Aardvark is a new, Web 2.0 product aiming to bring social search to the masses: unlike traditional search engines, that crawl and index a massive number of pages, Aardvark acts more like a router: it tries to understand enough of the question to determine its topic (and asks you when it fails), and then offer it to online users, starting with those who have declared an expertise in the given topic.

I have several Aardvark invitations available. Reply if you’re interested!

While bedridden, I serendipitously discovered this amazing new TV series — it does not even have enough user ratings yet — starring Tim Roth as a House-esque face-reader.

Surprisingly thoughtful, well-plotted, and with a diverse range of cases. People who find House too preposterous ought to give this one a try — they’re on Hulu.

My new netbook arrived on Thursday, 13 days earlier than expected. Dell really need to work on their delivery estimates, but it’s better than having it be late…

This was one day after I came down with a really bad cold — still shrugging it off now. Productivity plummets to no end, but setting up a new computer is a more fun way to while away illness than reading a book (sorry, Orhan Pamuk; I think My Name is Red is your one masterpiece. The others are too meandering, especially when one can’t concentrate well).

The initial plan was to install Rawhide (ambitious!) over the CS department’s gigabit network, using the btrfs file system. This turns out to be unworkable — the r8169 driver mistakes the netbook’s 8101E as a gigabit adapter, whereas it’s only Fast Ethernet. I managed to get a DHCP lease once, on Dell’s Ubuntu installation.

Several network install attempts follow, over a 100 mbps link, using F11 alpha’s boot.iso. These all mysteriously fail, sometimes maddeningly close to completion. Even with ‘maxcpus=0 selinux=0′.

Giving up on this approach, I opted next for a hard drive install: use livecd-tools to put boot.iso into a thumb drive, and copy the ISO image to the drive’s root. It appears that this is insufficient — images/install.img has to be on the drive as well. This allows installation to succeed.

And then disappointment comes.

• btrfs checksumming makes any RPM transaction mind-numbingly slow
• Kernel panics. Even with maxcpus=0. This might actually explain the network install failures
• Kernel panic at boot using newer kernels

So off with btrfs and on with ext4. Too bad; the SSD optimizations in btrfs look nice. One wonders if it’s the early production status, or if it does actually impose a certain amount of computational overhead making it unsuitable to netbooks (or any single-core computers, for that matter. No, hyperthreading does not count).

I’ve had a fully up-to-date Rawhide all of Sunday and it’s a joy to use. 512 MB is rather usable, albeit forcing a certain discipline when it comes to browser tabs. Will put in the 2GB upgrade when the new wireless card arrives, so I don’t have to open the hood twice. Ironically, that card shipped promptly but has since been wandering the limbo of Chinese customs… why is it that the cool electronics products inevitably come from Chinese eBay sellers…

Remaining bugs:

• Cannot be used on Gigabit networks
• Broadcom WL causing hard lock-up with PEAP authentication
• Internal mic not working. Same problem on my other Dell laptop. ALSA can be such a nightmare..

In my comments on the recent LWN seed “Will LSB 4 Standardize Linux?”, I made the argument in favour of application bundles:

The advantage of bundles is that it contains more metadata than a simple tarball.
Compatibility problems might arise, but at least the application launcher could provide more
meaningful feedback to the user.

Or even integrate with the OS’ version control system, especially now that Linux has
PackageKit, to say “hey, the user wants to run this new bundle that needs libfoo-x.y, install
whatever package is necessary to provide that”.

You’d need a package management system that automatically scans built packages for what
libraries they provide; RPM does that, not sure whether DPKG does.

To provide the context: the discussion was on how application vendors can easily target LSB 4 with a single binary image. My post was in direct response to an argument by another reader, that complicated schemes do not add much real value over tarballs, to which I begged to differ, arguing that the metadata available in bundles make the integration of binary applications much easier.

The issue of binary distribution triggers an allergic reaction from some people in the FLOSS community, a reaction that is, in my opinion, rather unwarranted. Even Debian provides, in their non-free repositories, stub packages that will download binary packages and create a standard .DEB package out of them. There are clear advantages to making binary-only applications more well-behaved, in fact the same argument for having package management systems with graph-based dependency tracking in the first place: dependency, dependency, dependency. When installing/upgrading a package, you’d want all its dependencies to be pulled in automatically. When upgrading a library, you want to make sure that all its dependents will still work. When there is a security vulnerability, you want a non-techie end-user to be notified, preferably within a fixed period of the vulnerability being made public (through periodic updates), or the next time the user launches the application concerned.

There have been attempts to create a one-size-fits-all universal package format, that’s distribution-independent and vendor-friendly. This is a red herring, IMHO, for the same reason that the Unix market splintered in the ’70s and ’80s, and that we have a proliferation of Linux distributions — and multiple independent BSD operating systems, each of them with their own ports tree (DragonFly being an exception in that they share NetBSD’s pkgsrc system). It’s nice to control your own packaging format, or if it’s a shared format (like RPM is), to control the naming conventions, etc.

What application bundles can do is provide the best of both worlds: vendors can ship binary-only bundles that declare dependencies in a least-common denominator format that the LSB can standardize, for example:

<br /><Provides>
  <lib>libbaz-a.b</lib>
</Provides>
<Requires>
  <lsb-version>4.0</lsb-version>
  <bin>convert</bin>
  <lib>libfoo-x.y</lib>
  <lib>libbar-z.w</lib>
</Requires>

The first time the bundle is launched, the launcher can add it to its index of available bundles. If any of the dependencies are missing, the system-native package management (or a meta management infrastructure such as PackageKit) is triggered to install the missing dependencies. The bundles themselves can be placed anywhere (though library bundles — in NextStep/OpenStep/OS X parlance, “frameworks” should probably be placed in pre-determined paths, e.g. /Library/Frameworks, /System/Library/Frameworks and ~/Library/Frameworks).

The only problem is that the system-provided libraries might not be ABI-compliant with the specified LSB standard, for example, libraries written in C++ after a compiler ABI change. There would probably be a need for the native packages to declare their compliance, or non-compliance, with LSB standards.

And one last nice thing about bundles: fat binaries. It’s easy to provide multi-arch bundles, and stripping away unwanted architectures is a simple rm operation.

Planète Béranger has raised the ABI issue surrounding Fedora and RHEL’s recent upgrade to Firefox 3. In short, RHEL 5.2 ships with Firefox updated to the new xulrunner-based Firefox 3, but its Eclipse and libswt3-gtk2 is still at 3.2, which depends on the old gtkmozembed interface.

This seems like a good argument in favour of adopting Debian-style package naming, when it comes to libraries: append the ABI version to the (sub)package name containing libraries that are linked to from other packages. So the old Firefox 1.5 would have a libgtkmozembed18 subpackage, that can be shipped with RHEL 5.2 without shipping the rest of Firefox 1.5 (technically speaking, the ABI version is 1.8.x.y, as prior to XULRunner 1.9 the ABI is ever-changing, but packages already handle this by depending on the specific version and release number anyway)

This is already done from time to time in the RHEL/Fedora world, in the form of compatibility packages, but making it the default would avoid this kind of breakage, where a package /has/ to be updated (due to upstream EOL) but parts of it are needed downstream.

Tim Bray’s revised Wide Finder project [ongoing.org] has been ongoing for a few weeks now, and I’ve finally took the time to design and prototype an implementation.

What
The goal is to evaluate the performance of middle-of-the-road, not embarrassingly parralelizable tasks on modern-day multi-core hardware. Such as the Sun T2000 servers. Fittingly, the task is to parse a multi-gigabyte web server log file and compile some aggregate statistics.

Design
The solution I came up with for the earlier iteration of the contest, coded in different versions (C++, OCaml and JoCaml) is fundamentally sound, though rather unoptimized (picking up two-and-a-half different languages in one weekend is a good way to find out how much there is to know about, say, C++ stream buffering). With the benefit of hindsight, and given that we are several weeks into the project and there are strong implementations already [wikis.sun.com], the idea is to find an unexplored niche.

Short recap of the main implementations:

• OCaml: Fernandez is ahead of the pack again, the only solution in the 7 minutes
• make+C+awk+sh: Perl is dead, but shell scripting is enjoying a renaissance with parallelizable tasks. 8 minutes
• Java-based solutions: in the 13-17 minutes range are the various JVM solutions, from Java, Groovy and Scala to Fan, an interesting Ruby-like language for the JVM. Reminds me of .NET’s Boo.
• Python, Ruby: in the 20+ minutes range. Python multiprocessing is not that efficient yet; I believe an improved Stackless Python solution might be forthcoming

I dabbled with a Common Lisp solution; it works and appears to be competitive, when tried on a partial log file. Exploring the available options for parallelism, however, revealed the disconcerting fact: no freely-available Common Lisp compilers have good multi-threading, or even multi-processing (without shared memory) on Solaris! Even worse, the SBCL incompatibility with GCC 4.3 means that even the Linux version on my Fedora machine is several months old, and does not have the threading library.

So it’s back to Java. Perusing the blogs of the Java and Scala programmers, it appears that the common complain is .. regular expressions. So the hunt was on for a good regular expression library. Joni, a port of the Ruby Oniguruma regex library to the JVM used by the JRuby project, appears ideal: low-level and supposedly very fast. Until one hits the total lack of documentation. So that’s off the table. Ended up using dk.brics.automaton, which appears to perform well enough, even when parsing Unicode strings.

The nice thing about using Java is that, if you hit a performance brick wall, chances are that many other people have been there before you. The problem I have, the need to have random access within a file (so different threads can start at different offsets (Java’s RandomAccessFile is good for this) combined with the need for buffered I/O (BufferedReader is good, but there is no RandomAccessReader !) is solved by the nice folks at Biojava.com. Great!

On my system (2 GHz Core 2, 2 GB RAM, 5400 rpm HDD, Fedora 9 x64), Ruby takes about 2.2 seconds, while my Java implementation running on OpenJDK 1.6 (64-bit) takes about 1.6-1.7 seconds with 1 thread and 1.4-1.5 seconds with 2 threads. Close to the 1.2+ seconds time that Alex reported for Python, but hey, we’re paying the Java start-up cost here.

Will update when I get an account on the test server. 40GB dataset, here I come! In the meantime, time to look for opportunities to use a JVM-based language better suited for the task. The Java code is a tad bit verbose.

@Béranger:

The comparison between Red Hat’s patent settlement and the MS-Novell covenant is instructive, but the two settlements are not exactly identical.

The downstream impact of both certainly only protect the respective companies’ customers. It is the upstream protection of developers that make the settlement’s coverage “broad” (you used the term “visionary” under quotation as if it was claimed by Red Hat; they did no such thing). Contrast to the MS-Novell deal that only covers Novell developers!

It would have been better to fight the lawsuit to completion, I agree, and considering the FLOSS world consider settlements in GPL licensing disputes to be a victory in their favour, the nature of this settlement is definitely ambiguous at best. Hopefully RH legal is using their resources to fight bigger battles. Abolish software patents — and curtail most patents in general, it’s not as if they lead to significant innovation anyway (Boldrin and Levine [2008]).

Unlike the commercial OSes (and commercially-supported Linux distributions), community Linux distributions tend to have fast-paced release cycles. Notably, Fedora and Ubuntu releases every 6 months.

Every OS upgrade entails several decision: do you do a clean install, or upgrade your current installation? Do you start with a clean home directory, or re-use your previous one? Any combination works fine, though my personal preference is to do a clean install and use a clean home directory, having archived the older directory. I think of it as house-cleaning — and it’s nice to experience the desktop as it ships out of the box, before customization (naturally, I then restore my music database, my address books, browser and e-mail client profiles, etc. This is not Memento!)

