2000-03-30

(23:25:30)

I had a long chat with an OpenLaw person about some of the DVD cases.

I had several very long chats with various people about my ex-girlfriend (and why she's my ex-girlfriend instead of my girlfriend).

I looked up the "number of ones in the binary representation of n" sequence on Neil Sloane's Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, and found that the first journal reference to it was before I was born.

In Pirke Avot, there is a line about the prospect of having someone tell you "I knew that before you were born!" -- and indeed I know a lot of people who knew a lot of things before I was born.

Bill Gosper has a nice line about an even more extreme version:

I've often been traumatized by discovering something and then learning that Euler knew about it in his adolescence.

I also came up with a very simple algorithm to convert from Gray code to normal binary representation of a number.

I was thinking about the number of ones in the binary or Gray code representation of n, and then how to convert between the two representations, and in general how many of the digit d appear in the base b representation of the number n... not much progress on most of these questions, although I have nice recursive rules to solve the digit problems for binary Gray codes and normal counting...

Also lots of discussions today I can't really talk about here.

A couple of days ago, I got a Tektronix X terminal at a computer store in Daly City. I've been trying to get it to work -- I found a monitor it will talk to, and a keyboard and a mouse, and I put it on a LAN and managed to send windows to it. Very nice. Unfortunately, it seems to have a hardware problem, because it keeps rebooting randomly. Also, the flash ROM is missing files...

2000-03-31

(18:18:41)

Last night was a warm night in San Francisco, but I went out too late and didn't manage to get any dinner. I did offer to trade a copy of K&R for a Blue Book, though.

I found my copy of Smullyan's book 5000 B.C., which I had misplaced. Umberto Eco quotes from that in the epigraph to Foucault's Pendulum: "Superstition brings bad luck."

Maybe I should extend a standing offer to send a copy of K&R to any lawyer who wants one. I wonder how much demand there would be.

At work, I'm going to do some sendmail stuff -- I'm starting to forget about sendmail, myself, but customers still use it. I still use it! Maybe if I fell in love with some other MTA, I could add it to my list of "cool stuff on modern Linux systems that will get people with a Unix background excited". (I'll probably talk more about that list in the future, and probably put it on-line.)

Company lunch: Pizza. I passed on that. I still eat pizza sometimes, but I didn't really feel like it today; I am still "slouching toward veganism" and making only very slow progress.

Nick's "Ctrl-V, e" trick didn't work for me, even using the copy of lynx which is installed on his server. I am confused; if it worked for me, I too would be able to write very long diary entries.

People keep sending tech support questions to the CalLUG Board, and I keep getting copied on them. Sometime people send other things -- someone is wondering how he can submit an idea to Linux developers so that nobody will "just copyright it". I imagine he means "patent" instead of "copyright", or else some more elaborate thing like "use it to create a proprietary program". OK, I'm trying to set him straight on the legal issue, but his other practical question is pretty solid. Suppose that you are not a programmer and have no contacts with The Free Software Community(tm). But you have a great idea for a project. What do you do to propose this project such that it is likely that somebody will actually be inclined to implement it? What are the odds that the program idea you thought of will actually turn out to be worth someone else's time to implement? :-)

I have a few people expressing their condolences to me on the end of my relationship with my girlfriend, a few people theorizing about the event, and a few people planning to get together with me sometime to talk about it. I'm spending more time on IRC as a result -- mostly private servers as opposed to OpenProjects, I'm afraid.

I didn't have a productive week at work because I was thinking about her a lot and generally pretty messed up. I thought that coming back from Southern California would let me get caught up on things in San Francisco, but I hadn't anticipated being broken up with (never mind the many strange consequences of this). My room is pretty messy and hard to walk across, and I may have missed some assorted deadlines at work. I'll hope that people are willing to excuse me for this. I probably should simply have stayed home -- I didn't manage to concentrate much.

I don't understand why Yosh and Uzi and other people I know are so comfortable down in Southern California. But Public Opinion here in San Francisco is pretty soundly against Southern California as a concept.

We had a really cool demo of a Linux-related thing I can't talk about yet. It's really nice to get a concrete example that people are not only still doing Cool Stuff with Linux, but even doing Hella Cool Stuff. Sorry for the allusion to secrets; I know it's not very nice.

2000-04-01

(13:45:22)

That's a bad situation. One nice thing about having data in a database is that you can ordinarily export it or import it using any number of formats -- from tabbed text or CSV, which you can process with cut, paste, awk, sed, Perl, or Python, to SQL, which you can use (with a few caveats) on any modern industry standard RDBMS, free, proprietary, or whatever.

If you have stored procedures, well, there's typically no standard and portable way to represent them. As a result, if you want to export data from your database, and an essential part of the data or its structure is contained in a stored procedure, that part will be lost when you try export the data. Oops!

Some people certainly have other philosophical objections to databases. They do not seem to be part of the mathematical formalism that database theorists such as E. F. Codd (of "Codd's Ten Commandments" and such -- does anyone have an actual list, or is this just computing folklore?) have set up as the Platonic ideal of the Relational Database. They may make the database more opaque and harder to maintain. And they're not necessarily consistent with popular paradigms like "three-tier client-server computing". Indeed, "database abstraction" may be as much of a religious principle as is the "end-to-end model" (although for much less important reasons).

In practice, DBAs seem to use stored procedures anyway -- because they're efficient and fast and do wonders for database performance, if you've learned the particular stored procedure language and semantics that your DBMS happens to support.

I looked in C. J. Date's Introduction to Database Systems to see what he had to say about stored procedures (and related schemes for putting code into the server rather than the client). Basically, Date more or less ignores stored procedures for his whole book -- he's a Codd fan and he wants to talk math, or else techniques for implementing Codd's ideas -- but he does mention them in passing. He notes that databases with stored procedures can be more efficient, but complains that there is not yet any standard, portable way to define and represent stored procedures. He says that the lack of such a standard has hindered their use.

Presumably each proprietary RDBMS vendor would like to see a world in which there is a very large crew of professional DBAs who know how to write procedures for that vendor's particular database. This is not a situation that free software enthusiasts should greet with enthusiasm. DBAs are clearly serious, dedicated, competant professionals (although the stereotypes of them are perhaps more on the "suit" side than the "hacker" side, because of the association of large databases with corporate IT). It is troubling to think that, because of their skills, they should become wedded to a particular proprietary platform -- but that's what we see happening, to some degree. People say "I'm an Oracle DBA" (or a Foo DBA, except that most professional DBAs do happen to be Oracle DBAs). Why Oracle? Well, mainly because they've become intimately familiar with the particular details of maintaining efficient databases using Oracle.

This specialization does not need to be as rigorous as it is today. If there were portable standards for more aspects of database design and implementation, it would be easier for DBAs to apply their skills regardless of the particular database platform.

A portable method for representing stored procedures would be a big win in any case, though. It doesn't necessarily have to be thought of in terms of making DBAs' skills portable; it also makes the data itself portable.

There is still the question of whether stored procedures are a good idea in the abstract. Many people would argue that you should just use a standard (SQL) database back-end, and then write, say, a Python program to implement the particular functionality you want. There is a lot to be said for that, really. Not using stored procedures in the first place is indeed an ideally portable technique. :-)

Thanks to various people at Linuxcare for talking about this with me.

I got a great letter from Wolfgang. Well, every letter from Wolfgang is great. I really need to write back to her. She's learned a lot this year. Some of you out there in Advogato land may still be in high school and thinking of going to college. If so, do me a favor, if you would. If you don't know exactly where you are going to college and why, or what it means to you to be going to college, please take a year off and do something completely different first. I say this because I neglected to do it, and ended up dropping out; Wolfgang had the foresight to go and do it, and her letters from all over the Pacific Northwest are full of insight and wisdom and sparkle (not that they ever weren't before).

It's anecdotal evidence, here. If taking a year off terrifies you, then don't do it; but consider that, for a lot of people, it seems to mean the difference between starting college with a halfway decent understanding of yourself, and starting college with no firm sense of who you are. For a lot of people, the former is probably going to turn out to be preferable.

Nobody has any obligation to go to college, either. I have only the highest respect for formal education Done Right (which in that connection is still not a clearly defined term for me), but it's likely much more important to understand and be content with why you're doing what you're doing than to fit someone else's expectations of what you ought to be up to.

I envy some grad students, like daw and Matthew (and I would have put daw's sometime officemate Ian here, if he were only a full time grad student at the moment), who, aside from being rather brilliant, have all sorts of interests and passions which graduate school gives them a series of opportunities to develop seriously. I mean, I don't know how much any particular grad student is actually enjoying grad school, but some of them are at the very least making pretty cool contributions to the intellectual world at large. (Some of the law students I've met through OpenLaw and other ways are also rather impressive activists.)

The vast majority of people in any given educational system don't really seem to know why they are there, or give any indication that, given a serious choice, they'd like to be. This is a serious problem, and I'm no longer so sure where to assign blame for it.

One time I was talking to someone about the proposition that "everyone should go to college" (it being assumed for the moment that everyone can afford to, and that everyone is admitted -- assumptions whose complete falsity are possibly hard to realize when you grow up in a middle-class college town). I said that I thought that "everyone should go to college, but not for the reasons most people do now". Then I elaborated and said that "if they can't find better reasons than their present reasons, they should not go to college". I think I still believe in this sentiment, more or less.

Sometimes I've thought of trying to go to grad school with no undergraduate degree. A few schools will consider this, if you can make them see why they should admit you. It is known that MIT has done this; they pride themselves on having "no admission requirements" and considering every case individually.

Wolfgang is still wandering around and still having all sorts of experiences, about which she writes wonderfully. I really need to write back to her, but I'm so caught up at the moment that it's hard to find the time and peace of mind to do a good job.

I found a bug in lynx when I wrote a script to generate links which perform queries on BookFinder.com. I haven't had the time of inclination to track it down and report it or fix it. I'm sure it would be a nice contribution to make. If somebody reads this and wants to remind me sometime, it would be a nice favor to me (and perhaps to the lynx folks).

Much discussion at great length about (and with) my ex-girlfriend. Maybe I should just try to write a script which will automatically add this paragraph to diary entries every day.

These things are very painful and very complex. They are worth mentioning. They are not topical for free software development, but no less topical than messy rooms, movies, food, Canada, air travel, or rats or ferrets as pets. (Hi, Ryan.)

I am looking for several quotations, but the question occurs to me to wonder who is reading this and whether any of you would actually be familiar with the quotations in question.

I did find out recently two things I was wondering about state bar exams: (1) you typically do have to have a J.D. (2) in order to be admitted to practice law before courts in states like, oh, California, you generally do have to swear a loyalty oath (because lawyers are officers of the court and all). I wonder whether my anarchist law student friends are aware of the latter. I had a little chat recently with a friend about what anarchist law students study -- whether they must not be students of anarchist law.

This is kind of tragic, in that it means that random antiauthoritarian types who are good at taking tests (like most of the people I know from CTY) are probably never going to end up becoming civil liberties lawyers on a whim. Perhaps that's good, because it means that civil liberties lawyers will actually really know what they are doing, but by the same token they are stretched pretty thin, and could probably use some relief. (Oh, it also means that I'll probably never be a lawyer myself; I had been wondering whether I could get there by buying a few thousand volumes worth of law books and reading them, without going to law school and without signing a loyalty oath.)

The question of whether it is good to become a lawyer is one I've addressed many times with many people -- sometimes, after I've recited pi to more places than the person listening happens to know, someone will pipe up "Gee, with a memory like that, you ought to be a lawyer!". (This also happened when I first started reading random snippets of USC and Supreme Court cases -- it seems that most people have never read any of either, at all.) This tends to provoke a long discussion about "why I am not in law school" (aside from the ordinary discussion about "why I am not in college").

I'm expecting to go to Berkeley for lunch today and then perhaps to a party in the evening. I hope that I manage to make it to both.

I think the main reason I haven't gone to parties much is the very frequent presence of (ethyl) alcohol. I like visiting with a small number of friends; when people gather in larger quantities, the odds of their all getting drunk seem to increase dramatically. (This is unless they are Freebornians or the equivalent.)

I think I've stayed less friendly toward drinking than a number of people I knew in junior high or high school. When they went to college, a lot of them started to drink, at least a little (or to use other drugs).

Nick once made a clever joke that I was a Pythagorean. I don't eat animals, I don't drink wine, and I am a number mystic. It works pretty well, doesn't it? The only problem is that I do eat beans; I guess I never took that part to heart. Otherwise, I imagine I would be an excellent Pythagorean.

The other joke: I regularly go to the liquor store to buy alcohol. But I have never been carded. How come? Because the alcohol I'm buying is isopropyl alcohol. I find it instructive that heavily diluted and relatively less poisonous ethanol is much more strictly regulated than the extremely hazardous methanol and isopropanol. I can buy all kinds of deadly poisonous concentrated volatile alcohols over the counter in virtually any quantity... but let me try to buy cooking sherry (not that I know how to cook or have any recipes that use it), and I'd be breaking California law. Indeed, all you have to do to ethyl alcohol to free it from most taxes and age restrictions is denature it -- that is, make it poisonous and foul-smelling. So sometimes it's easier to buy more dangerous things than less dangerous things.

Someone will dispute the idea that food-quality ethanol is less dangerous than properly denatured ethanol. Hmmmm...

Thanks to Nick and the lynx.cfg file, I got the "Ctrl-v, e" thing working, hence the long entry. You need to bind some key to EDITTEXTAREA first (which is not default as lynx.cfg is shipped). This is a very nice feature, except it really promotes being enormously verbose in these diary entries.

2000-04-03

(10:09:53)

I bought a VCR, because I thought I wanted one (I have no television, but a Macintosh that can take NTSC input), though don't ask me at the moment what clever applications I can find for it (aside from the obvious advantage of being able to watch "Magic Tricks, Card Shuffling, and Dynamic Computer Memories", a lecture by S. Brent Morris). I was also thinking about the DMCA and the fact that VCRs which don't implement hardware copy protection for analog video signals will become illegal this month. (Search for "automatic gain control" in 17 USC or in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. VCRs which were legal for years and years are now becoming illegal.) I don't know whether or not the VCR I purchased implements copy protection systems (and in particular automatic gain control) or not; I didn't check beforehand, and the manual is rather ambiguous on the subject. (The clerk at Target definitely would not have known. I myself don't know the difference between AGC and Macrovision, because I'm not enough of a video geek yet.) In the interest of reducing the impact of the DMCA, I'm tempted to urge everyone to stockpile copy-protection-free VCRs this month. Indeed, I'd be tempted to say that everyone in the United States who might ever want a VCR should buy one this month, and never buy one thereafter. But that's not going to happen, realistically, and so lots of people are going to end up with VCRs that do support AGC copy protection.

I should check on the date on which non-AGC VCRs become illegal, as well as good sources and models of non-AGC VCRs, and try to put out a note letting people know. It's a pity to hear after a law takes effect -- "Oh, yeah, it's been illegal to buy those ever since last year!"

Michelle bought an electric fan. It was cool. It was fancy. I never realized how many puns it is possible to make around fans.

I talked about ancient coins and the Cyber Patrol case with Paul, who is a law student and an ancient numismatist. (This is sort of like the "anarchist law student" question. Perhaps there is something inherently difficult to parse about sentences about law students.) Of course I mean that he is interested in ancient numismatics, not that he's a numismatist who is ancient.

I think that the Perl/Python rivalry is really heating up. I mentioned Python to some people and got somewhat strong reactions -- much as though I'd mentioned vi to them or something.

I didn't realize that the transition to DST in the United States was going to happen Sunday morning. I think this can be taken as a sign that I've been very "out of it" this past week; I almost always know about DST transitions well in advance. This week, I simply had no idea.

The new lynx (current dev version as of Saturday) is very nice and very full of interesting features. I've been using somewhat older versions which shipped with various distributions; lynx isn't a package I usually update very much. I also tried w3m recently (because I wanted to see the famed HTML table support in a text-only browser). I was suitably impressed, but w3m seemed difficult to use; perhaps that's only because I'm so accustomed to lynx. I'll give w3m another try, and keep it handy in case I want to look at things which really rely on tables.

w3m did a very elegant job with my DVD copy protection table.

I don't use Netscape much because I don't use X11 much -- not because Netscape is non-free (which also makes me unhappy). When I'm using X, I tend to use Netscape, too -- I haven't taken the Mozilla plunge just yet. I talked to Paul about just how many web browsers there are -- though the general public may know of two, and many geeks know of five or six, I think there are about a hundred floating around somewhere. (I think I can think of ten off the top of my head.) Of course, web pages are really Best Viewed with telnet to port 80.

As I was on my way back to San Francisco, a guy asked me for a dollar (which I gave him) and then told me a story about why he needed it (which I don't know whether to believe). My previous experience is that the great majority of people who ask for money and have a non-trivial story to tell about why they need it are being less than completely candid. Later on, I remembered that my friend Micah once said "Everybody's hustling something, Seth" -- this after only a year in the Village in New York City. I imagine Micah was in some sense right about that.

I poked around with the problem of converting binary to Gray code and vice versa. (This is a slightly imprecise statement of the problem, because there are many ways of writing things "in binary", and there are many different Gray codes. I'm talking about the "standard" binary numeral system, and the "standard" binary Gray code.) After writing a few equations with exclusive OR, and doing a little induction, I got a pair of very simple formulas.

Let b[i] be the ith digit (the rightmost digit is b[0], the previous digit is b[1]) of the binary representation of some number. Let g[i] be the ith digit (according to the same digit-numbering scheme) of the Gray code representation of the same number. Then, for all i,

g[i]=b[i+1] XOR b[i]

and, in the other direction,

b[i]=g[i] XOR g[i+1] XOR g[i+2] XOR g[i+3] XOR g[i+4] XOR ...

The infinite regress on the right hand side of the second equation should not cause any problems in practice, because all finite numbers start with an infinite number of repetitions of the digit "0", and repeated XORing with 0 doesn't cause any change in a value. Thus, in practice, it's only necessary to continue the XORing in the second equation until the leftmost non-zero digit of the Gray code representation is reached.

So, I actually understand the reasons why these conversions work, but they are difficult to explain here. They can be justified based on a pair of recursive generating rules which yield lists of all binary numbers (or lists of all Gray code numbers) of n digits.

A simpler way of saying this would be that

A particular Gray code bit is equal to the XOR of the corresponding binary bit with the binary bit to the left of that.

A particular binary bit is the XOR of the corresponding Gray code bit with all of the Gray code bits to the left of that.

It was a beautiful day yesterday in San Francisco, and my friend Ben came over, and we spent a long time walking around. We went up to Coit Tower, from which there was a very clear view of the whole Bay Area, and we wandered around the Embarcadero and some other places. It was really very, very nice. Ben told me (most topically for Advogato, of the many things he told me) about getting fan mail for a free software project of his -- a fairly simple script which Ben wrote "to scratch an itch", and which happened to fit the needs of somebody else precisely. Ben's correspondent was so pleased to find this particular script that, he said, he wanted to thank Ben -- and Ben's mother! :-)

South of Market is in transition. It's getting bought up amd retrofitted and filled with offices and apartments. In walking around yesterday, I saw a sign on a fence:

The City Planning Commission will meet in City Hall, Room 400, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, on ______ beginning at ______ to consider case no. _______, an application for THE DEMOLITION OF A 3-STORY BUILDING AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A 24-STORY, 314-FOOT TALL BUILDING, WITH APPROXIMATELY 252,000 GROSS SQUARE FEET OF OFFICES AND RETAIL USES AS WELL AS APPROXIMATELY 6,000 SQUARE FEET OF OPEN SPACE, 2 LOADING DOCKS, AND 43 PARKING SPACES.

It's amazing!

OK, the hyperlink was added later. This is San Francisco, but public comment notices posted on the street still don't have hyperlinks to the City of San Francisco web site. Maybe next year.

My own inclination would have been to certify jimd as Master, but I'm not sure that he would have liked that. :-)

I'm noticing some discussion about my comments on law and anarchy by Kelly and dhd; I want to comment in return, but I don't have time yet. If you're interested, take a look back.

I definitely remember talking to Nick about school, and I even remember once knowing where "The Idea of a University" comes from. But I can't remember that at the moment.

I seem to have provoked the College Thread (with my diary entry of several days ago on Wolfgang, and the fact that her decision to put off college for a year was far better than my decision to go immediately). I hope all of you are having a good time -- the reason I didn't post it as an article was that I thought it was not topical for an article, but pretty much anything is topical for a diary entry, right?

slashdot had an article a while back on "Should Geeks Skip College?"; I know from on-line the person interviewed for the piece which provoked that discussion, and so I found it quite interesting, but I also thought that the level of discussion in the slashdot thread was not very impressive. So I would be afraid of writing an article for Advogato which might provoke the same phenomenon. (I don't know whether the certification system is any more effective than slashdot moderation and karma, although I hope so -- I like it here!)

What I was talking about, incidentally, is much more general than whether geeks should skip college. I suppose it's more like "who should be in college or a formal educational environment, why, and when?". (Sorry, Raph, for even posing the question in a diary entry.)

2000-04-03

(12:26:36)

I thought these articles were strange, because they took the position that college was about vocational training or at least about becoming qualified to get some kind of job. They didn't discuss what college was good for, or who should be in college, so much as the far narrower issue of whether some particular people (geeks) could get good jobs without going to college.

The obvious answer is that lots of people can get good jobs without going to college at all, and lots of people do. (This is true regardless of what definition of "good job" you use.) This is something that not everyone realizes, but it's also not particularly interesting, because it ignores the other, potentially much more important reasons why someone might want to go to college.

It's very possible that students are being told that the purpose of their college experience is to allow them to get a good job; in that case, what they are being told is, as a general rule, doubly wrong.

2000-04-04

(00:44:21)

Random notes

It's still hot in San Francisco. I think this must be that new-fangled "summer" thing everybody's been talking about.

Isopropyl alcohol is cheaper in Berkeley. I wonder if you're supposed to pay import duties when you bring it back with you to San Francisco, though. I wonder whether someone will start an isopropyl alcohol smuggling ring, sending dozens of students back and forth across the Bay on BART with their backpacks full of Swan's or Shur Fine or one of the pharmacy chain brands...

I seem to be drinking water again (in addition to Arizona green tea and soda).

I'm very pleased that so many people are finding useful things to do with the BBC. It's really fun to see people's enthusiasm for the thing. Thanks for the fan mail and comments and criticisms, everybody.

Interesting Linux software

Two Kernel Monte was mentioned on linux-kernel (I saw it through Kernel Traffic) -- it's like a Linux version of LOADLIN, so you can boot a new kernel on an already-running system without a complete reboot. I like this a lot, and I think it certainly belongs on the BBC -- not to mention in Debian soon, I hope. (Just in case any Debian developers are listening...)

Nick got me to try a browser called "links" (as an alternative to w3m). It's really impressive, and I guess I'm managing to do pretty well with the (very lynx-like or DOS-like) interface. Wow! So, it has default key bindings which will be intuitive to people who've used DOS applications in the past (including heavy optional use of arrow keys), it supports tables very nicely (including attractive presentation of tables with borders), and it is quite fast. And it has a character-based menu interface, which, per ESR, is one of the "things hackers detest and avoid" (but I'm still impressed by links, for what it does). links includes color support, even parsing HTML hex triplets and mapping them into what seems to be ANSI color. Yikes!

Kangaroo

Sorry to hear about mbp and the kangaroo. I will admit that I had never before met anyone who had hit a kangaroo.

I was talking to Michelle over the weekend about the vastly different problems people in different places and at different times have to contend with. She works with a charitable organization which sends a lot of educational materials around the world, and also makes grants to community organizations in various places. One of the organizations, said Michelle, which had received a grant had recounted one of their biggest problems when they had been getting started: "monkeys were stealing their chickens".

So, here in San Francisco, I don't have to worry too much about monkeys stealing my chickens, nor about hitting a kangaroo while riding around. But most people in the world don't worry about the same things I worry about, either. There really are very amazing discrepancies in what people pay attention to and consider a big deal.

Martin, I'm very sorry about the kangaroo, and I hope you feel all right soon.

Discrete mathematics

I finished up the recursive calculation of the number of 1s in certain binary representations. I am frustrated not to have a closed form for these -- only recursive formulas. (My ex-girlfriend had found a very nice iterative solution using logarithms, which is all the more impressive since she has no training in computer science or discrete math, and she didn't really have the vocabulary. She described it anyway, and, although she probably didn't realize it, it was an iterative procedure relying on logarithms. It was very nice -- but, like my solution, it's still not a closed form expression.)

Neil Sloane's page seems to suggest that no closed form solution is known. I thought I remembered something about using the "choose" notation nCr, because I thought that the number of 1s in the binary representation of n was somehow related to Pascal's Triangle. But I can't find this anywhere, and I can't remember it. In fact, I might be making that up entirely. So the recursive or iterative versions may be the best we'll get.

For anybody who's wondering about the ceil_ld bit in there, it's a trick I worked out for the bonus question on Brian Harvey's Computer Science 61A final exam in 1997. If you have a recursive procedure f(i) which generates a list of length 2^i, and you want the nth item of such a list, you can use f(ceil(ld(n+1))) to get a list which will be long enough to contain it ("at least as long as you need"). I used that on the final exam, except that I wasn't allowed to use a library function to take logarithms, so I had to write another recursive procedure to evaluate ceil(ld(n+1)), which was fun, and indeed very concise in Scheme. (It doesn't require floating point at all -- do you see why?)

At http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa97/final, look for "Infinite Hanoi Stream", second category of correct solutions. My solution was one of the four in that category, although I think I described it in terms of logarithms. (Actually, I think the way I wrote it out was more complicated that the example given on-line, because I think I was fairly explicit about the logarithms and how they were calculated and why they were relevant.) That problem, which had to do with the recursive solution to the Towers of Hanoi problem, actually has a lot in common with these binary representation things -- in particular, having recursive rules that you can apply to lists to get other lists.

ceil_ld is a useful function for other things -- in fact, it also happens to be used in the iterative method mentioned above for solving the "number of ones" problems iteratively. It's just a useful thing to have around. ld is used a lot in information theory, and to a lesser extent in the analysis of data structures and algorithms. All the binary numbers between 0 and n can be written in at most ceil(ld(n)) bits apiece, for instance.

Latin and acronyms

ld is a mostly-obsolete and very useful notation for "logarithm to the base 2". It's short for Latin "logarithmus dualis" ("dual logarithm"), just as the much more familiar ln is short for "logarithmus naturalist" ("natural logarithm"). For computer people, ld is probably more useful than ln. Unfortunately, most people don't care for the notation, and end up writing the much more cumbersome log_2. Hmmmm.

I need to find out about publication of a really fun summary of Professor Robin Hartshorne's research into the history of "QED" and similar Latin acronyms in mathematics. I really enjoyed reading it (and I learned some cool acronyms).

Western Massachusetts

I am amazed to see rwatson talking about Northampton, MA, my home town, not to mention MHC and Bread and Circus -- the Bread and Circus, no doubt, in the Hampshire Mall, or more properly the "Dead Mall" right next to the Hampshire Mall. (Malls in Western Massachusetts are not anything like malls in California. Back in Western Massachusetts, a mall is an unusual thing and a trip to the mall is an event.) In Southern California, and to some extent in any vaguely suburban part of Northern California, there are malls all over the place, anywhere you go, and most of them rather larger than the Hampshire Mall.

Actually, I'm even more amazed to see a mention of Bela (I think only one "l"?) on Advogato. As a longtime vegetarian resident of Northampton, I ate there years ago, when it was called Fez; after it was bought by a new owner, the name changed to Bel{,l}a and the food improved. I ate there in the first week of January with a whole assortment of friends (only one of whom might be reading this), and we were all suitably impressed.

Northampton, not to mention Amherst, is an incredibly fun place to eat, not least if you are vegetarian. (Everyone thinks that Berkeley must be so great for vegetarians -- Northampton is much better.) I can think of about ten or twelve restaurants that I really wish existed in San Francisco or Berkeley -- for the quality of food, the very high proportion of vegetarian stuff, and the very low prices. I'm afraid that, given San Francisco rents, any Northampton restaurants transplanted out this way would probably become pretty expensive.

I'm hoping to be back in Northampton in May for the Smith graduation, and I'm really looking forward to the food! (Oh, yeah, and my family, and my friends who are graduating, and stuff...) :-) :-)

Free software

I wish I had actual free software projects to which I could make a regular contribution of code -- it would make me feel better about Advogato diary entries, for one thing. :-)

I'll get there, though, I think, and I'm not unhappy with the things I'm doing now.

Later today (Tuesday), I'll try to get to my first LUG meeting in a while.

2000-04-04

(14:19:07)

I'm really sad that I'm not out at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in Toronto right now. The only reason that I'm not there is that I didn't know about it beforehand and therefore couldn't make plans to attend. (CFP started Tuesday.)

I should really be sure to go next year -- and I should be sure to go back to DefCon this year. That's the weekend of July 28. I solemnly promise Brita that I won't write her a letter from there, unless I also finish it while I'm still in Las Vegas. (Last year, I took the letter home with me -- and pretty much everywhere else thereafter -- and it grew, and grew, and grew...)

More on Latin and acronyms

I wrote to Professor Hartshorne asking for permission to publish a copy of his nice summary on-line. I hope he won't mind.

Junger v. Daley, free speech in computer software, etc.

Wendy Seltzer found the opinion in the Junger v. Daley appeal the same morning it came out -- wow, what great fodder for the people up at CFP 2000 to talk about!

The Northern District of Ohio granted summary judgment against Professor Peter D. Junger, when he sued the government, claiming that encryption export control rules were an infringement upon his freedom of speech. The court said that his claim was groundless and that computer software could not be protected as a form of speech.

Professor Junger appealed this ruling, and encryption enthusiasts have been waiting around for a good long time to see what would happen. So this morning brought the great news that the appeals court overruled the district court and found full First Amendment protection for computer source code.

Hey, two judicial circuits down, eleven to go... :-)

For those who don't follow such things, the other so-far successful case is Bernstein v. Department of Justice (9th Circuit, where I live -- in fact, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California is walking distance from my apartment, and from Linuxcare, and more or less from the EFF; if there should happen to be hearings again there, maybe I can attend them). The 6th Circuit ruling this morning is more or less in line with the previous N.D. Cal. and 9th Circuit rulings in Professor Bernstein's case, whereas the original N.D. Ohio ruling in Junger's case had been almost exactly the opposite.

I wish I had some time to write an Advogato article about this issue. We've got an increasingly large number of cases where a computer program becomes the focus of a legal controversy, and many people have been reluctant to bring the first amendment into such controversies. But in some cases -- like crypto export rules -- it seems to be the only option for programmers who'd like to challenge software-related laws or administrative decisions in court.

As Professor Junger is well aware, his own case could have a lot of relevance for the DeCSS cases (and eventually, I'm convinced, for the legality of projects like LiViD, which choose to implement CSS without a license from the DVD CCA).

Let me correct myself. There has been litigation over computer software for years and years. However, in the past, it was almost always companies suing other companies, claiming copyright infringement, trade secret infringement, trade dress infringement, unfair competition, and even (alas!) patent infringement -- all in connection with proprietary commercial software.

But now some very significant software is being written by individuals, or by free software projects, and the legal issues are becoming more evident -- individuals are getting sued, in some instances, for the software they write, because of what it can be used for. (And many people have predicted that it is only a matter of time until there are trade secret or patent lawsuits against free software that starts to compete with major proprietary packages.)

I have a lot more to say about this, but I fear that, if I keep going, I'll start to write that article I didn't have time for...

Anarchy and law

I still haven't had time to comment here. I hope that the discussion will still be of interest to people here by the time I get a chance to have a go at it.

CalLUG

I'm still planning to go to CalLUG this evening and to stay overnight in Berkeley. I wonder whether any actual Berkeley students will come to CalLUG. :-)

2000-04-06

(01:14:55)

Let's suppose that (because it gets mentioned as interesting for embedded systems and so on) I'd like to learn FORTH. What should I do?

I was reminded of this by graydon's diary entry -- but I've had the idea for a while, after hearing that FORTH is excellent for robotics, embedded systems, and firmware.

Certainly Nick is also pretty enthusiastic about learning FORTH. If we ever get the living room cleaned up, we might well buy a few breadboards and a few chips with FORTH implementations on them, and see what we can work out.

Dimwits

I think I have to agree with jrennie's view on "Dimwit" ratings -- unless they're some kind of Zork reference.

Pejorative ratings possibly aren't necessary. If they are necessary, possibly they shouldn't be public. "I don't want to go on record saying that you are a Master" is not quite the same as "I do want to go on record saying that you are a Dimwit"!

Public ratings are useful for some things, but not necessarily for making people feel welcome and appreciated. That's especially true if they're pejorative; I remember some interesting discussions with lilo about the value of courtesy.

Logarithms

I see I made a typo a couple of days ago and wrote "logarithmus naturalist" instead of "logarithmus naturalis". This is because the Markov chains inside my head are so much more accustomed to typing the word "naturalist" than the word "naturalis" that the probability of my actually typing "naturalis" when I want to is pretty low.

What I need to do is get a decent keyboard and then type

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

about a hundred times. And then I'll be better at typing the word "naturalis", so that I'll go and say something like "her roommate is a pretty accomplished naturalis" and then resent the fact that I'm so good at typing "naturalis" and no longer very good at typing "naturalist".

Strangely, I don't have a habit of typing "dualist" instead of "dualis", as far as I can tell -- maybe I just write more about naturalists than about dualists?

Northampton cuisine

OK, "Bela" has only one "l" -- I found them at Noho.com. They are on Masonic Street, near the fire station, and near a bookstore... I miss Northampton.

Free speech in software

kelly points out that the 6th Circuit suggests that intermediate scrutiny, not strict scrutiny, should be applied to source code. Hmmmm. I have re-read the decision, and am fairly confused about what the court actually held. I'll have to go and take a look at this case, and the Bernstein case, again.

I'm on a couple of mailing lists with Professor Junger, at the moment, so I might just be really lazy and ask him whether he'd care to give one of those lists his interpretation of the recent ruling. :-)

Latin acronyms

Neat: Professor Hartshorne's summary of Latin acronyms and formulas for concluding proofs (a history of competitors to "QED") is now on-line.

Berkeley and LUGs; friends

I went back to Berkeley Tuesday -- first off for CalLUG. There were fairly few people there, and the discussion was pretty technical. yosh and uzi gave me a ride over, and they demonstrated some wireless Ethernet PCMCIA cards (I guess they were WaveLan cards?), and then Josh got three network interfaces up in his laptop at once: eth0 (wireless Ethernet), eth1 (100baseT Ethernet, connected to my laptop via a crossover cable), and ppp0 (PPP link over a Ricochet modem). With routing enabled, it was pretty neat -- I could ping Manish's laptop, two hops away, and browse web pages on it. (Josh's machine served as a gateway between the wireless LAN and the very small normal Ethernet LAN.) We could log into Josh's machine and get Internet access, too; he didn't try to set up masquerading.

Some people feel that CalLUG is not doing a very good job of serving the general Berkeley student community these days. One problem is that many of the people who have been going to meetings for a long time are very experienced and know each other fairly well; as a result, we get together and start chatting randomly, often about fairly technical things. This might make new users feel somewhat excluded, despite the fact that most of us would be positively overjoyed if some new Linux user at a LUG started to ask questions.

I remember that some former CalLUG members, like Michael Kaminsky (a very active organizer of the group in the past, now at MIT), were very good at keeping discussion flowing, involving everyone, and keeping everyone interested. I worry about the new user experience in small LUGs like CalLUG -- it's not as though people are wandering around trying to find someone to talk to, since everyone is gathered in a circle. I hope that new attendees don't give up, and feel comfortable joining in... otherwise the LUGs in question won't make all so much progress for the community.

Clearly, LUGs are potentially worthwhile in any case, if you have friends who enjoy going to their meetings -- but LUGs can be more than that, including an opportunity for outreach and for meeting new people. That won't work if everybody new gets scared off. I don't think that I myself am very good about being inclusive in technical meetings, unless I make a conscious effort.

When I first went to a LUG meeting (CalLUG, in September 1997), I remember that I was pretty scared, and remained so until I discovered that I had a relatively large amount of practical Linux experience (acquired mostly in almost total isolation from "The Community"), which meant that what I had to say was of interest. If I hadn't already been using Linux for a while, I don't know that my LUG experience would have felt particularly friendly or inviting.

Of course I am very attached to CalLUG, as a former officer and regular attendee -- and I don't mean any criticism unique to CalLUG here. I am just concerned that LUG organizers or regular visitors should keep these things in mind.

After this, I had a good time with several friends, had some very nice conversations, and learned a lot of physics (some of which I was too tired to absorb correctly). Now I see why linear algebra is such a big deal -- the quantum physicists use it left and right (and left again).

I wrote a little commentary about some deficiencies in math education (its frequent failure to provide context for understanding the significance of things), but I'm going to leave that out of this diary for now.

Actually, I have to say that I was very tired during my entire visit to Berkeley, which made it less fun than it might have been. I appreciate the willingness of my friends to put up with me under the circumstances.

I went out to Solano Avenue by bike; it was fun.

Communication

Communication is really, really important. I think I'm starting to get that impression.

I also remember some conversations with lilo on the value of good communication; so we've got communication and courtesy as some nice principles lilo works on. Does he have a third "c" out there somewhere?

A new project for work

I'm going to be going away for a while to work on an interesting project I can't talk about at the moment. I'm looking forward to it (and to the opportunity to say what it is in the future).

I appreciate the confidence that my being sent to work on this indicates. I think it's going to be a very good experience.

The Beautiful Gift of Linux

I just found some copies of "The Beautiful Gift of Linux". I hadn't seen one of those in almost a year -- they were drawn by Wolfgang as a birthday present for me after Don Marti suggested that somebody really ought to do a Linux cartoon tract in the style of the evangelical comic strips people sometimes hand out on street corners. Wolfgang did an unbelievably beautiful job of this, and the result is "The Beautiful Gift of Linux" -- a fold-up cartoon of which I've handed out a few dozen copies. Most of them I've kept for myself: perhaps I should bring them to LUG meetings and see how people react.

Wolfgang wasn't clear on the "free speech versus free beer" point -- but, in all fairness, neither was Richard M. Stallman, once upon a time.

Once upon a time, you could find a scanned version of "The Beautiful Gift of Linux" up on the SuSE N.A. web page somewhere; I don't know whether it's still there. For the full effect, though, you need to find the little booklet in a cafe, or someone needs to hand you one on a street corner, or while preaching on Sproul Plaza.

Advogato diary

I'm having fun writing long diary entries here. While these entries certainly contain points which are relevant to free software and to the community here (LUGs, legal stuff, package status), they also contain lots of non-topical personal stuff. Some people enjoy reading this, and some people don't. Obviously, nobody forces anyone to read a particular person's Advogato diary -- but maybe it's better if Advogato diaries are just about free software?

I'm wondering whether I should start maintaining a diary on the web (as lots of people did before Advogato), without any specific promise that it will have to do with free software on a particular day. I could then link to that from my Advogato personal page and then reserve my comments on Advogato for things that relate directly to free software.

I mean, I enjoy the opportunity to write a diary on the web. And I enjoy having people I know, including many free software people, take a look at what I have to say. But I'm afraid that most of what I'm going to end up saying is not in the spirit of "today I fixed 6 bugs and made a new release of foonly-2.7.18" -- it may be more interesting to some people, and less interesting to some people. So maybe I should say that I'm a free software person, but I don't specifically keep a free software diary, and so my diary shouldn't be on Advogato. Any opinions?

Advogato certifications (again)

I think kelly is right to wish for something in between Apprentice and Journeyer. According to the posted definition of Journeyer, I shouldn't really be a Journeyer -- at least if we talk about things like programming and not other contributions like LUG, list, and outreach work. (The Bay Area is really good for this, as I've often said.) In principle, I could be certified for my Bootable Business Card work or something, but I think that people who certified me mostly certified me because they felt that I was involved with and committed to free software, not because they had read my code somewhere. (trivial-net-setup is not a very pretty bash script, and I would hardly encourage anyone to read it looking to learn bash style...)

And I've certified people on a similar basis -- not following, I'm afraid, the certification categories' definitions very literally. I use Journeyer because I think "this person is in between Apprentice and Master, as I understand them" -- and I do feel that the people i've certified all have a serious and regular commitment, and make serious and regular contributions of some kind.

