I didn't intend to change my haircut this drastically, however I have a firm belief that I have nothing useful to say about haircuts, so even if I think, barber is misinterpreting what I asked for, it's better to accept the eventual result of some consistent effort rather than to jump in with my corrections in the middle.

This is the result. I find it unusual, but I can live with that.

For some reason j_b asked to post pictures of DNA Pizza even though its web site has a panorama of the same.

Oh well, here they are:( Read more... )

I finally got time to continue the list of my complaints about current sorry state of software development. Since no one responded to the previous entry, I assume that either what I have expressed is surprisingly widely understood, or even considered trivial among people who happened to read it, or they are all in such fundamental opposition to everything I said, they ignore it completely. There is, of course, a possibility that no one reads this in the first place.

No matter what it is, I will add another entry:
( Read more... )

...To be continued...

For a long time it bothered me, how a large number of people, some of them professional software developers, misunderstand software development practices on a fundamental level. While I recognize that more than a decade of Microsoft dominance and a about a decade of dotcoms (partially overlapping) could turn any atmosphere poisonous, it should have been long enough since the last talentless dork decided to "study computers" to earn billions by becoming "second Bill Gates" or creating a web site that clones functionality of another web site. Writing things that humans are not supposed to read is got sufficiently unpopular again, so only people genuinely interested in software development would do it, and therefore they would pay some attention to things that are obvious and easy to recognize, right? Apparently not. Like poison that saturated air, soil and water, worst practices continue to perpetuate themselves even among otherwise sane and educated people, and best ones are either ignored or paid lip service to. At very least, I believe, it will be useful to mention what is currently missing.
( Read more... )

...To be continued...

Today I was watching TV and noticed that something very remarkable escaped attention of the famous detective:



What is more interesting, it was already documented at IMDB.

(yes j_b, you asked me to post something, no matter how insignificant -- this counts as something)

For a reason that I don't understand j_b asked me to write a review of Avatar. This is the result:

( tl;dr and spoilers )

After The Great TV Transition To Digital, Comcast for a while kept transmitting everything in analog NTSC, so I was able to use my Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 for cable, and occasionally watched over-the-air ATSC with HVR-950. It was clear that this was not going to last, and recently all but few NTSC channels disappeared. On top of that, when HVR-950 didn't get a sufficiently strong signal or was otherwise confused, a combination of its hardware, driver and MythTV 0.21 ended up in some weird state that prevented all further tuning until full driver reload, so over the air reception was quite far from the painless experience that I remembered from pre-cable, pre-digital days. Upgrade to MythTV 0.22 gave me some improved HDTV output modes, but didn't do anything to reliable ATSC reception, and definitely didn't turn PVR-250 into a digital decoder -- something had to be done. My 40th birthday was an acceptable excuse to buy another device, so after some research I went to Fry's and brought home HDHomeRun -- a networked dual-tuner digital TV receiver.

Not surprisingly, installation and configuration were quite painless -- receiver got its address from DHCP, MythTV detected the receiver and its two tuners, ran a scan on both, and found a bunch of channels. Just as not-surprisingly, SchedulesDirect produced a channels list full of mis-identified channels (apparently radio stations that were recognized as TV), so the list required some tweaking before becoming usable.

The surprising part was playback. For a completely unrelated reason I have recently upgraded my NVIDIA graphics card, and the new card supports VDPAU. Before installing HDHomeRun I have spent some time tweaking MythTV to make HDTV play on a 1680x1050 monitor with my old AMD Athlon XP 3200+ and HVR-950. In the end everything up to 720x576 was set to ffmpeg decoder, Xv output, Yadif deinterlacer, denoise3d filter, everything above -- NVIDIA VDPAU, Temporal deinterlacer. Most channels played smooth, however it seemed like the time spent getting the high-resolution frames from HVR-950 was sufficient to cause some choppiness -- or maybe it only looked like that due to some dropped or corrupt data because I only tested it with over-the-air reception. With HDHomeRun this problem disappeared -- flawless playback on cable channels regardless of resolution, occasional visibly corrupt frames on some over-the-air channels, but no choppiness.

