James Fallows, a former presidential speechwriter, analyses the State of the Union speech by GWB. Interesting read, and a good lesson in the subtle art of rhetorics. Link courtesy of Aula.
We got a nice new venue for the Takapotku tournament. Phew. Another catastrophe foiled. Thanks to Jaakko for the tip.
Perhaps now I can go and finally get some work done. I already have overloaded myself with sugar and caffeine in preparation for the tasks ahead :-).
Jeremy Zawodny complains that people don't use good titles in their RSS feeds. It's not that clear-cut though - sometimes a cute headline can draw in people as well. The tabloid magazines do this well: their headlines draw you in, even if you would never read the actual article.
Obviously, the whole thing depends on your target audience as well... But a bit of variety is good, methinks.
For some strange and unfathomable reason, my Debian box started to run again - as if nothing had happened.
Perhaps threatening it with OSX helped...
From Slashdot: How to be a programmer. Surprisingly, some of the comments on that story are actually useful and insightful.
And my sound just disappeared somewhere as well - no error messages, no nothing. Just total silence. (And yes, I suspect it is because that for some totally incomprehensible reason ALSA likes to mute all channels by default. Why, oh why can't they restore your settings as well if you upgrade to a new version?)
AAAAARRGGGHHH!
apt-get upgrade-and-destroy X apt-get upgrade-and-destroy sound
I don't recall issuing those commands.
(How did I notice this? I was trying to watch new trailer of Matrix that was shown in SuperBowl.)
...like now. They did something to X configuration, and now I can no longer log in: KDM runs, but when I attempt to log in, X restarts immediately and I am back to KDM prompt.
Fuck. JSPWiki development is halted until I can get this fixed, since I have no windowing system and very little web browsing ability.
I am too busy and tired for this shit. I've got better things to do.
...but I seem to be Slackware Linux:
http://www.bbspot.com/Images/News_Features/2003/01/os_quiz/slackware.jpg
New York Times asks: If a Machine Creates Something Beautiful, Is It an Artist?. Perhaps.
(A bit of a Finnish follows: a good link to a site explaining why the age of the Compact Disc is over. Sorry to all non-Finns, but I think this rant is a good read for those who understand the language.)
I have to say that I agree - I have not bought a new CD for the past six months or something. Haven't downloaded any music either, legally or illegally. I don't like to be treated as if I were a criminal, and my music listening habits are easily catered for with my existing collection anyway. And the radio still works.
Here's an interesting article about why Firefly got cancelled. Too bad, I started to enjoy it.
Thanks to Henri for the link.
Bit of a problem burning in my mind now: The tournament I mentioned yesterday was larger than expected. And now the tournament that we have scheduled in three weeks is looking to overflow badly. This means that we have to find a new place with good tables and room for 40+ people, and pronto, or face the unfortunate task of leaving out people that would really like to come.
Panic!
The Kani6 tournament is finally over. It was good fun, and I won 3 of my 5 games - with one very near miss: a simple overplay cost me a few points, and so I lost by 1.5 points. Grr. But it feels good to know I played OK, and all those fast games have not completely destroyed my ability to concentrate.
(Update: another terminal, where I can find the bar. So I can link now: but the link is in Finnish, though =).
You know... there has been something that has been bothering me in the while weblogging business-thingy. You obviously already have nodes and hubs; people who are at the edge and those who are at the "routing points" of the weblogging world, respectively. The "hubs" see what else is out there, read other blogs, see what's good on them, and then links to the good ones. And since everyone else reads the good hubs, then those opinions and ideas are quickly spread throughout the blogosphere.
However, this makes me wonder: what is the social responsibility of those "hubs"? They are, after all, pretty much in control (unwillingly and perhaps not consciously) of much of the information flow that happens here. If they don't like your ideas, you won't get linked to in a big manner; and if they do like you, then you get instant fame. And this is totally fine - this is how any social network works.
But have those people who are at the hubs really thought about what it means to be one? What is their responsibility towards the people who link to them and read their weblogs every day? Even though it is nice to imagine that all people are smart and capable of clearly separating good and bad; right and wrong - there are and will be those who are not, or are willing to accept anything because it "comes from someone who knows better".
