I bought a new laptop a couple days ago. For the past 6 years I’ve been using Macs just about exclus­ively; for the past 3 years or so it’s been my Mac­Book that’s been my main machine. How­ever, for the past sev­eral months I’ve been increas­ingly annoyed with the Mac­Book: the case is crack­ing; the track­pad but­ton is stick­ing; and, some­thing which mat­ters to very people other than me, Apple has been slow in fix­ing some bugs and the source code wasn’t avail­able for me to fix them myself. So, after much delib­er­a­tion, a couple days ago I picked up a Toshiba Satel­lite, on sale and marked down even fur­ther because it was a demo model. Accord­ing to the spe­cific­a­tions it’s bet­ter than a mod­ern Mac­Book in pretty well every way, and at about one quarter the price. The only down­side was it didn’t run OS X, which I was becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned with anyway.

I inten­ded to run OpenSol­aris on it because I quite like the tech­no­lo­gies in OpenSol­aris. Unfor­tu­nately OpenSolaris’s hard­ware sup­port is very poor, but the laptop I bought looked like it had the highest chances of work­ing, and it was very highly rated by Con­sumer Reports as well. After try­ing vari­ous OpenSol­aris dis­tri­bu­tions and developer builds, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that it’s not going to work, at least not yet. It was prob­ably naïve of me to think I could get my wire­less card work­ing under OpenSolaris.

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Today’s xkcd is so val­id­at­ing. I first stumbled across the GNU mani­festo prob­ably in 1996, when I was in high school. I wanted to teach myself C and a good way to do that was to use the DJGPP com­piler, which led me to GNU. I didn’t really think much of it at the time except that these “Free Soft­ware Found­a­tion” people took soft­ware way too ser­i­ously, but I was happy to have a free com­piler to play with.

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I’ve prob­ably talked before about my ser­i­ous man-​​crush on Gisle Martens Meyer. Mostly I just really like his music. Fol­low­ing his blog there’s a lot I can identify with, too. He’s one of the few musi­cians to do his best to give an expli­cit “fuck you and thanks for dying” to the music industry at every oppor­tun­ity. He’s embraced the new real­ity of music dis­tri­bu­tion with open arms. Plus he seems very gung-​​ho about the robot future in con­trast to all those losers who throw around words like “apocalypse”.

The first sen­tence of one of his most recent blog posts just hit me like a brick:

The reason I like the future is because you can change it.

That sums up a lot about me and why I get so frus­trated with friends my age — or usu­ally quite a bit younger! — who are already start­ing to slip into the con­ser­vat­ive “things which are new suck” men­tal­ity. It might take me a bit of extra effort to “get” some of the new changes to the world: Twit­ter is a good example. It would be easy for me to stick to how things were and shake my cane and say “in my day, we wrote blog posts with more than 140 char­ac­ters!” but I think in the end it’s worth it.

I’m pretty psyched about the future and I want to be a part of it and, I guess most import­antly, I want to change it.

Domain name:           burrell.ca
Domain status:         EXIST
Approval date:         2005/02/02
Renewal date:          2012/02/02
Updated date:          2010/02/02

I’ve been watch­ing it for the past 3 or 4 years. Who­ever owns it doesn’t appear to be using it for a whole lot — prob­ably just email if any­thing — and it def­in­itely doesn’t seem to be a domain squat­ter. I was start­ing to think it was someone who registered the domain and for­got about it. When they for­got to renew the domain last month I figured it was finally going to be released.

Last night — the date the domain expired — I checked it and it was lis­ted by CIRA as SUSPD. I.e., it had entered the 30-​​day “sus­pen­ded” period where the owner has one final chance to renew before it’s released. I think CIRA charges a pen­alty for renew­ing a domain while it’s sus­pen­ded, so who­ever owns this domain appar­ently really wants it for some­thing. I guess I can’t be too upset about it. Oh well.

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.

One thing that’s always fas­cin­ated me about organic brains — in con­trast to elec­tronic equip­ment — is that they never crash in the same way. Or per­haps they’re crash­ing all the time and there’s enough redund­ancy to hide it away: it’s hard to tell.

