Planet DHG

jeremy — More racing skills

October 06, 2008 02:40 AM

Both days of this weekend had a skills clinic for the MIT racing team and I went to both. Again, the clinics were held down at the Wells Ave office park. I think at this point, I have the way from MIT to that part of Newton etched into my memory. Which also means I can get from MIT to various points around Brookline and Allston with relative ease.

Yesterday's clinic was focused on improving cornering skills. This is something which, especially after going through it, is incredibly useful and an area where I really had no clue what I was doing technique-wise. Sure, you can turn the bike and go around a corner, but being able to do so in a way that's both fast and safe is an entirely different story. There's quite a bit of technique to it. But it's cool to have a better idea of how the pros manage to severely tilt their bikes when going through corners of a crit at speed. It's an area where I'll want to spend some time practicing the technique to really get it down to where I don't have to think about it. After that, we followed up with another rousing game of Death Bike. Which was, again, a good time.

Today was focused on sprinting and riding in a pack. Again, a little bit of being told a "good" way of doing things seems like it will go a long way. But sprinting form feels like it's going to be a lot more difficult for me to get "right" just due to having to break bad habits. Luckily, sprint intervals are a pretty easy thing to do and a good way to work on the form. For riding in a pack, there was a bit of focus on moving up and how to do so quickly and efficiently. The fact that we were doing this at Wells Ave was interesting; I've raced there enough times that I know how various things feel and so it was interesting to do things in a different way. In the past I've mostly moved up by going to the outside, applying some power and getting to the front. While this does work, it's pretty inefficient as it ends up meaning I leave the draft. I've now got a much better idea on how to move up through the pack and save energy. Which should end up helping at the end for the sprint. We finished out the day with a game of Bike Capture the Flag which ended up being pretty fun as well.

All in all, a good two days of work. And although my distances were lower than my normal for a weekend, I feel like I got quite a bit out of both days and am pretty tired from both as well. This week will be an easy-ish week on the riding side so that I can be in good shape for racing at Jamestown next Monday. But that's okay, as it's a busy week on pretty much every other front. Especially since I didn't do any homework this weekend. So, it'll be a bit of a scramble to get that taken care of, but it doesn't look like it'll be too bad.

hsarik — Spinning dyeing roving knitting blah blah blah

October 05, 2008 06:20 PM

You'll never believe it, but in this past week I've done some knitting, dyed some roving, and spun up some wool!

I dyed up 2 5oz-ish hunks of BFL fiber last week and just finally got around to taking pictures this weekend. I was going to post them both to the Etsy store, but when I went to do the upload for this one, I just couldn't do it. So he's staying with me and is going to be socks, I think.

I named this colorway "Biff Spilled Sangria in the Swimming Pool Again".

Just look at that face. Could you give it up to a stranger?

This one is "Nightfall in the Enchanted Forest". I love it too, but not as much as my happy happy green and blue with purple splashes little Biff.

I finished knitting the Berry Hill mitts and I'm very happy with how they turned out. They took a good 3 days to dry on the drying rack after washing, so I just got some pictures today. I have a metric ass-tonne of this yarn left over, so I'm going to use up the rest by knitting a Calorimetry or some other earwarmer type project to match.

Note: taking in-focus pictures of your own hands is very hard, even with a mini-tripod and a self-timer. I got a bunch of blurry pictures, some with a garden hose, a bag of topsoil, my feet, and other fun stuff in the frame.

And lastly, I started knitting the Dreaming of September yarn into some simple short-cuffed ribbed socks. The yarn is soft and squishy and dense and the colors are a constant surprise. I couldn't love them more if they were made of sour cream. I hope I have enough yarn to finish them.

cec — Annotate Flickr

October 05, 2008 02:59 AM

A while back, Luis Villa asked about a script to add creative commons licensing information to an image. I just wrapped up a first cut at a GreaseMonkey script to do exactly that. Hopefully someone will find it useful.

Luis Villa — posting at Freedom To Tinker for a few weeks

October 03, 2008 12:43 PM

I was recently invited to guest-post at Freedom to Tinker, formerly Ed Felten’s group blog and now officially hosted by Ed’s Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. Ed’s been a hero for ages (dating back to at least his voting machine work, if not to his Microsoft work) and so the invite was very flattering. I’ll be there through mid-November, and cross-posting headlines and snippets here.

My first post at FTK is on a topic that got interesting to me after I saw Clay Shirky speak at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference: Political Information Overload and the New Filtering. In a nutshell, I look at some of the new filtering mechanisms that are (or aren’t) helping us deal with the deluge of political information- information that was always being created, but is only now being distributed so widely that it feels overwhelming. Sadly, I’ve got no great insight, but I think it is an area that deserves more thought and design instead of the ad hoc evolution that is creating it right now.

jeremy — More Fedora on XO progress

October 03, 2008 03:13 AM

Made some more progress today with running Fedora on the XO. Until I manage to go and pick up the right SD card, I figured I'd give performance a little bit of a rest and so instead focused on seeing which bits of the hardware appeared to work (or not). So I booted up into run-level 3 with the image I posted last night and started poking.

Wireless: First thing to check was the wireless to see if it worked. And it does, the driver gets loaded, we have the firmware and it managed to find the access point at my house and associate without problems. Haven't really looked at mesh at all, and also haven't dived into making sure wpa works, but at least for the basics, it seems okay.
Camera: From the quick test of "does the driver load" and "does the driver give data", this looks okay too. Doing cat < /dev/video0 as a user turns on the LED for the camera and prints garbage to the screen.
Sound: Driver loads and the mixer shows elements, but playing sound isn't looking like it's working. Needs more investigation
Internal Flash (NAND): Driver seems to load and with a couple of pointers from dwmw2, is mountable without having to do any more module loads. Went ahead and did the next obvious step and changed things so that we can use that for the persistent /home.
Special keys: Most of the keys on the keyboard seem to be appropriately mapped, but there are some that will need mapping via hal. Should be straight-forward to sit down and do as it's just writing some fdi file bits (hint: if someone wants to volunteer to do this, I can point you in the right direction :)
Power management: Suspend to RAM isn't showing up as available at all right now. I suspect some kernel bits that haven't been upstreamed need to be pulled out. Will probably look closer at this tomorrow

And now, I think it is time to go watch some tv

bryn — it's all about ME!!

October 02, 2008 05:00 PM

I practiced my chanter and pennywhistle at lunch today. Yay me! I can still play, although my endurance is terrible.

In other news, I'm wearing a tailored shirt that I tucked and darted and shrunk by 8+ inches until it actually fits me again. I've lost 8 inches around my middle!

bryn — Life... don't talk to me about life...

October 02, 2008 01:12 AM

I was late coming back from lunch today, because my brother and I had a very good talk and neither one of us wanted to stop. I was handed a genuine emergency the second I got back, though. I handled it with a fair amount of aplomb, I thought, and everything was back up and running in under 2 hours (including a full TB worth of fsck). The part that we might have to buy to replace what broke, however, would cost $950, so that will likely not be happening. Other options are looking promising.

House stuff never stops - I finished painting the bathroom on Saturday, and then on Sunday I noticed a black line of ick on the ceiling in the sewing/mud room. This would be the flat-roof part that didn't get replaced recently. Sigh.

In other news, my dad is being bugged by creditors who are trying to recoup my mom's recent college loans. This is ironic and painful at the same time.

We have survived our first Teacher Workday - my mom came over and she and Nate had a terrific day together, complete with a bus ride downtown and cookie baking. This is extremely encouraging, as it means that we'll be able to avoid paying for daycare on those days, and it gives Mom something big to look forward to.

My brother and I, to bring this post back around to the beginning, began talking about where Mom will be living in 7-10 years, the answer to which question I can only begin to speculate on. A. and I have started discussing building something on over our garage. Brother wants to assume that there will be money in the future, from Dad in one way or another, but I don't think it's safe to assume that.

hsarik — Dreaming of September

October 02, 2008 12:29 AM

The "Dreaming of September" roving was originally posted in my Etsy store, but it was hard to photograph due to the colors and I had a feeling that it was too bright and contrasty for most peoples' tastes, although I completely loved it. I took it off the site and got it spun and plied before the end of September, and here it is, around 230 yards of heavy sport/light DK weight Merino 2-ply (around 14-15WPI).

It's going to end up as some very soft, bright socks.

Before:

After:

jeremy — New Fedora on the XO Test Image

October 01, 2008 09:50 PM

A new image for testing Fedora on the XO is now available. This image runs quite a bit slower than the previous one in X and I haven't gotten to why yet, so if you try it, I recommend quite a bit of patience. But I wanted to get something up in the near-term so that people would see some sort of progress :-)

Changes and improvements in this image...:

Updated packages to match those that are included in the Fedora 10 beta that was released yesterday
Slightly newer kernel (the one that davej built last night) which has debugging disabled. Sadly, this wasn't the help I hoped it would be.