So, now that Fedora 9 has been released, what needs to be added to / changed from the base setup? As it turns out, not that many:

Compositing
Some people swear by Compiz; I personally find Metacity much more usable (Compiz does not support cycling through all windows of a given application — Ctrl+F6 in Metacity; Cmd+~ in OS X). Metacity now has a compositing manager that’s turned off by default; turning it on involves either using gconftool-2 (only for advanced users) or gconf-editor, and setting the /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager key to true.

The support in the stable version is a bit flaky still; the metacity package in Rawhide is much better behaved and appears quite stable. Upgrade by issuing yum --enablerepo=rawhide update metacity. As of the moment it does not pull in any other Rawhide package so you can rest easy.

Try pressing the volume up/down/mute keys on your keyboard (if you don’t have a multimedia keyboard, change the bindings in System->Preferences->Personal->Keyboard Shortcuts) and be amazed at the translucency coolness (no, this is not bling). The brightness pop-up windows have not been changed yet, alas.

Firefox
Ever cursed Firefox’s font rendering in silence? Type about:config in the address bar, and add the following boolean keys:

font.FreeType2.autohinted = true
font.FreeType2.enable = true

Keyboard
For the English-speakers among us specifically, and those who use the US keyboard layout in general (it’s the standard layout in Indonesia, for instance), the occasional times when one has to type an accented character is rather annoying.

There are various work-arounds — launch the character map (under Accessories), add the Character Palette applet to the panel (so that it consumes RAM even when you don’t use it!)…*or* you can just fix your keyboard layout. The die-hard command-line junkie would be able to tell you what option to pass to setxkbmap to achieve this. The rest of us can just use System->Preferences->Hardware->Keyboard. In the “Layouts” tab, select “Layout Options”. The option you want is “Compose key position”; I use Right Alt, but Caps Lock haters will rejoice to know that, yes, you can use that dreaded key as your compose key as well. To type an accented character, now the only thing you need to do is hit the Compose+accent followed by the letter you want to accent (using shift as necessary, e.g. for ^).

While you’re here, you might want to change the Alt/Win key behavior, and map either Meta, Super or Hyper to one of your Win-keys. The GNOME default is inexplicably for the Win-key to be a normal key and not a modifier (so it cannot be combined with other keys).

Coming up: Applications
Et voilà! You should have a nice-looking, and more importantly, functional desktop right now. In the next instalment, I’ll comment on the applications I use. Until then, à bientôt!

Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?” I dream of things that never were and say, “Why not?”
– George Bernard Shaw

It is easy to be apathetically indifferent. The world has its problems, sure, but hey, life is short and one should take care of oneself first, no? Yet the danger is that there are a *lot* of issues on which the silent majority is not sufficiently aware to care one way or another, and a small but outspoken minority gets to drive their agenda, because the other people who know the first group is wrong find it too uncouth to engage them in debate. To spread the word to the masses. To do something.

People have various reasons for being apathetic, and most of them certainly make sense. At the time, anyway. Life is short. Or, I know this guy is deluded on some issues, but how much harm can he/she do anyway? Or, people will come to their senses (how, if the only passionate people are on two diametric opposites, the mainstream media too busy triangulating and the moderates too indifferent to make their voice heard?). Or they believe in the “great leader” myth: mere mortals can’t lead movements for change, let’s wait for an inspired leader to set things right.

The latter is a particularly pernicious argument. Just because what you do does not have a great impact, does it mean you should not do it? We too often underestimate our potential impact. Whether negative (how much can a single SUV affect the environment anyway? Or taking those cheap flights in Europe. Or watching movies that glorify senseless violence). You’re just an anonymous consumer, right? Yet collectively our negative contributions add up to something significant.

It is the same with the positive things we can do. When you buy food from a local farm, who knows how many people are affected by your example? If stores and supermarkets notice that their customers are starting to buy up local produce, market economics dictate that they will allocate more shelf space to these produces. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Perhaps the feeling might be that meaningful change cannot be achieved within one’s lifetime. Yet is that reason for apathy? If the suffragettes became disillusioned early on, would women have the right to vote in the Western world today? If black Americans get discouraged by the post-Reconstruction setbacks, would the civil rights movement come into being?

Change does not crystallize magically once the right leader emerges. Were Stalin to be struck by lightning and decide to democratize overnight, would the system he had a hand in building let him do that? Even the most tyrannical dictator relies on a support structure, and thus is constrained in his/her (mostly his) actions. Education can work, no matter how plodding, slow and fraught with setbacks the process might seem at times.

Moral of the story? Put your efforts behind what you believe in. No matter how futile the cause might be, nothing feels more emasculating than not even talking about an issue you care about deeply, let alone doing something about it.

Personally, my #1 bugbear is electoral reform. A healthy discussion of issues is impossible within a two-party system: they are either too polarized for their supporters to talk to each other (and the center too indifferent), or in their attempt to appeal to centrists, too indistinct and amorphous. Paradoxically, they can even swing between the two at short notice. Politicians pander to the base during primaries and swing to the center for the actual election. In the end, nobody’s happy.

Or take feminism. Or anti-racism. Indifference abounds here — just because our society does not discriminate openly, does not mean that institutional discrimination does not still occur. Most women are still unfairly expected to do double duty between house and work. Yet how many of us question the way the workplace is structured, leaving most men (the traditional breadwinner) no choice but to work long hours? In the end it’s mostly the women who are forced to sacrifice career once they start families.

Affirmative action programs are flawed. Too targeted at specific minorities, and thus open to attacks on the grounds (ironically) of equality. Yet the problem is real, and even conservatives like George Will agrees. Fairness demands that we help those born with socio-economical disadvantage. That we try and make sure everyone gets to pursue the American Dream (or the equivalent), rather than using the Dream as a deus ex machina (oh look, here’s another rags-to-riches success story! (s)he can do it, so if you can’t, you must be lazy and it’s your fault).

Magic wands do not exist in the real world. Not everyone will be fêted as heroes, and no problem will magically go away. Yet is being an unsung hero so bad?

From LWN:

“The acquisition of Trolltech will help Nokia accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and develop its Internet services business…”

This is an interesting development. Presumably, given Maemo’s an entrenched investment in the GTK+/GNOME toolchain, Nokia will find itself in the same boat as Novell, supporting two directly competing platforms.

Though considering they are also heavily invested in Symbian, hopefully they can manage this properly.. unlike some other tech companies (hello, Compaq!)

Task: List the programming languages you consider important or interesting. Describe each of them in one sentence.

Posting this from the new N810 using its built-in keyboard. Typing those tags was painful, and as a result, more languages will be added to the table tomorrow — from the workstation.

• It looks gorgeous
• It runs Linux, and showcases what can be done with more vertical integration
• Nokia has been improving their interaction with the developer community
• Video camera and Skype (no Skype video support yet, though)
• Rhapsody subscription service
• New: Now with GPS, spacious internal storage, and sliding keyboard built-in!
• New: More video codecs, Flash 9, Mozilla-based browser

So commercial software providers (Skype, Real Networks) will provide Linux ports if they judge that the userbase is big enough. Which is good news.

The same thing applies to Nokia itself, naturally, and sadly in this case, they do not think there is demand for Ogg Vorbis playback.

So if, like me, you find the product attractive, but have a personal collection of Ogg Vorbis files (or FLAC, which transcodes seamlessly to Vorbis), then this is what you can do:

• E-mail Nokia about it
• Inform outlets that stock the tablet (e.g. Best Buy, CompUSA)
• Sign this pledge and pass it around

All the software for the new device (minus GPS — though perhaps it’s the same software that comes with the GPS kit for N800? Oh, and the ambient light sensor) will run on the N800, so holding back won’t be that painful.

Spent last night getting a crash course in using OCaml to do non-functional things (hash tables, file I/O, regular expressions) and the result is now up.

The JoCaml version does the file-partitioning trick used in the C++ implementation, with each finder workers being run inside a JoCaml channel; the channels share a single lock so they can update the hash table serially.

Interestingly, current implementation does not get a speed-up from the input file being cached (Ilmari’s wf.ml does). Will have to peruse his to see what’s slowing things down.

Lesson: not all techniques for processing a file line-wise are equally good!

Talked with a colleague about the slow single-threaded performance of my Wide Finder implementation, and we narrowed it down to two possibilities:

• Boost regular expression is not compiled?
• C++ strings have higher overhead than null-terminated c_str

First point can be ruled out: Boost compiles regular expressions when you assign them. Second point — well, reading in the file using std::getline turns out to consume the bulk of time.

I’ve reorganized the code a bit, using a multimap rather than a vector to rank the URLs by count, with no effect on speed. With two and four threads on a dual-core Intel notebook, the performance is at least on par with Ruby.

Alastair Rankine has a C++ implementation that is slightly faster, but uses Boost memory-mapped IO that I avoided for the same reason he put as caveat: that it will not scale to files that are too large. Which Tim’s log file might well be. Again, that is not significantly faster than the Ruby code.

Moral of the question: Perl and Ruby can be faster than C++! The C implementations out there are blindingly fast, but the way they do regular expression handling are really painful.

Will turn my (limited) spare time to doing a clean JoCaml implementation — it might not be faster but it definitely will look cleaner!

After turning in the C/C++ monster (cleanest C code I reckon it is possible to write, thus the total lack of memory-mapped I/O and other optimizations), I turned my attention to picking a better implementation language.

Requirements:

• Functional
• Good support for threading
• If possible, support for distributed computing

As it turns out, JoCaml fits the bill perfectly. It’s an extension of Ocaml, so it combines a rich library with a familiar syntax (not to me, but having used both Scheme and Haskell, how different can it be) — and a very nice process calculus!

Example: this is a concurrent stack that blocks if there is no input available

let new_stack () =
def state (s) & push (v) = state (v::s) & reply to push
or state (x::s) & pop () = state s & reply x to pop in
spawn state([]);
pop, push
;;

This defines a private state channel, and then export the pop and push synchronous channels (that to the user behave just like ordinary functions)

and this is how you use it:

let pop, push = new_stack ();;
spawn echo(pop());;
push(1);;

Note that the echo channel will block, since pop can’t return a value until the stack contains something! This value is then pushed into the stack and ‘1′ printed.

More of this at the JoCaml site. And, as it turns out, there already is a JoCaml implementation of the Wide Finder, by Ilmari Heikkinen. Will have to grok the finer details from him.

Several weeks ago, Tim Bray posted his Wide Finder project: take the Ruby script that parses an Apache log file and report the top 10 hits, and parallelize it in your language of choice.

It occurred to me a while back that this is a perfect job for a C multi-process program, taking advantage of Linux’s cheap copy-on-write fork, if not for the need to merge the result. So it would probably be easier to write it using the pthreads library instead. One would want to reduce inter-thread communication as much as possible, though.

I did not have time to touch the code until today, but now it’s done. Two key insights:

• The input file can be partitioned cleanly into multiple chunks of roughly identical sizes without communication, as long as each thread follows the same protocol. i.e. a common chunk size is used, and all but the first thread needs to check if the character before their starting offset is the end-of-line. If not, they need to skip until the end of line, yielding that line to the previous thread.
• When merging the hash maps, the first thread to acquire the lock does not need to insert its items one by one, but can just set the main hash map to point to its own

On a data set size of 200MB, with a single thread, performs slightly slower as Ruby by wall clock:

Ruby timing

2.99user 1.88system 0:05.26elapsed 92%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
152inputs+0outputs (3major+853minor)pagefaults 0swaps
3.04user 1.84system 0:05.33elapsed 91%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+856minor)pagefaults 0swaps
2.84user 2.01system 0:05.19elapsed 93%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+856minor)pagefaults 0swaps


C++ timing, one thread

2.70user 5.21system 0:07.95elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+655minor)pagefaults 0swaps
2.78user 5.14system 0:07.96elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+655minor)pagefaults 0swaps
2.72user 5.12system 0:07.90elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+654minor)pagefaults 0swaps


With two threads, though, it runs faster, almost at Ruby speed.

