By
Miguel Diaz
23 Dec 2003
Well, it’s that time of year again. The halls around my office are quiet…almost too quiet. Me and about four or five other recent hires are holding down the fort while the ancient ones spend the last of their five week vacation allotments to get away during the holidays.
<p>Not that there’s anyplace I’m particularly drawn to visit this time of year, but I’d definitely like to have some time to chill. While <a href="http://www.ibm.com"><span class="caps">IBM</span></a> executives finally got their heads out of their asses and decided to give us 0-5 year employees three weeks vacation starting next year I still can’t help but feel like I’m getting jobbed.</p>
<p>The really sad thing is that I should be feeling lucky about this. The United States is the only industrialized country that does not mandate (by law) a minimum amount of paid vacation per year so the corporations could really screw us if they wanted to. By contrast the <a href="http://europa.eu.int/">European Union</a> mandates at least 4 weeks paid vacation to all employees, with several countries increasing that minimum to 6 weeks.</p>
<p>Granted, my interest in this is purely out of self-preservation (I’ll save my altruism for my animal rights rants), but I’d be hard pressed not to vote for someone who ran with a minimum paid leave law on their <a href="http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8622">platform</a> (unless it was Bush). While looking into this I found lots of <a href="http://www.cepr.net/give_me_a_break.htm">information and comparison charts</a> that really make you want to take a few extra sick days next year.</p>
By
heather mascianica
20 Dec 2003
the new year is fast approaching and you know what that means! the annual celebration at jere’s! anthony and i plan to be there for sure. how about the rest of you?
<p>anyone know jere’s number?</p>
By
Miguel Diaz
17 Dec 2003
So, last month a Michigan State grad student participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search found the 40th Mersenne Prime number. Now, I’m sure this has some major mathematical significance to someone on the order of Andrew Wiles, but I’m not him so let’s talk about the distributed computing aspect of it all.
<p>Now, I’ve been interested in distributed computing for quite a while and have lent a few cycles to <a href="http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/">some</a> <a href="http://www.distributed.net/">intriguing</a> <a href="http://www.mersenne.org/">projects</a>. Around <a href="http://www.ibm.com">here</a> the <a href="http://www-1.ibm.com/grid/">concept</a> (or a derivitive/evolution anyway) is getting to be rather large. What I find to be kind of a let down though is that using over 200,000 machines* the <span class="caps">GIMPS</span> network (w/ 9 Teraflops) wouldn’t break into the <a href="http://www.top500.org/dlist/2003/11/">top 10</a> in supercomputers. I would think that the software and/or methodology could be improved in order to acheive that.</p>
<p>I think this is significant because projects like these are an ideal place for ideas to blossom into de facto standards before corporate giants catch hold of them and turn them into proprietary abominations. Once the technology is assimilated by corporate America, there is much less we can do (from the outside anyway) to influence its evolution.</p>
<p>All that being said, obviously this voluntary-distributed computing idea does make for a wonderfully cost-effective method of getting supercomputer-caliber calculation power without begging Dad for a raise in your allowance.</p>
<p>*I realize that the computers aren’t dedicated solely to running the distributed client (in many cases running at rather low priority), and the 200,000 probably represents a large number of zombie users (like myself), but without accurate numbers I think the point is still valid.</p>
By
Miguel Diaz
16 Dec 2003
Well, it seems EMC has decided to go and purchase VMWare. The move makes sense for EMC since they need to start playing in the virtualization realm in order to remain viable in the future and acquisitions are definitely more cost effective than in house development; especially when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. But this one hurts because VMWare is such a wonderful product and EMC has a history of fucking things up.
<p>Of course then there are the conspiracy theorists who have noted that the <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/apr03/04-28EMCpr.asp">partnership</a><br />
between <span class=”caps”>EMC</span> and <a href=”http://www.microsoft.com”>Micro$oft</a> has been growing recently and, being as <span class=”caps”>VMW</span>are is far and away the most comprehensive (and probably the only viable) virtualization solution for <a href=”http://www.linux.org”>Linux</a> on the desktop (either as host or guest OS), this could be a discreet attempt by Microsoft to undermine Linux’s viability. Not that I really agree with them, but conspiracy theories are always fun.</p>
<p><span class="caps">FWIW</span>, <span class="caps">VMW</span>are was scheduled to <span class="caps">IPO</span> in 2004 and I really think accepting this offer was something of a cowardly move on their executives’ part because they would have done very well in the market with virtualization being such a hot topic these days. But you all know that saying about the “hand in the bush” or something; I guess it’s hard for anyone to say no to $650M.</p>
By
anders pearson
09 Dec 2003
Gerard
it took me about 2 hours to drink a single bottle. it’s extremely thick and dense; it noticably bends light in its vicinity. the chocolate taste is very subtle and mostly present in the aftertaste. if you like stouts, i recommend it if you can find it. if you don’t like stouts, well, there’s no hope for you…
By
anders pearson
03 Dec 2003
i'm really fascinated with the recent gnome and mozilla bounties.
i think the idea of offering bounties for development of open source code has a lot of potential. if they opened things up so other users could contribute to the bounties, it might work even better. by myself i probably don’t have enough money to really make it worth anyone hacking in a feature that i really want, but if there are others like me, each willing to contribute to a bounty, we could probably come up with a decent amount of cash.
one very apt criticism of open source software is that the programmers tend to work on things that programmers care about or are fun to work on. end users’ needs are often secondary. a nice bounty system could really improve this situation, letting actual users of the software vote with cash on what features are actually important to them. plus it helps programmers who want to work on open source code generate some income without having to sell out or get a day job.