Booting to runlevel 3 is okay for at least some testing, though. So be sure to add --extra-kernel-args 3 to your invocation of livecd-iso-to-disk in addition to passing --xo. And hopefully we'll have a new image up shortly that fixes some of the slowness and makes things more reasonable for general use "soon"

Luis Villa — saddest (truest?) conversation of the day

September 30, 2008 06:50 PM

(me) I’m an irritating perfectionist who can’t prioritize
(me) stubborn ‘pride in work product’
(friend) lose it
(friend) that’s an evolutionary …whatchamacallit
(friend) like the appendix
(friend) a holdover that adds no value

hsarik — Good Idea, Bad Idea

September 29, 2008 10:01 PM

When I dye up rovings, usually I have a plan in mind. Occasionally I just gather up all the half-used dye bottles and dump them on some unsuspecting fiber, but usually I have some specific color combinations that I'm aiming for.

Good Idea

In this case, the colorway plan was "Plums and Greengages". I pictured red and purple plums and the "frosted" paler colors they sometimes have, along with the contrasting acid yellow-green of greengages (ie, green plums). I think I succeeded pretty well in capturing what I was after and I'm happy with the colors. If this doesn't sell, I'll very gladly spin it up for myself.

Bad Idea

Another idea I had involved the signature lime green and bright pink colors used by hoity toity resortwear designer Lilly Pulitzer. If you're not familiar with her work, pop on over to her web site and you'll get the idea.

My first idea was "Lilly Pulitzer in a Blender", but I had the feeling that bright pink and lime green and bright red wouldn't be that great together. Then I thought, "Lilly Pulitzer Goes Goth!", but I wasn't too sure about black and bright pink and lime green. After a while I remembered the silvery gray Brown Sheep roving that I've overdyed a couple times with good results, so I said, "Hey, I'll do 'Lilly Pulitzer Gets Lost in the Fog'!"

Um. Yeah.

I think I might put this on the Etsy store just to see if anyone buys it. I don't know who would want to, but taste is such an individual thing. If there are people who like malted milk balls and Clay Aiken CDs and Thomas Kinkade paintings, there must be someone out there who will just love "Lilly Pulitzer Got Lost in the Fog".

cec — Idle bailout thoughts

September 29, 2008 05:30 PM

Okay, this is probably the last of the foreseeable posts on the Wallstreet bailout - and probably the most serious.

I spend the last week extremely pissed off about the bailout. Here were a bunch of idiots absurdly inflating the price of housing, with other idiots actually loaning them money to do so, more idiots treating the bad loans as assets and still more idiots insuring them against loss under ridiculous assumptions. It’s not really a surprise that the whole thing blew up. The only surprise is that it took as long as it did. Hell - 5 years ago in late 2003 when K and I bought our current place, we were worried that there was a housing bubble inflating prices beyond what the properties were really worth. And this was in North Carolina which didn’t have the hottest housing market.

But here we are, we’ve got banks going defunct left and right and we’ve got republicans arguing that they really, really have always supported more federal regulation. The latter is one of the signs of the apocalypse for those keeping score at home. So along comes Paulson saying that he needs $700 billion to keep this from truly going in the crapper. The reason I’m so pissed off is that I agree.

Let’s put it this way - the U.S. economy (GDP) is on the order of $14 trillion. In other words, the bailout proposal was 5% of GDP. Now in real terms $700 billion or 5% of GDP are insanely huge amounts of money. Something like $7,000 per household. But if the economy collapses or if we go into a deeper recession than we otherwise would have, 5% of GDP is chump change. The economy could easily slow 5% in a year (or 2.5% each over two years, etc.). In other words, the proposed cure is cost effective compared to letting the disease run its course without intervention.

Given that we need some form of intervention to prevent a complete meltdown, there are a few questions that have to be addressed:

What is the proper size of the intervention? How much do we need to spend?
How will the plan work? How will assets be valued? Who has oversight? etc.
Who pays for it?

In all of these, the original (3 page) Paulson plan was completely inadequate. Paulson picked the $700 billion number out of thin air. Hell, for all I know he thought it should be 5% GDP and backed out the $700b from there. The original plan said nothing about how the assets would be valued - essentially, the govt would likely pay the original value of the assets regardless of their actual worth. Paulson was to have no oversight and all decisions were to be final with no appeal to judicial recourse. Finally, for the plan to have worked, taxpayers would have to lose money which means that the benefits would primarily go to those of us with money in the stock market (401k retirement funds, etc.) or to the financial institutions themselves and the burden would fall on our standard tax system which places only a slightly higher burden on the rich than it does the rest of us.

So that plan won’t/shouldn’t fly.

What about the new plan? On Sunday, the congress and the whitehouse finalized a new proposal. Caveat lector - I haven’t read it yet, I’ve only looked at excerpts. But from what I’ve seen, it is better in almost every way to the original Paulson plan.

The new bill grants the Treasury $350b up front and the rest isn’t guaranteed. Congress will have significant oversight. There are two ways that Paulson can buy assets: 1) conducting a reverse auction to find the true worth of the assets; or 2) essentially buy equity in the company equal to the amount of money received for taking the assets. The former is likely to generate smaller amounts of money for the companies, but does allow them to get the bad assets off of their books. The latter may be useful for companies in worse financial shape. In either case, the govt is essentially getting something of value for the money it’s spending. Oh - and companies that participate in the bailout have to agree to reductions in executive compensation which is a good thing. I still wish they were required to participate in credit counseling - along the lines of that required for consumers under the 2005 bankruptcy law, but I might just be thinking punitively.

So, what’s not to like? Probably quite a bit - like I said, I haven’t had a chance to read the 110 page draft. One thing that’s probably not to like is that the bill allows the SEC to temporarily suspend Mark-to-Market accounting. This is just dumb. It would allow the SEC to look the other way while companies pretend that they are worth more than they really are. It’s a way to allow the companies to claim that their assets are worth more than the market would pay for them, allowing the companies to appear healthier than they really are. That’s not really helpful.

So, I’ll probably read through the full bill tonight, but for the most part I think I support it. It’s not perfect, but it seems to be both necessary and significantly better than the original Paulson bill (oh, and much better than the silly House Republican proposal, but we won’t get into that).

bryn — Way too much 'suburban mom'...

September 29, 2008 02:28 PM

On Friday at lunch, we were discussing the reason there were Gay Pride flags all up and down 9th St. in Durham. I found out later that someone has rather sensibly switched gay pride from scorching July to late September, but Bambi speculated that it was because of Beaver Pride that had been last week, and that they were in fact taking them down, not putting them up.

My first thought was that the Beavers are the sports mascot of some team in Oregon or Wisconsin, and there couldn't possibly be enough gay Beaver fans in the.... oh.

Saturday was a bit rough in general, although I did enjoy having all 4 kids for a little while at the going-away/open house party. We watched the snake, which was cool.

The highlight of my weekend, though, was Sunday. I had volunteered to marshal Elvegast's heavy practice, which happens on the shore of Lake Crabtree near the airport. Only one guy with armour showed up, and two guys without. We sat around under the trees by the lake for very nearly 2 hours just hanging out, shooting the shit, catching up, etc. It was very calming. I was moderately sorry that there wasn't a fighter practice after all, but not annoyed or let down or anything. It was all good.

The bathroom has had its final coat of paint, except for the touch-ups that happened with the mud. Next - fixtures!

hsarik — Not a bad weekend, all things considered

September 28, 2008 11:14 PM

Despite two trips to the datacenter to fix a cranky server (my on-call week ends on Monday morning, thankfully), my weekend could have been a lot worse. I got to socialize and spin on Saturday evening, I got to do a little dyeing (which is still currently dripping away on the drying rack), and I managed to photograph and post a couple rovings from the Thursday night dyeing session on the Etsy store.

I dyed my first superfine Merino, which turned out to be much less delicate to deal with than I'd feared. It takes the dyes well and is amazingly soft, far softer than the "standard" 64-ct Merino I've been dyeing so far, and that stuff is like a fluffy cloud. I want to get some more of this soon.

I also dyed some more BFL in a copper/rust/verdigris colorway that I'm really happy with. BFL is so shimmery that the copper color looks metallic to me.

The fact that this:

turns to this:

...is why I love to spin 2-ply. I'm thinking this might end up as some wild Trekking-ish socks if I get enough yardage. I've just started plying this up.

bryn — I have got to quit reading this stuff...

September 26, 2008 01:54 PM

American troops deployed inside the US

The Stool Pigeon Theory

I'm starting to get really worried that they're going to suspend the election. This is way too freaky.