But if there were something in between, it could be helpful; I'd want to be certified there myself, for the moment. I would also like to hear more clarification about whether we can really count non-code contributions. I absolutely believe, intuitively, that dria and lilo both deserve their Master certifications for their particular contributions -- but I think even I have more code in free software projects than either of those folks. :-)

It's tricky. It's very tricky. But I'm not too worried about it, because this whole business is just supposed to be an experiment, and not any kind of Official Pronouncement that a certain person is a Master of Free Software in a sense that another person is not. And as far as trying to get some basic consensus that someone is involved in or has done good work on behalf of free software, and is maybe worth listening to or working with, I think this system is pretty impressive and has a lot of promise.

The Advogato certification system is one of the most popular topics for diary entries. Maybe people here talk about it much more than is necessary, but it seems very fascinating. Maybe it's all those pretty colors -- I wonder whether some people are going to try to get certified to their favorite colors' levels. :-)

Thanks to the people who are saying interesting things about the certifications -- you're having me a lot of good stuff to think about.

monte

At CalLUG, I talked about some perverse possible uses of the two-kernel monte program -- including booting kernels from very unusual filesystems which are not supported by any standard Linux boot loader. (For example, you could probably boot a kernel from an NTFS, a reiserfs, an iso9660 FS, or over SMB. Yes, I realize that lilo can do some of these things if you set it up right, because it doesn't necessarily care about the filesystem on which the kernel image is stored.)

I think there's a lot of fun stuff possible there; I'm also wondering whether you can use a RAM disk as the source for the contents of a RAM disk -- something like "initrd=/dev/ram0", except from a running system that has a filesystem already mounted on /dev/ram0. This would be a whole lot of fun for experimentation -- you could keep tweaking a RAM disk image in RAM and keep rebooting instantly to see the effect of your tweaks, if by some miracle that trick could work. That way, you could keep casually experimenting with the system boot process until you broke it entirely! :-)

ISC on BIND: not a cracking tool

I told the ISC about how the Daily Cal got the nature of BIND really wrong -- in some reporter's or editor's head, the concept seems to have morphed from "a security hole in the BIND program was used to break into computers" to "the BIND program was used to break into computers" to "BIND is a program which intruders use to break into computers". (There was also a corresponding mistake about buffer overflows: in the article, BIND ended up looking like the tool used to exploit overflows, as opposed to the victim of overflow exploits.)

This bothered me so much -- in part because of the really ridiculous slight against the authors of BIND, who, instead of praise for their contributions to Internet infrastructure, receive criticism for supposedly writing cracking tools -- that I asked the ISC whether they wanted to write to the Daily Cal to correct the misperception.

Impressively, they did -- and David Conrad's letter appeared yesterday to correct the misreporting.

I just thought it was really sad that a really important free software project from Berkeley was being totally misrepresented by the Berkeley student newspaper. Thanks to the ISC for taking the time to write about it.

2000-04-06

(10:23:32)

They say that the difference between automatic gain control copy protection for VHS and Macrovision is that Macrovision includes the AGC stuff and other schemes, like color-stripe CP stuff.

I am not much of a video geek and still less am I a VHS geek. But my reading of the law now is that, at the end of this month, VCRs manufactured or sold in the United States will be expected to implement Macrovision. Only part of Macrovision is required by law if you've been manufacturing a VCR without CP support in the past. If you produce a new model of VCR which has not been manufactured before, it will be expected to implement both AGC and color-stripe CP, which is to say the main parts of Macrovision that people I talked to on mailing lists were familiar with.

I think they just didn't want to say "Macrovision" in the text of the law, because it would look weird to admit that it was illegal to refuse to comply with a particular company's proprietary standard if you want to build a VCR.

AGC is not inherently a kind of copy protection -- once, it was a feature, but some implementations could break copying under some circumstances, so I think it was originally a feature that you were allowed to turn off.

2000-04-07

(12:23:09)

I went down to Menlo Park Thursday for a consulting assignment. I was there for most of the day, and I took CalTrain, since I don't drive. I enjoyed the opportunity to take the train -- it was very relaxing, and I even took a nap briefly on the way down. I may end up using CalTrain a lot more often in the near future; I can certainly think of worse fates. (CalTrain is slow, compared to some other methods of transportation, but it seems clean, quiet, and spacious. And you're even allowed to eat on board!)

When I got back, I tried to clean up my room a bit. I haven't done anything to clean up in a little over a week -- for reasons that will be obvious to some people. I've made a little progress today, and maybe I can keep making progress.

I've got to try to deal with a whole lot of loose ends at work tomorrow (Friday). It should be interesting.

Birthdays

A happy birthday to Raph, with many happy returns and appreciation for Advogato and his other free software work.

That reminds me that some other people I know have birthdays in April. I just wish they would tell me who they are. :-)

Digital roots and divisibility

While on CalTrain, I worked on my old digital roots and divisibility theorem. I've now got really concise proofs of the theorem and its converse -- the end result is something like

The digital root test for divisibility always works if and only if you are testing for divisibility by a divisor of the largest digit in the base in which the numbers are written.

Suppose you have a base b and you want to know if some numbers written in that base are divisible by d.

My theorem says that, if b-1 is divisible by d, the digital root test will always tell you correctly whether or not a particular number is divisible by d. But if b-1 is not divisible by d, there are always some numbers for which the digital root test will give you the wrong answer. (There are also some numbers for which it will give you the right answer, but it won't work "in general".)

I'd still really like to write up a nice explanation of this and a nice proof which will be easy to follow. I first discovered this years ago, but it took me until this past January to get around to proving the converse. But I still haven't written it up, unfortunately. Now I want to learn some more LaTeX, so that I can typeset the equations in the proof. Maybe I'll look for Paul Abrahams's book on TeX.

Gee, I feel like I have a math diary rather than a free software diary. It's a good thing that so many programmers have at least a passing interest in math.

MPAA wants injunctions against linking

Some of you may have heard that the MPAA has asked the New York court in which it's suing Emmanuel Goldstein (now 2600) to forbid him by an injunction from linking to web pages which provide mirrors of DeCSS.

That's really, really, really, really, really, really scary. I read the MPAA's arguments on dvd-discuss (you can find them right away in HTML on Cryptome -- when does John Young sleep?), and wow, do they ever misunderstand the World Wide Web.

I posted some gripes about how links are actually only a particular form of markup (a particular attribute of a particular tag). From the point of view of HTML, this is not substantially different from saying that the marked-up text is in boldface or italics, or is a title. If you think all this is perfectly obvious, go read the MPAA's motion. :-)

There's a lot there.

Ouch

My jaw hurts this morning for no apparent reason.

Traversing an array randomly

I've got an idea for rakholh, which I'll try to write up later.

2000-04-08

(13:45:40)

I was not very productive on Friday, but I corresponded with some people. Some things happened that are stressful. I enjoyed reading mbp's writing; the parts that are not funny are still clear.

The fog has sort of come back in San Francisco after about a week of very clear, hot days. I don't expect it to rain here again any time soon, but we may well alternate between blue skies and fog. It's fog for the moment, and it's pretty.

This evening (Saturday), a friend I haven't seen in a long time will be coming over -- she's going to a conference at UCSF this weekend. This afternoon, I'm going to go in to work on the Bootable Business Card a bit.

As I live right about on the midpoint of a line segment connecting the Sound Factory with the San Francisco Buca di Beppo (hmmm, why don't I just say "halfway in between"?), I really wish I had remembered to try to go to the Mozilla party which stephane mentions. I suspect that it would have been a nice time and that I would have met some interesting people, although I'm not 21 yet, so I don't know that I could have been "legitimately" admitted.

I think that Stephane and Nick are picking up hell of influences from each other, which is kind of neat. They are still both welcome to use my VCR, even if it does implement Macrovision.

(As a non-native Californian, whenever I use "hell of", I'm making a joke.)

Anoles

StevenRainwater saw an anole recently. This reminds me that, when I was younger, I kept two anoles, a male anole named Flash and a female anole named Brasilia (because I'd done a report on Brazil in elementary school). I kept them in a terrarium with a heating rock and some plants and sticks (which I think must have been awfully boring). They were very cute (yeah, I think anoles are cute). Bush beans, wow. Where do you get those, anyway?

That was the only time I ever had a pet, and I haven't felt all so much affinity for lizards since then. I do still think that anoles are cute, though.

The biggest activity for people who have anoles sometimes seems to be explaining the difference between an anole and a chameleon. Oh, and arguing about whether anole rhymes with "hole" (so says my Macmillan Illustrated Almanac) or with Latin "noli" (which is used with an infinitive as one of two ways to form the negative imperative).

Math

I decided to put up a web page with notes and articles on mathematical recreations. This could be a nice counterpoint to the page I've been working on about Martin Gardner. I know that at least one person here knows who Martin Gardner is, so I may well end up asking around on Advogato for advice or comments on my Martin Gardner fan page.

I've now written a Python program that calculates Catalan numbers by counting pairwise parenthesizations. Python is a really cool language -- for recreational mathematics, and in general.

DVD stuff

I sent off a note about the fact that I'm falling behind in the details of the legal argumentation in the DVD cases. I think that my contributions in the future will mostly need to be confined to outreach and education. I'm still hoping to organize a lecture series at Berkeley, which should help.

Wolfgang

I sent off a postcard to Wolfgang, who deserves an awful lot more than that. She's staying at a relative's house under the pseudonym of "Kait"; some people who don't know her too well might suspect that "Wolfgang" is the pseudonym, but I'd dispute that.

Market value of domain names

A friend of mine may receive $100,000 for a domain name. (He's no squatter -- he's really using it for himself, but someone felt it was worth $100,000.) This is a strange world and a strange time.

The fact that domain names are being sold at all makes me fear that there is a problem in the DNS. Some of this has to do with the question of why the general public uses the root servers that were established so long ago -- and how the operators of those root servers view the process of allocating names.

It's very trendy to write a long essay on the problems of procedures for domain-name allocation -- so I might just have to do it.

2000-04-08

(16:26:15)

Still, maybe instead of asking to get rid of the status, I ought to try to live up to it?

I had a good conversation with lilo which was enjoyable and encouraging. We talked about journalism a bit. I think next time a journalist calls me (no, I haven't spoken to a reporter, not a one, since I was interviewed for American Lawyer a month ago about geeks' contributions to OpenLaw), I should maybe say

Are you a good reporter, or an eeeevil reporter?

Hey, raph, how long until we can use the <CITE> tag?

2000-04-09

(12:11:34)

I write long Advogato diary entries. (If you're reading this, it's most likely you've already noticed that.) If you find them interesting, you are welcome and invited to read them. I'm not prepared to answer dria's very worthwhile question about why I or anyway else does that. If you don't care for my diary entries, you can skip them; if you read the "Recent diary entries" page and are annoyed at the length of my entries that are getting in the way of reading other people's shorter entries, we could ask raph for a way to save user preferences on ignoring particular people's diaries, or I could try to implement something.

Thanks.

General

I didn't manage to go to work or to the CABAL meeting on Saturday, because I was busy cleaning so that my friend would have a place to sleep. (My room was really, really messy.)

I had some interesting conversations with her when she came by, and am amazed at the amount of co-incidental parallelism that can happen in people's lives. It's the sort of thing that makes people say that certain things are "in the air" -- or maybe it's the great human pattern-finding ability that makes people see things in clouds. However, since January, my friend's life and mine have been parallel in a fairly astonishing number of ways. (Mutatis mutandis -- she's female.)

San Francisco is really nice. I really like it here.

I had lunch with lilo and his family, which was nice, although too hurried (with the above-mentioned cleaning -- I had to run off in the middle).

The sky is clear again today -- the fog has gone away for the moment.

People in the allegedly lovely cities of Portland and Seattle (I haven't been to either, but really want to visit) are supposedly pretty annoyed that all of these Californians keep moving there and making it crowded. I think people in San Francisco have a sort of conflicted view of people moving here.

1. It's nice that people move here, because it validates our view that San Francisco is really great. See?
2. It's annoying that people move here, because it makes it more crowded and makes the rent go up.

Maybe San Franciscans are just really insecure -- "San Francisco is lovely and interesting. No, really. Just look at all the people who dream of moving here! Honest!"

Cherry blossoms

mjs made it to the Cherry Blossom Festival, and I didn't. Oops. I need to write these things down in advance.

I did get to see the Dragon Parade in San Francisco at the Chinese new year. That was really cool; it's also a source of some of the "parallelism that can happen in people's lives". (My friend who visited yesterday was there, too.)

But I remembered wanting to see the festival, and then not remembering when it was. I guess I should have thought "in the spring" and then made the connection that it's the spring now.

Culture clash

I looked into Wendell Berry's What Are People For? again, and was a little better prepared for what I would find there (which is not necessarily a good thing, but which is a bit less upsetting). Imagine that you grew up with most of your friends for several years being on a BBS, that you started programming when you were six, that the smallest town you ever lived in as a child had 30,000 people or so, that you chose where to go to college in part because of all of the historically important free software that had been written there (and also in part because of the coverage in the New York Times of the community of cypherpunks which hung around there), that you had pity on the anarchocapitalist boyfriend of Ellen Ullman in Close to the Machine because you were an anarchocapitalist programmer too ("Isn't everyone?" asks Ullman, in a tone I think she appropriated from my cousin in New York) and she didn't quite understand him or know what to make of him. Now imagine that you read Wendell Berry.

Some of my teachers in high school were real fans of Wendell Berry. One of them gave me a copy of "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" (which is in What Are People For?), and I was fairly distressed by it back then. I even tried to write a response, but I didn't do a very good job, because I missed most of Berry's points entirely. I found myself in agreement with his claim that a computer would not be useful to him (and further might cause him to do things which his current standards consider a waste of time), but I thought that Berry was missing the point that we don't use computers because they are useful.

(This is actually an interesting point about the difference between people who chose computing as a profession and people who chose computing as a culture or as a way of life. I was in the latter category for as long as I can remember. This conflict is easy to see -- between "just a job people" and "hobbyists", but also elsewhere. It's important, but it's not the particular culture clash that I want to talk about here.)

I think that people who suggest (as lots and lots of advertising from computer companies now does) that most people in the general non-computer-using public can benefit -- according to their existing values and standards -- from a computer are probably wrong. (There are fascinating exceptions. Cliff Stoll does a rather responsible job of discussing both sides in his technology-critic books, although he's so occupied with trying to refute rampant computer industry hype that he doesn't have much time to address other kinds of claims about the value of computers. So there is a lot that he leaves out or passes over -- including things like the free software community.)

I mean, sometimes the actual real-world usefulness of these things (almost by accident) impresses me. I was almost horrified when I first heard about WebVan -- I thought it must be a joke, a self-parody. What, we can't go to the store down the street any more and buy our own groceries, we have to get them delivered by ordering with a credit card through a dot com?

Then I learned through a mutual friend that a handicapped woman I know in Berkeley, who can't shop for her own groceries, uses WebVan regularly to shop for groceries and have them delivered -- exactly what she wants, conveniently, at a reasonable price. Oh. The WebVan people are doing some good and providing a genuinely beneficial service -- almost, it seems, as if by accident, to people not necessarily in their target market.

But Wendell Berry might say that, in the old days, handicapped people had to rely on their local communities and support networks to help them, and that this dependence was not necessarily bad: that the problem was when those networks were absent, collapsing, or dysfunctional, and not the bare fact that they existed at all. He would probably complain that our particular brand of consumerism rejoices when a community network of friends and family of the disabled can be obsoleted and replaced by some commercial web sites. And he would probably be worrying about whether or not all disabled students have credit cards and credit with which to buy groceries on-line. Maybe he has written about such things recently -- most of the essays in What Are People For? are as old as I am, and I know that Wendell Berry has kept working since then.

To return to my point about culture clash, above: imagine that you have this sort of background (perhaps shared by a number of Advogato readers), and that you then dip into Wendell Berry, who is talking about a world of small farmers respectful of the land not because of environmentalist ideology, but because they actually personally cared about it, and thought it was necessary for their lives... a world in which people cared about the particular places they came from and didn't all want to move to famous cities to do big, exciting things... a world in which people were dependent upon their friends and family and didn't think that was a good thing... a world in which nobody was inclined to think that the idea of technological progress was much more than dangerous hype.

I did also look into Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies; of course, she's got an index entry for Wendell Berry, as an Enemy of the Future. Well, he is, according to the way virtually everyone who even uses the web regularly probably imagines the future.

Even though I am much more comfortable with Postrel, who actually believes in progress and mistrusts the government and thinks computers are interesting and education is good and there is such a thing as "creating wealth" and we shouldn't be forced by our circumstances and environments to conform to the expectations of tradition if we chose not to -- Berry is a much better and much more interesting writer. Postrel is a decent modern writer who can collect evidence in a clippings file and present the evidence in a reasonable, logical, clear and readable way. Berry is a master essayist who understands and shows he understands how to think.

So here we have the problem (for those who by disposition or training believe in something akin to Postrel's Future) that the Enemy of the Future is at the very least smarter and a better writer than its proponent -- and maybe has a more subtle understanding, too. (I can see a lot of gaps in Berry's knowledge, but I'm sure he could see more in mine.)

Before Silicon Snake Oil, it seems, all the smart people believed in progress -- or, in particular, all the smart people I read believed in progress.

And we doubt not through the ages
One increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened
With the process of the suns.

Now I see other things, like Berry, who says that the loss of small farming communities in favor of high-tech and highly intellectual city life is not progress, but a great loss and a failing, through which we and the world are impoverished (some materially and all culturally and spiritually) and endangered.

I don't know how to deal with this culture clash. It's not as though I want to ignore Berry (or Stoll, or the other perennial NMH faculty favorite, the fascinating Daniel Quinn, some of whose ideas are not necessarily far from Berry's, though they are much more abstract and ambitious). He was serious and respectful enough not to resort to relativism: he thinks that modern urban culture is a real problem, for everyone, even for the people who live in the cities and work with the computers.

And I know some people, like Wolfgang, who are in fact drawn to living in the country and farming and not working with computers (much). I'm not: but I'm amazed that people are now telling me that I'm missing out on something there, and that they're serious about what they're saying.

New project tomorrrow

Tomorrow I'm expecting to go off and start working on some neat stuff. I look forward to it.

I regret both quiet periods and corporate secrecy -- I mean, I would rather be talking about all of these things than writing about how I can't talk about them. When there was only the Linux community and not also the Linux industry, we would go to user groups and talk about everything we knew, and share our knowledge and our speculations.

Now (well, some people have been living with this for longer), when we go to LUGs, we can't talk about everything we know, or everything we are working on. (In fact, that's one reason that there's so little free software stuff in my diary here -- a lot of what I work on with Linux is now confidential, at least temporarily.)

I feel that this aspect of the success of Linux is a very substantial loss: our friends and comrades of the community are now, for some of us, at least theoretically our business competitors.

Maybe this isn't a problem of the Linux industry but of the entire business world -- I never had a full-time professional job before this. Lots of people in the various free software companies never had full-time professional jobs before this. All the computer people I know have done consulting in college, and some professionally to support themselves, but the world of NDAs and strategic alliances and business press releases is really fairly new to many of us. And I think it would be safe to say that, for all those for whom it is new, it produces some discomfort.

It's nice to know that people are still communicating, collaborating, and being courteous. Rumors of the death of the free software community (or of the net) have been greatly exaggerated.

A note on "environmentalist ideology"

(For readers of this who may have been wondering what I meant when I said "environmentalist ideology" above.) Some people are environmentalists and think of themselves as such, and have a set of views related to the idea that the environmental and natural world should be preserved or protected. Wendell Berry has a view which is similar to this but isn't necessarily in the mainstream of American environmentalist thought: so I am just trying to distinguish him from that mainstream somehow. One of the main things I see that distinguishes him from many environmental activists is the value he personally places on farming and on the land -- in part because of what he perceives that they bring to him, his family, and his local communities.

There are many different reasons that people believe in environmentalism: shallow ecology, deep ecology, religious convictions, personal intuitions. It's hard to put Wendell Berry in any particular category here (particularly because he regularly expresses a disapproval of ideologies and abstract categories). I can just say that I've spent a fair amount of time in the company of urban student environmental activists, and most of their motivations and sensibilities seem pretty different from Berry's.

2000-04-09

(12:17:14)

2000-04-10

(09:45:13)

For browsers that don't allow nested BLOCKQUOTE tags, this is going to look weird -- since I quote dhd in a few places using BLOCKQUOTE, and the whole diary entry is itself displayed inside of BLOCKQUOTEs.

General

My friend came back after the conference (it was a two-day thing), and we had lunch, talked some more, and took naps. (I don't want to say "took a nap", in that it wasn't the same nap.)

Now I feel guilty for having corrupted my friend the alternative medicine student with my Evil Hacker Meal and Sleep Schedule. I mean, it was hard for me to get out of my habits of doing everything three to five hours later than normal (especially on weekends), and I fear that I've dragged her along with me this weekend. I hope she can recover her regular routine pretty quickly and without too much trouble.

Certification

dhd took me all the way from Master down to Dimwit in a single step!

No offense taken -- now I'm back at Journeyer level, which I think is more reasonable. I don't have an active campaign to subvert the certification system, even though I think it Has Interesting Problems as much as the next person. At the moment, I am personally content to give people accurate ratings, as I see it (except Dimwit), and hope that the certification system works well. I just don't want to end up in a category that I don't think is justifiable -- I was thinking "What if Ulrich Drepper were here, or the gcc maintainers, or the maintainers of Linux kernel subsystems, or the inventors of programming languages or cryptographic algorithms, or the authors of great classics of computer science theory and practice -- or (l'havdil) Professor Tanenbaum himself? And I'm supposed to be in the top category with these folks?".

I've spoken at conferences, I've served on committees, I've Gotten Paid For This Stuff, I might have a shell script or three in your wallet right now, I've even held protest signs out on picket lines for free software, but I'm not comfortable with any certification system that makes me indistinguishable from the people I'd like to recognize as Masters.

Many thanks to dhd for listening to my lament and even for certifying me as ... something other than Master. :-)

dhd's diary entry

While we're on the subject of dhd:

For that matter, I'm somewhat uncomfortable with hierarchies in general, or at least, ones that are socially constructed (as, no doubt about it, Advogato's is). I do not want to believe that the "in-crowd"/"out-crowd" dynamic that we're starting to see here is some inevitable part of the way a group of people will organize itself socially. In the particular case of "geeks" (my apologies to those who don't fit that description), who, presumably, have spent the better part of their lives in the out-crowd, it's distressing to see them responding by creating their own in-crowd.

This is the only basically troubling implication of the certification concept for me. I appreciated the perception that the technical world was more or less a meritocracy -- while it's really basically a meritocracy, with fewer barriers to entry than other parts of life, still there is a large effect of in-crowd-ness and cliquishness here and there in the community. (I am not at all immune to this.)

This isn't generally used maliciously or with a view to excluding people; I'm not convinced that it's totally avoidable, either. But it should be important that new "unknown" people can get involved and get listened to on the strength of their interest and skills -- and that may be difficult sometimes, here as in real life.

Being inclusive is good -- as everybody who's ever been excluded for trivial reasons can tell you.

I can keep a secret. I've found so far that most of the stuff that is truly secret is either not technical in nature, not free software, not generally crucial to the bettering of free software and society at large, or has strict time limits on its secrecy, so it's not too hard to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

I have a few things that I've been involved with and maybe am about to be involved with that are in the "time limits" category; this category is frustrating, though understandable.

Some people particularly like to

draw a distinction between "capitalism" and "free enterprise".

because of who invented the word "capitalist", and why. Or is this claim an urban legend?

This reminds me of my "what's really wrong with the WTO" concept, which might be a diary entry for another day.

Blah. I would have zero interest in this, except that I find the earnest way in which people have carried on the discussion to be somewhat quaint and amusing.

I'm not going to take you to task for calling this discussion "quaint" the way dria did. Just go look at the "Person Paper", if you haven't seen it. (Yes, I know you used "they" where I would have used "he" -- and you're a linguist and I'm more of a "once and future" linguist, so you get away with it.)

Some of the questions about sexist language or the origins of terms (which haven't been discussed so much on Advogato -- it's been more a matter of meta-discussions of whether or not this is an appropriate topic to worry about) get back to the famous Chomsky-Whorf debate. Does sexist language promote sexism? Can people think, and can they be counted on to think, outside of the apparent limitations or biases of their language?

It seems to me that perhaps Whorf is winning in popular culture, while Chomsky is winning in linguist circles -- but my most recent reading in linguistics is Steven Pinker, and he's got a strong and clear bias.

Oh, and I don't have a girlfriend. Applications with references and code samples are always accepted. Operators are standing by.

I know of someone whose web page says that she's accepting code samples from prospective boyfriends; maybe the two of you could trade some code and see if it's compatible. :-)

(Having done a huge amount of thinking this month about girlfriends, I'd bet that this is a downright awful way to find partners for romantic relationships in real life.)

Domain names

My friend of the much-coveted domain name has now sold it for a good deal of money; I did not see the final negotiated terms, which could be fairly different from the intermediate draft he showed me. In any case, it was a big thing. I have to say again that living here, now, is a weird and fascinating thing.

Berkeley DVD forum

Does anybody in the Bay Area (or who likes to commute to the Bay Area for interesting talks) have a preference for dates and times? I'm hoping that daw's schedule will resolve itself and that he, Professor Samuelson, and Robin Gross (and maybe some other folks -- with or without an affiliation with Berkeley) will be able to give some lectures on their perspectives on the present DVD mess.

I'd still appreciate nominations for speakers and suggestions for times. This event has already been delayed more than a month because all of the speakers we wanted were interested but too busy.

The Idea of a University

Sumana got Nick to reveal the answer: it's a book by John Henry Newman. (Hi, Sumana.)

Newsbet

Skud mentions Newsbet, which reminds me of a scaled-down version of Foresight Exchange (based on Robin Hanson's "idea futures" -- "Could Gambling Save Science?"): but Newsbet is actually going to let people bet with real money?

2000-04-11

(10:56:18)

Advice to people who have trouble with low blood sugar: carry around some non-perishable carbohydrates, or renew your supply of fruit that you can carry with you. You never know when you will be in San Francisco on a Sunday and everywhere you expected to eat will turn out to be closed.

No, this didn't happen to me, but I did see it happen to someone else; it didn't look like it was very much fun. Sorry about that.

If anyone ever found my PalmPilot, I would want to make something like TealMeal that could search by food group, time, and proximity. For example, "What's open near here that I like where I can get carbohydrates?" "What's open near here that I like where I can get salad?" "What's open near here that I like where I can get tofu?"

If nobody ever finds my Pilot, I should just make a map of places to eat in San Francisco. It's an old-fashioned idea, maybe, but useful.

I'm still slouching toward veganism, but my mental food groups are "carbohydrates", "vegetables", and "tofu" -- mainly just "carbohydrates". If I were vegan right now, I would probably eat more processed foods and sugars than any vegan I know -- most vegans seem to gravitate toward fresh fruits and vegetables, but I really don't.

Work and after

I learned about cool stuff Monday.

After that, I went to Fry's with jimd. We talked about Advogato certifications briefly.

Jim found some 802.11 wireless Ethernet cards. They look cool. An increasing number of people are picking up those things.

I found some 100baseTX Ethernet cards -- NetGear in a 10-pack. I figure it is a pretty good deal. People used to make money by buying these 10-packs and then selling the card individually to students in dorms (at some pretty substantial markup). I have no such scalper instinct. I just figure they'll come in handy sometime (especially because I didn't have a single PCI NIC or 100baseTX NIC anywhere, unless you count PCMCIA). If you know me, and you need a PCI NIC, and you see me in person sometime, let me know.

Getting to know me in order to get a NetGear card is discouraged: by the time you get to know me, I will probably already be out of them. :-)

Maybe I should say "Mention this offer, and receive a complimentary coffee mug!" -- Cliff Stoll, who ought to be famous enough that he can't get away with this, said he'd give coffee and a book to people he met who saw the offer on his web page. Only about one person a year took him up on it!

I also bought a few power strips (I was also running out of outlets), and tried and failed to find a standalone video camera with NTSC output and no recording capability. Everything I saw is either a camcorder, or a CCD camera with USB output. The cameras I want should cost less than $50, if only I could find one -- they'll probably be sold as "security cameras".

All of this reminds me that I saw an eeeevil journalist Monday. Come on, you good journalists -- we know you're out there!

What's the difference between a scalper and an arbitrageur? I know some people who say there is none. Maybe the scalper is the person who makes what is already cheap for you expensive (but convenient), while the arbitrageur is the person who makes what is expensive for you cheaper. (This is a psychological distinction rather than solid economic definition -- it's just that some people like the idea of arbitrage, but few people say they're very fond of scalpers.)

On the train

I poked at Zoe-Dan numbers a bit on the train Monday. (This is not an official term in the literature. When I write up something about them, I'll explain why they're called that.) I haven't done anything with them in a few years, but they're on my list of things to mention when I get around to writing up interesting math stuff. So I thought I would take a look again.

I proved that the nth Zoe-Dan number is between n and n! (inclusive), but that's not saying much, and I think we already knew tighter bounds than that seven years ago. So I'm rusty. (I'm not rusty, though -- but I hope he feels better soon, all around.) OK, I also worked out my old proof that Zoe-Dan numbers grow faster than any linear function. I'm still not anywhere near a closed-form formula or even a halfway useful procedure for calculating them.

I also wrote a short letter (on paper) to my ex-girlfriend, but I didn't send it. I don't think I'm going to. I'm not sure exactly what's constructive.

One of the quotations whose source I'm looking for is very close to

All things are permissible, but not all things are constructive.

Ryan

I was very tempted to find a title for Ryan (along the lines of "Ferret Master") to match his appointment of me as "the most verbose little bugger on advogato"... but I realized that he already has more titles than he quite knows what to do with. So I will refrain from appointing him anything else.

Perhaps Ryan is He Who Does Not Need Your Silly Titles.

Western Massachusetts

Wow, another person is from Western Massachusetts (or at least lives there at the moment).

Whatever happened to...

Erik Fair and clock.org? I was following Erik's home page for a while, because of various points of interest -- but he hasn't updated it in two years, and there hasn't been any new material about clock.org for about four years.

It sounded like a very good idea to me when I first heard of it. Is there such a thing as a large, reliable, and explicitly public NTP network? (I know that there are lots of NTP servers; are they co-ordinated and listed anywhere for the benefit of the time-using public?)

Is clock.org actually doing what it set out to do? I know that there are a few machines listed there which are public NTP servers.

2000-04-12

(00:08:27)

I talked to some people from the OSI about the future of that organization, which is always a controversial subject. I hope we'll have the opportunity to get together and talk about it further.

Nick is reliving his former life through radio dramas -- a much better radio fan than I in real life, he grew up listening to all sorts of wonderful serials on the radio and on cassette tapes. Now he's found sources for many such things on CD -- but I'll let him tell you about it.

Work

I worked on cool stuff Tuesday, and met interesting people.

After that, I again got to see Jim and Heather (who doesn't have an Advogato account that I know of). We talked about Linux and about the valuation of common stock. Perhaps some finance geek can tell me whether there is any basis for the valuation of common stock other than dividends (actual or anticipated) and speculative value.

On the train

On the way down, I talked to some people on the phone. One the way back, I managed to sleep a little; I wish that I'd managed to sleep more.

Taxes (and their connotations)

I looked over my tax forms. I've been too busy and too preoccupied this year to spend much energy so far on the political implications of taxes or tax day. I remember, when I was involved with the Libertarian Party, having wanted to have protests and such; this year, it's been more a matter of "OK, it's time to pay taxes, and hopefully sometime later on in the year I can do something to object to that".

The LP does, every year, organize anti-tax protests on April 15 (the day income taxes are due in the US) -- but they usually fail to convey any kind of coherent message to the public beyond "taxes are too high", which is (1) subjective, (2) boring, (3) the sole province and political capital of the Republican Party.

The problem is that interesting and worthwhile messages about political philosophy mostly don't fit in sound bites. The messages of the Republican Party (say, on taxes) fit into sound bites just about as well as those of the Democratic Party. Other people with somewhat more radical positions have ideas which are elaborately justified (I might provoke some stronger-than-intended reactions by saying "well justified", so maybe I can stay with "elaborately" at the moment), but it takes time to appreciate the detail of these justifications, as well as their premises.

So, these things like tax day protests are usually spectacular failures, as conceived, because they are really far "out there", as far as most people are concerned, and it takes a lot of effort to get many people to realize what the underlying message is or to take it at all seriously.

I'm sure that these protests are lots of fun for the demonstrators, though. That's got to be the main reason that so many Linux people in the Bay Area have turned out to protest various things -- it seems that Windows Refund Day had no long-term impact (except for making more people aware of some aspect of Microsoft business practices that they could dislike, and making more people curious about the legal status of shrinkwrap licenses), but it was lots and lots of fun.

... or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that, there's only one thing you can do, is walk into the Microsoft regional office wherever you are, just walk in, and say, "If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, Manufacturer and Microsoft Licensing, Inc. ("MS") are unwilling to license the SOFTWARE PRODUCT to you. In such event, you may not use or copy the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, and you should promptly contact Manufacturer for instructions on return of the unused product(s) for a refund." And walk out.

I hope I will write a diary entry about the uses of protests at some point.

I'm going to assume that non-US Advogato readers already understand who Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians are as well as they care to.

Back to taxes: It looks like my withholding for the year was about right, unless there are weird things around stocks. So I only have to worry about California taxes for the time being. (I'm going to file for an extension on both State and Federal, and take my paperwork to a tax accountant sometime over the summer.) I hope that Advogato readers who mean to file income tax in the United States are thinking about it already, in order to save themselves to much last-minute stress.

OK, so some people at Linuxcare and other places filed back in February, but I just can't imagine that kind of lack of procrastination.

Interactive fiction

I remembered appreciating the quality of some of the "interactive fiction" games written after the style of Zork; I really believe that writing a good IF game is a real artistic achievement. (Some people say that they are more like novels than like games.)

Unfortunately, I've never managed to write one myself, nor had the time and patience to solve any puzzle-oriented IF games.

I particularly remember SoFar (extra points to people who can figure out why), and Photopia. Photopia, which won the 1998 IF competition, had no serious puzzles, and you would always "win" (if you could call it that -- we should say "complete") it if you had basic adventure game experience. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't well-done: it's superb.

OK, so neither SoFar nor Photopia can be "won" (by producing an ending which is a satisfying triumph). In that respect, they have a different sort of depth than a more impressive game (and bigger time commitment) like NetHack (which is a non-IF adventure game).

I played Photopia through to the end many times (alternately trying to understand and trying to change the outcome). By then I felt more or less like I did when I read the beginning of book II of the Aeneid -- really sad, and for some of the same reasons.

Or maybe I felt the way Aeneas says he feels there, since I was, or seemed to be, helping to tell the story, but unable to alter it.

Et, si fata deum, si mens non laeva fuisset...

Other people's diaries

I've got some wisdom teeth, and hope I'll continue to (without causing myself other problems).

Happy birthday to joey and to anyone else with an April birthday. (I wish that my mysterious friends with April birthdays would let me know soon, before April is over.)

Paul, of numismatist law student fame, claimed that the new golden dollars are not only the same diameter and weight as Susan B. Anthony dollars, but even have the same electrical and electromagnetic properties as Susan B. Anthony dollars.

Speaking of Paul, chromatic says that the quotation about "all things" sounds like Romans 14. That's true, and I thought that quotation sounded very New Testament-ish, but I can't find that exact line anywhere in Romans (or anywhere else in the New Testament, or anywhere else at all, for that matter).

2000-04-13

(00:54:58)

Tuesday night, I read part of Umberto Eco's book about universal language, and ate some Mexican food (with too much dairy, I think -- I'd really feel better if I kept cutting back). My dinner Wednesday was a large salad-bar salad, which I think was a much better idea.

I have three books which talk about Raymon Lull: Gardner's Logic Machines and Diagrams, Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language, and Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Gardner talks about Lull as a logician; Eco treats him as a logician-linguist (with ambitions somewhat like those of Leibniz), and Mackay presents him as an alchemist! (None of them can agree on how to spell his name, but all of them agree that he was definitely a religious fanatic -- he wanted to be a martyr, and he eventually got his wish.)

There is actually some degree of overlap between the Gardner and Eco books, because most "logic machines" before the 1930s were part of projects to produce universal notations or languages as part of a program of formalizing and automating human reasoning.

I think this is a fascinating area. If you're interested in linguistics and philosophy, The Search for the Perfect Language is very highly recommended.

I had a whole variety of bad dreams, from kidnapping to the collapse of the Linux community. Fortunately, I'm not known for having especially prophetic dreams.

The SVLUG discussion list got a forwarded copy of a message about how FINCEN was interested in FreeNet and in people who run FreeNet servers. I assume that the FreeNet developers ought to take that as a compliment.

I tried, without much luck, to stay in touch with a few friends, mostly by writing to them.

There was continuing discussion about the legal status of all sorts of random things whose legal status gets discussed on mailing lists I'm on:

• DeCSS
• cphack
• the GPL
• shrinkwrap licenses
• gratuitous licenses
• FreeNet
• and more

Someone from American Lawyer called back to check a quotation about OpenLaw that I had given to a reporter a while ago. She seemed to have a hard time understanding that I wasn't a lawyer and that tenured Harvard law professors would want to get a bunch of programmers together to talk about DVDs.

Lawyers have a stronger tradition of worrying about professional training and qualifications than do programmers. Programmers can deal with the "No, I don't have a college degree, I've just been doing this since elementary school" thing, which might sound strange coming from a lawyer. Why is this?

It's worth noting that I'm already a vegetarian (i.e. don't eat animals) and am thinking of becoming a vegan (i.e. wouldn't eat animal products like milk or eggs). I wish mbp lots of luck in becoming a vegetarian, though.

I am skeptical of his "disemvowel" script: it (self-consciously) puts punctuation and other non-alphabetical stuff both above and below the line. But I don't have a copy of Microserfs, so I don't know whether that's intended or not.

Work

I worked on cool stuff.

In the meantime, I got asked a question which led me to a C question about pointers to functions, but I thought I should check K&R before mentioning it here, and, sure enough, 2nd ed., p. 119:

Since they are known to be functions, the & operator is not necessary, in the same way that it is not necessary before an array name.

I find this decision irritating, but it does answer my question, which concerned why there were so many different valid syntaxes for forming pointers to functions. (I still don't see why Kernighan and Ritchie, in their infinite wisdom, did it this way.)

I never had occasion to use explicit pointers to functions before, outside of someone else's sample code, which already did it correctly. (I still don't have occasion to use explicit pointers to functions, actually, but I wondered what was going on.)

On the train

People on trains in the Bay Area talk on cell phones about IP addresses and firewalls. OK, so I talk on cell phones about IP addresses and firewalls while I'm on trains, too, but that doesn't make it normal!

And they read books that use big-sigma notation or talk about elliptic-curve cryptography. OK, so I read books that use big-sigma notation or talk about elliptic-curve cryptography, too, but that doesn't make that normal, either.

Some people even play Quake on trains. I wouldn't do that -- Quake makes me feel motion-sick enough when I play it in a room indoors. If I didn't have so many other things to do, I would play NetHack on a train. (That sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss.)

Ryan wants to flee Canada?

Rob says that Ryan would be welcome in San Francisco if the latter got sick of Ottawa and wanted out. (Funny how that works -- I was just wondering myself whether it would be fun to live in Ottawa, but not for the "not living in the Bay Area" problem that tends to result from that sort of thing. Maybe we should have an exchange program or something.)

Anyway, if I remember correctly, Ryan's already tried living here, once upon a time. Want to give it another shot? We've got springtime, corruption, fog, pretty historic buildings, and way too many web companies (all of which advertise on the radio). We've also got chocolate, oceans, bridges, more fog, some rainbows, interesting people, universities, electric motor scooters, cable cars, a lot of interesting ethnic food, and a very dramatic gap between rich and poor. We've got islands and ferries and nearby redwoods, and bicycles and bicycle activists, and some other stuff, too. We've got Muni Metro, a strange microclimate, and almost no mosquitoes. We've got earthquakes, and fountains that have survived them. We've got a huge tourist industry and a lot of different kinds of mass transit. We've got a new stadium three blocks from our apartment that Nick is really unhappy about. (They play baseball there, by the way, Nick.) We've got neighborhoods in transition and people who are unhappy about that; we've got refugees from the East Coast (and Vietnam and China and Mexico, and elsewhere). We've got Linux user groups and fog.

It is legally difficult, although not impossible, to keep ferrets in the City. You can fight City Hall, but you will typically lose.

