brainstorms

Tuesday June 28, 2005

gone diving...

this blog will be less active for the next three weeks, due to a much needed vacation break. i will either be under water with scuba gear someplace in the mediterranean or buried in a book near a beach, or photographing in some mosque. i expect i will have enough connectivity to get to gmail or maybe blog some notes, but nothing too well planned. photography will have to wait until i come back; i am going without a laptop to process my images.

scuba: after many years of scuba inactivity, did a refresher at scuba2000 a few days ago, and now as good as new for diving. it helps that years ago, i had a tough-as-nails instructor, dana winess, who also said to have trained navy seal divers. i remembered much more of my training than i thought i would. [always do the refresher at some local dive shop rather than some resort. costs much less.]

resolved to go for advanced and underwater photography training when i get back. alas, a good dive enclosure for D70 costs about as much as a D2X. may have to go for a nikonos instead.

[mosques are located here]

books: going away with steele, brin, sterling, dennett, connelly, sanford...

Monday June 27, 2005

to shuffle and discover...

i have now been shuffling for a couple of weeks. with a fairly large music library [now halfway re-ripped into mp3, all aac moved into trash - i am opposed to all proprietary and lock-in formats] shuffling has one major benefit i did not think much about:

[re]discovery.

deacon john
deacon john
pray for me.
i don't believe
i don't believe
in no heaven
i don't believe
in no hell
when i die
where i go
nobody know
no no
hey hey

john lee hooker, burning hell [from the ultimate collection 1948-1990]... i had not heard this one for years. what a joy to rediscover it.

his intensity brings tears to my eyes.

Friday June 24, 2005

time travel notes [cont]

[continuing to read and reflect on langford's white dwarf reviews collected in the complete critical assembly.]

nov 84 review mentions larry niven's the integral trees as "much more fun than the weary ringworld engineers". i have read most of niven's output (including some of the lesser bits with pournelle) but i do not think i have ever read the integral trees. how disappointing.

the really important part of the nov 84 piece is a short review of gibson's neuromancer:

Gibson crackles with creative energy, hammering your forebrain with ideas, colour, future slang and (the time-tested ian fleming technique) brand names. [...] I spent the whole time on the edge of my seat and got cramp as a result.

beautifully put. langford already knew gibson from his short stories like burning chrome but i did not; [the collection named after that story came out later] i was just lucky to receive a gollancz hardcover (second printing alas, shown here, now acid-worn, and worse for the wear after two decades) early in 85. i read it twice the week i received it. hard to describe what it did: hammering is a good word, but when i think about it, the word exhilarating keeps coming up. [the image i have is a long dive to cool clear blue ocean somewhere down south in a hot july afternoon]

jan 85 piece opens with a brief review of heinlein's job: a comedy of justice. I agree with langford; after the NOTB disaster, job shines. looking back, i am sure i missed some of the more subtle jabs of that book for not growing up as a christian. i did appreciate [more so now] one thing: at the time he did not have to worry about assorted religious nutbars trying to unplug him for his blasphemy. [these days i worry about james morrow's well being.]

it looks like brunner's the sheep look up was re-issued that year. langford calls it one massive downer, perhaps accurate for mid-eighties but a re-read today may assess that novel differently for its predictive power; we just know much more about the environmental damage caused by our carelessness and ignorance. referring to the ending, langford suggests the word Schadenfreude and i looked it up: german, from Schaden damage + Freude, joy. joy from suffering of others. i am not so sure. i should re-read it, but so should langford.

a reasonably detailed review by davin heckman is here.

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread,
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said.
-- Milton (Lycidas)

[the image on the right is the actual cover of the 1984 release of the sheep look up; it is poor but the only one i could locate on the web.]

[to be continued]

[this entry was prepared with markdown.]

Wednesday June 22, 2005

accelerando: it is a hot summer tuesday...

He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene.

this is from the opening of accelerando, one of the coolest and sharpest books of this summer. two decades ago, david langford (white dwarf) described neuromancer like this: crackles with creative energy, hammering your forebrain with ideas ... from what i have so far read, i would now like to borrow that description for accelerando.

various reviews out, one i like is rick kleffel's review.

[i do not ordinarily link to amazon, but for this book, i will make an exception.]

[alas, the pidgeon i grabbed is not from amsterdam, but from the distillery district, toronto. nikon d70 (iso 200) + nikon 28-105 f/3.5-4.5 AF D.]

Tuesday June 21, 2005

revision control, or the tyranny of adequacy

my good friend david tilbrook once coined the term tyranny of adequacy to describe the continued domination of make and make-like (eg. gmake, jam, cake, ant, ad nauseam) tools for product builds and release engineering. i think the term is now applicable to many other areas of software development, such as revision control. according to the (selection-biased) poll shown at kerneltrap, the most popular [foss] source-code control system appears to be subversion, essentially an adequate next-generation cvs. familiarity breeds no innovation; less familiar but interesting and powerful systems [some, like tom lord's gnu arch, are very idiosyncratic] get fewer users.

i would like to see a poll that covers the entire industry, instead of just the readers of kerneltrap.

reading: david wheeler has a very good overview of the systems shown on this chart.