Or, the little conspiracy-theorist sitting in the back of my head thinks that they'll let Obama take this one, and build up someone else for the next election cycle, and that's when it'll all fall apart.

bryn — File under: Things not to get upset about

September 25, 2008 05:58 PM

Getting upset because you live in Scotland but are sent leaflets in Welsh.

Sigh.

bryn

September 25, 2008 01:50 PM

This past Monday, I announced at the Kappellenberg business meeting that I was summarily suspending Kappellenberg's heavy practice until people actually want to fight and will show up and tell me about it ahead of time. Nobody is in any trouble or anything, I'm just tired of going over there to marshal nothing. It's nice to talk to the fencers and all, but it makes my poor husband sad to drag all his armour out and have nobody to hit.
Sorry, all! Let me know if you have an alternative idea or a yen to hit a K'berger.

bryn — Back to Kansas

September 24, 2008 09:11 PM

So I'm back to being from Kansas again...
Here's why.
Notice, please, that this is the same district that David Duke was representative of in the late 1980s and early 1990s (I think, unless Metarie has two districts?).

Thanks SO much to cec for pointing that one out.

bryn

September 24, 2008 01:42 PM

Thanks to

etselec for the Goat Lawn Service story.

These next two are from various GPGC folks.
The 269-269 split in the Electoral College, and because you need a laugh after reading that one, the

SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

DEAR AMERICAN:

I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH
A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.

I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS
HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 800
BILLION DOLLARS US. IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS TRANSFER, IT WOULD BE
MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.

I AM WORKING WITH MR. PHIL GRAM, LOBBYIST FOR UBS, WHO WILL BE MY
REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY. AS A SENATOR, YOU
MAY KNOW HIM AS THE LEADER OF THE AMERICAN BANKING DEREGULATION MOVEMENT
IN THE 1990S. THIS TRANSACTIN IS 100% SAFE.

THIS IS A MATTER OF GREAT URGENCY. WE NEED A BLANK CHECK. WE NEED THE
FUNDS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. WE CANNOT DIRECTLY TRANSFER THESE FUNDS IN
THE NAMES OF OUR CLOSE FRIENDS BECAUSE WE ARE CONSTANTLY UNDER
SURVEILLANCE. MY FAMILY LAWYER ADVISED ME THAT I SHOULD LOOK FOR A
RELIABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY PERSON WHO WILL ACT AS A NEXT OF KIN SO THE
FUNDS CAN BE TRANSFERRED.

PLEASE REPLY WITH ALL OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, IRA AND COLLEGE FUND ACCOUNT
NUMBERS AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN TO
WALLSTREETBAILOUT@TREASURY.GOV SO THAT WE MAY TRANSFER YOUR COMMISSION
FOR THIS TRANSACTION. AFTER I RECEIVE THAT INFORMATION, I WILL RESPOND
WITH DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT SAFEGUARDS THAT WILL BE USED TO PROTECT
THE FUNDS.

YOURS FAITHFULLY MINISTER OF TREASURY PAULSON

cec — We are all socialists now

September 24, 2008 01:18 AM

Welcome to the new socialist state… comrade.

From Propublica, an inflation adjusted comparison of bailouts.

jeremy — Progress with the end of seasons

September 23, 2008 02:21 AM

This was the last weekend of summer and on Saturday, it actually felt a bit like fall was already here. I went out with the MIT cycling club on their ride to Dover (MA). Was a nice route and largely in areas that I had never been before, which was good. Relaxed pace and a good opportunity to talk with and start to get to know some of the other people riding. Was glad that I had picked up some knee warmers, though, as they were pretty much the perfect extra layer. Yesterday, though, felt more like summer again as I went out on the Quad ride. Again a beautiful day, though, and nice to get some more good riding in.

Today brought the actual beginning of autumn and waking up to it being kind of dull, gray and cool was not the way I had hoped to start the morning. But I dragged myself out of bed and headed to the office for a day that I had somewhat booked already with meetings.

Between them, managed to get the serial cable hooked up to the OLPC in the office and started with trying to track down kernel things again. And finally started getting somewhere. After a week (plus) of dead ends, I happened upon the right avenue and was able to confirm that the problem was OpenFirmware loading the initrd into RAM where it shouldn't have been. Wrote up a good description of what was going wrong, sent it off, and Mitch Bradley (aka OFW Ninja) had me a fix in about an hour. I didn't see it for a while longer due to other meetings, but it was in my inbox.

So, after getting home and having dinner, I tried it out and was greeted with success. So modulo fixing some more "normal" kernel problems, it looks like we should be well on our way to having the XO able to boot with the regular Fedora kernel. And this means that having an XO run just any old Fedora live image is now a very big step closer to reality...

Luis Villa — computer usage data bleg (update: and server market share)

September 22, 2008 02:31 PM

Hey, all. I’m in need of data about ‘typical’ computer usage- i.e., ‘in 2007, the average computer user spent X% of time on the internet, Y% of time doing word processing, Z% of time listening to music, etc.’ The ideal data set would have this information for a number of years- ideally going back at least to 2000 A.D. (aka ‘1 B.iTunes.’) I’ve been googling for a bit and have had no luck. If anyone can point me at such data, I’d be extremely appreciative. Thanks!

Relatedly: (added later): similar long-term numbers for server market share, both by OS and by chip family (x86 v. everyone else, primarily) would be terrific to have if anyone knows of a source of them (ideally without paying Gartner bazillions, though I really need to look into whether or not the school’s Bloomberg subscription gives me access to that.)

hsarik — Fibery update

September 21, 2008 10:58 PM

1.) Dyeing!

I dyed up 4 more rovings that I'm really happy with. These will be going up on Etsy soon to replace the 3 I sold on Friday, yippie!

"Manly McManfredjinsinjin", some brown BFL that I overdyed.

"Mud Wrestling After The Prom", Targhee.

"Black Watch", some of the silver/black roving that I overdyed. This is my absolute favorite and I think I'll cry if it sells. The pictures don't even come close to doing this stuff justice.

"In The Gloaming", Targhee.

2.) Spinning

I spun up and plied the Poppy Flower Fibers BFL, and it's my most even yarn to date. A few "blowouts" here and there, but getting much better. This is really lovely soft fiber, too.

I snagged my "Dreaming of September" roving off Etsy and decided to spin it myself, since it's one of my favorites. All mine now, mineminemine.

3,) Knitting

I have most of one of the handspun Berry Hill fingerless gloves finished, all but the thumb. I love how this yarn is knitting up. I also got to do a sewn bind-off for the first time.

The End (...or is it?)

cec — Public service announcement

September 21, 2008 01:14 AM

As a public service announcement, I am hereby warning the people I know that in light of the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and the entire freaking banking system, all of which will cost tax payers about $1 trillion, the next person that tells me that deregulating markets will provide a solution to anything will be asked to STFU.

thank you and good night

Luis Villa — what you can (and can’t) learn from Google’s EULA mistake

September 19, 2008 02:48 AM

When people started complaining about the Google Chrome EULA, it seemed obvious to me that it was a copy and paste error- old language, copied into a new situation where it didn’t quite fit. But after Google explained that they had just reused language from other licenses, Gizmodo noted:

It’s not that I don’t trust Google, but the Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V explanation .. seems like an odd oversight for a product in secret, heavy development for close to two years.

Explaining why it isn’t that odd might give people a little better understanding about how corporate lawyers work, and maybe even what this does (and doesn’t) teach us about Google and privacy.

First thing this teaches us: Lawyers (like programmers) copy and paste whenever they can. On the plus side, a document that is copied is usually battle-tested- so you know you’re getting something that covers all the bases, generally does the right thing, and has no known errors. If you wrote it from scratch, you might forget or overlook something, and that would be a problem. And lawyers are expensive- so if the copy and paste saves them time, it saves you money. On the down side, a copied and pasted document sometimes doesn’t fit the new situation perfectly; for example, old language could take on new meaning when the software grows new functionality- which appears to be what bit Google here. Given lawyers’ love of ctl+c and ctl+v, this doesn’t seem that odd.

(Corporate lawyers in particular are notorious for copying and pasting, to the point that some venture capital groups provide their own legal documents, since they figure your lawyers are going to be copy and pasting anyway.)

Second thing this teaches us: lawyers are human too. Your eyes glaze over after reading just one of these EULAs, and corporate lawyers who work in this area can easily read hundreds of these, all very, very similar. This doesn’t excuse the mistake that happened here- lawyers are well paid to avoid exactly this kind of problem. But at the end of the day we’re only human- after reading the same phrases a thousand times, it isn’t too ‘odd’ that sometimes we miss the wrinkle that gives the same old sentence an entirely different meaning like it did here.