Most elec­tron­ics are stable and reli­able for a good while, but once they start to fail they gen­er­ally don’t fail out­right. A wire or sol­der­ing point will start to come a little bit loose. Sud­denly your device doesn’t work when it’s too hot (or too cold) or it’ll stop work­ing until you give it a good bang or blow out some dust, or some­times you have to try turn­ing it on mul­tiple times before it turns on for good. Machines often don’t reach a sud­den death like organic brains do, where one second they’re “alive” and the next second they’re “dead” and there’s no hope of them com­ing back again (ignor­ing the fact that there’s always ample oppor­tun­ity to repair them).

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In my pos­i­tion as chair of SOGS’ Bylaws and Con­sti­tu­tion Com­mit­tee, I was just given an archival pack­age of old doc­u­ments, mostly bylaws, by our old chair, Rebecca Feld­man. In that pack­age was a rather lovely essay on the early his­tory of SOGS. I had it scanned and ran it through an OCR sys­tem and cleaned up a couple OCR mis­takes so that I can put it online for every­one to see.

We were talk­ing about it and it would be really nice to extend this essay. I don’t know what the going rate for his­tory stu­dents in these days, but it would be awe­some to com­mis­sion another essay on SOGS’ his­tory from, say, 1980 to 1995.

Without fur­ther ado, here is the essay. It is entitled “The Soci­able Years: The Soci­ety of Gradu­ate Stu­dents, 1964 – 1979″ and is writ­ten by Daryl White. Daryl White is our former VP Fin­ance and unsur­pris­ingly was a his­tory major. It was obvi­ously writ­ten in Microsoft Word and I’ve done my best to clean up some of Word’s eye-​​bleedingly bad typo­graphy (okay, I’m just a snob).

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I recently rewrote the build sys­tem for Pola from ant to GNU make. Keep­ing things in ant was get­ting to be too much work, try­ing to be proper and writ­ing tasks (in Java) rather than just using the shell. I was ini­tially a little wor­ried about how much work it would be to redo the build sys­tem, but I was pleas­antly reminded by how simple it is. It took prob­ably about a quarter the amount of time to rewrite the entire build sys­tem from scratch in make than it would have taken to do a little incre­mental change to the ant sys­tem. As a bonus I man­aged to clean up the pro­ject a lot, redu­cing the build sys­tem down to just two files of a com­bined 70 lines. (more…)

Is there any good reason to refer to large amounts of data in terms of powers of 2? E.g., where 1kB is 1024 bytes (now prop­erly called a kib­i­b­yte) instead of 1000 bytes? People rag on hard drive man­u­fac­tur­ers for deceit­fully list­ing a 320 mil­lion byte capa­city drive as 320GB instead of 300GiB — and I’ll admit there’s undoubtedly some wil­ful deceit going on there — but to be hon­est, using powers of 10 makes a lot more sense to me.

The only instance I can see where using powers of 2 could pos­sibly be bene­fi­cial is when refer­ring exactly to the num­ber of MMU pages or the num­ber of file sys­tem blocks alloc­ated for some­thing, but in those instances I think I would rather say some­thing like “7 pages” than “28k”.

And yes, this is inspired by repar­ti­tion­ing my hard drive and being annoyed at hav­ing to con­vert a num­ber like 202691383296 bytes into gib­i­b­ytes (base 2 giga­bytes) because the tool stu­pidly won’t work with base 10 giga­bytes. Some­times I think people go out of their way to make things more arcane than they need to be.

For those who know a bit about me, you know one of my favour­ite musi­cians is Gisle Martens Meyer, his most fam­ous musical pro­ject being Ugress. I fol­low the blog, I buy the music, I down­load the music that isn’t sold, I even briefly con­sidered mak­ing a trip to Min­nesota at one point to see his first (and so far only) live show in North Amer­ica. If I’m a “fan” of anything/​anyone in this world, it’s surely Ugress. Still it took me over 2 weeks to build up the need to part with my hard-​​earned £6 (it’s always a fun sur­prise to find out at the end of the month how much my credit card com­pany has charged me for for­eign cur­rency) and buy his latest album. In fair­ness, I am very cheap.