Most of those things could probably have been hyperlinks, but I thought I'd hold off this time.

On the other hand, it's always worth keeping in mind that

caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt.

chromatic finds the quotation

Thanks to chromatic for finding 1 Corinthians 6:12 ("all things are ... but not all things are ..."). I'm impressed that my strategy of asking idle questions in an Advogato diary entry produced such a quick answer.

Now I should try to remember what else I was looking for.

libyou-have-no-right-to-distribute.so.0

I looked at a couple of proposed open source licenses for the OSI. I hope that a little bit of the backlog in license review will be gone soon, although that's not an unequivocally good thing. (The existence of the OSI has led more people to create licenses. A lot of those licenses are incompatible with one another. That might hinder code re-use between projects which are released under incompatible licenses.)

Upcoming events

zw: thanks for the reminder on Douglas Hofstadter's talk.

Now I need to know the dates of a few other things, so I can write them all down on a calendar. But I bet I can find them out for myself, more or less.

Unfortunately, my current work arrangement might make it difficult to get to talks at Berkeley in the early evening.

Massachusetts

Wow, more people who have lived in Massachusetts. I thought of going to Simon's Rock once myself, right before I started to enjoy high school. I remember visiting a very interesting class about Immanuel Kant and game theory. I subsequently enjoyed high school so much that I didn't at all regret not having gone off to Simon's Rock. Fortunately, though, it's there for people who need it.

The mind is its own place

I have some of my own evidence for something Milton said in Paradise Lost:

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

2000-04-14

(10:35:31)

I was pretty depressed Thursday.

I got out to City Lights right before it closed for the evening. Among other things, I got a translation of Sein und Zeit, and found it just about as incomprehensible as many people say it is.

On the train

I wrote an inefficient Python program that lists partitions of numbers. Then I made it more efficient by memoization, but it's still really inefficient. What are efficient ways of finding partitions?

I also considered the fastest ways to implement least common multiple and greatest common divisor in Python. I don't know any particularly spiffy algorithms for this, and I should probably go buy Knuth or something and see if he talks about it.

I imagined the possibility of using gcd (which you can get by Euclid's algorithm) to compute lcm, based on the relation

lcm(a,b) = a*b/gcd(a,b)

==> (lcm 128 23821 23723 3223 238712321)

7950174635009934352256

==> (lcm 1287 1982472 8721365 27827456 263 27 139284 2987 2423)

570028676575193375740247586594781440

I also wonder whether lcm might be implemented usefully in gmp or something. (I subsequently looked in gmp -- no sign of an LCM algorithm, but their PROJECTS file is pretty interesting, if only I had enough algorithms background. They have a freaky GCD algorithm in mpn/gcd.c -- yikes! I guess there are faster things than Euclid's algorithm, but we don't necessarily hear about them in school or on the net, possibly because of ideas like "only the people implementing gmp need to know about that...")

If you compile ssh yourself from source, you probably have a copy of the gmp sources sitting around under your ssh source directory, unless you use an operating system or distribution which provides ssh and has strictly separated libraries into their own packages.

Is there a faster way to compute lcm(a,b,c) than using

lcm(a,b,c) = lcm(a, lcm(b,c))

I made a list of the partitions of the number 30, and stared at them for a while, noticing that (1) there are lots of them, and (2) sure enough, I couldn't think of any that weren't included on my complete list. That's reassuring.

My program can now compute Bell numbers (inefficiently), and, if I had lcm in Python, it could compute Zoe-Dan numbers, too.

It seems that gmp has more and better math operations than Python. I wonder whether the former could, or should, be built as a module for the latter. Python already does multiprecision arithmetic, sure, but does it do it as well as gmp?

All of this inspired me to spend a few minutes reading Concrete Mathematics. I should keep reading -- I have a feeling that it would answer all of my questions, and some others, too.

Missed talks

Because of work and commuting, I missed two talks I wanted to hear at Berkeley on Thursday. Oops.

Credit reporting

My credit rating is going to suffer because a creditor got my ZIP code wrong.

- I'm being reported even though you got my ZIP code wrong?

- Yes, sir. When you stopped getting credit card bills, you should have wondered what was wrong and called us.

Perhaps I'll protest to a credit bureau that my ZIP code was wrong -- I think I still have an envelope that was delayed for several weeks because one post office in San Francisco kicked it off to a different post office.

The other fun thing would be writing a letter to my credit card issuer in LaTeX (because it looks impressive, the way my old California Public Records Act request turned out). Yes, I know I don't know LaTeX; that doesn't stop me from writing letters in it. I could gripe to them about the fact that the bill I missed was supposed to have arrived while I was out of town for several weeks, so I wasn't exactly regularly checking my mail to see whether or not my credit card bills came. I can see whether their customer service department cares about this. If they don't, I could try to be mean to them by paying my entire bill. :-)

On the other hand, it may not be bad if I have less-than-perfect credit: it might stop me from getting credit limit increases all the time and getting further into debt. :-)

Mozart's Requiem

Mozart's Requiem is being performed at UC Berkeley on Saturday (which is Cal Day, when the University holds an open house, for prospective students and others). I'd like to go; I have to check with my friend and see whether he's still going.

How to spell "Stephane"

mjs: you mean stephane's name isn't "Stephane"?

2000-04-17

(09:30:34)

I was certainly still feeling depressed on Friday. I had a better weekend (in large part because I got a letter from a friend from high school who was almost killed in a car crash early this year, letting me know that she is doing well), but I was nonetheless feeling depressed again by Sunday evening.

I didn't manage to get this diary entry finished, so it concerns Friday and the whole weekend (and is therefore pretty long -- not that my one-day diary entries are short, or anything).

Bookstores

stephane: Borders may be open until 11:00p (which was great when I was in Brea), but City Lights is open until midnight!

Of course, Border's is going to have a better selection, but I bet City Lights will win for poetry or radical politics. For technical stuff, City Lights doesn't win. I guess the Beats were never very enthusiastic about machines or numbers.

Breaking up is hard to do

Stampede developers: yikes. I'm sorry to hear about the troubles in your distribution. I hope that things will work out well for everyone (although I'll refrain from any "learning experience" comments).

It's obvious to me that participation in Stampede was a very important part of many developers' lives -- just on general principles and on the basis of having met a few of you once upon a time at LWCE in August. So I think it's really sad that you have left the distribution.

Alas.

On the train -- Friday

Concrete Mathematics, p. 515:

The best way known to compute lcm(m, n) is to compute gcd(m, n) first and then to divide mn by the gcd.

(No, I didn't read through to page 515 yet; I looked up "least common multiple" in the index, which is to say performed random access rather than sequential read on it, which is to say treated it like a reference instead of a textbook. That's OK, though, because I used to read dictionaries and encyclopedias, so I think it evens out.)

Relying on this wisdom, I implemented not only partitions(n), but relative_primes_partitions(n), and zoedan(n) and zoedan_instance(n). The zoedan functions can take an optional argument specifying which function to call to get a list of the partitions of n -- this is important because relative_primes_partitions is much faster than partitions.

The result of all this is the ability to do, in about 15 minutes of computation on my laptop,

>>> zoedan_instance(52, relative_primes_partitions)
180180 [13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 4, 1, 1, 1]

1. Any such shuffle repeats the original order of the deck in at most 180,180 steps.
2. There are shuffles which do not restore the original order of the deck in fewer than 180,180 steps.
3. A particular shuffle which requires 180,180 steps can be obtained by the following method:
   • Divide the deck into the following groups: A, 13 cards; B, 11 cards; C, 9 cards; D, 7 cards; E, 5 cards; F, 4 cards; G, the remaining 3 cards.

   • Place each group in its own pile.

   • Cut the top card in each pile to the bottom. (There are actually many other things you could do here, but this is the simplest; it is one way of performing a cyclic permutation of the pile.)

   • Reassemble the piles in their original order.
   This series of steps, if repeated 180,180 times, will return the deck to its original order; if repeated fewer than 180,180 times, it will not.

Later on, I looked up the place where Martin Gardner talks about this. All I remembered was that he said that the maximum period of a shuffle over a standard deck was 180,180 (which my program confirmed by brute force, although by a method somewhat more expedient than examining all 52! possible shuffles). When I saw what he wrote, I was amazed: he describes the LCM stuff in great detail, and then gives the same list, [13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 4, 1, 1, 1], that my program produced (although he has it in increasing order).

The remarkable thing is that Gardner wrote this long before I was born, without access to a computer; he alludes to a shortcut which lets him find the maximum possible LCM of a partition without trying all possible partitions. The really remarkable thing is that the calculation he's relying on was published in 1865. 1865?!?!!

This just goes to show how much better insight is than brute force, but I'm really wondering who it was who had such a wonderfully efficient method for finding ZD numbers more than a century before Zoe or Dan were born. :-) And I'm wondering what that method is, since Gardner declines to reprint it.

All this has made me wonder about reverse Zoe-Dan numbers. Suppose we want a shuffle with a period of n. How many cards do we need for such a shuffle to exist? (For some values of n, the answer will be "n cards"; can you see why, and identify these values of n?)

I'll call this relationship RZD(n). (RZD(x) is the smallest n such that there is a permutation of order x over n elements. This is the "reverse" of ZD(n) in that ZD(n) is the largest x such that there is a permutation of order x over n elements.) Some observations that come to mind:

• ZD(RZD(x)) does not necessarily equal x. (It's not smaller than x, though.)
• RZD(ZD(n)) does not necessarily equal n, either. (It's not bigger than n, though.)
• Knowing that ZD(a)>ZD(b) does not tell you whether RZD(a)>RZD(b), and vice versa, I think.
• RZD is not monotone increasing. But it is bounded below by some monotone increasing function (I think).
• RZD(n) is even harder to calculate than ZD(n).

I wonder whether

the best way known to compute lcm([a, b, c, d, e, ...]) is to compute gcd([a, b, c, d, e, ...]) first and then to divide (abcde...) by the gcd.

the best way known to determine whether [a, b, c, d, e...] are pairwise relatively prime is to compute gcd([a, b, c, d, e, ...]) and see whether it is 1 (or lcm([a, b, c, d, e, ...]) and see whether it is (abcde...), which seems less likely).

Make way for the gcd algorithms! gcd algorithms, coming through!

After I wrote all this, I read pvg's diary entry, with some very interesting material on lcm, gcd, and partitions. I did not know about most of the algorithms and properties he mentions -- very neat stuff, which makes some of my recent Python experimentation quite superfluous. But it was a lot of fun.

The stock market

The stock market crashed this past week, more or less. Free software companies' stocks also declined a lot; VA Linux stock, which I hold, actually went below its IPO price, which is remarkable considering its world-record first-day gains.

There are a lot of hazards and pitfalls associated with becoming a public company. When I am not employed by a company in a quiet period, I will be sure to talk about some of them. :-)

I am too busy being depressed about other things to be at all depressed about the NASDAQ or VA stock -- but I'm sorry for the other people who hold VA stock (or other free software companies' shares, or other NASDAQ securities, or whatever) for whom it no doubt feels like a big deal.

For my friends at VA: I hope you aren't taking the market's behavior personally. From what I hear, you're still doing cool stuff -- stuff that most of the people who held your stock might have had no idea of. Unfortunately, they might have bought your stock because it was trendy, and not because they knew what good work you were doing.

Shopping

I could go shopping near where I am working and take something (like, say, a microwave) on the train with me. Are microwaves safe?

Jim Bell out of jail

Jim Bell got out of prison Friday, according to an article by Declan McCullagh.

According to the article, Bell intends to continue to promote Assassination Politics, his controversial technique for distributed anonymous violent revolution. More or less.

I have lots of problems with Assassination Politics. One of the most general is how counterproductive violence is likely to be for achieving long-term goals. I can't see that an AP campaign would have an effect materially different from a non-Internet-organized campaign of assassinations or kidnappings. All AP changes, as far as I can see, is making organizing assassinations cheaper and safer to organize; it does nothing to alter the "user interface" of assassinations -- dead people, public outrage, turmoil, backlash...

If you want to produce a stable long-term change, you have to convince people. I'll say that again. If you want to produce a stable long-term change, you have to convince people. Otherwise, you just have something like a long-term war. Perhaps AP enables a long-term war to be prolonged indefinitely, without having the minority defeated by attrition. What's the point?

Need I add that assassination doesn't tend to convince either those assassinated or their supporters?

I'm amazed at the number of radical activists who are also militants. I mean, OK, you can change the incentives and the balances of power, you can change the tools and the calculations and the interactions, and such, but actually planning to get involved in armed struggles? Dulce et decorum est pro causa mori? (Sorry, I know it doesn't scan.)

If Jim Bell could destroy the Federal government tomorrow, somebody would hold a convention and re-create a new one the day after: and they would enjoy enormous popular support and probably be remarkably successful in asserting sovereignty over everyone else.

In order to live openly and at peace for a long time with other people, it is necessary to persuade them that it is right or reasonable to live on terms which are OK with you. Other "solutions" are just sort of asking for trouble, or they are fatally unstable. I don't mean to say that anyone is obliged to practice this persuasion, or that it will ever succeed, or that other ways to live are wrong. It's just that the alternatives all seem to have some really serious defects. They tend to lead to tragedies (like violence), or else to a lack of long-term progress.

I didn't suggest changing the terms which are OK with you in order to live at peace with other people, because proposing changing one's own beliefs is beyond the scope of activist advice. :-)

Hey, wow, I unexpectedly get to paraphrase the 1 Cor 6:12 quotation to summarize my basic objection to the use of violence for a good cause: some things may be justified, but they are not necessarily constructive.

Strange irony of the week: Bell's first morning as a free man is ... Tax Day. I wonder if they did that on purpose.

quam olim Abrahae promisisti, et semini eius

I went to Berkeley, and I heard the performance of Mozart's Requiem that some people here have been mentioning. Mozart's Requiem is one of my favorite pieces of music, but I wasn't that impressed with the performance at Berkeley. It was much too fast; parts of the piece which are very mournful were made to sound really rushed. I did appreciate the Confutatis and Lacrimosa (which might be the best part of the whole Requiem).

I stayed over with some friends, and ate twice at Intermezzo, which I still really like. I also got to go to Cody's, and I got some interesting stuff there. Most of interest to Advogato readers would probably be Volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming; I figure it will be more affordable if I don't try to buy all three volumes at once.

In the afternoon Sunday, I came back to San Francisco, got my tax forms done (requesting automatic extensions), exchanged some distressing e-mail, felt sad, and had a long and wide-ranging phone conversation with Paul of numismatist law student fame.

I also bought and listened to Leonard Bernstein's Kaddish, which I had been curious about. I don't think I liked it very much, but I'll give it another try another time.

Latin computer terminology

rbrady says that Latin lacks computer terminology. This is not quite true, although I don't know where to find a good Latin computer dictionary. I'm told that the Vatican has its own modern lexicon, including technical terms, and also the Finnish people who broadcast Nuntii Latini had worked one out. There is a "Neolatin Homepage" somewhere with a nice collection of links to modern Latin resources, and I think they have some discussion of technical terms.

When I was having talk sessions in Latin with my friend Daniel, we made up a bunch of our own computer terminology. (We managed to have a very long conversation on the subject of "Could the NSA decipher Linear A, if it wanted to?" in Latin some years ago. It was interesting.) The only thing I remember was intercatena, intercatenae, for Internet (because of the old "catenet" designation for IP networks, which you can see cited in some RFCs and internetworking papers). So we thought that the Internet might be called an "interchain" in Latin for historical reasons. Per intercatenam epistulam electronicam mittere, etc.

I suppose that one of the serious neo-Latinist projects has worked out a better name for the Internet in Latin.

Missing vocabulary was one reason I never completed my Latin translation of the Geek Code. If the new version comes out and I can find the vocabulary, I may still give it a try.

One more shuffle note

Gardner also points out that any shuffle restores the original order of the deck if repeated lcm(1,2,3,...,52) times. This is a big number. The idea of repeating a shuffle that many times is rather reminiscent of a card trick Gardner described in his Mathematics, Magic, and Mystery:

Reflecting on the above matters led Mr. [Mel] Stover to the invention of a truly stupendous breath-taking version of the trick. It makes use of [...] a deck of 10 billion playing cards! The best way to obtain such a deck, writes Stover [...] is to buy 200 million decks of 52 cards each, then discard two cards from each deck. The spectator shuffles this Gargantuan pack, then while your back is turned he marks one card in such a way that the mark can be seen only by close inspection. After this is done, he gives you a number from 1 through 10 billion. By dealing the cards ten times, into ten piles of a billion cards each, [...] you are able to bring the card to the desired position.

[...]

"Care must be taken not to make a mistake in the dealing," Mr. Stover cautions in a letter, "as this would necessitate repeating the trick, and few spectators would care to see it a second time."

2000-04-18

(13:29:31)

I apologize to people who are bothered by my long diary entries on the recent diary entries page -- I do wish that there were a good way to select whose diaries you see, or cut them off at a certain length.

Maybe I should move my diary off of Advogato and just have a link to it, although that would be more work for people here who do like reading it.

I have a long entry or two but I haven't gotten those done; I've been busy and lacking sleep.

South of Market had some blackouts yesterday, and the LinuxCabal was affected, such that my machine is now crashed and off the net, and likewise my backup MX.

This is why you aren't supposed to put your backup MX in the same room as your main machine.

I hope that somebody will manage to get one of those machines back up today; I'm not anywhere near San Francisco during "business hours".

Update

Nick got his machine back up, so I can get mail again, but my old mail and cssfaq.org are still down for the time being.

I don't actually want to move my diary off of Advogato, because I enjoy giving people the option to read it here; I just don't want it to irritate people when they see it taking up space in the recent diaries page.

That's why a technical solution would probably be nicer than moving: it would let people who wanted to read my diary read it, and let other people skip it.

2000-04-19

(19:16:08)

I appreciate all the encouragement from people who like my Advogato diary.

Many people who wrote encouraging things didn't understand the nature of the problem, though. The problem is that my diary entries show up, in full, on this page, so people who are reading that page instead of individual diary links get stuck reading my whole entry every time I write one.

Instead of explaining this, I ought to do something to fix it. :-)

On the train -- Monday

I managed to take a brief, uncomfortable nap. I was up until 4:00 on Sunday night, and I only got a couple of hours of sleep. (Subsequently, I slept on other train rides, so I'm closer to caught up now.)

Math

I didn't mention where Gardner talked about shuffles -- it was in his Mathematical Carnival (although I think he mentioned shuffling and the number 180,180 somewhere else, maybe in connection with a discussion of faro shuffling).

I came up with a conjecture about permutations which I then disproved. It was fun while it lasted.

License review

I reviewed a proposed license, and was made uneasy by a provision that required compliance with any applicable laws relating to distribution of the software.

Some people here have already encountered my objection to proposed open source licenses which contain clauses insisting on compliance with U.S. export control laws. I argued at great length (or "long-windedly"?) that such licenses shouldn't be accepted as free software or open source licenses, because they actively helped enforce discriminatory restrictions. Some people thought that this argument was unrealistic or pedantic the first time around, but it seems to have been accepted in some form by both the OSI and the FSF. (I was not the only person to think of it, of course; I just made a lot of noise about the point.) And the OSI actually got a few license authors to change their licenses on the strength of my argument that export-control language was not consistent with the OSD.

Now we've got the big challenge that was lurking in the background of this issue. What happens when a license does not mention export controls (or other sorts of discrimination) anywhere, but it insists that distributors of a package must comply with applicable law?

Clearly, compliance with applicable law would include things like compliance with applicable export controls, so presumably, if a requirement to comply with export controls is a sufficient reason to reject an open source license, a requirement to comply with export control laws and every other law would be more than sufficient.

But I don't think many people's intuitions are going to be with me on this point: a requirement to comply with laws is, for most people, rather run-of-the-mill, and would appear fairly neutral and innocuous. (People would tend to say that insisting on compliance with generally-applicable laws has no discriminatory intent.)

I think this perceived neutrality is real only so far as the legal systems of the world are themselves neutral and innocuous; since they aren't necessarily, uncritical assistance given to them by license authors is not necessarily neutral or innocuous.

I'm working on an argument about why it is a bad thing for licenses to try to implement, help enforce, or encourage adherence to "applicable laws". We'll see how far I get with it. If my position is accepted by the TLAs of the free software world, or by the great mass of developers, it might make free software look even weirder to the wider world.

More taxes

I went with a friend's family to provide company and navigation for their last-minute tax form mailing on Monday evening. We drove way down Third Street until we came to a huge traffic jam and traffic flares (not to mention lots and lots of police officers, and a protest). It was quite a wild scene; we immediately knew that we'd made it to the right place.

It felt like something out of a movie: we drive from ballpark to ballpark to reach a post office at the last minute, with a baby in the car, my friends trying to find out about my ex-girlfriend and my recent conversations with her and my lost sleep, a discussion ensuing about the morality of taxation, all sorts of random other things, we cross two rivers, and we are in the midst of a traffic jam in the middle of the night, lit up by brilliant red flares scattered through the road and spotlights on either side, with people running and shouting all around us, carrying envelopes or baskets of mail or flashlights or protest signs.

Well, you had to be there.

So, they got their taxes off in the mail: I handed a couple of envelopes through the car window to a very harried postal worker, who was thanked, and who promptly told us to keep moving and not block traffic.

Then we saw the substance of the protest: it wasn't against taxation in general, but rather in favor of same-sex marriage (the connection to Tax Day being that, if you believe you're married to someone of the same sex as yourself, the IRS will nonetheless not believe you, and won't be happy with you if you try to file a joint return as a married couple). We in the car thought that this protest was slightly off-target (this is a long discussion), but it looked like the demonstrators were all having a pretty good time, so we waved and such.

They got the Monday postmark -- no late fees.

LWN letter

LWN printed my letter about the cphack copyright assignment. (Or, why the FSF is more trustworthy than you are, if a large corporation wants to sue you.)

It's an interesting philosophical issue, you know -- the delegation of trust. Robin Hanson wrote something about that...

It's interesting to see how people try to take power and choices out of their own hands because they fear how they might react in a particular situation. At Cody's, I saw a time-lock safe, a clever expedient to reduce the value to a robber of what the robber could force you to do. The fact that the cashiers can't open such a safe "to save their lives" actually makes it less likely that a robber would threaten them (if the robber understood that their inability to open the safe was genuine).

The canonical story about people not trusting themselves, or, if you prefer, about multiple personalities (or beliefs, or "inclinations") fighting one another and each alternately claiming to be authentic, is the story of Odysseus and the Sirens, in the Odyssey. I have always been fascinated with that.

Latin

Salve, mdillon; salvete et vobis, o lectores Advogatonis ignoti Latinae.

I was glad to hear about the Lexicon which mdillon mentioned; I think that's what I'd heard alluded to.

Yahoo!

jimd: Yahoo! was probably paranoid because they thought you might be a minor. Because of recent legislation, companies in the U.S. are not allowed to collect personal information of minors on-line without the consent of those minors' parents.

Of course, the privacy issue that this legislation did not address was the minors' privacy against their parents, if minors choose to use computers for some purpose they don't want to share with their parents.

Update: that law is the COPPA, and a slashdot article appeared today discussing it. You can follow links from the comments on that article to read some other news coverage about the COPPA's effect on free e-mail services.

COPPA is a great reason not to collect demographic information about your visitors or customers! (Other great reasons: then it can't be stolen or subpoenaed.)

Wolfgang

I got another letter from Wolfgang, who's going to Kentucky rather than Canada. I wish her good luck. I wrote back to her by e-mail to let her know that I was too depressed to write her a suitable letter right now.

Wolfgang is fond of Lotta's Fountain; if I had been awake, I should have gone out to the 1906 earthquake commemoration ceremony at the fountain on Tuesday morning.

On the train -- Tuesday

I re-read Close to the Machine. I started when I got on the train and finished right before I got off; that means I read 126 pages an hour (although the pages are small, fairly large-print, and 1.5-spaced). This is about the same rate that is probably associated with reading Sarah, Plain and Tall in under 20 minutes (which I did when I was 13; that book has a similar number of words per page).

Close to the Machine, like all of Ellen Ullman's writing, is really good. (It was writing an earlier Advogato diary entry that made me want to re-read it, and the train ride that gave me the time.)

Berkeley

I didn't take the train back home Tuesday evening because Jim gave me a ride (during which I slept, exhausted) back to the City on his way to BALUG with Heather; I got off at Third Street and took BART to Berkeley, where, after eating, I attended CalLUG.

All sorts of things we talked about at CalLUG are relevant here, but I didn't make a list or anything. I remember making a table comparing password-based authentication protocols with shared-secret challenge-response authentication protocols. CalLUG attendance is still low; it's not too encouraging when most of the people in a meeting are officers or former officers of the group. It's still fun to attend, of course. I was told that some people still think of me as the Publicity Director of CalLUG, because that position has never been filled since I left Berkeley.

So, how do you pronounce "nonce"? I was talking about how APOP and some other protocols use a hash of the concatenation of a shared secret with a nonce, and I suddenly realized that I had never actually pronounced the word "nonce" in front of another person. So that's what LUGs are for -- to get you out of the house and learning how to pronounce things. (Is the "on" like "once", like "non", or like "phone"?)

After the meeting, I ran into a friend who gave me my fifth invitation to Douglas Hofstadter's upcoming talk on Friday. Hmmm, do you think people suspect I'm a Hofstadter fan or something?

I do plan to go to that talk, if I can make it; my friend said he's planning a discussion session afterwards, which is good, although not at all helpful for catching up on sleep.

2000-04-20

(09:27:51)

I continue to enjoy reading other people's diary entries, as well as their comments on or responses to my diary, even if I don't mention you by name. Thanks.

On the train

Leaving: slept. Coming back: should have slept, but instead wrote a poem. (I hadn't written a poem since December, and in fact this poem and that poem could be called counterparts.)

Work

I worked on cool stuff.

I regret not being able to talk more about Linuxcare. Everybody (who cares to do so) is talking about us, there are leaks and alleged leaks, there are controversies, there are rumors, there are slashdot flamewars, but there are precious few public opinions and comments of actual Linuxcare employees.

Hofstadter's talk

I got my sixth and seventh invitations to Hofstadter's talk. Thanks, Sumana. I hope to see you (and almost all of the people who invited me) there.

I'm amazed at how many of my friends know I'm a Hofstadter fan, and how many of them are actually Hofstadter fans themselves. I remember when I was the only person in my entire school who had heard of Douglas Hofstadter.

A sanitary and tidy way to eat buttered popcorn

Jim reports that, in a previous job, he knew someone who would eat popcorn with chopsticks, to avoid getting butter on his keyboard. That somehow seems to make a lot of sense to me.

Holidays; etymology

Holy Week -- evangelical Protestants at UC Berkeley are doing a sort of quiet but very visible outreach program to try to get people to talk to them about religion. I wonder whether other groups could use some of the same techniques. (I did preach for Linux on Sproul Plaza once, complete with readings from the Linux Bible, but I didn't have the same kind of organization that these Holy Week evangelists are practicing.)

Pesach -- there some disappointment within my family that I am not coming to celebrate Passover with them. I assume that, mutatis mutandis, my girlfriend probably would have taken me to a seder. As it happens, I'm not doing anything to observe the holiday.

I could probably get into the etymologies again this year, but lots of my friends have already heard the result. A year ago, I was still living in Berkeley, and I went and bought the Oxford Greek Dictionary (LSJ -- Liddell, Scott, and Jones, now also McKenzie) to resolve the question of whether "Pascha" (Orthodox Christian name for the Easter/Passover holiday) has to do with "pascho, paschein" (to suffer).

It seemed obvious to me that it should -- I heard about "paschal lambs" and so on, and it would make lots of intuitive sense to imagine a connection here. (In fact, Christian tradition definitely makes such a connection. See 1 Corinthians 5:7-8.)

To my astonishment, it turns out that "pascho" (from which we get all kinds of stuff -- "passion", "pathos", "pathetic", "sympathy", "pathology", "psychopathology", "passive", and so on) is thought to have absolutely no connection with "Pascha" (which is simply the Greek for the Hebrew proper noun "Pesach", which has to do with sparing, overlooking, omitting, but not suffering, experience, etc.). This is particularly funny in that the "Passion" and "Pascha" of Christian tradition commemorate the same event (sort of), and their Greek roots differ by only a single vowel, yet are not cognate.

Nick's father, a librarian and polyglot, reached the same conclusion, but I don't think he even had to look it up. :-)

2000-04-21

(01:54:16)

I heard from several friends, which was nice.

On the train

Going down: I did a tiny bit of consulting on the phone, felt mostly tired and unproductive, and should have taken a nap.

I planned my mini-vacation to attend the Smith College graduation in Northampton on May 14.

Coming back: I did take a nap. I was exhausted, and the conductor had to wake me up when we got to San Francisco. "Last stop!"

Licenses and local law

I talked to Jim about "indifference" and "depraved indifference", and whether you can have legal liability under various theories from putting code in the public domain.

kelly says that licenses might require compliance with local law so that courts won't re-interpret the licenses unfavorably in case of a conflict with local law.

Wouldn't a severability clause or a non-severability clause work for this purpose? The GPL is clear enough on this:

4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. [...]

7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

Nobody seems to think that either approach makes a license non-free. (It's the legal system's own fault, not the licensor's, if some jurisdiction isn't willing to respect the licensor's intentions!)

Is there something that a clause requiring compliance with local law gets you that a severability clause doesn't?

Speaking of preaching for Linux...

I got to see Don, who has my vote for Most Likely to Found the Real-Life Church of Emacs. All of you go read Linuxmanship now, if you haven't.

I'll put down the Linuxstammtische on my calendar now.

We're all mad here

$ zless glibc_2.1.3-8.diff.gz
   Per me si va ne la città dolente;
   per me si va ne l'etterno dolore;
   per me si va tra la perduta gente.

    Giustizia mosse il mio alto Fattore;
   fecemi la divina Potestate,
   la somma Sapienza e 'l primo Amore.

    Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create,
   se non etterne, e io etterno duro:
   Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate.

Shared libraries

I've been learning a lot about shared libraries this week, thanks mostly to dhd and to some experimentation. (I've also heard from other folks like Nick and David on this subject.) I'm trying to learn how shared libraries are organized and how to manipulate them in various ways.

I'm sure that some little birds could tell me more about this subject if I could just find the right opportunity. This reminds me that I really want to go to OLS.

My basic spring and summer travel schedule, if I can make it work out, would include Northampton (Smith graduation, elsewhere noted), Ottawa (OLS), and Las Vegas (DefCon). I might also try to sneak off to Los Angeles for another CPTWG, if I get in the mood.

If I ever finish writing "Third Parties and the End-to-end Model", I could submit it to a conference.

I really, really wanted to go to Portland, OR, and Seattle, WA, ever since September. But things really haven't worked out for that trip. It's actually very sad. I've now heard that two friends of mine are planning to drive up there after they graduate from college this spring -- but I don't know that I'll be able to take time away from work to join them.

Dale Carnegie

Re kelly's diary: I think the book was "How to Win Friends and Influence People".

pie

We got my colocated machine (pie) back up fairly quickly, thanks in part to tomsrtbt. (It's a very impressive piece of work. Thanks, Tom.) I couldn't use the BBC because pie doesn't have a CD-ROM drive.

2000-04-21

(14:57:21)

2000-04-23

(21:34:19)

This is longer than my usual diary entries, even, because it relates to the whole weekend. If you don't like this, click here to skip to the end of this entry (via a "#" link). Thanks.

I stayed in San Francisco on Friday and went to the Linuxcare company lunch and meeting. (Company lunch: pasta and pizza. This subsequently made me think about the lack of Passover-friendly food; see below.)

In the afternoon, Duncan and I worked on the Bootable Business Card. I hadn't had time to work on it at all recently, because I was out doing other work for Linuxcare.

I heard from my friend Anirvan, who's read my Advogato diary, and sent me a message about it. He had a number of very interesting comments on the phenomenon of web logs and web diaries.

Welcome to dmarti. ("Don Marti rules.")

Berkeley

In the evening, I went over to Berkeley. After having dinner with one friend, I went to Douglas Hofstadter's lecture, where I saw nine people I knew. (Hmmmm, you don't suppose I tend to meet people who would know who Douglas Hofstadter is, do you?)

I enjoyed Hofstadter's talk, and found it interesting. He discussed the various uses of "guy" (basically "a person" versus "a male person"), and some problems caused by these uses.

On the other hand, this talk was really not as exciting as other things Hofstadter has done. I heard him give a talk on translating poetry, a year or so ago, and it was more exciting. On the subject of sexism in language, Hofstadter's essay "A Person Paper on Purity in Language" (in Metamagical Themas) was much better, and I recommend it highly. There, he was completely dedicated to the point that sexism is language is an important and challenging issue, and he proved that point admirably.

One friend of mine was annoyed that Hofstadter had mixed descriptive linguistics (here are some ways that different people use "guy" in different situations) with prescriptive social activism (the implication that you should not use "guy" to refer to women, because of the negative consequences of doing so). Academic linguists usually do not mix prescriptive and descriptive treatments of language (and usually shy away from the prescriptive entirely, at least insisting that it does not belong to linguistics). My friend believed that Hofstadter crossed back and forth too carelessly.

I certainly respect Hofstadter a lot for his activism, as well as for his incredible academic work. (You can see some activist essays in Metamagical Themas, where there are several chapters on the challenges of preventing nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, in addition to the discussions of sexism in language. Hofstadter was courageous to decide to present these issues to his geek-and-linguist audience, and he used his talents well when he did so.) But I can appreciate the criticism that activist commentary and academic analysis don't always mix well. I think that, in this case, Hofstadter's talk would have been better if it had been more firmly on one side or the other. Very possibly, fewer people would have come to hear it.

Of course, it's very possible to be led to moral conclusions through academic work -- but people who present them together as such are going to be on pretty thin ice a lot of the time.

I'd like to see Hofstadter come back and talk about translation or concepts or fluidity in lexical categories or metaphors (maybe he could debate George Lakoff?), and then give a separate talk about sexism. I'd attend both.

Philosophiae, Quinte, semper vaco

After the talk, I was invited to a friend's house for what was originally billed as a discussion of what we'd just heard. The basic idea was that a number of people interested in philosophy or linguistics or cognitive science should come for a party at which we would all chat about Hofstadter's ideas.

This was a good idea, although it didn't necessarily come off exactly as planned: the amount of Hofstadter discussion was fairly small compared to other stuff. We had some fairly wide-ranging conversations.

I really had a lot of fun, and met some very interesting people. Maybe I should try to throw parties and get people talking to each other. That is a new idea for me; would it count toward my collaboration rating? :-)

Agreeing with Paul

The "I Agree With Paul" campaign was a big deal and a big topic of discussion all day, as well as at the party I went to. The basic idea was that some evangelical Protestant student groups got someone (a Berkeley student named Paul Lai) to write a personal statement of faith, whereupon almost all of their membership expressed their agreement with Paul's statement, and spent Holy Week ("Paul Week"?) wearing orange "I agree with Paul" shirts. (I'd like to link to Paul's statement, but I don't believe that it's online anywhere; it was printed in an ad in the Daily Cal, and on a few flyers.)

Amazingly, the evangelists did not register iagreewithpaul.com, iagreewithpaul.org, agreewithpaul.com, or agreewithpaul.org -- which I really would somehow have expected of a Bay Area movement run by twenty-year-olds. Not even paulweek.org. Hmmmm.

A couple of non-evangelical Christian friends told me that they were unhappy with the campaign, either because they felt that it was either hurting the solemnity or seriousness of religion, or because they did not agree with Christian evangelism in general.

I thought that the campaign was very effective because it got so many people to think about it and talk about it (and to do things like spend time writing Advogato diary entries about it). In fact, other campus groups started using the "I agree with..." formula in their own advertising. (I saw "Do you agree with Hofstadter?" flyers!) Some anti-Christian or anti-evangelical students ended up wearing their own orange t-shirts with other slogans (mostly "I agree with Nietzsche", which is actually a more complicated proposition than some people may have realized).

From the point of view of "exposing people who have never really heard about it to the gospel", even getting people to wear shirts that say that they disagree with Paul (of Tarsus, no doubt, as well as Paul Lai) is a great success. Many evangelists have said that the biggest problem is when people ignore their message -- not when people disagree with it. Every person who sees an anti-Paul shirt will thereby at least think about what Paul had to say, right?

I mean, I remember that lots of Linux activists were really happy when Microsoft started criticizing Linux, and running anti-Linux material on its web site. There are many reasons for this, including a peculiar sense of validation. Previously, Microsoft had scrupulously and deliberately ignored Linux, in a way that made it look completely out of touch with the technical community. By expressing its view that Linux was worthless, Microsoft proved that it thought that Linux was at least a worthy competitor, worth spending time and money to discredit.

And, in fact, by criticizing Linux, Microsoft made (in some people's view, certainly not everyone's) the PR battle turn from a fight to prove that Linux exists to a fight to prove that Linux is better. (Remember when the big problem for the spread of Linux was that nobody outside of hard-core geek circles had heard of the thing? Now, for the first time, we have large numbers of people trying Linux who subsequently actually don't like it and don't becoming Linux users! Previously, self-selection and other factors made this sort of thing fairly uncommon.)

So, even spending the time to argue against something helps keep it on people's minds, and helps send the message that you believe, and can understand, that someone might well at least find it worth considering. It lends credibility, or, if not credibility, at least an appearance of significance. Every single person who wears a shirt for or against the "I agree with Paul" campaign helps send the message to the public that he or she thinks that the question of who Jesus was is actually a question worth spending time and effort on. (This diary entry is itself also a victory of exactly the same sort I'm describing.)

So this is the strange and indirect triumph of the campaign, completely outside of how many people are converted directly by what they hear on Sproul Plaza. But the tactics are certainly making some observers very uneasy.

I guess my biggest problem with the campaign is that, for some people, it seems to reduce religion (and fundamental questions of theism and theology) to the level of a t-shirt slogan. The idea of uniting around a formal, common statement of belief is pretty old, and pretty common in Christianity. But these statements are traditionally longer, more sophisticated, and then also more elaborately justified, discussed, and understood.

The Nicene Creed is the statement of faith with which I'm most familiar. It (like the MIT X license) is certainly very concise. But that creed is the result of very sophisticated thought and discussion, and has a very detailed justification. In some sense, it was a major intellectual accomplishment. (I realize that some people, including some people who believe the Nicene Creed, don't think that that is an obvious virtue of a religious doctrine.)

The t-shirt slogan "I agree with Paul" is just not comparable to a religious tradition like that. It's just not as serious; it doesn't rely on or appeal to the same tradition of theological discussion. I guess that what I'm getting at is that religious t-shirt slogans seem sort of anti-intellectual to me, in comparison with other evangelical tactics like writing books. Last week, I was talking to someone about St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence and perfection of God, and (shortly afterward) reading some of Phillip Johnson's work, like Reason in the Balance, and criticisms of it, like Tower of Babel. It seems to me that this is a much better (more respectful, more committed, more fruitful?) approach to the question of God's existence (and the truth of particular religions, claimed divine revelations, etc.) than the apparent alternative:

Oh yeah? Well, I have an orange shirt!

You do not!

Do too!

Do not!

Do too!

Local law

I've been thinking further about kelly's comments about the "local law" provisions in licenses.

I'm familiar by now with the difference between a conditional license and a contract (although there are lots of efforts to prove that the GPL should be read as creating a contractual relationship, in order to make it irrevocable). I would like to know more about the consequences of different kinds of language in non-contractual licenses, and, for example, what happens if you put a severability clause or a non-severability clause in a non-contract license.

I'm still looking for ways to make people feel comfortable not requiring compliance with local law. :-) (This because I still think that doing so would violate the OSD, DSFG, etc., although I'm not sure I could convince people of this claim.)

There are also some subtle questions about the interaction between civil and criminal law (e.g. depraved indifference, contracts used to aid criminal purposes, other weird situations). The problem is that I originally only really wanted to learn about intellectual property stuff, but it seems impossible to have a good understanding of only one portion of a legal system -- like having a good understand of only one portion of science, maybe?

I'm probably going to need to think about the local law stuff, although maybe we can ask the lawyers who proposed this new license what they were trying to accomplish with that provision.

Food

Passover always makes me think a lot about what people eat and what they don't eat, and what they believe about what they eat, and what they believe about what other people eat, and what the social, political, and interpersonal consequences of these things are.

Some of these things are quite political, so to speak.

