, and we really need to do an updated release of the macos viewer.

N 32°11'00.0" W 110°46'12.7" (900m) 20020530 19:08 UTC

Oh desert how I missed thee. Arrived at my father's house outside Tuscon last night after an uneventful, if excessively legged, journey from Seattle. It's warm at last. In the northwest I'm usually cold, and occasionally hot, but never that comforting warm that comes with dry desert heat. I've slowly gotten used to the cooler clime, but it's always nice to go back.

Also I've seen a ton of wildlife, most of it right outside the patio door. A rabbit, a chipmunk (spread-eagled cooling itself in the shade) two road runners, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, quail, various other birds, a gila monster and a couple of bats. There's a lot more vegetation here than in the western mojave where I grew up, and a lot more diversity too, but I'm just overwhelmed. I'd forgotten how alive the desert is.

Still on dialup, alas. At least there's a local service I can use for free, so I can stay on a longer time.

London

The exciting news is that S has signed a lease on an apartment and moves in tomorrow (well, today) so we'll at least have a place to sleep. Now that I have a postal code I've been investigating broadband a little more fully. Unfortunately, neither NTL nor TeleWest think they service our area. BT does say there are people in our postal code with dsl, so at least the better option is available. Here's hoping it doesn't take forever.

Amusingly we're always just a bit off the edge of the 'central london' maps. E3 indeed.

N 47°40'53.0" W 122°10'51.8"

Sold the car!

N 47°37'22.6" W 122°19'20.1" (82m) 20020525 02:30 UTC

Farewell Vancouver.

Left Vancouver this morning, the last time for a while. Seems like it took forever to get the last bits packed and stored and everything cleaned. Kira was unfortunately unable to find someone to replace me, so she was moving out at the same time, complicating things. She's going homeless for three weeks, on a retreat with friends, then moving into an established house with 3 other people on the 15th. I think that'll be good for her. We get on really well as housemates, but I don't think I provide much entertainment for her otherwise. :-)

My mother came to visit over the weekend and help pack/move/clean, which was just excellent. And by coincidence my old friend Jen was in town for conference+vacation so I hung out with her and marc as well. A good send off.

Now in Seattle for a week. Chris arrives this evening for a visit, and there's a film fest on so I'll be going to lots of that. The only remaining bit of business is selling my car. Here's hoping I get more than junkyard rates for it. Anyone near seattle want to give a good home to an aging subaru?

SeattleWireless rocks.

New Machine

Glad you got some resonable (shop?) recommendations raph. It's a pity I'm not out your way anything soon; would have been a fun thing to spend an afternoon on together. I had noticed the screwdriver shops in Vancouver stared offering dual athlon machines last month, so presumedly the bugs are worked out.

I've built my last couple of machines. It can be fun, and it's really quick if everything works. The problems amount to (a) niggling hardware conventions they don't write down (like which support holes in the motherboard should be tied to case ground?) and (b) working around hardware and software bugs if any. That latter can eat orders of magnitude more time than the basic install.

A belated Ottawa entry

N 45°25'28.2" W 75&deg41'57.4" 20020508 16:37 UTC

We did make it to Ottawa as planned, and I got to admire the fabulous parliment buildings from all angles. I was really struck by what a difference the requirement for natural light made in the shape and feeling of buildings. Even with ugly in-window airconditioning units stuck everywhere, it had a delicious light feel. The neo-gothic aesthetic probably had someting too do with it too, of course. :) I wish we build more things like that now. The big, geometric shapes have always seemed appropriate for blade-runner-esque archologies, but they're pretty much uninteresting in the inconsiderate anarchy of modern cities.

There was a significant queue of school groups and the public entrance, and we couldn't find another that wasn't maked 'business only' so we didn't actually go inside.

We did drive across the river to Hull and saw the Museum of Civilization there. They had an excellent temporary exhibit on vikings, with lots of artefacts and a good comparison between recent archaeological evidence and the icelandic transcriptions of the oral history. (Apparently the sagas are mostly correct.) It was also the first museum exhibit that presented without question the story of the visits to north america. Interestingly, the Inuit arrived in Greenland about the same time as the vikings did, displacing earlier groups that had lived there for a couple thousand years. I had no idea and had somehow gotten the impression they'd always been there, though the exhibit said the Inuit remember this. Colonialism strikes again

The rest of the museum was less impressive. We didn't actually get to see that many other exhibits since they'd rented out the museum for the evening and started setting up tables and closing exhibits on 10 minutes' warning about two hours after we got there. Not cool; if we'd not made it through the viking exhibit we would have asked for our money back!

Finally we took a drive through the important-people's-neighborhood and admired the houses, and then drove along the canal out of town. I understand why so many people like Ottawa.

We returned to Kingston the same day and spent a nice rest of the week with Sandy's parents. Played a fair number of card games which was a lot of fun. They got me hooked on freecell, and her mother helped me with my hearts strategy a bit, and finally I taught them spades. Her parents are both good.

Finally, had a nice uneventful flight back to vancouver. Utterly mundane to retrace 8 days of driving in five hours. Pretty snow on the rockies.

Ottawa

dyork, sorry we'll miss you. Would be interesting to meet, but we'll just be up for the day I think. At least the weather looks good. We'll be back in Kingston until Monday, then we're catching a ride to Toronto with one of Sandy's friends.

JBIG2

Now that we're stationary I'm getting a chance to work on jbig2dec again. It's been languishing too long. So far I've been doing code cleanup and reminding myself what we've written so far, but hopefully I can start adding new features soon. Probably finish symbol dictionaries next.

Anyone with a win32 machine want to try the commercial demo codec from ImagePower and make us a suite of test files?

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