C++ timing, two threads

3.33user 5.40system 0:05.51elapsed 158%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+675minor)pagefaults 0swaps
3.40user 5.33system 0:05.86elapsed 148%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+672minor)pagefaults 0swaps
3.41user 5.36system 0:05.60elapsed 156%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+674minor)pagefaults 0swaps


So, as Tim observed, the problem is not entirely IO-bound. More testing is needed, but will probably need to be done on a machine with faster IO (and more CPUs). Like Tim’s new Niagara T2 testbed.

Will edit this post later — need to run now, and wanted to get this out as soon as possible. Code is available here… now I just need to find Tim’s email, since his blog is down. Argh!

Update: switched to the new std::tr1::unsorted_map. Performance seems identical with a single thread, but slightly higher (within margin of error) on two threads — which makes sense: a multithreaded run exercises the map more, because each thread’s map has to be merged into the final map.

As reported by Linux Weekly News, Microsoft has just announced version 1.0 of their Adobe Flash competitor, Silverlight.

An interesting development is that they are also working with Novell to bring the technology to Linux (to be known as Moonlight). Moonlight supposedly will be GPL’ed, with the exception of the binary codecs needed for playback of proprietary Windows Media formats.

So Linux is still a second-hand citizen (version 1.0 is out, and development on the Linux port is just announced?), but this might be interesting for those of us (read: most Linux desktop users) that have been waiting for a decent Flash playback (forget authoring) solutions. Still no x86_64 support after all these years, forcing people to stick to 32-bit browsers (or use nspluginwrapper). And unless Adobe has changed things since acquiring Macromedia, anyone who has merely used the Flash plugin is tainted and can’t work on Flash reimplementations!

(From this interview [lwn.net] with principal developers of Swfdec and Gnash)

Rob: The Adobe EULA for Flash forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools or plugin from working on Flash technologies. This has had a chilling effect on the development of free Flash players, since a developer must either choose to decide that Adobe won’t sue them over this, or to do what Gnash does, which is a slow and inefficient, clean room, reverse engineering project.

As I argued, Novell would most likely require copyright assignments on contributions to Moonlight, and thus the use of GPL is not going to hinder Microsoft benefiting from community contribution (interesting, from a once anti-GPL company). The framework is conveniently written in C# as well, so it’s not going to directly benefit the Gnash and Swfdec projects (Flash), but depending on how clearly Novell marks up their code for patent-encumbrance, it could still either benefit or act as a time bomb for Flash projects..

Naturally, I’d still advise anyone to refrain from using Silverlight/Moonlight unless it’s being used as a container for standard (H.263/4) codecs. WMV is an abomination dating back to the AVI days — note how most HD- and BD-DVDs are encoded in H.264, not VC-1 which is basically WMV.

This is cool beyond belief. For example, here’s a map showing the ridiculousness of US-style hub-and-spoke flying arrangements (unless you book enough in advance, or pay more, to get more direct routes), if you live in a remote place like Bloomington, Indiana (as yours truly do).

Due to WordPress.com limitations, though, you’d have to check my personal blog for it.

Salon.com’s Audiofile, a remarkable music blog that provides regular song reviews, complete with downloads of the reviewed songs in MP3 format, closed its door last month.

The archives, thankfully, are still (largely) available. But how, pray, would you download hundreds of songs scattered over 26 pages? (one per each letter in the alphabet)

If you use Firefox (and if not, you should. Not because it’s the best browser, but becaue of the add-ons), then it’s simple — look up FlashGot or DownThemAll!. The former is more configurable, I believe (you get to use your own download manager), but the latter is probably simpler to use.

Caveat lector: the (rough guess) 70% or so of the songs that still have functional links total up to more than 2GB’s worth. Will probably post a Torrent link on Mininova once I tidy them up a bit.

Dear Interweb,

I’ve heard this great news [apple.com] that Google is transcoding its videos to high-quality MP4 format for AppleTV and iPhone users. To my surprise (and disappointment), however, there are no instructions on how to use it from non-Apple devices (or even a non-appliance Mac).

I have been to YouTube Mobile, and as reported by jukkaeklund [allaboutsymbian.com] the video available to other mobile users (or PC users who use the URL) are still H.263, though in a saner container than those horrible FLVs. Not all the videos are there too.

Is Google giving Apple preferential treatment? Is Google becoming like the IBM of the past, with balkanized teams not coordinating with each other? (Hope not). Funny thing is, the video that motivated this question was a Linus Torvalds tech talk at Google, on distributed SCM. Unlike earlier Tech Talk videos hosted on Google Video, this one is on YouTube only — meaning no decent-quality downloads!

I can imagine even ordinary Mac users (as opposed to those on the consumer appliances) getting disappointed at this. They have paid the Apple Tax already, after all.

As Linux Weekly News reports, Microsoft’s general counsel has intensified the company’s sabre-rattling against Open Source projects, this time putting numbers on the alleged patent infringements in the Linux kernel, desktop projects and Open Office.

Conveniently left out is the one-sidedness of this smear campaign. Microsoft could take all their time to look at open-sourced code, but on the other hand, Microsoft’s code is sacrosanct. One wonders if Microsoft’s “Shared Source” licenses and EULAs allows the licensee to sue Microsoft for patent violation? One would suspect otherwise.

The patent system is broken. And it’s a matter of incentives. As I wrote in response, the US Patent and Trademark Office grants overly-broad patents without checking carefully for prior art. Thus Microsoft’s claim is probably true in a very twisted way: nobody can write anything meaningful without violating some patent that one of the big tech companies (IBM, Sun, Microsoft, etc.) holds. Any company with a legal team worth their salt would play the system and file for as many patents as they can, no matter how dubious. Some even boast about it (Steve Jobs, about Apple’s iPhone). The culprit is thus the patent system, not the owners of the dubious patents (who are ethically responsible to their shareholders only. Corporate law is also very flawed, but that’s the subject of another post), and certainly not the authors of the infringing software.

Regardless of whether software patents is a good idea or not (I personally think it’s not), the USPTO and Congress have a serious conflict-of-interest problem here. Granting more patents earn them more money, and examining patent applications carefully cost them money. Plus, they don’t lose anything for patents that are overturned. The Justice department should charge USPTO for the time wasted by patent challenges, if the patent ends up overturned because of USPTO’s fault. That way they’d have an incentive to be more careful.

From New York Post, via Monsters and Critics:

According to the New York Post, Microsoft is asking Yahoo to re-enter formal talks in order to finalize a merger of the two companies. This move was attempted in the past just shortly after Google emerged, but in the end went nowhere. After the huge loss last month to Google over the DoubleClick purchase, Microsoft is intensifying their plans to acquire Yahoo.

This is disturbing. Yahoo has traditionally been quite open-source friendly (Yahoo! Toolbar is available for Firefox, their AJAX library is open-sourced, and they even produced a Linux client of Yahoo Messenger, long time ago — it still works, though not updated), or at any rate, more platform-agnostic.

Of the three companies, Yahoo Messenger supports OS X on par with Windows, with Linux being an afterthought, while Microsoft’s Messenger client is a joke on a Mac, and GTalk .. is currently Windows-only (Google employs a key Pidgin developer, so now that the dispute with AOL over their old name, Gaim, has been settled, hopefully audio chat support will be coming to the free Unices (and OS X) soon.

What will a Microsoft buy-out entail? First of all, presumably the downgrading of Mac support (look at Virtual PC, or IE for Mac). Microsoft would cancel a product that’s making them money (VPC), and forbid the use of home editions of Vista under virtualization, to sabotage Mac interoperability, while at the same time offer (read: promise) a free version of their Flash competitor Silverlight for the platform (not authoring tools, naturally. Everyone knows digital artists <prefers> working in Windows). Imagine the fate of Yahoo Messenger, what with Apple aggressively pushing iChat into the corporate market. Microsoft will probably calculate that they are better served undermining OS X’s viability as a business platform, at the expense of a miniscule loss of marketshare.

So we in the FLOSS world are in this unconfortable situation of hitching our wagons to Google as the lesser of the two evils (despite privacy concerns). I’m personally using GTalk (through Pidgin) at least until Jabber becomes the established IM protocol standard, but if anyone has a suggestion for a good non-big-3 search engine, I’m definitely considering putting my eggs in more baskets.

The Inquirer would have you think so (Microsoft admits Vista failure). Dell has bowed to the lack of consumer enthusiasm about Vista (especially those laptop users dismayed at power management issues, but people whose applications suddenly break won’t be amused either), reinstating Windows XP availability on their customer line-ups. This is, at best, a grace period of one year, since Microsoft currently plans to stop XP sales entirely in 2008.

They have a point there. I have a problem with their assertion that the $3 Windows edition is another admission of failure. True, the stronger anti-piracy controls on Vista means that Microsoft’s closing one eye on piracy no longer reduces Linux’s price advantage as much. But there’s the point of government tie-in: to be eligible for the cheap Windows licenses, governments have to step in and subsidize the hardware!

So Microsoft might have a weakened hold on its current OEMs, but it is hoping to gain entire countries as new clients. In which case the price drop cannot be compared against the full price of Windows, but what Dell, HP etc. gets charged (less than $50 a piece, I’m sure). An order of magnitude less. Which is a side issue — Microsoft is not currently gaining anything from those pirated copies anyway (apart from mindshare). The main worry is that another generation will be locked into Microsoft products, and want to bet there’s a clause in the fine print promoting the so-called Open XML over Open Doc?

There was a Slashdot story a few weeks ago, on HP voiding your warranty if you install Linux. Linux geeks responded with an outrage, predictably, claiming that ever since CRT monitors come with safeguards that prevent the screen being fried through out-of-range settings, there is no way that a piece of software could destroy a hardware, and even if that’s the case, then it’s a bug in the hardware design itself.

In the case of the woman mentioned in the story, Linux is clearly not at fault — the keyboard was just broken, and the tech support person was too clueless (or the support regulations structured in such a way) to notice. However, there could be valid cases where the combination of crappy hardware and running Linux *would* ruin your hardware. I know, because it just happened to me.

The recipe is as such:

1. Broken ACPI implementation (hello, HP! To be fair, the most recent dv2000, dv6000 and equivalent Compaq lines are probably fixed; by the lack of complaints), so that Linux’s ACPI subsystem cannot control the fan and CPU voltage properly
2. A CPU that runs hot (first-generation “mobile” Turion 64)
3. 2 years of frequent use, tolerating occasional crashes due to overheating
4. OMG!!! LINUKS KILLZ ME PC!!

I guess the writing is on the wall when I had to remove my second memory module to keep the laptop running at all. The poor fans must be getting to their end of life. And today, after a freeze while the laptop was on battery power (previously almost unheard-of, it’s normally stable if running at 800 MHz, which it does when unplugged), it just never woke up again. The power indicators would be on, the optical drive would operate properly, and the AC indicator too, but apart from that, zilch. Nothing displayed to the screen, no error beep, nothing.

One begins to wonder whether the buggy Microsoft ACPI AML compiler was actually intentionally buggy. After all, if you load Windows onto your machine ”as it is intended”, you’ll be using a Microsoft-written AML interpreter, and everything would be just fine. If you use the Intel reference AML interpreter, well, … Very disturbing indeed. The same way Microsoft abused its IE market share by intentionally not making it standards-compliant, making life a nightmare for web designers and thus the easy way out is to only support IE ..