Third thing this teaches us: among lawyers, programmers are notorious for doing things first and asking the lawyers to check it over later, even the night before (or the day after!) the release. I have no idea if that is what happened here- it could well be that the lawyers were consulted from day one, and Google generally seems well-organized about this sort of thing. But it is quite possible that even in a two year project like this one the lawyers were called only weeks, days, or hours before the website went live- obviously increasing the odds of a mistake like this one. Again, lawyers are well paid to do things under pressure- so this shouldn’t have happened- but it isn’t too surprising.

What this doesn’t do is teach us much about Google, Chrome, and privacy.

First, we still don’t have a great idea what other privacy problems there are with Chrome. Google may no longer be claiming to own everything you publish on the web, but there is still a lot of data going from you to them, and I for one still haven’t seen a good analysis of that.

Second, some people have claimed that this shows us that when there is a public outcry, Google will respond, and therefore there is no need for government privacy regulation. I’m not convinced government privacy regulation is a good idea, and Google may well be very responsive to market forces. But the idea that this incident shows that Google reacts to the market is fairly ludicrous- remember, what we’re talking about here is correcting a copy and paste error. So, yes, we’ve proven that when a Google lawyer accidentally gives them the ability to do something they have no intention to do, they’ll fix the lawyer’s accident. But this tells us nothing about how they’ll respond when they actually consciously choose to collect data- they famously did nothing when there were huge complaints gmail and privacy, and their response when people actually take them to court seems to be that “complete privacy does not exist.”

So was this mistake odd? Not really. But it tells us a lot more about how lawyers work than it tells us about Google, Chrome, and privacy.

hsarik — A couple more

September 18, 2008 11:49 PM

I've updated the Etsy Shop with all 4 rovings, but here are some pictures of the other two rovings I dyed the other day.

First off, I dyed some of this silver-black-gray roving with purple, in the hopes that the cool streakiness would still be visible after dyeing. It is!

Before:

After:

I also dyed some Merino in red/green/blue/violet. I never get tired of this color combination.

jeremy — Catching up

September 18, 2008 10:46 PM

About this time last week, I came to the realization that I had a ton of pending work to get done. Luckily, I'm now starting to feel more like I'm on track and not behind. But it was less than fun, so I'm definitely going to try to be better about staying on top of things, especially the system architecture "opportunity sets" for the rest of the semester. Otherwise, classes are going good. Given the amount of time getting sucked up, I decided to not actually be a listener for the Software Systems Engineering course, which is too bad. But this way, I should have some time to just to a few more random talks around MIT. Which is probably going to be more interesting and helpful.

On other fronts, the Fedora on OLPC and Sugar on Fedora efforts are picking up steam a bit. Hopefully we'll have some more useful milestones for both in the next week or so. But due to work there, I haven't had much time to spend on getting a SIG for other smaller form factor machines (including netbooks, the XO and more) underway. Luckily, Peter Robinson has volunteered on fedora-devel-list to help get this off the ground, so hopefully we can get that going to.

Never a dull day...

hsarik — Spinning et al

September 18, 2008 01:36 AM

1.) Spinning: I finished spinning and 2-plying some Merino in a colorway I called "Open Water". I had a hard time color-adjusting this photo, the blue/green/aqua shades are really tough to capture accurately. Merino is my favorite fiber so far in terms of finished yarn, it's so incredibly soft and squishy, People seem to hate spinning it so much, I wonder if I'm doing something wrong. If HLF is reading this and is interested in this particular batch, let me know. :-)

I'm also working on plying some zany acid green-purple-yellow-turquoise BFL I bought from Poppy Flowers Fibers on Etsy. Miss HLF is also welcome to select this option (or wait to see what's behind Door #3).

2.) Knitting: Some very very backordered stuff has arrived and I can now continue on the Dad Secret project, which was originally intended to be a birthday gift and now will be a Christmas gift. Sigh.

I started knitting up some Berry Hill Fingerless Mittens (pattern only available on Ravelry, looks like) with the Misty Morning handspun. I really like how these are turning out. I have no idea if this striping pattern will continue, I was pretty random when I stripped the roving down for spinning and didn't try to keep any particular color order.

I dyed up 4 rovings on my day off, and here are the first two. Longwool fibers like these really suck up the pigments wonderfully and have a gorgeous sheen.

"Karma Chameleon", Wensleydale top.

And in a shout-out to my boy Keats, "Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness", Blue Faced Leicester.

hsarik — Too funny to not share

September 17, 2008 11:35 PM

It's The Sarah Palin Name Generator.

I would have been "Crunk Petrol Palin".

cec — Happy birthday to the U.S. Constitution

September 17, 2008 08:22 PM

Oh, on an entirely unrelated note, the U.S. Constitution was signed 221 years ago today - happy birthday! Okay, it wasn’t ratified for a couple of years after that, but still…

If you’ve got some time, take a read. It’s still the most impressive government document I’ve ever read.

A few years ago, I wanted to start a project that took the individual clauses of the constitution and traced the arguments for and against them back to the original sources or at least to the debates between the signing and ratification. The Federalist Papers , Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison and many of the documents collected in the two volume Library of America’s Debate on the Consitution would have featured prominantly. Never did have the time to kick that off.

cec — Baton Rouge - good news, bad news

September 17, 2008 07:58 PM

So, one more update on Gustav in Baton Rouge and then I’ll return you to your regularly scheduled odd musings, rants and wildlife pictures.

First, the good news - I got a text message from my mother last week. They got power back! Only 10 days without power. I suppose that’s not too bad. No word from K’s parents, but they had moved into K’s sister’s condo that did have power, so I’m guessing they’re still there.

The bad news is that my parent’s 100+ year old pecan tree that was struck by lightening a few years ago (and dying) just couldn’t take the hurricane. Too much concern that the root structure was loose and that it was going to fall on a house and completely crush it. So, they had to have it taken down. Three nice sized pecan trees in my parent’s yard - all gone, along with most of the limbs on an old magnolia and their Japanese magnolia.

The ironic news is that even though I knew they had power, I couldn’t get in touch with them on Monday to wish my father a happy birthday. So last night, I called my mom’s cell which was answered by my dad. Odd, but okay. I wished him a happy birthday and told him that I was sorry that I couldn’t reach him the day before. It turns out that I couldn’t reach him because their power was out again. Apparently the tree service accidentally dropped a limb on the power lines and took out power for them and the 3 or 4 nearest houses.

Somehow I’m imagining that a self-inflicted power outage is not going to be too high on the power company’s list of priorities. Fortunately, they are down to a manageable number of outages in Baton Rouge, so even with the majority of the power assistance now going to Houston/Galveston for Ike, my parents might still get power back soon.

Luis Villa — what these guys need is… a trademark license!

September 17, 2008 07:14 PM

Most screaming case for a community mark license I’ve seen in a while is the utterly cool PARK(ing) Day. Basically, they’ve got a very cool idea (probably patentable, not copyrightable) and have registered a mark (PARK(ing) Day, protected but not under copyright.) And they’ve put the thing (or tried to put it) under a CC-BY-NC-SA license, which is (say it with me, kids) a copyright license. And hence doesn’t accomplish what they want to accomplish, legally-speaking.

This isn’t really their fault; as far as I know no one has creatively addressed their needs¹. Still, frustrating to see. If only there were 30 hours in the day…

just as no one has creatively addressed the need of the spec writers

bryn — Pass the spam, please!

September 16, 2008 04:20 PM

> I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight....

Begin forwarded message:
/>
/>
/>

/>
/> If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."
/> --Grow up in Alaska eating moose burgers, a quintessential American story.
/>
/> If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
/> --Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.
/>
/> Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
/> --Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well-grounded.
/>
/> If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the
/> Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
/> --If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.
/>
/> If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
/> --If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married heiress Cindy the next month, you're a Christian?
/>
/> If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
/> --If , while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.
/>
/> If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.
/> --If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the US, your family is extremely admirable.
/>
/> OK, much clearer now.

jeremy — MIT Racing Skills Clinic

September 15, 2008 12:18 AM

One thing that I've told myself I'm going to try to take more advantage of than I did in the spring is some of the other things that MIT has to offer. This includes trying to make a point of going to some random lectures on random topics (... that seem interesting) but also doing some riding with the MIT cycling club/team. I went on a few of the Intercollegiate Ice Cream rides over the summer and the people seemed nice enough. So I went to the first meeting of the semester on Monday and decided that I am going to do some collegiate racing for MIT in the spring. I figure that a) it's a good chance to get some more riding in b) a good chance to meet some more people from different parts of MIT than I usually interact with as an SDM-er and c) the MIT racing team is good. Very very good. As in, nationals champion good.