the whole free-market approach might also help to shake off the open source community’s ‘commie’ image in the eyes of the hardcore capitalists who insist that proprietary software must be inherently better because it has monetary incentive. but it does it without actually giving up any of the advantages of open source.
of course there are all kinds of practical problems to be overcome to make it actually work, but i’m confident that it’s possible.
even without an infrastructure in place i still think that large companies and governments should look into directly funding open source projects. the US government must spend millions each year on windows licenses. if they came up with a list of issues that are actually preventing them from switching to linux and presented it to the open source community saying "we're about to give microsoft $X million dollars. if you can fix these issues, we'll instead give you that $X/2 million dollars." they would save a lot of money, and the whole world would benefit from the improved software. since microsoft operates on 85% profit margins, it shouldn't be hard for the government and maybe a few big corporations to come up with enough to fund the actual development of what they need.
honestly, i think that these kinds of models, if implemented well, have a greater long-term viability than the current commercial software industry. open source projects don’t need the overhead of an advertising department or overpaid executives.
By
Miguel Diaz
30 Nov 2003
yeah…so the best part about my thanksgiving visit with my Father and his clan would be that it is over…he’s always been a pain in the ass to deal with and this was no exception…sigh…at least we managed to discuss many of the issues with his wife before they left…would have been nice if he would have participated in the conversation a bit (hell, just stay around and listen…don’t even talk)…oh well, back to sleep…
By
anders pearson
23 Nov 2003
Gordie and i caught the spankers on the new york stop of their tour. i just saw them a few weeks ago in austin, but what the hell! they were playing on the upper west side, so it only took me about 10 minutes to get home from the show.
once again they were fantastic and funny. for the encore, they even played the Scrotum Song, which they didn't play in Austin. of course now Gordie's going to have the song stuck in his head for weeks and i'm not sure if he'll forgive me.
i was wearing my einstürzende neubauten shirt and Wammo got all excited about it so we talked about neubauten for a little bit after the show.
By
anders pearson
21 Nov 2003
making websites validate can be a pain. especially if your authoring software or CMS generates invalid markup. if you can’t change your authoring software or CMS, but you still want your site to validate, you’ll need to find another solution.
one way or another, that solution usually will end up involving <a href=”http://tidy.sourceforge.net/“>HTML Tidy</a>, which is a handy command-line tool for automatically cleaning up and fixing messy, invalid markup. it does an amazing job of turning ugly, tag-soup, pseudo-HTML into clean, nicely formatted XHTML. the usual pattern is to figure out some way to run tidy over your pages in batch mode.
now you can also do it live, on demand, right as the page is served by apache. i’ve written a nice little module that just wraps HTML Tidy and makes it available to a mod_perl enabled apache 1.x server: <a href=”http://thraxil.org/tidy/Apache-Tidy-0.1.tar.gz”>Apache::Tidy</a>.
eg, here’s the <a href=”http://thraxil.org/tidy/sample_static/source.txt”>original static badly formed, invalid HTML</a> and here’s the <a href=”http://thraxil.org/tidy/sample_static/“>tidied version</a>.
i also wrote Apache::Tidy to be <a href=”http://search.cpan.org/~kwilliams/Apache-Filter-1.022/lib/Apache/Filter.pm”>Apache::Filter</a> compliant, so you can also use it to automatically correct dynamically generated content as long as it is generated by another Apache::Filter aware perl module. eg, <a href=”http://thraxil.org/tidy/sample_perl/source.txt”>some perl code</a> being handled by <a href=”http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Apache%3A%3ARegistryFilter&mode=all”>Apache::RegistryFilter</a>, here is the <a href=”http://thraxil.org/tidy/sample_perl/“>tidied output</a>.
Mark Pilgrim
By
anders pearson
20 Nov 2003
today i got to go to a Noam Chomsky lecture. i’ve seen him talk <a href=”http://thraxil.org/nodes/202”>before</a>, and it’s always a thought provoking experience.
today’s lecture was called “After the War” and was some first-rate Bush-bashing. he talked some about the current administration’s policy of “anticipatory self-defense”, which is identical to the policy of imperial japan that brought us that day in 1941 that will live in infamy.
while Chomsky’s ideas and his books are first-rate, he’s not known for being a terribly dynamic, exciting speaker. fortunately, while his prepared talk was a little flat, he livens up considerably during a question/answer period. when he gets excited or annoyed at a question, he actually gets passionate and really starts to put some energy into it. today he even <em>swore</em>.
one of the better questions that was asked was, after he’d talked about how the government has managed to completely ignore the largest anti-war protests ever in the history of the world, how could activists hope to actually achieve anything in a fight against the money and media. Chomsky’s reply was to point out that 1) a bunch of people taking the afternoon off from work every once in a while to march is a pretty lame excuse for activism and 2) activists in much worse situations have managed to pull off much greater successes with fewer resources. his example was the recent brazillian election of Luiz Inacio da Silva, despite strong opposition from the brazillian and american media and governments. they managed to organize in a country where if you speak out against the government, the police will, in Chomsky’s words, “beat the shit out of you”.
he had plenty more to say too. you can probably get the gist of it by reading his <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805074007/“>new book</a>.
almost immediately after the Chomsky lecture, i met up with jP and a couple of his friends to go be in the studio audience for a taping of <a href=”http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/thedailyshowwithjonstewart/“>the Daily Show</a>. it was an interesting transition. the only other TV show i’ve seen filmed was a crazy gameshow in China. it was relatively low-budget compared to the Daily Show and i had a pretty tough time just figuring out what was going on most of the time.
the daily show was pretty impressive to watch live. they were really efficient. no retakes, no elaborate setups. it took less time to film than it takes to air.