I mean, there was a big flamewar at my high school once upon a time on our e-mail and conferencing system about the school's food policies. Sorry, make that two flamewars. One was about whether animal rights supporters were right to wish that the school served only vegetarian food (the flamewar didn't reach the question of whether or not it was right for the school to serve meat, but only whether it was right for someone to wish that the school didn't serve meat). The other was about whether the school or students should take what might be called nonintuitive steps to satisfy the religious beliefs of Muslims at the school.

So, most people would probably say that the best approach is to speak of courtesy rather than moral obligation.

I could outline quickly a few possible reasons for not eating something:

• "I have a moral or religious objection to people in general eating X"
  • moral vegetarianism, religious vegetarianism
  • politically-related boycotts (labor, trade, environmental issues)
  • GMO activism

• "I have a moral or religious reason not to eat X myself at this time"
  • any of the above
  • religious dietary laws
  • beliefs about processed foods, organic food, etc.

• "I have a 'mandatory' health reason not to eat X myself"
  • I know someone who is allergic to gluten and someone who is allergic to garlic

• "I have an 'elective' health reason (or other explicit elective reason) not to eat X myself"
  • being "on a diet"
  • being vegetarian for long-term health reasons
  • lots of other things

• "I don't like X"
  • e.g., I don't like tomatoes

• "I don't feel like eating X"

What should you do if someone tells you any of the above things? How does what you should do depend on other aspects of the situation you're in?

There's a lot more I could say about this, but the issues go off in all different directions, and I don't know which thread to follow. I just know that satisfying people's beliefs and rules around food is quite difficult and provides examples of all kinds of other interesting controversies.

I've heard some people get very unhappy because a large entity (firm, school, conference...) did not properly account for their dietary rules. (Passover is a common occasion for this; perhaps someone at Linuxcare could have been upset that absolutely everything served at lunch was chametz.) On the other hand, I can probably find some examples where some of the same people would not be upset that other dietary rules hadn't been accomodated. So I guess that people tend to divide dietary rules into different categories, and have different intuitions about the relative importance of making accomodations for different rules.

Saturday

On Saturday, I went to Stacey's and got some fantastic stuff. I got a copy of Who is Fourier?, Recreations in the Theory of Numbers (recommended by someone here on Advogato), several other things, and a birthday present for a friend.

I went to dinner at Steps of Rome, where I met my friend Ben. He came by and we talked for quite a while.

Sunday

stephane mentioned Ukrainian Easter eggs, which prompted me to look up more information about Galicia. (My family on my mother's side were supposedly mostly Galician Jews, a century or two ago. According to what I found on the web, this means they were likely Austro-Hungarian subjects for most of the time they lived there. I don't know whether they lived in Western or Eastern Galicia.)

Galicia is one of these parts of Europe with a long and complex history. Well, I guess all of Europe is like that.

I also talked to Nick about the calculation of Easter. It is more complicated than I thought -- he tells me that Old Calendarist and New Calendarist Orthodox Christians celebrate Pascha on the same day (which may or may not be the same day the Western churches do, in a given year), even though they celebrate other holidays on different days. (So there are actually three different ways in wide use of calculating Christian holidays -- Western-style Gregorian, Eastern-style Gregorian, and Eastern-style Julian.)

Since Nick and I weren't celebrating Easter today, we went out for Indian food. We ran into Joey on Muni. Then we ended up at the new branch of Black Oak Books in the City, which was fun. (I know some of the owners of that store, and they happened to drop by while we were there.)

kjk is looking for Vernor Vinge's "True Names"; I've been looking for that, too, for two years, and I haven't found it, despite checking in a few dozen bookstores, including science fiction bookstores. The book is True Names ... and Other Dangers, and, well, they told me that it was going to be reprinted Real Soon Now. It's very definitely out of print. (By the way, it's "Vernor" rather than "Vernon".)

ObFreeSoftware: I first heard of Vernor Vinge through the Jargon File bibliography, and then subsequently through the work of the American libertarian anarchist economist David D. Friedman (they cite each other in connection with Vinge's story "The Ungoverned" and Friedman's book The Machinery of Freedom; Friedman's speaking on Sunday in Berkeley, and anyone who's interested can e-mail me for details). But it turns out that Vinge also has a connection to the free software world; he is an occasional advisor to the FSF, and he's been a judge on a panel for the first FSF free software award.

I wrote to the FSF to ask what Vinge's connection was; they wrote back and said, more or less, that he had been a long-time supporter of the concept of free software.

2000-04-27

(09:36:06)

Click here to skip to the end of my diary entry. Thanks.

My beard is coming back, gradually. I believe that there is probably great psychological significance in this.

When I wrote (in my discussion of evangelism recently) about the changing demographics of people trying Linux, I said that many people "don't becoming Linux users"; that should have been "don't become Linux users".

pvg

When I first started looking at the Pascha/pascho thing, I didn't know that "Pascha" was related to "Pesach". At least, I don't think I knew that. But it turned out that I was not the first person to think there was a connection.

The Greek term for Easter, pascha, has nothing in common with the verb paschein, "to suffer," although by the later symbolic writers it was connected with it; it is the Aramaic form of the Hebrew word pesach (transitus, passover).

lilo

I wonder where Rob went.

Telsa

Metamagical Themas is much "easier" than Godel, Escher, Bach, because you can pick and choose which short essays you're interested in; they aren't all so tightly interwoven. The articles in MT don't really depend on one another, so you won't necessarily get confused by reading them out of order or by picking and choosing among them. I thought GEB was a great challenge, and it has been my favorite book, but it's definitely kind of scary.

Metamagical Themas is a collection of short articles on different subjects -- nuclear war, sexism, linguistics, LISP, the Rubik's Cube, Chopin, game theory and evolutionary biology, calligraphy, artificial intelligence, numbers, parapsychology... it's pretty cool.

rachel

I saw your article about Linuxcare. So did a lot of other people at Linuxcare. We must be interesting to the outside world or something... sort of like Red Hat.

Metagato

Maybe somebody should just register metagato.org and...

On the train -- Monday

On the way down:

I agree with the recent comment about high-level languages and library functions, assuming I remember it correctly. :-)

It's amazing to think about the difference between people whose computers are likely to be CPU-bound and people whose computers are not. This is the underlying point of the claim that most people don't need computers as fast as those presently on the market.

Clearly, if you are using your computer to try to do computations, then you need all the CPU time you can get. I've been thinking about calculations of pi again, after looking through Pi: A Source Book. If you're not trying to calculate a constant, or perform a simulation, or generally run something CPU-intensive, then you don't need such a fancy computer. If you strace most of the processes running on a desktop system, you will see that most of them are blocked on I/O most of the time (unless they are doing computations, or are poorly written). I mean, let someone log in as you remotely, and "strace -p" various things you are running as you run them. (I've attached an strace to the editor I'm using to write this entry. By switching back and forth, I can see that vim spends almost all of its time in select(2), waiting for Linux to tell it that I've typed something. The computer is, of course, millions of times faster than I am, even though I am still the fastest typist I know.)

Load averages tell the same basic story.

Lewis Carroll, I've discovered, shared my objection to the premises of certain arithmetical proportion problems. (As I put it, "If nine women can have nine babies in nine months, how many women will it take to have one baby in one month?" I think this analogy is originally due to F. P. Brooks or one of his colleagues.)

Once upon a time, I was actually asked such a question on a test, and I objected. I think the problem was given in terms of pizzas.

Suppose C chefs are making pizza. It is observed that they can make P pizzas in time T. The naive model says that everything is proportional; there is a rate R=kC=P/T such that any number of chefs can make pizzas in a quantity proportional to the number of chefs and the time spent on the exercise. (Actually, the really silly assumption is that there is a constant k such that k=R/C: that is, that each chef adds a constant number of pizzas per hour to the overall rate of pizza production!)

This assumption is ridiculous in several ways:

1. The pizza-making process consists of several steps which must be performed in a particular order (for each pizza). These steps have different characteristics.
2. There might be an absolutely fixed-time component required for one step (e.g. every pizza must be baked for 11 minutes, so the pizza-baking step can never be reduced below 11 minutes, regardless of what resources are applied to it).
3. There might be a limit on parallelization of one step (e.g. the oven used to bake the pizzas might only hold 8 pizzas at once, so no more than 8 pizzas at a time can ever be in the baking stage).
4. There might be diminishing returns to some resource (e.g. the "too many cooks" problem: if there are more than 12 chefs in the kitchen at once, they start to bump into each other and slow each other down).
5. There might be imperfect divisibility of some resource (e.g. a chef might be distracted by having to spend only one second at a time working on each of 20,000 pizzas).
6. There might be some step which cannot be scaled up or down at all (e.g. maybe some aspect of pizza-making requires exactly C chefs, one for each of C distinct and necessary roles, and is not aided by the addition of more chefs, but would be impossible with fewer chefs).
7. Some steps might be subject to a strict serialization constraint (e.g. it is not possible to begin preparing meat pizzas at all until all of the kosher pizzas that the kitchen will ever produce have been finished; chefs who specialize in some aspect of meat pizza production must sit around and watch until the kosher pizzas are all done and out of the kitchen).

Infinite divisibility and arbitrary scaling of processes are problematic assumptions. If a problem says that we should assume that every aspect of a process can be scaled arbitrarily and linearly, then this problem has no connection to anything that people can do in the real world. (It might be close to things computers can do, though.)

If you really made a large number of pizzas, some steps would be labor-bound, some steps would be time-bound, some steps would be space-bound, and so on.

On the way back: I took a nap.

Here's what Carroll said (I subsequently found it again in John Fisher's The Magic of Lewis Carroll, pp. 140-142).

If 6 cats kill 6 rats in 6 minutes, how many will be needed to kill 100 rats in 50 minutes?

This is a good example of a phenomenon that often occurs in working problems in double proportion; the answer looks all right at first, but when we come to test it, we find that, owing to peculiar circumstances in the case, the solution is either impossible or else indefinite, and needing further data. in 6 minutes, how many will be needed to kill 100 rats in 50 minutes?

This is a good example of a phenomenon that often occurs in working problems in double proportion; the answer looks all right at first, but when we come to test it, we find that, owing to peculiar circumstances in the case, the solution is either impossible or else indefinite, and needing further data. [...]

[W]hen we come to trace the history of this sanguinary scene through all its horrid details, we find that at the end of 48 minutes 96 rats are ead, and that there remain 4 live rates and 2 minutes to kill them in: the question is, can this be done?

Now there are at least four different ways in which the original feat, of 6 cats killing 6 rats in 6 minutes, may be achieved. For the sake of cleaness let us tabulate them:

A. All 6 cats are needed to kill a rat: and this they do in one minute, the other rats standing meekly by, waiting for their turn.

B. 3 cats are needed to kill a rat, and they do it in 2 minutes.

C. 2 cats are needed, and do it in 3 minutes.

D. Each cat kills a rat all by itself, and take[s] 6 minutes to do it. [...]

This, then, is an instance of a solution made "indefinite" by the circumstances of the case. If an instance of the "impossible" be desired, take the following: "If a cat can kill a rat in a minute, how many would be needed to kill it in the thousandth part of a second?" The mathematical answer, of course, is "60,000," and no doubt less than this would not suffice; but would 60,000 suffice? I doubt it very much. I fancy that at least 50,000 of the cats would never even see the rat, or have any idea of what was going on.

Or take this: "If a cat can kill a rat in a minute, how long would it be killing 60,000 rats?" Ah, how long, indeed! My private opinion is that the rats would kill the cat.

Python

I wrote my first Python one-liner Monday. It was fun. Thereupon, I also wrote the fragment below, which uses tuple, map, and divmod on the same line. Python's choices of built-in functions are pretty neat.

This is a way (I bet Python already provides a way) to print out integers formatted (US English locale-style) with commas every three places:

def comma(n):
        if n < 0:
                return "-" + comma(-n)
        if n < 1000:
                return str(n)
        return "%s,%s" % tuple(map(comma,divmod(n,1000)))

I think Python is something like a cross between BASIC and Scheme. Or maybe it's just my use of Python that's like a cross between BASIC and Scheme. :-)

Why doesn't the "%" string formatting operator allow you to use any sequence type, instead of just tuples? If it could work with a string and a list, I could say

return "%s,%s" % map(comma,divmod(n,1000))

</BLOCKQUOTE>

On the train -- Tuesday and Wednesday

I took some naps and also ported my book collection web page generation script from awk to Python. The awk version is much faster than the Python version. But the Python version helped me find some typos in the database, mostly because there are very few things that will actually ever cause an error in awk. (Array overruns? Non-existent dictionary keys? No problem!)

Conference schedules

Why are the O'Reilly Open Source Conference and the Ottawa Linux Symposium happening at the same time?

Wisdom teeth

Now I am getting very worried about my wisdom teeth; as they come in, they hurt slightly in various ways. Teeth do hurt when they come in, which is no problem; my concern is whether the pain will persist and be a sign that I need to see a dentist about this.

Wednesday

After work, I went to the Linuxstammtisch at Tied House in Mountain View. I'd never been to a Linuxstammtisch before, even though they've been held for over a year. I was impressed with Mountain View. I used to be under the impression that Mountain View was some sort of huge suburban wasteland, like some of the parts of Southern California I've seen. It's not true!

I had this impression because I had never been to downtown Mountain View; all I had ever seen was computer companies, and heard other people's descriptions. So, downtown Mountain View is actually chock full of restaurants, and (wow) bookstores. These, for me, are the two largest direct benefits of cities. What am I to make of this? I would not necessarily have minded living in Mountain View -- although it would make getting to Berkeley quite difficult.

The restaurants around Castro Street are quite appealing, even if some of them look like the were taken out of an upscale mall. There is a nice variety of Asian food, and a lot of other things. I look forward to coming back and trying some of them -- and going book-hunting.

The Linuxstammtische are held at Tied House, a brew pub and restaurant in Mountain View. It was quite nice, and the food was very good, much better than anything I have ever found at a bar before. (Not that I spend a lot of time in bars.) I finally learned why it's called "Tied House": it's based on an old name for a tavern which served a particular brewery's beer (in this case, its own!), as opposed to a "free house", which served the beer brewed by the breweries of its choice. I wonder if the Department of Justice will investigate. :-)

I saw lots of people I knew at the Linuxstammtisch, including Deirdre, Don, Heather, and Jim. (Also Rick, who's not on Advogato.) South Bay Linux events seem to get a very large VA contingent. The conversations were pretty geeky, and pretty loud (with the background noise of Tied House to compete against). There were some forseeable conversations about intellectual property law, and Don told me about some interesting stuff he was thinking about.

Don is fun to talk to. (Sorry I didn't get to talk to other people so much -- it was pretty noisy and hard to hear.)

Latin morphology and inflection code

Perseus clearly has some nice Latin and Greek morphological analysis software. You can put in something like "anesti", and it immediately tells you something like "oh, that's prefix ana- + third person singular indicative of eimi", which is cool, which is hard for people to learn to do in real life, and which is somewhat more useful than a dictionary, especially for compounds and irregular verbs (or compounds of irregular verbs).

In eighth grade, I wrote some Latin verb conjugating software in BASICA (i.e. GWBASIC). It was pretty nice, with infinitives and most finite forms produced from principal parts of a first-conjugation verb. (I had trouble with some of the rules for what happens to stem vowels in other conjugations. It can be tricky, although it's possible to describe somehow.) Among the many problems with this (completely aside from the awful language I was using) was the fact that it only went one way, from a description of a form to the form.

Nowadays, I might try to write a Latin inflections library, or a Latin parsing library (presumably in Python). It would be fun. But I'm wondering whether Perseus or someone else has released code that's useful for manipulating Latin words. I don't necessarily want to reinvent the wheel, but I don't know how Perseus feels about free software or where their code comes from. Is there something I should look at?

(17:30:04)

Click here to skip to the end of my diary entry. Thanks.

Jim told me about Japanese particles. (Think linguistics, not physics.)

I had some interesting e-mail exchanges with Rachel, although I wasn't as clear and well-organized as I'd like to have been. Her diary mentions the discussion between Eric and Larry Lessig (which I've been following -- it's a fantastic discussion, and I should say more about it sometime).

I read "What Russia Teaches Us Now" a while ago (probably shortly after it first came out); I this I followed the link from Huben's Critiques of Libertarianism site. I found it very depressing. (I remember reading something very similar in print in something my father sent me, probably in The Atlantic or something.)

Since I'm still planning to go hear David Friedman on Sunday, maybe I should take the opportunity to ask him about Russia. The problem is that Friedman isn't coming to talk about Machinery of Freedom sorts of things -- he's going to speak about economic analysis of law.

graydon's comments about LSD and Buddhism again remind me of the story of the Sirens in the Odyssey.

Nick announced that our roommate Karl is planning to move out, so there followed much discussion about whether we should try to get another roommate or not. (It's mostly a classic space vs. rent thing.)

The DVD cases have some interesting things coming up, most notably a "right to link" issue. The defense in the New York case is expected to respond very soon to a motion for an injunction which would forbid 2600 from putting links on its web site to of DeCSS (among other things).

This could be an important precedent, whether that motion is granted or denied.

BBC

Thanks to the good people of the Linuxcare web team, you can now download a BBC source tree directly from Linuxcare's web site. (Previously people were supposed to e-mail us and such.) I hope this will be helpful to sethcohn and the Lubbock Project.

Trading CS books for law books

I was going to trade a copy of K&R for a Blue Book, seeing as I had a spare K&R (sort of) and I know a lawyer who has a spare Blue Book. But she had already bought a copy of K&R. So, I get the Blue Book, and she gets an IOU.

Learning legal citation is reasonably useful, so that lawyers won't laugh at you when you write about the law. I've gotten as far as knowing how to cite Supreme Court decisions, USC, and CFR correctly in principle. There are still a lot of things I have absolutely no clue how to cite.

On the train

I listened to some music and thought about some things. I started a letter to Wolfgang. I finished my expense report for my trip to Southern California last month. No math recently; I've been trying to catch up on sleep and other things.

Book collecting

I reached the 500th book in my on-line catalog (which was Fraleigh's First Course in Abstract Algebra). And, speaking of algebra,

Let's do algebra instead of getting a haircut!

I wanted to go to Berkeley early on Saturday. Instead, I spent about three or four hours trying to simplify a polynomial. But I learned a lot from the process.

First, I got introduced to a library called SAML; then, I tried to build the Python stuff locally, and got stuck because I didn't have the Python API header files. While I was waiting for the Python source code to download over a 28.8 link, I ended up learning a little of the Samuel language, which exposes the string parsing functions of SAML, which was all I wanted to use in the first place.

I was doing this because a friend took her teacher certification exam this morning, and sent me a "complete this sequence" question:

1, 3, 7, 13, ___, 31, 43, 57

If you happen to want to try this problem yourself, don't read anything below this paragraph.

(Well, in case you didn't believe me, I'm giving you one more chance to stop reading now before you see my answer, which is, incidentally, not 15, in case your eyes are magically attracted to numbers in the paragraphs below where you are supposed to be reading...)

^L

OK, when I saw the problem, I did successive differences and immediately came up with the answer 21. I gave my friend a few justifications for why the answer should be 21 (the successive differences are the even numbers 2, 4, 6, 8...), and then I said "Now I have to come up with a justification for why 17 is correct, so that you can claim to be right anyway. :-)" -- so, three and a half hours later, having located, downloaded, built, and experimented with SAML and a bunch of Python programs that generate other Python programs or Samuel programs, I came up with

f(n) = (1/36)n^7 - (31/36)n^6 + (391/36)n^5 - (2581/36)n^4 + (2386/9)n^3 - (4882/9)n^2 + 563n - 223

I forgot where I learned the trick I used for getting an expression for that. But the expression itself was

((-(1/5040)*(n-2)*(n-3)*(n-4)*(n-5)*(n-6)*(n-7)*(n-8))+((3/720)*(n-1)*(n-3)*(n-4)*(n-5)*(n-6)*(n-7)*(n-8))+(-(7/240)*(n-1)*(n-2)*(n-4)*(n-5)*(n-6)*(n-7)*(n-8))+((13/144)*(n-1)*(n-2)*(n-3)*(n-5)*(n-6)*(n-7)*(n-8))+(-(17/144)*(n-1)*(n-2)*(n-3)*(n-4)*(n-6)*(n-7)*(n-8))+((31/240)*(n-1)*(n-2)*(n-3)*(n-4)*(n-5)*(n-7)*(n-8))+(-(43/720)*(n-1)*(n-2)*(n-3)*(n-4)*(n-5)*(n-6)*(n-8))+((57/5040)*(n-1)*(n-2)*(n-3)*(n-4)*(n-5)*(n-6)*(n-7)))

which took SAML to simplify, as I wouldn't have wanted to do it by hand. There are some very pretty reasons why the signs alternate.

Maybe I will publish a Python program which uses SAML to print a polynomial which generates an arbitrary integer sequence. The algebraic manipulation is the only missing piece, and it is kind of fun to be able to do this.

The only practical application I know, though, is proving the validity of completely absurd solutions to integer sequence completion puzzles.

The only problem is that this whole exercise made me something like five hours late getting to Berkeley, which ruined my plan of getting a haircut over there. However, people who implement free symbolic math libraries and languages rule!

(10:35:31)

Click here to skip to the end of my diary entry. Thanks.

Weekend

On Saturday, as my previous entry discusses, I worked for several hours on finding a polynomial which would generate a particular sequence. I still haven't remembered where I learned the technique to do this, but it's pretty easy in principle.

I guess I could repeat the process in five or ten minutes now using the programs I wrote and downloaded.

I eventually made it to Berkeley. I had a good weekend there; I saw several friends, several of whom showed me great hospitality. We ended up eating a lot of Indian food through the weekend.

I also ran into my boss from the Lab. We discussed of the ideal efficiency of parallel algorithms (and the significance of context switch time, or conditional branch time, versus network latency). I explained an argument due to my ex-girlfriend (who doesn't know what "context switch time" or "network latency" are, but who didn't let that prevent her from making a very subtle argument about them), and we delved into it a bit further than the people with us might have appreciated. (My friend who watched our discussion said it had reminded her of a graduation party where a comedian told jokes in Hindi -- she could at least tell that the jokes were funny...)

On Sunday evening, I heard David Friedman speak about encryption and freedom on the Internet. Most of his talk was a summary of standard cryptoanarchist theory (along the lines of the writing of T. C. May, who got some credit). Unfortunately, in Berkeley, most people who would come to a talk about encryption and freedom on the Internet are already pretty familiar with cypherpunk ideas. Friedman managed to avoid claiming that encryption and remailers would dramatically erode governments' control over the physical world. Those claims are really hard to support, compared to the much solider claim that information will be very difficult to regulate if the use of encryption and networks continues to expand.

Professor Friedman autographed my copy of The Machinery of Freedom. Cool. Unfortunately, Vernor Vinge's True Names ... and Other Dangers is still out of print; many people in the audience had been looking for it.

A performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor is coming up next weekend or so. I hope a few of my friends will want to go with me.

Copyleft for organisms

graydon: I've talked to people quite a bit about genome patents and organism patents. Many of my friends are very unhappy that, say, plant varieties (or features of plants, or plant genes) are patentable under various legal systems. For some people, this is an issue of being opposed to genetic engineering in general.

I'm not opposed to genetic engineering, but organism patents make me unhappy for other reasons. So I started wondering about whether plants could be copylefted -- or, in general, could one make up an effective copyleft-style license for patent rights?

I've asked several people about this, including one or two intellectual property lawyers, and Richard M. Stallman. Stallman's opinion was unequivocal: copyleft licensing cannot work for patents, and political activism toward patent reform is necessary instead. Apparently, according to Stallman, the law of patents is so far removed from the law of copyrights that the appropriate legal strategies simply can't translate meaningfully from one realm to another.

When Stallman told me this, I was disappointed, because I wished that, if intellectual property rights are going to be enforced in organisms and their genomes, it would be nice to have something analogous to copyleft to try to keep some useful but novel plant varieties and such freely available to the public.

I know of at least one person who is actually trying to draft a copyleft-style license for patent rights. (This despite the comments of Stallman and others that this strategy isn't effective.) I wish him luck.

One obvious practical difference between copyrights and patents (in the U.S.) is that copyrights exist immediately and automatically, with no filing fee. Patents require an application process, including a filing fee, and may or may not be granted. That definitely changes the economics of patent licensing.

May Day

I hope everybody had a happy May Day.

On the train

I tried to sleep on the way down, being very tired. On the way back, I started work on a "legal citation to URL convertor" (which you can try out here). One of the regulars on dvd-discuss proposed that a demonstration of the analogy between WWW hypertext links and legal citations might help the argument against the MPAA's anti-linking motion. (They asked the Southern District of New York to ban 2600 from linking to sites that mirror DeCSS.)

So one claim is that hypertext links are much like legal citations, because they are a precise, formal way to describe how to locate a particular resource. But they don't actually provide the resource: it's your job, if you want to look up a citation, or follow a link, to do the looking-up work. The actual resource will be provided by someone else; the citation just tells you where you ought to look and what you ought to look for.

Since a variety of legal authorities are now freely available on-line, we can dramatize this analogy by making a program which turns legal citations into URLs. I've now done this, but only for four authorities. (There are hundreds of legal authorities, and I don't know how to cite most of them. But I can learn!)

This might end up being a free software project -- I could try to expand this code into a library for manipulating legal citations (parsing them, generating them, and finding or explaining how to find what they refer to). That would be a fun way to learn the ins and outs of the whole thing.

No haircut

I never managed to get a haircut, because the places I wanted to go were closed on Sunday. Oops!

(10:44:09)

Click here to skip to the end of my diary entry. Thanks. (Oh, bneely, what's your objection to my use of "click here"? Do you, like me, not usually use a mouse with your web browser? Do you dislike the fact that this is phrased as an imperative? Or is it just that the use of the word "here" in links to refer to the links themselves is bad WWW style?)

I haven't had time to read all the diaries here in the past couple of days. Please excuse me if I've missed something.

I now have a plane ticket back to Massachusetts. I'll be there between Thursday, May 11, and Monday, May 15. I need to write a letter soon to make sure of seeing someone while I'm back.

Previous diary entry

A mistake in my previous diary entry erratum and a couple of things which should have been linked: OpenPatent License. MPAA's Hyperlink FAQ, DVD FAQ. (Is linking to those a copyright infringement?) T. C. May's views. Opposition to genome patents (and much of genetic engineering).

I can't find any news of the upcoming Mass in B minor performance. Maybe I misread the flyer, maybe it's just not announced on-line. If anybody knows about this (as lots of Advogato readers live in the Bay Area), please let me know.

Program design help

I now have a program which parses a few kinds of legal citations. It currently does this by using the re module in Python. (That module implements Perl-style regular expressions, which are quite powerful and flexible.)

I'm thinking of abandoning the regular expressions and writing a BNF grammar instead. (I don't know anything which can use BNF-style grammars with Python, though. I could no doubt learn bison and write in C instead.)

Does anyone have any opinion?

One reason that grammars are appealing is that a citation can have a recursive structure, e.g.

Party v. Party, Volume Reporter Page at Page (Year), Volume Reporter Page at Page, Volume Reporter Page at Page, Volume Reporter Page at Page.

So I could probably write some bison-style rules:

case: parties ", " startreporterlist;
parties: plaintiff " v. " defendant;
startreporterlist: firstreporterwithpage | firstreporterwithpage ", " reporterlist;
reporterlist: reporterwithpage ", " reporterlist | reporterwithpage;
firstreporterwithpage: reportercitewithpage " (" year ") "; reporterwithpage: reportercite | reportercite " at " page;
reportercite: volume " " reportername " " page;

As I think I mentioned before, the main reason for writing this is to prove that legal citations are formal and specific enough to be read directly by a computer. This might also be useful to people doing legal research, especially if they don't have a formal background in law.

I hereby threaten to try to write a parser for English phrase structure. (I did that once using the declarative database query language that's implemented in Scheme in SICP. It was slow. The basic idea is to write a lot of rules like "If A is a noun-phrase and B is a verb-phrase, then A B is a sentence." Then you see what the system can deduce about what strings are sentences.) But I guess I can work on that after I'm done with legal citations.

Patents

It's hard to co-ordinate any kind of anti-patent movement, in much the same way as it's hard to co-ordinate, say, an organized free software movement.

Some people think that {patents, proprietary software programs} are {morally wrong, improperly protected by legislation, impractical, inefficient, counterproductive} in {all cases, many general cases, certain situations}.

Sentiment against software, business method, and organism/variety/genome patents runs pretty high in certain circles. That's not necessarily in the Outside World, though. (Intellectual property in pharmaceutical products is pretty controversial too. You can imagine a world in which a cure for AIDS or cancer was known and published but nobody in most countries had the right to prepare and distribute it. Of course, economic considerations make this enormously unlikely.)

It's easier for people with the same overall perspective to agree on a strategy. Consider the difference between the GPL, releasing software to the public domain (or under an MIT-style license), and signing a (large, public) covenant among many programmers never to sue each other for copyright infringement. Depending on what people think the problems or opportunities are, different strategies will seem more appealing.

So, people who are against patents in general could sign a document saying that none of them will ever bring a patent infringement suit against anyone who has signed that document. But people who would sign such a thing are pretty unlikely to get ahold of patents in the first place, and definitely account for only a tiny percentage of patent holders.

I need to get ahold of Don and finish our discussion of the economics of patents. Well, it's only four weeks to the next Stammtisch...

Tuesday

I stayed in San Francisco on Tuesday and worked in Linuxcare's office there. I had lunch with Nick and Rob at a place called the Primo Patio Cafe (which has been mentioned on Advogato before). It was lots of fun.

Berkeley

I went to the last CalLUG meeting of the semester. It was unusually well attended. There were lots of novices there; did we make them feel welcome? I've heard two directly opposite opinions this semester -- that CalLUG doesn't do enough to make new and prospective users feel welcome, and that it does too much outreach and wastes time that way.

I feel that outreach to new and prospective users is incredibly important. On the other hand, I also expect them to be serious and dedicated if they do decide to become involved with Linux -- I guess my ideal is something like the martial arts instructors in the movies, who have no patience for students who lack commitment, but show a lot of concern for, and give a lot of attention to, those who seem to make the effort.

I got involved in a discussion of the "is free software changing the world, or is the world changing free software?" argument. (It's actually a normative question: "should free software try to change the world, or try to accomodate to people's existing expectations?".) I described the two extremes of opinion on this question and talked about GUIs versus command lines. One prospective Linux user at the meeting, when asked what attracted her to Linux, pronounced the lack of a required GUI the largest attraction. What, someone asked, did she have against graphics?

"I think they're decadent," she said.

Rounds of laughter.

No less an authority, I pointed out after she'd left, than Neal Stephenson suggested that many hacker-types had an instinct that graphical interface is decadent. I would much rather the LUG hadn't laughed at her; polite disagreement is fair.

I had dinner with a friend from CalLUG, and then quite a remarkable conversation. Thanks.

Wednesday

I went to SVLUG, where I heard Rasmus Lerdorf talking about PHP, and where there was much discussion about the recent events at Linuxcare. Thanks to Jim and Dave for rides.

A completely awesome list of people filing declarations in support of the defendant's motion against the anti-linking injunction -- there's a confusing sentence for you. These people made arguments that 2600 should be allowed to link to DeCSS. Take a look at this cast of characters! Professors, lawyers, computer scientists, security experts, Linux developers... (The actual motion is up at Cryptome by now.)

Haloch yelech u'vachoh

It has been said that having a girlfriend means allowing someone to call iopl(2) on you.

(12:18:47)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

(bneely has prevailed upon me to change how I phrase that.)

Happy Cinco de Mayo.

Professor Abelson's declaration in the New York DVD case inspired me to enter my copy of SICP into my database. Unfortunately, Abelson and Sussman are still not at the top of that list. I'm afraid that even the great Abelson can't beat the sort order of Edwin Abbott Abbott, author of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. It's hard for me to imagine who could beat Abbott. Does anyone know of an author with the last name "Aaron" who might be of interest to me? :-)

mdorman has a long and interesting diary entry which also happens to recommend Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater News Service. I've been a faithful subscriber for about a year, and I've already recommended it on my web site. If you are the sort of person who ... well, I don't know exactly what sort of person should read RRE. Maybe someone should ask Phil Agre.

I'll give the URL again as a hyperlink:

http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html

I am staying home today (Friday) to deal with some personal problems.

I have a note about demographics which I'll save for another time.

On the train (Thursday)

A passenger in my car had a seizure as the train was passing through the Burlingame station. That was scary, not least for the passenger himself. The Burlingame fire department were the first responders; they were there in about five minutes after the CalTrain conductors were notified. They had several paramedics with defibrilators, stethoscopes, oxygen, and lots of equipment I didn't recognize. After them came the Burlingame police, and finally an ambulance.

This is only the second time I've seen an emergency response. The first time was when I was in high school, and a neighbor collapsed from an allergic reaction to something he'd been prescribed. In both cases, I was deeply impressed by the responses. The people who responded were fast, knowledgeable, and professional.

In both cases, too, I felt very helpless. Back in high school, I did at least get to call for help; this time, there was nothing I could do. (I came within ten seconds of calling 911 on my cell phone, but I doubt it would have helped; I would have reached a dispatcher in San Francisco, and I hadn't even been paying enough attention to know what station we were in.)

Emergency responses are also an occasion for a lot of reflection (at least afterward!).

More law cite fun

My law cite --> URL script is now in a form where you can try it out a bit. It is primitive. It is possibly already useful to some people.

I appreciate dalke's tip on SPARK -- I'll definitely be taking a look at that. My e-mail address can be formed in the common way from UserDir URLs:

s/http:\/\/www\.\(.*\)\/~\(.*\)\//\2@\1/

ajk had some things to say about my problem, too -- I'd like to find some books on parsing and stuff, since I understand many of the concepts but never got that far in my formal CS education.

(10:33:29)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

I stayed home Friday to deal with some things, and, in the evening, my friend Josh arrived from Montana for a visit. He left again early Monday morning.

On Saturday, we went to Berkeley, and then came back to San Francisco to have dinner with a friend. We found some nice places to eat.

I am trying to think of exciting free-software-relevant events from the weekend. I did buy a copy of the other Kernighan and Pike. It looks very good. I also admired some other computing books in Cody's; they have a rather large Linux section, larger by quite a bit now than their Macintosh section. (I don't know whether the situation is quite the same in bookstores outside the Bay Area.)

Linux has a pretty significant mind share now, if the number of books in Cody's dedicated to it is any indication. But a whole lot of those are the cheap mass-market application-specific computing paperbacks that are only valid for a particular software version. (People are now writing some of the same kinds of books about Linux that they've been writing about Visual Basic for a long time.) I don't like to buy those books; I'd rather have books that talk about general principles on a high level of abstraction, and then maybe some technical manuals for current versions of particular software. "Learning Red Hat Linux 6.0" doesn't appeal to me much more than "Learning Visual Basic 4.0".

I had some chats with Nick and Stephane and Rob, at various points.

I'll be working more on my law cite thing soon, and I hope that it might eventually turn into a vaguely useful piece of free software.

(10:39:55)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

I met anton very briefly; he is visiting from Australia. I bet it would be cool to visit Australia and see what the people over there are up to.

Conferences, travel

Trying to get to OLS and Northampton, thinking of giving up on DefCon. When is DVD Pro again?

Law cites

Wendy sent me a Bluebook. Thanks, Wendy!

I messed around with SPARK on the train, and found that writing realistic grammars (even for a small language) is harder than it looks at first, not to mention more tedious. Of course, reading the Bluebook also contributed to this impression, because it mentions all kinds of bizarre special cases that people hardly ever use. But it suggested some of the possibilities that are out there and that I really ought to pay attention to.

Why is reading the Bluebook depressing?

Reading the Bluebook is depressing for a couple of broader reasons. I wrote a bunch about this, but I think it's another commentary I'll put off for now.

Zoe-Dan numbers

... are "Landau's function g(n)". So saith Sloane.

(17:10:38)

I finally got to see Napster in operation. This is very interesting on many different levels.

I think big copyright holders are going to start fighting end-to-end connectivity wherever they see it -- or perhaps just fighting upstream bandwidth for end users.

On the other hand, I think the Napster company is going to be shut down. They are not going to be able to convince courts that they're not engaged in contributory copyright infringement. Because they're a for-profit entity, they're not going to get a lot of pro-bono help from civil liberties activities. (It's really unfortunate that nobody in the outside world helped defend the StreamBox people when Real Networks sued them under the DMCA. That was a DMCA anti-circumvention case, long before the DeCSS case!)

2000-05-14

(23:50:38)

A certain alma mater of mine decided to put the student Unix machine there (which I use as a primary NS for a number of domains, since it seems more reliable than my own colocated machine) behind a firewall, destroying its ability to run a nameserver at all. (It's not going to be able to run much of anything behind that firewall. We've got to get it back out onto the open Internet, and soon.) So, this is happening while I'm out here on vacation, and any domain I still want to have a primary has to get switched over tonight.

In general, I've had a fantastic vacation, and I have a long diary entry about it in the works. I'm headed back to California tomorrow night. Congratulations to the new alumnae.

Smith diplomas refer to their having been granted "die XIV Maii anno Salutatis Humanae MM Respublicaeque Americanae CCXXIV" or something like that (I don't have one handy at the moment). Given the very substantial non-Christian population there, I bet more people would be complaining about this if they only knew what it meant.

2000-05-17

(09:50:06)

I still have no new laptop charger, so I can't get at my vacation diary entry drafts. I hope they still feel interesting when the laptop comes back up...

I'm back in California.

On the train (Tuesday)

I played around with what happens to sound from a point source by the time it reaches your (point) ears. I'm curious about whether I can make a program that will transform a sound wave so that it sounds like it originated from a particular location.

I'm neglecting the Doppler effect right now, but trying to explain what happens when a sound source is moving. I think the Doppler effect is actually necessary to avoid a paradox in which sounds are heard twice, or not at all, when the sources that created them are moving.

This is another "this was known long ago and is surely documented in relevant textbooks, but is fun and educational" thing.

It's interesting to realize that the formula for the intensity of a wave at a particular location should properly include all of space for all of history. We tend to hear this a lot in regard to light from distant stars (which may have originated vast numbers of years ago), but not about sound from distant sources. I guess this is mostly because the media through which sound waves can actually propagate stop at the end of our atmosphere, which is a relatively short distance which doesn't take sound long to cross. (A couple of minutes?) Also, sound waves dissipate energy much more quickly than light waves do. So the idea that we should be able to listen and hear distant sounds from millions of years ago is mathematically very nice, but very infeasible in practice.

2000-05-18

(10:26:04)

I became a member of CostCo. (For non-U.S. readers: they're a chain of consumer wholesale stores. You join and pay $40/year to be allowed to shop there, and you can then find lots of items in bulk at low per-unit prices.) I bought 34 pens. People who were previously surprised at how many pens I tended to carry around should have seen the 21 items I just took out of my right pocket. (Most of them were pens; I don't think carrying quite that many pens is a habit to keep up.)

I'm still thinking of buying a microwave oven there; I still want to know whether microwaves cause cancer. I know that the radiation they produce is non-ionizing -- but some people still suspect that there is a way for non-ionizing radiation to be carcinogenic. (Are modern applicances shielded well enough that it doesn't matter?)

On the train

Thought about sound propagation, and why people are attracted to some people rather than others.

The sound propagation point is maybe more on-topic here, and at least more conventional to talk about in public. So, the point that not everyone realizes right off is that we tell where a sound is coming from not only based on differences in volume, but more significantly based on differences in timing. If you want to produce a realistic impression that sound is coming from a specific location, you might have to worry more about the delay between channels than about the difference in volume. (I remember this from books, and haven't done any experiments yet to see the relative effect of each factor.)

What would the consequences be of saying "I tend to be attracted to people who are [...]"?

DMCA protest

Don organized a protest against the DMCA which is coming up today. I hope everybody has a good time there.

In other copyright news, I posted to debian-legal a bit in defense of Richard Stallman's views. It's more of the usual "RMS is incoherent or inconsistent or irresponsible"/"RMS is not incoherent or inconsistent or irresponsible". I can see why many people have gotten sick of that debate by now. But new people keep on accusing Stallman of random things all the time.

I wonder what people are going to chant at the DMCA protest, if anything. (Noted that free software protestors are not typically chanting types. People in the Bay Area have often done a nice job of giving intelligent interviews -- it's a pleasure to see Don, for instance, showing up in the papers as a voice against copyright maximalism.) I can't think of any catchy anti-DMCA chants. </em>

2000-05-19

(10:27:49)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

I got some nice off-line feedback about things I'm writing here.

