I probably forgot to mention it, but I optimized the search script slightly
-- a spin-off from similar tweaks in the wiki code. Depending on what the
search pattern is, wait time can be anything from slightly less to
dramatically less (Try "ZZZ" to see what I mean.) . As the journal
database grows week by week, such is becoming more important.
Because . doesn't match \n. [\0-\377] is the most efficient
way to match everything currently. Maybe \e should match everything. And
\E would of course match nothing. :-) -- Larry Wall (creator of
perl)
Yegads, the US doller is at its highest ever against the Swedish
Crown (and most other currencies). Lets put that into perspective: a few
years ago the rate was something like 1 USD = 7 SEK, then it stayed a long
time in the 7.50-7.80 range. The rate crept up over 8, to settle in the 8.20-8.40
range. Then we had 8.60-8.80 for a while. Now in a few months it has climbed
past 9, 9.50, 9.80, and now finally 10.25. Great, in view of coming royalties.
Not so great in light of the prices already going up here. (Mmm, I remember
when we had an exchange rate of around 5.) I still have a couple of 100 stashed
away somewhere after a trip.
By the numbers...
A Swedish village near a military airport is undergoing "improvements" in
that houses are being sound-proofed against the 100 dB noise of military
fighters taking off over town, cost paid for by state funds. The peculiar
thing is that only houses on one side of the main street are being retrofitted.
The reason? The rules state that the noise level must be 100 dB or more for
this kind of thing, and measurements determined that while one side of the
street did indeed reach 100 dB, the other peaked at only 90 dB. "It's just
like the weather maps," says the responsible administrator, "the line has
to go somewhere." Two jets taking off means 103 dB. Clearly, not enough jets
are taking off to warrant sound-proofing the other side of the street.
Other news...
-
The Ebola virus on the move again in northern Uganda. Ugh.
-
Oil spill on tracks caused several trains to miss their stations -- unable
to stop.
-
New Swedish law requires anyone applying for a job with school or child care
to show clean rap sheet for employer. (Critics say this will not stop the
kinds of publicized cases of child abuse or violence that motivated the law,
because those perps did not have any prior police record.)
-
Case of TV-news tape seized by prosecutor as evidence. The TV station sued
the prosecutor for breaking constitutional freedom laws. Prosecutor solves
problem by making copy of tape and revoking seizure. Case dismissed. Say
duh?
-
Swedish university library moves to procure 500 e-books which will be available
online for loan and installation on one's own system. This is stage 1, further
investment is promised.
-
SAS grounds all planes of type Dash8/Q400 after a long series of instrumental
problems. Triggering event was incident where a plane's instruments showed
enough incorrect values to set off a general security alert. Fly-by-wire
has its ups and downs....
Let's see, in order: woke up (I think), mad dash with Therese so that she'd
be on time for a school outing, quiet walk home, walk to the tram -- lovely
sunny autumn morning, by the way, with that special smell among the trees
-- then talk with tax people, talk with bank people (liveware for
a change), and talk-talk-talk with some old friends (which later became a
discussion over lunch: Tandoori chicken, very very nice eating was too),
and home again with a bag filled with the Babylon 5 movies, borrowed for
a time.
Hmm, you might have missed yesterday's post, because
I never got it up.
Insight of the day:
We've recently learned that Bill Gates once in his youth was convicted for
unlawful driving without a license. Suddenly the missing puzzle piece clicks
into place: Of course! THAT's where this obsession with software
licenses comes from!
But there's more. US govt is becoming more and more dependent on MS software.
The military is run with NT and W2K. Soon everything will be dotNETted. I
just had this vision of the final license being registered, a high-priority
email notification zipping to the topmost Outlook client, and Bill takes
his ultimate revenge: he revokes the software-dotNet
licenses for everybody. Take that! -- Driving without a
license, indeed.
Now then, work...?
And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between
null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is. :-)
-- Larry Wall
Dan Seto makes this comment
apropos the Swedish school/child-care law:
Silly goose. Of *course* the law won't be effective. That's not the
point. The point is to have the politicians look like the are *doing* something
about the problem. And the only thing they can do is pass laws. Unfortunately,
not all laws do what they say they intend to do. But at least they can say
they passed a law. And as we all know, laws solve all of our problems
</sarcasm>.
Thank you Dan, I always knew my goose was cooked :) I just needed something
to write about.
Legislation is in many ways like programming; full of attempts at rigorous
logic, and full of garbage-in/garbage-out potential. But what's worse,
legislation lacks even elementary error handling and sanity checks.
Just don't compare it with a real language, or you'll be unhappy...
:-) -- Larry Wall
The MP3 conflict appears to have reached a "settlement"...
