Someone on the Haskell Cafe mailing list pointed out the Haskell humor page on the wiki. Here are a few snippets:
<shapr> In my experience, Flash is mostly used as the hi-tek replacement for <BLINK>
”sigfpe”: Haskell is so strict about type safety that randomly generated snippets of code that successfully typecheck are likely to do something useful, even if you’ve no idea what that useful thing is.
So lots of technology sites are all excited about the launch of cuil.com, yet another in a long line of companies that the hype says could dethrone Google.
I went to cuil.com and searched for Amtrak.
It came up with hits for various routes, a historical society, etc. Everything except the actual homepage of Amtrak, amtrak.com, which has the most useful information about Amtrak.
#1 hit on Google.
If Cuil can’t get that right, why bother?
On Wednesday, OSCon really goes into high gear (and the wifi croaks) at OSCon. The people that aren’t going to the tutorials all arrive, and aren’t yet sluggish from the late-night vendor parties and BOFs.
The keynotes were OK, and after that, I listened to Keith Packard talk about the future of X. Then it was off to finish the preparation for my own talk on Linux on the corporate desktop. It was the first time I spoke at OSCon, and it seems to have gone well. I keep running into people that were at the talk and thought of some more questions — and of course I chatted with a number of people right after as well. There are a number of other companies that are planning on doing what we’ve done, or even started down the implementation path already. It’s some effort making something of OSCon quality (Damian Conway suggests something like 10 hours preparing for every 1 hour presenting — I didn’t do that), but I’m glad I did.
The Expo Hall opened Wednesday as well. Met some interesting folks there — Open Lina, a company that sells Linux hardware, an Open Source groupware product I hadn’t heard of before (they are apparently working on Debian Packages too), and some others I can’t remember right now…
Tuesday I had dinner at Andina, a Peruvian restaurant, with fellow Haskellers Bryan O’Sullivan and Don Stewart — the first time the three of us Real World Haskell folks met in one place.
Today brought Nat Torkington’s excellent keynote, and also r0ml’s great talk this afternoon (“I started this talk in 2003, and it’s run a bit long.”) Another great time for some networking in the hallways and expo hall. One of the LinuxFest Northwest folks had attended my talk, happened to see me as I was stuffing one of the may free t-shirts that vendors were giving out into my laptop bag (by afternoon, they were getting quite in your face about it), and struck up a conversation.
Went for sushi over lunch with a couple of folks from #oscon on IRC, then dinner with Debian folks.
Been a busy week, but met lots of people. I didn’t go to as many talks as I planned because I was so busy talking to people — guess that means the conference was a hit.
I’m really enjoying OSCon this year. I’ve been here two days and just Tuesday afternoon actually went to what I had planned to go to. There’s an XMPP summit here (wasn’t on the schedule), and I dropped in there a few times. Got one of the XMPP developers to look at my system and figure out why Empathy isn’t doing video chat with the N810 right.
Had an OSCon moment yesterday. I was sitting at a table with my laptop, trying to meet up with someone I had only met online before. We were chatting over Jabber. And I realized that person was about 20 feet away. This pattern has repeated itself several times now.
We went to McCormick and Schmick’s for dinner. Great seafood and everybody there seemed to really enjoy Jacob too.
The People for Geeks talk was fun. They talked about how geeks tend to apply the tact filter in input, and everybody else on the output, which causes frustration for everyone. Though somebody in the audience asked why that applies to computer geeks but not theater geeks — an interesting question, and one I wish they had probed a bit more.
I keep running in to interesting people here. One day I was talking to someone about alternatives to cfengine (he suggested parrot). This morning I was talking to someone that works for IBM, who is involved with their project to convert desktop machines to Linux and was interested in how we fared. I’ve met several people that spot my Haskell ribbon and are interested. One of them told me at breakfast that he heard there is this new Haskell book coming out that’s about using Haskell in the real world. Another OSCON momemt when I told him I’m one of the authors of that book. The surprise was fun.
Damian Conway had a great talk Monday night on “how to give a great OSCON talk.” I haven’t found his slides anywhere.
Back in May, I wrote about starting to bicycle to work. My plan was to do that 3 days a week. My ride is 10 miles each way, with the first 2.3 miles on dirt, gravel, and sand roads.
It’s been going well. Yesterday was the first day that the ride really felt easy. It’s been getting more and more fun, too.
And I’ve been getting faster. My worst time lately was 49 minutes, also yesterday morning. I really was riding slower than I felt normal, just taking it easy. But I had a headwind, and when I started my normal time in calm conditions was 60 minutes or more. That’s almost a 20% improvement already.
Due to vacations, holidays, and weather, I haven’t been able to average 3 days a week. When it’s raining, or has rained recently, our roads get muddy and pretty much impassible on bicycle. Though some days, my ride is 2 miles longer because the short route is too muddy but the long route isn’t.