I didn't give my SSN when I signed up for CostCo membership (and they didn't object). Once, I would have given it. Now, I follow the example of daw and try to safeguard that information.

I've been working on a document about privacy and security problems for undergrads at UC Berkeley. I think some of the material in there may be very interesting to some Berkeley people once I publish it.

Other people's diaries

bma: Some parts of the United States (though not the whole East Coast) don't observe DST. The most complete on-line source I've seen about this is the time zone code in glibc2. Those people are so thorough -- it's awesome. (I think that code is actually borrowed from another free software project, so maybe I should say that those other people are so thorough...)

Parts of Indiana, and some other locations, have different DST practices than most of the rest of the country. If you go to those places during DST, you'll probably notice, as lilo did.

cmacd: I just want to consider the Doppler effect because, if I write test programs that don't, they may have some strange artifacts. For instance, if a steady sound source is moving away from you, you might hear silence some of the time. I should check whether those artifacts really appear, or whether I'm just imagining them.

apgarcia: I graduated from an independent school back in Massachusetts and had junior undergraduate standing at UC Berkeley when I left there.

I keep those books on bookshelves (and chairs, and floors, and beds...). I still have at least a couple hundred books here in California that I haven't catalogued yet. I understand that She Whose Appropriate Name For This Context Is Difficult To Determine may sell me another bookcase, which would be nice. (Nick, if you're reading this, a hint would be helpful.)

decklin: Well, I use <esc>:wq when I'm done writing Advogato diary entries!

Free software and business

I enjoyed Bodo's article and some of the comments about it. I've probably missed out on lots of similar discussions in the past on fsb. (After writing that, I made a note to subscribe, and then eventually did.)

Yes, there is an entire mailing list, run by none other than Advogato's (and OSI's) own Russ Nelson, called fsb (Free Software Business). This list has a great reputation for very high-quality, serious discussions about issues related to free software and business.

(01:37:47)

Much fun with Stephane and Robin -- cool!

I honestly never thought I'd meet someone who was friends with Eval.

I also got a lot of exercise, to make up in part for all the exercise I haven't been getting recently. I never realized that, not only do these other parts of San Francisco exist, but I can even walk to them.

I have lots of book-hunting to do with lots of people now. Maybe I should make a regular event of it, and publish an advance schedule, inviting interested parties to join an expedition. On the other hand, spontaneous book-hunting ("Hey, want to go for a book hunt?") could be more fun.

I can think of six people who might like to go out book- hunting with me. But they don't all necessary like the same sorts of books, so a big book-hunt might be hard to manage. (Going to general-interest bookstores would help.) I'll figure something out.

More power

Thanks to Duncan, I now have a laptop charger and a cell phone charger again. That means I can post some of my longer Advogato diary entries pretty soon, once I copy them back out of my laptop.

2000-05-22

(00:12:47)

I'm still trying to pull together all of my old diary notes, so you can read about my vacation and so on.

It was a very hot day in San Francisco, and also in the East Bay. The Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco was today; I avoided it. I went back to Target with two friends, and got a dry erase board and a Pocket Simon (remember those?). I also got some lantern batteries, and am looking for something to do with them.

The Pocket Simon is an electronic memory game which flashes sequences of colored lights (with associated tones). You have to imitate it by pressing buttons in the same sequence.

I heard that my ex-girlfriend moved today and had a hard time of it (lots of stuff, little time, long distance, high temperatures, end-of-semester commotion). I was actively sad all day that I had not been there to help her.

This "time is out of joint".

Business planning

A friendly reader (does he want to be identified?) sent a couple of us an extremely useful link on the subject of the "Ben and Jerry's model" and the "Amazon.com model". Take a look; I'll try to say more about this soon.

NetHack

Enough people were talking about NetHack that I felt inspired, played a game, got crowned Envoy of Balance (my first time receiving that distinction), received several named weapons, and then let my character get killed after an unfortunate run-in with a cursed ring of polymorph.

2000-05-24

(14:13:16)

I still haven't sorted through my older diary entries. I'll try not to post them all at once, when I get around to editing them.

I missed my train Wednesday and didn't make it to the South Bay, although I spent some time talking to a co-worker about the project, and will get a ride down with him tomorrow.

I plan to attend the Linuxstammtisch in Mountain View in the evening.

2000-05-27

(12:26:12)

So now presumably I'm supposed to say something in support of guns or of gun rights.

I'd like to try to stay at a very high level of abstraction because I think everything below that tends to go off into noise or emotion. So I should probably say that the clear arguments in support of the right to own guns and the clear arguments in opposition are based on basically incompatible basic ideas about political philosophy (and, often, about related questions).

apgarcia mentions that "families would be much safer overall if guns were much more difficult to obtain": which is true. So the responses are (1) concerns about the legitimacy (sometimes about the efficacy) of banning things because they are unpopular or because of the appeal of the vision of a world in which they were uncommon; (2) concerns about discrepancies in power between criminals and other individuals; (3) concerns about discrepancies in power between government employees and other individuals.

The last one is probably the most controversial, because some people think that their government is so trustworthy that it should have as close as possible to a monopoly on the ability to use deadly force, where other people think their government is so untrustworthy that giving up some part of the practical ability to overthrow it is a nearly suicidal error. So a large part of the gun debate is a mask for the question of the legitimacy and trustworthiness of government.

2000-05-28

(01:47:43)

I had dinner at The Stinking Rose: A Garlic Restaurant with Sumana (hi, Sumana) and Dan. Their vegetarian menu has gotten a lot better since the last time I was there!

People who've studied algorithms probably already know how an iterative procedure can traverse a tree using a stack, but I did write up a quick demo to explain it. That technique might be useful with languages that handle recursive function calls extremely inefficiently, if you have an efficient stack implementation.

joey: a recent newspaper article said that Palm can't get the parts they need, like LCD screens, because they're competing head-to-head for those parts with cell phone manufacturers. Oops.

2000-05-29

(01:45:35)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like.

I've got readers!

People I know are mentioning things out of my Advogato diary. More than one person. More than once.

For people who were wondering about the time being out of joint. Then there's The Stinking Rose and its more-vegetarian-friendly menu.

"Yes, Micah, I have seen her in a mirror."

I had a good conversation with my mom on Saturday, in part about the South (non-U.S. readers: the southeastern part of the U.S., more or less the portion that seceded before and during the U.S. Civil War), cultural differences, and guns.

In San Francisco, I think the range of acceptible political opinion among educated people runs to liberal and libertarian. Or at least among computer geeks and activists, who are far from being the whole set of educated people.

Bennett says that David Burt has gone to work for N2H2. This raised gales of laughter, or at least bouts of smirking, in certain circles.

Book hunt

I went book-hunting for much of Sunday with Sumana; we visited Stacey's, City Lights, and A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books. (Closed when we went by: Alexander Book Company and the Books Inc. outlet store.)

I continued my practice of buying things I expect to disagree with by picking up copies of The Cost of Rights, Technopoly, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and (most of all) The Trouble with Principle.

This is following up on purchases like What Are People For? and The Future Does Not Compute. (Cliff Stoll doesn't look that radical, compared to these people! They make him look downright moderate, I'd say. Of course, I have yet to get to Kirkpatrick Sale or Jerry Mander. By the same token, I haven't read anything of Julian Simon's.)

The copy of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is to be a gift for Russell Nelson, who said he didn't want to buy a copy because he wanted to avoid supporting Lessig's ideas financially! So I said I'd get him a used copy, or get him a new copy and get myself a used copy -- no royalties to Basic Books or Lessig on Russell's account, but he can still read the book. (Maybe I'll refrain from giving it to him in front of Eric, though.)

It took me a while to start reading critics of things I believed in and cared about, but now I do it pretty often, I think. I'd like to understand their arguments, and maybe I'll be convinced, or better able to respond, or better able to explain how people are arguing at cross purposes because of disagreements about fundamental values or principles.

There is much more to say about this, sometime.

DVD

I bought a copy of 2600 and am going to subscribe. I never cared for the magazine in the past, but I'm so impressed with their courage and support for free speech lately that I've decided to subscribe.

I still haven't made time to submit comments on the OpenLaw amicus brief. I'd better hurry.

(21:32:42)

Deep Breakfast was the music I liked when I didn't like music. It was what I wanted to listen to before I wanted to listen to anything.

It was a favorite of a man I respect very much, and who taught me a lot. And I think he has good taste for liking this music.

About every three years, I've thought "I should go by my own copy of Deep Breakfast by Ray Lynch". So I finally did. (As Dar Williams said, "sometime was tonight".)

2000-06-02

(13:17:45)

Now I have even more saved-up diary entries scattered around, on a variety of topics. If people enjoy reading these, you can nag me about it and I'll post some of them. (If you don't enjoy reading them, of course, don't nag me.)

Contradiction

I was thinking about topics for little articles about math problems, which led me back to thinking about the game Set. Strangely, I managed to prove that any group of 13 or more cards must contain a set, and also that a particular group of 16 cards does not contain a set. That's an uncomfortable situation to be in -- one of those proofs must be wrong, but both seem very solid.

2000-06-02

(19:04:24)

OK, a ride back from the South Bay gave me the time to figure out the problem. My proof was fallacious and it is possible to have more than 12 cards without forming a set. The problem is that I had counted some cards twice (or more) when enumerating how many distinct cards were precluded from appearing.

My argument was that, since there are only 81 distinct cards, if I can prove that more than 81 distinct cards could be identified by a particular procedure, then I can show that the procedure can't be carried out. And I had come up with a procedure which, given more than 12 cards which don't form a set, could be used to identify more than 81 distinct cards. The problem is that the cards aren't really all distinct, as I'd thought, because an assumption I used to guarantee their distinctness isn't valid. Oops!

2600

I'm going to the San Francisco 2600 meeting tonight with a woman who probably owns both a Blue Book and a copy of K&R. I think it will be a lot of fun.

2000-06-07

(02:15:15)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

Gee, I've really been falling behind here. I'll try to do better in the future.

I hope that Robin and his companions enjoyed their trip over the weekend a week or so ago, and that Stephane found housing. (I hear setuid found housing, at last, although he's not on Advogato.)

Mundus enim parvus est: intellexi mdillon me recente vidisse, atque ipsum scire Jed Parsons, quem esse scio doctum linguis antiquis atque lectorem ucb.os.linux (quem interdum quoque vidi apud CalLUG).

I am going to send Wolfgang a collage, because I don't feel organized enough to write her a proper letter. I've been working on that collage for the past couple of days, photocopying various source materials that I can use.

I saw a couple of people for dinner under very nice circumstances, and had a good time. (A family friend, in North Beach; a remailer operator and two security journalists, at my first-ever 2600 meeting; and two friends from Berkeley on the occasion of one's birthday.)

The 2600 meeting is a long story, and was a lot of fun. I made an arrangement to meet up with a woman who's working in the City for the summer there; I'd exchanged e-mail with her but never seen her in person. So we showed up at Embarcadero Plaza, just having met one another, and found lots of people we didn't know -- but ended up at dinner with Packetstorm folks. There, I heard many good stories, and more proof that this is a small world. It was pretty neat.

My companion at the meeting, as I've already alluded to, was one of the few remaining anonymous remailer administrators in the world -- as most have given up, moved on to other things, or been shut down -- and a rather active cypherpunk. (I am omitting some of her many other activities and credentials because this is an Advogato diary entry, not a resume.) It was a pleasure to meet her.

The 2600 meeting itself just seemed like an opportunity to run into people -- not a single cohesive meeting with organized discussions or anything. I've been to LUG meetings that worked that way.

Deep Breakfast

Part of how Deep Breakfast affects me really has to do with the context in which I first heard it. That's true of other things, too: there's some music I would probably never have cared for on my own, which I heard in the company of friends and which has reminded me of them ever since.

So other people shouldn't necessarily expect to love "Celestial Soda Pop" as much as I do. But it is very nice.

oath.org

A Canadian organization called Olympic Athletes Together Honourably (OATH) wants to buy oath.org from me. (I registered loyalty.org and oath.org on the same day, the week Rescomp fired me. I haven't used the latter, except to try to direct people to the loyalty.org web site, and the VirtualHost is set up wrong at the moment, anyway.)

Does anyone know anything about the group called OATH, though? If they are legitimate, I would be glad to give up the domain.

Rescomp still isn't telling people about the loyalty oath! They've added a sentence to their job description about signing papers required by state law. Nothing about political tests or anything. Sometime I'll go back and give Vice Chancellor Padilla a hard time about what he told me -- I don't think the University is living up to even what the Vice Chancellor said it would do. (I can also give them a hard time about their not establishing a policy on this until I demanded a copy of the policy, but I could be charitable and call that more a question of laziness than of dishonesty.)

Work

I wish that some things would happen so that I could talk about what I'm working on.

I met some of my fellow Linuxcare employees, at least one of them an Advogato user, under circumstances that I shouldn't mention here. (NDAs and business relationships, I'm afraid, not anything sordid.)

I started taking my bike to work sometimes because Jim seemed to be ill. I hope Jim feels better now.

This exercise is good for me, though.

I also spent a couple of days with some time in the office in the San Francisco. This included an opportunity to chat with Rasmus about converting an infix expression to prefix. I wrote a little program to parse infix algebraic expressions into trees recursively. The only tricky part was the stripping of parentheses.

My original function would take "((a+b)*(c+d))" and give you "a+b)*(c+d" because it thought that two parentheses could be cancelled from either side. I fixed that, and now my program works properly.

That means I could use it to do symbolic differentiation, which is a programming problem with some emotional significance to me. Maybe I'll implement that at some point.

I understand that not everyone likes CS theory that much, but I feel sorry for all the people who have never been exposed to trees and recursive traversal in various orders. It's one of those very pretty things that is a lot of fun to see working.

Symbolic differentiation

We'd want to start with tree-generating functions "add", "subtract", "multiply", "divide", "exponentiate", "square". Then, the deriv() of an expression tree which is a sum is add(deriv(e.left), deriv(e.right)). deriv() of a difference is similarly subtract(deriv(e.left), deriv(e.right)). deriv() of a product is add(multiply(e.left, deriv(e.right)), multiply(deriv(e.left), e.right)). deriv() of a quotient is divide(subtract(multiply((e.right), deriv(e.left)), multiply(e.left, deriv(e.right))), square(e.right)). deriv() of a constant is 0. deriv() of x is 1. deriv() of an exponent is probably implemented as a series of special cases, to avoid logarithms. Some of those cases are fairly concise, while others are more involved. Still no trig, logs, general composition of functions, or anything. Not that I've tried to implement this, or anything.

You'd also want a "simplify" function. For instance, of a sum, if simplify(e.right) is 0, simplify(e) is e.left. If simplify(e.left) is 0, simplify(e) is e.right. You can keep going from there and eventually get a primitive symbolic algebra package -- but, as I've already mentioned in a diary entry, there is at least one such already out there as free software. It's just interesting to think about the rules which would be used in implementing one.

Sigh

I never thought I'd be in the position of writing that "my ex-girlfriend is so hard to figure out". That always seemed like something of a cliche to me: how could so many people really find their ex-girlfriends so mysterious, or spend so much time in trying to puzzle them out?

But, to my astonishment, it's happened to me: my ex-girlfriend is so hard to figure out!

It really feels to me like that should be someone else's comment, and not mine.

I worked on writing back to her while I was on the train one day, but I had enough to say that a single train ride wouldn't do it. So I spent a lot of time over several evenings and wrote quite a bit.

Furniture

Nick got some very nice furniture delivered. So the living room looks more like a living room now. My room is still a very chaotic mess.

Copyright

I've been talking about copyright all the time. You know you've been reading too much about copyright when you can make the argument that running a web proxy may be illegal!

Towers of Hanoi in troff

Yep, really.

(12:25:20)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

I think I already congratulated Rob on his new job. But I will again.

It rained in San Francisco yesterday, which I didn't realize at first, until I got wet. I've been working back in the new San Francisco Linuxcare office for a while. It's nice. But it's underground, and there is a way out through which you never see the outside until you open a (windowless) exit door and step out. I took that route when leaving last night, and all of a sudden was outside with water falling on me.

Suddenly coming above ground when you didn't know it was raining is a bit disconcerting.

I'm still working on my collage. I have a lot of source materials, especially after cleaning my room a bit.

I got plane tickets for my trip to Massachusetts in July with my friend Michelle. We're going to go look at universities there, since she's planning to apply to grad school.

I also picked up a couple of switches. I think my complaint about Radio Shack is still languishing in an unposted diary entry somewhere, so maybe I'll hold off on commenting about Radio Shack for the moment.

rachel: I'll have to get back to you on that...

Math

When I said "simplify(e) is e.right" I meant "simplify(e) is simplify(e.right)", etc. Otherwise, the simplify function might turn "(0+(0+0))" into "(0+0)" instead of just "0". Simplification or evaluation should always be applied recursively; some techniques would take more than one pass down an expression tree.

I wonder what it would take to write a library capable of expanding powers of polynomials. I thought about what's involved, and it's very elaborate. There's a lot that we take for granted in algebraic manipulation. Think about "3(x^2)y+5+2yxx" -- what do we have to do to figure out that that's 5((x^2)y+1)?

NetHack

My friend Greg from high school just got his first ever ascension in NetHack. I find that amazing -- my best game ever ended at the Valley of the Dead. Congratulations to Greg; maybe I'll catch up some day.

NetHack is one of my favorite computer games. I've often wanted to submit something to the amazing NetHack on-line encyclopedia, which is chock full of literary quotations and makes looking at monsters and objects in NetHack quite an educational experience.

(02:18:37)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

I hope that Maciej had a good birthday, and that Nick had fun celebrating with him. I didn't make it. I wish I'd gone; I still have yet to meet Maciej.

I worked back at Linuxcare during most of the week, and wrote some code there, in Python and in C. Some people at Linuxcare do want to hear my explanation of binary trees, so I'll write it up soon. (This is where the algebraic manipulation stuff comes from, even though that's not the problem Rasmus was actually trying to solve.)

Collage

I'm still copying stuff for my collage. I've got more than 100 pages of source material now.

I'm still going, too. I have a list of twenty or thirty other sources that I need to dig up. My collage is extremely textual -- copies of letters, e-mail messages, dictionary definitions, ephemera from conferences, and so on. I guess I'll fit one or two pictures in there somewhere.

California loyalty oath

So, working on this collage made me look back through the documents the University gave me. I found a very clear inconsistency or two in what was written about me. If I were mean about it, I could probably ask the Alameda County District Attorney to investigate, because public funds (in a very tiny amount) are involved. But of course the point is not to get anyone in trouble, but merely to get rid of the loyalty oath.

What I should do is get motivated again, re-start the trace-the-effects mailing list, and go back and talk to some people in person. I can point at things they signed, tell them what they signed doesn't make sense, and ask them when and if they're going to do something real about the loyalty oath.

I made 100 copies of a memorandum by then-UC President Clark Kerr, from 1965, which is still apparently official policy. It says, in effect, everyone who wants to work for the University must sign the oath, no exceptions, don't let anyone mess around, that's the law, if people try to mess with the oath, report them to our lawyers.

Clark Kerr was known for his advocacy for non-signers in the original loyalty oath controversy (1949-1950); but then he created the policy that non-signers would be fired, which is still in effect today.

The reason for this is (according to David P. Gardner) that most of the professors didn't object to the loyalty oath on principle, they just had a power struggle with the UC Regents, and, when the legal authority for the oath was transferred to the State from the Regents, they mostly dropped their objections! So we see Kerr as brave loyalty oath opponent, first time 'round, and then fifteen years later creating the authority to fire non-signers. Now the oath was prescribed by the California Constitution rather than a vote of the Regents -- but the actual text was harsher.

Anyway, I'll try to figure out what to do with my 100 copies of Kerr's memorandum. I wish they were distributed to all prospective students and faculty in the California public higher education system! :-)

DeCSS

The Schumann deposition is very long. I suspect giving a deposition is pretty painful. And this one was a tug-of-war between attorneys, and Schumann said he didn't even know whether the attorneys on his side were representing him or not!

Poor Schumann, caught in the middle of a series of legal debates between his copyright industry employers and their civil liberties attorneys opponents...

Schumann is obviously a computer geek. And he's used Linux, and he knows a great deal of technical detail. But his beliefs are apparently pretty different from those of many people here on Advogato. That shouldn't be any great surprise -- there are smart technical people off tending SQL Server on Windows NT all day -- but it feels funny. I wonder how he got there, and I got here.

Other people's diary entries

Spekaing of how people come to have different beliefs, mattbradshaw wouldn't be the first person to desire to include some Christian outreach in an Advogato diary entry. (I don't remember who the first person was.)

It's hardly less on-topic than some of the things I write about here, but that may not be saying much. :-)

I was thinking about whether there was any quick counter-quotation to cite in response to a John 3:16 or John 3:16-7 reference. (For some reason, you never see people at sports events holding up signs that say "Luc. De Rer. Nat. I, 101". How come? Not that I ever go to sports events or anything.) But I've already written on Advogato about how silly it is that people use these slogans back and forth. (See my earlier diary entry on Paul Week, and agreeing with Paul.)

I love little quotations as much as the next person (else I wouldn't be spending so much time on my collage), but for evangelism they serve a very limited purpose, and assume a very specific context. Sometime when my diary entry isn't already this long, I'll talk about that context.

raph, your economics piece is very broad, in that it naturally invites people to talk about other issues. I don't think you should sweat it -- most of what traditional economists have written about free software development is boring! (It may be accurate or provide a useful description, but it's still pretty boring.) What you wrote is interesting, but it leaves room for people to chat about their pet issues and concerns. They may well not pay attention to what you thought was original and innovative about the piece.

So we have an unfocused discussion -- it's still clearer than slashdot, I hope.

When was the last time you heard advertising actually explain the status of a standard? "This is an IETF Internet Draft at stage ...", "This was our submission to the W3C", "This was the unanimous opinion of delegates from over 730 nations at a convention in Athens in the 6th century BC", "This is a proprietary standard that our company created, and we have copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret rights in it, so we can safely say that we're the industry leader in implementation of this standard", "This is an open standard that any major consumer electronics corporation can freely license from the DVD Copy Control Association, for a low, low price, limited time offer, if you act now...".

Nope, the most any advertising ever seems to talk about where standards come from or what the adoption status of a standard might be is when they have to, because that information is part of the standard's name. It's nice to see RFCs get cited by number, but even that's not perfect, unless you have the will to actually track down the RFCs and understand their significance. An ANSI, FIPS, or ISO number may be totally irrelevant to what the product does, but that never stopped anybody from mentioning it in their literature... :-)

Tom Vogt got a demand letter from the MPAA which told him that the terms of a certain treaty would presumably subject him to civil liability. So he looked up that treaty. It turned out that it was a draft treaty which has never been ratified. I think that's got to be sneakier than any Adobe advertising!

Weekend

There's a CABAL Linux installfest tomorrow (Saturday) at the Cow Palace, but I think my sleep schedule is far enough out-of-sync with everybody else's that I won't make it. I hope those who do have a good time.

Current plans: cleaning, collage, sleeping. Maybe going to Berkeley on Sunday, or maybe not.

(02:34:29)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

I'll agree with dria about Peter Gabriel's soundtrack (which is called Passion). It's great.

My collage prompted me to buy and read two books from my childhood -- A Wrinkle in Time, and Bridge to Terabithia (which made me cry again). Some "children's literature" is very good, although in places you can see things that seem to have been put in specifically for children (like explanations of words or of adult concepts, or a very explicit statement of a high-level theme).

I spent most of my weekend either sleeping or working on the collage. I think I have reached almost 200 pages of source material. I think a reader of my collage would conclude (with me) that the major themes of my life over the past year were "my girlfriend", "copyright law", and "travel for Linuxcare". (Yes, some other things happened, too.) So I've been documenting and trying to hunt down various things in order to copy them. Everyone go buy Kinko's stock. (This is not an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities.) Kinko's is horribly expensive, but they're the only ones open at the times of night when I try to work on the collage.

I wrote to Phil Agre (mentioned in raph's article) to say that I wish I could take his classes (at UCLA), as they sound so worthwhile. Agre replied that he wished he had that opportunity, too!

Note to self: don't breathe chlorine fumes more than momentarily. Not even if "it's just for two minutes". (Yet another reason why it's good to clean with isopropyl alcohol.)

I had dinner with Sumana (hi, Sumana) and Dan in Berkeley on Sunday. Dan told me about complex analysis, and I talked to him about cryptographic protocols. We also argued about the OOP systems of Python and C++, even though I don't know C++ and he doesn't know Python. I remembered Guido van Rossum's comment about Python programmers being adults, which came in handy.

Some of the C++ OOP features, in Dan's description, sounded like a glorified version of assert() -- ways of deliberately making your program break when it detects that someone else has been sloppy. "Aha -- someone hasn't been following my spec. I think I'll raise an error!"

We also talked about John Locke and land tenure. We are geeks, that go to a bar on Sunday night and drink root beer and talk about complex analysis, object models, and the common law's account of adverse possession. And I'm ever so glad to know people who'll do that.

Nick recovered the data from his old hard drive, which included my old home directory, web page, and e-mail. I thought I'd lost all of that -- it has some material from when I was still in college! Also, it has the membership of the trace-the-effects list, minus the last two or three subscribers. I'll have to find a day or two to look through all this material at some point and see what's there.

This week, I think I'll again stay in San Francisco some of the time and work on things at Linuxcare. I have an opportunity there to work on something a bit more low-level than I'm used to (which is to say hardware-ish), and that should be interesting.

(03:00:30)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

Thanks, Monty. I used some of your software today. It was excellent.

I forgot to give Sumana a potentiometer. Sorry, Sumana. Thanks for a good time at dinner, though.

Working at Linuxcare was fun. I wrote up a long explanation of binary syntax trees, notations, traversals, recursion and iterations, and a touch of parsing, and sent it off to a mailing list there. I've also worked on a hardware-related project; the hardware is neat, and I think I got it to do what it's supposed to do, which is a satisfying feeling.

I seem to have another reader.

Collage

I didn't work much on the collage today, but the collage has its own bibliography (table of authorities?), which has stretched to three pages. I should probably include more of my own e-mail in the collage, but I didn't keep copies of most of it.

I'm down to twelve items left to dig up for the collage. Wish me luck, everybody.

Other people's diaries

macricht: yeah, I use chlorine bleach for cleaning the bathroom, not as a solvent, but I haven't been diluting it. I'll start. :-)

You should be able to use the <sub> tag to write subscripts, and the <sup> tag for superscripts. I know that's not all the notation you need, but it's a start, right?

I did breathe a bunch of chlorine fumes, and they made me feel ill again. (Last time I cleaned the bathroom, I made the same mistake.) That and Bridge to Terabithia gave me some interesting dreams.

I was going to comment on what a particular person did in my dream, and how I didn't mention it to her. But that might defeat the point of not mentioning it, because in principle she might then read this here. If you're reading this, though, nunc, olim, quocumque: yes, that's what prompted me to write to you today. But I'd been meaning to for a long time.

stephane: (even though you don't have a recent diary entry) please get some more sleep.

sad: sorry.

(18:37:17)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

I heard back promptly from the woman who appeared in my dream, even thugh I'd written to her quite late at night, local time. Time zones are funny that way.

I said the other day that "you know it's time to go to sleep when you see people in Germany and the Netherlands starting to follow up your list posts". (Of course, that sort of depends on where in the world you are.)

Ben got a letter for me from the USPTO, presumably letting me know that my old trademark registration application for "Californians for Academic Freedom" has expired. I don't think that registering that trademark will be necessary or useful, but it was interesting to learn how to apply for a registered trademark.

Wednesday was incredibly hot in San Francisco; I rode my bike (which has a flat tire) only a short distance but was incredibly glad for something to drink immediately afterward. According to news reports, today was tied as the hottest day ever recorded in San Francisco. PG&E was threatening to shut off the power all day, or to institute rolling blackouts. Linuxcare cut overhead lighting in the afternoon.

Computer companies are not the world's greatest enthusiasts for rolling blackouts during summers in cities. :-)

I'm taking pvg's suggestion and putting A Theory of Objects on my want list so as to get an interesting book whose author will come before Edwin Abbott in my book collection catalog. :-)

It turned out that PG&E did black out my apartment during the day, but not while I was there.

Eheu fugaces

I've been at Linuxcare for a year. That year took me to Minnesota, the wilds of Southern California, up to the Napa wine country, and all over Silicon Valley on business trips -- not to mention tech support, phone consulting, software hacking, testing, integration... hmmm, this must be a startup or something. I think the Bootable Business Card was my coolest and most public project of the past year.

Collage

Very close...

I might manage to get this collage done and put together sometime this weekend. That probably depends on whether or not I try to visit Friends in Berkeley (tm). I still know almost nobody except through LUGs and Cal, but between those I know a fair number of people.

I printed out my entire Advogato diary at 4-up double-sided, yielding only 11 pp. instead of 88.

The idea was to use lynx -dump -force_html on the diary.xml, use sed to clean it up a bit, and then enscript to build Postscript. I hit a few snags, but basically it did eventually work out.

This is a quick way to re-read my diary to see what it might contain that would be worth including in my collage.

Most recent photocopying is passages from books I disagree with (as maybe representative of things I am reading although, or since, I don't believe them). I've got attacks on technology and technological optimism, libertarianism, moral realism, liberalism (all sorts), moral principles, scientific naturalism, Platonism (i.e., per Whitehead, all of Western philosophy), and, I guess I should say, the whole Enlightenment.

Travel

I'm not going to DefCon, which is sad, because I know several of the people who are speaking there.

I'm also not going to OLS or Usenix or O'Reilly's OSCon. But I am going to Massachusetts at the end of July. Massachusetts is nice.

Next summer, I'll go to all sorts of conferences!

Debian

Joey, I'm sorry about our non-working cell phones; despite the heat wave, we had an outdoor meeting! Thanks for answering my questions.

The FSF is curious about details of the free software policies of the various distributions. It would be wonderful if the good folks who may investigate this question could satisfy the FSF's curiosity in a fair and objective way.

ILOVEPROPRIETARYSOFTWARE

My father called me up in the middle of the night, having caught the Love Bug worm. I had to walk my stepmother through downloading some Windows antivirus software and running it.

It's really frustrating that people are spreading around these single-user operating systems and sloppy habits and software that promotes sloppy habits that allow these viruses to spread so easily.

Nobody who uses my dad's computer (five different people) really understands the difference between downloading a program and downloading a data file, or what happens when a program is installed, or anything. They all regularly read e-mail (with attachments) and open things they've downloaded from the net. It's a perfect environment for the spread of viruses.

And Windows 98 certainly isn't making it any clearer for my dad and the rest of the family what the difference between a data file and a program actually is -- everything everywhere is a double-clickable icon. Nobody has told them and nowhere has it sunk in when, exactly, they are given an unknown third party absolute control over the computer by running someone's binaries or macros. Their machine could have BO2K or whatever else on it, and people could be causing all sorts of harm to my father, and none of the people using that computer would have any concept how the dangers had come about.

Phil Agre and also the RISKS folks have complained that this is an incredibly rinky-dink infrastructure for all it's being promoted as. And then that we're really just incredibly lucky that more horrible things haven't happened yet -- worms that really do steal all kinds of personal information and business information and post it to Usenet. Maybe this has happened, and nobody has noticed yet.

In a sense Unix is only marginally better -- there are a lot of holes in the implementations of things, and there have been notorious ways to trick users into running programs and eventually gaining unauthorized access. But Windows 98 plus these e-mail clients and nifty add-ons isn't secure even in principle; you click what's presented to you and you've got a virus.

It's amazing to think of the incredible havoc that someone who just knows VBA can wreak -- never mind a really experienced programmer or network engineer. Well, it's an easy way to reach the front pages of a newspaper...

RSI

I've felt some wrist pain on and off in one wrist for two or three days. There are many other things I guess it might be (as I've had similar pains come and go), but then again it could also be the start of a repetitive strain injury. I've been typing much and often for fourteen years now. So tell me, o great wisdom of Advogato, what do I do about this?

I'll try to go easy on that wrist, to start.

Judaism

A woman from the Partners in Torah called me up from Israel Thursday morning, wondering if I'd like to talk to a free volunteer religious counselor sometime. She said she had my name from the attendance list of one of their seminars three years ago, and wondered how I'd liked the seminar. And she said they had a whole network of volunteer counselors from all walks of life and all over the world who would be glad to meet and talk to fellow Jews about anything.

So, as far as I know, Partners in Torah is run by (or closely affiliated with) Aish Ha-Torah (Torah Fire).

Aish Ha-Torah is a sort of Jewish missionary organization, only instead of trying to convert non-Jews, they work on keeping Jews from converting to other religions, or from leaving Judaism. (Judaism has a very strong policy of not actively trying to convert outsiders. But there are tons of "Jewish identity", "Jewish culture", "Jewish experience", and "Jewish heritage" groups which are trying to keep Jews interested and actively within the religious community.)

I was not impressed with their seminar; it was based on material like that in the book The Bible Code (and related research) and gave informal statistical arguments and many co-incidences to suggest that the Torah is divinely inspired. (They also had an argument which some Muslim groups have used: our scriptures contain correct information which would not have been available to any human being at the time the scriptures were written!)

I told the very nice Israeli woman that I didn't really want to argue about theology with a counselor and found it a bit strange that they would take quite so much interest in me, flattering as it was. (They looked up my new cell phone number -- I lived in Massachusetts last time I had any contact with them!) The woman basically said "It's just because you're a Jew", and I started to give her a kind of Enlightenment argument that one's family's religious heritage is not directly relevant to determining some's importance as a subject of concern, etc., and she said she didn't have time for it and she'd call back Sunday.

The problem: in principle I like to talk to everyone about religion and such things, but not necessarily when someone has an agenda for me. I don't care to be in a long-term situation where it is someone's official "job" to cause me to believe something.

In other religion and evangelism news, I've started writing a long essay about D. L. Moody, which might displease some people at my high school. Reading the immensely distasteful Stanley Fish cleared some things up for me about the problems of "multiculturalism", so that I'm now better able to explain where my high school misunderstands Mr. Moody.

DeCSS

Jack Valenti's deposition was published; it's amazing. The man spends a hundred pages or so saying he doesn't remember or doesn't know any details of things he's written editorials about, or testified before Congress about.

2600 suggests that maybe Mr. Valenti doesn't write his own stuff -- that maybe he signs and delivers testimony, statements, and speeches written by MPAA staffers. I guess that's always a possibility.

ZKS

Rob is commenting on ZKS.

I am impressed with them because I asked Austin Hill something like 10 or 12 impromptu technical questions at DefCon and he answered them all with complete and well-thought out answers, right away. That made me think of the company as credible -- how many companies' presidents show up at hacker conferences and take technical questions face-to-face? "Geek cred" and all, you know.

They also seem to have hired some of the very best and brightest, and it sounds like an exciting place to work.

They also seem pretty far behind on their predictions about open source releases -- once upon a time (less than a year ago, of course) I heard that they were going to make money from services, and, once they had a bit of an installed base, they would release source code and/or document protocols for all the pieces. I hope this is still the plan.

(19:32:51)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

I got into an off-topic debate on dvd-discuss about the MPAA's rating system for movies; I'm arguing that it was never really voluntary. (I'm also talking about the Comics Code Authority and PICS and the V-Chip and the recent TV ratings and RSAC and so on.)

In a neat co-incidence, I wrote to Seth Finkelstein to tell him that some of his writings had influenced my arguments, and at just the same moment he wrote to me to express support for some of what I'd been writing.

Seth was a very active free speech activist since before I got on the net, with what I think are excellent technical and civil liberties credentials. But now he says he's retired from free speech activism; I hope to find out why that is.

Among other things, we are talking about whether there is such a thing as private censorship. Since I belong to Peacefire, people already know that I think there is and that I think it's a problem. Seth Finkelstein made an argument about "privatized censorship" and wrote about the Comics Code Authority and how private organizations implement the censorship regimes that politicians want to see. The issue is new (and terribly off-topic) on dvd-discuss.

samth is making what seem to be very good and clear arguments -- I hope they sound as solid in court as they sound to me on a mailing list. There is a lot of discussion of how one becomes "authorized" to watch a purchased DVD.

My wrist feels better for now -- I think I hurt it when I took a bump on my bike, not by typing. (Can I say that I had an acute rather than a chronic wrist injury?) But I'm still concerned about RSI for the long term; I've done nothing to spare my hands in all these years of typing, and I expect they must complain sometime.

Everyone go read Dennis Ritchie's "The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System", if you haven't. Apologies in advance to people who don't like Unix. Ritchie's paper is where the bit about the value of a multi-user time-sharing system comes in: "to encourage close communication"(!)

Housing

Congratulations to stephane and co. on finding a place. Housing (or housing in a place, condition, and price which are OK with the people who want to live in it) can be very hard to find in the Bay Area right now!

I'm reminded of the possibility that we might have a livingroomwarming party over here at some point.

Being asked to sign bizarre stuff is unpleasant. I've encountered the strange paradox: "Oh, it doesn't mean anything; just sign it." Huh? Some people think we should be more willing to sign things, the less important they are. And people who insist that something "doesn't mean anything" are still very willing to insist that one absolutely must sign it -- just because it's meaningless doesn't mean, somehow, that it can be done away with.

"Et, si fata deum, si mens non laeva fuisset", I would have a bunch of t-shirts highlighting this very problem. (Sigh.)

How often is there actually a "meeting of minds" in the conclusion of a contract? I think it's a problem, and one which should certainly be fixed quickly -- since time is of the essence.

Wolfgang

Wolfgang sent me a satirical full-color cartoon about e-commerce. She is my favorite cartoonist. I give thanks that she has never written anything which was reviewed by the Comics Code Authority.

My collage is still pretty close.

Advogato

One line to count how in how many entries a particular individual mentioned a particular word (really a regular expression, provided it's accepted by both egrep and sed).

#!/bin/sh

 PERSON=$1
WORD=$2

 wget -O - http://www.advogato.org/person/$PERSON/diary.xml 2>/dev/null | egrep "<entry>|</entry>|$WORD" | sed "s/^.*$WORD.*$/$WORD/" | uniq | egrep $WORD | wc -l

For instance, running this with "schoen" and "girlfriend" yielded 14 (before this entry had been posted), indicating that I had mentioned the phrase "girlfriend" in 14 different diary entries (out of 53 total entries).

This trick should be handy if you want to gather statistics on how often somebody talks about something. Now you can accuse people of acting like broken records in their Advogato diaries, or note trends as various people's percentages on various topics change over time.

Thus (to use the above example) someone who says "Gee, this Seth guy sure does talk about his ex-girlfriend a lot!" can now make this observation concrete. ("He mentions her 26.4% of the time when writing diary entries here.")

This is much more interesting than how many times someone has mentioned something in all. If I were talking about Richard Stallman in just one diary entry, I might well use the word "Stallman" twenty times -- but that doesn't prove that I regularly think and talk about Stallman in the long run. Using this script, on the other hand, you could see if I had mentioned Stallman on twenty separate occasions, which would be a more significant result.

To count the total number of diary entries, you just want to

egrep "<entry>" | wc -l

the output of wget.

Raph, how much load is put on the system by generating an XML file of somebody's diary? Is it impolite to use this script because of the load it might place on Advogato?

The next trick would be to implement a statistical package that could look at a person's diary and say something about the correlation between references to one term and references to another.

Yes, this is mainly a joke, although sometimes computer-aided searching and text analysis can actually be sources of useful information to researchers. I did have an English teacher who had productively used a concordance to support his research on Mark Twain. It's amazing that so many things which used to take hundreds of years can now be done at home.

If I ever teach a shell scripting class, perhaps I should give "produce a concordance to Shakespeare in a format suitable for printing" as an assignment.

I've been found out

It is cool to get off a train and immediately have someone recognize you as a Linux user and DMCA opponent.

OK, maybe my Linuxcare shirt helped a bit there. But someone at the train station recognized me and figured I'd been at the anti-DMCA protest at Stanford. Not true. But I had wished to.

I didn't get his name, but he rode off in a car with "Linux", "Stop the MPAA", and "MP3 is not a crime" bumper stickers.

(01:53:16)

Skip to the end of my diary, if you'd like. Thanks.

