The Butt Ugly Weblog

Kasa is collecting the first entries of Finnish blogs. Quite a few of them are either "test message" or "Let me explain about this blog..."

I can still remember how my first message came along... I had been tweaking the system here and there (yes, I write my own blog platform, thankyouverymuch) for a few days, but I didn't want to start with a "Hello world" -post. I wanted to say something minimalistic yet profound, as significant as the first word of a child, but in the end all I could think about was the fact that a) I was frigging lonely but I couldn't say anything about it without appearing whiny, and b) it was REALLY cold outside. Something in the order of -30°C with a wind chill factor taking it down to -50 or so. I remember some friends in Oulu telling me on IRC that we had it warm in the South - it was even colder up there.

So there you go - that's the story of the first words of this blog.

Father and Son

The Finnish "Oh My God We Must Protect The Children At Any Cost" - organization (aka "Pelastakaa Lapset") is again Very Concerned about people putting their kid's pictures online - "because they might end up with people who might do Evil Stuff with them". The implication is that the internet is filled with people who have nothing better to do than to spank the monkey at the sight of a funny picture of a kid in bath, and that hordes of perverts will descend from the sky and tear each other apart for the privilege of seeing a bit of naked child body.

Well, maybe I'm overexaggerating slightly, but these are folks who welcome almost any lengths of online censorship in the name of child protection. So the obvious reaction of any freedom-loving person is to laugh at the idea.

But hold on - I actually believe they are right in this case. Not because I would imagine that the online world is filled with perverts (which obviously do exist, but as usual, censorship is the wrong solution) - but because of a far larger concern: everyone's right to privacy.

A child is not able make an informed decision about choosing what to share or not, and therefore it is the job of the parent (or custodian) to make this determination for him. And, in this case, I think it makes sense to err on the side of caution. We know that pictures are difficult to remove from the internet, so once you choose to be open in this regard, the child cannot undo your decision once he gets old enough. It's a one-way street, and you must be careful when you go that way.

You don't know what your child will want when he's older. Until then, you need to choose wisely.

Jackrabbit, one of my favourite Apache projects, has reached version 1.6. Here's my entirely unscientific performance comparison between 1.5.6 and 1.6, using the default configuration:

Test results.  The number is operations/seconds - larger means faster.
Blob size 100 kB

                    FirstSess   LargeRead LargeRemove   LargeSave  NewSession    RandRead      
Jackrabbit 1.6.0         0.22    62328.60       82.13       29.58     2046.58    52643.22      
Jackrabbit 1.5.6         0.27    45740.63       98.99       30.63     1761.96    36375.67     

                    Remove        Save     SeqRead        UUID      Update     getItem getProperty    propUUID
Jackrabbit 1.6.0    428.69      141.12    12242.90    97184.56      189.64   239975.04  1184413.12   468099.05
Jackrabbit 1.5.6    449.58      155.56    11318.62    65905.68      229.21   139922.76   902527.08   470654.68

The tests are explained here. It seems that especially when it comes to the tree traversal, there have been quite a few improvements all around. However, the store/remove performance seems to have gone down a bit. All in all, seems like a good release.

As a geek, I thrive on the exchange of ideas. I've always maintained that ideas are cheap, plentiful and should be shared; not hoarded "in case someone else steals them." I don't call it brainstorming, because that has a very specific connotation, but it's closer to a free flow of ideas.

A good discussion is more like a flow than you might just imagine. I've found that you need a suitable potential energy difference between conversants to keep it interesting - if the participants are too much alike, there is no flow from one person to another. You don't have ideas that the other person wouldn't have either. If the difference is too great, the potential difference and amount of flow can kill - just like sticking your fingers to a power outlet could.

But having people just far enough apart from each other, who share just enough of a common language, it can become a thing of beauty. A revitalizing force that'll charge your batteries for a long time, getting you all anxious at all the potential in the world. It might not end up in anything concrete, but it will make you feel good - one of the prerequisites of liking the life.

(I was considering Tweeting this, but I realized I don't have the time to make a shorter version of this lousy analogy... I'm off to explore some places in London I've never been to before ;-)