As a public service, I thought that this might be of interest: a Python program to load your iPod Shuffle.
Monthly Archives: April 2005
Sarge vs. The Hoary Hedgehog?
Internetnews.com ran an interesting article about the synergy and tension beween Ubuntu Linux and classic . Ian Murdoch had this to say…
But Ian Murdoch, Debian’s founding father, does not believe Ubuntu’s popularity bodes well for Debian-based distros.
“If anything, Ubuntu’s popularity is a net negative for Debian,” Murdoch told internetnews.com. “It’s diverged so far from Sarge that packages built for Ubuntu often don’t work on Sarge. And given the momentum behind Ubuntu, more and more packages are being built like this. The result is a potential compatibility nightmare.”
Murdoch argues that if Ubuntu were truly compatible with Debian, all of the energy going into it could be directed at Sarge and toward getting it released, which is what would really benefit the Debian developer ecosystem as a whole.
“I understand what the Ubuntu folks are trying to do, and they’re doing lots of good work that will eventually find its way into Debian,” Murdoch said. “But what we really need right now as a community is for Sarge to be released.
“In that respect, Ubuntu’s popularity is more harmful than helpful.”
Ian, you are missing the point. I suppose that isn’t really surprising, since the reason that Ubuntu exists at all is because Debian has lost its way.
The reason that Ubuntu exists is actually pretty simple: no existing distribution had the features that people wanted. Among things that people want but have not received are:
- regular releases
- modern updates to windowing software and applications
- excitement! A sense that things are really moving.
Yes, the guys behind Ubuntu could have tried to work within Debian. But they would be forced to participate in what seems like an incredibly bloated, lethargic, unresponsive behemoth. Sarge has been years in the making, and is still at least months away from being ready to ship. The current “stable” release of Debian was first released in January of 2002 for pity’s sake.
And another pet peeve of mine: installation. Debian has the most quirky, oddball install of any popular distribution I’ve found. With Ubuntu, you download an iso, burn it, boot it, answer a couple of questions, and you are done.
Ubuntu should hurt Debian. Debian has seemingly worked at dispersing excitement and enthusiasm rather than generating it. It seems always to be looking backwards, rather than forwards. Some people think that is important, but for a project that relies upon the enthusiasm and excitement of volunteers, it doesn’t seem like a viable strategy.
Opening Day 2005
Well, the game was not the epic stuff that dreams are made of. The Blue Jays roughed up the A’s pretty good, they lead 10-0 at one point, and the A’s did little to quell the fears that they could be a below .500 team this season. The Blue Jay hitters peppered the field with balls that seemed to pathologically be where A’s players were not, and the A’s helped the matter with sloppy fielding, balls skipping over gloves, balls skipping under gloves, balls bouncing off the chest, and hey, even forgetting to cover first base. Sigh.
Still, I took a lot of pictures, had a pizza, an ice cream sandwich and a licorice rope (back on my diet today) and had a great time. Nothing like getting off the Bart in the colliseum and smelling the tailgater’s barbecue wafting over you, and realizing that baseball season has begun.
Poison Your Kids with Fast Food and Stupidity!
Apparently a fast food chain in Tennessee has decided to use material from Kent Hovind (aka Doctor Dino) to adorn the placemats they hand out to kids in an attempt to “educate” them about dinosaurs. It’s a pity really, because Dr. Dino doesn’t actually know anything about dinosaurs. Or rather, virtually everything he does know would seem to be wrong. Try checking out the front the front and the back.
Scientist’s have theorized that the T-rex could probably breathe fire.
If you could get near him, you could very easily pull off the arm of the T-Rex, He would die because he would bleed to death.
I think the stupidity is significantly enhanced by the ransom-note typography as well.
On the pope’s funeral…
Estimates are varied, but it seems clear that over a million people saw the pope’s body before he was finally buried over the weekend. Keeping with the spirit of brainwagon, let’s not dwell on the greater impact this man’s life had on the world, but rather just concentrate on the trivial aspects.
Assume that each person in line is standing 18″ from the person in front of them (that’s a pretty tight line, but let’s work with that. One million people standing in such a line works out to 284 miles. If we assume a reasonable walking pace of three miles per hour, then we have people walking past the pope 24 hours a day for nearly four days. Yes, I know, they weren’t single file, but sheesh. It’s still an amazing turnout.