Anyway, the first skills clinic of the year was held yesterday so I went down for it. Not a lot of mileage put in, but a good workout. And lots of good work. The MIT team is coached by Nicole Freedman and it's pretty obvious even after one skills clinic that one thing that has helped the team succeed is a good coach. The first skills clinic was a lot of fun -- some things to help focus on relaxing (somewhat ironic, yes), some skills drills and then some "getting comfortable riding really really close to someone". The latter culminated in a fun game of Death Bike. Yes, Death Bike is as much fun as it sounds and I'll have to be sure not to miss the first skills clinic next year so that I can do it again ;-) Looking forward to the future clinics as I think they'll be very helpful to me in getting to be a better rider and racer.

Today brought rain and quite a bit of it, so I didn't get out for a ride and have instead spent the day working either on stuff for work or on stuff for school. While I would have liked to have gotten a ride in, at least I can be glad that I was productive and thus feel better if I take some time for a ride on a day with better weather :-)

jeremy — One week of classes and then a little

September 14, 2008 07:47 PM

One week of classes is now complete so I figure it's about time to put up my first impressions of what I'm taking.

The first sort of general impression is that after a pretty busy summer semester I'm not really ready for things to be picking back up for the fall yet. I realized on Thursday that I've been a bit lax ingetting together groups for classes this semester and this also put off starting on some assignments. The first of which are all due this week. But got that under control and have spent some time this weekend to get back on track and will hopefully be done doing so with some concerted effort today. As for the specific classes I'm taking three for credit - two of the required and core classes for the SDM program and one elective

The first of the required classes is Systems Program Management. The course, as with a number of the ESD courses is taught by a few faculty members. Overall it looks like it should be okay and the professors definitely seem to be good. My one complaint thus far is that there is a non trivial amount of repeating, albeit at a less in-depth level, of the materials presented in System Dynamics. If it is seen as important enough to be covered either the course should be required or the sequencing adjusted a bit so that the intro material gets covered in SPM and then the SD class could spend more time on deeper aspects of the material.

The second of the required classes I'm taking is System Architecture. Crawley seems a bit less antagonistic than in January, at least thus far. And an attempt is being made to help make this more relevant to software -- we'll see how it goes.

The elective I'm taking is the Sloan Business Law course (15.616). I'm actually enjoying this quite a bit and think that it's going to be a very useful course. We're starting out with a bit of whirldwind tour through some of the basics of tort law, some regulation and criminal law, and contracts. Then, a vast majority of the rest of the course is taken up by guest lectures from practicing experts in a variety of legal fields. The readings have thus far been relevant and a reasonable length. And the professor is also very engaged and clearly wants to help drive some understanding of the material.

In addition to those three, I'm intending to be a listener (MIT-speak for auditing) for the new Software Systems Engineering course which is being run as a trial this fall. The big picture overview of the class made it seem like there's an attempt being made to bring in a lot of the big system-specific pieces for the software world. It should at the very least be interesting to give some feedback on the various pieces and hopefully help make the SDM program a bit better for software people in future years.

hsarik — Rising Meadow Farm Fest

September 14, 2008 02:34 PM

Yesterday me, Michelle, Jag and Jamie piled into Michelle's vehicle and drove out to Liberty, NC for the Rising Meadow Farm Fest. I forgot my camera like a dumbass, but Michelle took some pictures and video.

We watched a sheepdog demonstration, ate lamb burgers (the most delicious, juicy ground lamb I've ever had, it beats the crap out of the ground lamb from grocery stores), ate homemade ice cream, listened to a Celtic band doing all the usual Irish pub standards, watched a woman spinning angora straight from her very patient bunny, and did some shopping.

I bought 2 yarns. The top one is wool/cotton/silk/sparkly handspun by Nola Rich, a very nice woman who owns some unusual limited-production all-metal spinning wheels made by Columbine. They look like this. The bottom yarn is Rising Meadows Farm Corriedale singles in spring greens and blues.

I bought some rovings as well. Clockwise from the top middle, 2 balls (2oz each) of Rising Meadow Farm Corriedale roving, ISeeSpots Farm Merino/Silk/Angora blend roving, ISeeSpots Farm black alpaca roving, a new bobbin for my spinning wheel (I was so happy that ISeeSpots is a Kromski dealer and brought a walnut stained bobbin with them!), and Three Waters Farm superfine merino/tencel roving in "Black Hollyhock".

One of the Unique Sheep ladies was there, handing out little sample skeinlets of their sock yarns. I love their colorways.

It was a good time despite the really hot and humid weather.

During the drive I knitted a dishcloth in an experimental pattern. I wanted something mindless to work on, so I picked an easy pattern (eye of partridge) and gave it a 3-row garter stitch border. It did a great job of breaking up the variegated yarn, and gave a nice solid, squishy cloth, just like a sock heel. :-) I'll be making up a bunch more of these.

Luis Villa — that havoc, he’s such a nice young man. John McCain, not so much.

September 14, 2008 01:31 PM

HP: very nice post. The version in my drafts folder since Friday night is… hrm. Very similar in content, but, well, less polite. One might say ‘angrier’.

I had a lot of respect for John McCain (probably would have voted for him over Gore in 2000) but over the past couple of weeks that respect has gone- I’m just sick of the constant stream of lies, distortions, distractions. To paraphrase Obama, the distortions and the distractions don’t hurt Democrats or Republicans, they hurt America, not just for one media cycle, but permanently, because they prevent us from actually talking about the issues facing the country.

If we want to have a serious conversation about the very serious problems our country faces- if we want to actually solve problems instead of just win campaigns- this sort of behavior must have consequences. I can’t scold McCain (or the media, who share responsibility) to their faces, so I’ve done the next best thing: I’ve written the biggest check to Obama that I can, and time permitting I’m going to take action myself by phonebanking. In other words, I’m trying to help McCain and his handlers face the ultimate political penalty. They deserve nothing better. (I have no illusions that Obama can magically fix the problem by himself, but if Rovians continue to win, they will continue to behave this way. So their loss is where the solution must start.)

(It is worth noting that this issue of distractions and lies should be non-partisan. Honest Republicans who actually support America as an ongoing concern, and not just a place for their party to ‘win’ more scorched-earth victories, should want a discussion of the issues rather than a discussion of lipstick. Admittedly, it might cost you this election, but punishing the Rovians now will make your party stronger in the long run. So think about it supporting Obama, or at least withholding your support from McCain and Steve Schmidt.)

To bring this back slightly to my typical topics, this is a terrific chart (using the best Tufte-ian approach) explaining who would and wouldn’t get their taxes raised and lowered under the Obama and McCain tax plans. It puts the lie to McCain’s claim that Obama would raise taxes for most Americans. Given what lawyers earn, I’d probably be better off under McCain, but I don’t need it. Chart via the awesome ben fry.

bryn — Birthday party!

September 14, 2008 11:02 AM

We threw a birthday party for Nate yesterday. It was a somewhat lower-key version of the same party we threw last year - same spot, same games. We had a bit less food, not as many kids, and a lot fewer pictures. But we did have a fabulous time! Click on the link for the rest of the pictures.

The cake is Stealth Strawberry Cake. It got its own writeup.

bryn

September 12, 2008 05:28 PM

Thanks

etselec, for finding this article on gorilla surgery. I know Drs. Tomah and Mulvaney from my days supporting Medical Manager software. They get in the news on occasion, but this is a really nifty story.

bryn — Get your geek on

September 12, 2008 12:52 PM

User-agent-string history.

If you look at it and say 'wha??', don't worry about it, it's just me being geeky again.

hsarik — Yay handspun

September 12, 2008 03:25 AM

On Monday I bound off the Autumn Bliss Simple Yet Effective handspun shawl; on Tuesday I washed and blocked it, and on Wednesday I wore it to work, despite the weird looks from coworkers. :-) I'm using a dragonfly hair thingy I bought from The Bronze Jewelers at the NC Ren Faire last fall as a shawl pin, since it never did a great job of holding my hair, but seems right at home holding a shawl together.

The shawl is a perfect size for me, not long enough to drag or get caught on things, but big enough to keep me warm in the aggressively chilly A/C at work. And it reaches down to my butt. It's important that shawls reach down to one's butt.