For some reason closed captions (and only closed captions, not other forms of overlays) on some resolutions cause massive slowdown and dropped frames. Low resolution (with all-software decoding and Xv output) is fine, high resolution (hardware decoding and high-resolution overlay) is fine, medium resolution (apparently higher-resolution text overlay on lower-resolution hardware-decoded video) has problems. Other than that, I have a fully-functional TV and DVR that receives cable and over-the-air TV, on a box with Athlon XP 3200+ CPU and a five years old motherboard.

Obviously, the whole thing only works with non-encrypted channels -- if by any chance Comcast will decide that they should DRM the Hell out of their network, everything will be broken again. Hopefully sanity will prevail, and the amount of breakage that it would inflict on all other existing subscribers will keep them from going into that direction. PVR-250 still receives some NTSC channels, and HVR-950 is still connected for its analog video input and may potentially be used as a backup tuner -- if I (or driver developers) will find out how to keep it from getting stuck.

Tags: hardware, linux, software

For a long time I did not post anything here. I felt that I should provide some clarification about my (usually unflattering) description of Americans and American society, yet any attempt to express it in an entry ended up being too long and barely readable. Without finishing that entry I didn't feel like posting anything else, so I had to finish or abandon it at some point. The following is still too long, however it serves a purpose of clarification by being umm... clear.

( tl;dr )

In modern American culture right after two greatest values that are proclaimed to be celebrated the most -- "freedom" (whatever kind of freedom it is supposed to be) and money -- there is "individuality". And just like with first two, overwhelming majority of population lacks everything but the most rudimentary forms of it -- most of people have all their thoughts borrowed from one of the few "camps" ("conservatives", "progressives", "poor me, trying to survive", "technocrats" even), tastes borrowed from one of few popular styles, etc. Genuine interest in anything but few "popular" areas is extremely rare, people rarely diverge from cookbook solutions, fixed aesthetic styles and ritualized social behavior.

Some are quick to blame improvements in mass media and communication. If one has inclination for something popular, he won't have to look past his TV to be presented with multitude of carefully prepared, selected to fall smack in the middle of the range, role models. If he has inclination toward something unpopular, he will likely find a massive crowd of people into the same thing on the Internet, and will follow them, mimicking whatever grown to be popular among the group he joined -- no matter how bizarre or sick.
( Read more... )

I believe, I have an announcement to make -- as of last week, I am no longer poor.

Of course, such announcement goes against traditions of society, and the very fact of me no longer being poor can be disputed depending on the standards of "poor" -- by some I never was poor in the first place, by some I am still poor. I reject the first -- tradition -- because it obviously exists not for the benefit of those who follow it. It prevents people from learning important details of their friends and neighbors' lives and the condition of society as a whole. That leaves it to media and advertisements to paint a picture of either prosperity where the reader is the last person who still didn't benefit from it, or of doom and gloom where the aforementioned reader should be thankful for his supposedly uncommon position of financial stability among the sea of horror and chaos. Also this event is an important illustration to some points I am trying to express in the following long rant-like text, so it has to be brought up.

The second can be countered by presenting a definition that is superior to all others -- a poor person is someone who has to routinely inflict permanent harm on himself and others that he would avoid if he had sufficient wealth or income. In my case this is demonstrably true -- over the last few years I had to tolerate very constrained living conditions, had to eat food of inferior quality compared to my normal diet, delayed some dental care procedures, kept my car grounded due to disrepair and insurance cost thus wasting mine and other people's time when I had to go anywhere beyond San Francisco, imposed my presence on my friends who would be better off without it, missed many opportunities to learn something interesting and useful, and limited my participation in Free/Open Source software development to bare minimum. Considering that despite my still supposedly youthful looks I am almost 40, I count all those things as permanent harm. From this point all my self-destructive activities are strictly voluntary, therefore I am no longer poor.

In terms of absolute dollar value, my primary bank account briefly overshot $10k, and then returned back to that level as I made payments for my previously maxed out credit cards, returning my total amount of debt to about the same $10k. About $1900 that previously was spent on mortgage and maintenance of my Denver condo is now off my monthly expenses list, thus returning some sanity to the whole situation. Yes, it takes that little (or that much) to make a difference between deciding which bills to skip this month and living somewhat normal human life.