I must be an optimist:

[zork(~)] ./how-many-entries schoen 'good|right'
Entries mentioning 'good|right':
     39
Total entries in schoen's diary:
     54
[zork(~)] ./how-many-entries schoen 'bad|evil|wrong'
Entries mentioning 'bad|evil|wrong':
     16
Total entries in schoen's diary:
     54

Here is my how-many-entries script, newly modified to make better use of awk. (It downloads the person's diary twice, to avoid touching the local disk.) The advantage is that you can now search for any regular expression accepted by awk (which should be the same as those accepted by egrep); you don't need to worry about satisfying sed and egrep at the same time.

#!/bin/sh
 
echo "Entries mentioning '$2':"
wget -O - http://www.advogato.org/person/$1/diary.xml 2>/dev/null | awk "/<\/?entry>|$2/ {print /$2/}" | uniq | grep 1 | wc -l
echo "Total entries in $1's diary:"
wget -O - http://www.advogato.org/person/$1/diary.xml 2>/dev/null | grep "<entry>" | wc -l

I expect Don to have a good time with this.

I slept a lot on Saturday, ate dinner but no lunch, and worked on my collage. You were expecting maybe a protest march?

My collage bibliography is pushing four typed pages, but I still think an end is in sight.

When it was proclaimed that the library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad . . . The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who perhaps are not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.

(Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel", trans. James E. Irby, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings)

(15:55:04)

Skip to the end of my diary, if you'd like. Thanks.

mpav: greetings.

decklin: very nice.

I suppressed standard error because I didn't know about wget -q. If you didn't know about wget -q, you'd suppress standard error, too. :-)

dalke: that code is based on something I did, and my goal in writing the original was to make it as short as possible. I knew that there was a problem with metacharacters in the environment variables; if I documented the script, I'd have documented that, too.

A lot of one-liners have limitations (or preconditions, or assumptions, or input domain restrictions) which are quite obvious to their authors, but maybe not to everyone else. Does this mean we should

• stop publishing one-liners
• document them
• not re-use code from one-liners
• put big warnings on one-liners to the effect that they should not be re-used for other purposes

A lot of the benefit of open source is perhaps lost if you can't re-use code (and there is a tradition of shell script fragment re-use) -- but I knew what I was doing, at least, when I put together that original version.

Followup: interestingly, decklin, who improved my script, didn't think of this limitation, where I did consider it. I guess that proves dalke's point.

RSI

After I got a note asking me not to type with a hand that hurts, my wrist started to hurt again, so I stopped typing with it for now. I guess I can only type about 50 wpm with one hand, and I have to look at the keyboard (my left hand has no idea how to find those keys by touch!), but lots of other people only type 50 wpm with both hands, and they have to look at the keyboard when they type, too...

I hear so much disagreement about chorded keyboards that I am not about to run out and buy one. Maybe I'll write some things longhand for a while -- good thing the hand that hurts is my non-dominant hand!

Maybe vi hurt my right hand -- all this pressing of home row keys in quick succession over and over again to move around the keyboard. Alas. Possibly this injury -- if it lasts -- could get me to switch to another editor.

Partners in Torah

The nice woman from Israel called me back for the third time and was quite disappointed that I didn't want to study with one of their volunteers.

I didn't manage to give her a very good explanation; it was unfortunate. On the other hand, I didn't want to keep her on the phone for half an hour from Israel telling her exactly what I thought about religion and why I was uncomfortable taking their offer.

Updates

I talked to Rob, which was nice. I also got to congratulate stephane on her new housing arrangement.

My wrist continues to hurt. Ow. I suspect I should not use that hand for anything, not just not typing with it.

(00:36:04)

There is a party at the CoffeeNet tomorrow as it's closing and Richard Couture (proprietor) is moving with the LinuxCabal. Nick and I might be moving, too: our rent has just been raised, quite a lot. People are trying to convince me that it would be nice (and more affordable) to live in the Mission district. They say it is more interesting and cheaper out there, and you can still use transit easily to get downtown and elsewhere. I might be convinced if I looked around a bit down there. It's not as though I have lots of friends up here in the SoMa -- in fact, with RRC gone, my housemate Nick will be the last person I know in this entire neighborhood!

Plus, I seem to have managed to disprove the idea that this apartment is good luck (terribly sorry, Don).

I have to go to work and finish some stuff, though, and I still have many errands.

2000-06-26

(02:49:19)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

Hi there, Brian. (I know Brian from UC Berkeley; unfortunately, I've seen him very rarely in person since I moved over to San Francisco.)

I had dinner Friday in Berkeley with several friends. While two of them talked about Star Trek, I concocted an idea for an earthquake visualization program. (My ex-girlfriend got me interested in the generation of seismicity maps; seismologists and others want to see where and when earthquakes have happened around the world, and how big they are.)

I imagined a 3D historical display of all earthquakes ever (in real life, subsets within a certain time period and exceeding a certain magnitude) using helium balloons on strings to represent the earthquakes. (Balloon radius is proportional to magnitude on a log scale; string length is proportional to time elapsed between event and the present; string is attached to the epicenter or hypocenter of the event.) The user should be able to rotate the model of the Earth, zoom in and out, and perhaps move the camera around; the ability to select a balloon and get more details would be nice too.

OK, now I want to learn OpenGL and actually implement this.

Saturday I went by the CoffeeNet for the last-ever CABAL meeting at that location (744 Harrison Street). "O worlds inconstancie!", as they say. It was really pretty sad to think of the fact that there will be no more CABAL meetings there; I have some very happy memories of meetings there since the summer of 1998. A lot's happened since then!

I met all sorts of people through the CABAL, and, as I've said, got my apartment and job through CABAL connections. And of course that's just the beginning.

After the meeting, Duncan tried to take me to a vegetarian Chinese restaurant (such as I ate at Friday); all three that we knew of in Chinatown were closed! (Lotus Garden, Kowloon, and Lucky Creation.) We ended up going to an Indian place instead, and then we went to Linuxcare and worked until the proverbial wee hours on a project.

Sunday involved cleaning, dinner, and late-night collage work. I only had two meals the whole weekend, because of weird scheduling.

Wrist

My right wrist feels a lot better, though it still hurts a bit. Despite this, I mean to go to (mirabile dictu) a chiropractor tomorrow, on the helpful recommendation of a former colleague who read about my wrist pain here on Advogato. Is this the first-ever Advogato-mediated referral to a medical practitioner?

Collage

I've exceeded 2^7 sources from other people's works and 2^5 from my own, for a total of over 150 sources. I still think the end's in sight.

(00:48:51)

[...] in regna Lavini
Dardaniae venient (mitte hanc de pectore curam):
sed non et venisse volent. [...]

Dryden has

The coast, so long desir'd (nor doubt th' event)
Thy troops shall reach, but, having reach'd, repent.

2000-06-29

(16:23:37)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

"Multias are only free if your time has no value"

Nick gave me a Multia which he won at a trade show. So common are (or were) free Multias that he didn't even notice he'd won it -- it was sitting around with his other Multias very inconspicuously.

The Multias are mostly nice for being 64-bit, so you can run GNU date compiled with a 64-bit time_t and find out what day of the week your birthday will fall on in the year 1,000,000. They do, however, have a Y292G problem.

Otherwise, the hardware is not so great, but it is interesting to have a variety. I now have 3 vendors' CPUs that I know of in my room: an Intel i386, a Motorola PPC, and a DEC Alpha. (Some of the other devices have embedded CPUs of various descriptions, and I don't know what those are.) If I go buy some suitable parts, I can get the Multia up and running Linux or NetBSD.

JWZ is responsible for the original "Linux is only free if your time has no value".

Electrochemistry

OK, all you electrochemists out there in Advogato-land, suppose I impale a lemon or a grapefruit with two electrodes of different metals (as copper and zinc). I now have a power source of a certain characteristic voltage and a certain maximum current.

How are these affected by

• the chemical composition of the electrolyte
• the distance between the electrodes
• the metals of which the electrodes are made
• the exposed surface area of the portion of each electrode within the electrolyte?

I seem to remember something about the voltage having to do with the difference in electroegativity of the electrode metals. Or maybe the difference in ionization potential. But I'm not sure. I haven't studied chemistry in over five years now.

Wrist

My wrist felt better for two days after I went to see a chirapractor, so I went back to typing, and both arms promptly started to ache -- and my wrist pain has come back. Ouch!

The chiropractor gave me a rubber ball to squeeze for hand exercise. (I would have thought that less motion, period would be the best thing for my hand; she says that muscular strength and a variety of motions will help.)

I urge readers who have never had any wrist pain from typing to do something to keep it that way!

Collage

Still going. I should try to drop by Dolby Labs, as they're right in the City (near Linuxcare). The California Avocado Commission was very prompt about sending me the materials I requested.

(23:49:05)

Of the mathematical recreations stuff, I have 11 books here, and I think 3 in Massachusetts (Fractal Music, Hypercards, and More; The Sixth Scientific American Book; Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Diversions from Scientific American). Did Gardner write more than 14 mathematical recreations column collections?

2000-07-04

(13:46:26)

I am still trying to minimize typing.

On Friday, I'm going to have a meeting relating to the Open Source Initiative, which is trying to act on some of the very legitimate criticisms which have been made about it. I'm looking forward to that.

2000-07-05

(02:18:44)

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like. Thanks.

macricht, you're the person I thought might answer first. So can you tell me which of those factors affect voltage, and which affect current? If I change the electrode size or the distance between electrodes, is the voltage affected?

mpav: where's the victory party for California?

If there's no victory, maybe we can at least have a defeat party.

Aeneid

Your Aeneid quotation for today:

O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt!

I've said that before in similar circumstances, but never yet here on Advogato. I think it is incredibly genuine, yet not invidious.

I like the Aeneid enough to do sortes Vergilianae. Working on my collage has reminded me of that.

Weekend

I didn't type that much; I found some other interesting things to do.

I went to a CalLUG meeting. Nobody came except board members and former board members. It figures: how many people want to go to a tiny college LUG meeting on a Saturday night during the summer? Well, I do...

I went book-hunting with two people. I am so impressed with the Green Apple Bookstore (in the Richmond district in San Francisco, way out west). It was neat. They have a fantastic science section, and also religion, classics, history, and an entire store for fiction. Green Apple and one of my companions, a fellow Martin Gardner fan, helped my complete part of my Gardner collection (as I mentioned yesterday).

We also went to the Magritte exhibition at the SF MOMA, right down the street; I saw some famous paintings like La Condition Humaine and La Trahison des Images. I hadn't been to an art exhibition in a long time! I knew of Magritte mainly through the work of Douglas Hofstadter, who's very fond of him.

I got a limited-edition "Anonymity Loves Company" t-shirt, which will be signed by as many anonymous remailer operators (remops) as I can find in person. The shirt looks great -- it's white on black and very professional. (I should probably expand it to include people who have made significant contributions to the Internet remailer network; then I can include raph. As it has been pointed out, remailers have really been in decline these past few years.)

Since the weekend, I've heard from a couple of good friends from high school, which is a great pleasure. It will be even better when I manage to see them; most are still clustered around New England.

I'm told that the EFF and OSI will have some nice announcements soon.

Collage

5 pages of bibliography. <paste, paste>

(02:22:33)

But then, I normally spend my Friday nights talking about DeCSS -- on-line, or in person, if I can.

I had an meeting about the Open Source Initiative on Friday which was great fun. It gave me a lot to think about. I imagine that organization doesn't have a huge amount of credibility with all Advogato readers -- what can the OSI do differently and better? Maybe I'll make a front-page article about this at some point.

We went to the SF 2600 meeting again; it was fun and chock-full of culture clashes. One woman had come from Korea for the weekend -- her company sent her to San Francisco for the sole purpose of attending the San Francisco 2600 meeting and trying to recruit hackers to speak at a conference they're organizing back in Korea in the fall. Wow. Please, nobody send me to a foreign country all of a sudden over a weekend so that I can go to a mall and try to get a bunch of hackers to come home with me.

2000-07-11

(11:21:29)

The really cool news was that Cindy Cohn, who has been chief counsel for the plaintiff in the Bernstein crypto export case, is joining the EFF full-time! And so is another lawyer involved, whose name escaped me but some of whose work I've read.

I'm not going to try to list all the people I saw at the event, but it was just really neat to get to hang out with all of them.

2000-07-13

(02:02:08)

Quae quibus anteferam?

I am using my Advogato diary as one of my sources for my collage, so there's a bit of recursion there, because I cut out some parts where I talk about the collage, and pasted them into the collage.

My right wrist hurts again, a bit. I'm making plans for my trip at the end of the month.

I'm doing pretty well, outside of my wrist, accomplishing stuff at Linuxcare (though not writing free software). It's fun to see the potential of the programmable completions in bash 2.04. I'm not writing any completion functions yet, but one of my co-workers is, and they're pretty impressive. I think those tcsh users will have to surrender on the completion front pretty soon.

Nathan, do you mean to suggest that lawyers do things for no reason? :-)

Math

Sometimes I think I ought to be a math teacher. I'm not a very disciplined math student, but I do seem to be curious and in it for the long term, and explaining mathematics is more fun than most of what I get to do most of the time. It's a unique experience.

I was trying to explain formal methods at lunch, you see, and I went off into discussing the Four-Color Theorem, formal systems, topology, pi, Pi, the movie, the history of mathematics, radian measure, the differential calculus, the Pons Asinorum, the tangent and arctangent, Taylor series, error approximations, the relationship of mathematics and the natural sciences, the real number line, and the geography of South Africa. :-)

Now, if only I could do that every day...

As I say, I know 54 decimal places of pi, but I can't figure a restaurant tip inside of 30 seconds. But I can certainly tell you immediately that 54 squared is 2916.

DeCSS

I am seeking to commission a song about the CSS algorithm. I think we can probably get together a fair amount of money to support this; I'll post some more details here if this comes together.

As I said, you should all have gone to BayFF. But I said to one person that the BayFF meeting was for DVD ligitation fans, in much the same sense that science fiction conventions are held for science fiction fans. (Now, DVD litigation fans don't necessarily like DVD litigation as much as science fiction fans like science fiction...)

2000-07-17

(01:33:08)

I went to Berkeley on Sunday and saw Rob and his family. That was very nice. I saw the location of Transvirtual, right next to the old office of Berkeley Systems (the flying toaster people), in beautiful Northside, Berkeley, California.

I also went to several bookstores and got some neat stuff, including more Gardner, and the second volume of Knuth. And I bought a CD by Dan Bern, about whom I've heard good things. Dan Bern is very clever, but a bit weird for me.

The math and science sections at Moe's were better than I remembered.

The DeCSS trial in New York starts today -- have fun, everybody, and good luck to the defense.

Um, free software stuff? I got a link to some audio localization/spatialization code from an Advogato reader -- it's been released under the GPL, and I'd like to take a look at it. It's a lot more sophisticated than the model I was developing. I'm still doing mild Python hacking and sharing and acquiring Python expertise, but nothing is exciting enough to write home about. It's lots of 30-100 line Python programs for demonstrations and proofs of concept, and there's a lot I'd like to learn about and work with still. Gardner and Knuth make me think about card shuffling; it would be better for my wrists, surely, if I practiced real card shuffling instead of writing computer programs about it. But Knuth cited the famous paper by Persi Diaconis (Knuth cites everything!), and finding and reading that on paper would be way better for my wrists than shuffling or programming.

For those who have Knuth vol. 2 (Seminumerical Algorithms), see page 147. Gardner talks about shuffling in lots of places... among others (I am sure there are others), Mathematics, Magic, and Mystery, p. 27; Mathematical Carnival, p. 123; Mathematical Magic Show, p. 94. The latter is cited by Knuth. Hooray!

Happy Yellow Pig Day.

2000-07-18

(12:10:12)

Thanks to Advogato-Rachel for the kind mention in her article.

The LinuxCabal shut down today, alas, alas, and I also managed to bounce my mail for about 20 minutes in between due to an MX problem. (Another machine that didn't want to relay for me unexpectedly got the IP address of my old MX, and I couldn't update my DNS zone.) I'm still waiting for machines I rely on to land in their homes at friends' places with DSL -- but I think my mail is probably safe in the meantime with my last-resort backup MX.

It's really, really sad to see the CoffeeNet and LinuxCabal moving away; as I've said before, I live and work here in large part because of the proximity of those entities.

stefan: the "conscious design == authoritarian control" concept is something Phil Agre picked up in a long criticism of libertarianism in one of his "notes and recommendations" posts. What I thought Agre was missing, or at least not explicitly addressing, was that libertarians don't necessarily object to conscious design, but have objections about what one might call the authority model associated with certain designs. One question: is a particular design (of institutions) effective for the purpose for which it was intended? Another: is that purpose a good one? Most important, in my view, to the controversy between libertarians and most everyone else: who has legitimate authority to implement the design?

Different people have somewhat dramatically different authority models for human societies. :-)

2000-07-20

(01:04:18)

There is also a wedding coming up; one of my friends who's getting married is younger than I am. Wow.

I missed one friend in the City today (oops) but heard from another on the phone (not oops). Simon and I also went by Dolby Laboratories; their worldwide headquarters is literally one block away from Linuxcare, though, what do you know, they don't have brochures available for the general public, or anything for the public to see there.

You can see the sound spatialization code that a Canadian communications engineer named Karen wrote and released under the GPL over here. I still haven't had time to try it out (and the sample program only runs under Windows right now).

I wrote some Python code to represent a deck or pack of cards, but now there are an infinite number of features I'd like to add, because there are so many things you can do with a deck of cards. It was Knuth who got me back thinking about some of them, as I mentioned a couple of days ago.

I also agreed to give up the oath.org domain to Olympic Athletes Together Honourably. They can use it better than I can, and they're going to give me an acknowledgement on their site.

The DVD trial in New York is in full swing, and I have an exciting report from a friend who was there in person; I'm thinking of showing up myself next week when I'm in Manhattan! I got recruited to be the guest speaker at BALUG on Tuesday evening, and I ended up giving a largely impromptu talk about the DeCSS cases for nearly two hours, complete with an overhead projection of a picture of Jon Johansen. (I also announced my intention to commission a CSS song, which I've talked about here before.) I'm so tempted to take that down to Kinko's and get at least an 11" by 17" poster that says JON JOHANSEN IS WATCHING YOU.

2000-07-21

(01:58:25)

Speaking of romantic involvements, bridal registries, what a concept! Macy's has it down to a science: go there, enter a few characters of a bride's or groom's name on a cute little touch-screen kiosk (probably with a non-free OS, I fear), get a laser-printed list of gifts, vendors, departments, prices, item numbers, how many the bride and groom wanted, and how many people already got them. Go find an item, sixth floor, complimentary gift-wrapping, um, that was kind of impersonal there, wasn't it? But the lucky couple will receive a rather complete set of home furnishings, with minimal duplication.

The DeCSS trial continues with Jon Johansen's testimony. He is cool. I am definitely going to make a poster, and write away for some of those "Free Jon Johansen" bumper stickers. Jon's father Per is also an amazingly cool person, and I explained why in my comments at BALUG, which will apparently be available on-line soon.

I think mpav is also about to testify, and soon Bruce Schneier. Maybe I'll get lucky and have the privilege of hearing Schneier testify; hey, defense lawyers, would you mind calling him in the afternoon on July 27? Thanks, much obliged. :-)

I'm editing some course materials for Linuxcare University. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say what the course is about, because I don't know if all of our forthcoming courses have been announced somewhere or not. I also don't want people to blame me if there should be any problems left in the course; I didn't write it, I'm just trying to improve it as best I can.

Speaking of insightful technology writers named Phil, I wrote to Phil Agre to try to order a copy of the course reader for his course on information and institutional change. They're sold out already.

My arm hurts, but the magnitude of my friend's injury last weekend makes me try to keep this in perspective. I now know three people, maybe four people, who have almost been killed in accidents (and one who has been).

2000-07-22

(02:04:13)

I have five last-minute sources for my collage, so I plan a trip to Kinko's tomorrow, I guess, and I have lots of other stuff to do before leaving San Francisco on Sunday. I think I'll take my unfinished collage to Massachusetts with me and leave it with my father to mail.

I've had several e-mail conversations in Latin recently. I think this is helping my Latin skills return.

I'm not at OLS, I'm not at the O'Reilly conference, I'm not going to be at DefCon. More power to those who are and will be.

I subscribed to Linux Journal because Don Marti has become an editor there.

2000-07-23

(01:26:01)

I got procmail set up so that it will be easier to keep track of the mail I get during my vacation, even without typing.

Look out, MPAA! Jon Johansen is watching you!

2000-07-25

(23:03:54)

2000-08-02

(00:50:10)

As Advogato-Rachel once put it, "Long time no diarize".

The story of the atomic bomb is too complicated for me; I'm interested and I've read several books about it, but I can't quite figure out what angle to approach it from. There are so many facts and so many stories!

My Notable East Coast Vacation

9 days, 4 airplanes, 4 graduate schools of public health, 4 New England states (plus 1 nice view of Vermont), 3 rivers, 5 visits to Hartford, CT, 1 ocean, 3 urban subway systems, 1 amphibious vehicle, 1 limousine, 4 taxis, 2 interstate train rides, 3 parent and parent SO households, 3 consecutive Indian meals, 1 machine shop, 2 cities with suspected outbreaks of West Nile virus, 2 prep schools, 4 pre-Revolutionary cemetaries, 2 Catholic churches, at least 9 other churches, 1 day by which I missed attending the DeCSS trial in New York, 11 hospitals, 4 in-jokes, 3 admissions officers, 3 dental schools, 1 Gutenberg Bible, 1 Halon system, 1 department chair, 1 elementary school, 2 bunches of flowers, 3 evangelists and 4 pieces of evangelical literature, 10 ears of fresh corn, 3 high school friends, 2 stories of ambiguous encounters, 3 fire stations, 2 convention centers, 3 post offices, 2 informal college tours, 1 sandbox, 2 sailing ships, 1 theme restaurant, 1 radioisotope policy, 3 biohazard placards, 9 card shuffles, 3 magic tricks (plus 2 I didn't see), 1 bookseller who liked my anti-MPAA shirt and 1 Empire State Building elevator operator who disliked it, 2 debates about copyright, 3 family trees, 2 botanical gardens, 2 movies, 1 FreeBSD hacker, 1 math teacher, 4 bookstore cats, 1 HAZMAT response emergency vehicle, 1 Korean grocery store in Greenwich Village where I first tried Arizona green tea, 24 copies of Science and Health (but 0 of The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy), 3 paramedics, 3 parades and street fairs, 4 dishes of ice cream, 4 pieces of cannoli, 1 Holocaust memorial, 5 veterans' memorials, 1 esplanade, 2 major transit stations, 1 engagement, 3 chess games, 5 libraries, 1 civil liberties organization, 2 malls, at least 5 museums, 1 math student, and at least 11 bookstores. (I won't mention weddings, pickles, MIT, MP3s, or being in the same building as the Voynich manuscript.)

Now that's what I call a vacation!

2000-08-03

(11:29:16)

2000-08-05

(11:45:09)

My wrists started to hurt a lot again, and I will see a doctor.

This week I gave dictation for some material in a Linuxcare University course. Better than typing all day, right? I went through two and a half cassette tapes setting out my comments. When I dropped off the tapes, I ran into digdude, who was doing some late-night multimedia hacking; as I read my Linuxcare e-mail backlog, he solved one problem after another, after another, after another...

Multimedia support on Linux has gotten really good (I say from here in my 80x44 text console). Congratulations to all the people who've made it happen.

I hope to get caught up on lots of stuff through the weekend -- I have some really ambitious plans for getting back in sync on everything.

I don't know that I'm going to get caught up on the DeCSS trial this time around, though; I may have to start following it closely again only on appeal. I mean, I have about 200 pages of documents and about 500 e-mail messages to read if I want to be caught up again.

Ten words I'm never ever going to want to see again when this is all over:

A technological measure effectively controls access to a work if

2000-08-06

(01:59:51)

2000-08-07

(00:51:44)

I didn't get much done at all, but I did have a nice time at CalLUG and also tried another vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. It was great!

Vegetarian Chinese restaurants in San Francisco (and Berkeley)

This one is Lucky Creation on Washington Street (854, near Waverly Place, and relatively close by the City Lights bookstore in North Beach; 989-0818). I think it's my favorite of all the Bay Area vegetarian Chinese restaurants I've ever been to. Mmmmm. The Lotus Garden (532 Grant) has unfortunately been closed for months, and I didn't like Kowloon (909 Grant; 362-9888) that much (it may have been too authentic for me; most of the dishes were really unfamiliar, and I'm not so adventurous).

In Berkeley, there's the very cheap and very decent Vegi Food (2085 Vine, near Shattuck, very close by Transvirtual, and even closer to Black Oak Books, in what Berkeley students call Northside; 548-5244). There's also Lotus Vegetarian and Seafood at 2270 Shattuck (near University, pretty near The Other Change of Hobbit; 841-7303) which is OK and has a really big thing about trying to sell you a water filter, except they don't actually stock them...

I guess I'll have to start leading Bay Area vegetarian Chinese food tours, in addition to Bay Area book tours. (I know I'm still missing some places from my list; it will take more work.) Come on, East Coast friends, visit me!

Tech support

My mom called me up with lots of Windows support questions, but I've kind of deliberately forgotten a lot of what I knew about Windows, so I have a hard time thinking of specifics. Plus, I'd do everything possible with a command line, which is unfamiliar to my mom. So I didn't make that much progress helping her.

If she'd just switch to using bash under Linux, I could give her lots of suggestions all the time. As it is, I say things like "Well, I guess you could do that using Explorer...".

Keyboard

I borrowed an ergonomic keyboard from Nick, and I'll try to use it until I see a doctor.

General

Oh, Linuxcare got some more funding, but I don't actually know very much about that. I wasn't involved, you know.

Some people are worrying about threats to democratic institutions. Um. Long political debate I've missed out on for the time being. Everybody who knows me can already predict what I think; I spent Friday night having dinner with two cypherpunks who run anonymous remailers. One works for EFF and one for PGP. I got their autographs on an anonymous-remailer t-shirt. Hmmmm, am I in a demographic which thinks FreeNet is a good thing? :-)

2000-08-08

(04:01:12)

I actually bought a churro; it was absolutely delicious, every bit as good as those East Coast cannoli. Advogato is providing free advertising for the South of Market churro industry.

I don't know whether I'm going to LWCE or not. If I do, I'll see some of you there.

I went to a Linuxcare program on workplace discrimination and was very concerned by the "hostile work environment" rules. The rules about behavior aimed at a particular person make some sense to me, but the work environment bit seems like a problem to me. For instance, what if somebody is offended by my "Jon Johansen is watching you" poster? A very long story.

RSI

I found some other things to do at Linuxcare that don't involve typing -- mostly teaching classes. The interesting thing is that I'll have to get permission from my department to do work for other departments, and maybe they will bill each other. Unfortunately, I seem to squander most of my non-typing gains with bursts of typing to check e-mail and (say) write Advogato diary entries; that seems to undo my progress. I am still going to investigate more weird suggestions about interface devices, all the way to electrodes which read nerve impulses (no, they don't have to be implanted or anything) and maybe some voice recognition. I don't mind dictation quite as much as I thought I would.

Lots of people are visiting -- dhd, who taught me a bit about calling conventions, signal handling, and processor modes; lkcl, from whom I hope to learn a bunch of Samba lore tomorrow.

Tumble rings

The tumble rings I made in 1997 were unaccountably a smash hit in the office, after languishing in obscurity for almost three years. I just had to find the right people to show them to, and now we have a Linuxcare 19th-century mechnical optical illusion cottage industry. A visiting industry analyst saw them, too (you want maybe I should have shown her that Makefile instead?), so maybe they will become internationally famous tumble rings.

Zack of Kernel Traffic is extremely funny and creative, aside from being a clever Perl programmer.

Evening

A one-minute question turned into about four hours of conversations and e-mail relating to my ex-girlfriend. Ouch. (And not just because of my wrists.)

Which is more fun, failed relationship politics or trading playing card lore with somebody on another continent? Either way, I was up very late. Just like old times, in many ways.

In other news: "the depredations of the copyright industries".

Wendy has actually been mentioned in my Advogato diary once upon a time, but not by name, I don't think.

2000-08-09

(13:24:37)

2000-08-10

(10:27:21)

I wrote several friendly notes, one important letter, and did a lot of brooding. I also had a few nice meetings at work.

Lieberman

Someone's diary mentioned Lieberman, now Democratic VP candidate. So, as neat as it would be to see that a Jew could be elected vice president -- something I would not have thought when I was little, and which still might not be the case -- Senator Lieberman has a terrible record on Internet and media censorship (as was reported on Politech and in several other forums this week). OK, not that any mainstream candidate has a good record here -- from the PS+++ point of view. :-)

2000-08-11

(09:58:07)

nymia: I found Frederic Wheelock's Latin book to be very helpful; he gives straightforward grammar explanations (mostly in tables) followed by very interesting and memorable classical quotations. This is a very traditional way of teaching Latin, and I enjoyed reading that a lot, even though my class was using the more "modern" Ecce Romani.

It is necessary to memorize a huge number of inflections, although I can't say I could ever do all 144 finite forms (more or less) of any verb outside the first conjugation. (In addition, there are a few non-finite forms, not just the infinitive.) Traditionally, people would just recite those until they memorized them: puella puellae puellae puellam puella, puellae puellarum puellis puellas puellis. (Or "a ae ae am a, ae arum is as is; us i o um o, i orum is os is...")

Hey, at least it's easier than Greek, which has over 600 finite verb forms (especially if you learn the archaic duals, which I never did).

If you want to see lots of examples of conjugation, you may appreciate the Barron's book 201 Latin Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses, recently (1995) re-issued as 501 Latin Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses. But if you don't like inflections, that's probably the last thing you want to see.

LWCE

I'm going to be at LWCE in the Linuxcare booth on Thursday the 17th in the afternoon, and I'll be at the show wandering around in the morning.

2000-08-12

(14:42:18)

The doctor diagnosed me with "wrist pain"; my experience was very close to the old joke:

- Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!

- So don't do that, then.

I'm going to look at voice recognition stuff in Berkeley early next week; I'm trying to make an appointment with a voice recognition technology reseller. (Berkeley is the home of the disability movement, so it has a number of resellers, dealers, and consultants in assistive and adaptive technologies, and a bunch of them have showrooms. Cool!)

I also still haven't gotten around to comment in some of the front-page articles (death of copyright, graydon's technical questions).

Collage

My collage is delayed a lot because of my wrists, but I'll think it's a really bad thing if I can't get it finished this weekend.

12 coins (spoilers)

rillian: you can't search more than 3^n coins, or floor((3^n)/2) coins when you also have to state whether a coin is heavy or light -- this from an information flow argument (each weighing distinguishes one of three possible states, and the possible states described by "coin j is bad" are j in number, the states described by "coin j is bad with error-direction s" are 2j in number).

This doesn't prove that you can search (3^n)/2 coins, just that you can't search more than that.

bwtaylor: In answer to the original problem, we can break it into sub-problems.

1. Given 2 possibly-bad coins known to have the same possible error direction (both heavy or both light), where the shared possible error-direction is known, to find which of the two coins is bad (if either), in one use of the balance: weigh the two coins against each other. (If they balance, neither is bad.)

2. Given 4 possibly-bad coins of unknown error direction (coins of which one is heavy or light, but you don't know which -- call these "U" coins), and at least 1 known-good coin (call this an "N" coin), to find which coin is bad, and its error-direction, in 2 uses of the balance. Weigh two U coins against a third U coin and an N coin. If the two U coins rise: they are suspect-light coins (possibly light, known not to be heavy; call these "L" coins), and the third U coin is suspect-heavy ("H"); then use the solution to problem 1, above, with the two L coins (if neither is bad, then the H coin is bad). If the two U coins sink: they are H coins, and the third U coin is an L coin; use the solution to problem 1, above, with the two H coins (if neither is bad, then the L coin is bad). If the two U coins balance with the third U coin and the N coin: the fourth U coin is bad. Weigh it against the N coin to find out whether it is heavy or light.

3. Given 8 possibly-bad coins of which 4 are H and 4 are L, and at least 4 N coins, to find which coin is bad (its error direction is then automatically known), in 2 uses of the balance. Weigh 3 H coins and 1 L coin against 4 N coins. If the L coins and the H coin rise, then the bad coin is the L. If they sink, then the bad coin is one of the 3 H coins; use the solution to problem 1 with any two of the 3 H coins to find which is bad (if neither, it is the third). If they balance, then the bad coin is one of the 3 remaining L coins or the remaining 1 H coin. Use the solution to problem 2, above, with these 4 coins (we already have more information than we need!) to find which is bad.

4. Given 12 U coins, to find which coin is bad, and its error-direction, in 3 uses of the balance. Weigh 4 of the U coins against 4 others of the U coins. If they balance, one of the remaining 4 U coins is bad; use the solution to problem 2, above, to find which and its error-direction. If they do not balance, the 4 coins on the side which sinks are now H coins, and the 4 coins on the side which rises are now L coins. Use the solution to problem 3, above, to find which is bad.

In order to be able to search floor((3^n)/2) coins, I would need to find a recursive generalization of this somehow. I'm going to talk Ryan's advice and walk around San Francisco for a while today -- it is a beautiful day! -- and see if one comes to me.

Other people's diaries

rakholh: I don't want Lieberman to get elected "just because" he is Jewish. Actually, I don't want him to get elected at all, because he wants to censor the Internet. Actually, I don't want anyone to get elected, because I am an anarchist. But I especially don't want Lieberman to be elected, since he wants to censor the Internet. (All major candidates do, but Lieberman is just more vocal about it.)

I thought it was neat that he was a Jewish major-party nominee, though. In the U.S. it is extremely rare for anyone who doesn't appear to be a church-going white Protestant male to be elected President or Vice President, or even to be nominated by a major party for those offices. The last exception to the "getting elected" bit was John F. Kennedy, a Catholic (still Christian by prevailing standards, still white, still male). If I remember correctly, the Democrats did nominate a woman for Vice President once, but she was not elected. No woman has ever been elected President or Vice President. Neither has an atheist or an adherent of a religion other than Christianity. (Apparently some non-Christian theists who disliked organized religions were, once upon a time.)

Some time I can talk about claims of divine inspiration for scriptures. :-)

lilo: I need to give my wrists a break!

2000-08-14

(12:52:37)

I stumbled upon the San Francisco Art Institute, where my mom used to work in the 1970s. It's an incredibly beautiful tiny little campus up on a hill in the northeast corner of the city; there are amazing views from up on the roof, and you can walk right up out on it. I hadn't been there in over a decade.

On Sunday, I went to Berkeley so Sumana could help me with my collage (still not done!), and whom should I run into outside a new vegetarian Japanese restaurant...

I ended up staying over in Berkeley at a friend's house so I could go by the voice-recognition dealer's place in the morning. Well, they made me make an appointment (for Wednesday) and sent me away empty-handed. So I dropped by Transvirtual looking for Rob, and didn't see him but did see Jim. I'll catch up with Rob at LWCE.

I also read The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth over the weekend, and I highly recommend it (although I didn't find the ending very satisfying).

The U.S. Government Bookstore has moved from 2nd Street to somewhere else. Oops.

2000-08-15

(02:23:13)

There is nothing quite like listening to a bunch of your old classmates singing Pablo Casals's "O Vos Omnes" for an hour or two. (Casals set part of Lamentations 1:12 in Latin to music. It's very meaningful that Casals chose that text -- if you know a little of his life story.)

o vos omnes, o vos omnes qui transitis per viam,
oh, all you who pass by along the road:
attendite, attendite, et videte,
look and see,
si est dolor, si est dolor,
whether there is any grief
sicut dolor meus.
such as my grief.

2000-08-16

(00:27:48)

Physical therapists know some stretches they don't teach you in high school gym class. But it's a vaguely disturbing thought that there are stretches which can make you lose consciousness. I'll never doubt it again...

I'm sorry to be missing the first three days of LWCE. I hope everybody's having fun there. I'm still anticipating going on Thursday. You can recognize me because I have a long beard but am obviously not Alan or Maddog. Oh, and I'll be wearing a name tag that says "Seth Schoen". Yeah.

Tax stuff went well, except you're really not supposed to run for a postmark a couple of hours after fainting.

I wrote a sonnet which is an acrostic for the dedication of my collage. I'm so close, I can feel it (in my ulnar nerve, no doubt).

2000-08-16

(19:07:37)

I plan to get a Win98 box and run an X server, full-screen PuTTY, and screen for a while, and to make up some macros to make NaturallySpeaking more Unix-friendly, mutt-friendly, vim-friendly, bash-friendly, and Python-friendly. I might also try AbiWord under Windows.

A pity to be using proprietary stuff here, but Dragon is so far ahead of everyone else...

I continue to hope that not everybody will have gone home by the time I get to LWCE tomorrow.

2000-08-17

(19:34:24)

He went like one that hath been stunned
And is of sense forlorn.

2000-08-20

(14:56:46)

I had fun at LWCE, even though I just went for one day. I got to hang out with the EFF folks, and then to go to their BayFF meeting at Berkeley, where there was a debate about privacy and I met some neat people. I gave a good deal of money to the EFF during the week, because every time they were asking for money, I would make a contribution. So I ended up as an official EFF member, and got the t-shirt. (I also got some questions about the Copyleft DVD shirt I was wearing through the weekend.)

I didn't get to meet Maciej at the show, though I'd hoped to.

On Friday I went to Berkeley, and stayed over. My friend's sister made fun of her for always reading my Advogato diary. I also caught up with Rob and met netgod (Johnie).

I also went book shopping in Berkeley and bought and read Into the Forest by Jean Hegland, which has been alluded to here before.

My right arm is still messed up -- I seem to have normal motion, strength, and sensation in my hand, but my arm is often sore. (This is after that bad stretch on Wednesday.) It's not a problem, as long as it gets better in time. I'm using only my left hand to type until my voice recgnition software comes next week. So I still can't work on my collage, either.

I made what may be one last photocopy for the collage, and it made me think about the Greek word "kairos". It means time, but in the sense of right time, opportunity, special occasion, appropriate time, not like the time of day or the amount of time that something took (which is chronos). So "kairos" has a sort of a moral or metaphysical sense, like the connotations of the Latin word fas. So, what happens where people disagree about kairos? It's a very significant sort of disagreement...

Of course I'm not talking about anything so trivial as (for instance) business planning (is this kairos for Transmeta's S-1? which is like asking whether the appointment of a particular CEO at Linuxcare is fas or nefas, or whether it's done under good auspices). I'm thinking a little bigger than that, or trying to.

When people disagree about an assessment of kairos, they can feel uneasy, at the very least. If they can get along indefinitely in the face of a difference like that, then they might just be uncomfortable. If they needed to agree, they suffer.

2000-08-21

(11:39:48)

Recipes must be
shareable, but I don't need
to bake Wonder Bread.

ncm: it's a good thing I don't drink, then -- the doctor prescribed me a huge ibuprofen dose (total of 2.4 g/day, which would be 12 Advils, or half a bottle of Advil!) and didn't even say anything about interactions. So some bad things could have happened, I think.

Lancelot Hogben is trying to convince me that the Pythagoreans were more weird than to be emulated. But I bet they never had any harmful interactions with ibuprofen!

2000-08-21

(22:16:30)

So, I've heard Bach's Cello Suite No. 3 in MIDI tone synthesis in SimCity for Windows (if I remember correctly), and I've heard it in a Pablo Casals recording. (The "O Vos Omnes" made me think to get it.) It's hard to imagine a bigger difference!

If I were an ad exec, trying to dramatize the theme of "contrast" (e.g. Their Lame Product and Our Glorious Product), I would want to oppose SimCity for Windows background theme music and Pablo Casals.

2000-08-22

(01:38:49)

2000-08-24

(01:49:38)

Wednesday was terribly complicated; maybe I can explain it when I get NaturallySpeaking set up tomorrow.

I did know Azalea Jusay, who perished with her parents in a fire in Berkeley on Sunday. She was a member of the hall staff in my old dorm when I attended UC Berkeley, and I have friends who were friends with her.

Please test your smoke detector. If you don't have a working smoke detector where you live, please buy and install one today.

2000-08-26

(16:41:48)

Dave Winer is a famous programmer who is better known to WWW folks than to free software folks. He's a neat guy who gets into interesting discussions with various people... show up and chat! It's free (as in beer).

I'll be there -- I live across the street!