I don't know, really. Is this a problem?
Apple has released an official X11 port for OSX, though they are not making any noise. The platform is looking more and more interesting each day...
What is there not to like? UNIX-like functionality without all of the config hassle... Something that I've grown to loathe in my 12+ years of UNIX experience. Configuration of things. Different formats, different places, and nothing ever works straight out of the box. I've grown pretty good at doing it, but only through necessity - I hate configuring stuff outside the absolute minimum necessary.
Had a really good discussion today. Two in fact. Things ain't still good, but at least I got to offload some of my worries, and got some thoughts organized. Never a bad thing.
Jeremy Zawodny: Weblogs vs. Centralized Message Boards.
Good riddance to message boards. I've always found their interface to be clunky, and it is very difficult to follow the discussion flow. Especially since most discussion boards to not remember which items you've read before and will still display them. And they are not at all configurable.
I recall someone saying that "the web took us back 10 years in UI design", referring to the extremely limited capabilities of HTML forms. I think WebLogs and WikiWikis are also a new form of UI design... Sort of UI libraries on top of clunky HTML, much like current UI libraries lie on top of line-drawing primitives.
We blocked all access from crawler1.crawler918.com to the www.ecyrd.com site. They don't respect /robots.txt, so we don't respect their efforts (whatever they are - they have no web site, nor an URL in the referrer logs we could check). Checking the robots.txt would be polite, you know...
Wikipedia celebrates their 100,000th article! They are probably the largest WikiWiki in existence, and the only public Wiki used by non-geeks :-). I think the Wiki format suits an encyclopedia really well, perhaps the first real usage outside company intranets or documentation wikis. Sensei's Library is another example of a wiki-gone-encyclopedia.
We are truly moving towards a collective intelligence.
Gotta blog this: The Fly User Interface. A perfect little story, including the headline. How many times in your life do you get to use the word "fly" in three different meanings at the same time? :-)
In a comment on Simon Willison's weblog, L.M. Orchard suspects that Dave Winer sees all in the blogosphere. Let's test that and mention his name here, in a rarely read blog and see how long it takes for Dave to find this entry :-).
The clock starts now.
In 0xDECAFBAD, L.M. Orchard writes: Basically, I don't want to give up my openness, but I want to deflect the barbarians.
I may be just Harmless so far, but to me this sounds like the natural question every single society has to ask themselves: Where are the limits? How much do we allow our citizens to express themselves and behave freely, and and which point it becomes too damaging to the society?
So far, everyone creates their own laws in their own part of the Blogosphere state. But we have little or no ways of enforcing those laws.
Finally got rid of a really annoying error in JSPWiki: With JDK 1.4, migration from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 in pages would not work, and there had been a couple of unit test cases for months that I could not get to run. But I did some serious reading and experimenting on the terribly underdocumented java.nio.charset.Charset class, and managed to mount a JDK 1.4 solution to the whole problem. It took a bit of headbanging to get the multi-JDK code running as well, but now all of our unit tests finally show green.
It's nice to learn new things. Even though it is far too late in the night.
(If you need a sample how that to use the 1.4 Charsets and decoders, see the com.ecyrd.jspwiki.~FileUtil14 class in JSPWiki 2.0.21 or onwards.)
Edward Said, Al Ahram Weekly: An unacceptable helplessness. A cry out to the Arab world to solve their problems on their own instead of a script dictated by Americans. A good read.
Here is also an interesting UPI blurb about Israel mounting assassination operations in USA and other allied countries.
Released no less than three versions of JSPWiki today. Sorry to everyone who has been using an 2.0 beta, but we had to change the way ~BasicAttachmentProvider saves attachments on disk: first of all, it could not handle files that had non-usascii characters in their names; and second, it could not handle a trailing "." as the last character of a file name on Windows.
So we boldly break compatibility. Hope nobody is terribly inconvinienced.