Scanner Cameras
Courtesy of the Make Blog, here is Mike Golembewski’s page on Scanner Cameras. You can get more details on building a similar camera from Jason Yang’s thesis, A Light Field Camera for Image Based Rendering or Wang and Heidrich’s Design of an Inexpensive Very High Resolution Scan Camera System. Good stuff.
Spammers wear an IE hat…
I must admit, I’ve been a teeny bit perplexed by one of my website statistics: the majority of my traffic appears to still be using Internet Explorer. I would like to think that brainwagon readers are a bit more discerning, and would shift to using Firefox or Mozilla, both much better choices. But over at the Jer zone, they seemed to have uncovered something interesting: referer spammers (which sadly, still account for the vast majority of my traffic) invariably choose to masquerade as Internet Explorer. When you take that into account, Mozilla, Firefox and Safari jump WAY up in the popularity counts.
Thanks to Dan for pointing this out.
Learn Chinese Characters
Thanks to Susan for telling me about zhongwen.com, really cool site for learning chinese characters. I’m not sure how long this particular brain worm will last, but until it does fades, I’ll have a nice online reference for my exploration of Chinese characters.
If you know zero Chinese (like me), you can still use this site to find characters by using stroke count (the number of strokes in a character). For instance, I saw this character on the menu for my local Chinese restaurant.
Neat, huh?
A’s v. Blue Jays
With any luck, I’ll be podcasting, blogging, and posting photos from the A’s home opener later tonight.
Update: It’s looking good. I have three separate devices charging their lithium ion batteries as I write this.
Texas Hold’em Trivia…
While watching the World Poker Tour today, I saw Mike Madusow survive going all in against a pair of aces, and surviving by hitting three kings on the river. During the break, they had this question as a quiz:
Which hand has the best odds going up against A♦ A♣ in the hole?
- K♦ K♠
- 10♦ 9♦
- Q♣ J♦
It seems obvious that the third is right out, but what might be a teensy bit surprising is that you have a better shot with 10 ♦ 9♦ against a pair of aces than you do with the pair of kings. Apparently the additional chances to hit straights and flushes outweigh the additional rank which is mostly useless against the aces. You can use the GNU poker eval program to verify this:
[fishtank] % ./hcmp2 AD AC KH KS 1712304 boards cards win %win loss %lose tie %tie EV Ac Ad 1388072 81.06 317694 18.55 6538 0.38 0.813 Ks Kh 317694 18.55 1388072 81.06 6538 0.38 0.187 [fishtank] % ./hcmp2 AD AC TD 9D 1712304 boards cards win %win loss %lose tie %tie EV Ac Ad 1338249 78.15 367143 21.44 6912 0.40 0.784 Td 9d 367143 21.44 1338249 78.15 6912 0.40 0.216 [fishtank] % ./hcmp2 AD AC QC JH 1712304 boards cards win %win loss %lose tie %tie EV Ac Ad 1450987 84.74 254763 14.88 6554 0.38 0.849 Qc Jh 254763 14.88 1450987 84.74 6554 0.38 0.151
I thought it was cool.
A rose by any other name…
In the prehistory of Pixar, before Toy Story, we did lots of things to make ends meet. One of the things I worked on (indeed, I think the very first thing that earned me a credit in a movie) was work on the Imax film Cosmic Voyage. This was a remake of the “Powers of 10” idea for the big screen, and Loren Carpenter, Don Schreiter and I worked to provide some short effects (maybe two minutes?) for the 34 minute film.
I wish I could say that I played a key role in the development, but that would be overstating it. Loren Carpenter really did the most innovative work, writing a special renderer that could produce pictures of these huge datasets of colliding galaxies. My recollections were that they involved around a million individual stars, and that rendering them with the ordinary technology of the day took something like eight hours per frame on the fairly wimpy (by today’s standards) SGI machines we had. Loren wrote a very nice renderer that produced antialiased and motion blurred images of stars over a large range of brightness values and rendered them in something close to eight minutes. Loren continues to be pretty darned good at making cool things run fast.
Don Schreiter was the guy you want to be part of any production: the guy who cuts through all the B.S. and just gets the job done. I had the pleasure of working closely with Don again during The Incredibles, and that hasn’t changed one bit.