RIP, HP L2000 “Lance Armstrong special edition”. It’s ironic that a record winner of an endurance cycling race, who also happens to be a cancer survivor, would lend his name to a buggy laptop with poor noise insulation and heat issues that didn’t even last two years. I was planning to replace it with an HP dv2000t once the Santa Rosa models are out (late April — early May), but after this, I wonder. I’ve never had a laptop dying on me before; my previous write-offs are either due to inexpert disassembly (Vaio C1) or drop damage (Vaio C140). Perhaps I’ll get a Macbook after all, though my Apple purchasing track record is notoriously bad (I’d buy just before a new model is launched – I barely managed to cancel a Dell laptop purchase when the Powerbook G4 12″ was released, and I jumped the gun and bought the Sony C140 — now with a broken LCD — and before it even arrived, the Core 2 Macbooks came out).

Could I wait this time for the don’t-know-when Santa Rosa? Come on, Apple, update the line before Leopard comes out!

Update – 2007/04/16 – OSnews has an article on a Bill Gates memo showing Microsoft’s intention to cripple ACPI. You’re not paranoid if people really are out to get you! And shame on that abusive monopolist — this is straight out of The Corporate, folks. It figures that after screwing over DR-DOS in a very similar way, they’d try the same trick again.

Periodically, I’d scour the Internet for French-language streaming media broadcast. Unfortunately, despite the European Commission’s much-publicized anti-trust case against Microsoft, and the French’s famously anti-American attitude, when it comes to Internet broadcasting they are all in hock to Microsoft.

Case in point: France 24, the French answer to CNN and BBC. While most Anglo-American site would at least offer you a choice between Real and Windows Media (I don’t see QuickTime used much), most French sites, including the aforementioned, serves only WMV. This, at a time where the BBC is even sponsoring the development of an open-source video codec, Dirac [wikipedia.org].

The site’s design also feels rather sluggish, and the aspect ratio is wrong unless you go full-screen. Alors…

Found out from Maírín Duffy’s post that Kathy Sierra, of Creating Passionate Users, have been receiving death threats.

This saddened me greatly, that the Internet’s perceived anonymity is freedom of speech is used as an opportunity for making such hateful, vitriolic (and in this case, illegal) speech.

Having found out about Kathy’s amazing blog not too long ago from Simon Menchaca’s Direct2Dell post on the SXSW conference, I can only hope she won’t be deterred from posting for long.

Kathy, if you’re reading this (Trackback magic!), please don’t give up. Some people just cannot handle your success; precisely why you should not give in. Hopefully they will be cowed by the fact that the police is taking this seriously, and won’t bother you again.

My L2000 laptop has been experiencing random lock-ups under Linux for a long time; I’ve been attributing it to kernel issues (ACPI, APIC, sound and network drivers) because said lock-ups do not occur under Windows.

As it turns out, removing one of the two memory modules seems to have solved the problem (more than two days’ worth of almost continuous running and no crash yet!). The comparative vulnerability to overheating is still disturbing, considering Linux is quite aggressive in turning on the fan — perhaps it’s due to Linux’s more aggressive use of available physical RAM: if the other memory module is less well-cooled (the remaining memory stick is 1GB and wider than the 512 Mb I took out) it might be more likely to start randomly flipping bits.

Considering the laptop is certified for up to 2×1GB sticks, it is still a bit disturbing. Perhaps HP fits smaller-sized sticks if someone requested the maximum amount of RAM..

Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 Wireless-G MIMO Performance Router and Access Point

At our apartment we’ve been struggling recently with our old Linksys WRT54GC — we bought it almost two years ago for its size (costs the same as the full-sized WRT54G which has two antennas, but is as big as Apple’s Airport Express), but came to regret it in the past few months: the web interface is buggy (it gets really confused when told to change the static DHCP assignment for a MAC that currently has a lease), it gets sluggish over time until reset, and horror of horror, the Nintendo DS won’t connect to it unless wireless MAC filtering is turned off (why should that be ?!)

The open-source DD-WRT supported device page came to the rescue. The Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 has the best range with its built-in antenna, if need be there are open-source firmware for it, and it’s dirt-cheap. Costs $10 more than the non-MIMO version (Linksys wants $30 more), amazing configuration interface (for both static DHCP and wireless MAC filtering, the list of devices currently associated with the router is given and you can just click to add it to the list. Also, the NAT port-forwarding setup lets you group your entries, and is not limited to 7-8 (like the old Linksys; try to add more and it will just silently fail)

Buffalo, you’ve just gained a loyal customer. Thank you! It’s amazing being able to download Solaris 10 and Elephants Dream without any trouble at all, over wireless. And did I mention this thing does not use a silly default SSID? By default they use the MAC address instead. And should you move to a bigger house/office it supports range extenders.

Those using Mac OS X or ROX Desktop might wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, they have had application bundles since the beginning. Everyone else will probably be wondering “what are application bundles anyway?”. First, then, a primer.

If you think of an application as an object, a thing, then you want to be able to treat it like any other object (say, a document): you can copy it by drag-and-drop, move it to another location, run it by double-clicking, and when you don’t need it anymore, drag it to the trash. This works if you’re on the aforementioned system, but not for everyone else:

- Windows applications write to system directories, and the default Registry setting is normally set up only once, during installation
- Unix applications are installed all over the file system

Even with package management (e.g. RPM+yum, DEB+apt, Smart, emerge) the situation is far from ideal:
- application still cannot be dragged-and-dropped
- can’t run an application without installing (for trying it out, for example)
- if you don’t have the original package you can’t recover it from the installed files (I don’t believe the package database holds the pre-/post-install scripts, only the pre- and post-uninstall ones)

And even OS X’s implementation is not ideal: there’s no way to declare dependencies, so a lot of applications just bundle all the libraries they can’t expect the user to have installed already. ROX is ahead here with their integration of the 0install system: you first download an almost-empty application bundle, and the first time you run it it triggers 0install, which can pull in the main body of the application, and install the dependencies too.

For some reason ROX’s installation system has not caught on yet with the major desktops (neither Nautilus nor Konqueror, the two main desktops’ file managers, handle launching ROX AppDirs, the most basic prerequisite for interoperability; for some reason the talks with the XFCE project did not go anywhere either). But now at least another project is picking up the idea, and were it to be successful, would see application bundles available to millions of users. Who? Why, the One Laptop per Child project.

(J5 blogged about it several weeks ago, but I didn’t get to that post until now. Mea culpa.)

I don’t know how it’s implemented there, but as I commented, it could possibly go like this:

App.xo
|– deps.xml
|– info.xml
|– binary
|– icons/
|– libs/
|– share/

with the application directory monitored for changes; drop a new application in and Nautilus will scan deps.xml for any prerequisites that’s not yet installed and offer to install it.

That way we can have OS X-style ease-of-use without their application bloat (since a lot of the .app bundles there just ship all the libraries they can’t assume the use.

2006-11-25 19:09 EST Update: Here is the specification for the bundles. No dependency tracking yet, unfortunately.

Johannes Schmid forwarded this very disturbing video from YouTube:

Why a company with shady political connections and a disreputable security track record continues to be contracted to supply voting machines, I don’t know.

Technology is neutral. But belief in the infallibility of it is irresponsible, misguided, and .. perhaps actively encouraged by people with vested interest. Big Brother is watching YOU!

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

It’s Thanksgiving today in this part of North America (the Canadians had theirs last month [rfmcdpei]). Our Thanksgiving dinner has been postponed to tomorrow evening, which makes today more a day of reflection than of gluttony, not a bad thing at all.

I saw the YouTube video of the Helsinki Complaints Choir yesterday, as linked from insanecats.com, and it set the mood for today. Most of us in the developed world, and the middle classes of emerging market economies, really live in abundance, relative to our ancestors or to most of the rest of the world. The video made me smile – the seriousness of the facial expression of the choir members really made a point: of what importance is our personal complaints, when compared to the important things in life?

Here’s the video for those who have not seen it:

From Bruce Sterling’s post:

Courageously undaunted by her colossally embarrassing Internet sex-video scandal, Croatian sensation Severina Vuckovic performs here in the coolest turbofolk video I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen plenty.

I’ve been wondering whether she can actually sing, but never thought of hitting YouTube to find out (I did check Amazon to see if they carry .. um .. Croatian Christian pop, which they don’t). So now we know for sure.

Here’s the video:

Bruce links to another video, of an Elvis impersonation, and there are some more on YouTube. Fun stuff! I must say Eurovision is as hilarious as ever. The songwriters must be having giggle loops (or stacks)

… keeps the bugs away. And what’s this patch, you might ask? Why, it fixes Liferea’s font selection (Liferea’s a feed reader for the GNOME desktop). Previously it would use the application font setting for its HTML viewer, with this patch it uses the document font setting instead, bringing it in line with other applications.

No more squinting when looking at small text, or finding your desktop space taken up by extra-large application menus!

“Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them”.
- (Shakespeare, W., Twelfth Night, Quote Act II, Scene V).

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three”.
- (Heller, J., Catch-22, Quote Page 94 (paperback)).

“Some languages are born lazy, some languages achieve laziness, and some languages have laziness thrust upon them”.
- (Salim, M., unpublished)

So you can probably guess what this is about. A stream library for Lua, that allows you to do things like running the Sieve of Eratosthenes without specifying an upper bound, lazily filtering the set of all positive integers as you go along.

Witness the use of the library:

require("stream")

function ints(n)
   return {
      head = function () return n end,
      tail = function () return ints(n+1) end }
end

function primes (sints)
   local curprime = false
   local tailthunk = false
   local fhead =
      function ()
	 if curprime then return curprime
	 else
	    curprime = sints.head()
	    tailthunk = sints.tail
	    return curprime
	 end
      end
   local ftail =
      function ()
	 if (not tailthunk) then
	    fhead()
	 end
	 return primes(
		 stream.filter(function(n) return not (n%curprime == 0) end,
			       tailthunk() ))
      end
   return {head=fhead, tail=ftail}
end

-- print the first 100 primes
stream.print(100, primes(ints(2)))

A stream is a table containing a head and a tail; both are thunks, so you call them with no arguments to obtain the value. Note the caching that avoids recomputation, similar caching is done in the functions provided by the stream library (like stream.filter)

Code available on hircus.org.

And some benchmarks:

	Lua	Haskell

The Haskell code was run using GHC’s ‘runhaskell’, which does not precompile the code, to be fair to Lua which is interpreted. Not bad when put up against a language that is lazy by design (and thus optimized for it)! Timing taken using the ‘time’ utility on an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.66 GHz laptop which was mostly idle.

The Tuesday after E³ Expo, we get not one but two much-awaited announcements. Nokia finally demonstrated the OS 2006 upgrade for the Nokia 770 tablet, and Apple came out with the MacBook (sorry, Mac OS Rumors).

Alas, the Nokia announcement is still vaporware (I’d happily beta test the new firmware, since the latest update actually broke timezone support, and the full-screen virtual keyboard sounds like a nice improvement over the half-sized version one has to carefully peck with a stylus right now). And to make matter worse my tablet’s wireless actually died yesterday! Thankfully it’s still under warranty, and Nokia didn’t actually announce a hardware upgrade, as was speculated.

The Apple announcement, on the other hand, is welcome. There are concerns about the integrated video (can’t be worse than the also-integrated, 700-fps-in-glxgears ATi in my HP right now), and the price premium charged for the black case, but so far it’s looking good. I’ll let the early adopters work out all the issues with this and get the next model with OS X 10.5 and 64-bit Merom CPUs..

I finally got fed up of my Sony Ericsson K700i losing random phone numbers (well, not random – it’s always the phone numbers I’ve used recently, which thankfully means that most of the time, searching for unrecognized phone numbers in the call history list works) to do something about it.