Slept very late and went to a Japanese cooking class. We learned at least three different ways to cut fish (the names of which I promptly forgot), made sashimi, nabeyaki udon, and I finally learned how to make uramaki rolls. It's a clever little trick =). "Oishii...", he uttered, as he settled on the sofa, unable to move.
(For Finns near Helsinki, the ~PalacenRanta restaurant has a Japanese theme week next week.)
~ComputerWorld: Spam is getting more sophisticated.
Well... My spam filter removes any email that has been sent in HTML format, so I haven't really noticed any of those tricks that spammers use. But I've noticed that I have started getting emails with topics that say 'get wonderful secks'. Which is obvious spam. People I know can spell, you see. :-) I hate spam as much as anyone else, but I've got it down to a manageable level now, and it is kinda interesting to see where this arms race is going next...
What an exhausting week. I think I slept an average of 5 hours a night or something? Hard to say, because even though it's only early evening, I am already ripe for bed. Even this morning I had to wake up early for the funeral.
Strange. There was a nice lunch after the funeral (not exactly a wake, but close), where people looked at old photographs and talked. Which was actually quite nice. People were enjoying themselves, laughing (not very loudly, of course - this is Finland), talking to relatives you haven't seen in a while...
Perhaps it is the thought of death that brings people closer, and reminds them that it is important to laugh and enjoy the company of friends and family, while one still can. And as long as that happens, we're still doing okay.
(To any JSPWiki hackers out there: ~WikiProviders will break soon with page deletion being added. Prepare.)
CNN: Spammers Busted. Yay! Unfortunately, spamming is still not illegal :-(.
Yeah! Press Play On Tape, everyone's favourite Commodore 64-revival band, has published their first music video (28 Mb ~DivX 5). Rock!
(You know when you're tired when you have to edit the same blog entry three-four times to get it right. :-)
Artifical nipples sweep USA. OK. Fine. Great. Consumer demand and all that jazz. But could someone please explain the following comment from a happy user?
I love to look sassy and I love to be in charge of my compliments. Thanks to Bodyperks, I can do that.
- Paula, 27
St. Paul, MN
"In charge of your compliments." What the fuck does that mean? You actually like men to walk by and go: "Hey! Great nipples!" "Thanks!" "No worries."?
New York Times (free reg. reqd): Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. This explains quite well why any program targeted against the rich 1% is quickly shot down...
(Thanks to Aula for the link, to which I can't link to directly because they don't know how to make permalinks available to their entries... :-)
Been busy. First, a 9-hour day at work, then quickly to the Post office, to pick up a nice package from amazon containing, among other things, Eddie Izzard's The Circle. Then to the movie theatre, to watch Spirited Away again. All this, and more, on four hours of sleep.
Spirited Away really is a good movie. The bird and the mouse steal the show again, and a second viewing allowed me to enjoy the background paintings, since I was not so spellbound to the plot and foreground events as when I first saw it. I don't remember any other animation that really was so entrancing since Aladdin.
Eddie is also doing what he can do best: Do you get... erm... Do you folks even know that there other countries?
For some reason, I've never liked stand-up comedy. It always felt so ... artificial. But perhaps I only like middle-aged transvestites. :-)
As I was mentioning, there have been some burglaries in the neighbourhood, one even very near. Same building, one floor below in fact. So I got myself fortified a bit - a lock smith dropped by and now I have a brand new safety lock. And a peephole. And some extra bolts. So that's safe, then.
However, my dad called and asked me if I was going to be at home on Friday. I told him I was planning to go see my brother: "Why?" He tells me he is coming in for the funeral and would like to stay over.
"What funeral?" I ask.
"Your grand-aunt's", he answers.
"She's dead?" I ask, feeling kinda surprised.
"Yeah, she died a while ago. The funeral's on Saturday. Didn't anyone tell you?"
Oops.
May she rest in peace.
From Dave Winer: Sébastien Paquet: Personal knowledge publishing.
"The other factor that helps quality emerge in weblogs is personal ownership. Although webloggers participate in a community, the contents of a weblog is not a communal space; it is under the sole responsibility of its editor."
