Michael's musings

Mon, 25 Sep 2006

O-Train Canceled

Today I spent two hours at my "alma mata", Carleton University.

It's been 10 years since the Herzberg building was expanded, but I still think of it as new. For many, the O-train is still new, yet it will soon be old. Unless you do something about it.

I was giving out flyers about the cancellation of the O-train.

http://otra.sandelman.ca/2006-09/

I talked to students arriving by O-train and bus about the cities' plans to replace the widely successful O-train with a streetcar system. Most were very surprised.

OC-transpo doesn't talk much about this, yet it is a critical part of the plan: by shutting things down for a long enough period, people will have to make new arrangements, and will therefore not care if the "replacement" train gets finished or not. It will be more expensive than buses (it's designed to be), so, we'll have to cancel it.

http://www.cs.unca.edu/~manns/intropatterns.html explains some of this method, but I don't have the book in my hands, so I can't tell you the name of this anti-pattern.

I wrote about this before, using a piece from Tim Lane, that really says is better than I ever could:

http://www.sandelman.ca/mcr/blog/2006/06/12#tim_lane_on_o-train

Now the Mayor seems to have fallen into the trap of forgetting what the diesel O-Train has accomplished, and is convinced that any future LRT has to be the expensive kind.

He has forgotten that the #1 reason you bring in light rail, is TO REDUCE THE COST OF OPERATING YOUR TRANSIT SYSTEM!

The #2 reason, is to give your riders a FASTER, MORE RELIABLE TRIP, if terms of travel time, and schedule adherence.

The new North South LRT extension, looping through Riverside South before entering Barrhaven from the south east, will, at enormous cost, provide passengers with a slower trip from Barrhaven to downtown, than the express buses on Woodroffe Avenue.

The plans for the East West light rail lines, with proposals to run it down busy city streets, rather than the existing, mostly grade separated rail corridors, show that the purpose of LRT, now, is to enhance the value of developers properties.

The two real reasons for LRT, above, have been thrown out the window.

Sat, 16 Sep 2006

lilo dead

Just now, after spending the day at my Cousin's twin's first birthday, I sat down and opened my laptop, and within 30 seconds, the following shows up:

(17:18:40) christel: (notice) [Global Notice] On the 12th September Rob Levin, known to many as Freenode's lilo, was hit by a car while riding his bike. He suffered head injuries and passed away in hospital on the 16th. For more information please visit #freenode-announce

I joined the channel, as did too many other people to count.

It's very weird when virtual people die. (People who you've known for years, but have never met in person.) One has to realize that they were real.

Someone said to /whois him, pointing out that he was in fact online:

Nick: lilo (identified) Away: Whoops, I've stepped away. For URGENT freenode help (channel flooding, trolling users, network problems or access issues), please email my pager at 4iiygyvs@freenode.net . It's my job and I'm happy to respond. For ROUTINE issues, please see http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#gettinghelp .... Please take a look at my personal blog when you get a chance: http://spinhome.org1 .... Thanks! Username: i=levin@freenode/staff/pdpc.levin Realname: Rob Levin Server: irc.freenode.net (http://freenode.net/)

652 people in room, and climbing.

Fri, 08 Sep 2006

Dead projects aren't always bad ideas

My friend Mike wrote this, and having no blog, permitted me to post this.

From: "Mike Charlton" <mikekchar@gmail.com>

I don't have a blog anywhere and I just felt like writing this down. I hope you guys will indulge me. I've been thinking about a FLOSS project I abandoned a while ago and I wanted to record what forces were involved in abandoning it. Perhaps someone will find it interesting.

Last year I was lamenting the poor choices available of free software for people trying to learn Japanese. There were many started attempts (and abandoned), but none that seemed able (or stable enough) to really be used for day to day studying.

Japanese is an interesting language to learn. Not only do you have to learn the meaning of vocabulary, but you also have to learn how to write that vocabulary using kanji (Chinese characters). There are many flashcard systems around, but none that make it easy to create the necessary trinary association (English to Japanese pronunciation, Japanese pronunciation to English, Chinese characters to Japanese pronunciation), or to schedule the quizes appropriately.

So I decided to write my own. It is called JLDrill. I wrote some code and started to use it heavily. I looked at all the available Japanese drill programs around and tried to fix the deficiencies I found. It seemed like a good start.

Except... It wasn't helping me to learn Japanese. For some reason, even with my improved approach, there was still something missing. Once I got up to 1000 or so items of vocabulary, I would start forgetting things and the system became unmanageable.

So I decided to stop writing code and start doing research on the way memory worked. I stumbled across a technique called "spaced repetition". This psychological theory claims that there is an optimal schedule for repeating items that you want to memorize.

Lo and behold, I also found several active free software quiz programs that implemented spaced repetition. So I decided to start using one (Mnemosyne in case you are curious).

Wow! It was a night and day difference. Even though it still doesn't handle the specific oddities of Japanese language data, using it was amazingly more productive than using my own software. So I stopped working on JLDrill and suggested to my users that they switch to Mnemosyne.

I still feel a few itches for specific features for Japanese language drills. But instead of restarting JLDrill development, I will probably try to add these features to Mnemosyne. It will probably be easier that way.

In the meantime, JLDrill is yet another half finished program languishing on a server somewhere. If someone does statistics, they will see that it only had active development for about 3 months — just like all the other abandoned projects.

But what statistics don't show is that JLDrill completely served it's purpose. It allowed me to explore ideas which ultimately led to a better solution. Because both JLDrill and Mnemosyne are free software, it allowed me to migrate over to the better solution without losing my investment on JLDrill. Not only that, because Mnemosyne is more popular than JLDrill was, I now have a larger pool of development talent working on the project. All at no cost to me.