There are some HOWTOs and forum discussions out there, but most of the ones that refer to Ubuntu refer to earlier versions, and a lot of the steps mentioned are probably not needed anymore.

As it turns out, these are all you need:

apt-get install multisync libmultisync-plugin-irmc-bluetooth libmultisync-plugin-evolution

Modify /etc/bluetooth/hid.conf . This is the crucial step! In /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf, change the local device class from

class 0x3e0100;

to

class 0x100100;

Now set up multisync and follow the instructions – should be quite straightforward. The only thing to note is that by default, Multisync does not preselect any calendar, address books etc., since you can have more than one. Make sure to pick the ones you want to sync.

(Thanks to Roshan for posing the task)

Given two binary trees, and a depth-first-search traversal ordering of the leaf nodes, produce two new trees with the same structures as the originals, but with the leaf nodes swapped. If there are more leaf nodes in one tree than the other, the remaining leaf nodes are copied unchanged.

So (swap-leaves ‘(1 . (2 . 3)) ‘(a . ((b . c) . d)))
=> ‘((a . (b . c)) ‘(1 . ((2 . 3) . d))

Waiving the requirement that the program be completely functional, my original thought was I could probably just modify my tree walker to do this. This treewalk procedure takes a tree and produces a stream of leaf node values. Changing it so that it returns a pair of the value, and a setter procedure that can modify the value in place, is trivial: the recursive auxiliary procedure for treewalk is given the parent node, so it can use set-car! or set-cdr! (depending on which side of the parent node this leaf node is) to update the parent:

(define treewalk
  (lambda (t)
    (if (not (pair? t))
        (stream-cons
          `(t . (lambda (v)
                  (error "Cannot modify singleton")))
          empty-stream)
        (stream-append (treewalk^ (car t) #t t)
                       (treewalk^ (cdr t) #f t)))))

(define treewalk^
  (lambda (t left? parent)
    (if (not (pair? t))
        (stream-cons `(,t . ,(if left?
                               (lambda (v)
                                 (set-car! parent v))
                               (lambda (v)
                                 (set-cdr! parent v))))
                     empty-stream)
        (stream-append (treewalk^ (car t) #t t)
                       (treewalk^ (cdr t) #f t)))))

The swapping is then just a matter of calling the setter for node1 with the value of node2, and vice-versa; this generalizes to swapping between multiple trees as well.

(define treewalk
  (lambda (t)
    (if (not (pair? t))
        (stream-cons `(t . (lambda (v)
                             (error "Cannot modify singleton")))
                     empty-stream)
        (stream-append (treewalk^ (car t) #t t)
                       (treewalk^ (cdr t) #f t)))))

(define treewalk^
  (lambda (t left? parent)
    (if (not (pair? t))
        (stream-cons `(,t . ,(if left?
                               (lambda (v)
                                 (set-car! parent v))
                               (lambda (v)
                                 (set-cdr! parent v))))
                     empty-stream)
        (stream-append (treewalk^ (car t) #t t)
                       (treewalk^ (cdr t) #f t)))))

But this modifies existing trees in place, a big no-no in functional programming land (though imperative programmers live with this every day). Is there a way to do this in, if not a fully functional way, then in a way that the side-effects are confined? (I mentioned to Roshan that this is a dual of Haskell’s monads: it behaves functionally even though it is imperative; monads gave the illusion of imperative behaviour even though they are fully functional. He pointed out that internally the state monad is optimized into imperative calls as well, so the comparison is even more interesting)

Instead of modifying existing trees in place, we want to copy the trees. But copying, naively done, would involve traversing the trees again, and that would be inefficient. The copying should be done Lazily as needed, and with streams, that means doing it while you’re walking the tree and collecting the nodes!

In short, at every internal node,
- create a new node, which has as its children the children of the original node;
- update the clone of the parent, instead of the parent, so that its car or cdr points to this new node
- the setter procedures for each leaf nodes modify these cloned nodes instead of the originals

...
(let ([copy (cons (car t) (cdr t))])
  (if left?
    (set-car! copy-parent copy)
    (set-cdr! copy-parent copy))
  (stream-append (treewalk-copy^ (car t) #t copy)
                 (treewalk-copy^ (cdr t) #f copy))
...

The main treewalk procedure now has to return the cloned tree as well, since at each subsequent stage of the walk only the direct parent is known, not the entire tree.

...
(let ([copy (cons (car t) (cdr t))])
       (if left?
           (set-car! copy-parent copy)
           (set-cdr! copy-parent copy))
  (stream-append (treewalk-copy^ (car t) #t copy)
                 (treewalk-copy^ (cdr t) #f copy))
...

Code, including stream implementation, available here

This being mid-term week for course I am a TA for, the lab sections I taught yesterday were made optional, and so apart from handling several questions on exam questions and assignments, I had some free time.

That time was spent reading Lambda the Ultimate, which was how I noticed the LiteratePrograms wiki. Based on Wikipedia’s MediaWiki, with added feature from the noweb literate programming system, it is to collaborative programming what other wikis are to collaborative writing. You can declare code blocks, and if the language is supported get syntax highlighting for free; the code is automatically packaged into a zip archive everytime someone hits the download link.

Check it out. But if you’re teaching a programming course, don’t mention it to your students

Two days ago, this tail call decorator
by Crutcher Dunnavant was mentioned on LtU. It’s a clever little trick: the decorator returns a new function that, when called, checks if its grandparent
is itself. This would mean that a function declared to be tail-call-optimized is called from another tail-called-optimized function, and so the caller’s frame in the stack can be wiped. How does it do this? The function throws an exception. This is caught by the grandparent, which then calls the saved function with the arguments passed in the exception.

This is the original implementation:

#!/usr/bin/env python2.4
# This program shows off a python decorator(
# which implements tail call optimization. It
# does this by throwing an exception if it is
# it's own grandparent, and catching such
# exceptions to recall the stack.

import sys

class TailRecurseException:
  def __init__(self, args, kwargs):
    self.args = args
    self.kwargs = kwargs

def tail_call_optimized(g):
  """
  This function decorates a function with tail call
  optimization. It does this by throwing an exception
  if it is it's own grandparent, and catching such
  exceptions to fake the tail call optimization.

  This function fails if the decorated
  function recurses in a non-tail context.
  """
  def func(*args, **kwargs):
    f = sys._getframe()
    if f.f_back and f.f_back.f_back         and f.f_back.f_back.f_code == f.f_code:
      raise TailRecurseException(args, kwargs)
    else:
      while 1:
        try:
          return g(*args, **kwargs)
        except TailRecurseException, e:
          args = e.args
          kwargs = e.kwargs
  func.__doc__ = g.__doc__
  return func

@tail_call_optimized
def factorial(n, acc=1):
  "calculate a factorial"
  if n == 0:
    return acc
  return factorial(n-1, n*acc)

print factorial(10000)
# prints a big, big number,
# but doesn't hit the recursion limit.

@tail_call_optimized
def fib(i, current = 0, next = 1):
  if i == 0:
    return current
  else:
    return fib(i - 1, next, current + next)

print fib(10000)
# also prints a big number,
# but doesn't hit the recursion limit.

There is a subtle bug: after handling the exception, func then calls its own saved version of g, not the g of the func that throws the exception. Modifying func and the TailRecurseException class so that the function to be called can be passed in the exception solves this nicely:

class TailRecurseException:
  def __init__(self, g, args, kwargs):
    self.g = g
    self.args = args
    self.kwargs = kwargs

  ...
  def func(*args, **kwargs):
    f = sys._getframe()
    if f.f_back and f.f_back.f_back         and f.f_back.f_back.f_code == f.f_code:
      raise TailRecurseException(g, args, kwargs)
    else:
      newg = g
      while 1:
        try:
          return newg(*args, **kwargs)
        except TailRecurseException, e:
          newg = e.g
          args = e.args
          kwargs = e.kwargs
  ...

Throwing an exception just to handle the required stack manipulation because the interpreter won’t handle it is grossly inefficient, granted, and requiring the programmer to declare functions as optimizable is not be ideal, but still a really neat trick.

As a side note, if a function can be called in tail and non-tail position, a non-decorated version should be made available, otherwise bad things can happen:

@tail_call_optimized
def add1(n):
  return (n+1)

@tail_call_optimized
def add2(n):
  return add1(add1(n))

This returns 41.

Modified version, and test cases, available here [IUCS] (backup copy here).

Update: added isTailCall by jorend. Now it is safe to optimize every function (though for efficiency reason you’d only optimize the ones that make tail calls).

While the aptness of the Whorfian hypothesis is still a highly-contentious issue when it comes to natural languages, the hypothesis more or less confirms itself again and again in the realms of programming languages. Certain programming styles are simply more suited to certain languages: you don’t try to use higher-order functions in C, after all; the lack of nested functions make this idea unworkable.

Which makes languages like Scala exciting. It’s fully functional, and also fully object-oriented.Integers are objects. Functions? Also objects. The List ADT familiar to functional programmer is now an Object, with methods such as fold and filter defined on it (which makes the syntax a bit confusing, but not if you come from Ruby. Or your first language is japanese. But I digress)

Best of both worlds? Well, not quite. The new Scala compiler looks promising, but it still trips up on this simple mutual-recursion example:

object RecEvenOdd {
  def rec_oddp(n: Int): Boolean =
    { if (n == 0) false else rec_evenp(n-1) }
  def rec_evenp(n: Int): Boolean =
    { if (n == 0 ) true else rec_oddp(n-1) }
  def rec_oddevenp(flag: Boolean, n: Int): Boolean = {
    if (n == 0) flag else rec_oddevenp(!flag, n-1)
  }

  def main(args: Array[String]): unit = {
    val n: Int = Integer.parseInt(args(0));
    System.out.println("recursive: " + n + ": " +       rec_oddevenp(true, n));
    System.out.println("mutual rec: " + n + ": " +       rec_evenp(n));
  }
}

The former gets detected as a tail call and optimized. The second? No such luck.. yet.

Of further note is the implementation of streams: Scala implements the “odd” style of lazy programming (Wadler et al., How to add laziness to a strict language without even being odd); the provided implementation is very similar to the reference implementation of streams for Scheme in SICP. The following program will thus unnecessarily compute the square root of -1:

object WadlerTest {
  def countdown(n: Int): Stream[Int] =
    Stream.cons(n, countdown(n-1));
  def sqrt(n: Double): Double = {
    System.out.println("sqrt: called with " + n);
    Math.sqrt(n);
  }
  def main(args: Array[String]): unit = {
    countdown(4) map { n => sqrt(n) } take(5) print
  }
}

The syntax can also be bizarre at times, a motley of Java-isms and proper FP style. For example,

{ n => sqrt(n) }

is η-reducible to sqrt, but Scala would not compile it with this definition of sqrt. Rewriting sqrt thus:

  def sqrt = { n: Double =>
  ...

now sqrt can be passed to map – but the automatic cast from Int to Double is no longer performed. Eek.

Moral of the story? I’m learning Haskell.

… as in General Election, not General Electric. Or, to be precise, the federal election. Today is the last chance to vote for those who have not voted in advance, so it’s going to be a cliffhanger, not just for Canadians but also for a lot of us here in the States.

Why, you might ask. Well, all the rhetoric made by a proportion of liberals after the 2004 elections is predicated on Canada having a Liberal government. Both capital and lower-case ‘L’. As of tomorrow morning, that might not be the case. Meanwhile, American conservatives would be cheering on the man from Alberta, Stephen Harper, who appears to be triangulating himself between his core conservative supporters on one end, and the electorate at large on another

Would this be a mirror of the 1993 federal election? It saw the right-wing vote splintering, and as a result, an 11-year liberal majority, before the 2004 election returned the outgoing minority government. Would the NDP supplant the liberals as the main left-of-centre party? Assuming the voting pattern in Ontario is stable, the Liberals’ long-term future probably hinges on the outcomes in Quebec (traditionally a Liberals-BQ contest, with the Libs imploding) and British Columbia (Liberals vs NDP).