So, overall, I’ve been enjoying bicycling, and plan to keep doing it.
I’ve had a problem with recent kernels. (I think it’s the kernel that’s doing this.) When my workstation is doing heavy I/O, it repeats keystrokes. For instance, while I was typing this paragraph, audacity was writing audio to disk, and I got this word:
heavvvvvvvvvvvy
It seems as if it thinks I haven’t let up on the keys.
I’ve seen this on two different machines and it seems to have started with 2.6.24 or 2.6.25.
Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas where I’d go to fix it? Incidentally, I’m in X when this happens. I don’t use the console much when there would be a chance for it to happen.
This is such a weird problem I’ve struck out googling, and I’m not even sure which mailing list to take it to.
I have been using Gandi as my preferred register for some years now. They have probably the most customer-friendly AUP out there, are reliable, and good decent folks. I have liked everything about them.
Except the fact that they don’t have whois privacy. But now they do! Woohoo! They did have whois spam protection all along, but your address and phone number was visible to everyone.
Whois privacy services are something that you have to keep a close eye on. What you want is for your name to still show up in the public whois database, but just nothing else. Some whois privacy services put *their* name there, which means technically they own the domain. I wouldn’t trust that. Gandi is better about it. Your name, their address and phone number.
Of course, you still have to give Gandi your real contact info, and there are some situations in which it will be revealed. But all in all, I am very happy to see them doing this.
I had looked at other registrars that provided whois privacy, and never liked them for various reasons. Many happened to also have quite restrictive terms of service (hello Dynadot), maybe were good people but had restrictive ToS and crappy interface (register4less), etc.
Now I get to stick with Gandi and get the features I want. I’m very happy with that.
I’m working on switching from using a Mac to using Linux for editing video. I have a mini-DV camcorder that a bought a few years back, and I’ve been looking at capture and editing software for Linux.
Along with that, I want to post some videos online for family to be able to see I want to preserve the original quality as much as possible, offer the option to download the video, and be able to share some videos with family only (not the entire Internet).
I’ve been looking at various reviews of video sites (such as this PCWorld one) and decided to look at blip.tv and Vimeo in more detail.
Blip seems to have lots of controls, options, etc. And, they seem to really care about end users, respond fast, and care about freedom. There’s an impressive response from their support team concerning Ogg Theora out there. They offer FTP uploads (which are a huge improvement over HTTP POST uploading, in my opinion, and easily scriptable). They can also automatically post your video to archive.org or about a dozen other video or blogging sites.
But what I want to do is not really what they are aiming at. They are set up for “channels” (you can apparently only have one channel per user), and for more professional users. Most notably, you can’t make videos private or restricted without paying for their $100/year or so “pro” account.
Vimeo looks very much like the Flickr of video. They do offer various options for restricting who can see a video. When they transcode video to Flash, they have the option of preserving it in HD, which blip.tv doesn’t (both go 640×480 or so by default, and blip maximizes out that that). Though both offer the option to download the full, unmodified original. Vimeo has only one option for uploading, and it doesn’t seem to work well with Firefox. They have little detail about anything in their docs. Maybe it’s more the Photobucket of video than the Flickr of video. (Oh, who am I kidding — that’s Youtube).
Of course, there is Youtube. Maxes out at 320×240, doesn’t offer the original for downloading. Doesn’t make me think all that positively about them.
I could also use Flickr. I’m not sure if they offer the original, but there’s a 90-second limit on uploads there.
Any other thoughts?
Later this month, I will be giving a talk at OSCon about Linux on the corporate desktop — something we have done where I work. I’ve been alloted a 45-minute timeslot. I will, of course, be posting my slides online and I think OSCon also posts videos of these things.
I’m wondering if readers of my blog would like to leave me some comments on what you’d like to see. What would you like to know about Linux on the corporate desktop? Is there anything that you’d like to make sure I discuss?
I read 7 Ways Religion is Detrimental to Science, and thought it would be an interesting read. It was, but I don’t think it really made sense. Let’s look at the 7 ways they highlighted:
1. Faith and the Scientific Method are Opposites
The article states:
Faith is a belief in an idea regardless of the evidence for or against it.
Actually, that’s not true at all, at least for traditional Christianity. (Note that traditional Christianity is not the same as fundamentalism). Marcus J. Borg describes faith in four ways:
Fiducia — trusting in God. Borg says, “Faith . . . [means] we trust in God as the one upon whom we rely, as our support and foundation and ground, as our safe place.”
Fidelitas — loyalty, or “the comment of the self at its deepest level, the commitment of the ‘heart’. Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God. . . Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God.”
Visio — a way of seeing — “a way of seeing the whole, a way of seeing ‘what is’. . . the ability to love and to be present to the moment. It generates a ‘willingness to spend and be spent’ for the sake of a vision that goes beyond ourselves.”
