Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
Charles Miller has written a funny post on why the Mac is so desirable. That post, and this, makes the implicit assumption that you are male.
The Mac as mistress metaphor is very good, but I find it mildly offensive to use the metaphor that Windows is a prostitute. I don't disapprove of prostitution per se. It's just that for this metaphor to work, 90% of the computer-using population of the world would be having most of their relationships with prostitutes.
I would rather say that Windows is a female co-worker. Not unattractive, reasonably efficient (in her Win2000/XP guise), but prone to gaffes and embarrassing behaviour that kind of makes you dread meeting her in the hall or having lunch with her.
Linux on the desktop could well be a psychotic girlfriend. I wouldn't know, I've never used Linux as a desktop system, and I've never had a psychotic girlfriend. I do know that my laptop running OpenBSD and blackbox is a female co-worker that I would feel very comfortable with, even though I am married. Perhaps a hyper-efficient personal secretary.
Windows as a server is a female relative in a old peoples' home who calls you in the middle of the night and rambles senilely. You're happy to pay other people take care of her, and secretly wish that she would just die quietly.
Linux or *BSD as a server, on the other hand, is like a grandmother who is a world-class cook with a physics degree. You can always drop by her house, she is endlessly supportive and helps you with your life, without asking much in return. You love her all the more for it.
I learned Perl in my first real consulting gig at Agero. A large business directory company in Sweden wanted to synchronise their print catalogue with the Web. Additionally, they wanted an interface for customers to create their own ads on the Web. This was the sexy part of the project. I wasn't involved there.
The synchronisation didn't work yet, so every Monday my colleague had to take a 650 MB XML-file and feed it to a Java program that inserted the contents into a big old Oracle database running on a Sun Starfire. She was much more billable than I was, so as I incautiously admitted to Un*x knowledge I was asked if I could take over this job.
The XML was full of errors, unescaped ampersands, invalid characters... The Java program choked if it couldn't parse the file, so you had to manually search for the error and fix it, then try again. A successful run took about 9 hours.
I started by chopping up the file into the component entries and
checking for bad stuff. This is trivial, just set $/ to whatever end
element suits your fancy, but it took some reading of the Perl
Cookbook before I had it nailed.
Then I started looking at how to automate this stuff. I eventually
wrote a sophisticated run-control program that could be started with
at, and that sent email when something went wrong.
Just when I had cut down the effective load time from three days to about 11 hours, the whole project got axed. I later learned that this was the third attempt to integrate the print version with an online database.
The contractor more or less blamed the whole debacle on us, even though it could be fairly laid at bad project management and unrealistic promises from the client to its customers. Oh well.
In the middle of my next project, I was cding up from a directory
over a slow ssh link and accidentally rmd all my perl code. When I
called the admins of the machine they helpfully informed me that as
the machine wasn't in production it didn't have backups.
So now I know more Perl than I really want to. But I'm still learning more every day.
Mildly amusing (in Swedish).
Quick-n-dirty translation:
Hi! I'm going to a yearly dinner with my relatives at the end of May and need someone to play my boyfriend. Long story... You should be around 25, "normal", and be polite. Free food ;-)
Some thoughts after a visit to the mall:
You can now get a SIM-free taco for SEK 1 349, 1 100 less than what I paid for it four months ago. And that was with a subscription.
Electronic stores now run a DVD on all their TV screens with commercials and snippets from coming releases, instead of just showing MTV.
Kids and sugar don't really mix.
Also, IE doesn't
handle entities very well. I used them to
format the prices above. Removed for now.
Thomas C. Greene on Abu Graib
High school teacher fired for not censoring poetry
The ultimate timewaster for the taco
Ho hum. MEP elections are coming up. Booooring.
I feel strongly about one thing in the EU: that the CAP must be abolished. No-one I can elect to the parliament will make this happen. Probably only a combination of global warming and a massive die-back of French farmers will bring this about, in a century or two.
I feel less strongly about software patents. They affect lots of people and the future of free software, but compared to growing food they are unimportant. However, they maybe can be banned in the EU by the EP.
So I'm looking for a candidate who's opposed to software patents.
I'd like to vote for Christofer Fjellner (m), but his party supports software patents, and who knows what kind of hold they have over him.
So I'll probably vote for Olle Schmidt (fp) instead.
Anyone who reads Erik's linkblog will be astounded about two things:
damn, there's a lot of Java projects, and
how the hell does Erik do it?
The list of projects is impressive, and for me as a novice Java maintainer, a bit daunting. How can one person keep up with all this? And everyone seems to be on first-name basis, not just with the developers, but with the projects themselves. What the heck is Maven, anyway?