(If you’re inter­ested in his music, most of his albums offer free tracks and the rest are only 79 pence each)

First, a brief review. Remin­is­cience is much bet­ter than Uni­corn (the pre­vi­ously most recent album) in my opin­ion. Uni­corn had some good songs but the dir­ec­tion of the album was a little poppy for me, focus­ing a lot around the vocals of Christine Litle (who I must con­fess is pretty darned cute and a good singer to boot). This album’s more about the beats and the sound aes­thet­ics, which is what got me inter­ested in Ugress in the first place. I’ve only listened to half the album so far and I already I have a good 3 or 4 new favour­ite songs.

Read­ing his blog, you get the impres­sion that GMM is more a sound engin­eer than a com­poser. That’s prob­ably an exag­ger­a­tion (and it’s easier in text to describe engin­eer­ing pro­cesses than a par­tic­u­lar com­pos­i­tion on the go), but it’s pretty clear he takes sound pretty ser­i­ously. I’ve paid spe­cial atten­tion to it lately and noticed he really does a remark­able job of get­ting the most of the dynamic range that the (16-​​bit sample depth/​90dB, if I’m not mis­taken) MP3s will give you. Cool inter­est­ing post: describ­ing how he used a speech syn­thes­izer to gen­er­ate lyr­ics. Okay now I really am sound­ing like a fan.…

Any­way what I really wanted to talk about was GMM’s reac­tion to the album being pir­ated (or copy­right infringed upon to use made-​​up pos­sibly cor­rect ter­min­o­logy). He doesn’t just do the pro­duc­tion him­self, but he does all of the pub­lish­ing and dis­tri­bu­tion and what­not him­self. Tra­di­tional music labels, I under­stand, are as good as dead and worse than use­less. He gives out some free tracks, the rest are cheap and dis­trib­uted largely online, he’s okay with mash-​​ups and pub­lic per­form­ances and deriv­at­ive works and using his music as a back­ground to your stu­dent film. He dis­trib­utes the music in high qual­ity (320kbit/​s) non-​​DRM MP3s and even in FLAC.

What’s inter­est­ing about this is that he’s one of the very few (the only one I’m really closely famil­iar with) that is doing everything Right and makes it his day job (and then some; I worry a little if he has a life besides). Not that it I should be sur­prised that it would get pir­ated. People will pir­ate any­thing. People pir­ate free soft­ware. It’s almost like people put more effort into pir­at­ing than it would take to get some­thing legit­im­ately just for the sake of pir­at­ing. Well I’m not being fair: clearly people are pir­at­ing because a £6 album costs £6 more than a £0 album.

The primary reason I sup­port free soft­ware is to give free­dom to the users to use and repur­pose the soft­ware how­ever they like. This is from a dog­matic stand­point (I treat soft­ware pub­lish­ers con­trolling their soft­ware with great sus­pi­cion), from a qual­ity stand­point (there’s an annoy­ing bug in OS X’s Terminal.app for the past 6 months or so that I could likely fix in lit­er­ally a minute, but Apple has pre­ven­ted me from doing so) and from a human­it­arian stand­point (it’s near impossible to advance human­ity with improv­ing on one another’s work without per­mis­sion). I can see how this car­ries over from soft­ware into other realms of “inform­a­tion”. One thing I’m def­in­itely not is an eco­nom­ist, but I’ve increas­ingly viewed the Free Soft­ware Foundation’s free­dom 2 (that you should be able to share what you like with your neigh­bour) with some hes­it­a­tion. It’s a fant­astic idea in a great many of cases (cf., Linux), but I don’t see this as a strict mat­ter of free­dom, but as a mat­ter of eco­nom­ics and it’s one that I think can be treated on a case-​​by-​​case basis.

With this in mind I see GMM’s way of doing things as the Right way of doing things, or more accur­ately, as a Right way of doing things and would like more people to send him money in exchange for his hard work. Then again, I am just a fan. Ser­i­ously, The Bosporus Incid­ent is awesome.