2000-08-29

(23:05:29)

• relay logic
• teaching
• dictation and voice recognition
• voice strain
• relay logic
• lilo gets into arguments about copyright with famous people
• relay logic
• dietary deficiencies?
• controlling vi and mutt by pronouncing keystrokes(!)
• Dave Winer at Moscone
• I should go to ALS
• I should stop typing
• relay logic

2000-08-30

(23:06:26)

• teaching
• relay logic
• Berkeley
• it's hilarious that the USIA runs a radio station named after Jose Marti
• vegetarian Japanese restaurant
• freshmen
• nostalgia
• Dwinelle Hall
• nobody has registered dwinellehall.org; I want to be schoen at dwinellehall.org... and have a clickable map or VRML model
• I am a Dwinelle Hall fan, I have the official Dwinelle Hall Expansion t-shirt ($10, limited time offer during 1998, only available in person in a room way in the depths of Dwinelle, in the four-digit room number part), I would buy a Dwinelle Hall folklore coffeetable book (are you listening, Tim?)
• aren't architectural plans of public buildings public records under CPRA? I should start having "Law Student Nite @ St. Francis Place" so I can ask random legal questions like that
• 1/4 of the remaining membership of Cal Libertarians was on BART with me, including a guy about whom I told a story some readers may recall (he ran for California Assembly) -- a long story
• Laura Branigan, Dan Bern
• when I get dictation working with diaries, I will post in complete sentences again
• assign people to play BSD games to learn vi arrow keys
• I need to make some handouts, maybe copy the definition of daimon from LSJ, to explain why Unix daemons are called daemons
• it sounds like Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about biometrics

2000-08-31

(19:12:35)

• teaching
• good luck to stephane's cat
• vi
• Bill Joy was in the SJ Mercury because of a piece about self-reproducing robots (they don't exist yet, but more steps are being made -- a robot that can design and build other robots)
• my sister's first day of high school
• it sounds good
• we need some 6V SPDT relays; can we get them under $1.30 apiece?
• we're still looking
• I should go back to Halted
• an anti-evolutionist tract at the doctor's, in the waiting room
• far be it from me to deny a forum by removing literature, but I wish I had some stickers or cards for various causes so that I could quickly annotate advocacy pieces with references to rebuttals :-)
• there was a piece on the Human Genome project with good background and then a quick abiogenesis argument ("these amazing scientific discoveries should impress us with a sense of the irreducible complexity of life... so it must have been intelligently designed" kind of thing)
• argh
• it's like "the steady progress of science convinces us that science is not making any progress"
• debugging is exciting, sometimes
• magnet safety

2000-09-01

(02:06:08)

You did it so easily,
You pulled my world out from under me,
Look what you've done to me

anger sing goddess

2000-09-02

(03:22:46)

• teaching
• regular expressions
• Zack asks what 11-letter English word can be made from the letters in [cousin]; I know the answer because someone else solved it
• start of a long weekend
• SF 2600 meeting, with almost nobody there, since school is starting up again
• dinner in the Castro with some friends
• I could deal with living there
• interesting and challenging correspondence
• are cell phones good or bad?
• are there things that are neither good nor bad?
• oops, typing
• FROG meeting on Saturday; we will play with relays
• we have an electronics catalogue or two and will get some more

• odi et amo
• quare id faciam fortasse requiris

2000-09-03

(02:13:58)

• Skud: my diary is only in this form because of wrist injuries
• once I work around a bug with NaturallySpeaking, I'll go back to complete sentences and paragraphs
• I still far prefer complete sentences and paragraphs in principle
• FROG meeting
• some geeky ideas
• I don't know that the FROG is really specifically about promoting free software
• I had dinner with elise, stephane, mjs, and mathieu. It was fun.
• imagine a dinner with five people who all have Advogato diaries
• mathieu really, really, really, really likes good bread
• raph: please let us use <cite>, so I can talk about something like reading <cite>Secrets</cite> by Sissela Bok
• I felt an earthquake
• tomorrow I will mail an order for a number of Martin Gardner books

2000-09-04

(00:20:32)

• yikes
• ouch
• that was a long e-mail message
• Arnold, Dover Beach
• I love literature
• it's magic
• trip to Ghirardelli Square
• buying chocolate and CCEBs, dinner at Gaylord's India Restaurant (wow!)
• spilled all my CCEBs all over my bag, only got to eat ten or fifteen
• that's well enough, I've eaten a whole bottle of CCEBs in two days, easy to do and not a good idea
• read Bertrand Russell's "Philosophy's Ulterior Motives" in his Unpopular Essays
• are you making fun of me, Bertrand?
• wrote another letter to LWN about free software licensing issues
• haven't sent it yet

2000-09-04

(11:39:20)

               ... divum inclementia, divum
has evertit opes sternitque a culmine Troiam.
Aspice (namque omnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti
mortalis hebetat visus tibi et umida circum
caligat, nubem eripiam; tu ne qua parentis
iussa time neu praeceptis parere recusa):

2000-09-05

(01:35:09)

Whoops!

It's simply amazing how many people have inadvertently ended up in some kind of business relationship with Verizon. I found out that I've joined the honorable family of Verizon customers through one of the dozens of new Verizon subsidiaries.

I spent my long weekend doing lots of stuff, including writing the longest e-mail message I've ever written (I should have done a :!wc % before sending it), and quoting a whole lot of literature. This coming week is going to involve a lot of teaching (almost finishing up the introductory course) and several LUG meetings, including the first meeting of CalLUG for the new school year (Tuesday night). Seeing as my introduction to the Bay Area Linux community came on the corresponding evening three years ago, I feel a great compulsion to go and meet and greet new freshman Linux enthusiasts at Berkeley. I'll probably be in Berkeley a couple of times during the week; maybe I can catch up with lilo and talk about intellectual property journalism.

I guess it was a surprisingly peaceful long weekend; considering the way it started, I thought it might end up being kind of stressful. I did type too much, and my wrists hurt a little bit, but definitely not the way they used to hurt. I think the voice recognition and teaching are helping quite a bit; I'll be trying a new keyboard and some other things in the next couple of weeks, too. And I will probably not need to write any more 1,000-line e-mail messages right away.

I still need a good solution for doing these diary entries by voice. (MSIE is broken. I'm shocked. Shocked!) Does someone have a worked-out command-line program to post a given text file as an Advogato diary entry?

I think I'm going to post my LWN license-fragmentation letter as an article here instead, and then mention it to LWN (they can link to it if they like it, and save editorial space). Does anyone have a command-line program for posting articles from text files?

lilo: once raph adds support for <cite>, I can tell you to read Sissela Bok's <cite>Secrets</cite>, which talks about the various conflicts between openness and the desire for privacy. (Brin's <cite>The Transparent Society</cite> also talks about that, and takes a very unusual view.)

ErikLevy: I've actually had dreams that my brain was running a free operating system, or at least a multitasking Unix-like operating system.

ReadMe: my life seems more like a story than like a series of facts, but unfortunately (to borrow someone else's metaphor) at certain times it seems that the ending of certain parts have been ripped out and replaced with a forgery (perhaps something like the ending of the Hofstadter chapter with the "Very Asian gold box", where we're supposed to tell that we're in a false fiction instead of the original "true" fiction -- GEB, "Aria with Diverse Variations", pp. 404-5). I guess I'm fortunate that this sense is relatively rare.

That's the dialogue that starts off with

You see, I have found that a little number theory does wonders for my troubled psyche.

2000-09-08

(20:49:44)

jimd is teaching a shell scripting class at Linuxcare this weekend, but I need my sleep, etc. I think 10 hours of shell scripting lectures from Jim would be ideal -- after all, I wanted to discuss O'Reilly books with the learned men, seven hours every day.

I'm a bit disorganized, and trying to get back on top of things. I had a nice time in Berkeley on Tuesday evening at CalLUG, and again on Thursday. I talked to Erik and stephane at great length about relay logic, and Erik found a way to make a decoder for a set of d digits to be displayed on an s-segment display in at most s*ceil(log_2(d)) relays, each floor(d/2)-pole double-throw, plus at most s more single-pole double-throw relays. It's a very elegant, very general technique, and Stephane and I like it a lot. For a seven-segment display which shows either decimal or hexadecimal digits, this translates to at most 28 4PDT relays plus 7 SPDT relays. (This is all "per digit". To display an 8-bit quantity on 7-segment displays in decimal would take up to 105 relays, and in hex it would take just 70. Oh, yeah, but hex actually probably can't use 4PDT relays after all -- they may need to be 7PDT!)

I should write a Python program which automatically generates wiring layouts for electromechanical digital display decoder circuits.

I'm trying to figure out how things in general are. I don't know exactly. I think a friend of mine and I need to have our own sort of state-of-the-world summit when she gets here next week.

I've been playing the "compare and contrast life experiences" game a bit recently, maybe for the thrill of seeing how different people (even within the San Francisco Bay Area) are in their backgrounds and attitudes and expectations. Um, the most obvious things to contrast are "socioeconomic status" (our fancy term for "how you were affected by how much money your family had"), education, and religion. One can obviously also crash into other kinds of differences... but the ones I mentioned make for good conversation.

I'm thinking a lot about this stuff, but I don't have enough exciting material for a diary entry, unless I were to start giving details of particular people's lives.

Maybe this is why adults at parties always seemed to have so much to talk about: maybe they were wondering about this, too.

2000-09-11

(12:23:08)

At a birthday party, I met a few people, including Nathaniel of the Berlin project. He showed me some screenshots and demos of the project, and I was suitably impressed. (Many of the rumors I've heard about problems with Berlin are way out of date.) Thereupon we talked about computer science, math, and perception and cognition until 3:00 in the morning. Hooray! Somebody else has heard of Gregory J. Chaitin.

Nathaniel told me that the ASUCbookstore was selling a copy of Knuth's Surreal Numbers (because it is a required text for a math class at Berkeley this semester). That was enough to get me to stay over in Berkeley so I could go to the store and buy it (the last copy in stock, as it turned out -- sorry, actual Berkeley math students). It's cool.

In the beginning, everything was void, and J. H. W. H. Conway began to create numbers. Conway said, "Let there be two rules which bring forth all numbers large and small. This shall be the first rule: Every number corresponds to two sets of previously created numbers, such that no member of the left set is greater than or equal to any member of the right set. And the second rule shall be this: One number is less than or equal to another number if and only if no member of the first number's left set is greater than or equal to the second number, and no member of the second number's right set is less than or equal to the first number." And Conway examined these two rules he had made, and behold! they were very good.

And the first number was created from the void left set and the void right set. Conway called this number "zero," and said that it shall be a sign to separate positive numbers from negative numbers. Conway proved that zero was less than or equal to zero, and he saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the day of zero. On the next day, two more numbers were created, one with zero as its left set and one with zero as its right set. And Conway called the former number "one," and the latter he called "minus one." And he proved that minus one is less than but not equal to zero and zero is less than but not equal to one. And the evening...

On Sunday I had lunch at an Indian restaurant in West Berkeley called Vik's. It was really good! And then I ended up going for a walk and eventually staying with a couple of friends at International House. It's nice that I still know so many people over in Berkeley; in fact, I've met many of them since I left school there!

"So you know I asked a friend about it, on a bad day..."

I'm really sad that so many people's romantic relationships are ending, um, involuntarily. It makes me especially happy for those who have been spared the experience. Maybe I can try the "non ignara mali" thing -- but I'm not really convinced about "succurrere".

Gee, it looks like George Lakoff has a little bit of a following in Berkeley...

A puzzle

What do these letters have in common? KM(T)VWX.

(There's some doubt about whether "T" belongs in this class.)

2000-09-12

(11:55:07)

When I get to work and get access to voice recognition, I can try to reconstruct this. I'm not going to type it all out again.

2000-09-13

(23:00:20)

I didn't manage to say this yesterday, but the RSA patent expiration party in San Francisco is scheduled for Thursday, September 21 (RSVP required). Be there or be defective. (Or "be there and be squarefree".)

I added an X-Accept-Language: en,la,eo header to my outgoing e-mail today. I didn't dare claim he,el, as somebody would take me up on it, but I see that ISO 639-2 would let me use grc, and all would be well.

Postquam exempta fames epulis mensaeque remotae,
amissos longo socios sermone requirunt

2000-09-14

(23:25:19)

Al Lasher's Electronics in Berkeley is amazing, like something out of the 1950s (except that some of the components they sell there didn't actually exist in the 1950s). Now I finally have a collection of 7400-series genuine TTL chips. (7400, 7402, 7404, 7408, 7432, 7448, 7473, 7493, 74164. Woohoo!)

The new Dar Williams CD called "The Green World" has some very good bits -- I guess my favorite so far is the second song, "And A God Descended".

I felt inspired to try to write a song (well, lyrics) of my own, but it didn't quite work out.

2000-09-15

(11:40:31)

raph: congratulations!

thom: Yes, "Defeating Darwinism" and "Tower of Babel" are directly opposed to one another. I also have books by Richard Dawkins and Michael Behe. I've been collecting evolutionist and anti-evolutionist books for a year or so. I could write a lot about reasons for collecting two (or more) sides of a controversy. I think it's important, even if you're a committed adherent of one side. (I should write a diary entry sometime about why I collect these things.)

Creationism is more widespread in computer science and other computer-related areas than it is in other technical fields, I think. (For instance, there is a larger proportion of creationists amount computer scientists than among geologists!) Computer science more or less needs only mathematics (and maybe semiconductors) to thrive, so it is easier for us to be a bit more insulated from the mainstream of other technical fields.

sab39, there are lots of other things you could have done to recover. Here are a few:

• use sln (if you have it)
• run /sbin/sash, the stand-alone shell, which is a static binary and contains built-in versions of the most common shell commands
• use LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/test-lib mv /test-lib /lib
• or export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/test-lib:/usr/lib
• if you reboot, use init=/sbin/sash instead of init=/bin/sh (since, to the absolute horror of BSD folks, /bin/sh on Linux systems is typically bash, which is dynamically linked)

Ooh, a really sick one:

• echo /test-lib >>/etc/ld.so.conf; /sbin/ldconfig

Note that this almost works: you will probably need to invoke ld-linux.so.2 manually for each binary, like "/test-lib/ld-linux.so.2 /bin/ls"; this is because the path to ld.so (unlike normal libraries) is normally hard-coded inside a binary. I think this will work, but I'm not going to test it.

Actually, to use any dynamically linked binaries on a system without /lib, you probably do want to run ld-linux.so.2 directly.

2000-09-15

(21:05:16)

As the person whose book collection started this thread, surely I get to say something. But you can also skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like.

kgb:

Interesting. You called "creationism" a theory, while MANY get upset if evolution is taught that way.

What they get upset about is when the status of evolution as a theory is used as an argument against it, or to suggest that its status in science is substantially weaker than other important theories about the world. The usual phrase that gets people riled up is "only a theory": in some contexts that phrase is a misrepresentation.

If we can throw "theory of evolution" in with "theory of gravity", "theory of relativity", "theory of microbial pathogens" (and, if you want, "theory of phlogiston") then we're doing OK.

It's common sense that there are facts that don't quite fit or are unexplained in evolution, but they do not get included in the teachings.

Speaking as someone who believes in many unpopular ideas, I think it would be a great thing if more counterexamples, challenges, and difficulties were included in teaching. On the other hand, as far as I've been able to tell, it seems like a general problem, and not specific to evolution. For example, when people are taught about gravity, they don't usually hear about how the laws of gravity were discovered, or about anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, or anything.

If you are taught to question everything, then question that there is more to existence than can be taught, or proven by science or senses.

There are definitely radical skeptics who say that everything should be doubted: on the other hand, the king of radical skepticism, David Hume, was not trying to use doubt (I'm tempted to say "FUD") to propose an alternative to rational inquiry -- he was totally merciless toward revealed religion, for example -- but just to show its limitations. I don't think Hume has ever been refuted, so much as ignored, but his insistence on questioning everything seems to make sense. Hume's undertaking ends with a lack of certainty (we might say "agnosticism"), rather than a magically renewed certainty.

The alternative to that that I can see is questioning as much as possible, and then using reason to try to reach consensus and expand our understanding.

To illustrate my point, I could quote the great Michael Elkins: "All mailers suck. This one just sucks less." (Whereas David Hume swore off e-mail after the first sentence, I suppose.)

I've always seen atheism as the easy way out.

It's really funny how we all like to suggest that our beliefs are particularly difficult to hold. :-)

If you deny there is a God and ultimate accountability or forgiveness for your actions (even those done in secret), then there is little incentive to do anything except what creates gain for you or makes you feel good.

1. This is a fallacious appeal to consequences (unless you have some reason why there are necessarily other incentives).
2. It's not clear how the existence of God changes the situation by creating any new kinds of incentives which would otherwise not exist. (The incentives themselves might be different, but they still seem to fit into previously-existing categories.)
3. I think your list of incentives is too short, because it omits vast areas of psychology. (For instance, cognitive beliefs are a huge source of incentives you didn't specifically mention.)
4. If that list is complete, then a lot of things which are subsumed under "makes you feel good" can be described less pejoratively. For example, human nature may be such that love makes us feel very good, so that we have an incentive to behave in loving ways.

Speaking as someone that is also extremely analytical and raised in scientific methods. I can't understand how anyone can believe in anything BUT that there is a God and that we were created. All of nature and life is extremely complex.I see intellegence in design everywhere. Birds flying, fish breathing in water, the beauty of a flower, the range of biologically useful plants and substances. How about the mathematical perfections found throughout everything. Even a single cell is a very complex organism (more than what was known when Darwinism started). No species has ever proven to improve biologically (natural selection causes vulnerable life to get killed, but that's nothing like "evolving" into something else). There are no "half- breed" fossils. The mathematical odds of all this working by accident are astronomical, and I'm suppose to believe that it's all accidentally possible if you throw billions of years into the formulae? That's too easy to claim. And I haven't even worked the wonders of the human mind into this.

I'll be sitting here all night if I try to argue about whether evolution is true. :-)

I can give everyone a bibliography with the major popular works of the past five years arguing that evolution is (1) true, (2) false and we should believe in intelligent-design creation, or (3) false but we need not believe in intelligent-design creation. Then everybody can go read them, and help support bookdealers or librarians.

And for people that think it doesn't matter which you believe[...]

I'll consider that not addressed to me. Except you excluded agnosticism, twice, as a reasonable possibility. Careful, there: agnosticism isn't the same as apathy.

If God is real, ask him to prove himself in your life. He would know what it takes.

This isn't a bad idea, but it has the same sort of problem as the "Thank you Saint Jude for prayers answered, publication promised": some people will be convinced and say something about it, and relatively few people will comment if their lives and beliefs aren't changed. So we here many stories about people who made such a request to good effect, and fairly little about people who called on God to no effect.

There was a famous story about some's discussion of mariners who came back from stormy seas praising God because they had been saved when they prayed at the last moment. The trouble was that the mariners who had not been saved couldn't come and criticize God: they lay silently at the bottom of the ocean.

I know some people who asked God to reveal himself and then did experience religious conversions, and others who had no such experience. So this is a difficult strategy for public discussion -- it's meaningful, yes, but it's not reliable or public.

Also, before you claim to have formed your own opinion, actually read the Bible for yourself. I am always amazed when I hear from people that have definate opinions about the Bible, but have never studied it for themselves. It won't bite you if it's just a book. :-)

Why do you assume that people haven't read the Bible if they don't agree that it was divinely inspired?

Mettw: I posted to a request for an opinion, so forgive me if this is my last post on this. I didn't ask for a debate, and I don't want to preach. The examples you site have no impact on proving a non-existence of God. It's like denying a television wasn't created by intellegence because it doesn't plow a field, or that a program was created by chance because it has bugs or doesn't meet your definition of perfection. Nipples on a man does not negate that the complexity of everything down to the atom is staggering. A beautiful forest is not negated by a single tree. I could counter in a number of ways: An artist has the right to put what they want in the design. Just as evolutionists ask for a leap of faith for the "facts" that haven't been found, why is it hard to accept that the nipple reason exists but you do not know what it is (actually, the Bible states that Man was created in God's image, so it could be as simple as God has nipples).

But we're asked to conclude that the actual details of living organisms are evidence of design, because they are aesthetically appealing or show engineering ingenuity or efficiency or complexity. (A famous example of this is that many creationists have picked up on a sentence in Darwin where Darwin says it's amazing to imagine the evolution of the eye, because it's hard to see how that complexity would be produced and what the intermediate forms would be. They've asserted that the eye is very well- designed and asked evolutionists to show how it could be a product of evolution, which has prompted a lot of research and writing and debate.) And if we look at actual organisms and point out aspects that are ugly or wasteful or counterproductive -- we're usually told that this can't be a counterexample, because we can't judge.

Now, wait a minute, here. The argument said that, because we can use our judgment to see that organisms are elegant and efficient, we must conclude that they are a product of intelligent design. But if organisms don't all look beautiful and elegant and clever, if some of them look stupid or arbitrary or (gasp!) accidental, we are no longer allowed to judge. Hmmm...

The only point of things like finding design flaws in organisms is to undermine the prior argument that some "perfection" or "elegance" in those same organisms is to be taken as a positive proof of design.

While you may believe that evolution explains things more to you, you are involved in a belief that even the founder rejected.

Hey, this feels like Usenet!

1. Ad hominem. Darwin was not perfect, and he didn't know everything that we know now. During his life, he was subjected to all kinds of pressures from influential, powerful, and eloquent people who disagreed with his theory. Some of them threatened him with reasonably serious things, like ternal damnation. If he had ended up recanting, it wouldn't nullify his useful insights. (Even though Robert Nozick thinks that the political philosophy in his own magnum opus Anarchy, State, and Utopia is "inadequate", we still study it; many people still believe it and others still find useful insights in it. Some of Nozick's own arguments against his own work are based on completely separate grounds, which appear irrelevant to some readers.)
2. False. It appears that the story about Darwin's "conversion" is a fabrication by an evangelist named Lady Hope who was concerned about the consequences of Darwin's theory and wanted to discredit it. Darwin's family denied that he had recanted. Search for "Lady Hope" and you should be able to find the details of this.

To believe that 10k+ years of existence has produced no wisdom, and that WE, the current generation, are the first to truely understand what's important and how things ought to be is extreme to say the least.

On behalf of my favorite poet, who died 2,019 years ago, I demand a retraction!

Evolutionism is hardly saying that 10,000 years of human culture have produced no wisdom! It's saying that the real story of human origins (as a matter of natural history) was unknown until now, for perfectly understandable reasons. Just as we didn't know about the chemical composition of the starts until we had the quantum theory and spectrography, just as we didn't know about the germ theory of disease until microscopy, we didn't know about evolution until geology, radiocarbon dating, systematic zoology and botany, heredity, and genetics. We can be forgiven for that.

I have great respect for the wisdom of the past, and I enjoy reading ancient literary, religious, and philosophical works. I also believe in scientific progress, so I don't suppose that everything Aristotle had to say about the reproduction of animals is quite right, even though Aristotle may have been a very wise man.

It's not disrespectful of the past to say that the past has made some mistakes which have been corrected or which remain to be corrected.

Anyway, saying that we are the first to understand a particular thing about natural history doesn't mean that we suddenly understand everything; I just don't see where you get the idea that evolutionists claim uniquely "to truely understand what's important and how things ought to be". Huh?

I have 40+ years of life experiences where God has proven himself to me. I have already been where you are (in this POV) -- are you willing to entertain that you may be wrong?

You know, people are acquiring and losing religious beliefs all the time. So we have atheist ex-evangelicals and evangelical ex-atheists and...

...frustratingly, they still can't communicate effectively with each other most of the time.

I know you weren't addressing me when you asking this personal question, but I'll answer with a "yes" anyway. On the other hand, I keep having missionaries try to shock me with the great surprise of their euangelia. It's not really working that well. Maybe some day some of them will be willing to consider that they may be wrong, too, and then we can have a nice conversation and maybe teach each other something.

Actually, that's happened two or three times -- it was fun! And refreshing.

Today, it takes more courage to believe in God because it's more inconvient to society and government that ever.

Was there ever a time and place where advocates of any religion said it was easy and comfortable to believe it?

If you live in North Carolina today, you have a safer and more comfortable environment to believe, practice, and profess the religion of your choice than most people have ever had. It's true that there are lots of threats to religious freedom, but monotheists of North Carolina suffer fairly few of those. :-)

Yeah, it's true that a lot of people may make fun of you (or as Johnson says, refer to your beliefs with a "subtext of contempt"). But "more inconvenient than ever"? I think that's got to be an exaggeration. People used to get killed (and in many places are still being killed) for their religious beliefs. Now in the U.S. it's kind of inconvenient to express certain beliefs because you acquire a kind of social stigma in certain circles. More inconvenient than ever? Four major party national presidential and vice presidential candidates trying to improve their appeal by bragging about their religious faith and religious affiliations?

(00:40:24)

roguemtl: code not being considered speech means that it has less protection, not more: it can be banned for more reasons, in more circumstances, not fewer. (The courts strangely claim that obscenity isn't speech; an obscene movie which contains a libel is not therefore going to be exempt from a libel suit.)

There was an interesting argument that, if software is copyrightable, it should have first amendment protection (and if it lacks first amendment protection, it should not be copyrightable). I personally really like this argument, and have been interested in elaborating it.

Links: Lady Hope and Charles Darwin's beliefs; Michael Elkins on mail clients that suck; and, of course, Life in Our Anti-Christian America. (I should also link to "Viruses of the Mind" by Dawkins, but the context's missing.)

I had fun in San Francisco today -- a birthday party for someone else. Very touristy.

It's really time I start thinking seriously about going to ALS.

2000-09-18

(09:47:36)

I actually wrote a pretty long diary entry which I once again lost to pressing the wrong key in lynx. But this time I didn't give up; I ran "strings /dev/mem | less" and searched for stephane (since part of the entry related to Stephane and relays). I managed to recover the content of the entry into a file. So now I just have to clean it up and post it at some point. I wish I'd remembered to do that with the entry about Whitfield Diffie.

2000-09-19

(12:14:08)

• CalLUG install demo tonight
• RSA patent party Thursday
• Wedding Friday (not mine)
• Housewarming party Friday (not mine)
• Housewarming party Saturday (not mine)

How many of these will I have to miss? More than I'd like, I'm sure. I've participated in every CalLUG install demo (in the fall) since 1997; I'd hoped to get four in a row.

I guess it's a good opportunity to practice getting good medical care for myself in San Francisco. I'm going to go check in with a doctor tomorrow morning.

2000-09-21

(19:52:46)

I stayed sick for a week, and am feeling a little better now -- but I'm hoping that will last. I'm making some changes in my diet. I hope they "stick" as good habits and help me keep feeling better.

I have a bit of a diary backlog, which I'll try to work through. While I was sick, I got sixteen new Martin Gardner books (by mail order). I'm pretty proud of that collection. I had to expand into a second Gardner shelf.

I talked to my friend in Massachusetts who just did the Boston to New York AIDS Ride. That's amazing! 50 to 100 miles (80 to 160 kilometers) a day on a bike.

I went to Berkeley over the weekend and worked on cleaning up a bit back here. I missed the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade, but I did make it to a party, and met some interesting people. It also seems that a picture of me with Cindy Cohn and John Gilmore has made it up on the net -- pretty distinguished company in pretty unusual clothing. lilo, if you'd made it, you'd have seen David Chaum himself, in person! (And some other cryptographers with him.)

I'm cleaning up because I'm going to have a small party over here on Wednesday for my birthday. So I need some space for people to sit.

I'm volunteering to write documentation for Linux ioctls (at least terminal ioctls, maybe all ioctls), because I'm frustrated that I can't find any even half-decent documentation of all of them. Can anyone contradict this and tell me where to find ioctl documentation? I've seen the ioctl list, but that's a list, not a description of how and why to use the ioctls. I mean, how come there is no HOWTO or FAQ that can tell us that the STI in TIOCSTI stands for "Simulate Terminal Input" and it takes a (const char *) which points to a single character which will be simulated as input on the terminal? I had to read kernel sources and experiment to see that, which is not bad, but which could be improved upon. The sad part is that some of the sources I had to read were BSD sources. :-)

sab39, my idea in an earlier diary entry about

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/test-lib /test-lib/ld-linux.so.2 /bin/mv /test-lib /lib

works correctly -- I went ahead and tried it. (Yes, you shouldn't try moving /lib to /test-lib on a running system, but I figured that, if I couldn't manage to recover the system, it would be great for my wrists!)

stephane, good luck. I hope you'll come by and hack on relay arrays!

My parents sent me some cool birthday presents, including more bookplates and a shortwave radio receiver. Maybe I'll become a shortwave addict. I have a friend who's a ham and played WWV and WWVH for me, and I liked that.

Skud, I'm very sorry to hear what's happened.

At Trader Joe's, I bought some non-vegetarian soy milk by mistake. It is a little hard to believe that there is such a thing as non-vegetarian soy milk. This is even certified dairy-free soy milk, yet not vegetarian. I think I'm going to write them a letter. Non-vegetarian soy milk!

2000-09-22

(21:38:32)

I still feel under the proverbial weather. I guess there's a chance that this weekend will help, although I've already been home for a week, so I don't know that more rest will do any good. I'm doing pretty well with the doctor's advice to improve my diet and eating habits, although there's still a lot of room for improvement.

Rick and Deirdre are the first people I know to get married after meeting at a LUG meeting. (I was actually present at that meeting.) dmarti seems to have claimed that the trend may continue, but the relevant web page is off the net now.

I don't know if I can stress enough how great the RSA party was. I've suggested to Tabinda that there should be a regular party, once a month, to celebrate all the patents that have expired that month. I'm fairly sure Don could write a script to collect and present the relevant data, if he cares for the idea. I don't know if we could keep getting the Great American Music Hall, but...

I'm going to keep trying to get more sleep, too. I hope something works to make me feel better soon.

2000-09-25

(23:42:15)

I don't think I've lost too much -- probably some discussion of being sick, trying to feel better, and then really enjoying the RSA party.

2000-09-26

(21:47:46)

[zork(~)] echo \($(date +%s -d now)-$(date +%s -d '8:16 EDT Thursday, September 27, 1979')\)/"(86400*365.2422)" | bc -l
21.00163036538696990857
[zork(~)]

2000-09-28

(02:14:58)

I had an excellent 21st birthday party, with a bunch of friends (Advogato users: crackmonkey, stephane, lilo) coming over to the apartment and a few people calling or sending e-mail. I got some nice presents, and one of the nicest was a clean room (no, not like in semiconductor fabrication; like when you have a room and you clean it up). My room is clean; it's hard to believe. My room hasn't been clean in months.

What I found buried in the corners of my room is a long story. Some of the things I found made me very sad, simply by reminding me of things.

I demonstrated the Pulfrich effect at the party. Sunglasses, Krazy glue, twine, pennies, a couple of bright red Nerf darts, a chair, and you're all set for an impromptu perceptual psychology experiment!

I didn't recite the Nicene Creed or the MIT X license, despite earlier threats to do so. Nor did I recite pi, nor did anybody try to sing "The Elements".

I'm working on initrd stuff, and it looks like I may go back to doing some teaching. That would be nice.

lilo, I think you want to say "et alii" when you refer to people (unless they are all female: then "et aliae") and "et alia" when referring to things (works of authorship, ideas, topics, tasks, et alia). People who know Latin, as I've said now and then, may be offended if you refer to them with neuter grammatical gender. :-) The standard "et al." avoids the problem, because it could stand for any of these phrases, whichever is appropriate.

2000-10-01

(12:47:28)

Things in this world (and not just the Linux kernel) are so undocumented...

I heard back from Michael Chastain, who wrote ioctl-number.txt, that there is no current list and that making one could be "2 to 3 months of full time work starting from scratch". Yikes! So let me see if my wrists hold out for another week (dictating ioctl names is not fun), and then I guess I could send a proposal to linux-kernel.

One good reason why there should be a detailed ioctl list, according to Michael Chastain, is for strace, so that when you strace a random program that does a bunch of ioctls, you can find out what they are (and then, even better, look them up in the documentation). Indeed, that's one of two main reasons that ioctl numbers are supposed to be unique. This is easy for syscalls -- almost every syscall has a man page -- but there are so many more ioctls than syscalls!

At about the time of the release of 2.2, there were "no undocumented system calls" in 2.0, according to undocumented(2); on the other hand, there are a few undocumented calls in 2.2 again:

No manual entry for umount2 in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigreturn in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigaction in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigprocmask in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigpending in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigtimedwait in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigqueueinfo in section 2
No manual entry for rt_sigsuspend in section 2
No manual entry for getcwd in section 2
No manual entry for sigaltstack in section 2
No manual entry for getpmsg in section 2
No manual entry for putpmsg in section 2

But overall, the documentation for syscalls is pretty good and pretty thorough. (I try the same exercise with 2.4; this would probably not be a bad idea. The above pages are missing from the current Linux man pages release at ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/linux-local/manpages/.)

In Sony's 5x7 LED or VFD displays (not to be confused with seven-segment displays), there is only one dot which is never used at all for displaying numbers. Not that that has anything to do with anything. I've just been paying a lot of attention to numeric displays lately.

I finally gave my slightly unfinished collage to Wolfgang. It has a total of 237 sources cited in the bibliography. I didn't get a final page count; I'm guessing around 150 or so. I've promised a supplement of 15 or 20 pages which should finish it off; I can't add any new sources, because she already has the bibliography.

It's a strange feeling not to have a collage here any more. A whole corner of my room feels very empty now.

Goals for Sunday: lunch, buy lamp sockets and tube-shaped light bulbs, arrange them to display the digit "3" in seven-segment style, finish collage supplement, thank birthday party guests, collect all my lists of Martin Gardner books into one.

2000-10-07

(21:57:11)

What a world! The NSA is publishing VHDL source for hardware implementations of state-of-the-art cryptographic algorithms on the Internet. It's not copyrighted, but if it were, I think their disclaimer would even qualify as open source! Remember, this is the same Federal government which investigated Phil Zimmermann for export control violations in connection with the export of PGP. Now Red Hat is shipping OpenSSH and the NSA is posting hardware crypto implementation details on the Internet.

I've been teaching at work again. That's lots of fun; we did a lot of stuff on networking, and I learned a lot from it. I think I need to be a teacher, and ideally I should teach more than just Linux system administration.

My collage is done, really done, and signed, and sealed, and delivered. Can it be? My room looks so empty without all the collage scraps and scissors and source materials.

I've been in Berkeley a lot this week, once for CalLUG and then again just for a visit. And I bought into a machine in commercial colocation (my share being about what I've been paying for a whole machine in noncommercial colocation at the LinuxCabal).

In a restaurant and again in a store, I thought about the fact that I could actually now buy wine or beer or liquor legally. That's an odd feeling, because I'm used to thinking of them as illegal drugs. It's like they were suddenly decriminalized (but nobody noticed).

My short-term goals are to enjoy, if possible, a party on Friday the 13th (absit omen), and get to Davis and Santa Cruz to visit friends of mine who've recently moved to each place. Also, my cousin who is an artist is having an open studio this weekend, and I'd like to go. And maybe I'll also make it to the Exploratorium again soon.

I managed to hurt my right arm again, so I'm not going to volunteer to do ioctl documentation just yet. More to the point, I need to be more careful not to carry heavy bags or type with that arm.

I actually had conversations with a few strangers this week; that's really very unusual for me. And I certainly had a good time talking to some new and old friends.

I hope everybody has a good time at ALS.

Why are professional certification exams like the LPI paid for by prospective employees rather than prospective employers? Yes, requiring people to pay for standardized tests (like the LSAT, which a friend of mine took this morning) makes them prove to some extent that they are serious and that they do believe in their own qualifications, but the people who want the information and who believe it is meaningful and useful are the employers (or other institutions accepting applicants on the basis of their documented qualifications).

Cliff Stoll is really behind Acme Klein Bottles. I love it! So now I need to give those and Clever Clocks as gifts.

joey showed me Perl in Latin. "O let me be awake, my God! / Or let me sleep alway."

shaleh, do you still plan to create a Latin locale for GNU stuff?

Litigation

The Eldred v. Reno appeal was argued in the DC Circuit. Sounds like fun. At least Eric Eldred had a good time... wouldn't you, if Larry Lessig were your lawyer?

My condolences to Waldo, Lindsay, and Bennett on the disposition of their appeal. It might have been a major case in trade secrets, clickwrap licensing, and gratuitous licensing, but instead...

That case has some relevance for the people who are getting copies of the Universal v. Reimerdes injunction along with demand letters from the MPAA. Jacquith et al.'s appeal suggests that nonparties are only very rarely "bound by an injunction" and contempt proceedings will not be likely to succeed except against parties or people who are actually (for example) working for the parties.

In particular, the court said

The coin, however, has a flip side. A nonparty who has acted independently of the enjoined defendant will not be bound by the injunction, and, if she has had no opportunity to contest its validity, cannot be found in contempt without a separate adjudication. See id.; see also Alemite, 42 F.2d at 832 (declaring that a decree which purports to enjoin nonparties who are neither abettors nor legally identified with the defendant "is pro tanto brutum fulmen," and may safely be ignored). This tried and true dichotomy safeguards the rights of those who truly are strangers to an injunctive decree. It does not offend due process.

On the other hand, the damaging thing about the precedent in the 2600 case (as far as the general public is concerned) is that Judge Kaplan found that DeCSS violates the DMCA (declaratory judgment) and can be banned without impairing first amendment rights. This is an extremely damaging precedent which could be used by the MPAA as a basis for a new lawsuit, at least in the Southern District of New York, against people who don't comply with the demand letters.

Given the clearly parallel case, a judge might look at the precedent Kaplan set and grant summary judgment for the MPAA. So Kaplan's decision, in the light of this appeal (which claims that this is already long-settled in caselaw at the Supreme Court level!), doesn't directly forbid the public from publishing DeCSS; instead, it makes it especially easy for the MPAA to win in any subsequent related trial against some other defendant.

This means that lots of people who might be affected by having something (like writing free multimedia software, or doing security research, or publishing exploits for security flaws) that they like to do ruled illegal have an incentive to intervene in a precedent-setting case, at least so that they will have an opportunity to make arguments and have standing to appeal. But this is dangerous, because it risks making one's self into a target. Ah, "litigation strategy"...

(11:18:06)

2000-10-11

(11:31:13)

Since zork.net is still down, I'm missing the beginning: the story of an emergency response (maybe an attempted homicide) in the driveway outside my window on Saturday night. When zork comes back up, I can post that (although my record of actually going back and posting the contents of deferred diary entries here is not very good).

So, I did go to my cousin's open studio over the weekend. She is a very talented graphic artist.

I bought a print of a photograph of her collage called Saltwater, which was based on the fish and plant life in her old salt water aquarium. It's very beautiful, and it looks three-dimensional even in the photograph because of Moire effects.

For the random cool careers file: Perceptual psychologist. (That includes the discipline of psychoacoustics, which is very much in demand today on account of the importance of audio codecs.)

I had a very long conversation with my cousin about the, um, Structure and Interpretation of Romantic Relationships. I've had a lot of long conversations about parts of that with all sorts of people, but my cousin was particularly insightful.

She lives out in Noe Valley (a quiet and pretty old neighborhood in southern San Francisco, not to be confused with South San Francisco). San Francisco is (to paraphrase J. B. S. Haldane) not only larger than I imagine, it is larger than I can imagine.

On account of the air currents and reduced automotive traffic, the air in Noe Valley is much cleaner than the air downtown. Even I, who don't usually notice those things, can tell that right away.

I'm going to learn pic again something. I love the appearance of things typeset with pic. And LaTeX... mmmm. Once I know pic and LaTeX, I can write some technical papers, maybe about relay logic or something.

In the meantime, I'm looking for presents for that party on Friday the 13th. One of the people being honored at the party may well never forgive me for getting her these presents, but I'm having a good time with it.

My dad sent me a book with a table of classical Latin acronyms! A lot of them are particularly useful for monuments and inscriptions.

• ADMHM Absit dolus malus hoc monumento (May this monument be safe from evil treachery)
• AOVFDSAEMQMDCS Amico optimo viro fideli de suo aere moerensque monumentum dedit, curavit, statuit (Mourning for his best friend, a faithful man, he gave, oversaw, and established this monument for his friend out of his own funds)
• NLicSVN Nemini liceat sepulcrum violare nostrum (Nobody should be allowed to descrate our grave site)
• OHF Ossarium hoc fecit (He established this catacomb)
• OTBQ Ossa tibi bene quiescant (May your bones rest well)
• PDF Publico decreto fecerunt (They made it according to a public decree)
• PSPD Pecunia sua posuit dedicavit (He erected and dedicated it with his own money)
• QISS Quae infra scripta sunt (Which are written below)
• QSSS Quae supra scripta sunt (Which are written above)
• SHSR Sub hoc saxo requiescit (Under this stone is resting)
• SQHAPESSAVDF Si quis hanc arcam post excessum suprascriptorum aperire voluerit dabit fisco (If anybody wants to open this arch after the death of the people written above, he shall pay the public treasury [why?])