I also made my first two Etsy sales! :-D :-D The first one was to a perfect stranger, and the second proves that Celeste is either a wonderful friend or the most obsessed Durannie ever. :-)

bryn

September 11, 2008 05:52 PM

You can tell I'm home sick when I post too much:
PDF on the Constitutionality of teaching Abstinence-only sex education in public schools.
Existential depression in gifted children.

jeremy — Glimpse of Fall

September 11, 2008 03:37 PM

We've started to have our first glimpse of fall here in New England as the temperatures started to drop yesterday. And this means the start of the time of layering and digging out all of my cooler weather gear for commuting. I'm interested to see how long my Keen Commuter sandals are effective when worn with wool socks. Actually, a lot of my wardrobe this time of year starts to bring in wool -- it's a great fabric to keep you warm when it's cooler in the mornings and evenings but at the same time, it doesn't have to be overbearingly warm in the middle of the day. So I think that my Earth, Wind and Rider wool jerseys are going to start seeing quite a bit of use again.

bryn — When the body says 'STOP'

September 11, 2008 03:33 PM

Sometimes, your body just says 'ENOUGH'. So I'm trying very hard to listen. I'm thinking this is the best day of this week I can be home sick, which was clever of me, for when I got sick last night, I wasn't capable of holding it off. So. Here I am on the couch, mostly being quiet, and only doing a small amount of work.

jeremy — Fedora on an XO

September 11, 2008 02:26 AM

As I mentioned before, one thing that I've been spending some time on is getting a "stock" Fedora to run on the OLPC XO hardware. Obviously there's not a CD drive, but there is a USB port and there is also an SD card slot. Which given the support in our live images for running off of such things, there seemed to be a bit of an obvious matchup.

There's just one (large-ish) problem. The XO is a Geode, so an i586 processor with cmov. So the stock i686 kernel on the live images definitely doesn't boot there. Unfortunately, neither does the i586 kernel. I'm working on tracking down what the relevant configuration difference is so that it can be fixed -- interestingly enough, if you don't load an initrd, a Fedora i586 kernel can boot fine. So there's definitely something a little odd going on. If you have experience in debugging early boot of an XO and have any tips, leave a comment or catch me on IRC or send me mail :)

So, instead I've done a modified version of the main OLPC kernel with the help of sdziallas that includes squashfs and also turns on things like dm-snapshot which we need for live images.

That plus a pretty straight-forward image config and we can build a live image that boots into the GNOME desktop on the XO off of either an SD card or a USB stick. There are definitely still things to be fixed, though. To try to help some of that, I've created a tracking bug that can be used by those who have an XO and try running a Fedora live image on it.

Do you have an XO and are interested in trying it out? If so, first be sure that you have a developer key for your system. Then, you can download an image based on today's rawhide (debranded) from here. I've basically tested that it boots, logs in to the desktop and associates to my access point. Then gpk-update-icon fires up and we run out of memory for things. If you kill it quick enough, then you can fire up firefox and slowly do a little bit of other stuff.

Some things that are continuing to be worked on:

Having somewhere to swap would help a lot
Using the SD card/USB stick for your persistence instead of eating up valuable RAM
Persistent /home on the internal NAND (jffs2)
Looking at high memory usage things and helping to make them better
Fixing the standard kernel so that we can boot it on the XO
And if we do the last one then we can boot the standard live images, any of them, on the XO

Any help appreciated! Any bugs you find, please be sure to make them block the tracker so that we can keep up with them accordingly.

As for the questions about what the end goal is here -- ultimately, I'd like to have any Fedora spin working on the XO just like it works on lots of other hardware. For Fedora 10, this may be a stretch (although I'm going to land any small changes that can be identified in that timeframe even though it's not a feature and we're at feature/beta freeze). But for Fedora 11, it should certainly be doable.

bryn — Five years ago today

September 10, 2008 02:47 PM

I woke up at 4 am and said the words that change lives: "It's time to go to the hospital."

I'll skip the icky parts and tell this story, of the 'one day it'll be funny' variety.
I called the midwife, and she asked me some questions. Then she said Ok, you've got a while. Take a shower, drink a cup of tea, then head to the clinic. As I was getting out of the shower, the lightbulb in the bathroom exploded, and I screamed. A. ran in thinking he was going to have to pick the baby up off the floor of the tub. If only it were that easy!
At 8:19 pm we had a healthy baby boy, 6 lb 12 oz, 19 inches long.
Five years ago today.

bryn — Just so you know,

September 10, 2008 01:49 AM

My foot still hurts. Very annoying, it is. I find I'm going out of my way to avoid stairs and curbs, which makes me feel weak and handicapped. At least I can walk on the flat for a good ways, usually, before I need to stop. Unfortunately, there's a lot of not-flat around here...

jeremy — Classes begin, great weekend follows

September 08, 2008 03:34 PM

Classes started back up on Thursdsay. This semester is likely going to be pretty busy. I'm taking three classes and probably being a listener for another. I'm definitely going to be taking System Project Management and the second part of System Architecture. These are both SDM core classes and so I figure I should go ahead and take them this fall as this will leave me a lot more flexibility for next fall. And although there has been plenty of complaining about System Architecture in the past from some notable people, some changes are being made to the course to help keep it more relevant, eg, for software and so I'm keeping an open mind. The other class I'm signed up for is the Sloan Business Law course -- after a day, it looks like this should be a good overview of all things law-y and a number of interesting guest lectures. Personally, I might have preferred a little bit more on intellectural property than the syllabus shows, but at the same time, I'm a bit of an edge case there :-)

The class that I'm likely going to be a listener for is the trial run of Software Systems Engineering. One of the required classes in the SDM program has been a Systems Engineering course and there continues to be a (pretty significant) struggle in how to make that work for software people. And in fact, I was not a big fan of the class at all over the summer (perhaps and understatement). As part of the curriculum revamp currently in progress, the option of a Software Systems Engineering class instead of the "normal" one is being provided and it's being run for the first time this fall. Since I don't really need the credit but still think that feedback on the course is important, I'm thinking about being a listener for it. But, TBD for real after the class meets for the first time tomorrow.

Then, ended up having a great weekend. Friday after class, I met up with Kara so that we could look for her a new bike. She has a hybrid, which, while nice enough, is difficult to go longer distances on and she's been getting out on the weekends and riding. So, we looked and ended up finding a nice bike at a nice price at Quad. Then, we ended up having dinner at home, watching some tv and generally relaxing.

Saturday morning, woke up to go riding and the weather looked less than ideal. So, got some more sleep and woke up to the sun shining. But so it goes. Ended up taking an easy day with some more errand running. Then, headed over to Yoav's birthday party at which a fun time was had. Lots of cool people, interesting conversation, good food and everything else that makes for a good party. Thanks to Yoav and his wife for having us.

Sunday morning, woke up and the sun was shining and so headed out on a ride. Ended up going to the Hills of Haavvaahhhddd, which was actually a very nice ride. Ended up with about 60 miles at a little over 19 which seemed pretty good given both the wind and the hills. I do want to try to get in another time at Wells Ave before Jamestown, but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. Then, it was over to

spot and

pam's place for games, food and fun.

So, all in all, a good week and weekend.

Luis Villa — GNOME Mobile Stewardship Team

September 08, 2008 01:52 PM

On behalf of the board, I just announced a new GNOME Mobile Stewardship Team on foundation-announce. I’m pleased with this announcement for a number of reasons. Primarily, I think it’ll help us get better focus and direction around GNOME Mobile, and obviously that is important. But I’m also excited that this is a big step towards delegation for the Board. That’s something we’ve historically been bad at, and it was my only non-legal campaign plank when I ran for the board this year. So I’m excited to see that happen- I think it’ll make both the board and the Mobile community more effective, and hopefully will provide a template for us to move forward in other areas.

hsarik — More pretties

September 07, 2008 11:02 PM

I dyed 3 more rovings this weekend (I've nearly used up the first big batch of undyed wool top that I purchased) and I'm really happy with all of them. I had definite color themes in mind when I dyed them, and they came out pretty much exactly as I intended. The first is posted on Etsy; the other two I'll post tomorrow and Tuesday.

The conventional wisdom is that you need to post items frequently in order to stay at the top of product searches, since the most recently posted items come up first. Within 30 minutes of posting "Dogwoods in Bloom", I had fallen back to Page 2 on a search for "roving". The hand-dyed roving market, she is quite saturated. I've decided to let the listings run their 60-day course and then start poaching for my own use.

Dogwoods in Bloom, Columbia/Dorset:

Pansies, Superwash Merino

Rose Bouquet, Columbia/Dorset

Luis Villa — Software Freedom Day event in New York City

September 07, 2008 04:00 PM

James Vasile asked me to pass along that the Software Freedom Law Center is having a reception for Software Freedom Day. Details are at his blog (which is worth subscribing too- low volume, high value when something is said.

(I’ll try to make it, but my brother will be in town, so… possibly not.)

hsarik — Maybe if I could spin all day instead of checking email...

September 05, 2008 12:53 AM

I think I've decided that I just don't like working from home. My employer allows people to work from home up to 2 days a week, and when I received a company laptop (which is a requirement for working off-site) I talked to my boss and scheduled myself for Thursdays. Today was my second go at it, and I just don't enjoy it. It's boring and isolating, even with IM and email. I end up chained to the computer out of feelings of guilt that I'm not "really working" if I'm at home and therefore must check email continuously and respond instantaneously in order to prove that I'm being productive. I also miss hanging out with my coworkers much more than I thought. So today may be the last time.