Online music company MP3.com said on Wednesday it would pay up to
$30 million to music publishers in a preliminary pact that would give it
the right to use more than one million songs as part of its Internet-based
service. Under the three-year agreement, MP3.com's maximum $30 million payment
will cover payments to publishers for past uses of their music on the My.MP3.com
service as well as advance royalty payments. Under the royalty terms, MP3.com
will pay a quarter of a cent each time a song is accessed on the service
and a one-time fee each time a user stores a song on the service.
The principle (and legal precedent set) here seems questionable. After all,
the My-MP3 service is at root users uploading tracks from their own
(already purchased, we assume) CDs in order to themselves access
the songs from anywhere. In the agreement model, the "royalty fee" means
MP3 is paying both for storage and each subsequent access, and apparently
irrespective of whether the track is commercial or free, so surely
this cost will be passed on to the members in some way. Granted, this kind
of arrangement is pretty much what one expects from the Harry Fox Agency
(and their international counterparts) -- unfair, guilty until proven innocent
(and even then we don't care), and full of "pay now on the potential eventuality
that..." fees that are highly unlikely to reach the actual artists concerned.
Especially obnoxious in the current music-royalty system is that any potential
"public access" of music (when you play tracks, radio, or perform in such
a way that others have even the slightest possibility to hear it) -- any
music, even that in the public domain, or your own compositions -- is ebnough
to make you liable to these so-called royalty fees. Blank-media surcharges,
media license fees, and so on are just as bad. Grumble...
Before the shift in weather late this afternoon, it was rather nice out.
I took a stroll to the car, drying out in the sunshine, and looked at the
motor now when there was plenty of light. Popped the distributor cap -- dry
enough, but I did notice some corrosion on the rotor contacts, so I scraped
that off. Sure enough, the motor started right off when I tried. After another
couple of tries, and unsticking the handbrake, I zoomed back and forth along
the extensive parking lot, which runs for several blocks opposite the buildings
on this street, until the car felt less "stiff". It's been standing for weeks.
I suppose I should change the rotor and cap, along with the wiring. None
of them look too great anymore. Have to check what that costs these days.
Later, I climbed the patio tree and continued the trimming started weeks
ago. That was finished just in time, because the wind picked up and the clouds
chased away the warmth. Now only the hedge and rosebush remain. Already,
many leaves have turned and gone so things are starting to look bare, although
we have yet to experience the first frost -- soon enough, I guess, yet most
nights have remained in the 8-12 C range. (Remember, we're at the approximate
latitude of Aberdeen, Scotland, mid-Hudson Bay, or almost up to Anchorage,
Alaska).
I take it that it may be a two-pass sort of solution In the
first pass, install perl. :-) -- Larry Wall
Let's see, browsing some morning news...
-
Proposed Swedish law to forbid serving alcohol at nightclubs "sometime after
midnight". (On the other hand, increasing violence is making several clubs
close earlier in any case.)
-
Inability to agree on common parking fines in region leaves Swedish town
a parker's safe haven -- no fines issued for 3 years! Town council not terribly
concerned since fines in the absence of a municipal parking company would
normally go to the state.
-
A report that Legionnaires' Disease (50-100 cases registered per year in
Sweden, 10% fatal) is a great risk in modern apartments because the hot water
is not hot enough. (The risk of burning oneself has mandated that hot water
must not be more than 60C in the taps, and is often considerably less.)
-
East India Company sailing ship receives hull planking. The ambitious project
to build a modern copy of a classic trading ship continues despite constant
financial problems. The 41-meter, thousand-tonner is planned to sail from
Gothenburg to Canton, China in 2004.
-
Being poor is good for your health -- at least in the sense that men with
thick wallets in back pocket often suffer spinal problems and backache from
sitting crookedly.
On a more serious note, the European Union's "Schengen SIS" passport registry
has now reached 10 million names. Fully 1.3 million have been placed on the
special alert list of people "suspected of perhaps planning to commit serious
crimes in future". There is neither democratic nor judicial insight into
the administration of this pan-European registry, and there are few safeguards
against abuse. Losing a passport or ID-card is but one reason for the registry
to add an individual's name. Many of the ill-defined "suspects" have no police
record in any country, but once on the special list, they are subject to
"discrete" surveillance in any member country -- which can of course lead
to other people ending up in various police registries simply due to association
with suspect. Nobody entered into the registry is informed about the fact
or their rights. (The beginnings of the PSI Corps?)
Oops, I have a business appointment in 45 minutes. I'm out of here!
You can never entirely stop being what you once were. That's
why it's important to be the right person today, and not put it off till
tomorrow. -- Larry Wall
Unusual jobs department...