The production wasn’t without it’s perks: we got to fly out to Washington D.C. and tour the Air and Space museum, and met many different scientists on our advisory boards, all luminaries in cosmology. Frankly, a lot of it was over my head. I recall we also got to eat at a very expensive restaurant ($1400 for four of us, and we didn’t even drink…) on Motorola’s tab.
Strangely enough, I never got a chance to view the final product in an Imax theater, although it is currently playing at the Chabot Science Center where I help teach telescope making most every Friday. But a couple of years ago, I managed to get a copy of the DVD. I watched it and thought, very cool, very cool, and waited for the end credits.
Sigh.
They misspelled my name.
Now, I’m very careful to check to make sure they get it right. I was nearly lulled into a false sense of security by them getting it right several times in a row. I caught the misspelling they had entered on Incredibles just a day before it was immutably cast into stone. That will teach me to take things for granted.
Where has my country gone?
Witness this article from the Washinton Post:
And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty (washingtonpost.com)
Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of “Remedies to Judicial Tyranny” decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.
…
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.”…
Call me silly, but isn’t threatening violence against judges illegal?
Want to get scared? Try googling for “judicial tyranny”, and see what people are saying.
Doesn’t anyone read Jefferson?
The Constitution of the United States having divided the powers of government into three branches, legislative, executive, and judiciary, and deposited each with a separate body of magistracy, forbidding either to interfere in the department of the other, the executive are not at liberty to intermeddle in [a] question [that] must be ultimately decided by the Supreme Court.
or Madison?
As the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial departments of the United States are co-ordinate, and each equally bound to support the Constitution, it follows that each must, in the exercise of its functions, be guided by the text of the Constitution according to its own interpretation of it; and, consequently, that in the event of irreconciliable interpretations, the prevalence of the one or the other department must depend upon the nature of the case, as receiving its final decision from the one or the other, and passing from that decision into effect, without involving the functions of any other.
or
… independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights; they will be an inpenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive [branches].
It’s… just…
I’m left speechless.
Gutenberg Gem: Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders
Today’s Gutenberg Gem is just something that interested me vaguely: Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders. To be honest, I haven’t spent much time reading it, after all, you’d expect that we would know significantly more about this than those people publishing in 1912, but it does have some nice pictures and diagrams of rock burial mounds from the world over, including, of course Stonehenge.
New Release of Ubuntu Linux
The 5.04 version of Ubuntu Linux is freshly released, and is now running on my test machine. I must admit, I am really, really impressed by how quickly Ubuntu has become a mature and useful operating system. Things that are most impressive to me:
- It only takes up one ordinary CD blank. Yes, one. Yes, it doesn’t include everything in the universe, but it does include a very nice Gnome based desktop, and all the applications that get installed by default look like they are part of one seamless distribution.
- The Synaptic/apt package manager stuff works simply. Almost childishly so. It would be very easy for almost anyone to keep an Ubuntu system up to date.
- Ubuntu is committed to be free. Not just open, but actually free.
- Ubuntu is dedicated to providing high quality multi-lingual support. As an American, I know it’s unfashionable for me to say so, but that’s pretty cool.
There are a couple of small caveats: my system has a Savage chipset videocard (actually, built onto the motherboard) and the DRI stuff that makes playback of dvds and the like fast is not yet ported into this release, so it doesn’t as yet make the best DVD player. But I’m really happy with it. If you are bored with your older, staler distributions, think about giving Ubuntu a try.
Addendum: There is a review of the new Ubuntu release on forevergeek.com.
Addendum^2: Don’t like Gnome? Prefer KDE? Then what you are looking for is Kubuntu.
Two Jokes
A crook decided to break into the counterfeiting business. To ensure success, he decided that he would only try to pass his phony currency in the most back water towns deep in the heart of hillbilly country, figuring that most of the poor and simple folk who lived there had never seen denominations of even modest size.
He then strikes upon the idea of printing $18 bills. After all, if the Treasury Department caught him, then he could claim that he was just goofing around: nobody would ever cash an 18 dollar bill.
He loads his wallet full of his contraband currency, and heads to swampy country. He saunters into a general store, picks out a soda, walks to the counter where he is met by the clerk. The clerk says “that will be 50 cents”. The crook whips out his $18 bill and says “Can you break this for me?”
The clerk responds, “Sure, do you want 2 $9’s or 3 $6’s?”
Think that’s funny? Check out an even funnier joke..