With the lack of PR, it’s hard to predict the final outcome, so mine is probably as valid as half the predictions out there:

.. with Michael Ignatieff narrowly winning his riding by a margin of < 2000 votes. No clear winner, but with the two main incoming opposition parties losing support they would probably not rock the boat, so the minority government might last more than 2 years. The NDP would probably prefer to hang on to its gains as long as possible as well.

Categories: Canada, Election, Politics

My Nokia 770, pre-ordered on Nov 14th, finally arrived this Thursday, shipping after exactly one month (to FedEx’s credit, the 3-day shipping ended up taking 1 day). I had an exam in the morning and a paper due later that day, so it wasn’t until Friday that I laid my hand on it.

First impression? It’s smaller than expected – about the same dimension as a PDA, rotated 90° and stretched slightly along the width. And the screen is crystal-sharp!

On the downside, application load times are on the sluggish side, and the OOM killer kicks in a bit too often, wspecially when browsing Flash-heavy sites.

Some third-party applications are on the unstable side – the WebCore-based mini browser crashes whenever one types into a password field; the ScummVM game Beneath a Steel Sky does not display an icon in the task bar, making it impossible to kill without first installing X Terminal. Hail killall!

Need to set up my Linux box for Maemo development over the break, so I could start porting Quarry. Chess is great, but sometimes one feels like Go or Reversi…

This post typed on a 770

Kudos to Yahoo for making the Internet a more productive environment. I still have no access to their new, beta, webmail interface, but on the other hand, instant search works just fine. And it’s a mind-blowing experience.

Here’s how to enable it, for those of you who are clicking-averse:
    1    Go to instant.search.yahoo.com
    2    Type, e.g. weather 47401
    3    Click on Add It Now so you can use it from the main search page

Currently it does not work with Konqueror (as my roommate can attest, to his angst) but interestingly, it works with Safari. In addition to Gecko browsers like Firefox and Camino, naturally. Using AJAX, the page continuously runs queries based on the currently-typed search term, and if the search engine has a current result with a high enough rating, the result is appears in a bubble under the search box. Without pressing enter!

This is like the flip side of Google Suggest . Google’s approach is to provide the most common search terms that match what you’re typing. Yahoo gives you the most likely answer, but only if there is a reasonably good answer – and in this way, it’s different from, say, Google’s “I’m feeling lucky”.

Search terms I’ve tried successfully:

• weather zipcode (e.g., weather 47405)
• exchange rate code1 code2 (e.g., exchange rate USD IDR). Order matters for this, exchange rate has to appear at the front – which makes sense, really.
• movie zipcode
• gas price zipcode

Awesome stuff. Google better watch it’s back!
]]> http://hircus.wordpress.com/2005/09/25/yahoo-search/feed/ 0 hircus http://hircus.wordpress.com/2005/06/07/dusk-of-an-age-apple-wwdc-post-keynote-predictions/ http://hircus.wordpress.com/2005/06/07/dusk-of-an-age-apple-wwdc-post-keynote-predictions/#comments Tue, 07 Jun 2005 01:05:00 +0000 Michel http://hircus.wordpress.com/2005/06/07/dusk-of-an-age-apple-wwdc-post-keynote-predictions/ ]]>

Well, the Jobs reality-distortion field was in full swing again. The presentation was actually quite impressive, and the slightly ironic touch “this announcement should be news to almost all of you.. unless you read the Wall Street Journal” was amusing.

The performance of Rosetta JIT-ing PPC code was quite impressive, and the fact that it just works – running MS Office 2004 and Adobe Photoshop – was astounding (Jobs made another ironic gesture by tapping impatiently waiting for Photoshop to load its plugins). We don’t know how many times the two applications have been run, and how much instructions have been pre-cached, but I guess this is what Digital’s FX! 32 must have looked like. Now that’s one company that was the Xerox PARC of the ’80s-’90s: brilliant engineers, terrible management.

So, with the impending transition of Apple to Intel processors, what does it mean for other players in both the PPC and x86 camps? Here are some thoughts:

• Sayonara, Yellow Dog Linux.Terra Soft, the parent company, might survive as a High Performance Computing vendor specializing in IBM PPC64 solutions, but seeing as Red Hat already partners with IBM, and with their engineers working on the GCC compiler for PPC64, there’s stiff competition there.
• Is Intel really planning something big? Jobs tellingly focused on projected mid-2006 performance-per-watt figures, and Intel’s Paul Otellini made a self-effacing presentation showing Apple’s 1996 TV ad showing the Intel bunny man on fire, and interpreting it as a message from Apple that Intel CPUs need to run cooler. Since I can’t see Pentium 4s running efficiently anytime soon – and that dual core Pentium D is just a kludgy hack, forcing Intel to price their fastest non-EE Pentium D below AMD’s cheapest Athlon 64 X2 – that means.. dual-core Pentium M chips with x86-64 extensions? If the Israeli team works on it, it might actually end up looking good. They might want to redesign the FSB, though – copy AMD by integrating the memory controller on-die, and letting the two cores talk to each other without going through the FSB and back? They already pay AMD to license the 64-bit extensions anyway.
• Why Intel? Power usage, assuming they are going to use Pentium Ms, and production capabilities. Though Intel chips are still not using SoI, so in that respect IBM (PowerPC) and AMD (Opteron, Athlon 64) arguably have a leg up. But it’s jarring to see Jobs comparing the two architectures as PowerPC vs Intel .. guys, let’s call an apple an apple (umm..) and acknowledge AMD’s contribution there. Debian actually calls the platform AMD64, and even Linus was known to be annoyed when Intel launched their “IA-32e” platform. You’re talking to your developers, it’s not like they’d get confused or anything. Guess the chance of us seeing some AMD-Apple collaboration is pretty low here, considering their focus on the Intel branding. Intel executives must be quite happy, after IBM’s PR wins in the console market.
• Who wrote Rosetta? Presumably Transitive, and their low-key behind the scene approach probably explains why they were not named directly. Considering Rosetta was pretty much the coolest part of the keynote, probably as well for Jobs. It is interesting that the blurb on the site includes
  

  “Transitive expects to announce that a second computer OEM will deploy products enabled by its technology during the 1st half of 2005 and that others will deploy QuickTransit before the end of the year. Unfortunately, strict confidentiality obligations prevent us from discussing these relationships in any detail.”

  Timing sounds about right..

• People speculating on running OS X on generic hardware are probably (slightly) deluded. I can see the technical possibility of running OS X on a suitably modified virtualizer, like VMware – the changes required might be as little as having a suitable ID reported by the BIOS – but a commercial solution will never be made available. The PearPC team’s job has just been made much simpler though.
• Universal Binaries. Guess fat binaries don’t sound as cool. Oh well. Not a new feature, guys – NEXTSTEP did it (though of course NEXTSTEP is OS X’s older brother). Even Mac OS did it. And, if you’re on a Unix/X11 platform, ROX does it too.

The transition being stretched to several years is good news though. I’ll probably ditch my iBook – Linux desktops are looking pretty much almost there (wireless configuration, hardware management), and I like the feeling of helping out push a free solution rather than selfishly buying into the advance guard. And trying out Gtk#/Mono and Java-Gnome apps are much less convenient on a Mac!

So if anyone wants an iBook G4 1GHz, 768 MB RAM, in pristine condition around August 2004, let me know. If you want to wait for the eBay auction, that’s cool too.

Categories: apple, intel, amd, emulation, keynote, wwdc

Eric and I were discussing scoping in Scheme and Python earlier today, our third over the past few weeks – and we finally nailed it shut. The first time he brought up dynamic scoping in Common Lisp and how Prof. Friedman dislikes it; the second was on how Python appears to have dynamic scoping (which turns out to be true, pre-Python 2.2), and now, thanks to Wikipedia, I think we have it right.

Provided Eric gets the H211 Introduction to Programming (Honors) class, which is in Python, and I get the C211 Introduction to Programming (Scheme), our discussion should stand us in good steed, though funnily today I played the Python guy and he played the Scheme one.

I’m going to show the examples, both in Scheme and Python; the first one in each section would appear to show that the language in question features dynamic scoping, which is incorrect as both actually do lexical scoping.

Scheme:
Bad:

(let ((pi 3.1415))
 (define area
  (lambda (r)
   (* pi r r)))
 (display (area 10))
 (newline)
 (set! pi 3)
 (display (area 10)))

Good:

(let ((pi 3.1415))
 (define area
  (lambda (r)
   (* pi r r)))
 (display (area 10))
 (newline)
 (let ((pi 3))
  (display (area 10))))

Python:
Bad:

pi = 3.1415
def area(r):
 return pi*r*r
area(10)
pi = 3
area(10)

Good:

pi = 3.1415
pi_holder = 10
def create_area():
 pi_holder = pi  # local pi_holder, different from pi_holder outside
 def area(r):
  return pi_holder*r*r
 return area
area = create_area()
area(10)    # 314.15
pi_holder    # Still 10
pi_holder = 3
area(10)    # Still 314.15

The above works, but is a bit problematic. I introduced pi_holder=10 to show that, (1), pi_holder inside of create_area() is a local variable; (2), that this local pi_holder is the one that is in area’s scope, and thus changing the value of pi_holder does not affect it.

Isn’t it easier to just do pi = pi ? Well, that does not work. My initial hunch was that Python reads the LHS of the expression, decided pi has been redeclared as a local variable, and thus since it’s not been initialized it got confused trying to assign it the value of itself. But it’s actually worse; this code does not work either:

x = 42
def local_var_test():
 temp = x
 print temp  # 42
 x = temp
 print x   # 42?

Surprise! Python won’t let you do that either. Take out the last two lines and the code works, though. Basically, if in the block a variable is declared anywhere, it is a local variable everywhere in that block, and trying to refer to a variable declared in the surrounding scope, even before the local declaration, will fail.

But this is where default parameters come in handy. A better way to rewrite the clunky code above is as follows:

pi = 3.1415
def create_area(pi = pi):
 def area(r):
  return pi*r*r
 return area
area = create_area()
area(10)    #314.15
pi = 3
area(10)    #314.15

So Python has static scoping after all. The thing to bear in mind is that Scheme functions are named closures, while Python functions inherit the surrounding scope, so to freeze the variables you depend on you have to wrap your function definition inside another function that copies in the values you need into its local variables.

References:

• Python programming language (Wikipedia): Closures
• Scope (Wikipedia)

And the funny thing is, I started the day trying to find good dynamic languages that run on the Java platform (platform envy, I guess, since .NET more prominently touts its language neutrality). Sun’s finally catching up, though – Tim Bray wrote a few months back about the Coyote project to support dynamic languages in Sun’s open source IDE, NetBeans, and pointed to an interesting Sun-developed scripting language, Pnuts. Which reminded me of Groovy and Boo.

Googling for groovy boo .net – Groovy being a Ruby-like scripting language for Java that received a lot of attention a few months ago, and then taken some flak over its development model, and Boo being the Python-like language for .NET – yields this very interesting Slashdot discussion that led me to such intriguing functional OO languages as Scala and Nice. .NET fans do not get to have all the fun!

Groovy, on the other hand, seems rather disappointing. Oh well. Scala looks more like Haskell, but with dynamic type inference (like Boo).. yay!