"During the British Empire, people used to be employed particularly
to count the number on fleas on rats. The more fleas, the more chance of
an outbreak (of the Plague)." -- from
article
about the risks of culling rat populations.
A classic escape...
A couple of arrested armed robbers escaped from the city jail in a classic
way. From the 8th floor holding cell, they broke an "unbreakable" window
and slid down a rope made from cut-up blankets. They left around midnight
and it took 7 hours before anyone noticed.
Political stink?
A municipality in the greater Gothenburg region did some work on the sewerage
network. After a time, residents began to complain about the stink from the
gutters. The local council issued a statement that the residents would just
have to learn to live with it.
A correction to the item (Monday) about retrofitting
soundproofing to some houses near a military airport -- later reports (and
media did pick up on this over the week) noted that physical sound measurement
hadn't actually been made, but that the dB contours were calculated.
Oh folly...
Swedes are slowly realizing that they are subject to many arbitrary obstacles
in life. A change in policy in 1998 by the major credit-information company
(UC, owned by the five major business banks) means that anyone can be blocked
from renting an apartment, opening a bank account, restructuring a loan,
getting a phone, and even subscribing to cable, all if they have a registered
record of even a single non-payment. Not so strange? Well, consider that
the threshold for delinquency registration is now a single amount equivalent
to USD 10 due after a reminder, and the record doesn't mention if it was
paid later, nor any explanations why the delay occurred, or even if the company
demanding payment had made a mistake and later retracted the demand. Secondly,
the incidence of incorrect registration is on the rise, yet the incomplete
and incorrect UC list is often the only thing checked about an individual's
financial record when assessing future payment ability. More folly... A record
item at least expires after 5 years, no matter what, at least until the rules
are changed again.
There is an additional issue in that frequent queries to UC, and this is
part of the statistics presented, are seen as indicating a potential risk
-- yet many companies and banks now tend to at random routinely track some
customers on a monthly basis. The irony is of course that the banks not that
long ago speculated and frittered away something like USD 13 billion, which
bill was footed by the taxpayer. Did the banks get any registration for bad
credit-worthiness? -- I think not.
Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those
who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Oh joy... I suppose it was only a matter of time, but my defunct
mail account at Geocities appears to have been hacked to use as
a spam relay. The account shouldn't even exist since May 1999 when I began
the struggle to remove the legacy sites I could no longer access after the
Yahoo-Geocities merger, but the yahoos at geocities, if
you'll excuse the pun, seem terminally incapable of even the simplest account
maintenance. Anyway, I got this telling item forwarded into my mailbox:
Return-Path: <>
Received: from geocities.com (mail8.geocities.com
[209.1.224.42])
by leuf.net (8.8.8/8.8.5) with ESMTP id
BAA28787
for <bo@leuf.org>; Sat, 21 Oct 2000 01:22:30
-0400
Received: from mail.kva.se (firebird.kva.se
[130.242.20.5])
by geocities.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id
WAA17380
for <bleuf@geocities.com>; Fri, 20 Oct 2000 22:21:58 -0700
(PDT)
Received: by mail.kva.se with Internet Mail Service
(5.5.2650.21)
id <T6KCK4VB>; Sat, 21 Oct 2000 07:21:38
+0200
Message-ID:
<BB612E888E23D411B01B00508BC77F6907F443@mail.kva.se>
From: System Administrator
<postmaster@kva.se>
To: bleuf@geocities.com
Subject: Undeliverable: Delivery unsuccesful: Delivery
problems
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 07:21:38 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service
(5.5.2650.21)
X-PMFLAGS: 570949760 0 1 P4AC20.CNM
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Your message
To: huo26@kva.se
Subject: Delivery unsuccesful: Delivery
problems
Sent: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 08:04:24 +0200
did not reach the following recipient(s):
"My message" my foot! It was pure spam: "Cyber Investigator
EASY WAY TO FIND OUT ANYTHING ABOUT ANYONE". Luckily, I hadn't
simply put in place a blind filter to kill all mail from these legacy accounts,
sight unseen, though I have been tempted sometimes, given the amount of junk
sent to that account.
Yahoo-Geocities have no business providing email services if they
can't even handle the most elementary of account maintenance actions: that
of removing an account. (I just checked, all my old legacy accounts
-- 3 former websites -- are still active and happily relaying anything sent
their way.)
The worst thing is of course not knowing how many receive obnoxious, offensive,
or obscene spam with my name as the evident sender. This sort of thing can
go on for years with nobody the wiser. At least with my own domains on a
server where I can access all parts of the system I stand a chance of seeing
suspicious mail activity. The next step would be to close down all SMTP except
for a local sendmail on my own system.