This perhaps points out the key difference between a WikiWiki and a WebLog. A Wiki is most often a communal resource, where anyone can contribute, whereas a WebLog is always a personal viewpoint. However, they are technologically very similar: both emphasize speed and ease-of-use; they both give control to the user. By hiding unnecessary technical detail (like HTML) they are both optimized for production and storage of content.
Interesting: WebLogs have started off big-time as a new media for gaining 15 minutes of publicity, but WikiWikis are considered tools. Boring tools, like hammers. But the author's personal viewpoint cannot really be the distringuishing factor, since there are many blogs that are communally edited. Places such as slashdot and Aula are thriving, even though almost anyone can contribute...
Perhaps it is the personality of the weblog rather than the personality of its author that make them more interesting.
From rec.games.go: How said one mine friend from Russia : when you are solving problems it isn't important solve you problem or no, - important not forget the solution !
Right on!
Q: What is the sound of a head thudding against a keyboard? A: tfgrgtfyfgtvgfvgfhgbgtyhfgvvfd rft.
Zzz. Must go home and grab some.
(Were blogs created by memes so that they could spread faster?)
Jeremy Zawodny: Drink frist, write second.. Dunno, but around here it has always been an established truth that people are at their most creative after two beers. Above that you start to lose your coherence, but two beers are just enough to lubricate the mind to its fullest capability.
Though it is quite probable that this is the reason why so many great authors were also alcoholics.
Also, it seems that a dan-level go-player's game does not suffer very much as a function of consumed alcohol. As someone said: "His [referring to a dan-player] hands stop moving before his brain." This is probably somehow related to this article in Nature. Experience rules over intellect. Hm. Perhaps I should test this...
Any Finns looking at this blog might be interested in http://www.koulukaverit.com, a site where you can enter your old schools and (possibly) be able to track down some of your old class mates.
A bit of coding again, a nice social dinner, and watching Survivors. I'm so totally hooked on that series. Of course, saying that out loud in public is probably a very stupid thing, because then everyone is going to look up who won and spoil it for me. Thanks guys, I really appreciate that. Not.
From Slashdot: Guerrilla News Network has posted a great 11-minute "clip show" of different speeches from different politicians at http://www.gnn.tv/redux/. It is sad, funny, and frightening at the same time, and while it is not exactly hiding its bias, it should be able to raise a few thoughts, whatever your viewpoint to the whole US-Iraq war is.
A German teaching video for truck drivers (6 MB Windows Media, runs perfectly in mplayer). Not for the weak-kneed.
Just returned from the housewarming party of the Mikki and Anne Living Arrangement. It was a good party I guess, had a couple of interesting conversations and catched up on people whom I had not met in a while. I also managed to put faces on a few names I had heard before, or talked to over the 'net.
Sometime in the early evening, there was a discussion on people, and observing them. I didn't think much of it then, but towards the end I got sort of detached from the whole party thing, sat on a chair and listened to people, not contributing anything, not being a part of any spontaneous social circle (which was probably something everyone appreciated). I suddenly started to observe small things: a small pot belly here, a slightly receding hairline there, clear wrinkles on the face, discussion about house loans, and so on; and I sort of realized how people I have known for a long time have started to grow older. The same enthusiasm is still there (perhaps a bit muted), they still look the same, but there is something different altogether. Quite a lot of those folks were people I actually physically meet only few times a year, so perhaps that is why I picked it up: the old mental image does not match with the reality anymore, and there is no gradual change to dull your senses. It's just a "BANG! You're old!"
I don't know why this bothers me. I don't even know if it bothers me. Perhaps I've just become sensitive to change itself.
I released 2.0.14 under a beta label. There are still some odd windows issues that people keep digging up, and they're kinda hard to test, since my only real Windows computer is a 64 MB Windows 98 laptop... Which is not exactly the most comfortable environment to code in.
Whoops. Fixed a very nasty bug in JSPWiki that had become apparent when we moved to Tomcat 4. I'm amazed that nobody had caught it before. Either people don't like to use FindPage, or they just simply can't be bothered to give bug reports. I'd wager the latter.