In spinning news, I finished up about 6oz/175g of Columbia/Dorset 2-ply in "Misty Morning". I was trying for a thicker yarn, and I got about 305 yards, so probably a worsted-ish weight. I love the tight ply, the yarn is like a string of colored beads. Overall, it seems more even than my last attempt. I think I'm slowly improving! No idea yet what this will end up as.

I'm currently spinning up around 4oz of Blue Faced Leicester I bought from an Etsy vendor I like, in some wild bright colors. The long staple length is really interesting to work with, and it's so soft and shiny. It's going to end up as another 2-ply; pictures soon.

I'm also plugging away at the handspun shawl. The colors are perfect for fall, so I want to get this finished up so I can start wearing it once it gets colder, maybe over a black turtleneck or long-sleeved scoop neck shirt. I'm finding that the Columbia/Dorset gets softer and softer as it gets farther along in the process, and the knitted fabric is actually pretty nice. I found some lovely non-fussy hammered copper pins on Etsy at MJCopper that might look great with the shawl.

bryn — Computer-geek humour

September 04, 2008 07:13 PM

Luis Villa — Deblois plays NYC!

September 04, 2008 06:50 PM

My sister Deblois will be playing her acoustic-folk-blues-surf-rock in New York City on Friday and Saturday nights; details here or below the fold. (Some sample music here; buy here.) Krissa and I will be at both shows; let us know if you want to join us!

Deblois in Miami

Friday, September 5th, 2008

THE NATIONAL UNDERGROUND

7pm

159 E Houston
NY NY

Price: 7$ AT THE DOOR

This club is Joey and Gavin Degraw’s place, Danny Campbell with me on drums; we will have a great show.

Saturday, September 6th, 2008

Arlene’s Grocery

7pm

Price: $10

Subway directions: F or V train to 2nd Ave exit 1st Ave and the club is one block below Houston St between Ludlow and Orchard.

bryn — Hanna update

September 04, 2008 01:21 PM

Hanna is veering eastward, trending away from its previous path through the center of NC and aiming for the coast. It has also slowed down in its forward movement a good deal, so it is now projected to hit the SC/NC coast during the day Saturday. We likely won't have much in the way of clean-up in central NC, then, which is good, but I sure am not going to head eastward on Saturday (or Friday).

cec — Baton Rouge . . . disaster area

September 04, 2008 02:58 AM

I spoke to my mom for a little while this evening and got an update on where things stand in Baton Rouge or at least in her corner of it. A summery for those of you interested in Baton Rouge:

The news keeps talking about how mild things were in New Orleans, but the only time you hear about Baton Rouge is in passing. For example, I’ve heard at least two NO evacuees mention that things are better in NO than in the shelters in BR. That is, in part, what’s driving the exodus back south.
While the winds weren’t as bad in BR as they were in NO, they were (near) record winds for the city. BR has more trees and they haven’t experienced winds like this, so there were a lot of trees that fell down.
The local power company is estimating six to eight weeks before they get power to everywhere in the city. There are major grids in the city that don’t have power and then once those major sections are restored, they will still have to restore to the local homes/offices.
My parents did find a plumber to get the water line fixed. They are on the waiting list for a tree guy that can cut up a tree trunk as large as the one that fell in their yard (3′?) - it’s not really a do it yourself job.
Almost every yard in my parents’ neighbourhood has a tree down.
Most of the houses have experienced some damage.
Probably 20% of the houses have trees through the roofs.
There are a large number of cars that were struck by falling trees.
Many of the power poles on the main road outside of the neighbourhood are down. In the neighbourhood, there are few intact sections of power line more than 3 to 4 houses long. Entergy will probably have to replace many poles and string a lot of new line.
There is a curfew in effect. The National Guard did fire shots (in the air?) when some people tried to break into a FEMA trailer full of tarps.
Good news: there is fuel in many gas stations. Bad news: there’s no power to pump it with. Stations with fuel and power have long lines, in some cases backing up down the road.
My parents underestimated the amount of gasoline their generator requires (about 5 gallons a day) and are trying to find more 5 gallon cans.
It’s still raining and there’s little power, so some underpasses are flooding.
The humidity is very high. To the point where my parents’ wood floors are damp and are occasionally collecting puddles. Oh, and the mosquitoes are breeding, so the health authorities are warning people about West Nile.
There aren’t too many stores open, those that are open can’t accept credit cards (no phone lines) and so are requiring cash.

Taken as a whole, it reminds you of a post-apocalyptic distopian movie with people stocking up on water, fuel, food, guns, cash and gold. Maybe Mad Max, The Stand or The Postman. I suppose a comparison to Water World would be in poor taste…

bryn — Hurricane warnings

September 03, 2008 05:35 PM

Warning: I'm feeling moderately alarmist right now. We're making hurricane preparations on a personal level, and A. is heavily involved in hurricane recovery planning on the city-wide level (for a pleasant change). He's staying late at work most of the week, and has been told not to plan to go anywhere this weekend. It rained heavily here last week with remnants from Fay, with a moderate amount of tree damage across the Triangle. The soil is wet and loose, and trees were heavily stressed last year because of the drought. These are ideal conditions for trees to break limbs and/or fall over entirely due to high winds. Most of the storm tracks have Hanna headed inland over Charleston then turning due north and crossing the Triangle and/or the Triad, late on Friday. He's asked me to tell people that unless you're having a 'got to get to the hospital' emergency and a tree across your driveway, he's not likely going to be able to help cut it up right away. He's expecting to have to work all this weekend and likely through the week next week on 12-hour shifts.

Luis Villa — creative commons picture script request?

September 03, 2008 03:08 PM

I’m doing a lot of slide show work of late, so I was wondering if any of my readers knew of an in-image equivalent of the gfwa script I use on the blog? Basically, I’d love to know of (or have written?) a script that, given an image, a license, attribution strings, etc., would spit out the image plus an unobtrusive overlay containing the proper attribution information, so that I could put the image into the slide and preserve the requisite licensing information.

Something like adding the following in the lower righthand corner of this:

but less ugly (and more license-compliant; any CC-expert readers might want to weigh in in comments on the state of the art for citation in non-web-y formats like pictures/slide-decks.)

To be really kick-ass the script would probably need to take a font color and corner (upper left, upper-right, etc.) but I’ll settle for having that hard-coded for now.

Lessig handles this by including a list of attributions, links, etc., on the final slide, which may be appropriate for particularly image-dense presentations, but I’d like to experiment with this for now- it feels more appropriate anyway, especially if it can be done in a low impact, aesthetically pleasing way.

Thanks…

bryn

September 03, 2008 01:01 PM

I talked to my dad this morning - they're fine - they have power, but none of the broadcasters in their area are up and running, save one radio station (WJBO, which I think is an AM, and one of the older stations in town). So he has next to no news, which is driving him nuts. His wife's daughter and her 6-year-old are in town and staying with them. He can't go anywhere, since everything is closed, and his work is closed, and the streets are still filled with debris. But they're safe and dry and their house is undamaged. It's still raining there, and LSU is closed until at least Monday.
I didn't really think they'd have problems, but it's good to know anyway.

bryn — a non-hurricane-related post

September 02, 2008 08:38 PM

Thanks to

syrjustus for this:

bryn

September 02, 2008 08:21 PM

Official word from the Emergency Prep crew at Chow's work - "Cancel your weekend plans. You're staying in town."

Poo.

bryn — Twitchy about hurricanes

September 02, 2008 06:18 PM

The reason I'm so twitchy about hurricanes is that the spousal unit is the Arborist for the town, and in the event of storm damage, he'll have to stay in town and work 12-hour days for the duration of the cleanup. This is a well-worn drill in our house, and it goes like this - he works, I do all of the housework and childcare and care-and-feeding of the arborist in the meantime. This includes fun things like laundry with the power out, cooking without a freezer, etc. and so forth. Of course if we don't have power, the boy and I will likely pack up and go somewhere else for a few days until it is back on. But if we do have power and there's massive cleanup like there was on the 4th of July, then I'm there as support. No Coronation.

bryn — Gustav

September 02, 2008 03:30 PM

I'm not terrifically worried about my father, although I haven't talked to him yet. He's supposedly at home, as LSU is closed today. His home phone service is out, and the cell is acting strangely. BR took some wind damage, and LSU's campus got beat up pretty well.

Most of the GPGC's families are present and accounted for, as are

bluekitsune, her fiance', and their cats, although they are all out of Louisiana. cec's family is fine, although they haven't heard from his wife's family yet. I haven't heard about

francesca_la's family yet, but since they are in NOLA, I don't think they'll have had problems.

I think that's my current roll-call from Louisiana. I know lots of trees are down, and buildings are damaged, which is frustrating and stressful enough.

