Thursday Nov 25, 2004
My daughter was asleep when I arrived home last night and when I awoke this morning. She woke up just before I was about to walk out the door so I ran upstairs to say hi. That meant I would have to run like Jesse Owens to catch the train. I don't, so I was surprised to see the DART still there when I arrived at the train station. The doors wouldn't open for me and three other stragglers, but just then the driver shouted "all aboard" and opened the doors for a second before pulling away from the platform. A familiar announcment came over the speakers, "We would like to apologise for the delay due to technical difficulties." Apologise? Yes I could complain that the trains here are often late for various reasons; renovation, rain, leaves, points failure... The first word of Irish I learned was an impolite homonym of a friend's surname, the second was the word for "hope" and the third was "As Seirbhís", out of service. But today is thanksgiving day for my family and friends back in the U.S. so for once I'm thankful that the trains here don't run as they do in Germany or Bulgaria. The fact that trains run at all is a miracle considering the similar sized city of Milwaukee no longer has anything approaching Dublin's level of public transport. Sometimes I'm thankful for small things that would annoy me on other days. Today I learned that Lá Altaithe means thanksgiving day.
Monday Nov 22, 2004
A tale of three Operating Systems.
We spent the last couple of weekends moving house to take advantage of a slight softening in rent prices. Moving gave us an excuse to purge our belongings but occasionaly we regretted getting rid of something (like selling grandpa's red mandolin for $15!) I also found some things that were lost for a very long time. One of these was a digital media backup that was stored in a Wisconsin attic for ten years. The data from 1993 was still readable despite my less than ideal storage conditions (attic temperatures range from 0 to 130 degrees fahrenheit.) I found the amiga iff ultrasound image my brother emailed to me and I found some old Solaris binaries. Hmm.
Will SunOS 3.5.3 binaries from 1993 run on Solaris 10???
What was happening in 1993? Microsoft Windows was still at version 3.1 with almost no support for networking because Mosaic and the internet were just passing fads. Two immigration lawyers from Sarasota were plotting to send the first commercial SPAM and I was spending weekends scuba diving and windsurfing with dolphins just offshore.
On November 22, 2004 I moved those binaries built in 1993 for SunOS 3.5.3 (Solaris 5.3?) onto a Solaris 10 build 70 sparc machine. Then I pointed my LD_LIBRARY_PATH (yuck) to an ancient version of libXext and ran it via ssh with my display forwarded to an 256 color JDS linux laptop. Did I mention that I was once in the Society for Creative Anachronism?
In other news...a tale of Windows XP binary (in)compatibility
The friend I sail with is partial owner of a wind farm. When he updated Windows XP to the latest service pack his wind farm monitoring software stopped working.
Linux...
My first linux was Slackware 1996, running on a butterfly thinkpad. I was hooked when I saw that the Java wireframe 3d demo running on linux ran circles around the same program under Windows 95 on the same hardware. But when I installed my first version of Red Hat, some of my Slackware binaries didn't work. The wifi card I'm using at the moment has a driver for kernel 2.4 but not for kernel 2.6. I am still a linux fan but I do wish it had more stable ABIs and a stable hardware abstraction layer. Maybe I'm being naive, but wouldn't a stable open hardware abstraction layer be good for all alternative operating systems?
Just for fun
Other than the simple Java applications I was running in 1996, are there any binaries from these old linux distributions that would work unaltered on say RedHat 9?
Sunday Nov 07, 2004
We had another great sail Saturday. High tides were at about 6:00 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. so we decided on a late afternoon sail out to a Lambay island. We saw the tall pole marking the dangerous Burren Rocks. We didn't get too close, Irish lights gives its position as Latitude: 53° 29'.30 N, Longitude: 06° 02'.46 W. Turf smoke was rising from the chimney of one of the cottages on the island and the wind turbine was turning at a modest speed. Cattle were grazing near the beach and we could almost see the castle hidden in the trees. The island is privately owned so we could look but not touch. We sailed home into the sunset. The color of the sea and sky were beautiful but difficult to capture on digital film.
Sunday Nov 07, 2004
This
U.S. election map by county is interesting, but most of my
friends and family are neither blue nor red, they embrace a blend of
the best democrat and republican ideas along with ideas expressed by
neither party. The political duopoly squeezes 300 million diverse ideas
into a binary bottleneck.
The divisiveness of this bottleneck was so intense during the campaign that blue-leaning and red-leaning friends have said that if the wrong candidate were elected, they might
leave the country. I only hoped
they were joking. Don't get me wrong, there are excellent reasons
why I would encourage anyone to travel or live abroad. Emigration
for necessity, security, economics, a better life, more freedom, a
better work-family balance, to follow an outsourced job... all make perfect sense. But these reasons alone can't account for the 7 million U.S. citizens living
abroad. Most would have more wealth, security and freedom if they
remained in the U.S. One friend who was considering emigration expressed concern that the U.S. President might try to remove a civil right. I reminded her that this particular right has never existed over here.
The yanks still get a few basics right. The government in power
doesn't decide whether or when to hold an election, it doesn't own
the primary media news sources, nor any of the major newspapers.
People can say or print nearly anything, true or false about elected
officials without fear of lawsuits or other punishment. Children are born full
citizens regardless of their parentage or ethnicity. The government
doesn't decide which religious symbols are acceptable attire, and where.
Citizens can leave the country for medical or other reasons.
My suggestion for anyone considering leaving the U.S. is to
thoroughly investigate the laws, culture, lifestyle and weather of
the nation you are considering. You might learn that you didn't
appreciate how good you have it. The grass is always greener on the
other side of the fence, isn't it? And as Tim
Bray notes, the weather in most of Canada sucks. Ditto for Ireland.
So what is my favorite reason for living abroad? A 19th
century American author expressed it this way:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice,
bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely
on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men
and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of
the earth all one's lifetime”
-- Mark Twain.
Friday Nov 05, 2004
I found a message from almost exactly four years ago when I was interviewing for work in Ireland.
Monday Nov 01, 2004
We took our daughter to a friend's house for some bobbing apples and trick or treat fun. She met some little princesses and ballerinas from India, France, Ireland and the U.S. She was a little blue dog. I think this is a popular cartoon character in the U.S. I could stray into politics and suggest that while a "yellow dog democrat" is an early 20th century southerner who would rather vote for a yellow dog than a member of the party of Lincoln, a "blue dog democrat" is someone who attempts to bridge the gap between ideological extremes. I think we could use some of that. She has been a good ambassador so far in her travels, though she was somewhat bold to walk right into the house of someone who was offering her treats! My wife an I wore costumes she made for some maids and men in our Renaissance wedding. I was once a Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) member and my wife was inspired to sew her wedding dress and my doublet in Italian renaissance style.
Halloween in Ireland seems a tiny bit like halloween in the U.S. 20 years ago. Trick-or-treat was at night in a real neighborhood rather than mid-afternoon in a shopping mall. Illegal fireworks were going off all night long and bonfires were burning on the beach. Children walked only to nearby neighbors so that whether the treat was an apple, orange, peanuts, popcorn or a hypersweetened candy bar, there was little concern that the treats would have to be X-rayed.
The weekend weather was beautiful here, My friend and I managed to go for a short sail Saturday morning. It was the first time I've been out on his boat in less than 30 m.p.h. wind and so this was the first time I've seen his mainsail. The 70 m.p.h. winds earlier in the week were a welcome windfall for his windfarm, unfortunately the accompanying heavy rains caused severe problems for some communities. Ireland is designed for soft steady rain, not the deluges more associated with tropical climates.
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