[note: the graph on the right came out of staroffice. it is adequate for the job, but not more. i am in general not happy with most graphing tools i have found. that will require another blog entry...]

Monday June 20, 2005

notes on a strange encounter...

my recent blognote on groklaw FUD piece on sun produced some curious responses both here and in groklaw threads; here are some quick notes and observations:

i made a mistake. sometimes, looking at a baloon animal, pointing out a few anatomic problems and suggesting that it is much less real than it looks is not enough.

when i read groklaw editorials, i do not know nor think about the people behind them, their reputation, their personal details, whether they are nice or not. i only look at the content. i am not a part of that community; i visit it once in a while to read peter's book in progress. i glance at headlines to see if there is anything of interest, eg. another "IANAL" bashing of Sun or its licenses.

i have again revisited previous groglaw main articles around CDDL [eg. here, here, here and here] and i find them more troubling than before [and i am filtering all the journalistic tongue-clicking and name calling] the problem is not that groklaw does not have some interesting questions; the problem is that it speculates about the answers, and builds further arguments as if the earlier speculations have been resolved in its favor. this is not done in polite company.

i am pleased to note that in some articles, authors admit to wearing GPL-colored glasses for their view of the world. at least there is no pretention of impartiality in their work.

someone at groklaw called me mean and silly. i guess i am mean to bad arguments no matter who generates them. after revisiting earlier groklaw pieces, i realize that my note was not as mean as it may have been. i try not to be silly, but sometimes subject matter deserves nothing better.

as someone suggested, i do love my workplace and employer. i do not put my critical faculties on ice as a result; quite the contrary, i exercise them regularly and with good effect.

i am just an engineer blogging. i do not speak for sun. i do speak my mind.

sapere aude.

[tbd: balloon animal image]

CPB is hurt...

at least in one particular part of the world, anything associated with the word public appears to be in serious danger. latest casualty: corporation for the public broadcasting. it will have to serve public with $100 million [a quarter of its budget] fewer dollars. the reason: supposed liberal bias of PBS news programming. that roughly translates to not as fair and balanced as, say CNN or FOX is. mind boggling, is it not? i shall double my donations to the nearest PBS station. [in my case WNED TV Public Television (PBS) in Buffalo, New York] i hope other canadians will do the same.

What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is. -- Dan Quayle

someone comes to town, someone leaves town...

cory doctorow's latest novel, someone comes to town, someone leaves town is now available online under a creative commons license (of course). this time, he is using a creative commons developing nations license. from his announcement:

This book is the first novel to employ the new Creative Commons Developing Nations License. That's a license that lets anyone living in a country that's not on the World Bank's list of high-income countries treat the book as if it were in the public domain. If you live in a developing nation, you can print your own editions of this book and sell them, you can make your own movies, radio plays, translations and whatever else you can think of, charge whatever the traffic will bear for them, and never give me a penny or ask my permission (though I hope you'll drop me a line and let me know what you're up to so I can keep up on the book's spread!). The only limitation on this right is that you may only export your works to other developing nations: the rich nations where my paying customers live are strictly off-limits.

nicely done. congratulations cory.

music: tbd.

Saturday June 18, 2005

accelerando now available for download

charles stross's latest novel, accelerando is now available online under a creative commons license. charles asks bittorrent be used. [i ordered my hardcopy sometime ago]

The book is available for reading in HTML, with minimal markup (to make it easier for web clipping utilities to digest it). In addition, zip archives are provided for download in a variety of formats. The primary formats are RTF and conformant HTML 4.0. For direct reading on PDAs and smartphones, a Plucker database is provided. Finally, there are (deprecated) plain text and Palm DOC versions – these lack typographic markup.

music: tbd. i'm thinking of haydn string quartets by amadeus quartet (trio) but i may go for something like mercan dede's secret tribe (nar) or electronic.

darwin's watch...

I just received my eagerly awaited copy of pratchet, stewart & cohen's the science of discworld III: darwin's watch [the title alone will cause many to start grinning from ear to ear] one does not wait long: chapter two is titled paley's watch and takes on "intelligent design" as should. all of a sudden, you just know this book will not be a bestseller in many states, especially kansas.

Once God is removed from the day-to-day running of the planet, and installed somewhere behind DNA biochemistry and the Second law of thermodynamics, it is no longer so obvious that He must be fundamental to people's daily lives. In particular, there is no special reason to believe that He affects those lives in any way, or would wish to, so fundamentalist preachers could well be out of a job.

hmm, sleep, or darwin's watch. choices, choices... [um, i cannot believe what i just wrote]

important/great books referenced in the first fifty pages:

young and edis (eds) why intelligent design fails
susan haack, defending science - within reason
dennett, darwin's dangerous idea
dawkins, blind watchmaker

[a note on paper: the copy i am holding was printed and bound in england, and the copy page says papers used by ebury press are natural, recylable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. it does not say acid free. it does not smell or quite feel like acid paper, but i cannot tell. sigh]

what science abhors, the arts crave. -- science of discword III

[this book seems unavailable in the US through online sellers in any straight-forward way. you may wish to order it from canada, through chapters/indigo or amazon.ca.]