Now, we just need to dodge Hanna in Chapel Hill, and we'll be able to go to Coronation.

cec — Gustav (updated)

September 02, 2008 01:28 PM

Both K’s and I are from Louisiana, Baton Rouge to be specific, so we kept a close eye on Hurricane Gustav over Labor Day weekend. Fortunately, it looks like the storm weakened and the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. There were a couple of levees in New Orleans that were topped (a good thing the storm surge wasn’t any higher or there would have been major flooding).

Baton Rouge is about 90 miles inland, so we weren’t too worried about flooding, but the rain and high winds can cause a lot of damage. Since Gustav seemed to hold together pretty well, they did receive hurricane force winds in Baton Rouge, and online we saw the parish sheriff say that this was the worst storm damage he had seen in BR in his entire life.

I heard from my parents yesterday. Everyone there is fine. They did lose one of the three large pecan trees in their yard. Fortunately, it wasn’t the oldest one which seems to be dying, but whose trunk is about 8′ in diameter and would have caused massive damage to anything on which it fell. Even more fortunately, the tree that did fall fell in the one way that wouldn’t cause significant damage to my parent’s house or the neighbor’s house (see picture below). It did take up a water line, so no water until they can get it capped off (assuming that the city pumps are working).

We still haven’t heard from K’s parents or sister. We don’t have any reason to think that they aren’t okay, but it would be good if we could get through to them sometime today.

Update: We received a voice mail from K’s parents today around 2pm. Everyone’s fine. They had some carport damage and noted that there’s a lot of damage around the area. We still haven’t been able to get in touch with them, but it’s good to know that they are okay.

bryn

September 02, 2008 01:02 PM

My husband opined yesterday that apparently we're not supposed to go to any SCA events ever... We've been looking forward to Coronation since mid-summer, and now there's a HURRICANE POINTED RIGHT AT IT, set to make landfall around Friday night.

I'm about to give up, I swear!

jeremy — Holiday Weekend Wrapup

September 02, 2008 03:37 AM

This weekend was a long (3 day) holiday weekend in the US and since classes start back up this week, I mostly spent the weekend away from a computer.

Started things out on Friday evening by (finally) getting around to getting a haircut and a few other errands. Then Kara and I grabbed dinner, came home and then caught up on some things recorded on the TiVo. Including the rest of the Daily Show's "live" coverage of the DNC. We were suitably amused.

Saturday morning, woke up to the surprise of wet roads. But since it wasn't actively raining, went out on the Quad ride anyway and had a quite nice ride. Came home, had a quick lunch, cleaned the bike and then we headed over to some friends' house for a bit. Played Race for the Galaxy for a while which was quite a bit of fun actually. Then, we headed to Za! for dinner with some other friends as well. Ended up seeing

pam and

spot as they were having dinner there as well.

Sunday, again woke up and went on the Quad ride. Kara also headed out. Another good ride and then spent a good chunk of time at the bike shop. Ended up helping a few people with various things and then eventually headed home. Then, we headed over to another friend's house for an end of summer barbeque. Matthew is also from NC (randomly -- he's one of the other people I ride with) and was previously a chef -- so, he made pulled pork. It was quite good, as was the sausage which he made. Lots of people, only some of whom I even had a chance to meet and to be honest ended up spending a lot of time talking with people that I already knew. Headed home before it got to be too terribly late and got some more good sleep.

This morning, I again woke up and headed down for a bike ride, though a significantly different route today than the normal Quad ride. We ended up with a group of six of us and set a good pace for the entire ride. Then, grocery shopping as we were really starting to run low on a lot of our sort of staple foods. And then, again, dinner with friends.

All in all, a very good weekend. And this week starts back the full grind of work and school. I'm currently thinking of just sitting in on the first day or two of a few of my options as far as classes are concerned so that I can really decide which seems like the best fit. And also, hopefully making some more Fedora on XO progress. But more on that tomorrow or so -- reading and then sleep time now.

Luis Villa — quick thought on blizzard’s thoughts on google chrome

September 02, 2008 02:57 AM

“The fact that Google believes that they can launch a browser based on new technology means that the market is alive.” –Blizzard

monopoly-e-commerce

monopoly-e-commerce by Daniel Broche. License:

It is a pretty bizarre “market” where the major participants are, in market share order:

a repeatedly convicted monopolist that makes no money off its product in this market
a non-profit that makes no money (directly) off its product in this market, only indirectly off ads¹
a company that makes no money off its product in this market
a company that actually makes money² off its product in this market
(probably up to 3 or 4 soon) a company that sells a lot of ads, in large part through #2, but which won’t make any money off its product in this market

So, yes, it is a market, given a very, very broad definition of ‘market’. But a very unusual one.

This is not necessarily a bad thing- the same standard that makes it difficult to make a differentiated, profitable browser also makes for more innovation at the web app and operating system levels³. But as google hinted in their intro comic, getting innovation to happen at the same layer as the standard is hard. (Some related thoughts here.)

Will be interesting, as always, to see where this goes from here.

almost all by way of the new #5
really!
chance that Linux or Apple are viable desktop OS platforms right now if the web is not based on open standards is effectively zero

bryn — Want wallpaper

August 31, 2008 01:45 AM

Alhambra tile, or Mexaca en Alcazar, or this portugese tile...
My google-fu fails me.

bryn — A pleasant change of pace

August 30, 2008 11:08 PM

And now, for a pleasant change of pace, a perfectly ordinary weekend day.

No crazy storms, no parental health problems, no work crises...

The bathroom has walls all the way around. We have paint to spread around those walls after they're sanded and mudded again. I've ordered a vanity top with sink in a custom configuration that is needed because the sink drain and faucet outs are not centered in that space. Hair is cut, errands are run, and pretty much everything is done for the day. Lots of laundry happened, some dishes will be washed, and everyone is fed. It's such an amazing change of pace from our normal run-around-and-go-crazy mode that I'm not at all sure how to handle it. I think I'll look for wallpaper for our bedroom online. We'll see how long that lasts.

Of course, you know I'm going to jinx it just from even mentioning it...

bryn — Too easy

August 29, 2008 06:06 PM

moar funny pictures

jeremy — What have I been up to?

August 28, 2008 11:32 PM

Things have quieted down on the livecd-tools front -- it is mostly to a point where it's pretty stable and works fairly well. Also, I did not run for election to either the Board or FESCo this time around. Instead, I've tried to free up my time a bit so that I can spend more time looking into some "new and different" things, while still managing to spend most of my time on Fedora.

And after some time looking, it's mostly ending up being spending time helping to get Fedora working better on various "small" form-factor x86 machines. I sent out a message to fedora-devel-list about two weeks ago now seeing who else was interested and got a bit of a gamut of responses. Some were right along the lines of what I'm thinking with things such as Netbooks, UMPCs, MIDs and the XO. Others were more things like the OpenMoko. And while the latter is perhaps interesting to Fedora in the longer-term, it's not really a space that we're well equipped to work in at present.

So basically, I'm hoping to spend time in the lead-up to Fedora 10 helping to make Fedora work as well as possible on some of this hardware. Luckily, a lot of the drivers for these devices have made it into Linus's tree for 2.6.27, so this will be a lot less painful than it would have been previously.

I'm also spending some time with the OLPC people to help reconcile some of the forks which have occurred. I've spent some time over the past couple of days helping to get a live image which is bootable using the stock livecd-creator and booting into the "normal" Fedora environment. I also started a little while ago on helping to get more Sugar activities packaged up so that they can be built and installed as normal packages within Fedora.

Now, how are these things related you might ask? Well, longer term, I think that it could make a lot of sense to have a spin of Fedora available which is better suited for some of these smaller form-factor, internet always available devices. The idea being that with the resolutions in question, you may well not want to be running a stock GNOME or KDE. Instead, something like Sugar really is nicer, although there are definitely rough edges on Sugar right now. So maybe these new emerging form-factor devices can give a good additional place for Sugar to be deployed and used. And more people using Sugar means more people writing Sugar activities which means more things for the kids :-) But, that's likely Fedora 11 before it becomes a reality.

bryn

August 28, 2008 08:45 PM

My to-do list at work has gotten down to a much more manageable size, since the boss is out of town and can't ~~pester me~~ give me new stuff to do all the time.

Nate told me that on his first school-bus ride, he cried because the bus was going the wrong way. We then carefully explained that the bus has to pick up other kids, too, so they can also get to school. He was more or less happy with that, and went cheerfully on to the bus this morning.

However, I missed my bus downtown, again. I've taken to asking CHT this question, but they haven't answered yet - why in the world would you schedule two routes to arrive at all of the stops at the same time, with half an hour pauses in between them??? This makes no sense to me, and has annoyed me for a long time. It's time to try to get it fixed. I'll try going through channels first, but then I'm going to go through the boards and folks I know.

It