No, I'm not going to explain it. If you can't figure it out,
you didn't want to know anyway... :-) -- Larry Wall
So-o-o... it's Saturday, is it? Sometimes the days of the week blur together
like a child's watercolor left out in the rain. If I wasn't so spread out,
I'd say I was nevertheless about where I should be in scheduling. A few things
are running late, for instance the latest issue of the Doctorbank newsletter,
which should be webified -- I've had the photo files for weeks now.
(Hmm, since 3 Oct, eh? File datestamps rarely lie...). I suppose
I try to do that this weekend.
And the car refused to start this (wet and cool) morning. Drat! I'll have
to try the replace-the-wiring plan then. I should take the plugs as well,
but it's hell reaching two of them. I've never been a car mechanic at heart
-- Oh, I have had my hours working with the moped (lite/slow motorbike)
when I was in the younger teens, and later with cars when the need arose.
But to me, motorized wheels have always been a mode of transportation, not
an end. Some people I've known love tinkering, with or without the style
and knowledge -- I'll never forget the guy who couldn't unscrew the bolts
on his moped motor, so took it into the woodshed and tried to split the crankcase
housing with the heavy-duty axe. Amazingly, he did it too; the bolts sheered
without any fatal damage to the vital parts. And equally amazing: he didn't
lose a leg in the process. I've wondered if he treated his cars the same
way, and suspect he did.
My moped of the time was very retro, an old German clunker, and I did very
little to it. On the other hand, over time I found I was riding mine far
more than my contemporaries who more often than not tended to have their
machines spread out in various stages of assembly or disassembly. Also, they
were obsessed by squeezing out the maximum (illegal) speed possible. Mine
went (illegally) fast too, maybe not always just as fast, but on the other
hand, I could growl my way through the roughest cross-country in the woods,
summer or winter -- they couldn't. Where we lived, that mattered more than
hardtop speed trials.
I think what turned me off the mechanics of motorcars was the experience
gained second hand from my father. He's always been good with engines, having
learned through self-study and careful application, from mistakes as well
as successes; good both at the "accepted" (and expensive) way to do things
and the "unorthodox" but workable, and sometimes better way. Anyway, so often
getting the expensive things "right" was stymied by a two-bit part that was
so cheaply made we couldn't for the life of us figure out how it was supposed
to last more than around the block. Take the venerable carburettor idle-speed
adjustment in the days before electronics and injection. It depended on a
stop screw that kept the air-intake from closing completely. Often, you could
adjust this as precisely as you wanted, but the construction was about as
mechanically stable as aluminum foil, and it rusted. Plus the wire to the
gas pedal could run some very odd angles which made it sooner or later stick.
Constant idle speed? -- Forget it, as illusory as the pot-o'-gold under the
rainbow.
Then take the case of the moped motor. On my clunker, there was for the most
part a "rattle", to put it charitably, at low speeds -- more like
"clunka-thunka-bang-whang". Well, we knew what that was:
loose bearings. The problem was how to tighten them. The basic construction
was two halves of housing bolted together. The crank bearing was integral
with the housing, shaped so that tightening the outer bolts also tightened
bearing play. To "precisely" control this play, you had to use seals of specified
thickness and tighten with a specified torque. As for the ball bearings,
they were simply loose and you poured them into place just before the final
assembly step. (Hehe, a lot of mopeds tended to run without their full complement
of bearing balls, it being far too easy to lose one in the yard.) So, once,
my father and I went to the trouble of doing this the methodical, precise
way. We got new bearings and bushings, seals, and had all the professional
tools at hand. We reworked that motor so that all the bearings and bushings
and piston rings were just so, at precise , optimum tolerance. Then we did
the requisite contortions to assemble the whole without losing either parts
or tolerances.
My oh my, was that a remarkable sound when we eventually started the motor.
It whispered with not a single hint of rattle anywhere. It was so smooth
that it could have been a gas turbine. Carefully minding the advice to go
easy at first, I took a spin around the big road, marvelling at the slight
whistle at cruising speed, and how easy and full of power it felt. This lasted
all of a few days until (apparently) the bolts lost their precise torque,
unevenly, so the bearings spalled slightly. Immediately, the motor returned
to the customary rattle. We looked over the result and realized that there
was literally no way that any optimum torque could be maintained on those
bolts given the addled construction. Let's say I stopped caring about
fine-tuning.
This of course carries over into a lot of things, not just motors and engines.
Much of what we see and use is "optimized" for cheap manufacturing and assembly,
with little regard for later maintenance or even daily use. It may look good
(as it assuredly did on the drawing board), but in practice, it's a "clunker"
in one way or another. This is why we feel joy at real craftsmanship, when
something is well thought out, when form and function are melded in harmony.
Even software has its "clunkiness", but I'm not going there today. Have a
nice weekend.
Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality...
:-) -- Larry Wall