Assensus — perhaps the closest to what the author meant, is “faith as belief.” Borg goes on to add:
The notion that Christian faith is primarily . . . about belief, about a “head” matter, is recent. . . For many, Christian faith began to mean believing questionable things to be true. . . this is the most widespread contemporary understanding of “belief”.
This is very different from what faith as assensus meant. . . A deep but humble (and therefore imprecise) understanding of Christian faith as assensus, as involving affirmation of the centrality of God as known in the Bible and Jesus, is very close to faith as vision. It is a way of seeing reality.
As a Christian, I do not find the scientific method to be a problem. I find it to be enlightening in all sorts of matters, including even the history of religion in some instances. Christian faith is not about believing in certain ideas (such as the world being created in 6 literal 24-hour days), though there are those that distort it to be so. Rather, Christian faith is about living your life a certain way, about the meaning of life, about our duties to make the world a better place.
2. People Vote Base on Religious Ideas
The author says that “Stem Cells weren’t the first time a body of research didn’t get proper funding because some religious wack-jobs.” Well, I agree that that was a problem. Non-religious people can vote in odd ways too. I argue that the rejection of stem-cell research goes against Christian teaching; after all, we are to help the least among us, and do not people with Alzheimer’s qualify?
I think the author’s point should have been “exremists have odd views.” Extremists can be atheist, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or other religions. Religion does not have a monopoly on them.
3. Religion Removes the Need For Science
The author says:
When people are content to believe in something that explains why they are here, even if it is wrong, they become less interested in other ideas. Religion often leads people to believe that they have all the answers. Science is self-correcting in that nobody assumes they are absolutely correct.
That is incorrect on several levels. First, science cannot explain why we are here. It can explain some of the mechanics. As an example, let us take for granted that modern scientific thought on the origin of humanity is correct: that there was a Big Bang, that single-celled creatures evolved on earth, and that human life eventually evolved through a complex process of evolution and natural selection. Fine; this does not contradict religion in any way. Science and religion answer different questions. Science answers “how”. Religion answers “why”. Science cannot answer the question “Why was there a big bang?” or “Did the evolution of humanity serve a larger purpose?”
Moreover, religion should not assume that they have all the answers, either. The canonical Christian Bible was mostly fixed within a few centuries AD. Life in 200AD was a lot different from life today. Part of the reason there are many different groups of Christians is the complexity of applying the stories in the Bible to modern life. The ideas in any given denomination evolve over time, too. I think it would be the height of hubris for anyone, religious or not, to claim that he or she had all the answers. Again, I know that some religious people act that way, but then so do some atheists or agnostics.
4. People Lean on Religion, When They Could Benefit From Science
The author of “7 Ways” cites the quite rare case where a child dies of a curable disease while his/her parents pray, refusing medical care. This is an extreme position that is not shared by the vast majority of religious people. Most religious people are perfectly content to use the latest medical care.
Meditation or prayer does not replace medical care; it supplements it. Scientific studies have even demonstrated its effectiveness.
5. The Church Takes Up Natural Resources
The original author states that “The land that churches take up around the world could be used to build schools, homes, recreational buildings and commercial operations.” This is perhaps the most frivolous of arguments. Putting aside the fact that many churches operate schools, churches are often one of the few ways that modern city dwellers have to form a sense of community. They are not just places to engage in religion. They are places to meditate, to get away from it all, to meet your neighbors, to vote.
6. The Church Takes Up Monetary Resources
The original author says “if people donated to scientific advancement like they did to the church, imagine where we would be today.” It’s not a pleasant picture. Religion, and institutions supported primarily because of the teaching of religion, are the people that feed the hungry after natural disasters, that operate food pantries (our church operates the only one in our community, and it’s open to anyone without any questions or talk about religion), that operate schools in disadvantaged areas, that have spread the whole idea of fair trade for third-world artisans, etc.
It is true that acts of evil have been committed in the name of the church, too. It is also unquestionably true that some church groups spend money more carefully than others. As with any donation, people should be careful where they give. Government-operated research studies are not necessarily a good use of money, either.
7. Religion is A Strong Meme
The author of the original story seems to be responding to a particular brand of Christianity: what Borg calls “literal-factual” religion. There are quite a few people that take that stand. They are sometimes inaccurately referred to as “evangelicals” or the “religious right”; while there is some overlap between the groups, they are not one and the same. The people with the literal-factual view are not representative of the whole.
More interestingly, Borg points out that the literal-factual view was actually a response to the development of the scientific method during the Enlightenment. As the modern idea of truth moved to literal, factual, provable truth, some Christians grew defensive about their faith, and started to look for “scientific” ways to prove that the world was created in 6 days, etc. in an attempt to show the world that Christianity fit their new notion of truth.
That makes a compelling argument that the scientific method is the stronger meme in today’s Western world — so strong that the author of the rant against religion has apparently forgotten the more prevalant — both throughout history and today — view of Christianity that is “more than” Science, not at odds with science.