This is why free software is important.

MikeC

Thu, 07 Sep 2006

Bruce Schneier on DRM "bugs"

Bruce Schneier writes at:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/microsoft_and_f.html

and at:

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71738-0.html

Last week, a hacker developed an application called FairUse4WM that strips the copy protection from Windows Media DRM 10 and 11 files.

Now, this isn't a "vulnerability" in the normal sense of the word: digital rights management is not a feature that users want. Being able to remove copy protection is a good thing for some users, and completely irrelevant for everyone else. No user is ever going to say: "Oh no. I can now play the music I bought for my computer in my car. I must install a patch so I can't do that anymore."

But to Microsoft, this vulnerability is a big deal. It affects the company's relationship with major record labels. It affects the company's product offerings. It affects the company's bottom line. Fixing this "vulnerability" is in the company's best interest; never mind the customer.

So Microsoft wasted no time; it issued a patch three days after learning about the hack. There's no month-long wait for copyright holders who rely on Microsoft's DRM.

This clearly demonstrates that economics is a much more powerful motivator than security.

Tue, 05 Sep 2006

Things to do while waiting

This got emailed to me. Google could only find it on one other blog, and I suspect they got it as well.

Might as well give it a home. Why can't stores put nice chairs in various places for husbands to sit on?

January 12, 2006

Re: Mr. Bill McCubbin Multiple Complaints

Dear Mrs. McCubbin,

Over the past six months, your husband, Mr. Bill McCubbin has been causing quite a commotion in our store. We cannot tolerate this type of behaviour and have considered banning the entire family from shopping in any of our stores. We have documented all incidents on our video surveillance equipment. Three of our assistants are attending counselling from the trouble your husband has caused. All complaints against Mr. McCubbin have been compiled and are listed below.

15 Things Mr. Bill McCubbin has done while his spouse is shopping:

1. June 15 2005 : Took 14 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in people's carts when they weren't looking. Some religious factions can be extremely upset by this.

2. July 2 2005: Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals.

3. July 7 2005: Made a trail of Apple juice on the floor through ailse's 2 and 3 leading to the Toilets.

4. July 19 2005: Walked up to an employee and told her in an official tone, 'Code 11' in ailse 4..... and watched what happened. (This is a code for a terrorist attack the assistant is still off work with stress)

5. August 4 2005: Went to the Service Desk and asked to put a family bag of peanut M&M's in the lay away service till Xmas.

6. September 14 2005: Moved a 'CAUTION - WET FLOOR' sign to a carpeted area.

7. September 15 2005: Set up a tent in the camping department and told other shoppers he'd invite them in if they'll bring pillows and sleeping bags from the bedding department.

8. September 23 2005: When a clerk asks if they can help him, he begins to cry and asks, 'Why can't you people just leave me alone?'

9. October 4 2005: Looked right into the security camera; used it as a mirror, and picked his nose then proceeded to eat same. ( We had to replace £3000 worth of equipment after the female guard on duty threw up over it )

10. November 10 2005: While handling guns in the newly opened hunting department, he looked dishevelled and asked the assistant if she knows where the antidepressants are kept

11. December 3 2005: Darted around the store suspiciously whilst loudly humming the "Mission Impossible" theme.

12. December 6 2005: In the auto department, practiced his "Madonna lookalike' bit using different size funnels.

13. December 18 2005: Hid in a XXXL clothing rack and when overweight customers came anywhere near, he yelled "PICK ME FATTY !" "PICK ME!"

14. December 21 2005: When an announcement came over the loud speaker, he assumes the fetal position on the floor and screams "NO! NO! It's those voices again!!!!" (And; last, but not least!)

15. December 23 2005: Went into a fitting room, shut the door and waited a while; then, yelled, very loudly, "Hey anybody out there, There's no toilet paper in here!

Sumo Thin Client

I lost my third FreeS/WAN POS box last month. (it became very flaky)

But, I got another P4-4GB ram system, and moved disks around. I put a dual PATA controller in, as the MB has only a single PATA channel.

Machine is "grouper.sandelman.ca", and it's in trout's old tower case. I'll be moving some of my various <1GHz boxes into it as guests. I hope that the electrical savings will justify everything, but I had to replace the dead system anyway. Hopefully I can split the CPU between running UML tests and spamassassin...

I move the dead POS box's 80GB drive to it. I had some minor problems getting a new enough 'insmod' under debian root that could load the xen modules. (I hate modules.. and why bother for base xen devices, like xennet...?????)

Anyway, the machine is back up. I'll be bridging the second ethernet to my service network... so the Dom0 will be on one network, and won't actually be on the network that most of the guests are on.

I got a:

http://wmltd.co.uk/index.php/products/sumo_thin_client

and hooked it an LCD monitor in our mud room. It runs VNC over 802.11 to Meaghan's desktop. They installed ipsec in it, but they missed a couple of scripts, so it is not running over IPsec yet. I'll be addressing that issue as soon as I finish extracting their build environment.

(Yes, of course it runs Linux)

The speed with x11vnc to send her actual desktop over the wire isn't great. Probably, I'll be creating a XenU guest for her, and maybe just run xvncviewer on her desktop as well.

It also has a browser (dilo), and an SSH client.

The Sumo's price at just over 500CDN needs to get 50% cheaper before it becomes a no-brainer for a spousal/offspring system. I got a roll-up USB keyboard.. spillproof against Liam.

It needed a USB keyboard, I had none. The local store had few USB keyboard offerings that weren't wireless keyboard/mouse combos. I realize that the wireless mouse would rapidly get carried off by Liam, and lost in a toy box, like the VCR remote did.