But it's not just one happy family. There's a dark side to the Java development scene, and it rises to the surface here.
This person probably has a name, but I prefer to consider him or her as a cry from the collective subconscious of those Java programmer who're having trouble just staying on top of Java, never mind all the whimsically named frameworks and tools.
Both Erik and Russ are on the Bileblog's shitlist. But so is everyone else.
I really enjoy weblogging. I didn't think I would, but I do. It's the return to the personal web circa 1994, when everybody with a web page put up their hobbies, reading lists, collectors items etc. for all the other people out there to discover.
Now, after nearly a decade, we're back where we started, but with better tools. You don't need a unix account anymore, and you don't need to grok HTML. Anyone can update a web page, a.k.a. a weblog nowadays.
Every day makes me a day older, and even though I find it hard to believe, it's now seven years since I first installed Linux on a 386 by floppy. Now I'm using a IBM Thinkpad running OpenBSD to access mail and IRC on a UltraSparc 5, also running OpenBSD. The company I work for uses Linux on Intel for nearly all its infrastructure. I spend nearly all my days in two or three terminal windows. I read mail with emacs.
So I'm a unix kind of guy. I'd rather write a 20-line perl program to do some data munging than fire up Excel. My windows are handled by screen. I browse the web with links and w3m (lynx is sooo 1998). I believe an app should do one thing, and do it well.
Yet I'm using Movable Type, the CGI version of Word, a bloated, opaque web application that definitely puts style over substance, a blogging tool for Mac users and other artistic types. It straddles uneasily across the Unix/Perl world, with its (nowadays) strong open-source bias, and the corporate make-a-buck world of proprietary source code and expensive licensing.
Well, I've grown to know a lot of people on the mobitopia channel, and one of them, Ewan Spence has a site called Symbian Diaries where just about anyone can get a blog. His installation has a lot of authors, a lot of blogs, and would probably cost $1,200 to license from Movable Type... but that's another story.
Don't get me wrong -- MT is fine for anyone comfortable with web based tools like Yahoo Mail and Google. However, I don't feel comfortable with it. I would rather have a system like blosxom or even my own crude perl hack.
But the central question is: would I post more entries? Would new software make me more productive?
I don't think so. So even if I would have a lot of fun migrating to another system, and even if I can do that while keeping the symbiandiaries.com address, I think I'll stick around MT for now. I'll try to kvetch less, and write more.
And be more interesting.
I first encountered the belief that Europe was heading for an inevitable Islamic takeover in a most unlikely place: this post by Philip Greenspun.
This entry shocked me, because from what I've read of and about him, Phil is a smart guy. If this is how well educated Americans living in Boston view Europe?
I couldn't really put my finger on what was wrong with his analysis. This article does just that. Recommended reading.
Googling around for an emacs implementation of the Blogger API, I stumbled over color-mode.el by Don Knuth, and pmwiki.el by my old university friend Christian Ridderstr�m.
Knuth violates the emacs interface guidelines, but I guess he can get away with it. On the other hand, a celebrity deathmatch between RMS and Knuth would be something I would see on Pay per view...
The world is a small place, at least if you like emacs.
dwlt will be in Uppsala/Stockholm this weekend. Here is a short list of suggestions of things to do.
Uppsala: visit the cathedral (Domkyrkan). The town itself is a very nice place, Sweden's Oxford.
Stockholm: the Vasa Museum is well worth a visit.
The museum is on Djurg�rden, a park to the east of the centre of town. Waldermarsudde is an art gallery at the other end, with a very nice walk in between. Fans of Edvard Munch and Nietzsche will enjoy Thielska Galleriet in the same general area.
Visit the Stockholm Archipelago with a trip on the Vaxholm boats. Many different destinations for different timescales.
Stockholm Old Town, Gamla stan, in the middle of the city. The Royal Palace is here. South of the Old Town is S�der, literally South, the more Bohemian of Stockholms neighborhoods. Lots of bars, galleries, parks...
Eat traditional, if expensive Swedish food at KB or even more expensive seafood at Wedholms Fisk.
Jonas hosted the next installment of our semi-regular alumni gathering. This time, he had a digital camera and was not afraid to use it.
Love and War in the Appenines by Erik Newby.
Inspired by the Colditz book I re-read this classic of escape literature.
Of course, this being Newby, it is also very funny.
Colditz: the Definitive History by Henry Chancellor.
An entertaining history of the famous WW2 POW camp.
The most interesting thing about this book is the fact that Colditz, despite being the "prison of last resort" for repeat escapers and Deutschfeindlich, was actually more humane than many other places in Nazi Germany. Compared to concentration, extermination, and slave labour camps, it was a "bad hotel".
Essentials [dive into mark]