Just got a note from the house manager: It seems that there have been several break-ins in this area within the past few weeks, and one in this house even. A burglaried house would not be a pleasant thought - it's not the monetary value, but the trouble that you'd have to go through to get equivalents for most of the stuff you have.
As I was saying earlier, the calendar at the right side needed a bit of meditation. So what I did was that I enabled plugins to also be able to access HTTP parameters, and made the weblog plugin able to pick out the start date from the URL. This means that now you can access this page, add "weblog.startDate=ddmmyy" to the URL, and see the weblog as it was on that day. Obviously, the calendar works like that, too.
If you did not understand anything from the paragraph above, that's okay. It just means that you still have hope.
The Abuse-a-tron: "You get health care from a veterinarian, you shallow-brained, cat litter munching, goat discomfiting, churlish descendant of Barney the Dinosaur's greasy, tick-plagued loins."
Whee. I have been found by googlebot, and The Pinseri bloglist, resulting in an explosive increase of traffic to this blog. Welcome to all new readers - I'll be an extra 10% ugly for you today.
Thanks also to Henri for luring unsuspecting folks to my web :-).
(It seems that ebu managed to install Tomcat 4.x onto this web server. Hopefully it makes things a bit snappier.)
Now I am just tired.
There's this advertisement in the subway where two middle-aged persons, a man and a woman, proudly show their new automatic blood pressure measurement devices. This haunts me for some reason; perhaps because the advertisement shows 21st century technology as if it were 1980s technology. They've also got exactly the same, slightly pained, expressions on their faces. It sort of looks as if they were trying to convey of a feeling: "Things are not well, but thanks to these things, we are okay now". They fail miserably, though. The whole thing looks so antiquated, and burlesque - I wouldn't dare to touch those devices... But then again I am not exactly in the target group either.
"Vituttaa", as the Finns say so concisely. In English the concept takes a bit more words to explain, and I am not up to it right now. I'm feeling too asocial to even to talk to the computer. You can think of that as a symptom of "vitutus".
I slept through the alarm clock, and got to work far too late, still feeling tired. Got off work far too late, too, and skipped our weekly Thursday night go. Both of which suck.
Even sauna did not help.
I've been looking for a new laptop lately. My trusty Sharp Actius has so far been quite good (weight 1.3 kg, but the battery life is practically zero now), but I could use something new as well. So far the requirements have been "weight under 2 kg", "no fan". This new 12" thingy from Apple is nearly there. The 17" version would even have a lit keyboard.
The geek in me drools.
You may notice the tiny calendar on the right side. This is a new CalendarTag that is now with JSPWiki 2.0.12.
Currently it can only link to the first entry of the day, so I'll need to think of some way to make this thing better, so that you can actually go through the different entries. Perhaps a NextLink/PreviousLink tag pair? But if they're tags, they seriously limit their use in general weblogs. If they're plugins, then you have to put them on every page.
Must meditate on this.
(As a sidenote, people are finding bugs from JSPWiki 2.0.12 at an alarming rate, and the ideas-page is growing, too. While this is a good thing, it does sort of tear me apart; on the other hand it's cool and exciting to work on the JSPWiki, and I got a responsibility too; but on the other hand, I would also like to watch the pile of DVDs gathering dust in my living room, play go, and do a trillion of other things.)
From BBC: German faces jail for 'ironic' remark.
This is a kind of problem that is really hard to avoid:
- Irony is easily lost on the Internet.
- There are plenty of morons on the Internet.
- In addition to morons, there are also lots of people on the internet who just are overly sensitive to anything you might say. And have no sense of irony at all.
- The police has to investigate every complaint, even anonymous ones.
- Germany has strong laws against hate speech (considering their history, who can blame them).
Each and every point is justifiable or just simply true in many good ways. It's just their combination that gets people into these kinds of situations.
A U.S. viewpoint into the Finnish prison system, courtesy of Aula. As a Finn, I am always interested in what other people think of our country. Call it a curiosity complex of national proportions.
(BTW, my computer is still running after the tea incident. Got off lucky.)