As it is probably obvious by now, the reason for this whole event was very simple -- after almost two years of being unused, the Denver condo was sold, so I no longer have to pay for two apartments, the larger and more expensive of which I couldn't even use. I am renting a relatively small but nice apartment in Emeryville, in a building that survived last major earthquake unharmed, it is a 40-minutes walk to my work, and I find it to be a perfectly acceptable living arrangement. The amounts of "debt", "interest", and supposed "loss" I taken by selling the condo below the initial price are utterly irrelevant -- what is important, I have actually spent $50k of down payment in the end of 2001 buying the condo, paid $1700-$1900 per month in mortgage and maintenance payments, and got back about $8k when it was sold. The rest is for all practical purpose is a bunch of fictional money shuffled between banks and mortgage companies in a process that people are finally starting to call by its true name -- the credit bubble.
( Read more... )

If anyone was following the news about massive bailout of American financial companies, he probably heard about AIG and its brilliant decision how to use some of those money -- that is, placing them directly into the executives' pockets. Uncharacteristically for American government, US Treasury insisted on changing that, and apparently AIG will have to bring executives' salaries closer to the sane level, however AIG Chairman insisted that some "bonuses agreed to in 2008, before the firm's problems became known, could not legally be blocked", and therefore tax dollars are still going to line the pockets of those people.

O RLY?

Since apparently everyone involved is either a crook or an idiot, here is a solution that taken me a whole 20 seconds to find: if they won't do it, tax 100% of those bonuses. Yes, government can do that. No, I don't expect it to happen.

Not electing the worst candidate into the highest
office in the country: .......................... PASSED

Universal healthcare: ........................... Pending

Re-industrialization of economy: ................ Pending

National public school curriculum: .............. Pending

Replacing prison terms for nonviolent
drug-related offenses with medical treatment: ... Pending

Ending Iraq war: ................................ Pending

Ending Afghanistan war: ......................... Pending

Closing Guantanamo prison: ...................... Pending

Patent reform: .................................. Pending

Election campaign finance reform: ............... Pending

Limits on corporate power, oversight over
monopolies and financial companies,
responsibility for fraud, legal harassment and
deception of the public, perpetrated by
companies: ...................................... Pending

==========================================================

OVERALL GRADE: .................. STILL FREAKING RETARDED

Congratulations.

I haven't posted anything in a while, so here is another photo of myself.

( Photo )

I finally made Ubuntu properly suspend and resume on XO, so now I don't have to wait for it to boot up when I carry it around.

Today a story was posted on Slashdot about a previously uncontacted tribe in Amazon forest, with one of the photos showing archers in war paint shooting arrows at the helicopter while some other tribesman (or maybe woman) standing nearby.

Here is my take on that:

Current Mood: amused

I made a video of my XO running Ubuntu. Nothing really unusual -- booting up, using wireless networking, running Firefox, watching Youtube video, running OpenOffice.org writer simultaneously with Firefox in 256M without swap, rotating the screen and switching backlight on and off:

Part 1
( Video )

Part 2
( Video )

As usual, all video capture, adding titles and format conversion was done on my Linux desktop. Camera is previously mentioned Sony DCR-TRV320, titles added in Kino video editor.

Tags: hardware, linux, olpc, software

I have posted Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) installation procedure and files on OLPC News forums. Here is how it looks like:

( Photos of the whole process )

Xfce desktop

( ... )

For now, this is the easiest way to install it -- and since it works using XO itself for building the boot filesystem, it can be done by people who don't have other boxes running Linux. I will also post the "from scratch" installation procedure that produced those files I have placed into tarball -- they were installed in chroot environment starting from debootstrap.

Edit: I have posted the update with "from scratch" procedure.

Tags: hardware, linux, olpc, software
Current Mood: accomplished

I was walking in San Francisco Chinatown, and this ad attracted my attention:

( Read more... )

Tags: photos
Current Mood: bored

Some people recently asked me about my impressions about XO-1 laptop that I have mentioned one of my recent posts.

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Tags: hardware, linux, olpc

How you park a bicycle in Berkeley, a world-famous college town:


How you park a bicycle in Emeryville, a yuppie enclave surrounding the IKEA store on I-80:
( Photo )

How you park a bicycle in Oakland, directly in front of the gates of MacArthur BART station, the largest subway transfer point in the whole San Francisco Bay Area:
( Photo )

When visiting a Borders store I have encountered a UI deficiency of the kind that I have never seen before:

Current Mood: amused