Thursday June 16, 2005

rome logo contest, plan b [sigh]

rome logo contest had an unfortunate case of vote tempering. they have moved to their plan b: community email voting with project founders choosing their logo from amongst the top five logo entries. contest details, news update, voting details are all here.

all submissions for the ROME logo competition are here.

[sigh. fixed the broken link to wiki.java.net]

recent good quotes

There are few things more exhilarating than the authoritative endorsement of human ignorance. It resolves an imaginative tension from which we all suffer. We feel that the world is indecipherable, unknowable; yet, at the same time, we fear this may reflect nothing more than our own failing. There may be others - shrewder, wiser, better read - to whom it all makes perfect sense. -- bryan appleyard

Of course, the truth is that Windows Indexing Service is to Spotlight as Thomas the Tank Engine is to a bullet train. -- david pogue

Incantations... oops, I mean "ideas"... tend to whither when practical people are free to raise their hands and say "yes... but..." -- david brin

it is easy to feel frightened at the beginning of the twenty-first century. and among the most frightening things are the minds of other people. -- simon blackburn [truth - a guide]

Kodak shot themselves in the foot handling this product's introduction. They then proceeded to get a sledgehammer and hit themselves in the same foot. When they stopped screaming, they tried to kick in a metal door with that foot. -- thom hogan on kodak dcs pro 14n

painful though it is, the best way to think and write is to do nothing else. -- john kenneth galbraith [a life in our times: memoirs]

Solaris doesn't stand a chance against *BSD or Linux... their logo sucks! Come on... seriously... what's more cuter than a Penguin or a Daemon? -- jhfry@slashdot

Wednesday June 15, 2005

next morning: groklaw and the art of FUD...

groklaw was quiet yesterday. they must have spent the entire day deciding how to craft just the right article to belittle our efforts while mentioning IBM as well.

Sun Microsystems is the second corporation that needs Open Source. It would like you to help them make some money by writing code for them[*]. You can use the code you write for yourself too, so long as you swear on a stack of Bibles you won't mix it with GPL'd code (the CDDL is incompatible) or help Linux out in any way, shape or form.

i am not the least bit surprised about the tone of the article; groklaw made its analytic modes plain in the past with insults and innuendo. here we have selective Nth reprinting of our sun contributor agreement, and just for added dose of fear, binary-only license and various tone-deaf but "silly me" plain-english translations. funniest part for me is FUD with our joint copyright agreement:

In the case of the Sun Contributor Agreement, my understanding is that you give away your right to control what Sun does with your contribution; however, you are also free to use it any way you like yourself. However, since Sun is the copyright holder of your code, just as you are, it can change the licensing terms at any time it wishes. And, of course, the elephant in the room is Microsoft. Sun and Microsoft are in a patent peace, but you aren't. If Microsoft has patents it could use against you, even if Sun knows about those patents, there is nothing in the agreement or the CDDL that requires Sun to share with you what it knows. It can't be sued, but you can be.

can you follow that neat transition from Sun somehow changing the licensing terms to "and of course" microsoft [why not IBM or any other patent holder? that would be the wrong association] suing the programmer? how we would accept patent-troubled code [there is a clause in the contributor agreement about patents] to our life's work and cannot deal with it, or let the programmer know?

this is all very tiring; best thing to do is to stop taking these barely-clued doses of interpretation and translation from groklaw, and start thinking and asking questions instead.

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.-- Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[*] "help them make some money" is a link to a straight-forward news item in australianit news. it does not talk about sun making money by having you write code. this is a new twist in blog-journalism: links parading as supporting arguments. if you do not follow the link, you may be tempted to think there is some possibly negative analysis of sun's open source efforts.

note i have disabled further comments on this entry; apologies to those who may have had constructive comments to make. there is now a thread in groklaw about this blognote including my personal likeability (more on that anon); you can contribute your thoughts there if you like, or wait for the next installment. you can also reach me at ozan dot yigit at gmail.

Tuesday June 14, 2005

a big congratulations

a big congratulations to sun and the open source movement. we now have the strongest operating system in the industry open and free. it is a historic, educational and disruptive moment for computing; i am very happy and proud to be a part of one company that has the collective vision to deliver.

music while reflecting on opensolaris:
[classical] angela gheorghiu, the essential angela gheorghiu, london/decca, [jazz] jimmy smith, rockin' the boat, or art blakey & jazz messengers, buhaina's delight blue note rvg edition, [sountrack] ennio morricone, the legendary italian westerns, bmg/rca

funniest entry found in slashdot since the release:

Solaris doesn't stand a chance against *BSD or Linux... their logo sucks! Come on... seriously... what's more cuter than a Penguin or a Daemon? -- jhfry

[evening: ah, finally register has its story and it is even readable. nothing on groklaw.]

Monday June 13, 2005

eff legal guide for bloggers

eff has a new legal guide for bloggers which covers things like common legal issues, intellectual property, an overview of defamation law, privacy rights, labor law (blogging from work). required reading.