There are also a lot of religious slogans (Roman polytheist and Christian) with convenient acronyms, and an amazing variety of titles (religious and secular) of people who were recorded in records or on monuments. And there's a whole series of disclaimers: "But this monument does not apply to his descendants..." :-)

I got a haircut.

Waldo, can you sue SurfControl (successor-in-interest of Mattel, as far as I know) to try to get a declaratory judgment that posting CPHack is legal? (I guess there are two problems there: attorney's fees, and attorney's fees. In particular, yours, in protracted and complex litigation -- which you were expecting originally with your non-party appeal -- and perhaps theirs, if a judge found for them and awarded them costs.)

Can you settle out of court with SurfControl by agreeing not to sue them (for declaratory judgment) if they agree not to sue you (for permanent injunction and money damages or for contempt of the earlier District Court ruling)? :-) :-)

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the legal status of a program like DeCSS or CPHack benefits companies which are trying to suppress it, because (1) fewer people will mirror it, (2) it is less likely to be published on a "mainstream" archive or in a "mainstream" publication -- although that didn't stop a certain art-collecting professor, (3) it's certain that the technology and information expressed in the program will not be incorporated in commercial products. (For example, that consumer electronics companies will not use the description of the CSS algorithm in DeCSS to build a region-free DVD player, or a DVD player with "unlicensed" digital output.)

"to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts", carefully managed and circumscribed by industry license agreements. :-(

What is Barbara Simons (recent ACM President) doing these days again? I remember being surprised by it, but I forgot what it was.

Uzi, take care and good luck in your new job. You should come over to Berkeley and speak at CalLUG sometime! (I'm trying to line up some speakers for the rest of this school year for CalLUG, because I don't think the official Board is going to rush to do that.)

I'm very impressed with some of the contents of Wietse Venema and Dan Farmer's "The Coroner's Toolkit", which is advertised for recovering information from a compromised system but which also has a variety of other uses. cat or ls by inode number, find crypto keys in memory (!)...

(02:26:20)

Dar Williams is certainly one of my favorite contemporary musicians.

2000-10-12

(23:38:30)

zork.net came back up. Thanks, folks.

I seem to be living in a Dar Williams song now, or two, or three...

Waldo, we should remember that Peacefire didn't produce CPHack and acknowledge the authors, including mskala for their work and the liability they exposed themselves to.

Of course, Peacefire folks are carrying on the fight in an interesting way. So Peacefire has become associated with the CPHack case after the fact.

Daniel Burton, past president of Cal Libertarians, and State Assembly candidate in California, put out his press release encouraging people not to vote (for him or anybody else). I've been following this issue for some months already, so it seems like old news to me. I suspect it's going to get news coverage as "human interest" and not as "politics".

His press release isn't on-line, but he has (somewhat ironically) a web site at SmartVoter.org with a philosophy statement.

Tomorrow is going to be an exciting day. Good, I hope.

I'm working on a funny project I can't talk about. It's possible that this work will be published later.

2000-10-14

(22:33:29)

"I've never been to a party with Seth without a demonstration of the Pulfrich Effect..."

My friend gave me a CueCat (and I promptly took it apart on the bus back to San Francisco -- proprietary ASIC grumble grumble grumble grumble grumble). The argument is very solid that I own the CueCat outright and can do whatever I want with it: he got the CueCat in the mail as a gift from Wired, and then he gave it to me, and neither of us accepted any kind of license or contract.

I'll try to use the CueCat to catalog more of my book collection without hurting my wrists. If Digital Convergence is good for nothing else, they can help save my wrists. (Maybe I should send them a donation of $20 -- to thank them for the CueCat -- if they stop threatening to sue people.)

I'm going back to Berkeley on Sunday to see The Caucasian Chalk Circle; some of us know one of the crew for that play.

Jick, the best source of information on Bay Area Linux and free software groups and events is Rick Moen's Bay Area Linux Events page. Each user group is different, although there is a good deal of overlap in membership.

2000-10-16

(01:42:36)

I managed to write a shell script to look up an ISBN in the Library of Congress card catalog, which actually seems a little more complete than Amazon.

I could subscribe to Books in Print, but that costs a lot of money. I was thinking of writing a front-page Advogato entry about why there is no free bibliographic database.

It's very possible that I could get a program done pretty quickly to build a bibliography based on ISBNs (using the LOC catalog); then I could easily (say, in one day) catalog all my books published during my lifetime (well, I'm actually slightly older than ISBN). Then I'd still want a separate catalog of books with no ISBN. (Currently 497 of the 605 books in my on-line catalog have an ISBN; that might be representative of my collection as a whole.)

I'll write some more scripts to aid CueCat (and other bar code reader) automation of book indexing. Then I'll publish them on my web page and send some details to the people who are doing CueCat bibliographic stuff. I'm sure that I'll manage to do this, because it will "scratch an itch" for me.

Bar codes are fun!

I saw The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Berkeley and had many and varied conversations.

In many people's experience, romantic relationships are so powerful that they have the capacity to (inter alia) utterly destroy many wonderful things. I wish I could go back in time and warn some people about that aspect. Maybe they are like nuclear power; I was listening again to "The Great Unknown" by Dar Williams (I wish she'd done that one in concert too). My old .signature file quotation came from there:

They said Look at the light we're giving you
And the darkness that we're saving you from

2000-10-16

(22:27:37)

The Library of Congress stuff is working well -- but they don't have all the books in my collection! (Not just because I have some rare books and foreign books, but because they have a different edition, printing, or binding than I do, resulting in a different ISBN. The Library of Congress doesn't feel compelled to collect every single printing of everything that's printed -- so they are an excellent but not complete source of ISBN data.

What I guess I need is a way to fill in a couple of fields in a form and have a LOC search result with automatic extraction of data in my collection database. That way I can search for books in the above case, as well as things with no bar code and things with no ISBN.

I probably have at most two dozen books that are not in the Library's collection at all. So if I could search on other fields data, thewir data could still help me complete my database faster, and with less typing.

It's obvious a good occasion to write a nice Python class that does arbitrary Library of Congress card catalog searches (or better yet, arbitrary Z39.50 searches) and returns a tuple of BiblioRecord objects. (I don't know what a BiblioRecord object is; I'd have to define that class, too. It might just be a dictionary with particular additional subclass methods for extracting certain "common" fields, like title.)

But I feel a little lazy -- shell scripts are so much fun! Given that I can get the data I want out with sed...

brg, thanks for the suggestion. I'll get a copy next time I'm at City Lights, maybe tonight. I forgot that Hubert Dreyfus was a Berkeley professor; I know him as the author of What Computers [Still] Can't Do, a book which was pretty far ahead of its time in some ways. So both Dreyfus and Searle are at Berkeley. Hmmm.

Waldo, I would really like to try to change the trend of "company sells/gives away interesting device below its own cost, adopts distressing privacy-invasive business plan which is incompatibility with reverse engineering and interoperability; end users make unauthorized use, share tips and get threats of lawsuits". The point is that the companies which are selling these things are not intrinsically bad -- but their business models are very incompatible with certain principles to which a lot of us are fairly attached.

I think a partial solution to this problem is (1) aggressive legal defense for reverse engineering and free software (and I will continue to donate regularly to the EFF or to anybody else who steps up as an aggressive legal defender in that area); (2) trying to show companies that they don't need to have an antagonistic relationship with their customers, or to use intellectual property lawsuits to keep control. It would be nice to show companies that they can still make money even without such, um, antisocial behavior.

The problem is that the traditional way for hardware vendors to make money is by selling products at or above cost. Accordingly, all the companies now providing hardware for free or for a nominal cost have some kind of "gimmick" -- and this gimmick is not very likely to be free software friendly. After all, if you could actually do whatever you wanted with a piece of hardware, how could the vendor make money after you got it?

Well, lots of ways -- so how to find those ways and proclaim them from the proverbial rooftops?

At work, jimd is teaching a class and I'm sitting in. Jim is an official Unix wizard and bearded programmer.

I'll be back in Berkeley tomorrow for CalLUG; I'm also going to try to get rasmus to speak there in November, and some other people at other times. (daw comes to mind; I have a whole list. CalLUG hasn't had a regular speaker series in some years, but I think it would be a good thing.)

Dar Williams says that "life is as hard and as easy as they say"; Vergil notes "et quae sit sententia posco".

Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.

2000-10-19

(09:40:11)

My dad sent me a very remarkable book called The Unquiet Grave, published in London in 1945 under the pseudonym "Palinurus". Not four pages into it, I starting frowning and nodding and laughing uproariously.

My mom found what seems to me to be a legitimate use of JavaScript in a web site! (And zork.net, which is down again at the moment, has the world's only known legitimate use of the <BLINK> tag.)

jimd was teaching on Wednesday again; I'll be teaching part of Thursday and Friday.

brg, I still didn't manage to get a copy of Fear and Trembling. I'll get it very soon.

Palinurus says in The Unquiet Grave that Kierkegaard expressed regret at not having become a police spy, a career for which the latter apparently showed some aptitude. I think that's really funny somehow. Of course, I never imagine that famous philosophers (or writers in general) might have done something totally different.

davidm's new company sounds really cool -- congratulations -- but I share mbp's concern about the rate at which Linuxcare has been losing people. I'm trying to think if any of the technical people who were there when I started are still there. (On reflection, the answer is "yes".)

thom, I took a look at the British Library's OPAC 97 service, but it didn't have anything for either of my first two items that were missing from the Library of Congress collection (ISBNs 0140130470 and 0849304806). So I'm not that encouraged by that; I don't know that their collection is stronger than the LOC's, except in materials published in the UK.

Tragically, Amazon.com has almost all of the ISBNs; I assume they are providing an interface to Books in Print.

It seems that GNU barcode has full details on Code 39 barcodes (which I reverse-engineered once upon a time), and the ability to print them to PostScript. A consequence of this is that I could print out some labels which my CueCat could read, but I don't actually know what good that would do me.

I did make a small sample of a portion of the information I can get from the LOC catalog with my scripts and CueCat. This was generated almost entirely automatically after I scanned the bar codes on the back of 130 books in about twenty minutes yesterday evening.

<Zippy>Yow! I moved to SAN FRANCISCO so that I could write E-MAIL about th' ETYMOLOGY of TUNGSTEN and eat SOY ICE CREAM with CHOPSTICKS while suffering from LOVESICKNESS and TENNIS ELBOW!</Zippy>

2000-10-21

(14:43:20)

cmacd, I appreciate your suggestion. But I tried several ISBNs, and it didn't seem that the Canadian National Library had anything that the Library of Congress didn't, at least in my collection, which is overwhelmingly titles printed in the U.S.

brg, I now have a copy of Fear and Trembling. I'll read it soon.

vicious, one can write a Python program (GEGL.py?) which invokes sed to do what you want, without mentioning that forbidden character inside the program. I have a demonstration version, but (darn it!) the regexps in sed are annoying and you'd have to use a number of them. Here's a hint: "[%s%s]" % ((chr(76), chr(108)).

Furthermore, there's a short C program which reads stdin and writes stdout and ensures that any use of that character is in conformance with your instruction. It's a state machine with four states: "none", "G1", "E", and "G2". It ought to be be straightforward to describe the transition conditions. Those who have worked with the techniques for writing programs such as grep may even manage to generate those conditions just as a machine might do it.

It may be a very great heresy, but I have no idea what GEGL is.

hypatia, I certified you and now you have Apprentice. I personally think that running a Nomic game should get you Journeyer at least (but maybe not in free software).

• schoen certified PeterSuber as Master.

Actually, maybe a somewhat modified version of mod_virgule would work well as a forum for on-line Nomic games. Many aspects of voting and rules could be implemented on-line. The interesting thing would be that the code would have to modified in response to certain rule changes. Talk about "code is law"!

I'd like to know if Larry Lessig understands some of Bruce Schneier's points (also daw's points) about what cryptography fundamentally can and can't do. Lessig might be a good person to try to explain to the "outside world" why, for example, copy protection in software can't work.

In other news

I'm still putting off my ambitious ioctl documentation idea because I'm still having RSI problems. I appreciate several readers' suggestions.

I managed to break my phone, so I can't get phone calls, and then both zork and pie went down, so I couldn't get e-mail. It was certainly a very quiet end of the week. (At least the phone has remotely-accessible voicemail and I have a backup MX.)

Also, my toilet overflowed (it's been very unreliable). Since it was empty, it's not as gross as it might have been: but how do you get a bunch of water out of a carpet? The carpet is very absorbent, so paper towels don't take up all the water the way they would on a less absorbent surface.

I think it's actually a situation very like heat flow and heat capacity. (The absorbency of a substance is like its heat capacity, and "wetness" is like temperature; volume of water is like heat. And water will flow only from a more wet material to saturate or wetten a less wet material, when they are placed in contact. Of course, that's ignoring the effect of gravity, because this is a relatively small volume of water on a flat surface.)

I think I'm going to the Exploratorium on Sunday.

2000-10-23

(00:51:46)

I'm guessing that some people think that "no meat" doesn't imply "no poultry".

I would absolutely love to see a vegetarian certification program in parallel with kashrut/halal certification. Come on, entrepreneurs! And then they could have "this restaurant prepares these dishes in appropriate vegetarian style". Which a kashrut mashciach won't certify, because kashrut doesn't believe that just washing something will purify it.

Maybe I should just learn to cook something other than pasta and rice.

That was just the latest in a series of small disasters which have befallen me all week.

In unrelated news, a friend and I actually thought of a <buzzword>B2B</buzzword> startup that would be profitable (no, really) -- but we don't want to start it or tell other people to start it because we think there are a lot of ethical problems. We should have some reporters write an article "San Francisco Bay Area Twentysomethings Refrain From Founding Internet Company" but just not tell the reporters what our idea actually was. :-)

Actually, we could try to get a business method patent on it and then use the patent in some ethical way. Hmmm. But I'd feel guilty just having a patent at all. The worst thing I've ever done with the USPTO was to apply for a trademark (and then I let the application lapse).

As I look at some of the domains that might describe that idea, it looks like some squatters have registered them; do they actually understand the concept?

... my friend already has his own Internet company anyway, and it's actually profitable, and he's following the "Ben and Jerry's model" with great success. So he's not hurting for Internet startups or anything.

I know that Ralph Nader spoke in Davis on Sunday. It's a long story. Maybe some people had a good time hearing him speak.

I was over in Berkeley again, trying and failing to go to a bookstore. We didn't make it to the Exploratorium.

I promise to send something to raph's bibref.org mailing list soon, like Python or shell code to get bibliographic records from the Library of Congress by ISBN. I'm trying to clean this up a little and do some trivial collection management stuff so that it's convenient to scan books and automatically build a catalog from them.

I could probably write something for my father (a bookdealer) so that he could at least do inventory control with barcodes, although probably 80% of his books don't have ISBNs, much less ISBN barcodes. So he would need to print some kind of bar code labels to affix to books without damaging them. But this could help because he does try to list books through Alibris. I always want to automate my father's business in new ways, but it always turns out to be more difficult than it might first appear.

What I should really do is go visit the national libraries of five or six countries and ask them if they would make bibliographic data from their collections freely available in a standardized format for the benefit of collectors and all sorts of other purposes. But I do have over 50 things on my todo list before that. :-)

Maybe somebody can buy R. R. Bowker (never mind that they're not a public company) and turn them into a non-profit. It should only take a billion dollars or so, right?

Oh, wait... we'd have to make an offer to Reed-Elsevier. Hmmm. How much would Reed-Elsevier cost? :-)

Maybe it's better to start slightly less ambitiously.

thom, books are published at a kind of breakneck pace, so it would be pretty hard for any library to keep up. I once heard that the Library of Congress had every book every published, but I think that claim is extremely out of date (perhaps at least a century out of date), since I have books which aren't in their catalog.

To buy every book published -- assuming one started with an up-to-date collection! -- would take at least a multimillion-dollar annual acquisitions budget. This is of course ignoring many other issues like search and transaction costs, cataloguing and indexing costs, and shelving and archiving and maintenance costs -- not to mention the construction costs needed to build the equivalent of several normal library buildings a year. Right?

I've never heard of a library with more than tens of millions of items in its inventory, but maybe...

Also, even Books in Print doesn't provide a complete list of everything published in a particular year. For one thing, there are still plenty of small publishers far outside the reach of the ISBN system. Like IP addresses, ISBNs now unfortunately cost money. But a book even today need not have an ISBN or bar code or CIP data or anything in order to be a book. (Granted that it will never be on the shelves at Barnes and Noble.) I have a religious tract printed just last year -- bound signatures, title, page numbers, author, copyright notice, table of contents, introduction, a preface, even an edition number. No ISBN, no CIP, no subject headings, no publisher. That's right, it was "privately printed".

I think this is a "book", but I bet the Bodleian doesn't have it, I bet no national libraries have it. What would it cost to track down a copy if the tract went "out of print" before it attracted any notice in any guide to printed works? Is this situation any better for libraries or collectors than publishing in the 1700s?

2000-10-24

(08:52:49)

Foreign national library deposits wouldn't be required in order to enforce a foreign copyright under the Berne Convention, so, while these deposit libraries may have almost every book published in the UK, they won't have every book published in the world.

And ISBNs are different for hardcover and paperback editions (I guess deposit libraries probably receive only the hardcovers when both are published -- certainly the Library of Congress, which I believe has to pay for all its acquisitions, seems to prefer to get hardcovers rather than paperbacks). And they're different for US, UK, and Canadian editions, a lot of the time.

So I don't know that I've found a title yet in my collection that wasn't in any national library catalog, but, for ISBNs, it wasn't that hard. Now, if I had a way to cross-reference ISBNs, like a function that could return an "equivalence class" list of other ISBNs that refer to editions containing identical text, that would be nice. That would be really useful for people trying to search foreign libraries!

graydon, how much disk space would konqueror take on a system that lacked KDE libraries and Qt?

srl, how about suing the Attorney General to challenge those laws (a la ACLU v. Reno)? The "crime against nature" one wouldn't be overturned (grumble grumble grumble grumble Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986) grumble grumble grumble grumble), but I guess you'd do pretty well against blasphemy laws.

(Hmmm, one dissent in Bowers uses "victimless" in a somewhat different way than libertarians do.)

Maybe I shouldn't move back to Massachusetts just yet.

In other news

My right arm really hurts.

Lots of computer professionals don't know binary arithmetic. We must teach the world how all reals can be represented as convergent infinite series whose terms are digits in a base times powers of that base! Or we must behave like Socrates and show them that they already know this! Hooray for place value!

I'm going to get a phone on Thursday, with a new phone number and everything.

Baking soda may help remove spills from carpets.

We had a nice meeting about the Bootable Business Card. I think some very good things will happen with it.

2000-10-25

(00:37:36)

2000-10-26

(17:47:46)

2000-10-28

(20:30:57)

rachel, I also heard it doesn't rain in California, so I also feel betrayed: this isn't supposed to happen, I'm in California!

I wish jimd and dmandala luck in their new jobs. Friday was the last day for each of them at Linuxcare. I wish some other people luck in their new jobs, too -- those caught me more by surprise.

I missed Daniel Burton, Libertarian Not For State Assembly on KQED-FM Thursday evening. It's a pity; I wanted to see how the Republican and Democrat would react to competition from an anarchist. I hope they didn't laugh; as Penrose says, "whatever they should have done, they should not have laughed".

Where can I get bumperstickers made? I think, in retrospect, I want some "Daniel Burton, Libertarian Not For California State Assembly" bumperstickers (not that I have a car). Or even better: "Daniel Burton, Libertarian Against California State Assembly".

I was actually at a Linuxcare dinner (during which I got to talk to mbp on the phone, though I couldn't hear him that well) which turned out to be at a restaurant right around the corner from a Starbucks where a friend works. So that was a nice co-incidence, and I dropped by and rode a bus back to Market Street with her.

I wrote a message about why there are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, and 360 degrees in a circle -- another friend asked. I love that stuff; I think the history of calendars is the coolest thing ever (almost).

I also bought a copy of The Inner Game of Tennis, a controversial book of sports-training psychology, solely because Doug Engelbart praised it extensively in a documentary Brian Harvey showed in CS 61A at Berkeley.

Useless Telco! I still don't have my phone line, because they "weren't informed that [my] roommate already has a telephone line in that apartment" (as they said to crackmonkey when he answered the line in question).

lilo, I still work at Linuxcare. But you can't call me because I don't have any working phone!

Did anybody notice that censorware opponents got one of only two exemptions to the DMCA anticircumvention rules granted by the Librarian of Congress? They may use (but not traffic in) circumvention devices to find out what censorware blocks.

"I hate the DMCA, it makes this song illegal..."

Waldo, I see you noticed that. I disagree with you that it's a good thing from the DMCA. Why? Because the Library of Congress did not, and can not, declare that something like CPHack is legal: all they said is that the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions are not a particular legal theory under which people can be sued for creating programs like that.

There's still trade secret law, unfair competition, breaches of contract (heh!) and even traditional copyright law. Remember that the DMCA wasn't even mentioned in the Cyber Patrol case as providing a cause of action.

We now know that, until 2003, the DMCA won't provide a cause of action in any censorware case like that -- but that doesn't mean that there aren't other causes of action out there.

I had a general comment about the lilo/graydon exchange, and it was directed to stefan, on the subject of "throwing up our hands" and strands of thought in the liberal tradition.

But I think I'm a bit late with that because lilo and graydon are continuing to go back and forth on this. So I'll hold on.

Two really good friends came to visit Friday, so that I got to talk to them for a long time and even walk out to the lovely San Francisco Art Institute with them. SFAI might be a little more lovely when it's not in session, though. :-)

2000-10-30

(10:04:25)

Latin

lilo, things in Latin normally requiescunt in pace (in peace) rather than in pacem (into peace). You can also wish that your old car requiescat in partes -- rest in pieces. :-)

"Pacem" is used in prayers for peace ("dona nobis pacem", not necessarily far from the Kaddish Shalem) and the intensely controversial quotation "Si vis pacem, para bellum" (if you want peace, prepare for war). Some peace activists during my lifetime have suggested "Si vis pacem, para pacem" (if you want peace, prepare for peace) instead.

"Throwing up our hands"

stefan, here is the beginning of what I wrote about "throwing up our hands", with some changes. It's too long, but I know I glossed over some important things anyway.

Phil Agre wrote one of his essays about his limitless frustration with libertarians, pointing out that lots of libertarians obsessively avoid the idea of "designing" or "consciously choosing" anything. I should try to find that essay; it was very good, although I didn't think it quite reached my own objections.

If we talk about social problems as engineering problems (a powerful metaphor, an influential metaphor, obviously far from the only metaphor through which the left understands social problems), then clearly it's appealing to bring to bear some engineering-like methods (conscious choice!) to try to resolve or mitigate these problems.

Libertarian writers like Hayek and von Mises who were aggressively attacking totalitarian arrangements like Stalinist central planning pointed out (among other things) that social engineering has unintended consequences. So it doesn't always work, or often may not work as intended.

Then such writers sometimes added theoretical reasons to suggest that social engineering almost never works and typically achieves the exact opposite of what it sets out to do. I don't understand those theoretical reasons, and I think that part of the case was enormously overstated (although of course I have more political agreement with these writers than economic agreement).

I mean, some very naive central planning enthusiasts might have suggested in Stalin's day that all social programs can be solved directly and completely by engineering methods. Obviously those people were not engineers. :-) But it seems that a Hayek-style attack is most effective against somebody who believes that public policy is perfectly effective and never has harmful unintended consequences. Real engineers don't normally think of real engineering that way, or else they should be reading comp.risks.

Against "engineering problem" metaphor, there are a number of different attacks. In normal engineering problems, there is some actor (an engineer or engineering staff) knowledgeable, capable, and authorized to act to remedy the problem. If social problems are thought of in these terms, Hayek, say, hammers away at the "knowledgeable and capable" part, whereas I would be much more stressed out about the "authorized" part. Normal engineers almost always get to choose the means they think best to solve a problem, because the subject matter of their engineering doesn't implicate other moral concerns.

(As a side note, I should point out that this is wrong, a lot of the time, but engineers have yet to realize that, so we can pretend it's right.)

Social engineers (in the metaphor) are engineering with (not merely for) groups of people -- so that even given that they are "knowledgeable and capable", there are huge concerns about the morality of the means they choose.

(But progressives and libertarians already disagree about whether certain means are allowed -- so maybe phrasing the problem this way doesn't help, or maybe what I've said is already obvious.)

For example, libertarians, as individualists, normally consider individual choice sacrosanct, so that overruling it is wrong, even if overruling it is an appropriate engineering solution to a genuine social problem. (I don't have much patience for the claim that there is no such thing as a genuine social problem: just because society is an abstraction doesn't mean that it isn't a useful abstraction for understanding problems. That doesn't mean I'm willing to use that abstraction for other purposes.)

In other words, would-be social engineers are enormously constrained, because they probably lack legitimate authority to employ most of the means which would seem appropriate to them (and which, ineed, might be broadly effective).

If you think of the Prisoner's Dilemma, libertarians will insist that people who end up at the lower right should be allowed to stay there instead of forcing them to the upper left (although that's not the whole story) -- so how do you get everybody to the upper left corner without forcing them? I grant that things could be much better (in the utilitarian sense) and it's possible to get closer to that through conscious choice.

And libertarianism permits (please, not "produces") mutual defection in many situations where progressivism might forbid it.

Somebody wrote a recent book about two strands of thought in the liberal tradition dating back to the Enlightenment (and portions of which are older). One of these is rational ordering of things, and the other is individual sovereignty or autonomy. People have started to notice (obviously this author is far from the first to do so) that both of these are a part of the liberal tradition and yet that they're often in dramatic contrast.

Sometimes (frequently, it seems) the rational order fails to just appear (and what to blame for that is itself a subject of endless political debate -- greed, culture, human nature, advertising, a lack of education, the essential bankruptcy of the liberal tradition, states' policies or propaganda, foreign or domestic subversion, or "time and chance" per Ecclesiastes).

The liberal tradition's answer to this is probably that you need to produce the rational order through education and not indoctrination or coercion. I think lilo might feel less attacked by graydon if the former reflected on the latter's reluctance to suggest that cell phones should be banned: just, I think, that maybe we don't all absolutely need them. [After a few days, graydon emphasized that he didn't have a political agenda in mind, but rather a suggestion.]

As someone who's just recently given up on cell phones for a while, I could endorse that. :-)

But obviously people have different lifestyles and some people might have more use for certain items or (thinking of Phil Agre again) institutions than others. I'm sure that in most of these areas (from what graydon wrote) graydon would be happy to see people simply being more reasonable and reflective, less gratuitous and frenzied.

[Speaking of sub-issues, how about the difference between "there is such a thing as technological progress, and it is important and frequently beneficial to humanity" and "people all need to consume a lot and have a fast-paced lifestyle"? I think it would be nice to separate these two, and maybe others.]

So the outstanding issue about the "education alone" idea is in part that some people say it doesn't work (it's not enough) and some people say it will take a long time and some people say it's simply not being practiced at all.

Where education doesn't work, libertarian liberals would suggest that you simply give up (and perhaps try to mitigate the problems indirectly, or to escape from them), because you are not allowed to use other means to effect social change, lest you should compromise individual autonomy.

Progressive liberals would suggest that you consider some other means as well, provided that you have appropriate motives and/or appropriate safeguards.

I'm enthusiastic about education for lots of reasons -- in this context because it's the largest common ground between libertarians and progressives. [...]

In other news

I got a green FSF shirt in the mail, completing my collection (beige, maroon, black, green) -- and then I lost it.

Oops, davidm goes by davidm here and not dmandala.

The MIT Museum Shop seems to have stopped carrying slide rules. Shame!

The transition back to PST is very convenient. I trust all the other U.S. time zones made it OK, too. :-)

I read The Forge of God by Greg Bear. That's the first science fiction novel I've read in several months; I was disappointed in the ending (things rapidly get more and more "far out" and extreme, and it's not a happy ending by any stretch).

It's funny how science fiction writers manage to get together what would be called an adventuring party in role-playing games, and how normally most of them are brilliant scientists and their spouses; then there are some politicians or military leaders, some soldiers, and at least one smart kid. So The Forge of God did that.

The book also had some scenes taking place at an "American Geophysical Society meeting in San Francisco", which brought back some memories for me (although it's actually the American Geophysical Union).

plundis, take care and good luck.

Bay Area book collecting

Some really good news is that Black Oak Books of Berkeley has bought out Columbus Books at 540 Broadway in the City, and is opening up a third store (the second one is at 630 Irving, near Golden Gate Park).

Now, Black Oak is an excellent used book store (though some people think their prices are high, they have really nice inventory). Columbus Books is a just-OK used book store with a very large space and an impressive number of subject areas, but very uneven quality. So under Black Oak management, I think they will become consistently great.

But the really cool thing is that Columbus Books is just one block from the famous and also excellent new book store City Lights Books, so North Beach is going to become a fantastic area for book shopping, with an excellent independent new book store only a block away from an excellent independent used book store.

There's also Carroll's Books, about two blocks from City Lights; they're small, but I like them. (Used only.)

Something I'd like to do is go book-hunting with some friends again, by announcing in advance an all-day book hunt on a Saturday. I had a really pleasant itinerary like that with Sumana (hi, Sumana) one day earlier this year, and it would be a nice thing to repeat.

The backbone of that trip would probably be Stacy's (new), Alexander (new) City Lights (new), Black Oak III (used), Carroll's (used), Books Inc. (new), Green Apple (used), Green Apple (new), some bookstores down along near Van Ness (used), A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books (new). There are other possibilities. Lots of other possibilities.

For Berkeley: ASUC or CTE (textbooks), Cody's (new), Moe's (used), Shakespeare (used), Cartesian Books (used), then on Solano the surviving Half-Price Books (used) and Pegasus (used). The challenge is to fit in conveniently The Other Change of Hobbit (sci-fi), Pegasus on Shattuck, and Pendragon (among others) on College. College in particular is in the opposite direction from Solano.

So I should announce that I'm doing this on some fine clear Saturday and see who wants to come along.

(11:10:09)

Waldo, congratulations.

paci and davidw, good luck.

In other news

I wish I were qualified to handle liquid nitrogen.

I looked at the SFPD Crime Summary For October 6 - October 12, 2000. It seems that the dramatic emergency response outside my window that weekend was due to an AGGRAVATED ASSAULT WITH A KNIFE.

I've got voicemail working at work, and now PacBell is coming on Wednesday to set up my phone. This is better telephone luck than I've had in a while.

Jim Warren noted ages ago that identities of those who request public records are themselves public records (as a general rule); this is interesting, and maybe it should serve as a precaution to people contemplating making CPRA or FOIA or similar requests.

I'm eating some Double Rainbow Soy Cream recently. "40% Less Fat than Ice Cream" doesn't help much if you eat twice as much of it!

I wonder if I could get Herrell's to introduce a non-dairy ice cream. I should remember to ask about that. Hey, if you're reading this, and you read a later entry indicating that I'm in Northampton, would you mind dropping me an e-mail message to remind me to ask about non-dairy ice cream?

I've announced a Python class at Linuxcare (Thursday noon). I've already got five or six people planning to attend.

heu

2000-11-01

(15:11:12)

I'm no longer a Kaiser Permanente client, and I'm pretty pleased about that.

I've got on-line queries working in my CueCat book scanning stuff. So you can scan a book and have the LOC database queried immediately. In principle, I could easily do asynchronous (background) queries; in that case, there should be lockfile support so that scanning a particular book twice doesn't result in two simultaneous queries writing into the same file.

The main thing that's missing is the ability to start a new session if the LOC query session expires in the middle. Right now, I can't even detect that condition -- it was pretty much impossible for batch queries, but for real-time queries it could easily happen if you just leave the program running for a while and then come back and try to scan something else.

My friend in Teach for America in Mississippi writes

how can I expect these children to be able to analyze the effect of enzyme concentration on the rate of the reation it catalyzes if they don't even know how to calculate an average?

The phone line thing didn't work out that well. Say you're building an apartment complex in the South of Market in San Francisco in the late 1990s. On one side of you is Pac Bell; on another side of you is Best Internet; on another side is Pac Bell again. In a two-bedroom apartment, do you

(a) have two pairs of Cat 3 copper, encased in concrete, with no conduit (and a policy against exterior wiring), or

(b) have eight or ten pairs of Cat 5 in a conduit with easy access to pull more copper or fiber?

Guess which one my apartment complex chose?

So I got a pager instead of a phone line.

2000-11-02

(10:40:48)

My stepsister is engaged to be married. I hope I can make it to her wedding.

The MathWorld lawsuit makes me sad. Just in case anyone wanted to claim that copyright was about "protecting authors", we have further evidence that it's all about money (and of course a lot of the time that money is, well, given to authors).

(Protecting authors in the sense of getting people to abide by their wishes isn't the be-all and end-all either: there are various cases of successors in interest trying to withdraw or suppress old controversial works which are still under copyright. Or even authors themselves trying to do that. I would welcome news of more examples of this.)

The even worse thing is that I have actually bought a copy of the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics -- and it's great, of course -- but now my habit of linking to MathWorld is ruined.

But they cannot help their neighbors,
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.

I wrote a long answer to a question about the calculation of pi. That was fun.

Quick Python hacks I wrote as part of my answer include a Monte Carlo calculation and a Riemann sum calculation. Yes, I know these are horribly inefficient ways to calculate pi, but they illustrate important theoretical concepts (two particular techniques in numerical methods for approximating definite integrals).

The Bailey/Borwein/Plouffe algorithm is totally mind-blowing. There are so many people I wish were alive to see that. Arbitrary digits of pi in any base calculated directly, without any intermediate digits!

Today is my first Python class at Linuxcare. This should be fun. Also, teaching a class is really the best possible way to learn about something; I submit that even Guido van Rossum himself has probably learned more Python by teaching other people than by writing the Python interpreter.

2000-11-03

(11:11:48)

One incentive problem is that there are very few IPv6-only services, and, as a matter of policy and practice, people providing services over IPv6 normally don't want to make them IPv6-only. Consequently the people who want IPv6 are all kind of networking geeks; the transition mechanisms like 6over4 and 6to4 and all the rest have really reduced some of the urgency that people might feel!

I mean, it's now easier and less painful, but there isn't any big reason for people to worry about being "left behind"! That may be one reason they don't feel themselves in a hurry.

A world-wide multiprotocol network at the network layer is something that hasn't existed for some years; it's an interesting thing but also a sort of painful thing. In the best case, if your efforts are successful, that is the best we can look forward to for a while!

GJF, I don't think Richard Stallman would appreciate being called a "well known open source evangelist".

In other news

There's more Daniel Burton campaign coverage in the Daily Cal.

It's funny with what equanimity the reporter covered the story -- it seems she was probably given an assignment to track down all the candidates on the ballot for the office, interview them, and give them all equal space to tell their respective stories in their own words. Accordingly, Daniel gets just as much respect (and space) as Aroner, but there's no news analysis discussing the difference between them.

It seems that Linus Torvalds has written a book, an autobiography, called Just For Fun, forthcoming from HarperCollins.

It also seems that Wells Fargo Bank statements are bearing a notice that

EFFECTIVE 12/01/00, THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN ADDED TO THE DEPOSIT AGREEMENT: YOUR WELLS FARGO ATM/ATM & CHECK CARD OR INSTANT CASH/CASH & CHECK CARD MUST NOT BE USED FOR ANY UNLAWFUL PURPOSE (FOR EXAMPLE, FUNDING ANY ACCOUNT THAT IS SET UP TO FACILITATE ON-LINE GAMBLING). YOU AGREE YOU WILL NOT USE YOUR CARD OR ACCOUNT FOR ANY TRANSACTION THAT IS ILLEGAL UNDER APPLICABLE LAW.

I wonder why Wells Fargo did that, but it doesn't seem that kelly is around much to comment. It reminds me of some license issues that have come up and that I've been involved in. Of course, bank deposit policies are not exactly open source licenses.

I went to the BayFF meeting at the Moscone center. The meeting was a little scattered. There were three panelists (Scientology critic, reporter, law professor) talking about free speech and intellectual property on-line. I think I might have spotted the Church of Scientology representative. That issue is a bit less good-natured than "Spot the Fed" at DefCon.

I saw dmarti, Tabinda, crackmonkey, and shaleh there (the latter was accepting an award on behalf of Debian).

dmarti has had an excellent idea called antipackages (which perhaps shaleh will be implementing in Debian): a package with only conflicts, no dependencies, no provides... just conflicts!

Why would you want such a useless thing?

Well: task-no-cleartext-login-daemons, task-no-x11, task-no-gnome, task-no-kde, task-no-lzw, task-no-mp3, (once upon a time) task-no-unlicensed-rsa, task-no-strcpy (or task-no-non-bounds-checking-string-functions; this is problematic because there are safe ways to use these functions and maybe some very important software uses them safely), task-no-games (Don says that's useful for U.S. government procurements). In principle you could have task-no-nonfree (or task-no-semifree and task-no-proprietary), but that's already handled in a different way by Debian (by only shipping free software).

The cool thing is that you can upgrade antipackages to new versions, just like any other packages. It's just that their conflicts will be updated; nothing else will change.

This is a very convenient way to set a policy that a particular category of software should not be installed somewhere. And that policy won't be accidentally overridden by a dependency; instead, the system administrator will be specifically warned about the conflict, and will have to make a choice.

I also have a task-no-outstanding-security-flaws idea, as a way to remove automatically anything with a reported security flaw until its maintainer can fix it (and release a new version, which task-no-outstanding-security-flaws no longer conflicts with). I'm not sure this is an ideal solution, but it's an interesting application of package management.

2000-11-05

(15:05:39)

Can we really believe that belief is a matter of choice and that this choice can be taken upon factors unrelated to the content of the belief or to evidence for it?

Pascal suggests that we have to choose whether to believe in God, but his account of the nature of that choice is really suspect. He presents it as sort of a question of whether we want to live in one city or another city, knowing that the consequences might be extremely serious (perhaps more serious than the consequences of any other choice).

I don't see belief as formed that way!

In other news

Hooray, no force of law for administrative classification in the U.S. (no "official secrets act"). I'm actually totally amazed that Clinton vetoed that bill; I thought there was almost no chance of that.

Lots of turmoil and reports of old turmoil that I didn't know about in the anti-censorware community, currently centered around the Censorware Project [link updated October 28, 2004] and spilling over into other things. It's very sad.

Somehow I always think that only the bad guys have these things happen to them.

I spent a lot of Saturday with a friend wandering around, including an excursion to Green Apple Books in the Inner Richmond (6th and Clement; take the 1 bus to 6th and California from downtown). That was cool. Now I have Martin Gardner's most recent book (Did Adam & Eve Have Navels?).

I might go to my friend's place for Thanksgiving, which is fast approaching. I haven't been one for big family holidays in recent memory, but it should be cool to see how someone else's family does it.

stephane's party was pretty neat and seemed to have the TikiNature. I had a good time, and got home late. A lot of people with Advogato accounts were present, with large Eazel and Linuxcare contingents. I was going to post some quotations from the party here, but I've forgotten all of them!

OK, "we could get out some Cat 5 and start knitting" seems to have been one.

Stephane's cat Pixel is very cute.

So, happy birthday, Stephane, and happy Guy Fawkes Day, everybody.

2000-11-07

(09:18:02)

In other news

It looks like the sugar substitute "Sweet'n'Low" is named after a line in a poem by Tennyson.

Sure enough, it is.

I've had distressingly little math around here recently. Hmmm... so I wondered why the arithmetic mean of two numbers must be larger than their geometric mean.

I proved it for two numbers; now I'm trying to prove it for n numbers.

2000-11-10

(00:50:21)

I taught a Python class again and I dragged in digital roots for some reason -- I couldn't resist. "Hey, what's 37533094858041282253294 % 9? Hey, no paper, now!"

There are some nice memory tricks if you can do various running-total mod n calculations in your head. I saw Arthur Benjamin do one of those once when he performed at UC Berkeley; it was awesome.

Can anybody tell me a good way to get to Santa Rosa from San Francisco on Saturday?

2000-11-11

(20:54:25)

Once you've taken the logarithm of both sides, the proof that the logarithm of the average is larger than the average of the logarithms seems pretty easy.

I think there is an interesting analogy there to a famous picture from nuclear physics, the curve of binding en