Update – 2005/06/06

Realized a few days ago, but haven’t gotten round to posting about it, that I was unfairly comparing Scheme and Python, and that Python methods are closures in themselves. Note:

pi = 3.1415
def area(r):
 return pi*r*r
print area(10)  # 314.15
def test():
 pi = 3
 print area(10) # 314.15
test()

In the earlier example, overriding the value of pi with pi = 3 is the equivalent of doing (set! pi 3) in Scheme, i.e. it will change the value of the variable that both the top-level pi, which is the one that area knows. In a dynamic scope, which uses a stack to figure out which value assignment should apply, pi = 3 would affect the call to area just after it.

My comments for the latest I, Cringely column, Inflection Point (May 12, 2005):

Dear Bob,

I really enjoy reading your “Inflection Point” article, but I question
your interpretation about the computing powers it require.. as I understand the Google FAQ for it, it would seem that the Google servers just act as normal proxy servers, with most of the “smarts” being done by the client, running on the user’s computer. The only difference as far as the server is concerned is being able to send only the changed parts of a page instead of the full page – again, this requires processing on the client-side to update the local cache.

As for interactive formats like Flash, rendering them on the server makes no sense – the idea of a Web Accelerator is to decrease latency, not increase it. Running Flash on a Google server would be akin to, say, running a VNC or Apple Remote Desktop session. The bandwith required to transmit at 15 fps, say, the content of the Flash window, plus the computational overhead of doing the video encoding on the fly, plus the lack of responsiveness experienced by the user as any response entered has to travel to the Google server and back, makes this a non-starter.

Very intriguing analysis on the X-box 360 and Yahoo Music Engine; it is quite interesting to see how Microsoft’s OEMs are going to respond to the X-box. Not to mention Intel! There is something worrying about both Google and Yahoo’s recent software releases, though. Google Desktop and Web Accelerator, and Yahoo Music Engine are all Windows/x86 only. Granted that Google Desktop would make no sense on a Mac, but as a Mac+Linux user I am rather concerned by Yahoo’s push. Especially since Real, which according to your analysis stands to lose quite a bit from Yahoo’s push, is the most Linux-friendly of media software providers. One only hope they could avoid Netscape’s fate – the company they seem to parallel closely (both are at some point
much-criticized for bloat, and then announced open-source initiatives) – since at this point, it still takes a stable corporate presence to push video standards..

Regards,

–
Michel Salim

(As posted on LJ, in an attempt to figure out if Technorati has problems with tracking LJ blogs)

Stayed up rather late in the hope that I get to witness the Lib Dems getting their 60th seat in Westminster, but that was not to be.. after wondering whether they’d actually get there, considering a lot of the 20-odd seats left would be in Northern Ireland, which has had an entirely different political map for at least over a century, I woke up late this morning to a nice surprise: Lib Dems are at 62 seats!.

A lot of the gains are taken from Labour, and three of their seats fell back to the Conservatives (but two of those are won at by-elections and one was a Labour defector, so it looks quite good), but the Lib Dems are now in second place in 160 seats, 50 more than before. And they’re doing this despite the reduction in seat allotments north of the border, which on paper should hurt them more since they are historically stronger in Scotland than in England, but turns out Labour losses there more than make up for it.

Students seem to vote disproportionately in their favour, with Bristol West and Cambridge turning yellow, which bodes well for the future. A slight dampener to hopes of a more representative election system (with PR elements, preferably first-past-the-post plus a top-up party list ala the Scottish Parliament) is that apparently some pro-PR Labour MPs lost their seats [This is a low, Guardian blog]. The Lib Dems and smaller parties are currently way under-represented – with their 22.3% share of the vote, in a pure PR system the Lib Dems would have over 140 seats, instead of the current 62 (unlikely to be more than at most 63 or 64 when all dust settles). Meanwhile, Labour has 355 seats to the Conservatives’ 197 despite leading them by less than 3% in the popular vote.

A good analysis of the Lib Dem result here [Markos Moulitsas, Guardian], and thanks to the_wild_iris for linking to a humorous guide [Daily Kos] to the British electoral system. Congrats on Solihull ousting the Cons!

[Update - 1:36PM] It’s amazing how well the exit poll predictions hold up [Scotsman] – Labour majority is now at 65 seats with 5 seats still to declare, compared to the 66 seats predicted yesterday

Categories: Lib Dems, Britain, Elections, Politics

The way Nick Farrell abused the word ‘download’, he’s either doing a very good job at emulating a home user, or he’s way out of his depth:

…

There are three phases to the installation. The first from the boot-up disk downloads the core components. Then there is a reboot, which if you are not careful and have a Windows partition on the machine, will download the wrong operating system in the middle of your reboot.

If you do get through to the second reboot, and there is no indication which icon you have to press to do that, then Suse will download a list of software which it thinks you will need.
…

Amazing what Linux Today editors pick as being newsworthy nowadays. The only worthy point in the article is that Beagle is not installed by default, but from past discussions on the kernel’s inotify interface and the memory usage of Beagle itself, perhaps SuSE is making a wise choice for the.. ahem.. ‘home users’.

Ninety years ago today, the Ottomans started the pogrom that led to the Armenian Genocide, a topic that is still so controversial that just a few years back Turkey recalled its ambassador to France after the National Assembly there passed a resolution condemning it.

You could show your sympathy for the victims by lighting a candle for them. Atom Ergoyan’s movie Ararat [imdb.com] might prove instructive, both in highlighting the controversial nature of the topic and in understanding how the issue affect Armenians today, even in diaspora, especially in the light of recent China-Japan tensions.

Thanks to The Head Heeb for writing about this – you might want to read his post for links to reports of commemorations throughout the world.

As I wrote on the commemorative site,

To the genocide victims, may your plight be recognized and may the world come to abhor violence…

From the Beeb:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has been elected as the pope – the head of the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics.

Taking the name Pope Benedict XVI, the 78-year-old German appeared on the balcony of the Vatican palace.

…

A close friend and confidante of Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI is also known as a fellow conservative.

For more that 20 years he was head of the congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican – the Vatican’s guardian of orthodoxy.

The BBC’s William Horsley in Rome says his papacy is sure to continue John Paul II’s strongly traditional interpretation of the Catholic faith, including opposition to abortion, homosexuality, priestly marriage and women priests.

So, no reform for now, it seems the idea is to elect an older Pope who would continue John Paul II’s policies, providing time to digest them, and shelve changes until the next Pope’s reign. Although transitional periods are normally marked by the succesion of someone closer to the center..

An interesting speculative piece in The Guardian put forward the Archbishop of Jakarta, Julius Darmaatmadja, as an outside candidate for the papacy:

Julius Darmaatmadja, 70, Indonesian, archbishop of Jakarta. Darmaatmadja is widely respected in the Muslim community, an important achievement in the world’s most populous Muslim nation. He was outspoken in his opposition to the war in Iraq and has cautioned against linking Islam with terrorism. He is also socially conservative.

Highly unlikely – after all, Francis Arinze from Nigeria would share his good relations with the Muslim community, and Catholics and other Christians are much more on the map in Nigeria than Indonesia, which is 89% Muslim. Then again, the late Pope, John Paul II, came from a then-Communist-ruled country, and he was not even on any watch-list prior to his election.

At the very least, it’s an honour to have been named to such a list. The Guardian’s left-wing heritage might make them more attuned to the Church’s social mission than, say, the New York Times, but as Florence’s Ennio Antonelli said, “The new pope has already been chosen by the Lord. We just have to pray to understand who he is.”.

An Indonesian pope would probably be conservative on reproductive issues (sex education in Catholic schools there are definitely of the abstinence-only form), but tolerant of other faiths and strike a middle ground on matters of economics – fair trade as opposed to anti-globalisation.

When even the Archbishop of Chicago gets quoted thus on contraception:

A reporter asked Cardinal Francis George of Chicago in a news conference last week whether the church would consider approving the use of condoms to prevent AIDS in places like Africa.

“Your solution is to exterminate the poor?” he said, referring to the births that contraception would prevent. “The doctrine of the church isn’t going to change, and so you work with it as best as you can.”

it is probably premature to expect a change on that front, and as such, a papacy that at least focusing more closely on the needs of the developing world should be welcomed by even us liberals.

A meta-blog entry about the Guardian’s blog entry on the environment. Anyway, of equal interest to the entry itself is the comments that accompanied it .. it appears that they have yet to implement an effective comment spam countermeasure.

Some choice examples below:

my names chad and im a canadian from canada. we have whales in canada this is true, but we also have other types of marine life, such as penguins, and sea bass, they need saving too. all th canadian animals need saving. god bless canada fnyeah fnyeah
Comments posted by: chad at April 14, 2005 02:46 PM

hi im greg, im a canadian too. its good too see people lookin after our beautiful canadian animals. there the most beautiful animals in the world, because they are canadian. my favourite one is the canadian polar bear. hey chad i hope god blesses canada too, but seriouseley, how much more blessing does one country need. maybe we could get together some time over a cup of canadian white tea, and talk about our beautiful homeland? email me.greg
Comments posted by: greg at April 14, 2005 02:52 PM

ps chad.
i bonned your sister
Comments posted by: greg at April 14, 2005 02:55 PM

Reading it just after reading Wikipédia’s articles on Engrish and Franglais makes it even funnier. Ah, the funny coincidences that life throws your way..

… is the first release of a Linux distribution in a long time that I could cheer until my voice becomes hoarse (ha!) without going to very technical explanations. In other words, a lot of things Just Works™

Software installs/updates and power management.. the latter is probably an eye-popper to a veteran Linux laptop user, and the former, even Red Hat never managed to get right out of the box (while Debian never managed to get pretty-looking). The thing that prompted me to write this, though, is removable media support. Plug in a USB drive (in my case, the TunePlug from Magnatune, with 10 MP3 rock albums bundled) and up it pops on your desktop, with the correct volume label. Naturally suspicious, I did a quick directory listing of /media and, to my pleasant surprise, the mount-point was dynamically created with the same name.

I was impressed enough to start looking at fixing my desktop’s loud fans (to no avail, but I chanced upon Shuttle’s new BTX line, the XPC i-series. Gorgeous, alas, it’s for Intel CPUs.. and I’m not a fan (pun intended) of the Pentium 4’s design, even with the bolt-on 64-bit support). And looking at the notebook situation in Intel land.. which led me to humbly revise my opinion of Dell. Their Inspiron 700m is.. ooh!

Pity about the battery life though. Let’s see what Fujitsu could do with the new AMD Turion..

This is so far the best-written article I’ve read attacking the unconstitutional march of religious fundamentalism in the States:

The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model.

…

In this practice, any individual can use the courts to intervene in the private lives of others….

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

A couple of days ago I created a search plugin for this great encyclopedia; while it’s slowly making its way to the site, you could download it from here.

Just untar it in your searchplugins directory, restart your browser and enjoy.

Categories: Firefox, Mozilla, Philosophy, Reference

(Kudos to Oddiophile for the Technorati tagging bookmarklet)

From The Globe and Mail: North Korea admits having nuclear weapons:

…
Previously, North Korea had reportedly told U.S. negotiators in private talks that it had nuclear weapons and might test one of them. The North’s UN envoy said last year that the country had “weaponized” plutonium from its pool of 8,000 nuclear spent fuel rods. Those rods contained enough plutonium for several bombs.

But Thursday’s statement was North Korea’s first public acknowledgment that it has nuclear weapons.
…

When a superpower uses the WMD excuse to attack a country that does not have any, and meanwhile, countries like North Korea that are harder to attack get away with it, it does not quite make the world a safer place.. the phrase paper tiger comes to mind.

