My novel is still going. I’m still only at about 7000 words — over 10% of the way there! — but I think it’s going pretty well. No mat­ter how stressed I am or how much work piles up I find it pretty relax­ing to go back to the novel, even if it’s only for half an hour a week or some­thing like that.

Also I hit a very major mile­stone today: my novel’s first inter­ro­b­ang. The premise of the novel, again, is that it’s an altern­ate real­ity where another spe­cies of homo has sur­vived, in addi­tion to humans. They’re incap­able of verbal speech, though, which makes oppor­tun­it­ies for inter­ro­b­angs a little less plen­ti­ful than you’d get oth­er­wise. Oh well.

I’ve real­ized I don’t really care for drama that much. I tend to favour non-​​fiction over fic­tion and even the fic­tion I do like I gen­er­ally tend to like for the descrip­tion of the world itself. Any plot hap­pen­ings should be dir­ectly attrib­uted and in enhance­ment of the descrip­tion of the world itself and not just for drama’s sake, or so it seems. Well I threw in a bit of a plot twist today, so we’ll see how it goes.

At this rate I may even fin­ish in time for the next NaNoWriMo!

The LambdaVM pro­ject is actu­ally a really bril­liant pro­ject. It’s a modi­fic­a­tion of GHC to tar­get the JVM. I installed it in Octo­ber of last year and played around with it, feel­ing that it might actu­ally have a place in help­ing spread the gos­pel of Pola.

The thing is I can’t expect people to down­load the source to Pola if they want to play around with it, so I have to provide pre-​​compiled bin­ar­ies. OS X, Win­dows and Sol­aris are easy for me to pro­duce bin­ar­ies for, but then you have to think about Linux, BSD, OpenSol­aris, 64-​​bit Win­dows, etc., on vari­ous plat­forms. Tra­di­tion­ally I have about 6 or 7 bin­ar­ies up there for the most pop­u­lar archi­tec­tures — past releases have been most pop­u­lar with x86 Debian and x86 Win­dows — but every time I make a new release I have to rebuild them all.

So I was hop­ing to have a JVM ver­sion of Pola to put up there as a catch-​​all for archi­tec­tures I hadn’t had a chance to build for yet. While the LambdaVM pro­ject has treated me fant­ast­ic­ally well for little toy examples, it doesn’t do well for Pola. I tried it and it crashed after about 2 minutes after run­ning out of heap space. The stack trace showed it was still doing type inference…after two minutes…some­thing which Pola nat­ively com­piled does in less than a hun­dredth of a second.

I’m sure if I fiddled around with it I could get it sort of work­ing, but it doesn’t seem like a good use of my time, espe­cially since the end res­ult will be huge — the JAR file is 18MB, com­pared to 2MB for an uncom­pressed bin­ary — and many orders of mag­nitude slower and since I still have hopes of gradu­at­ing soon.

Still, the LambdaVM pro­ject is pretty awe­some. I hope it ends up kick­ing some ass.

I’ve always loved remote con­trolled cars. I think at one point in ele­ment­ary school I even lis­ted R/​C car driver as a future pro­fes­sion of mine. While I did have some actu­ally really nice cars as a kid, one dream of mine which never came to fruition was to put a video cam­era on the car. It would be like being trans­por­ted to a mini­ature world where everything is huge and cars go orders of mag­nitude faster than they should.

(more…)

I just dis­covered the Pola web­site has not been work­ing prop­erly for non-​​English users. From a Ger­man user I was get­ting errors like:

ActionView::TemplateError (trans­la­tion miss­ing: de, num­ber, human, storage_​units, format) on line #8 of app/views/attachments/_form.rhtml:

I tracked the prob­lem down to an incom­plete Ger­man loc­al­iz­a­tion file. I’m not really a “web guy” so I haven’t taken the time to determ­ine if my Red­mine install­a­tion is out-​​of-​​date or just mis­con­figured. In any case, after adding the miss­ing storage_​unit entries to the de.yml file and restart­ing the server, it appears to be work­ing now for Ger­man, or at least it works for me when using the Ger­man localization.

I’ll take a bet­ter look at it and fix up the other loc­al­iz­a­tions when I get a chance.

Over Christ­mas break we stopped by a Win­ners and I picked up an amphi­bi­ous bat­tery con­trolled car. The box had some dra­matic pic­tures of it going from water to land, so I decided to try it out in my own kit­chen sink. Not great, but well worth the $2.25, I’d say!

Here’s the video.