Plenty of destruction and mayhem yesterday, with some kinematic stunts attached. Exploding cars (two to be exact), bullets flying in slow motion... yeah! The game was Feng Shui, a new acquaintance; and a not at all a bad one.
The real world damages were luckily limited to a lamp, GM's vocal cords, and possibly his budding relationship with their new neighbours.
Some totally hilarious translations from a bootleg copy of The Fellowship of the Ring:
http://users3.ev1.net/~eekfrenzy/captionspage/badfotrcaptionsx.html
Worked a few hours on JSPWiki, and added a couple of features that certain persons have been asking for very loudly.
The good thing about having a nice constant 20 degrees C below zero is that you get to ventilate all of the mattresses, pillows, and what-have-you. Kills all bugs, too. I've filled my small balcony with all kinds of things I could pry loose, and put them outside with the small hope that a storm does not suddenly arise and sweep all of my stuff away...
Spent the last 20 hours playing go, talking to good friends, drinking good beer and excellent single-malt scotch whiskeys. Then some sleep, and more go. And not even a hangover.
I wonder what will be life's inevitable backlash.
(For any Finns near Helsinki: Pikkulintu in Puotila Mall is an excellent place to pursue your elitist desires, if you like beer or malt whiskeys. They have 100+ different kinds of Scotch over there...)
New York Times (a free registration required, sorry) reports a terrible problem: The European Copyright on recordings is only 50 years, whereas in the US it's up to 95 years. Simply put, this means that recordings[1] from the 1950s are becoming public domain in Europe.
Why bring up this issue now? Because people still listen to music from that era, Elvis most notably... And so there is still money to be made from it.
But the sad truth is, that the record companies only care about 1% of the recordings from that era. And all of the other great and not so great music can disappear, as far as they're concerned. But as copyrights expire, it means that people can share this stuff freely, and perhaps start a whole new 50s craze. And then the one who's got good copies of all of the records is going to win big time...
Come on guys, the copyright was agreed to be 50 years, and everyone thought then that was a good idea. And it's still a good idea. Elvis is dead, live with it.
[#1] However, the actual music copyright still stands at 70 years from author's death.
Do not pour hot liquids on your computer. You'll save yourself from a lot of grief and heart pounding.
Cold liquid is much better, since it does not burn your hands when you are desperately attempting to dry the puddles with inadequate amounts of tissue paper. However, note that liquids with high sugar content tend to make things stick together. Which may be an issue or not, depending on whether your keyboard was among the victims.
I updated a new version of the software. The format of the permalinks was changed, so that they are now valid WikiNames. The RSS feed is now also rendered in HTML instead of Wiki markup.
This ~FastCompany article hits home (and ties in nicely with the previous entry): What should I do with my life?.
- There are far too many smart, educated, talented people operating at quarter speed, unsure of their place in the world, contributing far too little to the productive engine of modern civilization. There are far too many people who look like they have their act together but have yet to make an impact. You know who you are. It comes down to a simple gut check: You either love what you do or you don't. Period.
China plans to put a man into space by the end of this year, says China Daily, and are perhaps planning a moon trip next.
Good news. Competition doesn't hurt at all in this new space race.
Dork Tower reminds us again about the essentials of weblogging.
Come on, Life. I'm waiting for you. Give it your best shot.
I just finished viewing the excellent DVD box of The Band of Brothers. It really is up to par with the From the Earth to the Moon, also from HBO.
The US TV companies produce a lot of crap, but there is still an enormous amount of creativity left over there. And sometimes, the will to produce good things. I'm especially impressed about the fact that The Band of Brothers has not been designed around commercials, unlike practically all other TV these days - 2.5 minutes of ads every 10 minutes, and a compulsory small "cliffhanger" before every break to keep people from running away to other channels. TBB has a totally different kind of intensity.
This is the so totally wrong way to start the year (said he at 3:42 in the morning). New Year resolution: Get to bed earlier. Turn back the old internal clock to something resembling a European timezone...
It is so cold, that when you inhale, the snot in your nose freezes immediately.
Private comments? Drop me an email. Or complain in a nearby pub - that'll help.
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