Personally, I am all for humanitarian interventions, and it is good to see the US at least speaking up more strongly than most other Western nations in the case of Darfur. But when realpolitik muddies the water, even decisions taken with good intentions, such as this, might, understandably, be misconstrued by others.

Instruction: fill in the blank with the first US Administration that comes to mind as you are reading the following passage:

The contemporary United States expresses the greatest of all paradoxes. It is at one and the same time a democracy — at any rate a pluralist open society — and an empire. No other country has ever been, or had, both things at once. Or not for long. And there must be some question about the durability of this present coexistence, too. Already spokesmen of the … Administration say plainly that their foreign and military policy is incompatible with the disloyalty and division that stem from a deliberative Congress and an inquisitive press. They laughably exaggerate the reflective capacity of the first and the adversary character of the second, but they have a point. If it is to have the least chance of success, their strategy calls for an imposed national unanimity, a well-cultivated awareness of “enemies within,” and a strong draft of amnesia.

If you had guessed George W. Bush, you could be forgiven for the mistake. The missing word was Reagan, the passage taken from Christopher Hitchens’ defense of Noam Chomsky, in his 1985 essay
The Chorus and Cassandra.

The passage is as relevant then as it is now – just like the following quote:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
John Kerry, 1971

As Iraqis brave insurgent attacks to vote today, let us hope that, unlike the war in Indo-china that Kerry courageously denounced, the American mission in Iraq can still be salvaged. They owe the Iraqi people at least that much.

From The Gamer’s Nook,

CLEVELAND — Joining the animated fray, the United Church of Christ today (Jan. 24) said that Jesus’ message of extravagant welcome extends to all, including SpongeBob Squarepants – the cartoon character that has come under fire for allegedly holding hands with a starfish.

“Absolutely, the UCC extends an unequivocal welcome to SpongeBob,” the Rev. John H. Thomas, the UCC’s general minister and president, said, only partly in jest. “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.”

For that matter, Thomas explained, the 1.3-million-member church, if given the opportunity, would warmly receive Barney, Big Bird, Tinky-Winky, Clifford the Big Red Dog or, for that matter, any who have experienced the Christian message as a harsh word of judgment rather than Jesus’ offering of grace.

The UCC’s welcome comes in the wake of laughable accusations by James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, that the popular SpongeBob and other well-known cartoon characters are crossing “a moral line” by stressing tolerance in a national We Are Family Foundation-sponsored video that will be distributed to U.S. schools on March 11, 2005.

After all the hysteria surrounding TV cartoon by right-wing fundamentalists such as James C. Dobson from the Focus on the Family, it is refreshing to see a humorous, inclusive response hopefully more representative of American Christians than those who are more outspokenly misrepresenting them in the media.

Further reading:
• Photos of a “visit” by SpongeBob
• Wikipedia entry on UCC
• Wikipedia entry on United Church of Canada, a similar organization in Canada
• Older entry on my other blog on Clinton’s speech at the Riverside Church in NY, affiliated with UCC

As evidenced by the Ongoing article Mini for Mom?, Canadian seniors are apparently quite tech-savvy.. to the point of being irritated at Microsoft.

.. this Wikipedia article reminds me of the People’s Front of Judaea and the Judaean People Front in that classic Monty Python movie..

The tumultuous presidential elections in Ukraine is finally over.. at least on the surface. There were worries that the Russian government of Vladimir Putin, after publicly backing Viktor Yanukovych, the anointed heir of outgoing (now ex-) President Leonid Kuchma, would continue in its refusal to acknowledge the result of the Dec 26 rerun, which Yuschenko decidedly won by a margin of around 8%. Considering Russian involvements in separatist movements in Moldova and Georgia, such continued hostility could have been potentially disastrous for the region.

Yulia Timoshenko (MosNews)

It is quite interesting to note that a closed Yuschenko ally, Yulia Timoshenko, considered by some to be too radical for the Prime Minister position,
extended an olive branch to Russia in an editorial published by
the Moscow Times on January 12th. One week later Yuschenko’s side sealed victory when the Supreme Court rejected Yanukovych’s last appeal of the results, and the Russian government finally offered its congratulations to the President-elect.

On the inauguration day itself, it is notable that while heads of state from the ex-Soviet Baltic republics and the ex-satellites in East Europe attended – and outgoing US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his last overseas trip – Russia only sent a low-level dignitary. Relations between Ukraine and Russia is likely to be thornier than that between US and the European Union for the time being.

It is interesting to note that Timoshenko is insisting that she is not in the running for any position in the new government. That she will get a position is assured, so her insistence might be aimed at assuaging Russia and the Russian speakers, or part of negotiations between the parties in Rada, the parliament. The line-up of the upcoming cabinet will be something to watch: the challenge will be to push for reforms, which could potentially be economically painful for the industrial East, and moving closer to Europe, without alienating Ukraine’s giant neighbour to the East. The upcoming constitutional changes ceding power from the President to the Rada, originally pushed through by Kuchma’s administration as the chance of a Yanukovych victory grew dimmer, might throw a spanner in the works, unless Yuschenko capitalized on his popular support by holding snap parliamentary elections. Heady times..

Apple – QuickTime – Macworld San Francisco 2005 Expo Keynote

• 101 Apple Retail Stores
• Latest, largest store in London

I get an ironic sense of déja vù at this point – remember that the Mac was launched with a Superbowl ad referring to George Orwell’s 1984? Think of ‘room 101′ and the fact that 1984 is set in London.

Spotlight demo

• OS X Tiger froze when Jobs opened an image full-screen – guess it’s not just Bill Gates that’s having problems with OS demos. He handled it quite well though
• iTunes Artwork screensaver is cool

Apple’s QuickTime server seems totally swamped right now, so I’ll post this now and add to this entry later. Of course, you can check out the Mac mini, iPod Shuffle and Pages right now..

Update: 01/12/05 1:37 PM

• Mail.app integrates with iPhoto and Spotlight
• Mail.app has slideshow for images (with ‘add to iPhoto’ support)
• They use the House of Flying Daggers trailer for the H.264 demo.. nice!
• on-screen controls from iPhoto used in both Mail.app and QT7
• Dashboard widgets are really awesome – Konfabulator stands no chance, alas
• Steve Jobs’ favourite onomatopoeic word: boom
• Colour scheme of iChat icon changed from blue-yellow to blue-white?
• No exact date for Tiger launch – still ‘first half of 2005′
• iPhoto photo editing seems much improved. Quick links to other photos in the same album, and much more options. Remains to be seen if resizing a photo using iPhoto still results in a much larger image than using, say, Gimp
• Al Gore was in the audience (he’s an Apple VP, IIRC)
• Am I falling under the RDF? For the iMovie demo Jobs used Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Over the Rainbow, which I adore..
• Mac mini: BYODKM – bring your own display, keyboard, mouse. Tiny 6″x6″x2″ computer (power adapter external, obviously, and it uses 2.5″ laptop drives). Very impressive when Jobs showed it around for the first time.. while on the HDTV screen, it was superimposed with an iPod mini!
• iPod: iPod adapter now available on, among others, Scion cars. Reminds me of a Scion advertisement I saw in a cinema recently; I recall thinking that the Scion logo looks a lot like Toyota’s .. well, it’s because it is one. Just like Honda has Accura and Toyota has Lexus for their high-end models, now they have Scion to target Gen Y yuppies.
• iPod Shuffle: Hmm, not sure about this one. Nice and small, not so much more expensive than a normal thumbdrive, but.. I like to know what song I’m listening too. Though I’m tempted to get one to use when exercising ..

From Jakarta Post via AP: Taiwan is accusing China of blocking its tsunami relief efforts:

Taiwan’s vice president on Monday accused rival China of trying to block Taiwanese efforts to send tsunami relief to Southeast Asia using military aircraft and vessels.

Taiwan has offered to use the craft to speed up delivery of rice, medical goods and other supplies to Indonesia and Thailand — but Taiwanese officials said those governments were concerned about China’s possible objection.

Indonesia and Thailand have not publicly confirmed those concerns.

…

Vice President Annette Lu said China also blocked Taiwan from attending an international relief summit in Indonesia last week.

Emphasis mine. The first issue, the use of military aircraft, seems like it will be perceived as a de facto assertion of independence, and it is understandable that the governments of Indonesia and Thailand would not want to offend China in this matter.

The second issue is more tragic. Like during the SARS crisis, China is hell-bent on preventing Taiwanese participation in international organizations and fora, even those dealing with humanitarian matters (like the WHO, and this relief summit). The irony is that during the Cold War, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) already had a seat in the United Nations, even though it is de facto and de jure not independent. Taiwan, on the other hand, is de facto independent, which makes its exclusion from international bodies all the more important.

So it’s Chinese callousness against Taiwanese opportunism. Not a pretty sight.

A similar development is occuring in Aceh: the military warning aid workers that separatists have taken shelter in survivor camps, the government denying this, and Australia feeling compelled to state that their troops on the ground will not be involved militarily.

Civilian control over the Indonesian military is, alas, still rather shaky, even though the current president is an ex-general. Whether this has to do with the re-appointment of Abdurrahman Wahid’s defense minister, Dr. Juwono Sudarsono – Indonesia’s first civilian holding that post – or just general intransigence on the part of the military, now excluded from politics, protecting its turf, is hard to say.

There has been reports of the military interfering with delivery of aid, but at least for now foreigners are allowed on the ground, putting constraints on the former’s freedom of action. The lesson of history is that people don’t learn from it – Aceh was turning into our Vietnam + Afghanistan + Iraq combined – the guerillas are probably less popular than the Viet-cong among the local populace but more than the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, the army earns a tidy sum contracting out to protect Western oil and gas fields, and both sides are alleged to be involved in drug trafficking.. hopefully the tsunami gave all sides a chance to start anew.

After all, even piracy in the Strait of Malacca is down to nothing.. at least for the moment.

As covered by London Free Press:

With an SUV body mounted, Stephens said the Sequel promises a 500-kilometre range and acceleration to 100 km/h in about nine seconds — certainly functional numbers in today’s world.

Of course, this is still a concept car. Hydrogen-powered private cars will not really take off until a network of refueling stations is established, though using hydrogen for public transport vehicles will be a nice way to demonstrate their feasibility.

GM also unveiled a couple of hybrid products, joining Toyota, Honda, Ford (whose Escape Hybrid is the first hybrid SUV and whose CEO Bill Ford Jr. considers himself an environmentalist), and Chrysler too.

I was rather sceptical at first about Ford’s SUV, thinking to myself great, the increased fuel efficiency is going to be wasted on accelerating a bulky mass of steel but apparently it gets 35 mpg, better than a normal fuel-efficient sedan like the Honda Civic.

All in all, it is quite impressive that a market for fuel-efficient cars is starting to take off, even though the economic and legal incentives could have been much better (California has a state law allowing fuel-efficient cars with one occupant to use the highway lane reserved for car-poolers, but it is awaiting approval at the federal level; and the minimum mpg standard has yet to be raised for SUVs). As a reminder of what’s at stake, though, you can peruse The Detroit Project’s advertisements on fuel efficiency.

.. as expected, after garnering a share of the popular vote in the high 60s [The Scotsman]. Turnout seems to be a bit low though – voting was extended, after apparently only 30% of voters have voted by noon [NYTimes], though later reports [Reuters] claim that the final turnout was above 60%.

Both Hamas and the runner-up Mustafa Barghouti seem to be satisfied with the results, so hopefully (whether the final turnout figure was inflated or not) there is now a mandate for Abbas to pursue peace talks with Israel, streamline the security services and dissuade militant groups from launching terror attacks.

*Update* 05:47 PM – The Head Heeb has a more detailed report; correspondents on the ground reported heavy turnout, so it has been a successful election after all. Congratulations to election organizers, observers and last but not least, voters!