I normally avoid topics of a personal nature in this journal, as it’s meant for programming / business topics, however, I am extremely happy to announce the birth of our first daughter!

A passing thought:

Would it be fair to compare Google’s App Engine to Ford’s assembly line, in a roundabout sort of way? Ford’s mass produced cars put cars within reach of many more people, and over time, put paid to the many custom car producers who didn’t adapt. Google’s App Engine is a way for people to easily scale their web applications in a way that wasn’t possible until now. No fiddling with EC2 images, or hosting, or a bunch of other stuff that, for the time being will still drive people to want to control their own infrastructure, but the prospect of very cheap hosting and very easy scaling is potentially something that will change things significantly.

Sourceforge is giving me this junk:

Please note: passwords should contain only letters and numbers. Inclusion of other characters in your password may result in inability to access some SourceForge.net systems.

How annoying. Throwing a few symbols in there is a good way to make a password a little bit more secure.

Lots of banks have systems that are similarly crippled.

Lately, I’ve seen multiple comments like the first one here:

https://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2008/03/09/bypassing-androids-resources#comments

It seems like spam, in that the comment is kind of off topic and irrelevant. However… it doesn’t link to obvious spam topics like viagra, porn, etc… and nor does the actual site that it links to. Or it doesn’t seem to at least.

Just someone trying to promote their site, or is there a trick to it?

I just finished re-reading one of my favorite books, Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I don’t often reread books, but this one is really a classic, and I got even more out if it the second time around. If for some reason you haven’t already read it, and you are the type of person who likes sci-fi, startups, computers, crypto and the like, I’d highly recommend it. I’m a pretty quick reader, so having a book that lasts a week or two is also a pleasant change from briefer, quicker material. There are lots of subtle references and nuances to keep your mind entertained outside of the main story line, which is pretty good in and of itself, spanning two timelines, one during the second world war, and one in the late nineties (it’s been a while since I’ve had to type startx to launch a GUI on Linux!).

I’m looking around for a way to handle a bunch of command line options, and so naturally I was drawn to the Apache Commons CLI, where I found this line:

There are currently no plans to continue the 1.x line beyond bugfixes. The 2.x design is generally preferred and is in use, however there is no current activity to make a 2.0 release. To this end, the 1.1 release is recommended to most users while the 2.x line is recommended for anyone interested in helping to get this better API released.

So: one is not being worked on because it’s old, and the other isn’t being worked on… for some other reason? This is, in part, what The Paradox of Choice is about. I’m sure either one would meet my needs, but the doubts cast on the whole thing by the lack of a clear and easy choice make you a bit frustrated because you have to choose between two things, neither one of which is clearly the “right” choice. This is clearly a bit irrational given that you’re getting, in any case, a bunch of good code that very likely does its job, but there you go… that’s why it’s called “the paradox of choice”.

Here’s a question that has bugged me for a while, and to which I’ve never found a satisfactory answer.

How do people handle mailing list moderation when they have spam filters active? For instance, I get a lot of spam in the moderation queues for the Apache mailing lists I moderate. Sometimes gmail flags it as spam, and I can’t quite say it’s wrong… I mean the body of the email that’s help up for moderation is often full of spam words. But the moderation message itself isn’t really spam. I’m afraid of confusing the filter if I let it through. I guess this is where an open source system might be better, as you could simply put a rule in saying “if it’s a moderation email, don’t even bother looking at the keywords”. Gmail’s awfully convenient though… anyone else out there with the same problem?

1. Go to http://www.networksolutions.com/

2. Type in a silly domain name (not something you actually care about!).

3. In a few minutes, they will have registered that domain themselves, locking you into buying it from them if you actually want it.

They’re overpriced anyway, but that’s really sleazy.

I’ve actually had this idea floating around in my head for a while. Recently, I mentioned it on a Debian list, where it was well received. Since I don’t think I’ll be able to implement it any time soon, let me just throw it out there:

One of the cool things about belonging to a group like Debian or the Apache Software Foundation, or other similar groups is that there are people all over the world that are often willing to meet if you’re in their area.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a centralized resource where you could post something like “hey, I’m going to be in Paris/Perth/Padova/Philadelphia/Porto Alegre/Pretoria, anyone want to get together for a beer or whatever people drink there?”.

You’d have to balance it some – make it too generic and it loses some of the appeal – part of the appeal about meeting someone from a group you belong to is that you instantly have something to talk about. Extend that too far and it would just be like meeting random people on Facebook.

I don’t have the time or inclination to pursue the creation of such a site, but it would be quite simple, I believe.

And of course, if anyone is headed to Innsbruck, I’m always happy to go out for a beer!

So it looks like I will have to use the other computer, and hope that Dell sorts things out quickly. I’m pretty disappointed, as I just purchased the machine (an Inspiron 1505 with Ubuntu) in July, and haven’t really traveled with it much.

[440525.460000] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/33
[440525.460000] ata2: EH complete
[440942.908000] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
[440942.908000] ata2.00: cmd a0/01:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x43 data 12 in
[440942.908000]          res 50/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x2 (HSM violation)
[440942.908000] ata2: soft resetting port

It required fsck’ing, and that was pretty much all she wrote.

The disk itself, according to smartctl:

Device: ATA      ST980813AS       Version: 3.AD
Serial number:             5NH0301G

It doesn’t support SMART though, so I don’t know if the recent fuss about Ubuntu and Laptop HD’s has anything to do with it. I never ran it much without power in any case, so I doubt it.

It’s especially frustrating, because I was making good progress on the Android port for Hecl, and will in the best of cases have to get a new computer “broken in”, even though I do have good backups.

My fingers are crossed that the money I spent for extra coverage will be worth something and that Dell Austria will be able to resolve the problem in a hurry, without requiring that I send the machine to the US or anything else that takes a lot of time.

Sigh:-(