Someone recently asked about Freenet, so I decided to try it out again. If you’re curi­ous about Freenet, the about page gives a good descrip­tion of it. It’s a WWW-​​like net­work — minus the dynamic con­tent and search engines — with the added bene­fit that it’s totally anonym­ous and uncensor­able. “Anonym­ous” is a bit of a mis­nomer: it’s actu­ally closer to pseud­onym­ous since, through cryp­to­graphic prim­it­ives, it’s designed around the idea of hav­ing iden­tit­ies not linked to real iden­tit­ies. The “WWW-​​like” is also a mis­nomer as it’s actu­ally a more gen­eral key-​​data sort of enorm­ous filesys­tem, but the WWW-​​like part of it is what most users see, espe­cially initially.

I played around with it years ago and I have to say it’s improved quite a bit since then. The biggest, and just about the only vis­ible, change is in per­form­ance. I haven’t dug into see­ing what they’ve done to help things, but most frees­ites load within a minute and there are very few “data not found“s. “Within a minute” may not sound very impress­ive com­pared to the WWW, but it’s really impress­ive con­sid­er­ing the nature of Freenet.

From a local resource con­sump­tion stand­point, per­form­ance is still quite ter­rible. I’ve been run­ning it for close to a day now and the load aver­age stays some­where around 0.3 even when not doing any­thing and can jump up above 3.0 when doing cas­ual brows­ing of frees­ites or Frost boards. This is unfor­tu­nate since you have to leave it run­ning 24/​7 for it to work well.

The same prob­lem is with Freenet that has always been there: con­tent. I agree with the gen­eral philo­sophies of Freenet: even “good” cen­sor­ship philo­soph­ic­ally has bad con­sequences and so it is nice to have a place like Freenet free from any sort of cen­sor­ship. Well, in prac­tice, that hasn’t really panned out. Freenet’s been around for close to 10 years now and still doesn’t have any com­pel­ling con­tent. I’ve poked around the major frees­ites (this link will not work if you aren’t on Freenet) and the Frost mes­sage boards and…nothing. There’s piles of con­tent, of course, but little of it of con­sequence, very little of it inter­est­ing, and none of it compelling.

The primary value of some­thing like Freenet in mostly-​​free coun­tries like Canada would be Wikileaks, I would think. Well there is some of that — for instance there’s a frees­ite devoted to the leaked Sarah Palin emails — but the fact of the mat­ter is that Wikileaks exists in the “real” cen­sor­able Inter­net and it hasn’t been cen­sored. Or at least not yet. There’s been pos­tur­ing that maybe it will be some day, we’ll see. But the fact that it hasn’t been yet takes away a niche mar­ket for Freenet.

What I see a lot of on the frees­ites is politically…disagreeable…writings. In this sense Freenet actu­ally does make sense. The Inter­net is becom­ing less and less anonym­ous. It used to be that you could set up a Geo­cit­ies sites and write about your love for Emma Gold­man, but these days ser­vice pro­viders (in the most gen­eral sense) are chomp­ing at the bit jump­ing all over them­selves at the oppor­tun­ity of passing on IP addresses and what­not. The polit­ical writ­ings on Freenet aren’t gen­er­ally illegal (well, maybe there might be one or two in a few coun­tries with severe hate speech laws, but those are the excep­tions), but they’re uncon­ven­tional enough that I can see people want­ing anonym­ity. It’s not so much about Freenet being uncensor­able as it is about Freenet offer­ing this very eleg­ant pseud­onym­ity. I sup­pose it’s nice to have a place where you can write and you know that it’s impossible for future employ­ers to track you down and find out that you secretly agree with Emma Goldman’s politics.

Well, I still agree with the the­ory of Freenet and I still acknow­ledge its prac­tical value in places like China, but…I still can’t see that it applies to me. I’d like to cre­ate a frees­ite to add more con­tent and get more people inter­ested in Freenet, but like most people, I can’t think of any­thing com­pel­ling to put there. I think I’ll just unin­stall it again and wish it well.

P.S. I’ve just learned that Frost has been obsol­esced by a new Freenet mes­sage board sys­tem called FMS. When I’d pre­vi­ously used Freenet many years ago, Frost was the big one, so I installed it out of habit. FMS looks actu­ally rather fant­astic (and it works with your exist­ing news­group reader like Thun­der­bird) and maybe I’ll keep Freenet around another couple hours to play with FMS, but I doubt the con­tent on there is going to be rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent from the rest of Freenet.